Return to a wilderness of predators
What does the 2024 election mean? Nothing new. The faculties of Mind that Sapiens acquired when it branched off from ape long ago function fitfully and imperfectly. Pulled as it were by the remnants of ape-will still present in its brain away from the destination implied by its evolution forward. Away from mindfulness. From thoughtfulness and sensitivity, attributes that distinguish Sapiens from animal. Now and then, but not just at the moment.
The 2024 election means that we are in truth Mind-beings who appear to be trapped in an animal kingdom of body-beings. Body-beings take care of everyday business dependent on their five body senses and willfulness. Animal instinct. Action that has no use for mindfulness and is in fact viscerally hostile to it. To anything mindful.
The election outcome can’t be a surprise if the mindful among us are aware that we are trespassers here. Life on Earth was meant to be a paradise for animal body- beings whose organizing principle isn’t the individual but the group. The tribe. Individual in a physical-psychological wilderness of predators where no living thing can be trusted has a life expectancy of zero.
Welcome home!
Voters suffering from delusions of victimhood, the opposite of forgiveness, seeking sanctuary from threats, real and imaginary, abandon individuality and independent judgment for tribal conformance. They fall in with the governing ethic of animal kingdom hierarchy: forget about integrity. To get along go along. And, above all, kiss ass. If an apparition shows up pronouncing himself or herself king of beasts above all kiss their ass. And understand that the ass being kissed is the ass-kisser-in-chief.
Welcome to salvation. Welcome home. Backward and downward we go. Potentially all the way back to ape. The unthinkable: a reversal of evolution. Potentially all the way back to pre-ape when body-beings’ economy of extraction and exploitation, along with their awesome warrior technology, ethnic-cleanses planet Earth of all life.
We’re better than this
A vision, to be sure, of what the body-beings we aren’t has in store for the Mind-being trespassers we are. Stark reality with none of the glint of nobility Rousseau gave the savage. Just dreary Hobbesian beast. The eternal divide posed by this existence: we are either stuck in the blood-soaked mud of a kingdom of predators or we are better than that. Individuals capable of personhood. Able to find sanctuary in independent judgment, personal integrity, and moving forward. Mindfully free of tribal conformity and combat destined to defeat its enemy – itself.
What the 2024 election could mean if any of us were gifted with clairvoyance. Cassandra was myth, the prophecies of Nostradamus bunk. Psychic insights do make us wonder. And when they’re accessible on the scale of a psychic like Edgar Cayce, they can make us believe. But even so, what can anyone know, Mind- or body-being, in a reality of hierarchical willfulness so self-contradictory that it can only be a mirage? A slapstick comedy when it isn’t a horrific tragedy. Seeming packed with distractions that can’t be what it seems. Just a show on the playbill of the theatre of the absurd to delay Mind-being’s getting it: we don’t belong here. Not in an animal kingdom of ass-kissing hierarchy. Not in a theatre of the absurd. We’re better than this.
Questions to ask ourselves
But being better and being aware of it aren’t the same. So long as we’re genuflecting to fellow human-apes, amusing or scaring ourselves in our theatre of the absurd, we’ll never think or feel our way forward and upward without help. If I’ve ever come up with anything worth listening to I’d like to take credit. But the only thoughts worth listening to don’t come from anything willed. They come from spontaneity. From insights whose focus is on the individual person and the person’s state of Mind. On mindfulness. Not on the source and its willfulness.
They come from uncomplicated conversation with the surface of the water reflecting our image back to us. Asking us with genuine interest, curious to know who or what we think we see. As if it welcomed us, wanted to interact with us, cared about us. Because it does. And it has not a thing to do with hierarchy. “Supreme” anything. Remote in lordly isolation on a mountaintop. Behind the walls of a temple passing along answers through intermediaries reinforcing the illusion of its distance.
The surface of the water is a sprite who has only questions that are for us to answer. With her help when we allow ourselves to ask for it and trust it. Until we take another look one day and the answer comes to us through us. Through the Mind that we all share. Our own answer that can no longer be distinguished from the Mind-being that we’ve been interacting with. Question from Mind-being to itself: in “relationship” with who it is instead of who it isn’t: mindless captive of bogus “authority.”
Disconnection-backward
Loss of self-awareness by the Mind-Child hallucinating us flipped relationship between self-awareness and Creation into reverse. Instead of Creation reflecting, affirming, and reciprocating the Life-Worth of Self-Awareness, Mind that’s Relationship between Love and Logic, the function of Mind-Child self-unawarenessis is now to reflect, affirm, and reciprocate the worth of an alternate non-self unreality. A reflection to reflect and verify reflection. Reversing loving friendships among co-equals in an egalitarian setting into adversarial contests of wills in a hierarchical setting.
Where games substitute for meaning and summitry substitutes for Love and Logic. For anything remotely rational. The governing principle of self-unawareness is separation and reversal. Disconnection-backward.
Their prized possession
Our situation here means that we can’t know what anything means. We’re blindfolded. Lost in a hierarchical wilderness of wildness without definition, needing hand-holding to lead us back to civilization. Our body senses can’t lead us there if their purpose is to keep body-being here. To keep the meaning of anything beyond detection. Hidden behind the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of bodies. Behind commotion without motion. When “impact” can’t be defined by what “others” think. It’s an internal process performed by each individual in relationship with an innate capacity for mind-being. With a voice from its Self. A reflection on the surface of the pond, mirroring Who am I? with a question: Who are you?
