Consciousness and the Antivirus

I was around back then. The 1960s, an era of grand achievements and breakthroughs coupled with massive civil unrest and social upheaval.

Perplexed by a confusing world, I fell into meaningless, low level jobs. Which suitably reinforced a questioning mind struggling to accept the irrational as rational. There’s nothing quite as isolated as a poor man thinking.

Along the way, I formalized my struggles by joining the martial arts and related, formal consciousness studies. These studies went on for decades, and the legendary inner, ego-thrashing transformation not-so-gently eventually occurred.

I’m not an opportunist by nature. I, similar to others like me, am a chameleon. We can be quite invisible in our everyday lives. If we are Influencers in any way, it is by a completely different set of measurements.

The world detests any change that threatens our personal selfishness. Most of us label our selfishness using interesting phrases such as “putting family first.” We defend it by joining like-minded groups where we can reinforce our need to be secure and right. We seek out habits and affiliations which infuse us with a deceptively subtle sense that we are somehow in control even though we live within an unimaginably vast inner and outer universe.

Those among us who have done the so-called inner, transformative work can be too conveniently viewed dismissively, perhaps even ‘treated’ to subtle forms of biting sarcasm and including demonstrations of superior wit, raging confidence and studied intelligence.

The thing is, when our societal measuring tools are Likes, vacations, gated homes and other so-called privileges, a poor or modest everyday working or non-working man or woman has little to no value. And a student of conscious awareness is perhaps seen as having even less.

Some people believe that the major existential crisis sets within which we find ourselves, the ones that threaten human existence, are a battle between good and evil. There’s much that can be said about that, including the obvious: when wrong is called right and being social and considerate is called wrong, something is clearly out-of-balance.

It’s not all that difficult to imagine that humanity is in a test, like a big lab experiment. Our nations, races and special interest groups are even called cultures. Which culture will bring forward a successful antivirus? Who has allowed themselves to be exposed both to the highly infectious disease and to the antivirus? Who has built up antibodies? What would that even look like? What would living within the experience of that be like?