OUtrage (Rant 176)
Rant 176
Outrage
"The failure to live comes from the fear of death or injury.
The failure to organize comes from the fear of chaos.
The failure to become liberated from suffering comes from the fear and misunderstanding of what one's own desires do."
-from "Walking With Eris"
"Fuck this spiritual crap! I want to know about shitting, pissing, and fucking! The things that make up daily life!"
-An audience member to a lama
"But how have you gotten on in life till now without knowing these things?"
-The lama in response to audience member
How can you hope to get free if your disgust of babylon/samsara/Thud is insufficient? Some of you will question such vehemence and wonder if it is necessary. Some of you would rather compromise and remain enslaved so long as you can think of yourselves as this, that, or other types of persons. Some of you have looked into freedom and have rejected it because the journey to it is difficult and fraught with uncertainty and that goes against the grain of your present inculcated sense of instant-point-and-click-satisfaction-guaranteed-results. Some of you rightly hate sexual perverts who prey on the vulnerable. Now take this disgust and let it move through you. Now look at today's cultural and social climate. Shouldn't it also disgust you that people are being taught, educated, coerced, and deluded into being slaves to others' profits, or to others' ideas, gods, or programs? Shouldn't you allow a burning anger against anything that limits the possibilities of individual human freedom? Or do you believe that compliance and cooperation with slavery will somehow win freedom?
Maybe you should just admit that you are afraid to stand up. You are afraid to act and maybe lose something dear to you: Your "self." Though even dearer is something you have yet to rise up and take back for yourself: freedom. Instead of standing up, you are using the dangerous delusion of pacifism. For you, this idea is nothing more than a delusion. (As are all ideas.) When peace is practiced in its right context, it leads to wonderful things, but when made into an "ism" it causes people to forego rational thought for some imagined higher spiritual principles that they barely understand.
You can think you are being pacifist or being a "better" person, but that will only destroy you because you are using an artificially contrived notion in an attempt to cover up the truth. Slaves are taught pacifism to keep them from rising up. They are taught that conflict is wrong (even while the masters keep waging wars), even though they are also taught that competition with the other slaves is healthy. (Or citizens are taught that violence is wrong unless the State orders it.) So, which one is it?
Pacifism or even compromise can only work in situations where equality between human individuals is possible. If you are attacked by some group or person who views you as an evil sinner, or some other label that really means "non-human outcast," they'd gladly accept it if you cut your own veins and layed yourself down for the sake of peace. They won't care that you refuse to fight them because you value their lives more than your own. The end results are what really matters to them. So your "spiritual" gesture would fall on barren soil, deaf ears, and blind eyes. You will have thrown away a precious opportunity, your own life, to awaken.
So why compromise, respect, or seek peace with a socio-cultural system that teaches we are nothing more than consumers...simply makers and spenders without any further value or meaning, without any real freedom beyond choosing between 15 thousand versions of the same thing. You don't have to make war on society or go out actively sabotaging it. But on the other hand, you can't just passively accept its forms of slavery as being something you can live with. Not if you are free, or at least looking to be free...which is at least something fresh and decent in this polluted land of twisted politicians and foul-smelling religious fanatics.
You need to learn that anger, disgust, and even loathing are not bad emotions to feel. It's your intentions that make them negative or positive. Disgust for any form of slavery should not detract you from being free. Just see it as the natural instinct for situations that are optimal for human beings. Just as you have in you an evolved natural disgust for rotting flesh or excrement which kept human beings alive for hundreds of thousands of years, you also have a similar instinct against slavery and for anything that limits human beings. It is just that this latter instinct has been inculcated away, and they have used love, compliance, fear, or any one of your desires to keep you from feeling digusted. But deep down inside, your nausea can be felt. Reach deep down and learn to vomit all of this mass of inculcation right up! Throw up and spit out any of the more grand active coercions as well as the more passive little coercions of society and its present ideologues.
Your feelings of alienation from society or from the economy or even from the "world" are simply the hangover effects of slavery. Of going around in circles too many times. Of chasing desire after desire because you have been taught and accepted the premise that chasing fantasies or desiring the feeling of desire is much more pretty and exciting than freedom from the whole mess. You can blame society or the world for being the way it is, but remember that no one can keep you in slavery unless you first agree to it. It is not wrong to be disgusted or angry with anyone or anything that either chooses slavery or keeps others enslaved.
-Irreverend Hugh
August 15th, 2006