Poised on the edge of an abyss, we surf the wave of being into the future. It requires skill, and foresight, control, and concentration. One wrong move and, acutely unbalanced, we will topple into the crushing chaos of the massive wave. Karma is what happens at the point where intention meets action and action metes out results. As the force that drives the wave propels us forward, we are always at the mercy of its power. It is the great unconscious progenitor of our kind; blind, mute, deaf and dumb. Yet it is that it finds its expression in us. We are the consciousness of the wave; eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch—the body sensate, alive to its existence. The abyss is the greater unconsciousness that yawns like a bottomless maw, ready to swallow us, ready to swallow even the wave itself, to take it all into nothingness. But so long as we ride the wave, the future unrolls with us.
Please pardon the poetic language. I have lately been taken by a sense of our predicament that rather outreaches my ability to capture it in the usual prose. I want to turn my attention to it here at VWN, break it down into accessible entries that reflect my understanding, but it’s difficult for me. There are so many voices out there on the Web saying many of the things I’d like to say, only saying it better. I read them to inform myself. It would be foolish of me to presume to be equally as informative, when most of my time is spent processing pieces of paper in a smallish office. Hell, these days I’m just happy to have a job, right?
Then again, it’s the people at my job whose lives inspire me to attempt to put some things to words here. They inspire me because I have learned just how little concern people can have with regard to what’s going on in the world. Not that I don’t wonder if maybe I’m the fool here, because I pay attention to and worry about things that I really don’t have a lot of control over. I mean, what good does it do me to think about the peril we’re in? I still have to drive a car by myself every workday morn. I still have to buy food products whose very existence is virtually an affront to the planet’s ecosystem. I still have to participate in the madness of an American life. Don’t I?
It’s all well and good to say “Tune in, turn on, drop out”—until you are responsible for helping maintain a household that you do not get to set the rules for. It’s all well and good to say “I quit!”—until you realize that your options are strictly limited by factors you cannot alter, even out of necessity, without a significant investment of time and capital and you have neither.
And yet there has to be some sort of change for me, because I cannot stand idly by and just watch the bad things happen. I have a strong sense of responsibility where life on earth is concerned. However convinced I may be that we have passed a tipping point, bluffed too long with a bad hand and now have to lay down our cards and pay up, I feel that it is very important we face the treacherous future with our eyes wide open.
(More to come.)
