If you’ve happened to stumble upon this post, it’s most probable that you are in some kind of a civilization right now, wasting your time over the net, but while you’re here you might as well learn some things about this “pretty neat” thing called civilization.
The main idea behind civilization is advancement and prosperity, but what exactly and for who. Certainly, you’ve got your running water, your waterproof roof, a comfy bed and obviosly a PC on which to waste time, but while we take these things for granted by the civilization we also pay for them a stiff price, the price of individuality, thought and choice. Let me explain why.
The only free time a person has in his life is pretty much till 7 and after 70 or at least that’s what a certain system called civilization is based upon. It’s preferred that most of your life is crushed inside a weekend and a week or two every year, no free time between school and high, between high and work, because according to everybody “it’s a bad idea to stop. You’ll just lose your inertia”. And that’s how based on inertia we slowly walk to the end of our lives and only when we’re quite old we stop and think of life, of it’s wonders and beauties.
But who enforces this, we do upon ourselves, because we have an idea of life inherited from our parents and their parents and so on. It’s much easier to adapt to an old idea instead of making a new one. Although no one asks you to make up new things. A lot of things have already been made and a lot of paths have been well designated. It’s just a matter of choosing one of them.
And here we come to the topic of choice, What is it, that thing that people give their lives for and do we really understand it? Of course most of you will say you do and you choose everything by yourself, but that is further from the truth than the moon from Earth.
The two most important things you need to make a real choice are quite a lot of guts and be able to see the choices, everything else is just choosing (still) the easy path and going with the flow, which is what most of earth’s “civilized” population is doing. Why, because they choose to. They also choose to be miserable, unhappy, work their asses off for nothing, finding pleasure only in the drug called love (even less understood than the choice but that one’s for another time) and travel once in a while around the country, gather with friends, work their asses off, drink a bit of alcohol, have a wife and bunch of kids they think of as their “legacy”, work their asses off to ensure their children’s “future”… Does that sum it up? I think so. Few are those that go off this standardized path and are considered insane… Well guess what, sanity is overrated. Moreover, it’s pretty much death, cos life is spent like a tree, sitting on one place, with roots growing deeper and deeper. Humans are supposed to be animals, not trees last time I checked, but anyway.
So most of choice, while it truly can be defined as one is still based on going on the path of least resistance (hence the bravery needed in order to deviate from it and seek something more that might happen to not be there) , which is “controlled” by people/beings that would have the most benefit of it, in the material case by huge corporations and in a higher case, the very gods we tend to worship. They do lead us to somewhere, but only they know where, and as I said, only to a direcion from where they’d have the most profit of.
Then how does seeing the abundance of choices happen. It’s simple. Force yourself to stop everything else for an hour, a day, a week, a month and just observe, pay attention to, go to new places, experience new things and the possibilities and people that have taken them and have succeeded will start to show themselves
And don’t pay attention to some great CEO’s and company manager. These people are tied down to even fewer choices that the casual person has, because they have power and their main purpose is preserving it, and that takes quite a lot of energy.
A few rules one might adapt when going out into life are:
1. We have a lot of power stored in ourselves, but all of it has its roots in nature. Without it we are powerless. Still, all external power is temporary.Control is an illusion that destroys you. Only the power over ourselves is more permanent.
2. While we have choices, where our choices end, faith begins. The only way to overcome faith is by awareness.
3. A person is born with nothing material and dies with nothing material. Apart from our needs there’s no reason why the middle should be any different. While you might have some stuff, all of it is rented and is taken away in one time or another. Nothing really belongs to you, the least of which someone elses or your own life for that matter.
4. Life isn’t in what was or what can be. It’s in what IS, here and now. Awareness is the key to everything. Second comes the above mentioned power over yourself and so on.
