Today we have a post from Peace Tree contributing author, W. Christopher Epler.Fascism Is The Acting Out Of Delusion
Behind all this chaos and hate is delusion. We human beings just refuse to grow up and the essence of fascism is merely institutionalized fear.
But fear of what?
Fear of truth -- fear of "reality".
Let's take a fun/serious philosophical example. How many of us really take it in that when a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one around, there isn't any sound?
Of course, we have to rephrase it a bit and say that when a tree falls in a forest and there's no "auditory nervous systems" around (human or otherwise), there isn't any sound. However, this self evident answer utterly redefines the human condition! It opens us to realities beyond the consensus scheme of things (i.e., "consensus reality").
Consensus reality is our living our life from place. The only problem is that it's a form of intelligence suicide.
Take the falling tree business. An axiom of consensus reality is that there's a duality between separate selves and the external world.
Basically, the alleged external world is what separate selves are separate from (and also from each other).
Sound is supposed to be in the external world and sometimes we hear it and sometimes we don't, but the duality between hearing and sound is absolute.
But this, of course, is total nonsense. Sound IS hearing, just as hearing IS sound. We don't view the view; the view IS the view. All that perceiver, perceiving, and perceived foolishness is a game of the mind. It's projecting language into reality.
The truth of the matter is that there simply AREN'T any "separate selves", any more than there is an abstract "external world". What's real is infinitely (?) more mysterious than this running amok of language.
It would take a book to make all the connections between the above example and the cancer of fascism (implicit or explicit), but the connections are there. If the human mind set is in profound reality denial (and always has been), then it's relatively obvious that this defective take on what's real will manifest accordingly. Hence, fascism is a symptom of reality ignorance.
The tragedy is that none of this is hard to realize and there's countless other ways reality keeps tapping us on the shoulder.
Let's look at one more example. How rarely do we confront the truth that we never think about what we think about before we think about it.
Thinking is what you're doing right now -- bang, bang, bang! You never stop and think before any mental activity. Hence, no "thinker" -- any more than there's a "writer" or "reader" of these words.
Which means what? It means we never "one up" ANYTHING. Immediacy ongoingness is reality process and it's the self activity of that which is already the case. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The ancient Chinese word for nature is tzu-jan, which means (roughly) that which is so of itself. So nowing is the of-itself-soing of that which is so of itself. Only hubris thinks this spontaneous ongoingness is in any way "one upped" or caused by a meaningless separate self.
That name and face on "our" driver's license has no denotative meaning. It's not referring to a kind of entity/thing. It's just a face and a name. So all those "me's" and "we's" and "you's", and "they's", etc., are just white noise in the flow of that which forever transcends language and theory (including scientific and religious theory).
These observations could go on and on, but the relevant intuition is that all this Bush/Republican evil and hatred is DIRECTLY (albeit convolutedly) connected to the consensus delusions of our species.
An encouraging thought is that evolution works in mysterious ways and conceivably Mother Nature is already "dissolving" the chaos and suffering which we will never be able to "solve" with politicalvsolutions. And surely it's obvious by now that politics is part of the problem, not the solution.
One thing is certain. Mother Nature always has more tricks up her sleeve than can ever be imagined by delusional separate selves.
Or said differently, however uncomfortable the possibility, the probability is that "we" are not the problem solvers, but the very problem itself.
Thinking otherwise is the soul of fascism.
W. Christopher Epler (Bill)
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Peace y'all
