Today we have a post from Peace Tree contributing author, Bill Epler.
Maya Politics
For millennia, the orient has been talking about Maya. So just what is Maya? Maya is basically the delusional mind set of our species. It's the consensus mental video game we live and die for.
Call it philosophical craziness -- that works.
So what's "maya politics"? Maya politics is being buried alive in political events, political issues, and yes, even political activism. But events aren't the problem; it's the belief systems and attitudes that we take to the events.
Well, that's nice, but why bother to even talk about this? It’s because political problems ultimately don't have political solutions (Karl Marx notwithstanding). And to the degree that we humans are fuzzy about this, our alleged problem solving recycles the problem.
Admittedly, this is tricky to talk about. How much easier to just fight the good political fight. And it IS a good fight! Certainly anyone who helps to rid our country of the Bush/Republican abomination is deserving of praise and Godspeed to them.
But small values and truths can cover up big values and truths. So at the same time we're dealing with these fascists, let's remember that politics is never the final truth of things. Nations, like individuals, have their ups and downs, but the secret challenge is to keep frying the bigger fish.
And to the degree we lose the big picture sense of things, we become ineffectual with the small stuff. It's like getting overly carried away in a marital argument. Even if you're more or less in the right, once intelligence shuts down, everyone loses. You, your kids, your profession -- everything.
Please note how strong the pull is to discount what's being said here as mere "intellectualizing". But also please note that there's something in each of us which knows that it's intellectualizing only if we use it to avoid the deeper and more frightening challenges of life.
And these challenges are what?
Writ large, the challenge is to realize that life transcends thought (religious thought, scientific thought, and political thought -- ANY thought).
More specifically, the challenge is to realize that politics without politicians has a different feel to it. Or said differently, that life doesn't need delusional identities of separateness to do its thing. Or when the thinking about point of view tires to one up reality, one wonders from what perspective it presumes to do this. Theres also a potent alchemy in discovering that we never think about what we think about before we think about it.
But can we rise to such challenges? Absolutely -- or at least in ways which significantly change our life. The tragedy is that since our intelligence (which really isn't "ours") is so much smarter than consensus foolishness, how sad that we settle for lives of un-freedom and bewilderment.
But what about politics; what about George Bush? Not to worry about that. The Bush/Republicans aren't going anywhere. The difference is that evil (why not call it that?) is more creatively dealt with from in-touch-with-reality intelligence, than cowardly, slothful, delusion.
W. Christopher Epler
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Peace y'all
