Have you heard it? Or them? The wild voices in the woods, when the wind blows through the trees, or the sounds of the creeks flowing over well-washed stones from rainfall long ago.
I walked by the sea this weekend, and also walked in the County of Orange, where the lawns were as exquisitely manicured as the owners could afford, battling the offered and implied Obama label on the Bush deficit, and cursing the collective will for asking more of a tithe so the country could afford to prosper.
This is a time for us to deeply examine our individual and collective values, which begins with coming to know how we ourselves come to value what we do. Only when we understand ourselves can we then move this understanding into larger contexts. Otherwise we’re puppets. We feel pulled, but by whom? And those who pull upon us, do they know who pulls them?
We’re all capable of developing an awareness that can learn, and can develop loving links to all we know- and all we don’t know that we know. Part of coming out of the trance is to begin to question our habituated momentums, and begin, however slowly, to look into the nature of habits in general. Then we might come to understand how we now come to find ourselves where we are, each of us, in this life.
Confucius stated the double-negative Golden Rule about 500 years before Jesus: “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.” (The double-negative is a Chinese way to both be less direct, and more global at the same time.)
So many young people now are diving into their computers, the pachinko parlors, the virtual reality- watch the steel ball-bearings bouncing on the shiny pins form a Gaussian distribution, in a daze. After a while, perhaps some years, the glitz wears off, and we have the chance to take a walk in the woods. How is it that such a walk is so refreshing? (Unless one finds oneself continuing to yearn for fast-food.)
Wildness. Other than bonsai and topiary, no one told the trees how to grow except how they naturally express themselves. How would we express ourselves if we let go of our ideas of who we are and how we’re supposed to act? (That bonsai habit of rigid wire and root-clipping by some external gardener is hard to shake.)(How many people are willing to give away their power to anyone who says they will “take care of” those who give away that power?)
Confucius developed rituals, in the spirit of surfing on the energy of the naturally unfolding world. (David Jones, 2009) Some have mis-interpreted these rituals, in having locked down the rules, so that people would get them right. But when locked down, rigidified, the rules become dead, and following them deadly.
The only rules that are of vitality are embedded in the wildness that we see- and have mistakenly fought against for hundreds of years. Align with that wildness, and we are again vital. Even a little bit of alignment will bring an astonishing degree of energy. When we abandon ourselves to it, it is so intense that we die- and then become wave forms, moving along with all the other waves. (Alan Watts said it: See me? I’m waving to you! Hi!)
©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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