Let's not build back better. No one asked to build anything, better or worse. You know what is wrong with better? It is judgement, measurement of improvement, based on before, as a yardstick, from which to measure. Better, is continuity of what came before. Measurements are always divisible, meaning what is better for one group of people is not good for another. I wonder, since this campaign began, how many people, feel we are aiming towards something 'better'?
Let's awaken.
Lets awaken to forgetting our future, this ground of illusory 'better". Let's awaken to seeing this day, in all it's magnificent universal beauty, and this planet, in all it's human suffering and despair. I don't see how we can make anything better, unless we remove our eyes from making ten year plans, and free them to see the ills of this day. I don't see how acting for a future incarnation of 'betterment' touches many deep and long lasting issues we face as a race, this very moment. I don't see how being led, awakens humanity to a freedom of perception, to awaken to the deep responsibilities of his own life. What are we building back better, if we remain divided, rich to poor, opulent, to degraded and spat upon in life? One man choosing between his dozen palaces to sleep of a night, another selecting a wet, cold and dangerous street corner to attempt to provide shelter for a family.
What will be 'better' for us, unless the ills of our society come to end? Building back better, without ending the corruption in this unnecessarily corrupt world, shall maintain corruption. We see it everywhere today, its roots are not external in the lives of one class, its roots are in every one of us, in our inner psychological approach to life, in our thoughts, which are grounded in self interest. Our schooling corrupts our lives, and our schooling provides the foundation for the continuity of all destructive divisions between people. One child educated to be Catholic, another a Protestant, one to be Jew, another an Arab, one Russian, another American. And our battles continue and our peace is lost. One brought up to golden thrones and bowing heads and others spat upon, birth to death. This is a historical pattern we have always lived under, a pattern of measurement, and our habitual educated approach to life of measuring, quantifying, categorising, destroys our life harmony. No one is to blame, or, perhaps, all of us are to blame. We live unquestioningly within a mental construct of inner self based on previously educated knowledge, which is divisive between us, and so destroys harmony in this world.
As we have ever lived this way, and we have, we have never known peace, neither have we come to silently witness the beauty of this universe we stand in this day. We have never seen the depth of infinite space which stretches out before us on a dark, star filled night. We have never heard the immense silence of this living and dying wonder, this infinity which gave birth to our lives, and which we die back into upon the end of our physical lives.
We live as 'selves'. As names. As identities. As attachments to nations. As beliefs. As ideologies. As petty numbers. And all of these divide us, and we all consider our lives to be more superior than another. Perhaps the greatest insanity this day is that we have provided the driving seat of our world to the richest of us, to the most self interested. To our Gods of numbers. I wonder why we did this? Is it that we seek what they have? Do they have contentment, deep love, happiness joy and understanding of their lives? Or are these people the same as us? Only differentiated from us, based on a superficial counting of numbers our society magics out of thin air? We are prone to many illusions in our lives and deaths.
We have all been deeply trained to find security in following an authority, which denies any possibility of our coming to an intelligent self led understanding of our lives and deaths. Our lives and deaths are one movement, though, in our immaturity and reliance on the words of others, we have come to separate life and death, naming one good, (God knows why, when you look at this broken world), and the other, the ending of life, bad. We face life always with these calculated unquestioned ideologies. We come to fear death, and so we come to fear our lives, for in truth, death is an inescapable major event belonging naturally to every life. We never face facts, we seek to change, without any understanding of what it is we are seeking to change. Our lives can never be made 'better' through any ten year planned out event aiming to make them so. For we do not find life, in anyone's future conceptual idea.
We find life here and now. And here and now, is the only place we can act. All else, is a corruption. But don't take my word for any of this, lest you be persuaded to follow the words of another man. You have followed the words and directions of too many in your life already.