Savage Luxuries

There is no nation whose soil is not soaked in blood. There are those individuals who have lived pacific lives, and there have been local periods of peace and prosperity, but such history as we have concerning social evolution is a mixed bag of horror and hagiography combined with steady progress in manipulating nature. There is, however, a small golden thread running through all this that we could perhaps call the "pursuit of enlightenment". Quite naturally this thread has been caught up in, and spun out of, religious forms. In just the same way as myth charged descriptions of the cosmos have given way to the observations of astronomy, the pursuit of enlightenment must shed its shell of historical decoration. Pragmatic fact based descriptions of reality may have distanced the gods, but they have brought us closer to that reality of which the gods are a legitimate symbol. The mystery of being is immediate when we have no symbols to hide behind.

There are many technologies of meditation: technologies of posture, breathing, imaging, and so forth. It seems to me that these aids can be a hinderance to that opening of awareness which is the fact of enlightenment. If we simply set our consciousness to the contemplation of awareness nothing more is necessary. Enlightenment comes of its self with the maturation of awareness.

Ideologies, secular and religious, are savage luxuries that the world can ill afford considering our woefully advanced technologies of destruction. Enlightenment is the universal solvent that can dissolve historical incrustations and free once and for all the spirit which has invigorated seekers since the dawn of time.