Ponder This

By Marc Lowe

Where to begin?

The human race.

It was a nice experiment, wasn't it?

It was a wonderful show. So full of drama and romance, thrills and chills, sex and violence and…

Have you realized, yet, what you are? What we all are?

Have you understood why we do the things we do, both to ourselves and to each other?

This is the essential question.

Where to begin?

One cannot find the way out without first finding the way (back) in.

Ponder this.

One cannot find the way out without first finding the way (back) in.

Do you fancy yourself a ________?

What would you do if you lost everything? Your name, your possessions, your fancy job titles?

Have you ever imagined how liberating it might be?

It’s all perspective.

Or, rather, perhaps it’s just recognizing what “it” is in the first place.

Our conditioning. From birth.

I am not talking about shampoo/rinse. I mean…

We are conditioned since the time we are born.

Ponder this.

We are conditioned since the time we are born.

Do you consider yourself a ________?

What if you woke up one day with a different face? a different body? What if you found yourself in the body of someone of another race, another sex?

Perhaps this would not seem so liberating to you. 

Likely, it would frighten you. Immensely.

But, then, what if your very thoughts, your very way of thinking, too, had become those of this other person,who was/is, now, actually you?

Tell me something: Where would you have gone to, in this situation? And where (or who) were you to begin with?

Unsettling thought, isn’t it?

And yet…

And yet, if you could equally be a person of another race, another sex, someone who speaks a different language, has grown up in a different culture, has been programmed with radically different ideas about the world, who has a totally different conditioning…

What, then, essentially, would separate you from him/her?

Is it not simply your conditioning? Put aside the superficial differences, the language differences, and so on. What, essentially, is it that would now separate “you” from “the other person.”

Ponder this.

If one were to hurt another person, while realizing, at one and the same time, that this other was also, in some sense, essentially no different from oneself, would you still do it?

Would you try and “one-up” yourself if you knew that the battle was in fact a battle between yourself and yourself? 

Would you try and steal your own promotion from yourself? Compete against yourself for another’s favor? Be jealous of yourself because you had something that you, too, wanted, but didn’t also have?

Would you try and trick yourself by lying and then cover your tracks when you were found out (by yourself)?

Would you try to make yourself more like “yourself,” or would you keep yourself subservient, so that you could better “control yourself”?

Would you bomb yourself in the name of your own country/religion/ideology? Would you claim that your God was better than your God, your country more important than your country?

One cannot find the way out without first finding the way (back) in.

What are we doing to ourselves? What have we done?

Ponder this.

Carefully.

July 4, 2024

Tokyo, Japan