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Global versus local and the decision to Know
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Moon over San Antonio
Sometimes the days of our lives catch us up, leave us dazed and confused as we deal with the ups and downs our choices occasion. It's easy to get caught up. In fact, we seek it out consciously. Work and friends, family and fun, often the outside world catches us unawares as events swirl around cosmic alignments and historical confluences, whirling us unawares into the gyre of destiny manifest.
Closing the loop on the world is comfortable. Living within the confines of the known is a simple way of creating your own reality and losing all sense of the world outside of your own bubble. Taken to extremes, this way of living is a spiritual path. The image of the native shaman or buddhist monk, the catholic priest or nun rises to mind. Or, the older person who has lived life and found peace in the immediacy of their surroundings, blissfully approaching dissolution secure in his or her spiritual gains.
But most of us are in the exploratory or householding stages of life, where our attention remains centered in the lowest chakras and we strive for bodily and familial comfort and egoic acclaim. Because life is what it is, this is as it should be, our efforts the accumulated gain of a lifetime of focus, whatever that focus might be. Being the best slacker you can be or the best physician. The best accountant, teacher or cop. We each see people each day whose interests exemplify every possible permutation of human endeavor. Genius rears its proud head in the most mundane of matters; noted, processed and shifted into memory, synthesized within the continuous stream of input that passes for our lives.
Meanwhile, our lives are affected drastically by worldly forces that make themselves known politically, economically and culturally. The price of gasoline is connected to political relationships we have with countries on the other side of the world. The food we buy depends upon the economics of the oil from which gas is derived. The urban, suburban and exurban lifestyles are an integral part of the cultural imperatives of American civilization and are also dependent upon oil-based sustenance. These imperatives of American, and Western, civilization, permeate every aspect of our relationships with other, non-Western countries. Often unconsciously, our hegemonic position as a nation - at the center of the world's power and presige - makes us complacent in the assumption that things will always be the way that they are now. Perhaps they will not.
As in our personal lives, the juxtaposition of worldly and spiritual imperatives leaves us dazed and confused and, most times, we try to bury our thoughts, desires and actions in the minutia of the minute in order not to consider the greater forces at work in our lives. The allure of cognitive dissonance as defense against the stark brilliance of gnosis is undeniable. Building, tearing down and rebuilding the subjective synapses of our neural nets, changing our minds and gaining the ability to synthesize information in the attainment of sure knowledge based upon the evidence, too much work. San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, the smaller cities of the hinterlands and urban realms are the scenes of our petty dramas. Each of these is no less important, in our lives, than the elections in Iran to the lives of everyday Iranians, the suicides of farmers in India to one of the farmer's wife and children or the threat of nuclear war from North Korea to the "Rock Soldier" stationed on the DMZ, staring across that desolate expanse at South Korean and American soldiers every day.
Determining the correct distance to cultivate between ourselves, our lives and choices and those greater streams of life and destiny that give rise to existential alienation is the choice to live consciously, aware of the events which often force us upon the paths we choose. And no matter how insignificant you feel amidst the wreckage and ruin of your daily lives, each of our decisions resonates at a higher level as chaos responds to underlying laws that reverbrate in fractal waves of creation become. The butterfly effect becomes lived reality and none of us is, truly, an island.
This interconnectedness lifts us up and bears us along a stream of all-encompassing light, together, into the scintillating skies of life and beyond. And this is the promise intuited by each of us, every time we stop for a moment and bask in the sheer joy of life realized.
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