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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 3/31/12

Reflections on Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words

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On 3/25/12 Rob Kall wrote an article titled "Smoke and mirrors, Sausage Factory, Lesser Evils and YOU Making a Difference."   Within this article he writes:

Things are getting uglier. I'm finally coming to face the reality that voting only feeds into the illusion the system creates that different candidates really make a difference. The truth is, voting for the lesser of two evils only moves us towards the next election with two worse evils.

 

Moving to the encouragement of action, Kall writes:

 

I don't have any concrete answers, except that I'm certain that depending on election day to set things right is far from enough. We must become activists, fighting for a just, fair future where human rights are put before corporate rights.

We must work, as part of the activist effort to awaken those who sleep comfortably within the illusion that they have freedom, that they have rights.

 

Mr. Kall is right.   I would take his message further and entice the reader into deepening her or his understanding of a problem that ultimately has 6,000 years or more of conditioning behind it (see Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and / or Chellis Glendenning's My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization).   Due to this intense conditioning, we have to learn to think outside the box and challenge the foundations of who we think we are and what we think the world is. More importantly, we must challenge our current divorce of the world as reflected in our destruction of the planet, continual non-ending wars, and corporate top-down control of education, foods, land, etc. We may be at or close to the tipping point where if we don't challenge ourselves we will remain stuck in a nightmare of our own making entailing the threat of our extinction alongside many other species.

Perhaps our destruction of the planet and turning Her into a wasteland mirrors the wasteland of our mechanized and reductionistic minds?  

  We, and the politicians and corporations that we reflect, are holographic (the part mirrors the whole) mindsets that have overtaken western society.   This conditioning probably originated during the days of pharaohs, the writing of the Old Testament, and Babylonian society.   Our conditioning defines how we see the world.   For example, we may say we are atheist and argue we don't believe anything in the Bible and that the Christians, Jews and Muslims should be eradicated " their religion, at least, if not them personally.     Just like them, we are self-righteously assured that those "over there" are evil or just plain ignorant about our scientific and rational way of understanding the world.   As such, they need to be controlled or eradication by us, the "good guys," who know the Truth regarding a rational world in which the only intelligence is that of the human being.

The arrogance of the scientific worldview is the same arrogance inherent in psyches of many belonging to the cults of the Judea-Muslim-Christian peoples.   What none of us are willing to do is questioning our self, i.e., our conditioning, and how that conditioning mirrors "The Others" that we point the finger at.   The danger in this "it's them" mentality is that we run the risk, indeed we ensure, that we stay stuck in the same patterns.   It's time to expose the patterns and move on.   Nowhere is this need better defined than in a book titled A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen.   

If you are not one to question whether the fabric of what you believe is truth, do not read this book.   If you are able to question the conditioning socio-pathology of the culture as operating in yourself and what you believe, then, by all means, take this book on.   You will learn that the culture's socio-pathology has been instilled in you since grade school and even since you emerged from your mother's womb.    Pink Floyd realized this pattern in their infamous "Another Brick in the Wall" when they sang "Hey teachers, leave us kids alone"all in all you're just another brick in the wall."

Republican, democrat, big business, bankers, psychologists, mental health workers, accountants are all the same.   The key word in the Pink Floyd song is "another."   YOU'RE just another brick in a wall of bricks.   The psychosis is widespread in our species.   It is one psychosis spanning continents, cultures and time.   And that psychosis is in you and me as well as the workplace, the government, the schools, etc.   To heal the culture, we must first reach deeply into ourselves.   The pattern is there and that's where change begins.   It's not easy.   Real change demands that you question how you see Reality and flip it on its ear.   What you think is reality is not reality.   It is the result of a conditioning that has you brainwashed into following the status quo, be you liberal, conservative, republican or democrat.

A Language Older than Words is a long book.   Yet, it is one that keeps you reading.   In its passionately written flaring passages of anger, it holds you spellbound.   When describing his own experiences of being raped by his father in relationship to the rape of his Soul by the school systems and the destruction of aboriginal peoples and the Earth's body, you begin to see the patterns.   Rape is not generated only towards women.   The rape of women is a holographic manifestation of the rape of the Earth and the rape of the human Soul".the inner world of all human beings.   In Jensen's book, you see these patterns of rape occurring in yourself, within the school systems, and the industries that employ you for more hours and higher levels production while supporting you with less money and benefits.

To heal we are going to need to take health care, education, etc. into OUR hands and get it out of the hands of corporations and government.   Would you trust a sociopath such as the infamous Godfathers of the Mafia world?   Are the sociopaths in government and corporate boardrooms any different?   "Make my day" states a sociopathic Clint Eastwood holding a large barreled gun as if it were a phallus.   This is the mentality of the modern day.

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Burl Hall is a retired counselor who is living in a Senior Citizen Housing apartment. Burl has one book to his credit, titled "Sophia's Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature." For more information, search the book on Amazon. (more...)
 
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