We count on our political, religious, scientific leaders to be intelligent, visionary, rational, caring, true to their promises, so they can lead us into better lives and greater understanding of ourselves and our world. But instead, they betray us, they lie to us, they use the power we have given them to deceive us with the purpose to achieve their own agendas.

Their divisive religious dogmas coerce us into conflict 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 destruction and gluttonous consumption while pushing millions into horrible levels of humiliation, despair, and poverty. –  Their political and economic aims, aided by an unprincipled and gutless corporate media, are to build systems of power to manipulate us into extreme inequality and blind obedience.

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

The environment in which our lives depend is being pillaged, species are being decimated at unprecedented rates, innocent people are being killed by the thousands, and the corporate media hides the facts from us so the elite it cowardly serves can continue to profit out of wars and environmental devastation.

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

Imagine our transformation if we were free to demand discussion over the fact that, if we continue obeying the mandates of a narrow-minded, greedy, egotistic and vicious corporate elite, we will overwhelm, and even destroy the environment that gives us life.

Our existence can be immensely significant in the things we accomplish or in the changes we bring about … think about Einstein, Galileo, Rosa Parks, or even Hitler; we see our world differently because of what they did. We do possess the undeniable degree of freedom to affect not only our own development but the development of entire orders of organization. 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 the dictates of our own yearning to create something that opens our minds to the world beyond the limitations of our organic senses, and to the Universe that pre-determines our existence yet sets us free to wonder.

If a neuron in our brain, endowed with the capacity to interconnect and extend the reach of its dendrites, can transform nerve activity into the realization of ideas and concepts, 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 a 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

 It hurts deeply to see the human spirit in chains.

 Reviewed February 2018

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Pre-meditation and pre-determination are complementary expressions of existence. The subjective world of our minds and the physical world of our bodies, purposefully and instinctively parallel each other as we interact with environments. In our conscious and unconscious behavior, we fluctuate back and forth between these complementary expressions, changing them and being changed by them.

Our Bodies are complemented by the subjective Being we try to describe with many words: Mind, Self, Soul, Ego, Energy, Intelligence, Consciousness, Awareness, etc., etc. But this Being is almost impossible to define because, although it feels independent and uniquely ours, is a common experience we share with the rest of Humanity. We all experience this indefinable Being making its own decisions, dreaming its own dreams, craving its own desires, creating its own fantasies and, without hesitation or consent, finding its own ways to get what it wants. We all experience the 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 wonders 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 physical Being we try to describe with many words: Body, Organism, Animal, Creature, Structure, System, etc., etc. But this Being is almost impossible to define because, although it feels independent and uniquely ours, it is a common experience we share with the rest of Humanity. We all experience the Being that has roots in ancient times and has learned to absorb and synthesize the energy sources of the natural world it inhabits; the indomitable Creature that challenges the laws of Nature and rebelliously obeys its pre-determined ending; the supple Structure that can create new forms of existence and transform itself and its 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 retribution destroys without remorse and seeking pleasure perpetuates Life; the supple and sensuous Body that reaches heights beyond its comprehension in the ecstasy of lovemaking.

Although there are times when our minds feel detached from our bodies, and times when our bodies feel detached from our minds, these are moments of fancy when we lose ourselves to our instincts or move deep into the wonder of self-reflection; they are but One.

These complementary expressions of our existence are parallel in our lives as we fluctuate between them in degrees of pre-meditation and degrees of pre-determination.

Descartes was wrong in his deduction centuries ago that the mind is separate from the body. As Energy cannot exist without mass nor mass without energy, mind cannot exist without the body nor the body without the mind. Yet we let a mistake this man made hundreds of years ago continue to dominate the way we think. Go figure!

Revised July 2017

Note: New posts are usually published on the 1^st and 15^th of the month. To subscribe to the Blog, click on the RSS feeder (orange icon) on the left column of the Home page, down below the Archives.