A NEW WAY TO LIVE

Let us speak of finding a new way. A common arrangement long practiced throughout humanity across the Earth is marriage and family. All have some  familiarity with that subject whether they marry or do not. It is all around every neighborhood. It makes a good place to start.

The institution, though widespread, has little going for it. At its base was a plan by men to dominate women and the children they birth. That makes it so very suspicious all at once. It is completely the work of thinking brains of human manipulation. Nothing supports the belief that a Great Spirit told man to carry out such domination and abuse upon those he is supposed to love and cherish. Man and woman are conditioned deeply to make the claim it is so, though. Historians will chime in by claiming the alternative to marriage is an utterly chaotic world where men brutally take women by force for pleasure then abandon them and the children so conceived. Seem familiar?

So it is usually written in defense of a civilization that man has continuously attempted to improve the originally brutal system by declaring marriage to be a “sacred” instrument of the local religion. It is claimed that Great Spirit brings the two people together and binds them. But then they go to the home, close the door, and Hell breaks loose. So much for such a Great Spirit. For most, marriage  quite soon becomes a dull, monotonous repetition one has been taught to accept as never ending. Quite a Hell, actually. I can go on. Enough for now to close by writing that both sexes have been participating in the arrangement for thousands and thousands of years, at least; but does anybody really conclude it is working? I overheard a woman ask a man who had just complimented her  “then why do you not ask me out?” The dating game…courting is the old-fashioned name for it. Same thing. Courting is illusive. When “I “ court “you” we create images of one another. Based on the images we decide whether to continue the courting or break it off. Many marry the image they have of the other. All know that is not working out. This courting thing is very mechanical and life is certainly not mechanical! There is absolutely no method in love. Actually, courting is produced by fear. It’s the same for all image-making. Look. My image of myself attaches to the image of “marriage”. Why? It gives a certain feeling of security and we all crave security. Ask deeply of your inner being “what is true security?” and let the question answer itself. Two who meet in love (a dimension within each) will act purely without thoughts of a future or past (time) to bring further private meetings together to explore the love they feel. There is a gap between time and the timeless. It is also the gap between thinking and inner stillness (the dimension of love).

Here is what is seen on introspection. I have been taught that choice is freedom and freedom is choice. So, in marriage I make a choice. A problem arises between us. So, what do people do? They first make the mistake they always have made when a problem presents itself. They work on the named problem to make it better. Only the very foolish would fail (right quickly) to see that there are countless factors working together to make the situation as it is and realize a serious look at the whole picture is required to make anything truly new in the sense that the overall well-being of the couple can be expected to improve from the work to be done. In fact, a young child’s brain would go there first. Not so for the adult’s conditioned brain. You might ask why do the adults not ask the children. That’s a good question. Freedom is not a state of having a choice between images. A free human is clear and certain. Pure action follows. No room is there for decision-making there. It happens from time to time that two meet for the first time and one asks, “Why don’t we make a home together and have babies?”

Why did anyone ever come up with the idea to build a jail? That is worthy of careful and deep study for it will bear good fruit that actually can make a very much more satisfying world for all of us. It is a fact that a jail stands for the proposition that some of us are bad people who need to be locked up. And to be treated like criminals and the rest of the population are good people who ought to be allowed to move freely about. The result could have been foreseen. As more and more people are jailed it is becoming obvious to just about all that the wise thing to do is to cease trying to increase effort that fails and look at the whole picture for a change. We are the bad people we despise. This bundle of bad people is us. None are separate from the bundle. We must learn to love one another. And everybody will be surprised to find it is much less costly than a system of criminal courts and jails. Actually to love is a dimension beyond accounting figures altogether just as it is beyond “choice”. When a human acts in love there is a repayment vastly larger than any cost. And the ridiculous thing is, everybody knows it! Love cannot be “figured out”.

The practice of family carries with it the notion of a family name. In the West it is the common practice to concoct a system around a surname based on the male’s name which was concocted in the same arbitrary manner that has no more legitimacy than the practice of building jails. It is absolutely the spoiled fruit from ages of male domination. A common name is Smith. But Mister Smith had a mother. Also, Mister Smith’s father had one, too. These people as well had both mothers and fathers who each had such a pair who also each had mothers and fathers as well…and so on and on up the family tree. It is called a family tree but it as an enormously vast multitude of relationships. We know as a fact that all people have a mother and a father but it is not a fact that Mister Smith’s name is Smith. That is illusion. That symbolic practice results from a game developed along with a benefit to be gained by lying to children. And, millions have been persecuted and killed as a result of  the game. Wars are only justified by the “family” game. All the while, there is a fact that all of us are one nameless family all born related to everyone else as human beings. This writer happens to be equally related to the Smith family, the West family, the Bennett family and the King family…and that is just at the level of grandparents. Each grandparent had a branch like me. We honor but a tiny branch of the whole tree and ignore all the rest. 

Actually we are trees! 

We are the birds singing in the trees! 

And need to learn all their songs!

Many have thought violence is a requirement for us all and believe we will become peaceful after death if we have joined and practiced the right religious “method”. How silly can it get? For any who look it will be found that thinking divides whatever it thinks about into fragments and in separation there is no love. Love trumps thought. That ends the game. And instantly, one recognizes the actual problem concerning marriages and jails and wars throughout the world today. Need I say it?

We have no love. 

We have no peace, only cease fires to reload for the next war.