On Exploration

I ended the first of my blogs yesterday on a note of exploration, in quoting T.S. Eliot on the subject.  I would like here to enlarge on that subject a bit.  And to do so, I would like to begin with a personal example.

You may have heard of the book title, or at least the expression, of A Stranger In A Strange Land.  C’est moi.  At least the way I felt for a long time, in my growing-up days.  So much of what was and is going on around me is so far beneath me that it is hard for me to comprehend it.  It feels at the least as though I left this level of consciousness behind me so long ago that many ‘humans’ feel like a different species to me - like, say, Neanderthal Man.  Their darkness is very hard for me to contemplate, and live in the proximity of, in its depths of depravity.  It is, simply, painful to be here, now.

I don’t know why people can’t get along with each other.  Well, actually, I do know.  It’s down to one major factor.  And no, that’s not ‘money’ - the monetary system, in vogue at this time, and having been for a very long time; pitting us against one another, rather than being in cooperation with one another.  So, that’s close to the answer.  But it’s more fundamental than that.

It’s due to a lack of understanding, that

We Are One Another.

And:

We - our incarnate souls - went through an Ice Age, where it was each man for himself.  Winner take all (including the women).(1)  And those ‘instincts’ - of survival of the fittest, and fight or flight - got severely activated under those conditions.  But we have come a ways, from those savage days.  Consider the social custom nowadays of handshakes.  Its origin was in the mutual clasping of the club- and then sword-wielding hand of The Other, in order to move beyond a survival gesture to, say, trade with one another.  (But now, perhaps we can get simply to a raised right hand in greeting.  Like, oh, say, the Native American Indians.  Good sign of civility, that one.)(2) 

But he was still the Other.  Hey - I seem to have news for many Homo sapiens sapiens even in our relatively more enlightened day: that 

We Are All

One.

Of One Great Being.  Experiencing itself through Us.

Coming aware of our true natures.  Beyond the material templates that we have donned, in order to 

go to school in.

Come, let us not just reason together, but rejoice together, here at the end of 

the Play. 

And the beginning of

the Real Thing.

Being even more of a creator - in mimicry of our essential Selves - than we have ever been before.  As we begin the exploration of the higher realms.

Physical.

And energetic.    

—

footnotes:

(1) One can also say that that ‘instinct’ came from the ancient stage of our human template, as that of the higher primates; who still express those instincts to this day.  But let me move on, in this particular blog.  It is not a scientific treatise per se.  It is a musing, on the human condition, only.

(2) Not ‘civilization’.  What we know of as civilization has been brought about by our cleverness as creators.  (Our deeper ‘instincts’ coming to the fore.)  If all you have to do to survive is go out each day and do the equivalent of shinny up a tree for your ‘daily bread,’ you don’t have to activate your innate abilities to come up with such things as plows, and threshers, and steam engines, and such.  ‘Civility’ and ’civilization’ do not necessarily go hand in hand.  So to speak.

--

P.S. And lest it be misunderstood, in my projection of The New:
     I very truly honor the history of this country.  The principles for which it stands - limited government/personal responsibility, the sovereignty of the individual over either royalty or the state, etc. - will live on forever in the annals of not just the history of this country, but human history.  And that history will be preserved, against the attempts of the nation-wreckers amongst us to scrub it out of the picture of human 'progress' .
     May the days when the Continental Army soldiers seeing out the winter at Valley Forge and at least coming close to needing to boil their boots in order to eat the leather to survive (an undoubtedly apocryphal story, but close to the mark), and those sorts of war-encampment circumstances in general, never be visited on humanity again.
     But one never knows.  We don't seem to have very long memories.  I understand, e.g., that just 12% of our twelfth-graders are at grade-level proficiency in American History.
     Lest we forget, people.  Lest we forget.