photo by me of one of my only real friends on the island
I’m telling you the birds and the bees. It’s way over your head? Come on now slow down and read. This is the biggest thing on earth where we whip up ourselves. I’ve revealed the times, any way you look at them. See that dog standin’ there? It’s the same for him. Now let this poem unfold before your eyes a poet where you’re sittin’.
All about bears and livid nature just feed the worm. They just didn’t do it right, be themselves in a public crowd. An exaggerated sense of self led them through the day. This is the human worm. I think this plagues everybody. It’s baseline bein’ human, when we encounter each other. I am so big in my eyes. I need to show this to people. I have to feel good about myself and expose my difference. I am just one in a crowd, and that hurts.
A social hierarchy makes everybody sting and just messes up bein’ human. Everyone is just falling all over themselves to be an item. Your boss said no. Now, what’s at fault here? Everybody’s just bein’ human. Let me give you a hug. I’ve just arrived on the scene, and I think we met once, and I have to show this scene my Jesus imitation mi corazón, or I just sit back and judge everybody pretendin’ to be bigger than everybody else with my debonair, so they see I’m the one important here.
Can you stop? Nobody can. These are the facts of life. I’m a hole in one. I see everything as the center of me. My senses place me dead center. I hear everything inside confirm that. I feel it on my skin, and you can be my child, and I am not your senses to you, and your inner life is dead to me. I don’t hear a thing. I infer. I gather. I learn to empathize. I don’t know where you’re at as you see me. My world is so big you understand, your world pressin’ in on me. I’ve got to show yah I’m worth.
Here’s the deal. You don’t believe me, unlessin’ we mean for each other. There are just too many of us to care about them others. This is such an exaggerated posture, however much noise we make to show our worth. We feel ourselves so deeply. We are ever-present with ourselves, and we want so to be liked and loved, not made to feel bad about who we are. Oh man please listen to me. We each and everyone of us hurt so because we’re ridin’ the world right upon its seat, legitimately the peddlers of existence, wind in our hair, fire under our tires, and not a person sees that but us.
Oh my God that hurts. It’s downright mean to arrange a world bottle this way. Is it a Creator laugh? We’re so on ourselves, little children at the handlebars, peddlin’ for all it’s worth. Who can blame us for bein’ mean? Now you know that’s not right, and God is not a son of a bitch. We’re workin’ out a plan too big for us to see. We have to take the impossible and pump it on our bikes, not live in a storm of I am the you, the me.
We have to do this ourselves, realize every Dick and Jane is the center of ourself too, and they feel the world out there the central event in it, just like everyone of us does to our existential eyes. Oh my God all life fits there. Oh my God all the world fits there.
Can you see the change in identity? There you are identifying with everything. Now you can still get your work done, but with radically changed hands and thought process, and your heart beats in everyone’s so that you can feel them like yourself. Even if you fumble this someone really does you in, you climb back up there because it’s how you see.
Now am I livin’ wart? I have the apple in my hand. I’ve explained to you humanity, right there in social dice. I’m the cows come home, and I’m different you see? I’m posturin’ so you’ll give me worth. Is it all a game? Do we just bury our heads in sand dunes we are so embarrassing on each other? Oh no sweet brother, sweet sister, puppy dog, pussy cat, we are so much more than tumultuous sees. We are bigger than stars, just immature infants that’s all to how fucking big everything is and meaningful. We have a role to play in an unimaginable creation’s purpose, these little animals that we are, but we grow up you see.
I’m speakin’ from that tall noon far off in a shimmering distance. Inevitable we arrive. A chrysalises our dumb selves, and we’re just waitin’ on that greater light to open us, and this poem has eyes on that light. Is that okay? You sent me the email to shut up. I’m sorry I can’t. It’s what makes me tick, right here: see that me there? I’m lookin’ at the world poet my number. His editorial number God central that’s you.
I have to have a storm to peddle in emergencies, passage mean, this business of losing my job. A cute muffin is my horticulture, a grassroots revealing poem. Now think on this. What’s so weird this is Candid Camera. We’re bein’ caught in ourselves, because as luck would have it we are the One lookin’ out at the world through everyone’s eyes.
We get caught in ourselves seein’ that, and there’s a host of pile-ons. We’re creation’s niggers, little hapless animals breastfeeding on life, not knowin’ who we are, not knowin’ where we came from. We’re a little window on time, unaware of the All inside. It’s spurs us on. It gives us courage. It’s not bound by time or even existence. We are there you see in the front of ourselves too close to see.
