DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT HERE AS A RELIGIOUS DEMAGOGUE OF ANY SORT. MY GOAL IS TO EXPLORE SOLUTIONS TO A PROBLEM THAT I FEEL AILS MANY. I ADMIT THAT THESE ARE MY OPINIONS THAT I BELIEVE ARE BASED IN FACT. I HOPE THAT PEOPLE WILL APPROACH ME AND CHALLENGE MY THINKING SO THAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM EACH OTHER.
Hello, everyone. It's been a long time and I want to try to do this again. I'm going to try and do this as thoroughly and comprehensively as I can. It's been a few years and a lot has changed for me. I've learned many things, have better developed my heart and soul, and may have experienced something of a rebirth. So let's take it from the top:
The things I want to talk about are so broad and far-reaching that its hard to think about them without employing almost purely just one's imagination. I will admit, I don't know if I'm the best person to talk about these things; I will be extremely clumsy, talk about things out of order, reiterate a lot of things, but this is just to get my head on "paper" for hopefully more than one person to see. I believe that what I want to talk about is what humanity as a whole needs to survive this century. If you think this makes me sound like I think I'm some prophet, then I won't blame you if you turn your back right now. I feel these are things that must be said, and damn it, I'm an angry, lonely bastard for keeping this inside me so long.
Now As better philosophers do, I will try to approach the crux of this, knowing full well that I may change my thoughts on this at some point:
Humans don't listen.
It's true, in many ways. I don't want to shit on us right away, so I'll say quite objectively that we humans don't handle outside influence very well, sometimes even internal influence. And I understand, the idea is quite terrifying. Our hope, as animals, is to be able to stand self-sufficient, rigid and strong enough to weather any coming tide and come out on the other side just as solid, if not more so. That image of security, stability, and well-being is an attractive one that our baser survival instincts love to death, and why shouldn't they? Nobody likes pain. This is how we all should aspire to live at some point, right?
Yeah... too bad that's not going to happen.
Life, as Buddhists observe, is suffering. Sure there's fun to be had, laughs and love to enjoy, but ultimately time takes its toll. Friends come and go, family pass away, our own bodies begin to betray us as we grow old. You could be the richest human in the world, in charge of a medical science corporation that could guarantee you, at some point in our tech savvy future, something like immortality, and still time and tide would destroy you at some point. All things die; time and infinity are simply impossible foes. This is a truth that terrifies us to our very core, so we survive.
But I believe that this attitude is almost all wrong.
Memento Mori. Remember you must die. We survive in denial of this truth without taking a moment to realize that it is inevitable and that we have already discovered the best way to move forward: essentially, to listen.
An intelligent man named Charles Darwin proposed that life as we know it has survived impossible odds by way of evolution. This is to say that there was never a point in time where each organism on this planet was figured out in such a way that it could survive literally any environmental challenge and then stuck to it and lived forever. What the man said was that not the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable survive. Our intelligence as human beings has given us the gift of adaptability. We have only made it this incredibly far because we took the time to recognize our environment, take a more active role in our relationship with it, and use it to survive.
But we did more than that; we thrived.
You see, adaptability is like a form of listening. By submitting to the fact that we knew little, by listening to our own insufficiency, we were able to grow and enter several whole other levels of what life could be capable of. The major problem of the majority of our species today, is that we have lost the desire to listen. This affects us on physical, emotional, spiritual, communal... so many levels it's not even funny. If you genuinely think about it, this very issue is the cornerstone of why we face so many hard times now: We have a planet that is warming and flooding, nations around the world itching to point guns at each other, different colors of people that are once again eyeing each other with hatred and envy. The world focuses on opposition rather than cooperation and I am sick and tired of it on every single order of magnitude that I am exposed to it by on a daily basis and I am terrified of its ramifications for our future.
Finally, this is my proposal. This is my blog and I want to use it to quasi-philosophically explore the nature of listening at a fundamental level. My hope is that people can discover this blog and take away from it some element of listening into their own lives, in the quest to find unity with ourselves and each other, while growing together passionately towards a common goal: to thrive instead of survive, and show this unforgiving universe what life is capable of.
Thank you and I hope you will come to understand what I mean when I say I love you all.
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