http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysSRjYd_9nQ
Our 2012 Western society could not exist if we didn't
pervert and distort and burry the joy of exercising the heart as inferior to
the pleasures of exercising the head and flesh - endless planning, endless
talking, endless cowardice, endless desire for entertainment, food, infotainment…
endless lusting; everything but loving.
Now, if this society of head and flesh continues to exist there will be
no future. If this direction doesn't
change there will be no future worth living, for the next 2000 generations. But
it exists because it has found how to relegate, to virtual non-existence, the
80% of our circuitry associated with our heart, loving, solidarity, unity,
humanity - we ridicule it, right? When
it is serious, the heart, we ridicule it to keep it at bay. We engage the heart in kind of a faux way, on
Sunday morning, and in doing so, we emphasize how fanciful, how irresponsible,
how juvenile , how irrelevant, weak, like a ‘pet,’ it is. So peripheral to ‘real’ life.
We take it out a little bit when we go to our movies, and
read our books, because they're all about exercising the heart. But our culture has managed to keep the heart
so contained, so drugged, so belittled by implication, so entirely devoid of
living models, that mass loving never, never breaks out. People like Teresa of Calcutta, and I'm
thinking of her specifically, because I know the quote, "I don't want to
be dismissed as a Saint." Along a
similar line King said, 'Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve." What Jesus words and behavior say is, we are
all made in the creator’s image. What
could be more great in potential, what could be more divine, in potential than
being like the Creator? A part of the
Creator itself, a full Daughter, or Son?
So what have we done?
We've turned these Potent Activists into non-human beings, we've turned
them into saints, we've turned them into unreachable ‘sons of God, we've turned
them into these unreachable things to protect, 'hey, if that's the son of God,’-
I might as well stay head and flesh, cuz hey, I'm not the son of God, I can't
be him,' even though Jesus said we could, we're all Our Father's children,
we're all born in Our Father's image, we simply then select head and flesh,
over Heart, heart being Our Father's kingdom, by whatever name, by whatever
concept, or at least that part of the Kingdom we can know.
I've probably not come across a more important intellect
than Pitirim Sorokin, founder of the field of sociology, while at Harvard. Was much revered at the time, has been much
maligned since, and by this sick society I'd say that's a badge of honor. His seminal study was called Social and
Cultural Dynamics, but I was blessed by years ago reading the 600 page synopsis
of this multi-volume, many thousand page set.
He took his intellect and the best resources at the time, the first half
of the 1900's, and asked the question, have all cultures been the same, or have
there been patterns and cycles, that tend to be gone through sequentially, I
don't remember the sequence, sensate, of the senses like our culture;
ideational as I recall, very cerebral; the Athenians of ancient Greece maybe;
and then another, a synthesis of the two, Idealistic, I think, a merger of the
two, senses and ideas, the whole human being – Heart being the place of
synthesis.
From that he derives a sense of psychology, even though he
was a sociologist, it is far and away the best model I've seen. We can best understand our nervous systems
and ourselves as three major components, head, flesh and heart. And we have a culture today, uber-sensate,
with a touch of Ideational, that reviles
Heart, that is built entirely on disabling it, so that the head and the flesh,
those entirely, by nature, selfish entities, they simply don't have the
circuits for solidarity, unity, sense of humanity… they think they do, they
have the words, but it is like a color blind person may have the name for a
color they can't see, that doesn't mean they can see it.
What gets used grows.
So, we exercise in this society, this is one big gymnasium for the head
and the flesh, and nothing to exercise the Heart, except the probes that jab it
when it shows itself, and shock it and punish it when it shows itself. Don't be a Pollyanna. Don't be a Don Quixote. Get realistic. You can't save the world. Be responsible, Yada, yada, yada.
So guess what we are?
Our nervous systems are very plastic until we die, more so as children,
but until we die, what gets used grows, what doesn't get used atrophies. Yes, all the potent activists, the insanely
humane warriors of unviolence, have all been creatures of the heart. When the heart is exercised, it generates a chemical
cocktail continuously as long, every second it is exercised, for days, years,
lifetime on end, and we call the feeling of this cocktail, is called joy, is
called peace of heart. Understood as joy, and peace of heart and Life.
The head and the flesh, have their own very potent, very
mind wiping, drugs as well, called pleasure, sense of intoxication. And when we exercise our capacity to take
care of just me and mine, those chemicals flow, and they wipe out virtually all
memory of the heart, all memory of how to get back.
I was much a creature of the heart when I was 20, like most
of us. I lost it through a series of
events I partly understand, like near all of us. My memory was wiped by
hormones, the tidal wave of temptations, expectations, pressures that come with
entering college, the job market, the marriage market…except I knew I had lost
the divine, and I spent 25 years in this sick culture, trying to find my way
back, and the last 13 years I've been there.
If you are a creature of the head and the flesh, God bless
you, I love you. You are not a hope for
humanity. You are a hope for the status
quo, whether you wear activist clothes, whether you smoke pot in an activist
house, weather you go to marches, it doesn't matter. You are the change that's already in place,
the status quo.
If you become a creature of the heart, by more and more
refusing to exercise the head and flesh in charge, and more and more exercise
the heart in charge, then you are joining those that have been the proven
potent, demonstrated ,insanely humane, inspiration and sources of health and
growth and reconstructive direction for humanity.
Choose the Heart.
I've done both friends. I was
more addicted to the sanctioned pleasures of the head and the flesh than anyone
you'll ever meet. It's garbage. It's the crack addict in the corner, thinking
he's in heaven, and you see him and you know he's in hell. And that's where I see my brothers and
sisters, who are creatures of the head and the flesh.
Stop it, and love someone in your life enough, to find life
as I did, and lead them toward it. They
may or may not follow, but by God, you can do your part of blazing the trail.
All hope lies with that.
Unless there is a mass awakening of the heart, Einstein was
clear, mid 1950's, and I paraphrase with liberties he’d approve, 'if we develop
no more technology, humanity will be ok.
But if our morality, if our hearts don't grow, to the size of our
intellect and our science, we will destroy ourselves.’
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