I would endeavor today to be sanguine and say something righteous and hopeful this holiday season. The closer one looks at the state of our world, the more reason there is for concern. We look and see many things that need to change, and we wonder if perhaps it is too late to change them. Perhaps we were asleep at the wheel a little too long, and the window of opportunity has passed.
This is not the first time the world has been in crisis, though. How do people keep the faith in such times? When hope dims, humans often take solace by comparing their current lot with that of someone in a less favorable position. Yet, given that we may be enduring some sort of multi-millennial, full-spectrum, cosmically induced mother of all paradigm shifts, it’s hard to compare the current plight of humanity with any other time in history, because between climate change, endless conflict, and a potential world war barking at our heels, it’s not easy to imagine a time when there were larger challengers.
Well, then, who exactly are we better off than? Where is that aforementioned hope and righteousness? Wait. I know! We need to go off-planet for this one. Let’s imagine … “Holidays with the Skywalkers.”
Yeah, that’s it. Life on Tatooine was tough. No quiche-eating men. No soft-skinned females. Instead, sandstorms for rain. Criminal aliens running amok. Just imagine Thanksgiving dinner at the Skywalker’s house. Turkey? Nope. No turkeys on Tatooine. They had Womp Rats. The closest Luke Skywalker ever came to having a “T” day was driving his T-16 land speeder out to Beggars Canyon and blasting the largest rodent he could get in his sights. Anything over two meters would feed the family. That’s assuming Bantha jerky and smuggler stew as side dishes, with jawa pudding for dessert.
Come to think of it, Luke had the suckiest life I’ve ever heard of …
growing up on a rat-infested patch of scorched desert …
on the only planet in the entire far far away galaxy with TWO friggin’ suns …
being used as slave labor by a liar of a grumpy “uncle”…
and with a head evil doer for a father to boot!
IT’S A MIRACLE THE BOY WAS ABLE TO AMOUNT TO ANYTHING … LET ALONE BECOME THE SAVIOR OF THE ENTIRE GALAXY!
But he did. Luke saved the galaxy. In an analog to David vs. Goliath, one innocent boy tapped into a power larger than himself and crippled an entire galactic hive of scum and villainy with a single shot. Is that not hopeful?
And then he stuck around to redeem his head evil dooer old man (Darth Vader), and between them put the kybosh on the entire evil empire. Is that not hopeful?
That gets me to thinking … could we pull off something like that? Could we take a page from Luke’s book and save, if not our galaxy, then perhaps our own little plot of ground we call terra firma? Could we cast off the real scummy control mechanism on this planet … the one that keeps us at each others’ throats? The one that forces us to line up on either side of a so-called principle and defend it to the death under the illusion of “I am right, therefore you are wrong.”
But the question is, who is that enemy? I haven’t spotted anyone flying around in an intimidating black suit and conical helmet. Please peel back the layers and show yourself! Who is it pulling the strings and using us as pawns in a never-ending cosmic gag reel that feeds off the violent energy of mankind? The radical right? The Bilderbergs? The Illuminati? The Globalists? The man behind the curtain? For an answer, we turn to Dana Carvey, as … the Church Lady:
“Welcome to Church chat. Question: Who indeed is the head evil dooer in this planet? Well, now, isn’t that a special question. Let’s see now. Could it beeeeeeee ……. SATAN?”
Actually, no. Try again.
“How conveeeeenient. Well, could it beeeeeeee ……. The EGO?”
Bing, bing, bing!
It’s us! Humans. The human ego. We’re our own worst enemy. We’ve been fighting ourselves. A personal internal battle we each play out on a grand stage of illusion. And we’ve just about won. Which actually means we’ve just about lost.
Stick with me on this. Let’s go back to Luke for a moment and draw further on George Lucas’s masterfully rekindled mythology of “The Hero’s Journey.” Remember when Luke trekked into that jungle on Degobah and met up with himself while ostensibly fighting Vader? The lesson was that at some point in the future Luke would face a choice — a life of service, or a life spent on the dark side like his dad. When later he knelt over his father at the end of Episode IV, he could have easily disregarded the fact that his old man had just saved his life, and gotten downright medieval on Vader’s sorry butt right then and there for all the massively evil things father evildoer had done, starting with the death of his mother. Or, he could keep his heart open as he had been, and see through to the good in Anakin. Luke’s heart enabled the wisdom to see that his father was indeed, in the end, redeemable. I think it is fair to say that father and son redeemed each other in that final sequence.
So what does it all mean? Can’t say for sure, but this is pretty “heady” stuff the world is dealing with at present. That may be unavoidable, but to address the problems that our heads perceive … move into our hearts, we must.
Author / Anthropologist / Mythologist Joseph Campbell spoke of the mythology of the Native American Indian and the pact they had with the buffalo. Even though the herds ran like hell at the sight of a party of Indians with spears, Campbell explains that there was in fact a secret accord in place whereby the buffalo gave permission for the Indians to hunt them, and in sacrificing their lives they promoted themselves on the cosmic plane. It is a very high form of “play” (think Michael Douglas in The Game, but with higher stakes). I tend to believe that somehow all of mankind is secretly complicit in the games that we have been playing with each other throughout history. As serious and downright horrifying as this “divine dance” gets, we likely have all chosen to be-here-now, in the roles we are each in, and further, we have chosen a stage for our play that renders the illusion of separateness. Each of us appears to be incomplete within our own supposed separateness. Thus we seek to take from “others” to complete ourselves. Albeit love or war … the game’s afoot.
I mean, yeah, we may simply have to get the laser swords out at some point and hack the evil dooers ruining this planet into little p-i-e-c-e-s, or, we may be able to instead make p-e-a-c-e by simply allowing for the possibility that humans can start operating through their hearts instead of their heads. The ego lives through the mind. The True Self lives through the heart. By acting through the heart, we may be able to raise our consciousness sufficiently to choose another way to play with each other. The current choice is getting a little old, and truthfully … a strategy of the heart might be the only way to actually win this so-called fight.
That’s right. I am respectfully suggesting that in spite of appearances, it might be less about oppression from the global elite, and more about raising global consciousness. Then, what we perceive to be the failings of human nature may fall away as we take on the mantle of a higher truth.
The very best of holiday wishes to all.