Finding the Self

[Naga_Fireball]

In America so damn many of us grow up looking down on others and thinking that opinion is defining us.

We are told so many things about other groups of people.
We are taught to hate most of them, then we waste a good deal of our lives learning how to love people who in turn hate us, and ultimately many of us end up once more hating them. Home run?

We are told all about God etc and how he supposedly provides a way out of our own stupidity (a surety that follows the vast majority of us to the grave, this stupidity). Religion is sold like snowshoes for walking on stupid.

We become willing enough to work for pleasure. We pay for cars as long as we can speed. We pay for licenses as long as we can kill. Everyone is on the take somehow, they just don't admit what's going on.

And there we get back to the subject of self reflection.

Who am I?
Why am I here?
Is it to merely criticize the never ending stupidity of my average fellow human, or does my existence have a greater, self-defining, yet group-illuminating purpose?

Is it true that at times it is so much easier to hate one's fellow man simply because the specific flavor of hatred is in vogue? That we would not engage universally, but because of a lack of personal character development, about 99.9% of USA is unfit to coexist with others because of one or two or three petty triggers, half-truths that like a loaded gun in the hands of a monkey, have the power to kill?

We may all find ourselves confronted by our own hate at some low point in life. How we use that energy actually shapes our local realities. It can be hard to accept that much responsibility for our own existences! It can be hard to quantify emotional pain in terms of cause and effect.

One of the great comedians of our modern age said something like, "when you fall down a manhole and die, it's a comedy. When I cut my finger, it's a tragedy." (George Carlin?)

Life is like that when we allow ourselves to be hateful or narcissistic even for a single day. It becomes repetitive and pointless because when hate can't find an enemy to destroy, it destroys its own vessel just like an acid.

I am learning a lot about my priorities and limitations this year. I am disliking myself for hating and yet at the same time am vaguely proud of my courage in spite of the hate.

It is a strange 2017 so far. I hope I find strength that is independent of judgment, toward others and from others.

I want to see who I am without obscurity.
I want to be clear of the haze of anger and become a person of action.

Finding the self is really about discovering the magnum opus, the great work.