Juan Santos writes some great pieces in his fourth-world blog.
The good news is that the death system is dying. It could come to no other end.
The bad news is that it has become so all encompassing that there is nowhere left to run if we were able to escape it. Escaping global warming would be like escaping the air itself, the atmosphere itself. But we cannot escape the air, there are no spaceships to carry us elsewhere, and we probably couldn’t breathe if we got there.
I don’t think dying is so bad, personally. I came close to dying a few months ago. Later, it occurred to me it would have been easier than living. If it were to happen, I later realized, all it would take is to close the eyes. Easy, but cheap and faithless.
What we have been doing – dying – doesn’t work. What we have been doing – fighting or resisting, or going along or “getting ours” – doesn’t work. It didn’t work.
And its time is over.
This whole way of life is over. Everything my generation rebelled against is over This cancerous consumption and the growth of consumption is over. It can’t take another step. As George Monbiot points out, if the economy grows by only 3% a year, global economic activity- and consumption- will double in roughly a quarter of a century.
It certainly is. And we need to help it pass away, free ourselves from its death grip, and seek a real life, containing all the things that make life so magical but don’t add anything to GDP.
Let us pray and let us work and let us learn how to build a completely different future once this way is finally dead and buried. It will take everything we have, and more. It will take what we don’t have.
Since this way of life is over, since this culture is over, the fiction of who we have assumed ourselves to be is also over. We are not that. We never were that. It’s just that our survival in the system meant we had no choice but to pretend- even to ourselves – to be that. It is time, now, for us to deliberately and consciously to enter into what my generation called the psychedelic experience, the dissolution of our egos- I mean our stories, the stories we have told ourselves about what it is to be alive, to be a human being on Earth. Like an actor when the stage is being torn down after the show, it’s time to abandon who we were, what we were, what we said, what we did, and what we planned. That’s what it means to die consciously, to allow the ego to die, to let go of a life that can no longer be sustained. That’s what it means to die with joy, to see death as liberation from suffering. All the stuff the Buddha said. It’s Time now. It’s time to die, so that the world might be re-born.
I imagine, rightly or wrongly – I haven’t asked – that the people who’ve been preaching love and forgiveness to me already understood this. I don’t know, and it matters little. I let them work in me, I let their words dismantle me, even though I had felt profoundly insulted by them, even though some of the things that were said were arrogant and clearly meant to be insulting. Nevertheless, I began to give up the story. Slowly, the anger is giving way to sadness. Sadness is a step closer to love than anger. That’s good. Beneath the anger is grief, and beneath the grief is light and joy and renewal and the colors of the rainbow. Beneath the grief is life, not the phony “life” we’ve been led to lead, but real life. I know, because I’ve been down the road before. That’s how I knew to listen to the love preachers in the first place. That’s how I knew it was time to shut up, to sit with the impossible and let it answer itself. And here’s the deal.
Death’s own answer is love. No, it’s not death vs. love. Love is death’s own answer. The answer we have always needed under the death system is love – a way to love and a way to be loved. A way to connect, to break down, to open up. Oppression is nothing but a block to love, to connection, to inclusion. Love is the road. Oppression is not sustainable, and to that extent, it is not fundamentally real. It is doomed to collapse. Love is fundamentally real. Connection is fundamentally real. Death and oppression have no victory if we know we are connected, if we know that the door is open to our love, if we can still give it and receive it, if we can pledge it beyond the grave, beyond the prison’s bars. It is our love for life, for kids and animals, that we can pledge now, and pledge it beyond the grave, to a future we will never live to see. To a new world whose parents and ancestors we may become if we but choose it and lay the foundations for it. We will have to lay them the only place they can be laid, in the midst of the destruction and unimaginable anguish to come.
It is love that we, ourselves, will need, as the world we have been shunted into dies around us. What we will need is those who will love us enough to help us face death, the death of our ego-“lives” and the real death that will accompany economic collapse or ecological collapse, or both. We will need people willing to become boddhisatvas, people willing to try to become something like we imagine Christ or Quetzalcoatl to have been, people willing to be with us, in love, until the end, and beyond the end. It’s Time now. It’s time to get free. It’s time to become the True Sister and the True Brother, those who know they are related, those who know they are connected, those who can remember how to love, those who the Hopi said might renew the Earth.
