Jacking the air conditioner and standing in front of it is one response to global warming, a response that solves the problem only for one person and only temporarily while it makes the underlying PROBLEM worse. What kind of a solution makes a problem worse? (Answer: A retarded one.) I mean, if you’re gonna DIE of the heat . . . But otherwise . . . . Retarded.
I believe that the planet is in the shape it is as a symptom of a single problem: people treat people (including themselves) like shit. We’re careless, short sighted, and gratuitously destructive of one another. We mistake pleasure for happiness and grab at immediate gratification instead of the more difficult process of investing in people, spiting our own contentment like hell. We throw each other away and ourselves away as if there’s an infinite supply of both. We say mean things, do mean things, and make ourselves feel powerful by putting other people asunder. Making someone else feel like shit is analogous to having dominion over them, and like baby goats we take other people to the alter of Ourselves and bleed them dry of their feeling for us. Sometimes the environment of this has made me literally sick. And then I thought I was going to die unless I got inside myself where it was cooler, where I could breathe.
This last weekend was the Buddha’s birthday - lots of meditation centers and yoga studios offering all-day sanctuary. I meditated on Unattachment. I can’t manage it because it is not at all the same thing as indifference. Indifference I can do, no problemo - just toggle the Prideful-Wrath mode and then you can go fuck yourself for all I care. Unattachment, on the other hand, is loving others without specific expectations of what you’re going to get out of that, including even the other person’s very existence - you look at others like “you are going to die (any second in the big scheme of things) so there’s no time to waste on anything but appreciating you as wholly as possible in this very moment, moment by moment to infinity”. Indifference by comparison is the equivalent of jacking the air conditioner and standing near it, a prisoner to the relief it provides. I’m trying really hard to not confuse the two, and to cultivate Unattachment . . . But honestly it’d be a lot easier if people would lay off spewing their dioxide producing cold air every which way, i.e. often in my fuckin’ face.
It’s Eid Ul-Adha today, which translates into something like “though it may seem like terrible sacrifice at first, the obedience to Love results in persons NOT getting their throats slit actually”. Go figure. I’m secularizing the concept and suggesting “International Try to Be Less of a Mindless Self-Centered Asshole Day”. I think that’s a great idea, while I’m unattached to its catching on I spose.
Will.I.Am - It’s a New Day super high rec - this is a fantastic song - and here's the video:
