You Are a Product of Your Experience

I can’t thank you guys enough. Yesterday’s post garnered an outpouring of support and encouragement. It means so much to know that scattered across the states is a world of people who would go well out of their way, at their own risk and expense, to help if called on. More than that, I was assured in so many ways that what I share here hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. That means more than anything, to know that it isn’t all for naught. 

   Given the post’s rather negative “vibe,” I feel it’s necessary to assure you that I’ve not lost my way. I have all the same tools that I’ve been sharing with you for the last several years ratcheting away at my inner experience, reframing and reconditioning to counter the influences I’ve been inundated with. 

   I’ve seen a lot of people say, “I just choose to focus on the good.” That is a wonderful sentiment. It’s true that what we attend to sits at the root of so many of our problems, but this philosophy alone veers toward avoidance and repression. It will not get you through months of being bombarded with negativity at such a pace that you don’t even get the downtime to let your growing hill of negative human experiences erode and wash away. 

   This is our reality: humans don’t want to suffer. Humans built a society around selfishly securing a lack of suffering on an individual level, instead of a collective level. We are all, in some ways, alleviating our own suffering at the expense of others. 

   Call it good or bad. Lean on yin and yang and form the perspective that all preference depends on the comparison of things which we can either be grateful for or avoid focusing on; it doesn’t matter. We take on the qualities of our environment. 

   Honestly, that hardly expresses the idea! I’m going to jack something from Watts here. An organism and its environment are not two separate things. Language is playing tricks on us, yet again. The organism and its environment are part of one unified process of change. Here’s another way of putting it. 

   You don’t simply exist IN your environment; you’re an EVENT of the environment. A flame is not separate from its fuel; it is a result of the fuel. A wave is not separate from the ocean; it is an arising within the ocean due to its currents. A person is not having an experience of the universe; the universe is experiencing in the form of a person. 

   Language is dumb, reductive, and misused. We imagine ourselves to be an object, when we are just as much a verb. An apple tree “apples,” just as our environment “peoples.”

   We are literally the air we breathe and the food we consume. The vibrations of sound give rise to patterns in thought, whether they emanate from strings as music or as that reductive language spewing from the mouths of those who have been conditioned to believe we are alien flukes spontaneously appearing in a cold, indifferent spacetime. 

   For the last 9 months I’ve walked the streets of a world predicated on some of the most unhealthy concepts we’ve conjured up as a species. It doesn’t mean there isn’t good out there. It doesn’t mean that people are inherently bad. It means we grew into this together, and we all have to work double time to become the environment its people need. 

   For those reasons, we remain mostly positive here, and we will continue to spread that light. We spotlight the goodness out there. We find ways of reframing the things which typically cause us to suffer. But this walk is, nonetheless, a walk for change. 

   We aren’t proclaiming nobody needs to do anything, and everyone’s perfect even if they’re causing undue harm to innumerable beings. But we know the folly of assumption and the imposition of moral condemnation on well-intentioned people. So we lead with acceptance and openness, knowing it’s our only way to shift our heading in the direction of love over hate. 

   Being right, doesn’t mean proclaiming it. Being right comes with only one certainty: that you could be wrong. 

   So I walked my walk, and I’ve been thus affected. It will change in time with effort, struggle, and work. But it takes time. It isn’t as simple as “get over it and look elsewhere.”

   I’m as committed as ever to my mission, regardless of who’s in it with me, because if you want to change the tides, you will have to hold on hard enough to avoid being washed away by the sea. Even if we lose the battle, our corpse will at least give the universe food to “people” more people out of; our love and acceptance will give those people light to illuminate a darkened path.

   I bleed for you. I’m not mortally wounded, but I want to inspire you all to bleed for each other; just hang on to love before getting dragged down by the undertow of apathy or hatred.