The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Me today is very different to the me that raised my first family...
I "woke up" around 1990, and with my spiritual awakening came a new way of looking at life and how we humans do 3D here on this planet...
I suddenly saw many of the incongruities, the incoherence, the dissonance we live with, enable in our daily life...
And I realised that most of the system and the rules we live by don't make any sense (other than enforcing the power over, and control of, the many by a few) and are really quite silly, if not outright toxic and damaging, and in some cases murderous...
For example...
"Thou shalt not kill... but if you kill someone else, we reserve the right to kill you...
and,
we reserve the right to conscript you and send you off to war to kill and injure people you have never met and against whom you have no personal beef...
Oh, and if you refuse to go where we send you and do that, or you run away from it because it's all too much and too horrible, we will punish you, even kill you - THAT'S RIGHT, WE'LL EVEN KILL YOU IF YOU REFUSE TO KILL OTHERS..."
Either life is sacred or it's not... make up your mind, world...
Then there's the fact that absolutely every single situation in life is different - happening at a different time, in a different place, to different people, in different circumstances, driven by different causes and motivations...
If every one of us on the planet saw the same event, we would have 6B+ different versions of that event, 6B+ different sets of beliefs about the morality or otherwise of whatever is playing out...
There is no black and white - everything is grey... and so it seems to me to be pointless to have set in stone a bunch of rules that must apply in all scenarios, and which never have scope and flexibility built in to take into account complexity and context...
When I lived in Brisbane, I hung out with a bunch of women wanting to live authentic lives... real women... and one of the teachings/truths we were examining in our practice of being real was:
... guidelines are for the wise ...
Most of us have grown up accepting society's laws and rules by osmosis, never consciously looking at what they mean, where and why they originated, whether they're about safety or about maintaining power and control, whether we have ever been asked for our agreement to these strictures being placed on us as free human beings...
As far as I can tell, rules and laws were created by the few powerful 'haves' to protect themselves and their possessions from the many powerless 'have nots', making refusal, rebellion and revolution difficult...
Think about it... we're living in a world where there's no longer any sense of community, of clan or tribe, of working together and sharing resources and the product of that work.
We're each responsible for providing for ourselves, regardless of the circumstances.
And we've developed a system of trade, even of the basic necessities of life, where goods pass through many hands from creator to consumer, and at each point of exchange become more expensive, with the final "buyer" paying much more than the creator received for the initial transaction.
Imagine a man or woman has no food for his/her hungry children, and is standing in front of a bakery looking at a loaf of bread; this parent has no money (method of energy exchange) and no goods or services to trade for that loaf of bread in the window...
In other societal and economic structures, the community would have planted the seed, grown and harvested the wheat and made the bread together, and would have shared the fruits of their labours...
There's an order of Divine versus earthly logic that applies here...
Is it more of a "crime" to let one's children go hungry than it is to take (without offering immediate exchange) a loaf of bread that will alleviate that hunger?
Who does the law "thou shalt not steal" protect in this case? The most vulnerable in our community, or those who already are provided for? Surely if the loaf of bread is up for sale, that means it's "surplus to requirements," as they say, and the "owner" already has plenty for his/her own needs?
Our forebears, at some point determined that taking something without exchange, even to feed the hungry, is an offence, punishable by imprisonment, whipping, having limbs amputated, enslavement, banishment and exile, and sometimes death...
And we still say all "stealing" is wrong, no matter what the circumstances leading up to the decision to take something without offering an immediate exchange...
This denies the fact that all of life is a circle, a connected web, where energy (money, food, love, caring, action) flows around the circle and will eventually come back to us...the return will not often be directly reciprocal, but it does return - all major spiritual traditions remind us of that...
When I was growing up in New Zealand, I remember hearing about the butter and wheat mountains, that the west had, while at the same time we were reminded daily on our television screens about the plight of the starving children of Biafra...
40 years on and nothing has changed... we still have people and governments sitting on food to force the price to rise, while billions starve...
EU butter mountain to return
The European Union's notorious butter mountains and milk lakes are to return after a controversial decision to reintroduce dairy subsidies.
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels 4:49PM GMT 22 Jan 2009
The European Commission has announced plans to artificially boost prices by buying up 139,000 tonnes of diary products at a cost to the public purse of £237 million.
From March 1 until the end of August, the EU will become the owner of 30,000 tonnes of butter and 109,000 tonnes of skimmed powder milk, paid for at above market cost to support the dairy industry.
The EU is has also agreed to begin new export subsidies for European butter, milk powder and butteroil.
Export subsidies and EU food stocks were last used in 2007 and the Commission last year tried to scrap such payments, a reform that was blocked by France and Germany.
Commission officials have played down the measure as a temporary move after a steep slide in milk prices triggered a 33 per cent decline in butter exports last year.
- Butter Mountain To Return“Know the rules well,
so you can break them effectively.”
~ Dalai Lama XIV
Posts
I replied that it's a sad day when common sense and compassion are over-ridden by "rules"...
And thinking about it, the lack of common sense and compassion and the imposition by others of silly 'rules' are the reasons we can't stay where we are living now, any longer...
Thanks Janice, for creating the space for me to see that!