I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
J. Krishnamurti , Dissolution Speech , 1929You have to admire this guy. He threw it all away in front of everyone he knew.
Would that more folks saw it this way.
We here in blogoland are filled with our little truths. We pound away at our keyboards, exasperated that no one seems to see it the way that we do. But, we are all too caught up in our own mental vision of Utopia to see that place as it truly is; it has always been a fable. Our little mental visions of the truth seem to lead us away from the thing we seek. We posit our innumerable faiths then go out and live our day to day live in direct contravention of what the truths say.
So we are sitting here in a world that we know will be draining away. We will be going into a world where the structure of the society is much more tightly constrained than the easy ways we have been taught so far. Our old myths of what it was to live in society are dying, and we don't have a clue where we are going next.
The truths that we are moving away from are the tried and true Americana. Greatest country in the world, greatest education. big middle class, retirement for everyone. All this stuff is slipping down the pipe.
The first thing that I noticed leaving is the middle class which was the main driver for the Bourgeois lifestyle that we have come to cherish. When you get down to it, this has been going for quite some time now. Springsteen wrote about it back in 1985. In retrospect, This was always a transient. We always held in us the same fate as the British Empire, when you are the first to the trough, it will run dry for you the fastest.
We are living a bunch of false dreams and discredited truths. We have to throw them away and move on. But right now we are stymied. Not enough have recognized that changes will occur, and the majority of our friends and neighbors sit squatting on their pile of old truths and glaring at us for speaking of moving on.
It is a temptation to say "screw 'em" and wander away. But all that will do is create the sides of a future war. We have to sit here every day and gently pull folks along. That will take doing things that necessity demands of us to get to where we need to be. Nearly all of these will take years of patient work.
Get to it.
2 comments:
Sometimes 'we' is just too humongous a place to try to visit, amigo. It's an easy place to get lost in because the boundaries between 'we' and 'I' are just lines drawn in the dirt where there's not enough light to see them.
Good blog entry. Thanks. Jules
I think all we can do is "lead by example". You can't change someone's mind with words unless they are open to suggestion. Those people are few and far between... So I plug along, finding any way I can to work around the system, and hope that folks will see my successes, learn from my failures, and maybe try something different themselves. I suppose it is "risky" for me to publicly broadcast some of the things I do (or don't do), but as the saying goes "Nothing ventured, nothing gained"...
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