To find ourselves is to free ourselves!
9/26/2016

 

Alone in what others call darkness is solitude. It is a place where piercing eyes have no power, vocalized hostilities and jest are silenced, and the fear of raging fists does not exist. There is only peace and contentment, no happiness guaranteed nor fear and despair. It is a place that society fears while gathered together because they cannot control it and will try to destroy it when simple discouragement of it does not produce conformity.

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With this kind of solitude, poverty is the rule for many here. But intellectual solitude is the rule for all at many stages of enlightenment when freedom is the desire. It is a place few understand because few explore it. Yet, this doesn’t simply apply to physical freedom.  No.  This is applicable to freedom from fear, depression, and everything.

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Make no mistake that the exploration of this place for many is not always done voluntarily. In fact it is quite the contrary due entirely to the unintended consequences of acts of aggression by others; acts of aggression that are not readily understood as such until they are separated from the glob of the collective and applied directly to the individual.  The very nature of acceptance by others as a society and any group lesser than and rejection by such often leads many to these places that those with acceptance, clinging desperately to maintain it or blissfully ignorant in having it, to fear those in intellectual and or physical solitude. 

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And often physical solitude is induced by coerced intellectual solitude.  Social mandates and whims are tremendously powerful because we desire acceptance.  Rigid socially constructed norms demand compliance in order to preserve one’s physical security.  This can be seen in history by the expulsion and eradication of so many people through legalities and war.  And for what reason do people reject and hate and destroy the lives of others through all aspects of conflict?

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Their failures to recognize and comprehend the context of the situations belonging to their targets of ridicule and hostility are always the reasons.  This means that people straying for any reason from the group mentality of acceptance are often physically removed from them, even if the distance is just a few feet away in a set of classroom desks from the other children to a home or apartment everyone avoids because of a rumor or misunderstanding about the occupant’s life.

Often the accepted can see others in their dark solitude, mostly they cannot. And the accepted fear what they do not understand. Yet they do not realize how their lack of understanding, regardless of nescience or intentional ignorance, put many people there.

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Then the accepted catalog many or all of those in solitude as something to be feared, if not outright monsters, due to the actions of a relative few pushed into dark, despair filled solitude. They don't make the wrong choice or the right choice. The collective of accepted individuals simply make choices based on no understanding of their own goals.  These often, arguably typically, make no considerations of how they will affect others.

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This isn't about political correctness or lovey-dovey compassion and equality. This is about how we see others, our selves, and communicating the differences with our perspectives to grow ourselves and then others through our positive actions. This is about achieving peace through the simple acts of gratitude at the end of the idea.  But at the beginning there is the recognition of trying to follow through our actions to ensure they don’t hinder others, let alone hurt them with intent.

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It may take a lot of effort to understand this process; but does it really take all that much effort to simply say, "Thank you"?  How much effort does it require to show appreciation to another for something they did to make your life easier or more comfortable that doesn’t involve violating your consent?

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People go days, weeks, months, years, decades, and longer being abusive to others and never realizing the burden they put onto them. This is seen in relationships where the woman wants passion but the husband is busy providing security, shelter, sustenance, and financial extras leaving him little time to further pamper his wife as he did when they were courting. She forgets to look at what he is doing instead leading him to not do what she wishes he would do.

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This is seen the morale of employees whom work tirelessly, stepping up to challenges, and while being told for so long how appreciated their efforts have been, never promoted or shown additional value for all they have accomplished.  Of course this is all done by employees not tasked with specific work doing it atop what they are tasked with as those tasked with it are paid for it being done and not doing it for whatever reasons.

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This is seen in the belittling of children who work so hard for their parents’ approval.  So these children grow up and inadvertently raise their children the way they were raised because they didn’t get the approval they wanted, seems fitting that they don’t give it or give it without reason because the time was never invested into understand their childhood difficulties.

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This is seen in how people demand government be used as a necessary evil because other people have governments; because there are bad people in the world, because people can’t get along but can magically work together with the utmost moral scruples in financial efficiency and moral efficiency after violating people in front of a threat to jail them for not paying a fee to be protected from things that may or may not exist.

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Change starts by recognizing the context of what we know. Why do we know it? How well do we understand what we know? When did we learn what we know? These are all questions that change the dynamics of who we are when self reflecting.

And when we understand these concepts we begin to realize that the dark solitude we feared others have gone to is now our only true bastion of freedom. We begin to understand how and why others are in theirs. We begin to understand the struggle others have endured. We begin to understand our own goals and what freedom really is.  But what is this dark solitude?

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It is the security of peace of mind inside your own mind.  It is about knowing you are safe inside your own mind because you can control it, even when people are nasty and vile to you.  You need only separate yourself from them to make external peace so you can break down their poison to examine it for the venom they employed it as.  And that is the important part.

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If we willingly take from others such things it is poisonous.  Yet when they try to hurt us it is venomous.  The difference is enlightening to learn.  The path to this enlightenment is the struggle for everyone.  Yet the journey there is only the beginning.  Once there, understanding how to break down and understand everything is a new challenge each time.

That is what the dark solitude is.  Facing the fact that we grow mostly alone, but we don’t have to if we make time to invest in listening to others, letting them know they will not be hurt by us with intention because we intend to learn from them to better ourselves too!

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-JLD

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