An article by Sha'Tara - local writer and friend

The Most Difficult Lesson

[thoughts from   ~a burning woman~   by Sha'Tara]
 
I have been told that life is all about learning lessons.  I would say, it's all about learning lessons for those who want to, and it's just 'laissez faire' and damn the torpedoes, or consequences, for the rest.  No lesson is ever learned unless the desire to learn precedes the lesson.  Life isn't at all like universal education: you have the choice to attend, and learn or repeat your mistakes forever.
 
This is my argument:  If life was truly about learning lessons, i.e., if there were no choice but to learn lessons, then it stands to reason and common sense that 'lessons' would indeed be learned and people would not continue to repeat the same stupid mistakes, year after year (or life after life for those who suspect continuity of individual awareness and inevitable return to the wheel of time).  Lessons 'learned' would enter into the race's programming and succeeding generations would blithely move on without having to repeat their forebears' idiocy.  Obviously that is not the case.  So that whole idea called 'the hundredth monkey' is bogus, at least as it would apply to Earthians: they are immune to progressive learning and almost completely lacking in common sense.  When they move 'forward' in one area, say, philosophy, art, science or technology, it is to subsequently plunge deeper and more viciously into progressive violence and war, war that is always fought for 'space' be it in land or ideology, or to indulge itself in self-pleasing.  Interesting that we see no evidence of a steady and constant rise to higher understanding of life's purpose.  History shows one pattern: a sudden rise of some civilization to be followed inevitably by its downfall into the dust.  I think we are seeing the sunset of our own sudden and inexplicable rise (if high technological achievements that burned and poisoned a world almost to extinction in a hundred years can be called a 'rise').
 
Of course, anyone who has applied himself to the idea would know that 'learning lessons' is never easy.  While the noisy and nasty, the cheap and easy, the slovenly and violent, the lascivious and ignorant, come easy, are easily expressed and performed (as easily as those involved are exploited), not so with personality uplifting lessons.  Even the so-called education system has finally concluded that lessons are best left to kindergarten and perhaps the first two or three grades.  After that, it's just jamming brains full of unconnected, basically useless data, most of which wicks out as fast as it can be entered.  The effects of "higher" education in the richest countries of the world can easily be observed.  I rest my case.
 
I suppose that parents and educators, not to mention the plethora of useless bureaucratic 'services' accessorizing the education process figure that 'lessons' will be taught by life's experiences.  As they are, of course, to the great detriment and rapid disintegration of ethics and moral values once considered the necessary underpinning of any upwardly striving civilized society.  Fifty years of observation tell me that whereas this is indeed a highly developed technological society, it is certainly not civilized, not by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, the more technology it has developed, the more brutal and senseless, the less sensitive to 'others' it has grown.  Political correctness, as one 'civilizing' aspect of this society for example, is a veneer so thin it is transparent, ready to splinter, leaving nothing to show it was ever enacted.  Every social evil which political correctness presumably sought to correct remains as vital as ever, if perhaps hungrier for having been temporarily denied its periodic outbreaks of racial and gender violence.  No lessons learned there either, but a whole new bunch of  bureaucrats, or 'thought police' associated with this process, like termites, have burrowed in, and established themselves at every echelon of government and corporate institutions. 
 
For every step forward Earthian society takes, it is guaranteed to take a definitive step or two backward. 
 
That's all well and good.  And all pretty negative.  I'm certain that even on this small list there are some who would add to my 'complaints' but is there some way out of the nightmare?  I believe there is or I wouldn't be wasting time writing this.  I don't get paid for this!
 
What can we do?  That's easy: nothing.  And someone would say, 'What?  What do you mean, nothing we can do?'  And I'd repeat it emphatically: Nothing at all we can do. 
 
Oh, it's not that we don't have ready made and amazingly effective solutions to apply quite successfully to every single one of our social problems, we do.  The problem as I see it now, being old and wise—Ok, wiser at least—is the pronoun 'we'.  We can't do anything about any of our problems because "we" collectively are the cause of all the problems.  We are the source of the problem, and every time we turn around in attempts to apply our collectively spawned solutions to glaring social problems we splatter the problem all over the place, making things worse.  That's why 'democracy' doesn't work, never will.  It's just another form of totalitarianism, of course.  No different than the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as advocated by the Soviet Union—and what a shining example of a workers' paradise that turned out to be.  
 
It's not we who will change the face of Earth.  It's "I".  I stands for Individual.  I choose to become a better person.  I dissociate myself from the collective 'we' and choose a different way of looking at 'you'.  A way that guarantees you never have to look over your shoulder if I am the one behind you.  I choose not to indulge my whims, my urges, my desires, at your expense, at anyone's expense.  I choose to look at this world and all that resides therein, not as something to exploit, or to curse and condemn, but as something to care about, something precious, something important to the greater life flow.
 
Looks easy enough in words.  But words mean nothing.  I have to be willing to do this, all the time.  Every thought, every word spoken, every act, must dovetail perfectly with my goal.  That calls for wisdom, and self-empowerment.  Enough empowerment that I can brutally judge myself without becoming perverse about it; without the self-condemnation, despair or guilt that has accompanied, and accompanies, so many.  I know this: I am not a good person, but I can be.  I will fail, but I don't have to keep failing.  I mean, it's not rocket science: the road to 'perfection' is infinitely long!  But if I think small, I will speak small and act small.  I will feel powerless and will be tempted, once more, to go the route of the collective to give myself an appearance of having some kind of power, some kind of control.  I will vote. I will join various organizations that seem to offer me the power I can't seem to gain or manage on my own.  And I will conveniently forget the first lesson: that no collective has ever been any better than any other.  Give any collective enough time and power and it will corrupt itself and all those within until it destroys itself.  That's a given.
 
So I think maybe I change by simply caring more about others than myself and reflecting my feelings about this interaction back onto myself.  Thus I can see myself as I truly am, because I become what others think of me, what they see of me.  Instead of thinking I am this or that, I'll accept your verdict of who I am.  What the world I interact with personally sees me as, that is what I am.  I won't argue.
 
That's the meaning of servanthood properly understood: a pretty high calling that is usually rejected because it is basically an unknown virtue; its effectiveness carefully filtered and erased by the Matrix.  Not that people don't serve, but they seldom do it in detachment.  The normal life of service is rife with expectations.  Service to God, to country, to family, to profession, to reputation, to power, to adulation, to success, to money (even if only for the minimum wage paycheck) and all that is pure selfishness, however it is lived.  There is a type of service that surpasses all of that; ignores all of that.  It's the one that "I" as an individual choose to enter into, the 'contract' being with myself alone. 
 
At this point in my understanding of what it means to be 'alive' as an ISSA being, that is the most difficult lesson.