Silver Back Muzik

Never Too Old - Never Past It

Regardless of our age, gender, social status, IQ and emotional connections to others, need and creed, emotion and reason, combine into our very personalized Achilles heel.

Ex-Prime ministers and Presidents, music artists, impressive CEOs, actors, scientists, innovators, and athletes of international renown are notable examples of the enduring craving for love received via the cheering and the emotions of their supporters and fans. For them as for us, 'love' comes in the shape of rewards and seeming 'whole-hearted' responses from others.

Few are the cultural icons who choose to retire to a 'civilian' life while they still maintain a modicum of currency and credibility in their field. Of course, they, too, fear 'the future'. Thus, not many deliberately turn their back 'now' to lucrative key-note addresses, lectures and brand sponsorships. In truth, these luminaries are dependent on their reward dollars, no less than we are, to perpetuate the cycle of 'love' and appreciation that keeps their inner circle spinning around them. They need to please and appease, as we do, to be invited to appear and reappear in front of the masses. Besides, once one has felt such waves of admiration and respect a.k.a. waves of love, how grey and boring life would seem if the only focus were simply to be present in the 'now' moment to interact lovingly with children, partner, family, friends and neighbors in an unconditional manner that is actively accepting!

When one considers the billions of heart-related ailments that plague all strata of our society, one would be excused for thinking that we are in the middle of a massive pandemic dis-ease, and perhaps we are, if we understand that all disease infiltrates first, our energy field long before other symptoms are noticed.

We do understand that it is a cause that generates symptoms, but we are wrong to think that the cause is purely physical or emotional.

Serious question #1:what if the cause were generated in our energy field and what if the cause materialised out of a karmic imbalance due to a closed-hearted, self-centered response to the stressors of in our 'now, moment after moment over a period of years?

Serious question #2:what would happen if the millions of people employed to tend to our ailing hearts were to be phased out because of an en masse healthier approach to doing life?

Be that as it may, for now, it seems safe to say that our aching hearts do keep our western world economy from collapsing further.

Imagine if you can the ramifications of immensely shrinking the work load of local doctors, ubiquitous heart specialists and the armada of nurses? What about the plethora of hospital staff from the Registrars to cleaners, dry-cleaners and surgeons? And let's not forget the pharmaceutical industry that engineers billion-dollar revenues from the chemicals they produce as well as from the machinery they create to tend to our aching hearts? Oh, and let's not forget either the industries that look after us... at the moment of our 'untimely' death!

Tangentially, the twin juggernaut industries of Correctional Services and of Defense are on par with the oddly-named industry of Health when it comes to the most massive pillars of our economy.

Serious question #3:How would we fare psychologically within a biophilial culture in which all people shared a common bond through a love of humanity and nature as well as a respect for independence and freedom, as argued by Erich Fromm [1] if it meant an economy massively depressed by the obsolescence of

> the meat and dairy industries

> the Correctional Services that process criminality

> the manufacturing, processing and sales of weapons made legal by the pro-gun lobby

> weapons of mass destruction and drones, as generated used by the Armed forces and Homeland Defence?

Consider for a moment the genuine armadas of personnel needed to maintain the relative degree of safety/security demanded by the criminality potential in any of our developed countries. Let's start by considering the thousands and thousands of staff involved in prevention, guidance and rehabilitation. Next, let's consider the number of police personnel, judges, prison officers, secretaries, ancillary staff and all manner of security guards and electronic security. Let's not forget the purchase of these employees' vehicles and their maintenance. Let's not forget either the staff involved in the maintenance of all of the buildings and infrastructures that prop up this industry. And what about the bureaucrats who look after all these employees' salaries, insurances and retirement funds?

It is a truly odd thing to say that 'crime doesn't pay' because, clearly, it pays the salaries of millions of people in each of our countries and these millions of workers contribute to the survival of other sectors of our economy. The same job-diversity inventory-type of reflection can be applied to the hundreds of industries and the millions of staff that 'live off' the Armed Forces and Homeland Defence.

When it comes to these four industries, peace on earth, safety in our streets, love in our homes, love and peace in our hearts, even towards the cows and their calves, the sheep and their lambs, would surely trigger world-wide chaos - a prize far too exorbitant to pay for harmony within communities across the globe.

It is thus not surprising that the ones who do have the power to 'flick the switch', the handful of family dynasties who rule our world, overseeing our key-leaders, prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. It's so much easier for all to maintain the status quo by quietly chocking certain areas of alternative progress which would eventually lead to... true progress! And tacitly, we do agree with them, don't we?

Fence-sitting is not always an enduring option.

Back to topic, the clear and deadly by-product of the general mismanagement of our affairs on just about every level is the love starvation that manifests itself in the ever-present need, the desire, the unavowed craving for praise in one form or another. It is from this insatiable hunger that stems the anxiety that plagues populations world-wide. It is from this anxiety that we breed our cancers as readily as we breed depression, as readily as we become dependent on food, alcohol, drugs - as readily as we project ourselves as... victims.

