The Two Ends of the Power Cord

I was one of the estimated 30,000 Melburnians who Marched in March over the weekend from the State Library to Parliament House to register a vote of no confidence in the current government.  I am very proud to have done so. 

It was a messy hodgepodge of people and placards, some of which I was in favour of and others which I wasn't.  That's how it goes, I guess, in a democracy – a loud mix of voices, some contradictory, which can feel uncomfortable and not entirely safe.

This might sound ridiculous in the face of internet trolls, the NSA, city bashings, Kyle Sandilands, reality TV, familial incest, Russia, the US and China sticking out their chests and the Abbott Government, but I really don't believe that humanity has reached anywhere near its highest potential.  We march slowly, slowly forward into unity in diversity, greater compassion and equality, a space where we can all feel safer and freer to express our humanity.  But it's an uncomfortable march – it requires us to not only speak truth to power, but also to own our own shit after a fashion, to own the bits that we don't like about ourselves.

Now, just in case I possibly give the impression of being a preachy Girl Guide with her entire shit together talking about love, rainbows and unity, to dispel that misconception I will share a couple of home truths about myself as well, helpfully highlighted in bold.

Anyway, I never made it to Girl Guides.  I distinctly remember as a 10 year old dancing as a Brownie around a plastic mushroom with my fellow Junjarins and thinking, “What a bloody load of cods this is.”

It's the hardest of hard work to understand your cultural place in history, to see the shadows and blind spots that others in 500 years' time will be able to see very clearly.  But as evidenced on the weekend, there are some spots that come into focus and beam like beacons – unfair distribution of power and wealth which shows up in the way previous governments on both sides have treated refugees, the way those in power are increasingly treating us. 

I like one Bryan Adams song and love another one.

And yet while it's right to march and voice your opinion and empower yourself, it's a victim's stance to believe that all of the power lies in the hands of the powerful.  After all, hard as it is to believe, they are human as well.  I try to put myself in their position and imagine how all of us would appear to them.  The mob has never been pretty and for all of our moves forward into tolerance and diversity we are still just as intolerant and hateful and despising and dualistic in our thinking as we've ever been when it comes to those who we believe are wrong.  If I was a politician, I would be scared of us.  And as much as I would hate to imagine it, I would be swept along in the fear and revolt that formed in me in response to that and, swept along with the revolting political machine would find myself where most politicians find themselves, toeing the line and stifling my idealism and speaking lies and bullshit.

On the train on the way to the march I saw an Anglo guy sitting with an Asian woman and my initial thought until I rejected it was that he had probably spent money to have her sitting next to him with her hand entwined in his hair.

Power is a corrupter, as we all know.  Like money, I imagine there doesn't ever quite seem to be enough of it.  It doesn’t fill up the hole of insecurity like we imagine it might.  It seems that within Maslow's hierarchy of needs, more than enough of both money and power starts to rot and decay us from the inside.

We all know that pretty well, and for most of us it's why we were marching on the weekend.

When I was a teenager I used to call Aboriginal people boongs and not think twice about what I was saying.

I didn’t stay for any of the speeches at the march because quite frankly I was starving and my feet were killing me and my energy had run out.  So perhaps my view is a little more glowing than of those who did stay because I left with lovely action-ey feelings of marching in spotty rain with thousands of people in unity.  I didn't end up listening to individual people with individual views who might have appeared to some to be hijacking the whole event for their own ends.  I don’t know.  I didn’t hear any of that – I was eating a footlong flatbread Seafood Sensation at Subway and dreaming beautiful thoughts of the potential of humanity.

Beautiful ideas about humanity are so much easier to handle than the messy blobs of it that show up in our lives, after all, with their own ideas and how to go about achieving them and the defensiveness that flares up within our selves in response.  Perhaps that's why ideas that seem so wonderful fall to poo when wielded in the hands of people on behalf of other people.

Perhaps that's what will stand out so starkly in 500 years' time – what control freaks we were when we thought we weren't.  Our beautiful ideas always end up falling into the stink of control because those filth out there don't know how to do them properly so we in here need to enforce the parameters with which they do them.  It's not only powerful people who do this stuff.

I sometimes expect people with depression and anxiety to “snap out of it” if I happen to be having a good run of not experiencing those things myself.  I suffer from those demons myself and have been clinically depressed in the past.

I do not think that we are very good at putting our ideas out there into the world and letting them be.  We are micromanagers and control freaks.  We do not trust each other, not one bit.  And sometimes we won't give each other an inch without a fight, either.  We have been so easily divided and conquered by those at the top for so many millennia that we too easily fight amongst ourselves for the spoils they leave us, and whenever our egos are threatened by someone who thinks differently than us. 

Maybe this is partially what keeps us weak and the powerful strong.  Maybe the work of correcting the imbalance rests more with us than we think it does.  Maybe our actions in our own lives to those of us who we consider our enemies is about loving them, as some carpenter dude said once and others have said before and after him.  Maybe our actions there affect the greater whole in ways we can't quite understand in our cause and effect reasoning.  After all, we live in an era when the unified field of consciousness has moved from the realms of fancy into the realms of science as a reality we can stand on.  On more levels than the mushy Hallmark one, we really are one.

