I worked, by contract, in the criminal justice system for a
few years and now I work, by contract, for a corporation which commits terrible
crimes daily but they are crimes that are not detailed in the criminal justice
system of this nation because they are crimes which injure everyone and
everything – BUT – those of the injuries which are inflicted on you and me and the
rest of Western society are delayed enough that in our collective insanity we
can easily ignore them – or – for most people I suspect, remain consciously unaware
of them.
I still do volunteer work in the criminal justice community
and I don’t think of myself as being any better than the murderers and child
rapists I have worked with, And I don’t mean that in the bullshit phony way
that many others might delight in saying. I am in fact no better. I’ve never
directly killed a human being nor had sexual contact with a child and I’m
pretty damn confident that I will never do either of those things. These are
not my areas of weakness. There is no appeal.
However I regularly inflict death and violence upon the
Earth and its mammals and even upon human beings who don’t live around here. I
do it all the time. Daily. I do it when I eat many of the things I eat. I do it
when I buy a new laptop. I do it when I fill the tank with gas. I am an
extremely harmful person. I know this with perfect clarity on my best days and
on those best days I also reflect upon my total insanity of the previous days
wherein my instincts had been duping my consciousness or when I’d been
rationalizing my way to a benign self image which is bullshit.
I am no saint. I was not made “in His own image” and neither
was anyone else. Humans are beasts the same as wolves and trees and mosquitoes
and precisely like wolves and trees and mosquitoes, just about everything we do
satisfies our instinctive survival instincts which, besides food and sex and
protection, has evolved very largely to manifest as survival within the society
which equals REPUTATION, which often includes MONEY (for money is simply a ledger
of reputation). Just like the wolf, tree or mosquito, nearly everything we do
is bent on our own needs at the expense of any other species. Wolves, trees and
mosquitoes – and bunny rabbits and petunias are all, if you open your eyes and
pay attention – entirely evil. They kill in order to live. Just like us. And just
like the peacock’s tail and many other phenomena of evolution, we have our own unlikely
elaborate errant evolutionary feature. It is in the human mind and it
encompasses our cleverness, our perversely social infatuation and our illusion
of consciousness.
When I keep that in mind I look around at all the nice
things we are doing on the surface and it’s very easy to realize that these
nice things do not make us angels; do not make us benevolent; do not make us
innocent and certainly don’t make us better than murderers and rapists except within
a childish viewpoint. Because all the nice things we do reward our vicious
survival instincts. They improve our reputation. Nice deeds that we do, feed
our own greed.
Now – does every single nice thing we do necessarily come
solely from selfish desire or from the master instinctive mind’s need to fool
our own consciousness (for we have to fool ourselves in order to effectively
fool others)? I won’t suggest that. I like to imagine otherwise but the fact
is, it is very simple to map all our good deeds to greedy beastly motives and
pretty much impossible to prove otherwise…
BUT…!
So what?
I’m not trying to say that we are all terrible. Oh, I felt
that way for a while, years ago. I thought we were all devils. All Satan.
Satans in drag as gods. And for the record I suspect that the God mythology
stems from that idea; that originally this personification of the source of the
universe was set up like that: that Satan is the creator and God is his
disguise. But that doesn’t matter. And I’m not here to slag religion today,
even though it has perpetrated two of the primary nails in the coffin of humanity
– the twin omnipresent fatal ideas – and I mean fatal to our species, literally:
one, that we were made in his own image and two, that Earth is not heaven, that
some improved heaven resides somewhere else. This is why humans do not
understand that we are killers – we are killing machines above all else and why
we don’t understand that Earth is the paradise and that we are mercilessly
killing it and there is very little time remaining. By Earth I really mean the
biosphere, not the crust, mantle, core and all the other bits and pieces. I
mean the forests, wetlands and top soil and water systems and air and
underground filtration – all of which we have massively crippled or destroyed
in a tiny infinitesimal blip of time by any real (universal) perspective or
context outside the illusion of our puny lifespans.
Look – all of this is natural. This is the natural state of
humanity. It’s nothing to cry or rage about.
And it is okay to wake up from our insanity. It is okay to
face up to the beasts that we are. We have every opportunity to evolve. We can
close the gap between instinct and consciousness; between the devil and angel
if you prefer. I have reliably witnessed this functionality. We humans did not
ask for this circumstance. We were born into it without choice. We did not ask
for this illusion of consciousness which is – in a sense – an evolutionary
precursor to genuine consciousness. We learned to kill to survive because we
had to. We are beautiful for this opportunity to become the first species of
harmony. We are beautiful for this terrible struggle that we must endure. We
are beautiful for our potential and for the suffering we inflict upon
our selves.
I am human and I am okay with that. I am not a single entity.
I know that. There is a beast in me and there is a weak pitiful beautiful consciousness
as well. And when I look around I don’t see single human creatures. When I look
at you I see two of you. It has become my normal everyday perception.
