Live by love, take what we need, leave the rest
An important conversation prompted this article in the context of people’s focus on the latest manifestations of fear porn and revelations of plunder and structural violence.
While the internet has given us unlimited access to information and social media the means to share and learn from others, these technologies are a double edged sword.
After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite
From modems to the Metaverse, Mark Pesce has seen it all
What the article doesn’t explore is how these technologies and the information we glean from them affect our psyche and our spirit.
Social media is undoubtedly addictive (in most cases by design as many insiders will attest). Furthermore, there is a tendency to adopt binary judgements on others leading to hostility and division.
This brings me to the conversation in which something Bruce Lee said was mentioned, “take what you need, discard the rest”.
“Discard” implies that everything you discard is worthless. If we apply the same saying to nature, we have a very different interpretation which would appear to sanction waste, irresponsible greed and pollution. That’s not the context in which Bruce was speaking but we know how often things are taken out of context leading to binary judgements.
- Leave the rest can mean leave something to whither through lack of attention
- Leave the rest can also mean for others who may have need of what we leave
This first meaning helps us to use social media effectively. When being bombarded by stories of greed, death and destruction, our psyche’s are stimulated to react, thus suppressing our ability to think. In this state of excitement, we feel the urge to share our outrage, disgust or whatever thereby inducing the same behaviour and impotence in others. Why impotence? The structure is psychopathic and impervious to demands for truth and justice.
Everything is driven by money but that is the subject of another article, in the future.
Sharing fear porn and the like harvests the energy of all those in the chain of communication. Nonetheless, it is often useful to be able to put events and issues into the context of our awareness of the structure, how it works and its impacts. We start from different places and take different routes to arrive a similar destination and the benefit of sharing information is to help each other on our journey of discovery.
Individual sources are often the subject of discussion on social media and give rise to ad hominem attacks and tribal cliques. And this is the point of leave the rest; the sources are of relevance because we need to know their biases and blind spots but the information itself is paramount. We take what we need, leave the rest.
Which brings me to the title of this article. Wisdom comes from a quiet place.
When we focus on ourselves it leads us from the microcosm to the macrocosm, universal consciousness and where meaning comes from. My own journey has brought me to this realisation via contemplation of the Tarot.
The important conversation, earlier in the week, highlighted the need to contemplate. The techniques used to quieten our minds are many and various:
- meditation
- visual, sound, smell
- natural and chemical mind stimulation
these often combine, thereby powering resonance with universal consciousness and as a consequence with each other.
Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process – US Army Intelligence and Security Command
“No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.” ― Niels Bohr
We don’t let the structure harvest our energy. We share information selectively thereby acting as quality control for each other. We take time to contemplate…
…then we’re on the real journey of discovery without being diverted into groundhog day.
Most of us are occupied by the demands of the structure simply to live and our journey of discovery places additional demands on our time and energy. The point of leave the rest, aside discarding the irrelevant and damaging, is to free us up to concentrate on what really matters and what we can control and change, ourselves.
