What is this constant battle with the external world? This crushing pressure from society that one is not good enough, will never be good enough, that one is insufficient, needs improvement, not as good as others of the present, and especially of the past.

 

It seems a sad joke on the individual that his entire life should roll out in this dismal way, constantly failing, perpetually dredging through the mire. Continually chasing after the fulfillment of another's prescriptive direction. Trying to get, sell, impress, form alliances with others. Knowing full well that should one slip and fall in this compost heap of critical dismay, the only recourse is to trip up another alongside in the pig-pen, with malice reaching out pull another back, criticize, block, hurt the other to insist they keep struggling too, remain bound, wallowing in the muck and dreariness of the common misery. Or find a helping hand and in doing so, find oneself indebted to the other, a friend for a time, until another better 'friend' should come along.

 

But what is this all about? Is ambition so deeply conditioned in human beings as the focus of our lives that when one says, 'enough' that the rest should attack in disbelief? Almost as though the very fact that another should not rush ahead, not fall behind, but simply proceed fully with attention to the observation of their own experience, free of the comparisions that are a result of conditioning from the external world, that this determination of the other threatens everything about the identity of the trapped individual. The escapee must be corrected, discomforted, attacked, until forced by the pressure and pain of the world to take up the futile efforts of struggling in the whirlpool again.

 

How sad, how useless this appears to be to the one who stands free within his own observation. Blowing off all ambition, all belief, as if a supernova had thrown out all junk and matter into the universe to sit & bright pure, unmoving in the heavens.