Feeling the Call to Pause?
Stand Still. Be Present. Listen
We live in strange times. To make a blessing of it we might say that we live in interesting times. What is this time teaching us?
It seems to me that our society has lost its mind, I think, to hyper rationality.
I don’t have to look far to study the matter. My own Monkey Mind is ever on overdrive. The way our society behaves now, on the whole, is not so different.
The Monkey Mind, no matter what is going on, finds the thing wrong in the world and fixates on it, then tries to fix it. It wants to be useful. It shapes, is, our ego.
But so much of what it seeks to fix is made up. So the mind, like a Chinese finger puzzle, pulls itself ever more tightly into its own trap. Manufacturing Madness.
The thing we seem these days most to create is problems that feed our problem-solving addiction. This hyper-rationality, hyper intellection, abstracts, separates, and studies, in its dissociated-from-life laboratory, its made up things.
We are wounded by this dissociation.
And so, I feel the call to pause. To be still, silent, and listen.
That impulse, that thought, terrifies the Monkey Mind. Where, if I do not go out into the world and make my way by solving problems will my next meal come from? How will disaster be fended off?
If I would but be still all the problems I envisage would, rather than be solved, simply dissolve.
Then what use for the loyal soldier who has so long been at war with the world? Perhaps relief? A laying down of one’s implements? Yes.
Surrender to the course of events. Cease your perseverance in preventing what is unfolding from doing so. Quiet.
It is said that there is no force that can withstand submission. Surrender, then.
Peace.
Peace and Quiet.
Remember. Re-member. Re-constitute. Re-connect. Re-store.
The motion of the Tao … is Return.
The pendulum perhaps swung so far to madness, now returns to wholeness? Why wouldn’t one embrace this, allow and participate in it?
I begin to imagine all that would be dissolved if I were, we were, to just stop. Pause. Listen.
Peace. Quiet. Remembering.
Re-membering with all parts of who we are. Re-membering in community, with others. Re-membering with World, with Lifeworld. All of this is who we truly are, yet have forgotten.
And doesn’t this, whispers my wiser mind, make sense: That balance would be restored simply by re-membering, in animating Lifeworld, that world so far encroached upon by System, which itself is nothing more than the collective projection of our monkey minds onto a colossal world screen?
What if we take back that projection? Turn off the light in the projector. Stop the reel.
What if we pay attention to something different. It still seems to stand to reason, if not logic, that doing so would dissolve so much of what ails us. It too, would just stop.
What would we see if we stopped long enough, paused. Together?
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Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash