http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYXQ2McDGu8
I can't suggest to you that history's potent activists had
the advantage I have of Harvard’s Piririm Sorokin's implied model of
psychology; that we best understand ourselves, our nervous system in terms of
head, flesh and heart; that we live in a culture optimized for head and flesh,
and optimized to destroy our hearts, which pretty much by the end of high
school has now happened to our American students, studies of empathy suggest. My generation at least made it through the
first couple years college, with heart intact.
But though they didn't have the language or the benefit of Sorokin’s
model, they still were the best we've ever seen in terms of understanding their
own nervous systems, how we're shaped by
our DNA’s predispositions, how we're predisposed and therefore how others are
genetically pre-disposed, but I'll switch to speaking explicitly from my own
behavior and experience, which I now experience as being extremely similar to
theirs.
We are all born creatures of the heart; were born loving
creatures; and in this culture, we then have that punished, and we're turned
into creatures of the head and flesh. The
great Ashley Montague said, this highly degreed, PhD man, who taught at Yale,
Princeton and elsewhere - 'we die by
degrees in this country, bachelors degree, Masters degree, PhD degree. He wasn't kidding. There are people that escape it, just like there
are people that escape an epidemic, just like there are people that escape our spiritually
eviscerating main religions, but they're the exception not the rule. We swim in a multitrillion dollar economy
that is entirely directed at inflaming and intoxicating and selling intoxicants
to the head and the flesh - he house, the car, the girl, the boy, the wife, the
husband, the glamorous job, the Coca-Cola, the expensive meal, the vacation,
and they're all intoxicants for the head and the flesh. I didn't just condemn them, though I don't want
them in my life anymore than I want crack cocaine in my life. I want the joy of serving our global
neediest that I can stretch and reach in my life. I want my universal family to entirely fill
my life, but that's different than saying the lusts of the head and flesh are
bad, just experientially grossly inferior to the joy of serving from the heart,
and this, intuitively or through study, the great activists know, and live. That's the core reason why you find a Diane
Wilson planning an action in her own mind, or talking to serious activists
about doing so, rather than off at the movies or off a party, or off dancing. I'm not speaking for her. She might
disagree. But that's my take on it.
They would not have said that these other things are bad,
intoxications of the head and the flesh.
They showed by their lives that they preferred loving, over lusting and
the intoxications and pleasures that come from lusting for stuff, head and
flesh in charge. I’m with them on this,
now. I never I guessed, I always knew it
as possible, most of my life, I didn't
believe it would ever happen to me. I
wasn't sure it was real. It's absolutely
real. And it's heaven, living Heart in
charge for the joy of serving, Loving.
I look at all the lusts I wasted my life on and I hate every
second that I did. I'd trade every single
second, for another second for what I'm doing right now; out of love of giving
my life for our brothers and sisters, which some of us should do over 90 years,
and some of us, depending upon a more appropriate mission for us at the time,
over 90 seconds, or 90 days. Depends
entirely on what our human Family needs from us.
If you're not a creature of the heart, as I was not creature
the heart, you can do it.
Use this personal trainer, invest your time, every day,
hours a day at the beginning, and as your nervous system becomes grooved you
can do it less and less, that's how it is with me. It becomes part of your cell structure, it
becomes part of your atomic structure. But there are always temptations. They come at the worst times, they come in
the most unrecognizable ways, and there may be no more important tool than this
Personal Trainer to recover in time - 'Am I operating out of the head and the
flesh in charge, or am I operating out of the heart in charge?’
There may be more no more important compass for staying on
the path in difficult situations, than this question, one that I had to learn
and develop and use for myself to my great profit and gratitude.
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