What a Hollywood. It’s wonderful really, and validates all our notions of look important me. To discover that in yourselves you would have to remove the Earth from view, see brighter than stars. Can you do that? That will be the day you will count forever as the starting of your see. You would’ve seen Earth laid bare in all of its miracle. In several seconds sums it up for me. I’m seein’ all those pile-ons a poet describin’ time. Is that so bad? A referee man, I’m tellin’ yah how the cow ate the cabbage. Am I invited to dinner?
The most precious thing on earth, your dog loves you so, and you can treat ‘im like a dog, piss all over him with your human control, shock the shit out of him with that play-button shock collar, and he’ll lick your hand and throw away all his pride at your feet. Now how do we help that dog? It's not abuse you get arrested for, but you don't wanna look at it. There’s better hours his master can spend with him. Well I found out theys do me dog here too. Comin’ in didn’t see that. I thought I was a pedigree dog. (The sound of laughter) He gets embarrassed and shy we share identity. Get that puppy so much better than scoldin’s. Honor that dog.
It’s everybody, not just you seein’ this kid, art, representational. Photo by Donny
Launch of Will
In this system
show you guys how to do it.
What is office in the film?
That’s ego activism.
I’ve had enough.
Are you sure you’re sorry?
You’ve said it.
And we hear from the crowd.
They see me in my underwear.
Sing hallelujah to the Lord. [heard sung, song “Sing Hallelujah”]
What do I do with Joseph?
Isn’t that
my own enigma?
Help makes it
vocally present.
Go 900.
The heaviest place on earth,
you go in it,
a chest of healing.
I got ears.
Ego activism (the short list)— dynamic social action using one’s creativity to undermine the dominance of the human ego in the world, one’s own ego as well as the ego in general. It has the aim to quicken human evolution out of this ego stage of identity. It recognizes the primacy of the ego as the root of the problems in the human condition, and while it may address individual problems, such as climate change, sexual assault, mass murder, and racism, to name pressing ones today, it sees the solution in not giving primacy to the ego but to a more integral and unified human identity based on oneness, on the part of everybody, not just the people manifesting this wrong or that, their own ego being the primary ego the activist aims to surpass.
It does not point the finger at the behavior of others without three fingers pointing back at the activist, and when it does point the finger, it does so with compassion and understanding, for one’s self as well the ones being pointed out, keeping out of its attitude self-righteousness, judging, blaming, anger, hatred, and violence. It engages people with sincerity, vulnerability, beauty, and a knowledge of truth, truth not being any religious formula but what’s actually going on. While it’s never mean, it is frank and honest, is not afraid to speak its piece or call a spade a spade, and while pacifism is its preferred mode of action, it’s not adverse to the activist physically defending themselves and others if the genuine need arises.
Self-sacrifice, however, is a major characteristic of ego activism, not however, the kind that surrenders to the condemnation and punishment of the world, which would be surrendering to the ego and its methods, but the kind whereby the activist is willing to put themselves at great risk in conducting the action, not foolish, impulsive risk that has harm to the activist or death as its probable or certain outcome, but wise, calculated risk that has both the needs of the activist and the world at heart and in harmony whatever the outcome.
(Note: I’ve made a blog post from a comment I posted after a story on Medium called “Why Arguments Against Abolition Inevitably Fail” by Angela Y. Davis, abolition in this case the abolition of police and prisons.)
Dr. Davis, you are still talking about reform, not a fundamental change of society. You’re addressing only one aspect of society, albeit a central one, police and prisons, crime and punishment, or however we label the way we deal with people who harm or are suspected of harming others, how we make communities safe from harming individuals or groups, give people justice that have been harmed, and prevent said individuals and groups from harming more, not to mention healing them, something seldom discussed. Furthermore, you’re context is racial, as if it’s the determining factor of society itself, however significant it is in being a determining factor, much like Marxism makes social class the basis of understanding and organizing society. And you’re only looking at the history of America in terms of policing and prison, as if it’s occurred in isolation and isn’t a part of the evolution of ‘crime and punishment’ in the development of human society. There is a long history of it before America came into being, and just like the Marxist saying the bottom line of history is class struggle, you can make the case that policing and punishment evolved solely in terms of the effort to control minorities, but, while you’d identify a major player in the evolution, you’d narrow your understanding that would make it unable to grasp the whole of the matter.