Which suggests an obvious truth about our situation here. That no matter what the outcome of any test of wills there’s something to be learned from it. That our purpose here isn’t to replace the pretender who replaced one Mind-being, who we really are, but to re-learn the awareness of who we really are that was lost in the situation that preceded ours.
That produced a sub-species of metaphysics – physics, our material world – just as ape produced a sub-species of ape – Sapiens. Capable of reflection connecting us to Logic and Love. Capable of introspection, differentiation, analysis, evaluation, judgment, and choice. None of which can be detected in the behavior of animal.
Faculties of Mind endowed with a sixth sense. Intuition, capable of receiving spontaneous insights. The definitive attribute of Mind-being that body-being ape-humans must deny at all costs or risk losing their prized possession. Their domain ruled by animal willfulness. By predatory mindlessness.
It was always going to happen
No matter what the outcomes they can only change the cards we have to play. The task is unchanged: to learn our way back to self-awareness, the reason why we’re here. If we’re blessed with a period of relative peace and prosperity, with Democracy’s respect for individuality, originality, and creativity, we learn from that. If willfulness intrudes and destroys all of it, we learn from that.
Our part in the script of animal kingdom wildness being to reverse whatever happened in metaphysics to produce this absurdity. A state of mind converted into a physical place where personal integrity can be surrendered to an impersonator. To a tribal beast impersonating a person. Holding forth from its throne atop the pinnacle of hierarchy. Alone in the splendor of its invincibility. Beyond questioning. Beyond thought, feeling, or conscience. Beyond accountability. Unrelatable.
What’s to be learned? The humility of not being able to say. A stepping back from all judgment, because in a few seconds the tectonic plate underneath me may decide to shift a little. Or an aneurysm may decide to rupture. Or the king of beasts may have a change of heart. Or not, and that would be a good thing. Or would it? We can never be certain of the consequences of any event in advance.
If Mind-Relationship itself and the Creativity shared by its Self-Awareness can’t change the sequence of before-after, if Creation would be meaningless were it not an adventure into the unknown, an exercise in the freshness and originality of the Now, what possible lunacy could excuse our arrogating to ourselves exclusive possession of an impossibility: the “big picture”? The arrogance of unquestioned, top-down authority. The return of King George III. The tribal beast atop animal kingdom’s hierarchy that’s always been there. The 2024 election was always going to happen.
Distrust
The question now is what are we to learn from it? How do we go about Sapiens’ mission of evolving forward instead of regressing backward? By reflecting. By allowing ourselves to listen to the voice from the surface of the water mirroring the image we present to it. The voice from Walden Pond that spoke to generations through Thoreau two centuries ago. Through Boethius 15 centuries ago, from the dungeon where it brought The Consolation of Philosophy to him and generations to follow. Through Parmenides 26 centuries ago, the founder of metaphysics. And Jesus, the personification of metaphysics. Whose perspective exists in time and place but is bound by neither. So that he can teach individuals how to shed their impersonations and become persons. By role-modeling relatability.
All helping us to focus our awareness on the task at hand. Not on provocateurs and their provocations but, first, on the Mind-beings we are and the means we possess to put provocateurs in their place. On the underside of Definition where they belong: a threat to harm but a manageable threat. Because the thoughtfulness we possess put willfulness there and manages the threat. By using the vision of metaphysics to see through its heinous lies. Its self-centered, mindless insensitivity and cruelty. Its insatiable appetite for attention and injustice.
By understanding with the vision of Love and Logic, order and spontaneity, that the natural order of things isn’t rigged. It is what it must be by Definition: one thing at a time in orderly sequence. The thing before, its opposite-implication after. Derivative after the thing it’s derived from. Not number two to hierarchy’s number one but after in the before-after sequence of Mind-being thinking, feeling, and Creating. Where numbering makes no sense, has no meaning. Only the interconnections that lead from one to the other, one implication, one relationship-association, at a time. A harmless thought process that nevertheless hooks body-being authoritarian willfulness, deluded by its animal kingdom of hierarchy, competition, and conquest, dependent on its five body senses, into a permanent posture of suspicion and defensiveness. Into distrust, the poison of separation, killer of friendship
The Meaning we really seek
What’s to be learned before forming our Band of Brothers in defense of Demoracy, before giving the enemy the fight it’s been spoiling for, is to reflect on how to fight. On the nature of the “enemy.” Not so that it can be given a dose of its own medicine but so that the natural order of things can be restored. Put after back where it belongs: after before. Cart after the horse instead of before, because that’s where election 2024 and irrationality put it. Out of sequence. In reverse order. We’ve been challenged by our own reverse-reflections, our own shadow-opposites, to put Mind-being back in its natural state on the top side of Definition. And return its noisy menagerie of body-being beasts to silence on the underside. To the place specially reserved for the absurdities that they are.
How? By proceeding in orderly sequence from premise to implication, from value to interrelationship. From Logic to making sense, Love to making right. From both: movement forward with direction under the care and discipline of Conscience. Helping us improve the way we use our minds. Because whatever hole we’re in, we dug it ourselves. By letting willfulness corrupt our thinking. By deluding us into believing an impossibility: that it came first and so it’s real and Mind-being isn’t. And so getting the meaning and purpose of our situation-context wrong. Forging ahead with flawed answers because, back at the start, we asked the wrong question.
Why choose to hide behind body-being masks of invincibility and unforgiving victimhood, both intending self-destruction, when the Mind-being behind the masks makes more sense? Relatability offering not competition among unequals but loving friendship among equals. The Meaning we really seek.