The Fear of "Implosion"
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I have been there, before. I know what that's like. And I understand that it was the result of placing the responsibility for my well being and happiness upon people, places and things outside of myself. And that becomes a recipe for inevitable frustration, disappointment and disaster. My ideas about my own identity and value as a human being were based on my ideas about these external circumstances, which means that to discover that these external circumstances were not as I had believed they were, or for me to see these circumstances change, was a direct threat to who I thought I was and where I found my own sense of value. Yet nothing is ever exactly as we believe them to be, and everything is always changing.
That's what happened to me. Those external circumstances that I relied upon for my identity and well being were no longer as I had believed, and though I fought desperately to make them so, it was an impossible attempt, and I "imploded" as a person. I like that word; it's really what it felt like. Everything I thought I was, God was, and the world was suddenly receded into nothingness. It was all an illusion founded on fantasy and make-believe and then someone turned on the reality light.
I read in the papers often about those guys (it's usually guys) that shoot their wives or girlfriends in some drunken insane rage, and I understand what was happening in their heads. They had based their value and identity upon their image of this love relationship, and then suddenly were being forced to face the real fact that it was just an image in their heads, and wasn't really the Big Love they thought it was. And they just refused to accept that. They end up killing the person they claimed to love so much, precisely because that person turned out not to exist. And in their shock, fear, grief and rage they shoot the "impostor". They shoot the person that turned out not to be their dream, because to lose that dream is to lose everything they think they are and will ever be. They are dying, they feel, and so will take their "killer" with them. I don't know what women do when this happens to them. Some of them kill, certainly, but usually it's the men who kill. I suppose that sort of aggressive reaction is programmed into men, whereas women tend more to just accept defeat, to "implode".
I guess my point in commenting on this is to show how catastrophic this kind of thing is for we human beings. We are very strange animals in that though we are animals, we have an imagination that is so powerful that it can easily subvert and confuse even our own animal instincts. Unlike most other animals, we create in our minds these elaborate imaginary constructions that are our "identity". I am Dave, and Dave is a huge collection of memories, conceptions, images and desires that exist only in the mental landscape of my own imagination. This picture show in my head has been shaped and effected by my interactions with external reality, but for me (and all humans) reality is still essentially the picture show in our heads. Who we are to ourselves is who we think we are in our minds. Just as who we are to others is who they think we are in their minds. And so here we are, these animals with these elaborate imaginary "identities" that we think are really us, walking around and bumping into the various aspects of external reality, and constantly adjusting our imaginary ideas of our "selves" to align them with the inflow of new information we get from interacting with this external reality. (True reality is simply what is, it has no "identity" or internal/external parts.)
Well, that's us in an ideal sense, anyway. But unfortunately, we don't all rise to that ideal. Many of us fight against external reality. We don't want to alter our identities to accommodate an outside reality, we want to alter outside reality to accommodate our imagined identities. When the world we live in threatens our images of ourselves, we want to change the world rather than change who we think we are. And when we are unaware of this egotism in ourselves, it can become so intense and pervasive that we honestly believe that our imaginary landscape with it's ideas and images of who we are, who God is, who other people are, and what life is all about BECOME our preferred reality. We deem it "Truth" and vow to fight any aspect of an outside reality that would seek to alter our "Truth". Then we become very dangerous. We become warriors promoting our own imagined reality, and in that imagined reality we can never be wrong.
That's when we kill people. We kill them because they are not fitting into the scheme of Truth and Reality as we have imagined it, and so we see them as threatening to destroy our illusions (that we no longer will accept as being illusions). Mostly we only kill them in our minds and hearts, by negating everything they believe, or by rendering them in our imaginary Truth as some deviant form of human, an anomalous nuisance, the "lost" and confused ones. But if that doesn't satisfy the perceived threat, we'll go to more extreme measures. If we come to feel that the representatives of reality are going to destroy our illusions of Truth, we will kill, and we do it every day. Just read a newspaper. We won't all resort to this, of course, but there are many of us who will.It's true that I often have little good to say about organized religion. And the reason is that I believe most organized religion is in the business of promoting this sort of egocentric imaginary "Truth" and in justifying the "killing" of any aspect of reality that would clash with their imagined "Truth". Because this is their main agenda, they are capable of becoming very dangerous organizations. Most of the time their "killing" is limited to using lies to annihilate any alternative theology, philosophy, or view of reality, and their greatest crimes are only intimidation, humiliation, and deceit. But whenever human beings embark on this war against reality, there is the very real danger that it will turn violent. And even in the absence of actual violence, there is always the emotional and spiritual violence that results from such a toxic and dishonest way of life.
There certainly are other kinds of human organizations that embrace this egocentric aggression as their main agenda. Governments have done so routinely, and tend to become violent far sooner than a religious organization would. But when governments do it they don't usually hide behind God. They just point their guns and say comply or die and the people carrying out the aggression aren't pretending to be pious. But more importantly, it isn't government that is so infected with this sort of aggressive egocentrism in the United States at the moment. It's organized religion. Religious fundamentalism (the most extreme forms of organized religion) are on the rise in the U.S., and I believe they pose a real threat. The only way I know of to thwart them is to keep our focus on what they're really about.
They're really about the fear of implosion. They're really about avoiding it by forcing the world to comply with their images of it; forcing the world to comply with their "Truth". And like those sad and dangerous guys in the newspapers, they will kill the very ones they profess to love, simply because the "beloved" insisted on being themselves, rather than complying with their killer's ego-centric concept of "Truth".
Peace,
Dave