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The masquerade of "civilization" by Herb Ruhs, MD, Sept. 11, 2005 When we first start to wake up from the waking dream that is our usual state, we are understandably disoriented and confused. Shocked awake by the loud sounds of horror at our door we long for the peaceful world of our dreaming state where things made sense, where things would keep happening just as they always had, a place where we felt safe, a place without the hard edges of suffering and despair. So, naturally, in the wake of any such awakening occurring to a large number of people, such as now after the horrors of New Orleans, a market immediately develops in ideas that serve to put us back to sleep. These ideas are like drugs that dull the pain of consciousness, that call attention to the suffering of others but puts suffering over there, not in our neighborhood, not in our family, not at our work place. Those with the courage to resist the siren call of a false reality will have little to comfort them. There will be no great understanding, no set of new ideas to spread, like thick paint, over the ugliness that we have allowed reality to become. Being awake will suck relentlessly. However, for those with the courage to take the pain and remain focused on the real real, there will be a transformation. The pain will subside into acceptance for what is. The despair will dwindle into a willingness to do in the moment what the light leads us to. The hardship will be finessed into an understanding of how little we actually need to achieve, if not happiness, then quiet contentment, and it will be sufficient to our immediate needs. The fog of confusion will resolve into correct understandings. We will discover that we don't need people to tell us what to think when we can see plainly what is before our eyes and ears. Choices will resolve into simpler alternatives. False friends will slip away, and new, more nourishing people will come into our lives. We will see plainly that the whole superstructure of ignorance and suffering is dependent on our acceptance of the idea that it is acceptable for people to profit from the suffering of others. All evil flows from this. A community that allows predation will suffer all the pain that has come to be seen as a "normal" part of the world. Allow one person to trap another into servitude by stealth and lies, and eventually the entire society will be ruled by the depraved. Every spiritual teacher in history has taught this. The trap that has been laid for us in our social conditioning is that once awake to the evil in the world, we are immediately paralyzed by shame and guilt. You live in a better house. You have a car. You indulge yourself with luxuries. Therefore you are guilty and have no right to question the order of things. Bullshit. Granted, in an ideal setting, a far off fantasy, you might not be doing these things and everyone would be happy. But as an awake person you have the ability to step outside your habits and prejudices, your compulsive consumptions and just watch yourself as your automatic self, that has been trained and conditioned for a life structured by injustice for the many and the benefit of the few. We do not have to "do" anything at all. As the sleep is wiped from our eyes we will change without effort. It will be as if magic has entered our lives. And magic will have entered our lives, as each day we make slightly different choices about what we do and who we are susceptible to. In a remarkably short time we will have our own selves back, dinged up a lot to be sure, but quite serviceable for living a rewarding life. It is a struggle, that once begun, is won at the outset because we have no plans to fail, no design to impose, no disappointment to deal with. Each day will just be another learning experience, a series of teachable moments. Understandably, it will feel narcissistic, selfish and self centered to start with. We first will notice how poorly our minds relate to the needs of our bodies for healthful nutriment and rest. When we are sufficiently back into our bodies, and our minds are safely muzzled and chained, we will begin to become aware of how we feed ourselves with stimuli that justify the imaginings of the mind. We will find ourselves in a violent action movie, laughing while everyone else in the theater is gripped in terror. We will find ourselves greeting strangers and smiling at the fear and distrust we see in their eyes. We will find ourselves politely emptying the contents of our mouths into napkins to avoid insulting our host who knows that we, at least used to, love some tasty food that now tastes like poison to us. We will watch as we experience the pangs of withdrawal as our old habits fall away and our brains cry out for the sugar, the nicotine, the images of terror and release, the addictive substances of our former lives. And we will laugh at these pangs for what they are, the means used by a confused, conditioned mind to bind us to a way of life that was a misery. As we wake up we will become aware of others who are more awake because they will be surrounded by what seems like a halo of light. They will, in turn, be drawn to us like a magnet for the same reason. We will begin to compare notes, and just as the magic of mere watching transformed our lives, our mutual observations of the world, as it is, will begin the transformation on ever larger scales. Nothing will cancel the wreckage of the past that we have strewn thoughtlessly in our path, but the new awareness will point us to what needs to be done to heal ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. All the great spiritual teachers tried to teach this, but the irony is that it can not be taught, it can only be experienced. As the transformation enters our souls nothing will seem to be happening. No special pay off, no special "high" will be experienced, just imperceptible change, day by day. We will seem to be the same person that we were yesterday but not the same as last year, and this will be worth only a moments glance because it is not part of now, where we really are, and where our complete attention is fixed. Ideology will become as nothing more than an unpleasant smell. We will seek out people who are different and challenging because we will have become interested in how we are reflected in the many different kinds of mirrors that relationship presents. We will be more like ourselves and less like anyone else at the same time that we feel more like we are the same as everyone else. Criticism will be absorbed as what it is, helpful or irrelevant, nutrient or waste to be passed through our systems unchanged. We will continue to suffer, but our sufferings will become puzzles to work out for our selves or endured with equanimity while we wait for collaborators to come forward to heal them together. We will learn to change what we can and accept what we can not. As we come together in our circles of light we will see how, eventually, everything can be changed for the better as ever larger numbers of people come to see clearly the patterns of predation that surround us and masquerade as "Civilization." We will be content to help who we can and accept that we can not help who we can not, secure in the understanding that, as the circle of light spreads to encompass the world, that everyone will be helped in the precise way that they need, and we will not need to understand how this comes about other than to have faith that when we are all awake all will be as it should be because otherwise it would be monopolizing the attention of everyone until it changes. Now that the sermon is complete, I will return to my misery as one of the multitude that stands on the first rung of the ladder, and feel content that it is not by my hand alone that I will achieve the light. I will progress with a little help from my friends. herb
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