A fundamental change in society would involve an essential change in human identity, or, put in practical terms, a fundamental change in the ways and means of ego transcription and the subsequent socialization and education of individuals growing up. From birth we’d have to give children a more inclusive identity, where they identify first and foremost with being a human being over being a Last-Name (family), an American, a male, a Christian, a White person, or whatever grouping human beings identify with, which wouldn’t mean we stop identifying with groups. It’d mean we identify first with humanity, and it’s beyond the discussion here, but such a holistic identity would naturally include the whole earth, as the step to the whole of humanity would be a giant leap to holism.
A holistic identity holds in the very ground of its consciousness an identity with all it sees, what the ideal “love your neighbor as yourself” is realized, and it’s also beyond the scope of a single comment to discuss the allowance and celebration even of difference as the foundation of the unity, the delight of the holistic identity, or the fact that each creature and species have different needs and places in the scheme of things, and that a clam would not claim the rights of a human being, and that each human being would have the inalienable right, regardless of any intrinsic characteristic such as race, gender, or sexuality, to self-fulfillment and self-determination, but it does good to mention these things here to understand what holism is and is not. There is no other way to stop racism in society, to change the formula of crime and punishment, no other way to end violence, no other way to stop climate change, in short, no other way to fundamentally change society. Spend some months and years doing the math.
It’s not impossible. It’s just going to take a lot more than this current racial crisis, not undermining its importance, to get us to make such a radical change. It’ll take us facing extinction, not as something afar that will come if we don’t do such and such, but something directly in our face: things like cataclysmic destruction or an environmental disaster. But we can still start now. Although such an ego transcription could not fully come about only in a progressive family environment, since society at large plays such an enormous role in giving us our identities, parents can go a long ways in giving their children a humanity identity. And pilot communities could be started to work towards that human unity to circumvent the problems an individual family faces in giving its kids such an identity. Of course we’d have to become a whole lot more conscious of the process of ego transcription, something we are as yet largely ignorant of, but there’s no doubt that it takes place. You like art, seem to always include it in your lists, and I have a lot of art (poetry) that reveals the ways of means of how we become the people that we are and what it means to be human. You’d find a lot of it on Twitter but not only there, and it’s also on my Medium account.
Of course it will take generations to make such a fundamental change in human identity, even when we begin to give it lead in raising children on a large scale. I don’t think even our brightest and best thinkers are mature enough yet in thought to grasp the possibility of such a change, much less begin to work towards it. People like you will hit on the particulars and the immediate, but even here, it’ll take a long time to work change. I see you’re a student of consciousness, and I don’t think it out of line to make the assumption that you operate from the scientific paradigm, have studied it as science studies it, something made by the brain, have not done a lifetime of self-study of consciousness itself, and I mean by that an exploration of your own consciousness.
Since childhood, via lucid dream, out of body experience, and spiritual experience, I’ve explored mine. One thing of significance here that I’ve focused on is if my consciousness connects to yours, you being other people, and if it does how and what that would mean to being human. For 25 years I’ve had a partner doing the same exploration, and we traveled both together and separately to many different countries and discussed dreams and inner experience with most all whom we were around for any length of time, and we often stayed with the people of the country we were traveling in. (I myself was a penniless vagabond for a number of years.) I can say that I do not believe that we share a common field of consciousness but that I know we do. But it’s taken a lifetime of study every bit as thorough and time-consuming as what we normally mean by school.
It’s here, in the knowledge of our shared field of consciousness and its implications, that we will find the missing pieces to the puzzle of human evil, racism a part of that picture, pieces we yet do not even know are missing. How many hidden wills are involved in a person harming another? What is the effect of ill will that people feel inside on the whole of society? Is the ill will to punish someone who harms, or who holds a racist attitude, the same ill will they feel harming or holding that attitude?
The biggest objection to your thesis of abolishing the police and prisons is how to protect communities from harm and administer justice, it no longer being a forced restitution. And how are you going to stop people from causing harm? You won’t get a handle on it until you become more fully conscious of yourself and our shared field of consciousness, indeed, of our shared identity, or I should say, that until enough of us are thusly conscious (can I say ‘woke’?) to outnumber those that aren’t, because you don’t have all the facts yet, those underwater ones so to speak, the more powerful ones that move us towards causing harm to one another. You aren’t even looking in that direction. Towards that end I post my comment.
Harm's End 