I have engaged quite happily when at get-togethers with friends in talking about whoever isn't there even though I hate it when other people gossip about me.

When we truly believe this and know this, we might not need to march.  But if we do, we will not be able to walk past the homeless guy and pretend he's not there while we're doing it.  And we won't ignore the red traffic lights either just because we can, forcing the unfortunate cars finding themselves in the city at that time to bank themselves up and beep.

I once gave someone a blowjob in my car in the street. 

When we marched round the corner from Swanston Street onto Bourke Street, there was a young woman and a homeless guy. 

I vacuum four times a year tops.

The homeless guy sat with a cardboard sign and a couple of bags surrounding him and downcast eyes as we all marched past him.  We really are one.

I walked past the homeless guy myself.

I used to go to school with a guy who was quite obviously not very clever.  I knew this but I was very insecure.  I used to say things in front of my other classmates to make myself look better and to make him look even stupider.  His response was always a goofy smile.  I guess that is its own  punishment.

The young woman was playing Auld Lang Syne on the erdu.  A traditional Scottish poem, played by a Chinese woman, on the streets of Melbourne.  It seemed a fitting, beautiful accompaniment for a walk where people from one of the most multicultural countries on the earth were marching partially against the treatment of those who seek asylum here. 

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, yes, we really are one.

Stop Hating Yourself

As far as the internetosphere goes, there seems to me to be two camps of people when it comes to responding to others.

Actually, no - three.

At one end you've got trolls - deliberate antagonists who have bored and small lives and want to fuck everyone up.

At the other end you've got people who may be in opposition or disagreement with another person or group of people but who don't wish to spew their own internal crap over other people who have become their enemy by virtue of the fact that the other people are alien to them in some way, and therefore a threat (we have very flimsy egos in the early 21st century, as flimsy as chiffon which, as an aside, I have been told by reliable sources actually means 'rag' in French.  I'm about to get my chiffons has a nicer ring to it, although there's nothing all that romantic about having blood come from your vagina no matter what you call the appendage you use to mop it up so it doesn't spill onto the floor.  It is almost unspeakable in many circles, this having blood come from your vagina, being entirely not what some people still would consider feminine, a little vulgar, hence blue liquid.  But I digress twice).  So these people, though they are disagreeing with someone else, are able for whatever reason (generally self-examination and development of certain social skills) to put forward their view without condemnation or shame because they do not need to use the tools of the Empire ~ violence and oppression ~ in stating their case.


In the middle of trolls and people who can have a view without condemning those who don't are maybe a big lump of people who from what I can see have the mindset of the group above but who actually come across as trolls.  They seem to lack the discipline to behave kindly, to live and let live without condemnation because the opportunity to define themselves against someone else so they know they exist is too much.  The chance to assauge a tiny bit of the contents of the giant vats of anger and anxiety and ennui which reside inside of them is simply too much to resist.  Those vats are huge in most of us.  They are byproducts of living in the almost-unbearable-at-times death-throes 21st century.  The projectionists.

As far as I can see, there's an opportunity in every encounter that can go either way.  You can accept the differences of people and try to overcome whatever fear rises up in you at their differences.  Or you can perform the equivalent of online masturbation, or eating an entire block of Snack chocolate, by indulging in projecting your vats of understandable fear onto the person in front of you who has become your enemy by their difference.  For you, as for me (particularly if I've hit the PTSD freeze), this feeling about people is a regular occurrence.  It's a product of an entire species of tense and/or traumatised mammals communicating with each other in an ever-changing environment the changes of which their evolutionary processes haven't even caught up with yet.  It's the product of living in a world where every day we hear of how fucked up it is ecologically (or get to experience it firsthand, if you happen to live in areas that are inclined to the occasional deadly cyclone/typhoon/mass fires/or even ridiculous barometric drops that cover winter and summer in one week (that's us, Melbourne, this week.  Have you recovered)?

This fight, between the terrors that fuel our insides and the person in front of us (or in front of us on our screen) is the ongoing fight of the age.  The extent of its going on, especially on the net (where we wouldn't dare to speak to people face to face the way some of us do online) shows just how scared we are, and why it's necessary, for our own health and the health of our culture, to continue the ongoing quest to overcome the separation that we feel so often but which, as far as I can see, is really about as thin as chiffon.

Our enemies, whoever or whatever they might be, are an awesome way to discover what is going on within ourselves.  Because it's almost a cliche to say that when I hate you, I am really hating a part of myself.  Just because it's not immediately apparent what the corresponding part is in you doesn't mean you're not doing it.  Something in your shadow, some undeveloped or ignored (whether good or bad) part of you that you fear because of its unknowness, is projected out onto you hating that idiot over there because they are irrational in the face of your cool rationality.  Or they are a stupid trump falling for all that left-wing bullshit where you can see the hole they're about to fall into in the road they're taking.  Or they're an extrovert who loves partying so they must automatically be a bit dim.  Or they believe in God/don't believe in God ~ whichever way that mop flops, if you're a judgmental fundamentalist on the other end then that person is a fucktard who deserves to have their nose wiped in their stupid beliefs, right?

