DARE TO BE HAPPY!

Back last August my friend, Ichiban Kaboom, observed that, “your final point gets back to the same point your last blog got me on: the possibility for the individual to engineer significant and lasting social change, and the relationship between that and personal growth." He was the first and only person to even hint that I have a primary subject to explore or that every post is an attempt to get to the essence of a truth that seems self-evident to me. Just as sensitivity to environmental health begins at home with personal low impact living, a healthy social life is made of individuals who are concerned with learning and being happy with who they have always been since before conformity set in.

I’ve gone back to that post to explain why I bring a comment from a regular visitor, Troutsky, that furthers the point I intended two posts ago. He said, "… opens a million more questions. Such as: Can the idea of 'blundering' really then exist? It seems contradictory to the project of exposing the facade of an observer/observed duality. Perhaps you disturbing the web was as much a perfect expression of being as the spiders making it? In which case how do we judge right action or right speech?”

My answer was, The only blunder I intended to express was my willful ignorance of the threshold altogether through the blinders of my purpose. The propriety of other’s personal choices made within this threshold of the golden rule conscienseness is not my business — I just don't want it to be treated like a metal detector … to be got around. That consideration of the effect of our actions in a broader scope than our own purpose is my only concern and reason for the post. As to the spider web, it was back up, bigger and better the next day. The only blunder was to my purpose because of the expediency of my purpose.

Like all human faculties we are free to misuse them in this great experiment life is. Memory seems to be one of the least understood of such faculties as evidenced by the extremes to which it has been exploited in perversion of its evolutionary advantage. Memory of our living experience is one half of the metaphor completed by our genetic memory, we may be guided by recognizing patterns woven by comparing the timeless way of all against the way of the momentary observation. The best English word I have heard used to refer to that natural connectedness of the observed moment to internal eternity is wisdom. In direct opposition to such an idea I find the monkey wrench of education shouting down these more subtle signals, insisting on inspecting the efficacy of its cultural indoctrinations in the snotty voice of authority evoking memory to purge chunks of arbitrary answers on cue to qualify for existence in mixed company, while genetic memory quietly reminds us of other wrong paths taken, but never quite this far, believing we own all we survey.

With minds honed to fine lines between question and answer, action gallops along side with spurts of energy, occasionally bursting ahead of thought altogether… damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and all that. The perception of observer/observed duality is the birthing ground of questions more specific and purposeful than the amazing wordless wonder oneness with the universe seems to be.

Born of dualistic perception, purpose needs a foe to be avoided, converted or slain, — yin-yang becomes trikaya. We are presented with the question, “… how do we judge right action or right speech?” Should we be silent, lest we be misunderstood and attacked for our well intended contribution? Should we persuade the world to change so we can be happy in it? Should we kill that which makes us not want to live? Between the rightness of our intentions and the rightness of the results of our actions lies a large enough ocean of golden rule contemplation to grind this mindlessly insatiable imperialism of western culture’s frenzied, acquisitive expedience to a molasses creep in midwinter.

Of course, that’ll never happen, but any individual finding value in a threshold wherein pure thought undergoes inspection by the light of the golden rule before stepping onto the shore of action brings a gift to the world by being happy in it — and that’s gotta relax things a bit. At least locally. Maybe.