Unfortunately when I talk to you I must talk to both of you at the same time
and that makes things tricky and I confess, I don’t often treat that challenge
with utmost diligence. Generally I am not keeping track of what I want each of
you to hear; you and your evil twin! Creeped out? Still want to do lunch?
So this piece (if anyone is still reading it) was not
planned in any way. It’s strictly a stream-of-consciousness ramble which was
intended for one reason only:
I have many associates who open up to me and there is one
who is trying to get together with me, largely to express something which they
find terrible to contemplate; a suffering. A couple hints have been dropped and
I am going out on a limb and I am suspecting that some kind of molestation has
been brought to light. I am going to guess a child molestation which has
severed – or potentially severed – close relationships. And while it can be
very difficult for me to express certain ideas to someone who is looking to me
for comfort, because they may not want to accept them and may be looking for
other comforts which I regard as artificial comforts, and I may not play the
blame game to their liking, I am safe in ruminating here in this anonymous
space.
And to anyone who is watching their family break apart because
someone they loved has been revealed a victim and another revealed a monster
and just can’t wrap their head around it and just doesn’t know what to do or
who to support in what way…
The answer, by my accounting, is not difficult to conceive:
You forgive because forgiveness is the only sane option. To
forgive is to confess that what has happened was inevitable. All of causality
is connected. All happenings are inevitable. There is no logic with which to escape
this certainty.
You forgive the conscious entity in the perpetrator. It was
the beast which was compelled to act, not the conscious person whom you loved
and whom you can still love if you are strong enough; if you understand enough;
if you are on board with these understandings enough.
You forgive but that forgiveness is not with impunity. You
forgive but you do not forget. You accept that there must be consequences for
the instinctive presence whose survival mechanisms dictated the act (probably
multiple acts) while fooling the consciousness or rationalizing. For the sake
of community safety and the victim’s well-being, there must be consequences. Those
consequences could ideally take many forms but for most of us we don’t have the
opportunity to manufacture ideal justice and we must trust the police and
courts and prison system – as horrifically flawed as they are – to do the best
they can.
You love and support the conscious perpetrator if you are
strong enough – perhaps after a required hiatus from them – or else you tell
them honestly, “I wish I could support you but I am not strong enough. I am
only strong enough to try to support the victim if I can. If I grow in strength
in the future, then I will return to you. For now I must abandon you for my own well being.”
You also have to support yourself by understanding the above
ideas and remembering that we are all molesters; we are all killers; we all
leave victims in our wake: the Earth (our only conduit to the survival of our children
and descendants), the animals, the people of poor countries whom our masters
have brutally exploited through the Western imperialism which gives us our impossible
cars and furnaces and iPhones which we gladly accept; blindly or deviously or
otherwise.
You support yourself by suppressing the urge to see yourself
as a collateral victim.
You support yourself by looking at the victim and
remembering that we are all victims and we all create victims and that what has
happened to your beloved is not outside the normal mode of life. We all live by
creating victims and for all of us our time comes when we are victimized;
eventually to the extent of our death.
You support yourself by looking beyond the instinctive
desire to see the victim as a tragic aberration though your instincts push you
to see it that way. What has happened is essentially normal. (Do not think that
this means that I suggest throwing in the towel. It can be our purpose in life
to improve; to seek harmony, to reduce victimization of all sorts. We must
endeavor to improve; of course.)
Unfortunately it is hard for me to suggest how to support
the victim. The victim will have heightened instinctive survival forces working
on her – or him. The ideal support is to absorb the above understandings but
every victim will be in a different place psychologically and not ready for
most of the above material. But ideally I would want to work toward those
concepts as gently and patiently and slowly as required. Unfortunately it might
be often best in the short term to trust the psychology community for help
though that is far from ideal in terms of getting at the one true comfort in
life; the comfort of truth; of genuine reality. Psychology will not rescue
anyone from the Matrix but often they can do a decent job of navigating the
Matrix.
The most valuable thing probably, for a victim to understand
is that the victimization happened in the past and the past does not exist. The
acts happened to a person who existed in the past who is no longer “you.” The
only reason we seem eternally harmed by victimization is because we internally
choose to. Our instinctive ego chooses not to let go of it because the pain of victimization
becomes our identity and we cannot conceive of letting go of our identity – because
we are all in the business of manufacturing identity instead of being real; a
bi-product of the survival-by-reputation-and-denial game which the instinct forces
upon the consciousness.
I suppose it is probably in actions that we can most-accessibly
help victims: simply doing the things that demonstrate they are loved and
without condition. But other than the pursuit of true consciousness and the
resulting enlightenment which dispels the spectres of lasting pain and victimhood,
which is evidently rare to achieve, the area of victim recovery is not my area of
privilege; of strongest insight.
