Lament of the Tower

Today. There is a great deal calling to my attention which is not near at hand. I struggle to maintain attention in such a way as to maintain integration as opposed to the fragmenting by beholding things far from my body. Around the world the rebellion of the working class, those with strong material reality feedback, toward the arbitrary power trip of the politicians, those with minimal feedback, strikes me as a moment of clarity for our world. The history of humanity may well hang in the balance as we attempt to negotiate between top-down control from “experts” vs bottom up feedback. By this latter I mean those whose primary efforts of work provide the basic necessities for survival of society. These Canadian truckers might well be understood as red blood cells carrying the nutrients to the vast array of living appendages of the collective. When the very means of locomotion of survival rebels against the expert ideas of the authoritative will, it is the unfolding of a deadly disease. We reckon with the life of our civilization and make no mistake, there is no going back. 

For far too long the great Tower of the West has been sustaining the parasitism of all those who profit from lies. Great structures provide great safety within them, even for those who betray the structure itself. However, the quicksand under the feet of the turncoat is that his own being rests on the structure from which he would steal. Great structures are built by straightforward truth telling and exploration of transjective reality. The true explorer seeks not to assimilate and arbitrate the new land he finds, but only to revel in the glorious luminosity of the discovery. We have long lost this mode of being as our core orientation. Instead we attempt to “have” all that we can. Exploration in our gluttonous thirst for more is done with postulated goals of exploitation. Thus the goodness and beauty which sustains the soul eludes our gaze, though we stare directly at it. 

“The angels keep their ancient places, turn but a stone and start a wing. Tis ye, tis your estranged faces, that miss the many splendored thing.” -In No Strange Land, Francis Thompson

Oh! Would we but cease our dreadful pride! Would we but humble ourselves at the vastness of glory laid out before us, within us, around us. In all our having we have lost our being. We have built a tower to heaven and found ourselves instead in the bowels of hell. What great fools we have been. We who make a mockery of the sacred, the mystical, the mundane. We seek fulfillment as far from home as we may manage, while our true selves starve at the altars within our own breasts.