Have you ever noticed how many people balk at the notion of being still? They’re always on the move, on the go, making plans, and scheming. They’re trying to win each other over with arguments and rationalized beliefs that don’t actually make sense. Nonsense dressed up as the sensible, the civil. And they struggle in life, like the cheapest glue, trying to hold it all together.
We’ll do anything to remain as we are. We’ll even buy books on how to live effortless lives—anything to not actually live effortlessly in the true sense of it. This, because rubbing against the grain of our natural state of being is how we’ve come to define our natural state of being for thousands of years. Going with the flow, living in the now—these are catchy phrases that we think we understand. Maybe we dabble in them; maybe we sell them; maybe we mock them. Rarely do we understand them because we don’t know them as ourselves. We know them as notions, intellectualizations, and exercises in relation to ourselves and at odds with ourselves.
Going with the flow feels more natural than the grinding struggle of making decisions based on personal thought and that’s because it is. But have you ever noticed how much we struggle against our decision to find that moment where we can relax into what we call “the flow?” Or lazily “hand over our power,” as the saying goes, to the nearest dictator who lusts it? Despite this we continue to sell ourselves on free will as the miracle of human nature. Why?
In theory, going with the flow sounds like being a preprogrammed machine or an animal running on instinct alone. Whether animals actually run on instinct alone is another question—but we tend to view them that way as a means of propping ourselves up on the notion that we are separate from them thanks to free will. It’s tempting to stop here, having presumably arrived at our answer: Oh. We stick with free will because it’s what separates us from animals. It shows us to be at the top of a hierarchy of Earth-based consciousness. There’s matter. There’s animals. And then there’s us, better than them all, the best this rock has produced. But that’s not the answer to why we sell ourselves on the miracle of free will. The answer is because we live in theory. We live theoretical lives.
We live theoretical lives because we live in arguments. Ever since the ancient Greeks. They taught us that logic and rationality are da bomb. The fuse that sets off da bomb is arguing. You cannot argue if you don’t think you’re right. And you can’t be right if you haven’t thoroughly thought whatever it is through. Or pretended to. How many of us rationalize away so that we sound like we’ve thought something through, when really we’re justifying our stupidity?
All of this leads us to begin sentences with, “Hypothetically speaking…” and to feel smart doling out thought experiments. We are a thought experiment. That’s what “Westernized mind” is. And the results are in. Turns out Earth isn’t some un-alive glob of matter. Placing ourselves above her may soon lead to a massive, invisible finger and thumb going *flick*.
If the Testaments old and new separated us from nature, then the ancient Greeks, my people, gave us humanity’s firm push into the head as smarmy, arrogant know-it-alls. Now, in post-modern times, we find that smarmy, arrogant know-nothings have taken the reigns. This is all very logical. A logical progression away from our interconnecting nature—the toxicity of rationality run amok.
Someone needs to make an argument that living as logically as possible is illogical. Wait, I think I just have. We all have. And if the way out of interconnecting nature is by falling in love with listening to ourselves speak, then the way back is through silence. Which means there is no way back, there is only silence, for a way implies more noise.
In silence one makes the greatest discovery of all: Silence is Love–real Love, not the fraud of our desires to be and to grow. Love, real Love, grows us anew, opens us like flowers, pours into us, and is our flow. All of that because Love, real Love, is us and these are our actions. Our actions when we’re not dictating or handing ourselves over to another dictator.
Love, real Love, is action in the freedom of peace.