A good point from Caitlin Johnstone — geopolitics is (my words) about rampaging ego

© 2021 Peter Free

 

09 April 2021

 

 

Laziness encourages most of us to speak superficially about spirit

 

Especially in the United States, all the nonsense of no-work mindfulness as a way to increased productivity and financial success.

 

Talk about getting the 'celestial' message exactly backwards.

 

 

With regard to laziness's relationship to harm . . .

 

. . . enter Caitlin Johnstone. She writes wisely about geopolitics and the evils that the Avaricious American Empire generates.

 

Some of her recent words caught my eye, perhaps because our developmental backgrounds are similar.

 

Here — with typos corrected:

 

 

When you ask good spiritual teachers to show you the truth, they will always point you back at yourself, insistently and uncompromisingly. When you ask phony spiritual teachers to show you the truth, they’ll find various (often clever and subtle) ways to point at themselves.

 

It’s a battle between truth and ego, for us as individuals and for humanity as a whole.

 

It’s no coincidence that we’re currently ruled by psychopaths and sociopaths, disorders which sit on the extreme end of the narcissism spectrum.

 

Humanity’s problems are literally ego run amok.

 

© 2021 Caitlin Johnstone, The Empire Has A Dark Vision For Our World: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, caitlinjohnstone.com (08 April 2021)

 

 

I mention Johnstone's words for three reasons

 

First, her paragraphs are a good reminder that 'everything' begins with reintegrating the small self (ego-based, separate and individualistic) with the large (undivided and seamless) one.

 

Second, you can detect the beginnings of Bad Things about to happen, when you're being told that it is necessary to squish or subjugate some Thing, or some People, for some obviously self-profiting Reason.

 

Ego.

 

Third, Johnstone's conclusion highlights the fact that Wisdom, paradoxically, always begins with us individually. Usually, with one's "teacher" (our inner or selected outer) sending us back to the meditation cushion.

 

At least, while we're on the cushion grappling with self and Self, we're usually not in a position to be harming others.

 

 

The moral? — Simpleton or not?

 

Johnstone's view (and mine) may seem simplistic. But, if I'm reasonably certain of anything in my elderly decrepitude, it is 'that'.

 

That last word is a wry pun. The reference will be obvious to anyone with traces of Advaita Vedanta in their bones.