At 70 Years
What I have Learned so Far
by Doug Rose
Perhaps the most important thing that I have learned in the past seventy years is that “We” are more important than me, muses the author.
Doctors told me I would be dead within six months. I decided that traveling around the world would be more fun than dancing with The Reaper. That was several years ago. Tough times are a constant companion to a seventy-year-old with arthritis, degenerative spinal disease, two hernias, hammer toes, and a diagnosis of terminal liver cancer—but so are blessings and miracles. This trip has so far brought me half-way around the world from where I started. It has been a wonderful adventure full of insights into different cultures, but it hasn't taught me much about humanity that I didn't already know. It has confirmed a lot that I had already suspected.
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People anywhere and everywhere are more similar than different. Most of us try to be decent and happy—but everyone has a different definition of what “decent” and “happy” mean. There are a small number of seriously self- centered jackasses among us, but they are also just trying to hunt happiness in their own warped fashion.
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Nice people can be awfully cruel at times. Cruel people are occasionally very nice. No one gets out alive, but most folks act as if death only happens to other people. There is, as a rule, very little consciousness of mortality going on. There actually seems to be precious little consciousness of any type going on! People live much of life habitually, without awareness of their thoughts or actions. Few folks realize how many choices they have. Many are busy strangling opportunities with irrelevant, inaccurate historical information when they could be taking advantage of those opportunities instead. People don’t seem to realize that a good deal of what we call “tradition” turns out to be little more than peer pressure from dead people that lacks any value, and often lacks any real, substance. Many seem swept away by life, like a body trapped in the current of a wide river. They do not even see that there are banks on both sides of any river, much less that they can swim to, climb ashore on, and perhaps find golden new possibilities waiting there.
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A lot of us are hypnotized and fooled by the many commercial, religious, and political nuances our culture feeds us. We are led to believe that the remedies to our problems lie somewhere outside of ourselves. All these misleading nuances are more similar than different no matter what culture they travel through, and no matter what language they are presented in. They are all aimed at convincing the public that it has a need for what those nuances are trying to sell. Many people become trapped for an entire lifetime in these well-promoted but largely fruitless pursuits of well-being. The products and ideas that are being hawked are always something external to the individual human ingenuity and intelligence that is likely harboring a much better solution to any given problem than external solutions could possibly hold for us.
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Many people are aware that something is wrong; that there is something out of place with life, but they just can't figure out what that something is.
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The historical Buddha is often misquoted as having said that “Life is suffering.” But the word “dukkha” that he used is more accurately translated as “dislocated” or “out of joint,” like a dislocated shoulder or collarbone. Many folks give lip-service to the well-known fact that love is the answer. They mouth it often in the Western world and can feel it on certain Sundays or at Christmas. But most folks have trouble putting that feeling into consistent application during the rest of their week and the rest of their living. They may know what the best stuff is but are disjointed/ dislocated from it.
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Pain will happen in life, but suffering can often be optional or at least adjustable. Reconnecting with “The Bigger Thing” will obviously eliminate the dislocation from it. That re-established connection with something bigger than our little selves and our relatively small problems can supersede and modify all the previous connections to our personal sufferings. It doesn’t matter whether one labels the “Bigger Thing” as God, The Collective Unconscious, The Quantum Field, all living things, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, the mailman, Humanity, The Holy Alfalfa Sprout, The Great Pumpkin, The Great Spirit, Universal Consciousness, The Force, or Self. Correctly driving any good car, you put fuel in, can get you to the destination.
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The quality of attention paid by the student is often much more important than who the teacher is. Teachers, mentors, exemplars, and deities can be wonderful and, in many cases, essential catalysts. But if a person is not fully staying awake and focused on what they want to produce or are trying to learn, he or she could be in the same room with Jesus, Shiva, and Buddha but still walk out of that room an idiot.
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Those guys and gods can’t do it for you. They can give you tools to work with and meaningful instructions on getting development done.
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More people every day are realising that we are at a crucial point in history. Earth is in crisis mode. The fine-line details necessary to reach whatever “enlightenment” is are just not as important as what has to be done immediately to save our asses.
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Folks can figure out later that those label systems, all those gods and goddesses we think will do our work for us, are largely symbolic. We do not need to immediately realize that “supernatural” is a state of being available to almost any human who takes the time and makes serious effort to build his or her nature into something a little more super. All this will come to light by itself, in time.
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Right now, even paying serious attention to our positive “beliefs” can be a vehicle on the road to saving the environment immediately, improving quality of life as soon as possible, and gaining objectively sound wisdom for the future.
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That wisdom in the future will include coming to terms with the fact that the word “belief” implies a lack of knowledge. It will include courage enough to say, “I don’t know.” Admitting that we don’t know a lot of the things that we are currently make believe we do know can eliminate our attachment to some of the unrealistic stories that have become the backbone of many modern disappointments. Believing in fairytale explanations of life can foster a false sense of an actually nonexistent security. It can disfigure reality and allow the awareness of our serious problems and their solutions to slip through the cracks.
