Saturday, October 22, 2011

Radical Acts of the Silent Non-Conformist


In our “evolution” as a human species we have forgotten two profound urges that exist within the human soul; humility and sacrifice.

To be humble is to embrace the laughter and the ridicule of others as you act upon the voice of Spirit that guides you along your path.

Sacrifice is to give freely that which another needs. To live in the mystery that lay between the have and the have-not, and to be grateful for the blessing of love you can shower upon others.

Humility and sacrifice are the soul’s truest expression of the instincts that make us human and lead to the fullness of living and enacting the purpose of our existence – to be stewards to all of our relations.

Conformity is our greatest enemy at this time because conformity demands that we live within the constructs of a materially driven world. To conform requires that we abandon our true nature – the wild act of flourishing in the natural world – and instead seek approval of the masses designed to make us smaller than we were ever meant to be. We rein in our passions and channel our energy into being the tamed consumer for the insignificant, controlling business of banal pleasure.

We shun sacrifice but fail to see the profound sacrifices made by our relations in the natural world to support our lust for conformity.

Consider what is required for the creature whose massive life is restricted to the cold metallic counter of the scientist, the beauty-engineer, testing agonizing chemicals upon innocent eyes so that we might mask our faces.

Consider the tree that existed long before we were even aware of the forest, that falls so we can live in houses so large that we lose our Spirits in the many empty rooms supported by walls that separate us.

Consider the bloating body of the child lying under the hot sun weakly grasping for the shrunken breast of its mother.

This is what conformity demands of us; that we pay the price of turning from our own souls, ignore the whisper of compassion, and glorify our lust and greed. Glorify these through entertainment we call “Reality”, through uselessly stuffing our face with riches that never fill the void within us, through denying the yearning of our strong hands to hold the hand of one who is reaching.

We deny the need for sacrifice yet demand it of every other living creature on our Mother Earth.

Can you throw away the trappings of servitude and seek the peace that awaits you in the soft weeping of a world we are recklessly and perversely violating? Can you sacrifice your material desires and replace these with the truest desire of your own soul – to be at one with our perfect Earth and with yourself by silently singing the poetry of your soothing love?

Can you make these sacrifices and then forget them, requiring not even your own praise?

Humility is the gift given to us; a simple shining pebble nestled within our heart, which fosters the expression of our greatest love in the most hidden of places, away from the eyes and the approval of others. Humility breaks free from conformity so that we might live a life of “rightness” with God. Humility allows us to walk upon the body of our Mother gently and with reverence unashamed but without pride.

I know pride, have been ruled by it and selfishly indulged the lies of my ego by contorting my body into misshapen poses most pleasing to the world. I have withheld that which I know another requires because of false esteem that seduced me into believing I was more worthy and that giving made me weak.

In remembering humility I am being freed to return to the grace of my soul and to use my body as the landscape through which my nature is liberated.

The humility I am remembering challenges all modern notions of freedom of expression, beauty, or reward. Freed expression is the song of love, beauty is the pebble and not the cut diamond and reward is living in oneness with my God and my Mother Earth.

I bow my head to acknowledge the greatness of All My Relations. I am remembering that each act of kindness I perform is as natural as breathing. Requiring reward for breathing would result in physical death; requiring reward for kindness results in death of the spirit. Natural instincts need only the blessing of life in order to thrive.

Walking this path which is placed before me is no great act and requires no self-aggrandisement, just as a wolf requires no applause for the giving of its song to the moon.

When we are humbled by each sacrifice we make we are freed from the shallow waters of conformity and dive, instead, into the depth of our tremendous soul.

Sacrifice and humility cannot exist along-side the mediocrity of fortune, material abundance and socially constructed ideals of perfection. Sacrifice and humility require the tremendous act of silence and of fierce submission to the ancient and primal call of our Soul.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Restrain the Insane Lest Chaos Reign


The controlling, “power-over”, dominance of man-made religions permeates all areas of our society. We recreate this religion in all constructs of our lives – in the hierarchies we adhere to, in the worship of trinkets – money being yet another external source of power, in our institutions and corporations. Although we do not call it religion and we have all but erased any reference to God, we replicate the essence of its dogma at every turn. We seek to control and dominate through instilling fear of the wrath of poverty, illness and loneliness. Through fear we are led to uphold a system into which we are indoctrinated, cursed with never being enough; never pretty, rich or thin enough. We pray for perfection and purification with our wallets and seek to escape the evil of our true nature. We deny our bodies with our obsessive need to sculpt them.

And this permeates our mental health systems as well. Any behaviour deemed as “out of control” must be controlled with medications, therapies and, if need be, restraints.

We seek to dwarf and eradicate “illusions” of grandeur and delusional creativity. These make us uncomfortable and threaten our fragile structures. These people, these “mentally ill”, do not conform to, nor do they reflect, our collective external reality.

Those who are marked as mentally ill rally against the norm; they hear voices others cannot hear, see images others cannot see. They are messengers whom we shoot with mind-numbing drugs so that we might kill the message.

The mentally ill must be restrained lest chaos reigns; chaos that results in unbridled expression.

The dull comfort of an orderly world; one in which we can count on wars, corporate greed, earth-destroying machinery, famine and soul wrenching cruelty is chosen because of its predictability. We can rely on those activities of materialism and say we are against them while we continue to sculpt our bodies, silence our minds with entertainment that relishes that which we say appals us, and bend our knees to the will of the economy and the affluent that hold its reins.

And so I wonder; would the “depressed” contemplate and plot their own escape from overwhelming sadness if they could be held and validated – assured that their tears make sense in a world where inflicting pain on a massive scale is sanctioned?

Would the “bi-polar” require medications that feed the gluttony of the pharmaceuticals if space was cleared for the expression of immense joy and expansive energy; if they had partners that freed themselves from the chains of equilibrium and danced with them in the bedlam?

Would the “schizophrenic” need to scream so loudly if they were heard?

What if the mentally ill are the barometer of a world that is truly ill, sick to the point of collapse, deaf to the collective soul that whispers to us but is unheard through the reckless din we have created?

What if God is truly among us now and those that know this, feel this presence are overcome with God’s sorrow, joy and anger? And so they give voice to God in a hundred ways that threaten to break through the haze we so desperately need in order to maintain this religion we adhere to and the idols we have constructed to worship at.

I walk among the mentally ill, know the power of a label that seeks to invalidate each thought I have, each vision I share.

Yet it is amidst the chaos of my own mind where I hear the voice of my soul, taste the tears of truth and sing the madness of compassion – none of which are mine, but are expressions of Divine Love; the insanity of God.

I stand with those who cannot live within the house of conformity and so exist outside of it looking in. Yet I have also made my home within that house and collapsed into the seductive breast of compliance. And I have learned that within it, I cannot breathe and colours are dull and food is tasteless.

As madness weaves around me and my brothers and sisters, I must embrace that which God gives me. Not ‘must’ as in commands but ‘must’ as in my organic nature. Just as I ‘must’ eat in order to live, I must live in the untamed world so that I might know life.

This religion and the lunacy of its’ materially-driven clergy is rotting, just as the walls of the insane asylums that once held the wild ones have collapsed, and the shiny falsehoods preached to the masses are beginning to be revealed for what they are.

And it is on the breath, in the sorrow and through the ecstasy of those irrational ones; those that live on the streets, in the darkness of their homes, and in the prisons of the terrified dictator, that God’s love and desire can be found – wrapped in the skin of the wounded.