I wonder why people won’t look at their life or wonder or doubt
about those questions of existence that I have mentioned…
why won’t people ask themselves about what it means to be human?
fear, ignorance, or perhaps it simply has never occurred to them…
from a society standpoint, it cannot allow large number of people
to engage in those questions of existence because that takes away
people from doing the task that society needs done…
and in the short term that might be true, but in the long
run, I believe an examination of our values, of the questions
of existence, would be beneficial to society…
recall our analogy of before Zen where the mountains were solid, calm,
peaceful, and the sea was flat and motionless and the river ran quietly
in its bank and then during Zen, the mountains dances and quiver and the
sea was violent and the waves danced high in the air and the river overflowed
it banks…… and after Zen, when the mountains were once again solid
and calm and the sea was calm and motionless and the river once again
returned to its riverbank………
if people were to examine their lives in regard to the existential questions
of existence, they would be thrown into the state of being upset and confused
and out of control…….but that is a small price to pay for the understanding that
would come out of an detailed examination of our lives…
I have gone from detailing the conditions of our existence to
to listing why, why we should examine our lives in terms of
the Kantian/Kropotkin questions of existence…indeed, ask
yourself, why should I engage in these questions that will only
throw me into chaos?
Isn’t understanding the value of our lives worth a little chaos?
isn’t find the meaning of our lives worth some chaos?
the road is hard and paved with difficult rocks to walk along,
but that is the point… the path to understanding is hard
and it is painful and it is difficult to bear……….
but look around you… I look around me and I see people
already in confusion and in pain and in doubt… the rise in drug use
and the lost feeling people have is a result of our failure to examine
those questions of existence………
the dogmatic attachment people have to their ism’s and ideologies
stems from their being at loss and alienated from society…
we hold those ism’s and ideologies tight because we have no other
foundations to hold on to…… if we can give people something other
to believe in besides dogmatic and destructive ideologies, they can
begin to set their feet along another path…… the path to values
and wisdom………
our society is at war with each other because we haven’t
really begun to question the basic values of our society which
are crying out to be questioned and doubted……
it isn’t our society at war, but the phony values that cannot
lead us to a better life that are at war……. to find ourselves,
to correct society, we must find the values which best represent
who we really are… both individually and collectively…
the values we currently hold no longer fit who we are… that
is the reason for our discomfort and alienation we feel…
we hold “American” values which no longer fit our circumstances
at this time… we must revise, revisit our values, personally
and collectively to understand “what we are to do?” and
“what should our values be?” and “what we should spend our energy on?”
we are not even in position to be able to ask about those existential questions
because we are so lost in regards to what is really important in our lives…
the nihilism that dominates our lives is blindly us to our real possibilities,
our real choices…it isn’t in the pursuit of our happiness which we have
equated to be the search for money/profits that should be the goal of life…
no, we must engage in the questions of existence to find our meaning, our purpose…
and why are we so afraid to engage in those questions?
we have become paralyzed with fear to the point, of not being able to
confront the questions of “what are we really to do?”…
we have to overcome and that is one of the basic understanding of life…
we begin with knowing ourselves, know thyself, and then we
reevaluate our values and in doing so, we can overcome who we are right now…
the process is always the same… and the beginning point is always the same…
we must become aware…awareness is always the beginning point…
so start there… become aware…
and be truly the ubermensch….for who among the crowd
actually tries to begin the process of becoming who they are?
begin that process by becoming aware…
Kropotkin