12-26-2013, 12:00 AM
~
While attending NAU my freshman year, my roommate was a
senior named Rick, studying to become an accountant. He told me countless
times how he secretly hated accounting, yet he was becoming an accountant
because that’s what his father was. He was so desperate to please his
parents that his life was a constant losing struggle to live up to their
expectations and win their approval. He hated a lot of things about his
life so he was never happy and often angry. He suffered from depression
and alcoholism, though to outward appearances he seemed happy and
successful. Projecting that image, especially to his parents, was the
driving motivation of his life. In my senior year I ran into Rick again,
which was a surprise, and he told me that after just a couple of years he had
quit the accountant job and was back to school for a new career, a fresh
start. On a more touching note, he accomplished what’s discussed below.
Our relationship to our parents is a very important thing to
look at, not because we want to heal the relationship of any wounds we may have
suffered or inflicted, but because most of us are still stuck at that
level. If our basic understanding of life is similar in the broad
outlines to that of our parents, then we have not yet begun our own
journey. We are the children of children who are the children of children
who were the children of children and so on all the way back. Quite a
chain to break, but breaking chains is what liberation is all about.
Anyone who ever wants to do anything in life, to become a person in their own
right, must begin by killing their parents. (Metaphorically!)
When we kill our parents, what we’re really doing is
sloughing off the inmost layer of false context in which we are encased and by
which we are defined. That’s what we’re doing any time we take a step;
sloughing off the next layer of enshrouding delusion.
Cathartic means purgative, as in purge, as in evacuating a
toxin or obstruction, as in taking a massive mental/emotional dump and
restoring free flow system-wide. All progress can be understood as a
matter of flow and obstruction. Rick, my roommate mentioned above, after
suffering for years, finally managed to have his own cathartic, purgative,
healing event. He lost all of his primary definitions.
Rick had a morbid fixation on pleasing his parents so they’d
be proud of him, but they were never pleased. Nothing he did was good
enough, so he kept trying to do more and he just made himself crazy. He
was still just a little boy to them. Drinking, high-achievement and low
self-esteem, chronic unhappiness, always dissatisfied, always pretending he was
happy and successful, and all because he was so eager to please his parents,
which he never did because they were never impressed by anything. No
matter what he did, he was trapped. [Does this describe YOU?]
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living.
That’s some serious ****. Most people wouldn’t want to examine that
statement, much less their own lives. If we take it to mean the
stagnated, entrenched life is not worth living, then we are saying that most
people’s lives aren’t worth the bother.
Socrates makes quite a damning indictment: The
unexamined life is not worth living. Who lives a conscious, examined
life? Everyone probably thinks they do, but virtually no one actually
does. Who decides to spend the hours and days and weeks and months and
years of their life as they do? Who, by conscious decision, with informed
thought aforethought, decides to pair up and have kids and buy a house and work
a job and spend the very coin of their life filling in the lines of a
hand-me-down, coloring-book life? Where are the people living examined
lives? Lives worth living? Where are the people who made a
choice? Not just the secondary choices made within an un-chosen
framework, but the principal choices, the choice of the framework itself.
Where are the people who chose their lives?
Who consciously chooses to wrap themselves in chains?
Who chooses marriage and children and career? Who chooses to join the
ranks of debt-ridden consumers and spend the fruits of their lifelong labors as
a slave to possessions and corporations? Who chooses to spend their free
time running errands and doing chores and watching television? Who
chooses to eat toxic foods, to live in toxic environments surrounded by toxic
people? Who chooses to live a pre-programmed life from birth to
death? Who dreams such sordid, vile, life-negating dreams?
Sure, maybe a life of drudgery and carrot-chasing is exactly
what we’d choose if we did choose, but we don’t. That’s what it means to
be unaware and unconscious; to be asleep within the dream. We slip into
lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their
mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don’t
live our lives by choice, but by default. We play roles we are born
to. We don’t live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away
because we don’t know any better, and the reason we don’t know any better is
because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted, never stood up,
never drew the line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual
advisors or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early
lives and asked one simple, honest, straightforward question, the one question
that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
“What the hell is going on here?”
That’s how you kill them. Not with guns and machetes,
but with thought and honesty and directness and burning hot unbending intent. That’s how you look, how you
see. That’s how you draw a line.
This isn’t a peppy little halftime speech meant to whip us
all into a carpe diem frenzy and send us screaming out onto the find with
victory in our hearts and a life-positive, freedom-loving,
first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life bloodlust pumping through our veins until the
alarm blares Monday morning and sends us shuffling back to our prison routine.
Seizing the day just ain’t gonna cut it. That’s like
encouraging an inmate to pursue their life-long dream of singing in the prison
choir. With my son and daughter, people for whom I care deeply, I would
encourage them instead with the words carpe vitae; seize your life. And
if I knew the Latin word for fuckin’, I’d stick that in there too. I may
just tattoo it on the backs of their hands so they have to look at it all the
time and feel a healthy shame and self-loathing for every minute they piss away
as a spectator instead of a player.
Speaking metaphorically, the first thing we must do in our
bid for freedom is kill our parents. We kill the Buddha, Nagual (or
equivalent) last on the way to truth-realization, but we kill our parent first
on the way to anywhere. There are a whole lot more people who need
killing before freedom is achieved, but that’s how it must begin. Until
we kill our parents (metaphorically!) we remain unborn.
