Saturday, February 13, 2010

In the grip of bad ideas

You can make the world very small and meaningless.
“Life sucks and then you die.” That kind of thing.

Well, to be more precise,
you don’t make the world small and meaningless,
you have been fooled to believe that this is the case.
Your parents, your friends, school,
TV, the Hollywood stars...
They have all fooled you
and they have all been fooled
exactly like you have.

We can bee fooled to believe almost anything.
We can be fooled to go to war and do the most terrible things.
We can be fooled to live our lives in the most amazingly stupid ways.

We can be fooled to believe that we belong to a superior race
or that our God are better than their God.
We can be fooled to believe that nothing really counts but money.
We can be fooled to believe that we are stupid, not good enough,
from a good family or from a bad family…

So,
you can make the world small and meaningless
or you can be fooled to believe that the world is small and meaningless
but you can also wake up from this hypnotic sleep.

It is possible to wake up and see
that all the bad ideas, beliefs and misperceptions
are nothing but bad ideas, beliefs and misperceptions,
hypnotic suggestions, magic spells.

Awakening is not something fantastic
that suddenly comes about after years of meditation practice.
Awakening is, I think, similar to realizing
that one has been victim of a fraud.
For example, if you have paid a lot of money
for a timeshare apartment on the Canary Islands,
then, when you at last realize that
there is no timeshare apartment waiting for you on the Canary Islands,
when it eventually it sinks in that you have been deceived
this is to wake up.

To wake up is to realize that the world is not
what you think it is.

Some people think that the huge cathedrals,
mosks and temples
are symbols of the grandeur of creation.
To me they are symbols of power
bigotry, small mindedness, we against them nonsense and evil.
I don’t visit cathedrals and I don’t want my children to visit them
for other reasons than historical education
in the same way as they may visit Auschwitz
to learn what we are capable of.