I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe- ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
– Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
So the question is, what will it take for us to be prepared for it? When will we able to live together as brothers and sisters in harmony, without the need for all this division, anger, greed, manipulation, etc.? Is it some external event that will cause everything to fall into place? Or is it something inside of us? What would cause the human to evolve to a point where this friction and violence are no longer necessary? We’ve been grappling with this issue for quite awhile now.
What is revealing about the times we are living in is how polarized and separated we appear to be on every issue. The middle ground has been lost, you must take a position one way or another. From racism, socialism, and climate change to abortion, guns, and (dare I say it) COVID-19. You simply must choose a side, you’re either with “us” or you aren’t. How and why did it come to this point?
This is an enormously complex issue that I am trying to condense into blog form, but there is a lot that can be learned about the world and ourselves by delving into this topic. And in doing so, it is important to try and remain as neutral as possible to avoid being pulled into the fray (sound familiar?) for several reasons. First and foremost, we need to try and avoid assigning blame to one “side” or another. We become emotionally involved and lose the ability to reason clearly. Secondly, we need to understand that every “side” has value to it, there is something behind the energy that serves some purpose – whether we agree with it or not. It is part of the whole, it has to be respected and given the space to exist.
Hopefully you are beginning to see the parallel I am drawing here, between what goes on internally in our minds and what is happening externally in the world “out there”. The government (the corporate state really, as big business and politics are functionally one entity at this point) is a nearly one-to-one external analogy for the collective ego we all have in our minds. It is a centralized power structure that keeps churning out the unresolved karma and momentum of our past, trying to keep things under control. In an age of competition and war over scarce resources, this seems like a bit of a necessity. As humanity evolves, however, we should eventually reach a point where we recognize our shared being and begin to put down our figurative guns.
But that does not seem to be the case at this moment, the friction between the two “sides” appears to only be growing. Why would that be?
It is a survival mechanism.
Government power is losing its legitimacy and necessity – Dorothy has begun to pull back the curtain. And she is not liking what she is seeing (the same way we often don’t like what we see in meditation, a topic I will get into in my next video). Technology has paved the way for a much higher degree of information access and transparency than ever before. The old tricks just don’t work as well anymore.
So the power structure has to up the ante, it has to push the “sides” further apart in order to keep attention off of itself and fuel the fire of division. In doing so, however, it risks more and more exposure of itself. People begin to recognize that they aren’t so different from one another at all, they are not so easily duped by the machine. And as I said, government is not “evil”, it is just filling a role that was and is necessitated by a people unwilling or unprepared to take responsibility for their own freedom. There is basically a feedback loop between the power structure and the people – as we withdraw our energy from it (whether “it” is the government or our own ego) then it begins to dissolve.
To the extent that people need to be controlled and cannot trust themselves or each other, then the power structure will always be necessitated. And to the extent that we can recognize our oneness and that we already have everything we could ever need, we can do away with “external” systems of control. But this is a gradual shift, we’re talking about millennia of social and psychological conditioning doing a total reversal. It doesn’t happen overnight. One thing is for certain, though, we have passed the point of no return.
At its core, we are basically just describing the master-slave dynamic, which plays out in almost every sphere of human interaction. There is an ease and comfort involved in resigning oneself to being controlled, it makes things simpler in a way. We give up our freedom, but we receive some assurance of a livelihood and protection in exchange – the risk and uncertainty of life is removed. But it comes at the cost of our very soul, our creative freedom as individuals to meander down whatever path nature has ordained for us. We become constricted, cowed, broken.. and deep down our hearts cry out for the wild unknown we once knew.
So what next? As the traditional forms of power begin to lose more of their support, their attempts for survival have become more desperate and sloppy. You can see this in the workforce already, where more and more people are leaving the corporate grind and risking the financial insecurity of betting on themselves, following their own path – and it is contagious. We are starting to become our own masters.
Every system has a breaking point, or a singularity event. The energy polarity becomes too much to be contained in the original form, and it collapses, reconfiguring into something entirely new. In our current situation, the opposing energies of left vs right, us versus them simply cannot be pushed any further. There will either be a mass conflict (war) or, more likely in this case, a continued gradual dissipation of the old power structures as the energy is increasingly decentralized down to the state, to the town, to the community, and finally to the individual. Non-participation in the old paradigm of competition and division simply becomes more attractive than engaging with the diminishing returns of an obsolete system. People are and will continue to drop out at the margins, reclaiming power for themselves.
And if you were to visualize this happening person by person on a global scale, you get a pretty good image of how meditation works in the brain. Gradually, thought by thought, moment by moment, our neural activity simply doesn’t engage with the ego (default mode network) like it used to, we throw off the “masters’ chains” one by one. In doing so, what feels like a terrifying drop into the deep ocean turns out to be a return to the glory of God. A world consciously turning its darkness into light, one candle at a time.
“Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the world.”
– Rumi
Jeff Nirenberg 