In a rich man's world

I just had a very beautiful meditation, full of truth and inspiration. I very much liked following the free flowing of my thoughts, and felt like a child watching a puppet show, whilst at the same time being an adult applauding the logic of my inner voice.

I will try to share some of that flow.

It started where my meditation of yesterday ended, with a vision of timelessness and potentiality all around me, a space where I could travel and emerge at any point around me, and I jumped from there into the black space surrounded by a billion bright and shining stars. Usually, this place gives me peace and detachment from the worries of this world, but this time, it seemed I stayed very much connected to the center of my meditation, which was our lucid and bright planet Earth.

And I thought, I love the Earth. It is full of people trying their best to survive, and smile still at their friends. It is full of activity, of people seeking a better way, of people uniting, of people working, for a better future, for a more equitable world for all. There is so much going on, it really is a positive place. And I thought of the power of the system, the power of the wealthy, the power of the powerful, the power of the conservative. I thought of how it is very difficult to speak up, to stand up, to try and lead by example in changing the world.

I saw people bent and bowing, always keeping a low profile and keeping their heads down, so as not to be noticed, so as not to stand out from the crowd. I saw people silent, from all the cursing and protesting they keep just to themselves. And it made me sad and angry, and it made me think.

I was thinking, it will not be until all of us stand up together, that we can make the powerful feel afraid. I was thinking of how the elite were truly ruthless and mean, of how aggressive and murderous they are, and how they will not hesitate to eliminate any one who rebels and takes the stand, and speaks against them and their crimes, their injustice, their destruction, their theft and their poisoning. The CIA, as a major part of this maffia gang, monitors very closely the crowd, and eagerly detects the unwanted element, the threat to the power of the rich. They do not hesitate to take out someone like that, and that makes everyone paranoid and afraid of course. People don’t want to stand up, people don’t dare to stand up.

So that’s what is so difficult to me. I have a great sympathy for the common man, the one who endures all the suffering, and who believes in caring for the ones close to him still. The one who conforms without complaining, restraining himself for the sake of his modest dream that at least his family have enough to stay alive and share sickness and health in a spirit of love. The ones who try their best to carry the weight of this world, for the sake of their children, for the sake of their loved ones, for sake of safeguarding something they might call freedom, which is, a minimal form of allowance and private life. They suffer much, yet they are content with their peers and the ones close to them. They live a life that is small, retreated, but somehow safe from being wiped away by the powerful, as they apparently give them their blessing to rule them.

However, I don’t know if this medieval attitude can still serve even the modest for long anymore, and it is why I dream of a total revolution. Some may not be willing to risk it all for the sake of distant ideals like the survival of the whale or the polar bear, or for the sake of the survival of some uncontacted jungle tribe. They may not protest unfair trade, the World Bank or the unfair practices of debt and privatization of what were once economies of the people. They may not share the vision or courage to help feed, clothe or cure a Third World child. They may say, I keep to myself, that is already difficult enough and it is all I care about.

But as much as I understand and feel for the common man, the powerless, the victim of the gigantic system that weighs on him and keeps him down every day, I feel for the revolutionary, for the voice of truth and reason, that tries to move him out of his comfort zone, and into the heat of debate and change. Perhaps it is because I am cursed with a revolutionary mind myself, that I do regret people being so damn obedient. For one person can be killed, one voice can be silent, but if each and every man were to stand up against the elite, they would at last start to notice, and start to think, and start to care. They would become afraid, because their games would no longer work. You cannot eliminate the whole world, you cannot kill everyone, if everyone would live by the revolutionary ideas and ideals of what is just, and what is sane.

And I had to think of Occupy Wall Street, and how ’occupy’ is truly the word to be. It is like in medieval times of war, when a city was occupied, it was surrounded and cut off from the outside world, from food, from trade, from every form of organic exchange with the outside world. The siege was beheld, so as to starve and suffocate the city people, that they would come out and surrender to the forces who camped in a circle around them. That is the spirit of ’to occupy’. We should lock the enemy in, besiege them, and force them to surrender. Now of course, it is an insane invertion of this principle, where we are the ones besieged, and we are the ones living under the threat of occupation and starvation, in the many homes we live in. But we are many, we are perhaps enough.

