Here's the deal....
Once upon a time, Humans were viewed as the pinnacle of Creation. We were Masters of our domain (Seinfeld excepted) and the individual was a sacred being capable of achieving god-like characteristics. Buddhism, which predates both Christianity and Judaism, speaks to the whole idea that humans are perfectable to the point of deification. Each of us, given enough time and effort, are capable of achieving apotheosis. As Robert Heinlein put it in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' "Thou art god."
That whole concept is as foreign to us now as snorting Moon-dust. We folks today can't imagine such an idea as individual human beings becoming gods in their own right. That's some quaint idea reserved for Caesars and Japanese Emperors. Us little people are but worms to be trod upon for the greater glory of someone else.
It shows up in so many subtle ways in our thinking and social discourse. The concept of our baseness and unworthy-ness is built into our language. We speak it and don't even think about it. If we only paused for a moment and pondered what we say on a daily basis, we would (should) be shocked.
The other day, in my Business Conversation class, we took up the topic of 'jargon'. Jargon is slang that is meant to exclude others from the inner sanctum of any given profession. Jargon separates us into guilds and professions. It allows us to exclude the uninitiated, but it also excludes us from other groups. Slang divides generations, jargon divides disciplines.
Some of the terms we took up were 'core competency', 'corporate values', and 'human resources'. If you are a corporate drone, then these terms are branded on your soul. And chances are, you've probably never really thought them through. So let's do that, because it's part of the Big Picture here on the Far Side.
First of all, 'core competency'. This is a gem of bullshit. Here, we've taken a horse turd and shined it up into an object of veneration and desire. We are using 'core', which means the center, heart or penultimate, as an adjective to describe 'competency', which means average achievement, mediocrity and unenlightened. So, when your boss talks about your company's 'core competency', he's asking you to buy into the idea that at your organization's heart is nothing more than mediocre ability. A competent surgeon means he likely won't kill you, but all the effort and money likely won't cure you, either. There's no art or substance, just following directions, boss.
Finally, we come to 'human resources'. This is particularly egregious. Earth, wind, fire, and water are resources. Humans are not. Paper is a resource. Ink is a resource. Electricity is a resource. Time is a resource. But humans are humans. We are not raw materials to be thrown at any given situation, along with whatever lumps of shit we have to hand. I have skills and talents that are available to my employer for a fee, but I am not cord wood to be thrown on the fire on a cold night.
Now, I think we have sufficiently built a framework to show that the whole core of modern society is sick and dying. That we humans has surrendered our basic value as individuals who are capable of apotheosis, in order to become cells in artificial golems of mystical construct, in order to receive remuneration and pay taxes is, in a word, sick.
We are a sick society, and perhaps that is why apocolyptism has become so prevalent. We know we are sick and admit that we have no way to cure this sickness, and so we hope for some deus ex machina to come along and take care of the situation for us.
It doesn't matter what stripe you hail from. Whether it's neopagan, Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism...everyone is looking for some outside force to come in and clean up our dirty thinking.
This is the way mass murderers think. They know they are 'broken'. They can't figure out a way to cure themselves. So they start killing people hoping to be caught so that someone else will take responsibility for their sickness.
This is the origin of the 'war on drugs'. The elite don't want the individual to figure out how to cure their illness.
We, as a society-culture-civilization, are doing all we can to deny the problem at the core of our existence. We ARE gods. We are spiritual beings who are capable of things far beyond what we are achieving on a daily basis right now. We are in the throes of evil beings trying to harness our power for their personal gain. We are the cocoon denying the worm the ability to become a butterfly.
It's time.
It's time to release ourselves. Only we, as individuals, can open the cocoon and allow ourselves to soar where we belong. All the legalisms and jingoisms and jargonisms serve only to keep us in the shell, when we should be fighting with all our might to break free of this morass of limits and horizons.
To come full circle, the Supreme Corpse decision on Obamacare serves only the shell, not the 'becoming'. Those who are doomed to believe that we are nothing without the collective are doomed to spend eternity inside the cocoon.
In Asian thought, an individual is created by hard work. One must spend a lifetime drawing the elements together to form a unique being. If you fail, then you must return to the 'soup' from which you came, so that your energy can be recycled into another effort, commonly called reincarnation. Once you achieve 'self', then you can perfect that thing into an eternal being.
Is the 'self' you are trying to create a part of some 'corporate' being? Or are you strong enough to create a real 'individual'? Therein lies our common dilemma in this day and age.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel was that the gods confused human language to keep them from achieving their true status. Language is the key. Learn your own language to the roots. Then learn as many other languages as you can. Then, at some point, it will all congeal to show the Big Picture.
Don't let anyone control your language. If they control your language, they control your thoughts. That was the whole point of the Great Light called George Carlin. That is the point that I am trying to make. Learn all languages. Use language with great care and control. It is the most powerful weapon that we, as Individual Human Beings, have at our command. By controlling our language, we are setting ourselves free to exit the cocoon.
In other words, fuck the Supreme Corpse.
