A Small Medium @ Large
“Perception is reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn’t mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don’t go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.” Ivanka Trump
The “perception is reality” meme got perfectly illustrated in last week’s “Mueller Report” hearing, and I’m using it to tee up today’s theme. I take it as just more evidence that nobody sees things as they are. We see things as we are, and what we call reality is illusory, a moving target and a matter of our state of mind.
This veil of everyday blindness is what one makes of it. The more positive reality one creates and cultivates the more of it one has. The same goes for the negative- we apprehend the world through our models rather than directly. Our hardball convictions may be accelerants to runaway polarization, but not the fire itself.
Our unconscious reliance upon selective perception to navigate life is neither good nor bad unless the inevitable downside comes back to blindside us. For example, I’ve noted that the ongoing poisoning of Douglas County with synthetic biocides has grave consequences in real time. Because we have alternatives this is not a theoretical debate and even a small medium can see the coming lawsuits.
Heads up, Ava! But a screed on political dithering is not where I’m going with this. Forget, for a moment, whether you’re a “tree-hugger” or a “fundamental economics” kind of voter. The root of America’s political paralysis goes deeper.
It is because we perceive the world as hostile. Whether you are a Smash-and-Grab Capitalist, or a Kool-Aid Drinking Socialist, the underlying fear’s the same. America’s political theater would be a tenth the size- and cost everyone far less- but for the underlying fear that binds us apart. What’s really going on?
As long as we presume to be a “me” with a fate distinct from “you” and “others” there is no answer to fear. Identification with the point of view of separation of the body and mind inherently generates fear because these temporal phenomena are literally built to die.
Our Me culture elevates self-possession well past its capacity for strategic understanding. Children are not connecting to larger universal relationships that give meaning to existence. Snowflakes with fat crayons are lining up to become the majority in Congress and may God help us.
This is why I reiterate the three relationships that form human existence, each with its unique economy, ecology, powers and responsibilities. The adult works to maintain health (balance) between three relationships- to Source, to species, and to the planet’s bio web. The adult of the future, like in the communities past, will independently feed its family in harmony with nature.
The people of Missouri owned their own food supply a hundred years ago. The Golden Age of Missouri Agriculture was the talk of the world and the wealth of everyday people reached it all-time high. Nowadays, we’ve been educated into total dependency on the corporate state. We sleep.
And yet, don’t we willingly and pleasurably surrender our identification with the body and mind every day when we fall into deep sleep? And don’t we wake up refreshed when we do? If we could but trust in an authority that’s greater than the separate self we’d be refreshed. We’d enjoy a life of well-being and clarity.
It is why I hammer the basics about Food Freedom. Restoring food autarchy can and should be wholly funded if tied to self-managing our transfer of wealth (TOW) asset base and dedicating a small percentage of coordinated giving to a charitable foundation founded by the folks in any given watershed – hence, a ‘congress’. We’d turn over a whopping trillion dollars to each other every fifty years – imagine every major watershed with its own Charitable Foundation dedicated to the people’s cause. The Farm Resettlement’s 20 Year Plan returns food freedom through a non-political, economic-driven process of decentralization.
I don’t say that a bioregional model is the only way. But until the happy crickets of hierarchy in Jeff City begin speaking to the big picture, Herald readers will have the field of dreams all to themselves.
The fact is, when we no longer fear we think, speak, and act differently. That’s why I’ll continue to focus on the root fiction of our system, the “I am separate” feeling of consciousness that solidifies over a couple of years after birth. That’s when the mind constructs an analogue world based upon language.
Self-contraction is a process that becomes concretized in a child about the time it begins looking at itself in a mirror or starts combing their hair. The “I-am-Me” feeling of the self is not a thing, as such, but an introspective operation that parallels the behavioral world, and involves a dividing of mental space with our computational descriptions. The world of things and world of symbols soon becomes reflexively conflated.
And here we are. It’s no accident that the legends of naming stuff in Eden is followed by The Fall, and then the chaos of Babble. All run together. Things still operate this way…exactly.
One theory is that consciousness didn’t evolve. It appeared very recently in human history as a communication break- down within the bicameral brain. Some say that a pole-reversal and magnetic flux changes in the earth’s core could explain how a neuro freak-out happened to everyone’s equipment all at the same time.
However it happened, and with all the invisible eddies shaping human perception through precast meaning, we are simply unaware that we are the ones creating the trance we experience. Meaning, our perception of reality is isomorphic with scripted and sculpted function of our personal biography.
It’s also why we’re spring-loaded to blame others for any mess, and the Muller Report’s a fine example. To mistake the material world as being fundamentally real with fixed attention on the contents of our consciousness is to endure self-deception, and fratricide, the opiate and bottom line of materialism.
But restoring Liberty through food freedom remains our hope. Required of us is that we know the universe to be Self-Aware. That is, we must believe that consciousness is implicit to creation and is not epiphenomenal, not a byproduct of a universe that originated from chance and subsequently “evolves” by itself in empty space. Which is just ducky for an end-justifies-the-means outcome.
Look closely at any human conflict and you’ll see the degree to which people have identified with either “material pragmatism,” or “monistic idealism,” as the basis for their grip on reality. What’s so confusing for each camp is that we must rely upon the same world of matter and the world of mental phenomena, such as thought, to provide the evidentiary justification for our desired outcomes.
I argue that identification with the archetypal or implicit realm (think of Plato’s cave allegory or of the Kingdom of heaven) offers the way to a sustainable, prosperous, shared and inclusive future.
In a unitary philosophy (God is One, the only Self), any subdivisions such as the “immanent” and the “transcendent” are within consciousness. Thus the all-pervading conscious is the only reality and the qualities of existence, knowledge and bliss comprise its true nature and not incidentally, our own. If not this, what?
