View From the Top > Esteemed Reader

There will be Sturm and Drang. There will be a fit of resistance to the change. But here, where we are, there is no other course than to become free. The force to resist automatism will not arise without plumbing the depth of despair that each has buried within. This despair contains the force of unknowing, the power to fire up a figurative furnace to turn the solid to liquid, liquid to vapor, vapor to electronic intelligence.
We are burning. We are being burned alive. The difference between where we’ve been and where we are going is vast. We are weary travelers, but the unknown draws us on.

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:
A friend confessed to me that he feels dismayed—depressed even—at the state of the world; at the ignorant selfishness of our leaders, the quiet acquiescence of the followers. The machinations of the corporate-owned government is really getting him down. You see, he is an idealistic chap. He subscribes to those hopeful, liberal ideals that came to a little life in the Sixties and early Seventies, and is despondent that these values haven’t blossomed into an enlightened society; that the generation that once, in part, acted for the good has become as self-serving and materialistic as the forebears they revolted against.

I share my friend’s disappointment. And I see that we must let it go, and begin again, where we are. We must begin again with a different kind of revolution. A revolution that will not be televised. A revolution based on real acceptance of all. What is needed is a revolution against what is ordinary—because what is ordinary is ignorance—for what is extraordinary, because what is extraordinary is acceptance and seeing.
Of course we constitute the first front in this war on ignorance. When we become angered, outraged, lack of acceptance is the basis. To not accept what is, to selectively ignore is, well, ignorance. All our truculent reactions are premised upon ignorance. We can, like the protesters at Kent State, fight rifles with flowers, albeit proverbial blooms.

In the war against ignorance the fundamental principle is “believe nothing, verify everything.” Ordinarily we are ensconced in the mode of acceptance and rejection, yes and no, agreement and disagreement. This dualistic mindset is our greatest prison. But we can approach everything we hear, everything we see and encounter in a different way. We can ask: “What is it?” Not believing or disbelieving, but verifying, if verification in the particular instance is possible. Like the approach a practitioner takes to a Zen koan, asking “What is it?” Every answer is wrong except whatever understanding is realized in the crucible of our own experience.

Our shallow, assembly-line education conditioned us to formulate cursory opinions and judgments about everything. We refer to the collection of information that has been crammed into every cranny of our overstuffed intellects to formulate an answer to what is before us. We have no patience for the unknown, for mystery, in this “most enlightened” age of technology in which, we are led to believe, all the important questions have been answered. Ascertaining the truth, we think, is more a matter of finding the right reference than discovering that truth for ourselves. And yet now, more than ever, we must exhume that characteristically American trait of thinking for ourselves.
This is an age in which our collective power of discernment is blunted; an age in which we are assaulted with propaganda more forcefully and effectively than even in the darkest period of Soviet glasnost. This propagandizing is so slyly accomplished that we can blithely exist under the delusion that we are thinking for ourselves—making it particularly insidious.

But the media is controlled by a few corporations under the direction of an almost singular agenda. The daily outpouring from the mass media of doctored and contradictory positions keep us constantly occupied with new fallacious premises about which to formulate opinions. And because we are ever busy formulating new opinions about nonsense, we are never free to see the truth that is before us. This smokescreen strategy is impeccably expressed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who recently told his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, what to say at a press conference: “Here’s how you deal with the media. Begin with an illogical premise and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion.” And the media dutifully repeats the claptrap as though it actually means something.

We rarely ask ourselves: What is behind the twaddle? How is the use of meaningless ejaculation meant to distract or mislead us? And what from?

Ignorance cannot be fought on its own terms. To fight against ignorance is to subscribe to the perception that informs it. Instead, the antidote for ignorance is illumination. To illuminate requires that we see more. And to see more, we must be more.

So the real war—the war against ignorance—needs to be waged in ourselves. In the way we approach everything we think, see, hear. And in finding something ever more real, more true, we can discover an appropriate response. Outrage, anger, fear, or even disappointment and disillusionment have no relevance. They are signs of ignorance reacting to ignorance. The first step to being able to see anything clearly is to accept it completely and utterly.

To accept is to love. To love is to invite transformation. May it be so.

—Jason Stern