We count on our political, religious and scientific leaders to be intelligent and visionary and rational and caring and true to their promises, so they can lead us into better lives and help us understand our world, but instead they betray us, they lie to us, they deceive us to achieve their own selfish agendas, they use the power we have given them to enslave us:

• * Their divisive religious dogmas coerce us into ignorance and hate.
• * Their dogmatic scientific method limits the avenues of knowledge by restricting inquiry into the spiritual and subjective side of human nature.
• * Their unsustainable economic doctrines promote agendas of destruction and gluttonous consumption while pushing millions of us into horrible levels of humiliation and poverty.
• * Their political and religious voices … loaded with threats and dread and fear, and soaked in empty promises, and aided by an unprincipled and gutless corporate media … control and manipulate us into blind obedience. The environment in which our lives depend is being pillaged, people are being killed … by the thousands … and the corporate media hides it from us so the elite it cowardly serves can continue to profit out of wars and environmental devastation.

And so we are made afraid to question their intentions, even if it is clear to us that their greed is enabling the destruction of our world.

But the chains that imprison the human mind are made out of old clay, brittle and breakable, because they are of our own making.

Imagine the extent of our transformation if we were free to explore the fact that

–          even if our existence is insignificant in the scheme of the Universe, it can be immensely significant in the things we can accomplish or in the changes we can bring about … think about an Einstein or a Galileo or a Rosa Parks or even a Hitler; we see our world differently because of what they did …

–          or if we were free to explore the fact that we consume energy sources from our environment and convert them into action and motion and determination and purpose and transformation

–          or the fact that we do possesses an undeniable degree of freedom to affect, not only our own development, but the development of entire orders of organization

–          or the fact that if we continue to unthinkingly obey the mandates of a narrow-minded and egotistic and vicious corporate elite, we will overwhelm and even destroy the same environment that gives us life

–          or the fact that a true sense of Being in a world that sculpts us and can be sculpted by us is not found in blindly following the dictates of others, but following instead the dictates of our own yearning to transform, to create, to bring about something new, something that opens our minds to the world beyond the limitations of our organic senses or to the Universe that pre-determines our existence yet sets us free to wonder.

There is no doubt in my mind that as neurons in our brains are endowed with the capacity to interconnect and extend the reach of their dendrites and transform nerve activity into the realization of an idea, so a human being can transform the selfishness and greed that control our cultures into reverence for the opportunity we are granted to come alive once … this once … pregnant with the potential to make our mark in the world.

“Help me. You see, we slip back,

without knowing it, from our advance,

into something we didn’t intend; where

we can become caught up, as in a dream,

and where we could die without waking.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pre-meditated thought and pre-determined instinct are complementary expressions of existence. The world of our minds and the world of our bodies thoughtfully and instinctively parallel each other as we interact with environments. In our conscious and unconscious behaviors we fluctuate back and forth between these complements, changing them and being changed by them.

Our Bodies are complemented by a mysterious Being who we try to describe with many words: Mind, Self, Soul, Ego, Energy, Intelligence, Consciousness, Awareness, etc, etc. But this mysterious Being is almost impossible to define because, although it feels uniquely ours, it is a common ‘thing’ we share with the rest of Humanity. We all experience this indefinable ‘thing’ that makes its own decisions and dreams its own dreams and craves its own desires and creates its own fantasies and … without hesitation or consent … finds its own ways to get what it wants. We all experience the autonomous Self that makes us laugh and cry, the Ego that drives us into love and hate, the Mind that stands in awe before the beauty and unpredictability of Nature, the Intelligence that inquires about its own meaning and the meaning of it all, the Consciousness that tells us what is wrong and what is right, the Soul that has become aware of its own awareness and intuitively knows it belongs to something beyond its comprehension.

Our Minds are complemented by a mysterious Being who we try to describe with many words: Body, Organism, Animal, Creature, Structure, System, etc., etc. But this mysterious Being is almost impossible to define because, although it feels uniquely ours, it is a common ‘thing’ we share with the rest of Humanity. We all experience this indefinable ‘thing’ that has roots in ancient times and has learned to absorb and synthesize the elements of the world it inhabits; we all experience the indomitable Creature that challenges the laws of Nature and rebelliously obeys its pre-destined ending, the organic Structure that can create new forms of existence or destroy its own world, the fragile Organism created out of the union of an ovum and a sperm knowing how to manipulate and be manipulated by its own environment, the instinctive Animal that seeking pleasure perpetuates Life, the fluid and sensuous Body that reaches feelings beyond its comprehension in the ecstasy of lovemaking.

Although there are times when our minds do feel separate from our bodies and times when our bodies do feel separate from our minds, it is in moments of fancy when we lose ourselves to our instincts or when we move deep into the wonder of self-reflection. But as energy is transformed into mass and mass is transformed into energy, so we transform mind into animal and animal into mind while creating an existence that is insignificant in the scheme of the Universe yet a transformative force in the scheme of Life.

Descartes was wrong in his deduction centuries ago that the mind is separate from the body. Like Energy and Mass, Mind and body are parallel and inseparable expressions of Nature. One cannot exist without the other, and we cannot exist without them. We are Nature, and Nature is us.

Yet we let a mistake a man made hundreds of years ago dominate how we think!!!