Existence is Anarchy

The question of why we change careers in search of meaning haunts anyone who has felt the inevitable ennui of existing in our modernist – post modernist even – existence. If you wake up one morning and ask the dress in the back of the closet “What love’s got to do with it?”, you might get the reply, “Absolutely nothing.” I ask my shoes quite frequently, and all they ever say is “slorp, squish, scuff, slorp”.
 
Was that my consciousness leaving just now?
 
If you were to tag every possibility into digital existence to capture the imaginations of all, whilst hiding in your hermetic existence:
 
Telling the public to “witness but do not touch, don’t even talk to the man behind the curtain, that wizard that may fulfill your every wish and desire – political assurance? check, retribution of a lost love or wrongdoing? check, collective safety put on by the allusion that we are connected through a binding meaning? you got it.” For I am the glorified untouchable of boundless fame and fortune. You can only come to the father through me! Expose yourself to the public, the masses, expressing your vulnerabilities, go to work! Someone must do it. But I, even though I am doing a job – a job that only a mind like mine is cut out to do – I must remain behind the paywall. You know that fame is amongst you, but I will only walk through in secret, never showing my vampiric feasts in the nightfalls of your city streets and rural farmlands. I will change and manipulate your daily existence, and you will bow to my precepts, though never witness my travels or sittings in your bars…
 
What a tab we’ve been running up..
 
Removing desire from the human experience seems to get at the point of kindness. Having no desire or attachment to if I achieve the desire allows me to pursue unadulterated kindness. The “enough is enough of enough” concept presented by the Tao is often difficult to reconcile when we have desire. Don’t we have desire to be fed, to have shelter, to have love/belonging, to have enough of life? Of course we do, and I believe that we can be freed from the anxiety that comes from that desire and trust, have faith that these things exist when we are in the Way.

If I am on the path, in the Way, I will have all of those things laid out before me because I am in the flow of the universe, of the fabric, of god. I am moving through things as they are and would have me play a role in the great whole of it. This idea lends to stoicism in that if I accept that I am an animal hitched to a wheel moving in a circular path, I will become free in my hitched state. I am not resisting what is, and therefore, I am taken care of fully and have no need to have desire for any of it.

And now, here is Spring, bounding into existence through warmth, snow packed water run-off, hopefully rain, and with that, we may all get new life – reproductive life in all kingdoms. Of course, this means it’s foraging season, the season where we all go out alone or in small groups searching for our favorite morsels that nature alone brings. We cherish them, share them, and even hoard our precious creatures that do not care for one single second about our digital currency, our illusory fame, or what any “star” or “politician” is doing.

I propose that existence at its very core is anarchy. It is self-governing, community-oriented, honest existence. Its very survival requires it. Sometimes it is painful, and others it is cradling. It always elates. Yet, we will drift our sub-conscious states into the noise that we acquire from the digital wasteland and allow them to make us feel superior and inferior to the other digital sub-consciousness that arrives. This drives out our self-governance and our ability to purely exist.

My wish for all of us this Spring is to get up and allow our consciousness to travel to other rooms, rooms that are actual and made of soil and all its inhabitants. The late surrealist master David Lynch discussed the concept of allowing our consciousness to travel to other rooms to “Catch the Big Fish”, which lived in another room. We can only catch that fish if we sit down and alleviate ourselves of the sub-conscious comparisons and desires that we allow to invade and feed our souls. We must sit down and become bored. Then we can become our anarchy.

Here's to Spring and sitting down and getting up again.

- In Kindness and Anarchy,
Sam