I was thinking that we should not only do this because of our own well-being and prosperity, but for the sake of the powerful themselves as well. We may think of ourselves as criminals, conspiring against the government, we may fear being labelled antisocial, and that we should be locked up in a correctional facility, where they will teach us perhaps to truly bow before our king, and acknowledge the ones in power. But should we be locked up by the agents of surveillance, or should we be the ones to lock them in and force them to bow for something perhaps as big and plain as mere reality ?

For you see, once upon a time, there were the middle ages, and gold was all the wealthy cared about. Having gold was having power, having gold was buying into an office, was befriending the church, was buying another soldier’s sword to go and take more food from the peasants. Having power was living well, and the rest, well, they bowed then as they bow now, and they give and they surrender, and they hold their wives and they care about their children. And if it may, they find some time and space to laugh once in a while with their friends and family in the pub or at a time of feast. So, the middle ages taught the wealthy, that gold brings the good life, gold is what gets you out of poverty, out of the misery, out of the trenches where you are every day fighting for your life.

But will gold still do that ? Or is it just a stubborn belief, that is like a cancer tumor refusing with all its might to die ?

For what has the world turned into, now that the feudal has made space for the capital ? The world has become a place where a ’happy’ few try to make money from everything. The world is slowly changing, from a place full of trees and fish and fruit, to a place of money money money. Fish are turned into money, trees are turned into money, fruit is turned into money, the rivers and the oceans are turned into money, and even one’s brother, is turned into money. We seem to resemble that ancient king from the classic myths, who’s wish it was that everything he touched was transformed into gold. He died, because he could no longer touch his food, without it becoming that stubborn and hard yellow substance, that he had craved for so hard when he had made his wish.

Perhaps the ancient were already past us in their myths, and perhaps now is a time to revalue their insights. Because the story of that fairy-tale king is exactly the question we confront in our coming out of the middle ages today. If we make money, and make more money, and make money of everything, if we transform the whole of the earth into money, what will we eat somewhat further down the line ?

The rich suffer the obvious problem that they may be dreaming of white sandy beached and palm trees overhead, but they are turning those white sands into contaminated wastelands where no living being can survive and they are poisoning the soil for the palm tree to grow in. It seems the ones in charge of ’progress’ suffer from some mental condition that is known as psychosis in the psychological literature. They see things, but they have no feeling with reality.

The rich and powerful think that if they can turn the whole of the earth into money, they will live a good life. They still adhere to medieval values, ideals and beliefs. But the world is changing, and the world is changed. Nature is forever more polluted and destroyed, and if it is not for the well-being of the common man, the one who bows, the one who is starving without complaint, the one who will never speak up or stand up for himself, the one who is deterred from defending his own existence, the one who is kept small, then it is for the sake of the rich and powerful themselves, that we should unite and occupy their castle, occupy their towns, occupy their Wall Street.

For if a person, a common and unimportant man, is in the condition where he dreams big dreams of wealth and beauty, strength and health, but neglects his own hygiene and nourishment, if a person thinks he is a millionaire but has no money left to buy a cigarette, if a person thinks he is intelligent but just keeps talking nonsense, if a person thinks he is Jezus but kills his father and mother, then we come to take him out of his home, and if he does not let us in, we force him out and lock him up in a psychiatric ward. We call such a person psychotic, because he has no touch with reality, because he is living in delusions, because his inner world is fully disconnected with his outer reality.

People should be realistic, they have to take into account many things. The taxes they have to pay, the money for the electricity, bringing their children to school, driving on the right side of the road, stopping for a traffic light. If a person has lost all sense of reality, and is seeing delusions and maybe hearing voices telling him to go kill another man, in the name of some sacred end, then for his own sake, and at times for the sake of public safety as well, we lock him up and give him drugs that may cure him, and take away the worlds of delusion, and let him regain touch with reality again. That he may be able to take care of himself, or his household, his children, his neighbors, his taxes, his reason and rationality. For a person who lives so far away from reality, cannot survive for long, and may even be dangerous to his brother.

