Break On Through

It has taken me some years to realize that the enemy is not a group or groups of people, that the enemy is not my mother, my father, my sister or brother; it is not my teacher, or my school, it is not the government or priest; it’s none of those things. It is not any one particular social role or condition or training, or even an amalgamation of any role or condition or training; it is not even civilization (I must admit to myself, despite my abhorrence of current society and my professed anti-civilization standpoint).

The enemy is far more hideous, far more dangerous, and far closer that I once thought. Because the enemy is inside the Mind. It is inside me, a part of me; so much a part of me that I didn’t even know it’s there. It can’t be seen; it is invisible to all the senses, and cannot be detected with any radar or within any wave spectrum. I can’t see it by looking in a mirror, because although, it is inside me, it does not wear my face.

I do know that this enemy is not a corporeal enemy.

War Ideology bombards this culture: War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Poverty, War on Guns, War on Want, War on Democracy, War on Sex, etc. Why? About what are all these wars on concepts? What if it was to try to teach me something? To instill in the mind, that, One: war is righteous and necessary; and Two: that fighting against an invisible enemy is not possible. [Did you think I was going to say that it was “possible”? Why would you think that it was possible? Has any War on Drugs or Terror or Sex or Guns or Want or Poverty yet resulted in a victor? If it has, why is it that these wars are still fought?] I was taught that wars on intangibles, concepts (i.e., ideologies) could not be won. Now, why is it I was taught this? Maybe it is so I would not think to peer into my own mind for an enemy. Therefore, introspection would never happen.

Social Construct — a social mechanism, phenomenon, or category created and developed by society; a perception of an individual, group, or idea that is ‘constructed’ through cultural or social practice. (Dictionary.com)

I wonder how such a feat is possible. If I believe a particular ideology and am not aware that I believe the particular ideology that is inside my mind, doesn’t that mean that I am divided from my own mind. So, I question, how does one become divided from one’s mind? From the moment I was born, I was inundated with the unwritten laws of what it means to be not a continuously learning, seeking being existing as an inhabitant of a planet earth, but a nationality, a gender, a career, a sexual orientation, an “-ism”, a denomination, etc. That is not to say that it is bad (or good) to classify one’s self as a particular word, only that once one identifies as a certain thing, one supplants the self (the I, the Mind) with this particular word, thereby becoming that word (i.e., role, condition, thought-process), then dramatizes that word upon a Life Stage and calls this theatre Living. This is but a delusional Construct in the Mind. And I know this construct by its name, Ideology.

Ideology — the set of beliefs by which a group or society orders reality so as to render it intelligible. (TheFreeDictionary.com)

So, like the snake, I must shed the skins that I have outgrown. Discard them with their illusions; leave them behind me, in the wake of where I have already been. I must constantly be aware of when my skin becomes too tight so it will never bind me, and strive to break through the edge of my own known existence.

Into the unknown.

“A world is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.” ~William Irwin Thompson