| |
Our
driving desire for fame, knowledge, wealth, power, and moral or “spiritual”
standing, is really the attempt to annul the fact that we are all fundamentally
(existentially) the same. Therefore, awareness of the absurdity and sheer
danger of such attempt implies freedom from the universally held illusion
that we exist as separate individuals and, consequently, also from the
often harsh demands implicit in having to prove this by irrationally attempting
to become better than others: something we are really not.
Psychological comparison with others fueled by the imperious need to prove
one's existence, will of course detect at a superficial level and give
great importance to a multitude of different characteristics. But identification
with that sort of comparative information is in itself the beam in the
eye blinding each and everyone of us to the immense fact that we share
the same brain, the same planet and the same life; a life that is ever
one and indivisible. For as long as we are striving to prove ourselves
different from and, perhaps, superior to others, we are also generating
isolation and conflict which in turn inevitable produce suffering followed
by even greater attempts to shore up our hopelessly ambitious and fearful
insularity.
Seeking what can only be a short lived sense of psychological and tribal
significance and security, we generate the mental disorders and the social
chaos that are the hallmark of our existence and the permanent source
of our general insecurity. Our very definitions of self and our strenuous
efforts to defend and expand these definitions, then makes us insensitive
to the fact that real and universal security can only lie in the fact
that we really do not exist as separate psychological entities. What appear
to be separate individualities are really only different sets of images
and ideas held as memories and used to comparatively define who we are
and to imagine and implement the projects that will presumably bring about
whoever we each think we are entitled to become. This, of course, if there
are no contradictory ideas present in one past, present and future sense
of oneself, or if the ideas and plans of others do not derail ours. And
those always prove to be very large ifs.
|
|