SHM
While attending NAU my freshman year, my roommate was a
senior named Rick, studying to become an accountant. He told me countless
times how he secretly hated accounting, yet he was becoming an accountant
because that’s what his father was. He was so desperate to please his
parents that his life was a constant losing struggle to live up to their
expectations and win their approval. He hated a lot of things about his
life so he was never happy and often angry. He suffered from depression
and alcoholism, though to outward appearances he seemed happy and
successful. Projecting that image, especially to his parents, was the
driving motivation of his life. In my senior year I ran into Rick again,
which was a surprise, and he told me that after just a couple of years he had
quit the accountant job and was back to school for a new career, a fresh
start. On a more touching note, he accomplished what’s discussed below.
Our relationship to our parents is a very important thing to
look at, not because we want to heal the relationship of any wounds we may have
suffered or inflicted, but because most of us are still stuck at that
level. If our basic understanding of life is similar in the broad
outlines to that of our parents, then we have not yet begun our own
journey. We are the children of children who are the children of children
who were the children of children and so on all the way back. Quite a
chain to break, but breaking chains is what liberation is all about.
Anyone who ever wants to do anything in life, to become a person in their own
right, must begin by killing their parents. (Metaphorically!)
When we kill our parents, what we’re really doing is
sloughing off the inmost layer of false context in which we are encased and by
which we are defined. That’s what we’re doing any time we take a step;
sloughing off the next layer of enshrouding delusion.
Cathartic means purgative, as in purge, as in evacuating a
toxin or obstruction, as in taking a massive mental/emotional dump and
restoring free flow system-wide. All progress can be understood as a
matter of flow and obstruction. Rick, my roommate mentioned above, after
suffering for years, finally managed to have his own cathartic, purgative,
healing event. He lost all of his primary definitions.
Rick had a morbid fixation on pleasing his parents so they’d
be proud of him, but they were never pleased. Nothing he did was good
enough, so he kept trying to do more and he just made himself crazy. He
was still just a little boy to them. Drinking, high-achievement and low
self-esteem, chronic unhappiness, always dissatisfied, always pretending he was
happy and successful, and all because he was so eager to please his parents,
which he never did because they were never impressed by anything. No
matter what he did, he was trapped. [Does this describe YOU?]
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living.
That’s some serious ****. Most people wouldn’t want to examine that
statement, much less their own lives. If we take it to mean the
stagnated, entrenched life is not worth living, then we are saying that most
people’s lives aren’t worth the bother.
Socrates makes quite a damning indictment: The
unexamined life is not worth living. Who lives a conscious, examined
life? Everyone probably thinks they do, but virtually no one actually
does. Who decides to spend the hours and days and weeks and months and
years of their life as they do? Who, by conscious decision, with informed
thought aforethought, decides to pair up and have kids and buy a house and work
a job and spend the very coin of their life filling in the lines of a
hand-me-down, coloring-book life? Where are the people living examined
lives? Lives worth living? Where are the people who made a
choice? Not just the secondary choices made within an un-chosen
framework, but the principal choices, the choice of the framework itself.
Where are the people who chose their lives?
Who consciously chooses to wrap themselves in chains?
Who chooses marriage and children and career? Who chooses to join the
ranks of debt-ridden consumers and spend the fruits of their lifelong labors as
a slave to possessions and corporations? Who chooses to spend their free
time running errands and doing chores and watching television? Who
chooses to eat toxic foods, to live in toxic environments surrounded by toxic
people? Who chooses to live a pre-programmed life from birth to
death? Who dreams such sordid, vile, life-negating dreams?
Sure, maybe a life of drudgery and carrot-chasing is exactly
what we’d choose if we did choose, but we don’t. That’s what it means to
be unaware and unconscious; to be asleep within the dream. We slip into
lives that are laid out for us the way children slip into the clothes their
mother lays out for them in the morning. No one decides. We don’t
live our lives by choice, but by default. We play roles we are born
to. We don’t live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away
because we don’t know any better, and the reason we don’t know any better is
because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted, never stood up,
never drew the line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual
advisors or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early
lives and asked one simple, honest, straightforward question, the one question
that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
“What the hell is going on here?”
That’s how you kill them. Not with guns and machetes,
but with thought and honesty and directness and burning hot unbending intent. That’s how you look, how you
see. That’s how you draw a line.
This isn’t a peppy little halftime speech meant to whip us
all into a carpe diem frenzy and send us screaming out onto the find with
victory in our hearts and a life-positive, freedom-loving,
first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life bloodlust pumping through our veins until the
alarm blares Monday morning and sends us shuffling back to our prison routine.
Seizing the day just ain’t gonna cut it. That’s like
encouraging an inmate to pursue their life-long dream of singing in the prison
choir. With my son and daughter, people for whom I care deeply, I would
encourage them instead with the words carpe vitae; seize your life. And
if I knew the Latin word for fuckin’, I’d stick that in there too. I may
just tattoo it on the backs of their hands so they have to look at it all the
time and feel a healthy shame and self-loathing for every minute they piss away
as a spectator instead of a player.
Speaking metaphorically, the first thing we must do in our
bid for freedom is kill our parents. We kill the Buddha, Nagual (or
equivalent) last on the way to truth-realization, but we kill our parent first
on the way to anywhere. There are a whole lot more people who need
killing before freedom is achieved, but that’s how it must begin. Until
we kill our parents (metaphorically!) we remain unborn.
SHM