So I think it is a bit the same with the rich and powerful, the ones who are hypnotized by money and bewildered by the royal medieval dream. That gold is all we need. Minding the king from the ancient myth, we can wonder if such a person is realistic, and if he is really to be trusted to be taking care of his life, his future and his destiny, and even, may we wonder, if such a person is not a threat to his brother. For people who are preaching the benefits of financial wealth, and talking to us about how money is all you need, and people who are convincing us of the capitalist dream to turn every tree, every fish, every river and every ocean into a quick buck and another dollar, may be testifying to a major disturbance of the mind, a complete lack of sensing reality, a delusional mentality, and we may call them fools if we should choose to use such terminology.

For what in the end, the native americans have warned us, when every river has been poisoned and every tree has been cut down, in the end, what will we eat, what will we drink, what will we have to breathe but poisonous air carrying our paper planes of money ? Should we not occupy the wealthy, and give them drugs and medication, to rectify their sense once again of reality ? Should we not demand, that they feel the course of evolution, should we not want for them to sell us realistic talks and sermons ?

It is bit of an argument, where fools call the realistic ones delusional. When you say all of the pollution is causing illness to the world and the environment, you are seeing ghosts. But when you are saying that all of the car fumes and the cattle metabolism is bringing us fresh and healthy, clean air, then you can run for presidency. When you say you can’t eat money, you are a stupid hippie who should stay off the pot and the acid, but when you say money is all we need, let’s turn the whole of the planet into the new gold, then you are a prophet of the capitalist logic and get a high seat in the office. When you say people should live together as brothers and sisters, you are a softy who needs realism, but when you say we should invent new weapons and bombs and fighter jets, then you are welcome in wall street because killing off your family is paving the way for well-being and prosperity. It is difficult and tiresome to be arguing sometimes, as to who is wrong and who is right, but I think we have to keep considering about people, and the degree to which they are still in touch with reality.

Certainly if it is the people who are leading the planet and showing us the way.

So I think it is important, when the earth is such a great place full of creativity, and so many people are joining together for the good, for survival, for the whales, for the amazon, for fair trade and for longevity, that we step out of the ideals of the middle ages and put first on our agenda the touching of reality. We simply cannot believe the fools any longer who are convincing us that life is about money, gold and dollar signs. We cannot let them endanger our health and our well-being, we cannot let them define the meaning of prosperity. We should recognize they are fools with no feeling for reality, they are sick, psychotic and they need to be carried from their homes, and put on drugs in a correctional facility. For they are the true schizophrenics, they are the ones who think they are Jezus, whilst they are mere criminals endangering themselves and all the rest.

And even if people are used to feeling so weak and low, that they would not in a thousand years speak and stand up for themselves, and even if the common man is apt to starve and suffocate without ever complaining or revolting, even if the human heart and soul have been broken and left to bleed since time immemorial, even if we have not an ounce of self-assertion left, even if there is not a horse left that remembers running wild and free, even then, should we stop the insane, out of compassion, out of vision, out of a stubborn caring for our family. For in the end, are they not just brothers and sisters who are going the wrong way, are they not fundamentally dooming themselves, even when we forgive them for sickening the rest of us ?

What if, at the end of times, all of the world is a wasteland, and the poor and common man has long vanished from starvation, and only the rich survive ? Will they have a fish left to eat ? Will there be, for them as well, still air to breathe ?

They accumulate wealth and transfer it to their children, but they care not really about their offspring. They give as their inheritance a world left to die, a world murdered, a nature battered, poisoned, imprisoned and impoverished. They only care about themselves, now, holding on to that medieval dream of gold and power, and never minding that the times have changed and the ideals should adapt to this obvious evolution. There is too much at stake.

So, and that is where I end my meditation, even if this world is a wonderful planet, full of diligent and inspired people, who are perhaps only to modest to truly protest, even if the better knowing are used to keeping their mouth shut and let the bully have his glory, even when the spark of revolution is very dim and small in these times, even then, there should be enough clarity to occupy the rich, to lock them up for being a danger to themselves and to society, and to, as a planet, regain our sense of reality. Seen from space, the earth is one beautiful whole without borders or separation, with great potential and perhaps as one of the few planets in the universe, endowed with the gift of life.

To me, the world is a majesty worth far more than only gold and money. Perhaps with some respect, we may learn how uplifting truly bowing is.