Serious questions: how is that that we are still planning the *future* though, any one of us past our formative years, has already spent the best part of our life planning that future? Isn't it true that in introspective moments, whether ours is a good life or a challenging one, most of us look at our current circumstances wondering How did my life turn out the way it has?

Looking at the overwhelming evidence, should we go on proudly claiming that we have total control over a life that, on the whole, yields as much contentment as an olive yields juice? So very little!

Serious questions:how can anyone assume we are the masters of our destiny when we belong to a species who can no more suspend breath than initiate it of our own evolution; when we are miserable the moment we get the sniffles, a toothache or a paper cut on the edge of a little finger; when our dog dies; when we can no more control our sleeping patterns than stop our eyes from blinking; when we change our mind according to our mood and when our pulse quickens at the sight of an object of desire planted in our brain by media hype, be it a car, a pair of sneakers, a designer label computer, a painting or another human being classified INACCESSIBLE; when we only know what we 'think' we want without having the faintest idea of how, in the fullness of time, any of these wants will eventually boomerang back to us? Like our teenagers who refuse to budge away from undesirable patterns of behaviour, don't we already have enough evidence that, for most of us, doing life our way is not the way to achieve what we are so desperate to achieve?

Eyes open wide: can we possibly exert a clear-minded control over the endless string of our 'now' moments, as long as we are constantly much more preoccupied by our appearance, our possessions or lack of, and by how others perceive us than by true origins of our thoughts? Than by the content of our thoughts? Than by the results of our thoughts?

We only become care-less in regards to others' perceptions of ourselves once we find ourselves at two opposite ends of the spectrum of inner balance when:

1. we are 'in' love and exhibiting narcissistic emotions

2. we are in a state of depression and exhibiting sado-masochistic tendencies.

Ironically, it is while positioned anywhere in between these two poles on the continuum of emotions that we either tackle irritating, disappointing 'now' moments as pests that must not be allowed to multiply or as if the Oracle had signalled the incipient, shadowy encroachment of death. Even if it were the latter, it can still be argued that one has responsibility to one's self to choose in which state one prefers to leave one's body.

Option #1:in a state of sour, anxious, fearful detachment due to a disappointing lifetime spent alternating between wetting our toes, wading knee-dip or immersing ourselves in a shifting sea of greed, lust, sloth, pride envy and anger.

Option #2:in a more serene state due to a lifetime spent alternating between wetting our toes, wading knee-dip or immersing ourselves in a softer sea of sharing, of purpose-centred diligence, ego-training, of humility, of patience and generosity of spirit.

Serious question:what have we got to lose once we understand that there are no membership fees to pay for this training of our inner self, that there is not a single thing that needs to be bought, no special clothes, no books, no crystals or statues, that the rethinking or our thinking can be done anywhere, any time.

Any timemeans any time a thought of fear or insecurity creeps in; any time a thought of Me first and to hell with her/him/them is attempting to overpower us; any time a thought of Fun now! Consequences later is pushing us towards recklessness; any time a thought of separation or dislike of someone; any time we're itching to take sides and gossip; any time the urge comes to 'touch', to manipulate, to sway in whichever manner a situation in our favour or to make it go away - any time is karmic time to control what pops into our ego in the moment - 'now'.

Why?Because each of these recurring irritants and each of our crises are but a part of the constellation of impacts karmically intended to force us to switch off our automatic pilot and attune our consciousness to our inner self.

Honest question:isn't it more empowering to think along those lines than to think that life is random and unfair and that basically some of us have a lot more bad luck than others?

State of things:although, as adults, we usually know right from wrong, we, humans, are prone to actions that go against our better judgment. If we know what is best for us, then why don't we get on with it? This conundrum known as Akrasia brought Socrates and Aristotle to loggerheads.

To this day, no amount of plumbing the depth of our psyche has revealed to contemporary philosophers the real cause of our 'natural' ambivalence between emotion and reason. If we understood the Law of Karma better, we might simply concede that human error, tragedies and apparent non-sequiturs of reasoning stem from a blend of divine/cosmic and human interventions, If we did truly understand this, then, we would, perhaps, give up trying to isolate the 'real cause' of this karma-generating natural human ambivalence.

Here is a fun last minute thought: one funky way to eventually reduce the population explosion on our planet would be for more and more of us to amend karma better and faster in each consecutive lifetime.

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1. Fromm, Erich On Being Human London: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 1997, p. 101

NB: Long story made short, though, clearly, it is Soul's energy that keeps us alive [not any sort of medical intervention or degree of fitness] until our karmic time is up and not one second longer, I imagine that she has, in all likelihood, given up on us a long, long time ago. Or she would have, if she were not pure energy.