I had a dream last night that I was trying to stop a train with a couple of sticks in the tracks. I didn’t think it would work, and I was pretty sure it might kill me, but I tried anyway. The train came through entirely unimpeded on a parallel set of tracks I didn’t even see.
Then I was in a large truck driven by my mother. I was in the back. She missed a wide turn badly, then slid backwards downhill while I clung to the back seat. I finally told her to downshift and pull the emergency brake. She did, and I realized terror had made her stupid.
Interpretation: the two dreams are related. I think most “plans” to “save the world”, when they are roughly sincere, are rooted in fear. Ideology is almost entirely the Emergent Property of dominant fear. Rigidity and stupidity, also, are the results of fear.
We–and here I mean me, but many others too–come up with schemes and ideas to change the world that originate in fear, but the REALITY is that most of what most of us do does not matter all that much. The train can simply arrive elsewhere, and ignore us entirely.
And to be sure, I grew up in a fearful home. It was repressed fear, hidden fear, but in my mothers case was very close to hysteria most of the time. She simply lied about it, to herself and everyone else. Seeing the effects of such lies is no doubt an important reason emotional honesty is so important to me, as is self examination.
I am reading a very interesting and useful book called “Let the Moon be Free”. It is an outstanding companion book to my Kum Nye practice. He talks often about listening to your body. Logically, if one part of you is listening, then the body is talking.
And he points out that none of fear the present so much as we fear the future. My PRESENT, as it exists at this exact moment, drinking coffee, doing laundry (waiting on a machine), typing, is not in the least bit scary. No one is going to burst in and attack or arrest me. No: all that is in the future, where dragons, mist and darkness seems to be.
And he points out that fear is endemic to the human condition. The sooner you get away from the idea that fears in aggregate can be managed by managing the world, the better. No, you have to make friends with Fear, the root, Fear the unanchored and ambient and potentially omnipresent.
Here is what I would suggest: most of us are completely helpless. I of course heartily approve of what the Canadian truckers are doing. That is basically a highway sit-in, as I understand it. Rather than involving self absorbed students it involves ordinary citizens who are rebelling, but doing so non-violently and peacefully. THAT IS THE WAY, politically. Passive and even aggressive non-participation, and non-cooperation. No violence, but no saying OK any longer to the patently absurd.
But returning to the point, all of us can commit resolutely to staying AWAKE, to learning to recognize propaganda when we see it, to stop obeying stupid rules thoughtlessly, and to asking a LOT of questions. I would like to see all thoughtful people running interference campaigns in their localities on whatever medias are public and in general use. Just insert true ideas that they are trying to suppress through lies, grotesque distortions, vitriol, and outright censorship.
Don’t be afraid. Whatever the future is, it will come with or without your permission, and most likely regardless of your best efforts.
Good remains possible. I honestly think people are starting to wake up, and that is BY FAR our best hope for a truly good and desirable future.
One last comment: it occurred to me the other day that Tarkovsky’s Stalker might be seen as an interesting metaphor for Ideology. The realm feels good to him, but it has no smell. None of the people who enter it have any desire to penetrate to the heart of it. And the Stalker leaves heartbroken that other people do not believe in something he himself cannot bring himself to enter, all while his daughter–real life–is performing miracles.
As such, this was a sly and very subtle condemnation of Soviet Russia, which got through the censors.