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| Illustration credited to Alex Hill |
Friends and Readers,
This is not an exposition on the phenomena of anger, but it
is my anger that I will be pouring out. As the religious have for eons written
confessions, dreams, and their angers as well, it is my turn.
We Buddhists attempt to channel our anger (hopefully not
just get rid of it, ultimately impossible) in the proper ways, through
meditation, through action, through illumination and through community
activities. These can all be either positive reactions or negatives to the
anger that is boiling within us, but I am getting off topic. Let me tell you
what is making my own blood boil.
I am angry that many have lost the need for depth in life. In fact, I am furious.
Just today I was serving a gentleman
(I’m a waiter, which is the fate that befalls us philosophers) who
looked at me after I told him I study philosophy and said,
“Why don’t you study something useful like economics?” I am still infuriated by this notion and I
am now shifting by belief that I have no reason to prove to anybody why philosophy
is still important, they have to show me why it's not.
I am angry that we believe we can ultimately be pleased by a
surface existence. Popular culture has no evil intrinsically, but my
satisfaction cannot be sustained by watching the latest TV show, no matter how
good, by the most recent fashion fad (which will change in a few hours
anyways).
My anathema is the continuation of staring into screens,
onto pages, into each other and only seeking information. Catalogs only suffice to those who want more of the surface. The ocean is much
more than just how far it stretches, but its depths make it the most mysterious
of all. We are like this. You will only find some life on the surface of the
ocean but to be a functional habitat for the trillions of life-forms that live
there, depth is required.
Walt Whitman said there is a multiplicity within us, there
are lives within us, depths to be explored, criticized, praised, changed, and
kept. It infuriates me to state that our lives can be lived happily enough if we just stay on the
surface. Yes, the depths are dangerous, dark, sometimes bringing from
themselves nightmares and poisonous serpents but without those depths, there
would be no surface for us to frolic on.
There is ferment within me. The inferno within wishes to
engulf the sick belief that money automatically means anything at all besides being money. This is hardly anything new,
in fact, I am beating a field of dead horses by writing any of this, but the
inferno is only growing and cannot be contained. Money automatically means
happiness? No. Money automatically means evil? No (despite how lovely this view
looks).
Our egos have exploded and grow to disproportionate sizes—a
sex tape conjures the belief that one is a celebrity who requires attention,
fame, money, power. The surface, it seems, has satisfied us and has turned us
into monsters. We are zeppelins that are inflated with the thin hydrogen of our
most basic desires. We fly around, slowly, demanding awe from the onlookers who
will only shortly burn up in the crash along with us and just another moron
(pardon my French) will attempt to rebuild it, alter it just slightly, and set
it up into the sky.
I am tired of dogmatism—certainty stains the eyes and the
souls. I am not arguing with matter-of-facts, I am not proposing, asking, or
trying to even all together persuade why all of these lead to horrendous ends,
we have seen it time and time again. I am demanding that it STOPPPPPPPPP.
Has our beasthood (which is not to criticize the animal
world, which is not ‘beastly’ as we like to believe, in order to inflate our
own egos some more) taken over? Soon we shall be shedding our skins and
underneath will not be another layer of skin, but bones and muscle. We have
become this dull. We have become boring, incapable of opening our minds to
foreign concepts (and the more tragic part, to “foreign people.”) We treat
those who are different with disgust because they are not us.
This has gone so far that we even spread democracy with the
gun. Really?????????????
What is all of this for? For life? For happiness? This
provides no happiness for me, it drives me to the belief that there’s something
wrong with me. How sick. Am I to believe that my belief that we have dimensions
of us (and the world) that are unexplored and won’t be, that things change;
there are variations and perspectives, that philosophy is dead, that the
humanities are dead—no—that humanity is dead.
These are not my wishes. Humanity shouldn’t continue to
decay in its iniquity, it should reach and fish within its own dangerous depths
to find the pearls that only lurk at the bottom of the seas. I don’t have the
answers my friends, I have my frustrations, my convictions, my love and my hope
and for now, I have my life and that will suffice. But know, because I have my
life, hope, convictions etc. I will not just sit idly and be satisfied with
only things that I’m “supposed” to be satisfied with. I am furious that people
are becoming automatons because I know for a fact they are not, but reorienting
themselves to be. Let’s stand together, move together, love together and all go
fishing together, within ourselves, so that we may come to the bottom and bring
the pearls to the surface, which will illuminate the waves that crash along the
shores of our lives.