The real interesting part comes when we examine WHY we feel so strongly and react so strongly against people who have views that we consider are really so against the grain that they deserve our contempt and our disrespect (and don't think being polite but yet making snide comments is not a form of shaming and disrespect).  Are we really so in the throes of the idyll of control freakness that we think it's all neat and squared away and that everyone is on the same page as us or they should be?  Is there any need for everyone to see the world the same way?  Where does that leave paradox?  What would the world look like if everyone looked just like me?  It sounds good in theory but man, what a nightmare it'd be in fact.

I also find it interesting how so often many of us seem most alive when we're defining ourselves against something else.  When what I'm really interested in is if people would spend more time explaining and describing their own position, their own take, their own view, whey they hold it, what they love about it, what it does to them, instead of just blathering on against the shadow of what's-not-for-me.

Good discussion in this vid below with Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg about Working With Your Enemies, whether inward or outward (facilitated by Robert's own daughter, Uma).  The work for the ages ... 

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The Cast of Thousands

It is easy to believe that the person who has just pushed front of you is only one thing.  To you right now, affronted in your car, they are easily only a bastard, only narcissistic, or only an idiot.  You have come to know yourself well enough to know that you contain A Cast of Thousands.  It is the ultimate challenge to believe that of the other person also when they behave like such turds.  Nevertheless, it must be true if you also believe something else you believe, namely, that we are all Of The Same Thing.

It is tiring that you have come here to write and you find that you are Writing About Things That Are Capitalised.  You have had the sort of morning where you feel like you are constantly forgetting that Everything Is Fine, Just Fine.  You feel like if you were to have looked into the mirror your skin would have been standing out in jagged tufts, like a cartoon cat.  And yet there is that, but also the other state, and it is faith to believe that you can walk towards one from the other.  We all do it every day and it is courage only we know about.

And so you walked from one state to see if you could see another, and sat outside in the beautiful morning sun and been silent for 30 minutes.  You watched your thoughts flit in and out, in and out, and stop occasionally like a moth stopping for a moment and resting on a leaf.  You have watched yourself do this, and reminded yourself that all is still as it always is, as you suspect it is, and even that is enough to find the spikey tufts begin sitting back down along your skin.

An annoying cast member of The Cast of Thousands always jumps up at those spikey times to begin pointing out to you what a stupid pathetic person you are for being anxious.  Some days you cower before this cast member.  Others, you talk back to it and it retreats. You have even taken sometimes to sitting down with it or one of its kind and an open Word document and asking it questions.  It talks back to you and says surprising things.

You are grateful to Plato and his Forms, and Jung and his archetypes, and Reality and her non-duality.  Indeed, you remember one of those archetypes, how it came out to make itself known in your dream.  An Anglo Aussie farmer, late 50's, weathered, beaten, his face drought-lined, came to you in your dream, naked into your bedroom except for his hat, and stuck his fingers into you and you woke yelling.  And so with the help of another one wise, you nailed him down.  You drew the dream, you did stupid embarrassing things like sit in a chair and be him, and then sit in a chair and be you and talk to him, and the nasty man morphed under your hands.  You drew clothes onto him, and then tears ran down his cheeks.  The wise lady pointed out how in your drawing you portrayed your body as one half, and he was another half, and if you cut the page in the half and turned it around, it became one body.

Some of the Cast of Thousands have particularly harsh manners of speaking.  They cow you, you flinch away from them like a dog from a harsh voice.  But they are you.  You project them out onto the bastard in front of you but they are you.  That person in the car in front of you is also, to many intents and purposes, you.

It has been proven that our bodies do not know the difference between us thinking bad negative thoughts about someone else, and thinking them about ourselves.  So it is bad enough that you have as part of your life's work learning to understand what several cast members of The Thousands want, when they speak to you so badly, learning to take their energy and turn it to better ends.  You can take their presence as licence to say awful things to yourself, to thinking the thoughts that become the reality out in your world.  Even worse to consider that when you do it to other people outside of your own body, who have pushed in front of your car, that it is as if you are doing it to yourself.

But of course there are many beautiful members of The Cast of Thousands that sweep in like a summer night breeze and take your breath away.  They are wise beyond all of our years, they are beautiful beyond description.  They are young and old, male and female, all pieces of you made symbols so that you have something to work with, so they don't slip through your hands like water.  Some of the Cast of Thousands enjoy singing songs on your own personal radio station - 666 Radio Susie on the FM dial.  Sometimes phrases come out of nowhere.  One came the other day as if on a breeze with a phrase you had not thought of for some time:

"Do not despise the day of small beginnings," it said.

Such a beautiful phrase.  A delightful doorway.