February 25, 2013

  • I find myself looking more and more about how we perceive things.

    It's interesting how all of us can blind ourselves, often, knowingly. Back in the days when I was young I used to rail against what I saw as the unfair and authoritarian views that were being forced on me, I hated the rules and those who demanded that I blindly follow them. I would fight back in almost any way I could, no matter what it cost me. Later I started thinking that I could be more successful if I started working from within the system, weakening it from the inside, but that turned out to be almost as pointless as the outright battles.

    Then, for years I just let all the anger and outrage just slide by, it became just as pointless to try to beat the odds against me.

    It has only been in the last ten years that I've come to understand that the real battle has always been within my own mind. The rules of our societies are taught to us from birth, each new lesson layered over the last, a laminated composite that we don't even know exists until we can change our perspective. We live in our society because we choose to, we choose to accept the restrictions, the blindness, the "guidance" of those who "know better."

    The reality is that we can't escape society. The vast conglomeration of all these conflicting concepts become less and less cohesive as more of us try to cross barriers that have been in place for thousands of years. And that is where the real battle is now, in accepting that what you see is just as flawed as any other view, in stripping away as much of the conditioning as you can and looking for what is common to us all, instead of what makes us different.

    We can't escape, but if we try, we can maybe build a better one...