Illusion & Narrative

Its a strange thing to find Conservatives or Labour party members.

These parties were set up around policies and attitudes to government. But as time changes it may well become the case that opposition politicians hold better policies. So we vote for them instead of our own party.

So if we vote blindly for our party then we may well vote in leaders who damage the country and we end up having the opposite impact we intended by joining the party.

This is the danger in being dogmatic, of fixating on the image and packaging rather than the substance and contents.

Another thing I have learned is that people joing groups for its own sake, they like being in a group and membership is more important than what the group was formed for. Be it the social experience, the power, status or wealth - groups are fascinating to many people and often the group can seem to be individually good while overall being bad.

In animal behaviour herding is a good example. One argument for animals herding is that it affords individual protection cos your mates might get eaten instead of you. It also increases the chance of seeing predators also. On the down side however it increases the overall predation on the species cos groups are easier to find and once found predators can go on a feeding binge. Individually advantages, overall disadvantages. Members of rich states enjoy the economic benefits and are unwilling to change their group membership, even while environmental damage is overall making this unprofitable.

In general we fixate on the image of things, the definitions, what we think we know, the packaging of things rather than the things themselves.

Take a picture. We think it is of the boat, we think we know. But we also know that we can't sail in this boat because it is not a real boat. Its an illusion of a boat. It makes us think of a boat, but is just a picture, some ink on a page which gives us the illusion of a real boat.

There are so many illusion. These words on a page are a spectacular illusion - talking of the world in such confidence when really they are just marks on a computer screen or page.

Most of our life is illusion. People talking about the images of things, which when you try and find the real things they don't match.

The war they talk of is not glorious, it is ugly and destructive. The evil people we fought against were kids like us ourself. The evil political machine a power house for the German elite, like the Imperial machine which housed the British elite. The horror of Nazi genocide an extreme expression of hatred for unwanted people we see the world over from Rwanda, to old Yugoslavia, to Darfur and America today (I speak of the elimination of Amerindians). (I'll write on Semitism next)

Where is this power and there is suppression, oneday the tables will turn. One only needs to see the sporting circuits of clubs and countries rising and falling in skill and dominance (again Englands sad rugby demise) to see that what is up and what is down, will soon be what is down and what is up.

Today you lose Kundun, tomorrow you win.

Not that we should take stock of this and wait for our time of triumph, but rather realise that tiumph is just a moment in time between losses, and losses moments in time between triumphs.

Why play life like a leaf on ocean waves?

Like is football for most of us. We change teams, be bank on teams, we watch the rise and fall always focusing on the tops, or the bottoms depending upon how positive or negative our minds.

Is this all it is? What if we let go of the ups and downs and stop comparing moment to moment? What if we stop worrying about the political climate, the economy, our life? What if we just do what is obviously needed, as it is needed. Listen and learn and keep and open mind and heart? If things go down, so be it. If things go up, so be it? We do what we do, we accept the way it turns.

The problem with all these stories we furnish our minds and life with is that we think they are books with a beginning middle and end. No history has a beginning and end. We are just on a page somewhere between endless pages and maybe this part of the story is down, and the next is up. Maybe our chapter is a good one, maybe the next is bad.

Fixation on a notion of time, an attachment to a place in history, a particular page in the book and time is the worst illusion. That was "my" chapter we think.

But we look again and see how many billions of chapters there have been and how many more to come. Is "my" chapter so important, is the good or the bad of my chapter so important in a book where the story has been going up and down forever?