Humanity | Consciousness

Courage or Cowardice? Originality or More of the Same?

Your turn. You choose.

Winding our way here — following the path from silence to clarity to creation — we reach a point of decision.

Here now, at this most sacred hour — when foundations shake and the veil is thin — we can jump wildly into the unknown.

We can dive down, down…to where blackness and aliveness live. To where bodies dissolve and there are just waves. Just breath.

Or we can retreat to the shores from which we came. The shores of all we thought we knew and the Inheritance that feels less solid but still…familiar.

An easier place to hide.

Returning from the seas of unknowing and the seas of nothing knowable, we can collapse onto sands of self and lapse into…I-am-fine-ness.

Everyone around us will approve. Everyone around us will…relax.

This point of decision is terrifying, mostly. This point of decision drives most to spend entire lives scurrying through shifting sands.

Building castles. Playing war. Accumulating small treasures and calling them this. Calling them mine.

Naming. Blaming. Proclaiming.

Whole lives washed away in an instant. Whole lives building and bequeathing more of the same.

Rejecting any grander Inheritance. Refusing Medicine and Madness. Renouncing the gift of Prophecy and the gift of being truly here, in the roiling, crashing concert of things.

It’s true. The easiest course is to come ashore. To build a castle. Pick a side.

It’s true. The best, most perfect distraction is to create some caricatured…Other.

But this way will get us…nowhere.

We are the Other, after all — outraged denial proving the point. Looking down from above or in from without, the resemblance is…striking.

Meanwhile, we fail to see much of anything, sand filling eyes and ears. Mired in the thick, panicky place. The place of fear, blaming, complaining. The place of distraction and the place of…cowardice.

There is no light, in that. There is no hope of “winning” or “transcending” with righteousness.

Only anger upon anger. Only pain upon pain and hate upon hate. Whatever the outcome, we’re more of the same.

The Way is to find something at once original and old as time.

The Way is to choose courage, speak true, and find the capacity to hold this and that.

Us and them, together in the embrace of another perspective. One that is from here and also isn’t. One bigger than ever imagined, refracted through every cell.

Mirroring truth. Embodying an instant.

This is us. This is humanity. Also, everything more.

Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here:

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