September 22, 2011

The Great Fork in the Road

September 22, 2011 There is a lot of panicky talk on the news regarding the financial world and the government. I am always struck by how out-of-touch the various finance ministers and heads of state appear to be. For three years now, they have stubbornly refused to admit we are having a recession, and perhaps rightly so, for it is really a restructuring that is occurring. Anyone who cares to look at the whole picture will see that our world is being restructured. This includes everything…our relationship with Mother Nature and the Earth, our dependency on jobs instead of work that is meaningful to us, our move away from state-funded education to something more relevant related to life, the shift from religion to personal awakening, our use of energy, our views and attitudes toward money, right down to the question, “Do we need a ‘nation’ with its clunky, corrupted ways of managing our relationships with other people around the planet?” Is there some other form of collective organization that would be more practical? The authority of government is held in place by the financial system which guarantees that we are so distracted that we don’t stop to question what is happening. The jobs issue is a particularly illuminating example of how this distraction works. Politicians keep squawking about creating more jobs because having a job keeps people too busy for things like protests, riots, and revolutions. A job is the means by which people get the money to feed their habits and addictions whether that is food and drugs or big TVs and entertainment. Governments fear that without jobs, it will only be a matter of time until they are challenged by those with free time on their hands – and rightly so! People who are not busy working-to-consume will have time to reflect. They will begin to see how much the government has taken over our lives. In fact, you can measure the degree of control government has usurped by the amount of blame it receives. Is it bad for government to decide what we eat and wear, what medicines we take, how we will travel, how we build houses, what we drive and how much gas costs, how private our cell phone conversations are, and what kind of scientific research is permissible?  We can spend our lives in debate about these questions, but if we do, we will discover too late that they are just part of the planned distraction. The real questions are, “What is the work that restructuring calls us to do? Can we work together well enough to preserve and evolve the unique form of life that is indigenous to Planet Earth?” If we do not answer these two questions, we are likely to collapse and die out. We are at that great fork in the road that the Robes called “choosing an alignment.” One path leads to greater life, the other leads to self-destruction. As they said so long ago, “If you don’t want to align with life, you needn’t do anything different for you are already on the path to destruction. However, if you choose life and creation, you will have to do many things differently.” So here we are. What is your choice?