Saddam, Qaddafi, Stalin and Goebbels each took their chance at the roll of history's drum, hoping to tumble the numbers their way, bucking for Bingo in the jet-stream. How did "we" think "they" happened? What part of Saddam could any one of us take responsibility for?
Because of fear, because of pain, each of us learns to be a walled portion of the whole, learning to adhere to the selfness of individual identity. This is something we do largely out of a favor to the rest of the world. A stubbed toe is something we learn to keep from others, for good and bad reasons -- not to pass on the pain of it to them, or not to share the advantage in drawing attention that a hurt brings. Nothing pulls in attention like a good hurt, and we all learn the nuances that will make the most of any we "receive" in our own scripts. Nor do we want to see our acquaintances quiver in the throes of our hurt, be it of heart or knee, in love or little league. The answer is to hold it back and keep it in, while naturally resisting the experience since what else is pain good for?
So we learn that the wall's the thing; being an "I here" is manageable, expected, agreed-upon; while being a "We all around " is intuitive, natural, dynamic, sensitive, and totally repulsive to any "other" I who is busy being a solid. We learn -- sometimes through great pain -- to "keep to our selves, one by one".
But even with that harsh lesson under our belts, chilling our passions with its frostbite, we know there is at least a family of our kind, a connection, a human species. Awe and love of our collective Kind is possible even when the We of Perception has been denied. And the denial, as always happen, simply brings persistence to the reality denied.
This family knowing, the perception that we are a species, not a clump of races, in turn becomes a thing to resist so that advantage can be taken, in commerce or invention or in service or love. Dynamic forces of egos not aligned become the primary topic of attention in internal dialogues as well as external ones. To maintain this then, we have another sub-section, a retreat from One, to Family, to Competitor, to the harder lessons of failure in Competition. And all these exciting roller-coaster rides are fueled with the strange energy that comes from being something and retreating from it -- two simultaneous motions. An inversion of our saner forces begins to result from these retreats, where the craziest things are trotted out as "good survival".
Behind the Joycean monologue and the river of conscious thoughts each of us runs daily from dawn on, behind the chatter of private tongues and babble of selves thinking about themselves as though they were completely separate, there is still a back-fill of higher light, like the royal sunrise behind a crowded shantytown -- there is the whisper of the past space, the higher communication, filling the void. Dodge it though we may, when we allow stillness it is still there singing quietly.
To maintain the fictions of our degenerated and solid lives, we must maintain firm retreat from the true fires in our hearts, the effervescent chorale, the orchestra of lights and heart-stopping beauties of our largest Create. And while we deny those heights, in order to hold the dark, moldy, dense hardwood walls by which we define ourselves , where Are We Being?
And Where are we Being Now?