Sorting Reality from Ideas

We live in a culture where some segments truly believe (or at least act like) preferences and feelings have some kind of sacred status – where the more villainizing, stomping, protesting, and loudly signaling our outrage, the more legitimate our argument is. As if our personal passion were a suitable substitute for substance – as if spouting off with vein popping force somehow makes the argument more credible. Some of us apparently lack depth perception to see beyond ourselves, and as a consequence, we project our arrogant ignorance along with our fears, suspicions, hopes and emotions on to public figures, associates as well as cultural icons of every stripe, dead or alive. We live in a universe whose boundaries extend to the outskirts of our own ignorance. We then mistake our ghostly projections for reality, not knowing the vomited echo of our ignorant self indulgence blowing back on us is not an accurate picture of the social landscape. What we see as reality is actually composed of reflections from the hall of distorted mirrors in which we live and breathe.

Unless we make the investment to exit the shadowy cave of our own self importance to embrace the wider social reality , we will continue to falsely assert our sanctity and suffer the frustrated experience that is spawned from that reactionary prison. Unless we embrace a reality that recognizes we coexist and attempt to forge a climate of respect and dignity at the same time we also defend against real antagonisms that can destroy us, we will become a fountain of frustration spewing maligning scorn and incessant tantrums toward any perspective other than our own. Even worse, through the destructive force of our self importance spawning a reactionary climate, we will conjure up the very demons that consume us. We will bathe in the toxic bile we made out of this false idea that we alone have the one true bead on how we all should think and behave…

In the dim glow of our ignorance we can miss the profound hypocrisy and irony of our stance. Our ignorance will also protect us from an awareness of our powerful contribution to the disintegration of the foundation on which we all stand. This also means that when the destruction of our own making comes to fruition, we will be ignorant of its source much less its resolution or prevention. We will continue to live in a wordy world of self righteous blame and impotence like any fundamentalist – baying at the moon with the expectation that it should bow to our cries and change its course.

A cat is natively wired to be suspicious of being attacked from anything outside its very small trusted comfort zone. This is not because of how the world actually is, it is because the cat sees the world through its own self induced lens. It thinks of how it would behave and projects that motive on to the outside world, and then bathes in the experience of life that is generated from that place… And this, by the way, is the very nature of the spectrum of mental illness that spans from neurosis to psychosis.