When, for a period of time, we have been living in a way that does not express our highest ideals, it is important that we let such living come to pass. The pressures of modern living push us out of a noble, innocent, and lofty mode of being. Owing to whatever painful difficulties we experienced as children, usually because of the wrongful limits imposed upon us by our parents, our tendency in the face of the pressure is to bury under our magnificence. This gains us social approval with the herd, relief from bullying, camouflage from the many obvious predators in the environment, and allows us some normalcy.
We are not meant to live this way.
The heart suffers under the weight of society’s dishonesty, the dishonesty in our family system. We have to break out and break free, repeatedly. We must be guided by a noble commitment to inhabit our best, most truest sides. We desperately need to live in a way that fulfills the promise of our childhood and all the intense love and wonderment we were filled with. We must harken back, again and again, to a manner of being that connects us intensely with who we are when our defenses are completely lowered.
This love of honesty and freedom of expression is at total odds with our protective, defensive impulses. These impulses form our lower nature and while they serve a good and necessary purpose, they must be reminded with frequency that they serve our highest, noblest self. We can only break through to this true self if have done a good job with self-knowledge and faced and dealt with our traumas from childhood. Over time, as we keep up this essential “house cleaning”, it becomes easier and easier to break through to our noblest, highest self.
Without this guiding light in our lives, it is all too easy to “lose the thread” and be given over to vice, temptation, false “toughness”, stubbornness in our self-erasure, and the ugly conformity that a thousand and one demons demand. We lose our vigor and our inspiration. We no longer are open to the radiant goodness of children. We think society must be oriented around self-serious, maudlin adult things. The play is gone out of life. We fall into drudgery which begets more drudgery. We take on hideous, socialist personalities, full of false authority and certainty.
Let us cast off this false equanimity that long ago served our parents as they were consumed by the devils of the world. They lost themselves to a sick culture, dishonest ways, addiction, and technological abuses. There is no need for us to fall in line. We should break out and break loose, whatever the cost, so that we can live in line with our highest, noblest ideals. If it takes tears to break down the crusty shell we’ve come to inhabit, let the tears come. The artistic flame of our lives should never go out. We should live so truthfully and so nobly that we paint our lives with a brush. Life is a beach. Life is a mountain meadow. Life is a galleon on uncharted waters. Let us never lose sight of the finer things, those which can only be informed by philosophy and the human soul.
