An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

The Answer is in the Question

[thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

How does it come about?  I don’t know.  All I know is that as far back as I can remember I refused to accept things as they presented themselves to my mind—my senses being something entirely different.  The whole program made me uncomfortable and I always expected to wake up from it all one day and heave a big sigh of relief realizing it was only a dream.  But however hard I tried, it seemed I could not wake up fast enough to extricate myself from the flow.

When you’re a child, especially if in situations of want or oppression (hunger or the recipient of verbal and physical violence) you have your magical world to escape to when ‘real life’ frightens or hurts you and you have no control over it.  You pretend its not real and your magical world is.  Eventually if you keep it up long enough you come to a point where your dream world and the ‘real’ world become reversed.  You live in your dream world and the ‘real’ world you are supposed to be in is no more than a bad dream from which you become convinced you will awaken someday.  When you get old enough to read, fairy tales become your mind’s bread and butter.

I kept my magical dream world until a couple of years before my teens.  Then the pressures of growing up and taking responsibility for myself and for others shattered the magical kingdom weave I had wrapped myself up in and was left with but one life in only one world: this one.  Funny thing is, magical kingdoms may disappear at certain times but if they were really believed in, lived in and fully engaged, they can be brought back.  I re-entered my magical world some twenty five or so years ago when this ‘real’ world collapsed under me. It turned into a predictable and cheap cartoon that failed to give me a reason to go on living.  Whatever it was supposed to mean, or be for, didn’t do it.  The endless existential questions (which do not arise in magical kingdoms!) kept pounding around my mind like the four horses of the Apocalypse.  There were no answers to those questions because, you see, I wasn’t the one asking the questions!  They were questions asked by a confused and disillusioned consensus reality, the same reality that predictably did not want to know the answers because as obvious as they were, they remained too onerous for serious consideration!

It is said that ‘man’ was created in the image of God.  What is God?  It’s a kind of consensus reality, that’s all.  Where does that come from?  As a species evolves it appears its mind (collective unconscious) changes itself.  It ‘sees’ things differently and this new vision imposes itself on the entire species.  Not in detail, but in a kind of general awareness.  This awareness grows from various pressure sources.  Desires, beliefs, dreams, environmental changes, wars and diasporas, indoctrination of the weak by the stronger, programming and paradigms.  New understanding (not necessarily good) changes mores and values. 

But life learned long ago to maintain a kind of balance (whether of terror, or power, or even “love”) within itself so when powerful changes seem imminent, such as we are about to experience perhaps as never before, an old guard arises to try to prevent the changes from taking the whole wagon over the cliff.  This old guard, for example Soviet Communism or the current ‘New World Order’ promise new ways while intent on entrenching the old.  To do this they oppress and exploit until their system becomes so unbearable the people, or the environment, revolt and these ‘leaders’ are overthrown.  Now the world goes through various stages of chaotic re-alignment.  New political forces arise.  There are revolutions, riots, genocidal massacres, diseases and famine, sometimes globally, sometimes restricted to a continent, or a nation.

Well, that’s the world as I see it in a small broken nutshell.  I see this pattern ever repeating with no end in sight and I want so desperately to ‘escape’ this folly.  In today’s economic madness it seems fair to ask, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul?”  Indeed, what are man’s accomplishments worth on his death bed?  Is this the way things should be or must be? 

We, no one else, created this reality by consensus.  For most that consensus was entirely unconscious simply because that majority is too confused with its daily self-pleasuring and basic survival tick-tock routine to pay attention to what it is creating in its collective mind.  You could say that much of that majority doesn’t have individual minds at all, just brains housed in bodies devoid of accountability to the future.  consumers, bags constantly needing re-filling.  That being the case it should come as no surprise that vultures have taking over the reins of leadership and power all over the planet.  Why not?  It is all there for the taking and no one is stopping them because no one cares enough to actually ‘do’ something about it.

As consensus reality developed, it seems to me it forgot to take into account both the past and the future.  It can be summed up in ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ and that’s not very conducive to the taking of responsibility.  When we dare look into the past we can see the mistakes made by society and this allows us to make course corrections.  Anyone can do that, it’s not difficult at all.  When we look into the future, especially if we come to terms with the fact that we must return to it, we can change consensus reality and begin a process that must destroy the old ‘gods’ –the old paradigms—and create a new reality.

That brings us back to our magical worlds of childhood fantasy and daydreams.  We ‘jolt’ ourselves back into our back-up reality where we turn everything upside down.  We rediscover the dream time, the sacred, the holy, the human sense of justice, the power of one through self-empowerment.  We throw out the childish familiar with its outdated and useless values and dare live something new, something that possesses the potential to create positive change.  We laugh at the pompous idiots, the commercial ‘professional’ types with their over-inflated sense of importance that prevents them from seeing they have feet of clay and they’re standing in water.  Then we begin to see the whole global nightmare of oppression and unfairness in all the lands, in all the various groupings, but especially among those who loudly advertise their virtues and accomplishments and blame others when found wanting. 

Here, in our magical world we once more become aware of these two: sorrow and joy.  For we can see the current horror with the same eyes that see a beautiful future for all on this very world.  That we are entering our generation’s ‘time of the crucible’ is no longer debatable, however long the old guard may manage to delay some of it, so shouldn’t we be deciding now what changes we wish to make for the time when we come out of it?  If we are going to be ground into powder, can we recreate ourselves into something better by individual will power fueled by experience, which translates as self-empowerment?  Can we rise from the crucible no longer dependent on imaginary deities (in the sense that they provide ‘salvation’—I’d be the last to deny their existence) or the bureaucratic vultures that have characterized Earthian leadership as far back as historical records indicate?  Can we choose to become responsible individuals? 

Of course.  All that’s needed is to give up the childish idea that it could ever be easy or painless.  

“Life is pain, princess.  Anyone who says different is selling something.” (Princess Bride—the movie)