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Many of these fairytale stories were invented as control devices designed to tame and civilize, or intimidate and rule, unruly populations. Others were well intended as parables and metaphorical lessons. But history shows that over a period of centuries, a lot of material meant to be metaphorical was concretized, bent to individual purposes, or inaccurately translated. Take a look at what happens in just a few short minutes to a message running through a group of kids playing telephone! Much adult information has had centuries to morph even more severely. Over time, the molested fragments of so many of the once-great messages that humanity has received no longer resemble the actual meaning of the original message.
It gets even worse in some cases. For example, one has to wonder how much of the original message King James got into his all too popular Bible translation. Many problems besides the time gap take their toll on James’s accuracy. The perceptive mechanism of a slave-owning, narcissistic monarch of the world’s biggest empire who had a strong sexual identity confusion accompanied by a very bad attitude toward women as well as a royally egotistical sense of entitlement and superiority may not have been the best filter to run sacred truths of equanimity and compassion through.
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The good part is that everybody wants to get love and life right, even if they don’t know exactly how to do it. That desire may see little practical application in the modern world but increasing numbers of people want to be an improved, happier, nicer version of themselves.
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Folks are searching. There is hope.
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I see people waking up to a sense of essential altruism and equanimity every day! Unfortunately, it is also true that every day there is another misguided jackass hypnotized from birth to think his little life is so important that your life doesn’t matter at all. These are the people that manufacture and fuel all the separations that keep humanity from becoming itself. Sexual, national, religious, and ethnic differences are so very often given a bloated importance in our world! The limited feeling of inclusion that these little clubs give us can be harmless, if those feelings are not fostered at the expense and degradation of any other little clubs—but they aren’t part of the bigger, more intrinsically accurate picture. These little likes and dislikes, inclinations, preferences, and accidents of birth have no importance in the world of pure consciousness. It is insane to allow these relatively meaningless personal variances to overpower the very much more meaningful universal inclusiveness that pure consciousness entails.
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I have seen a lot of human inconsistency while traveling around the world. There does not seem to be any sense in being an optimist or a pessimist. Everything may work out just fine in the long run, or humanity may become extinct within a decade or two.
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Most people are, or at least want to be, nice. Our happiness and perhaps even our continued existence now depends upon whether these nice folks can find enough inspiration, power, and intelligence to make all the nastier people on the planet see reason. That will take some real effort because in order to help others do that job efficiently, nice folks will first have to do a version of it on themselves. The mechanics of the Bigger Thing dictate that things work the way Mahatma Gandhi did.
A mother came to the Mahatma and asked him to get her sugar-addicted child off sugar. Gandhi told her to come back in two weeks with the boy. She did. The Mahatma talked to the boy and the child stopped eating sugar from that day on. The mother asked Gandhi, “Why did you have me wait two weeks?” He answered, “Two weeks ago, I was on sugar!”
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Nice folks also have to be careful not to become the nasty people. It happens sometimes. Many people have killed off tyrants only to become tyrants themselves. Revolution, by dictionary definition, means you eventually end up back where you started. Evolution, on the other hand, will put you somewhere else. “Somewhere else” would, in almost every nonphysical sense of the phrase, be a good place for humanity to move to—especially that nastier fraction of humanity.
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Perhaps the most important thing that I have learned in the past seventy years is that “We” are more important than me.
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Whether you are basically nice or nasty, like your sex with men or women, are born black/white/brown/ whatever, and no matter where on Earth you are living, we now have no functional choice but to quickly figure out the mechanics of and embody inclusion, generosity, kindness, and cooperation over competition and greed. Humanity’s lone hope for survival hinges on how much of the greedy self-centered aspect in each of us we can replace with a kinder, more altruistically centered-in-self orientation. In the face of our possible extinction on fronts that include environmental, warrior/political/nuclear, and a potentially fatal overpopulation of the planet as well as the draining of its natural resources, it is essential for every individual to stop being a victim of our collective inconsistencies. If we can find and nourish our untapped courage and kindness, it will allow us to live up to our potential. If we ever do fully live up to our human potential, the utopias of legend will become accessible to us.
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The criminally selfish, willfully ignorant men that we hire by election or otherwise support with our time, resources, and attention are more beholden to private interests than they are to public necessities. They can legislate, regulate, and otherwise influence our actions. They function in concert with other cultural influences to direct our very thoughts and attitudes.
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We use these people to shoulder blame for our disasters, but they cannot destroy us unless we let them.
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They also can’t save us. We can. I wonder if we will.
Doug Rose is a free spirit who travels the world and documents his experiences through his writings.