VITALITY

Vital is defined as “indispensable to life,” so that vitality can be seen as the efficiency with which one applies ones energy to an active continuance of ones life. One of the most important characteristics of a vital individual is an open mind. Such willingness to grant now the infinite possibilities it contains may view completely contradictory variations in experience as beneficial expansions of vital wisdom rather than as occasion for proper choices of reality based on memory of the prior, always premature conclusions of the closed mind. More traumatic yet for the vaunted, vaulted mentality is to undergo the earthquake of being forced to admit to a preponderance of experience being denied, to suffer the pain and effort of unmaking and remaking ones perpetually closed mind by modifying the absolutes in ones still premature conclusions (repundancy intended). That we insist on an either-or approach to existence is a measure of how limitedly low the count to infinite possibilities our culture requires of us to imagine we can claim to possess knowledge, at the complete sacrifice of evolving any wisdom. Sometime it doesn’t even require a duality for the most self righteous —— “it’s my way or the highway, it’s my god or oblivion.”

“Why, sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! And what do we ask of you in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore for you — for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our RIGHTS …” —— Henry MacNeal Turner, addressing the 1868 Georgia House of Representatives upon being expelled from office along with twenty six other black legislators in reconstruction backlash.

While reading this I had another one of those serial metaphor overlaps, which I am beginning to think may be the language of my genetic memory, using flash cards of patterns from experiences of my present incarnation, which, when overlaid and aligned, point me to the Tao, showing itself in human reaction to western civilization, to the competitive version of human society. The first metaphor for Turner’s staggering wisdom in stating his desire to be able to start afresh despite horrendous grievances and referring to what his father, rather than he, suffered as dead and buried, is paralleled in the seven year cycle of the human body to completely regenerate every cell without noticeable discontinuity throughout a life of many cycles.

This also resonated in the regeneration of each individual human, each cell of the human race inheriting not only genetic memory and physical resemblance from ones parents but the inescapable, artificial conditions of their culture. That the evolution of mankind seems to have bogged down somewhere in a self cheapening tautology created by the almost universal belief that we own all we survey, makes pleas like Turner’s almost inevitable throughout the true history of a civilization whose leaders dictate different, more public, more noble records for posterity.

When the human body presents itself to the public of western civilization eighty percent of its sensitivity to its environment is stifled from reporting anything more than the texture of and the light filtered through clothing. When humanity assumes the myth of western civilization is true, its kinship to its environment is stifled by being clothed in the same mistaken ownership that allowed slave owners to consider their slaves inhuman property and justifies corporate-governments’ obliteration of entire enemy cities and consideration of their own citizens as commodities.

The closed mind of western civilization discovered and destroyed the key to escape its evolutionary museum when it met the people who lived in what they thought was India. Imperialism’s tautological mythology requires it to infect the entire world with the same case of glut, so to feed further on the new addicts created. Rejection of their perfection is a selection for ejection from the protection of their erections or subjection to inspection for detection of nature's constant, vital insurrection.