What Separates Us?

Chapter 1

One thing about humans is keeping us apart. It has us thinking we are impotent in the face of those who would divide and dominate us.

A strange tendency, which follows shortly initial incarceration inside a social institution, (a family for instance, a clan, a city, a nation, a school, a ball team, a job, any gang really) is to become a voluntary self jailer who maintains his assigned station as if it were his very own dream. Yet, it is not. We need an alternative way of looking at things.

Oddly, the hook keeping us apart is the strong wish to be a part of something grand. On the surface that seems absurd. The bait we bite on keeps us dreaming of a tomorrow that will never come. Is it a paradox? Maybe. Depends on what that term means to you. What is certain is we seek something we have. When you are in that fix, having already what you desire, but not recognizing that fact, you are at a complete loss to know what to do except to keep looking for it, only harder. Strive! Strive! And since you have it, you will never find it by seeking it and no matter how well intentioned your search nor how desperately one searches life, for you, becomes futile. You know this.

Chapter 2

It happens unseen. It is practically impossible to detect and correct. People become radical slaves to football teams, for example, upon moving a family to a new city where they become devout fans of the one named for the City and buy all the merchandise that the corporate franchise will sell to them that they might feel justified. So clever is the process it is never even mentioned. It appears to be taken for granted. Everybody does it, so the story goes.

I watched a movie in which a family of daughters is being placed with respectable bachelors into marriages they want not to be in as wives who are expected to bear children for a lifetime of service. All the while, in the background, WWII arises, flares, and as it does so, extinguishes the lives of many of the men. In the film nobody winds up happy. And, no one sees that marriages and wars are related. The film suggests to me that one cannot have a war unless one first invents the institution of marriage. With that, someone has a family to protect. Against whom? Others with families to protect? Preposterous! Yet, it is so. Warring populations send children off with bombs and guns to annihilate families in need of protection from them.

Marriage is the name for a certain type of purchase of both parties to it. In fact, all attempts to manufacture a feeling of belonging are always going to be as a practical matter a sellout on both sides. Selling one's integrity is never a good idea. But, what we need is not a program to change or repair systems as we know them into something better. We need an alternative way of looking at the world. Wise men point to a fountain not made by the hands of men, a fountain that those already fastened to social fountains made by men do not see.

People have adopted lifetime careers for themselves from a prepared list handed them like assignments handed to the inmates of a work camp. Once at work, people quickly require of themselves a duty to report on a schedule not their own and to do work they do not like and to do it in ways they are told they are supposed to do it that seem to them corrupted, tainted, dishonest. They buy things advertised to them as appropriate at prices that keep them tied to their posts like helpless, frightened prisoners. Again someone points to the other fountain from which blessings flow freely.

Musicians in a band ride on buses to gigs booked on a schedule prepared by agents who sell tickets expecting band members to show up on time and perform on cue. These same kids never once cleaned their room at home. How quickly they change just to please others who are using them to grow rich themselves with little concern for whether it kills the performers. (Note: These same musicians blame others for the evils of the world in songs they sing on stages all around the world. How strange.)

I heard a world class actress with many awards to her credit tell that she felt her one advantage was that she did not choose her work but it came to her sort of sideways, day after day, year after year. Opportunities appeared which she accepted. She likened it to the common experience of forgetting a name then trying directly to recall it with no success and then giving that approach up to allow the name to quickly and easily appear sideways. That is the fountain! It is not about religion. It is not spiritual. It is practical as dirt is for planting seeds. It is simple truth that the fountain is here.






We do not need advice or counsel or teachers or leaders so much as we need an alternative way of looking at what is actually happening in the world we actually live in. Certainly, we are in need of no bag of beliefs.

Chapter 3

Christ: Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'.

And, a man's foes will be those of his own household. Matthew 10:34-36

A sword of truth cuts souls free from foolishness and the hypnotic desire for what is just out of reach. Peace is already here. Like a small dove of peace in constant flight you are nobody else. The Kingdom is in your hands. It has always been so.

And when the fact of death stretches forth its hand to where I stand

viewing the last remains of my dearest friend

a captive of love meets a stranger-

and then- myself- and in that meeting- I saw a forsaken man chained in a dungeon

Weird music playing all around our heads that it might strangle wicked demons and free all our friends is bringing an alternative way of looking at the world.

All hate is a misplaced champion of love; and there is naught to defeat; no storm to rise above. No one has taken life; life, it has taken you; all faith is a knowing within, it's true!
Revenge is a two-faced warrior, disgraced; all has been lost in a bloody foot race; but nothing's replaced. It's true!

When hate is restored to the palaces of love
on the back of a fugitive, wing-ed turtle dove
souls come together
where all we thought lost lasts forever.

Dignity, astride a gentle donkey, forfeits the race;
and so shuns every crown tethered athletes chase.

Oh, I am about to gain all from the deep rigors of pain; with the faith of the laboring mother who strains...and,
who, holding a stillborn trophy, her primary memory hard rain,
knows a love that remains as a death not in vain as she feels in a secret which blows through her ear; this one, gone before it began, came as a mirr'r.