Today's sophisticated lover is giddy, and sometimes rises above jealousy. Why plan your lover's life? Freedom is easy, that's what we really want to believe. Yet, is freedom easier than the self-slavery of your neuroses? Freedom means that you need to think for yourself. Illustrious, imaginative ones: to be given that chance blessing of surplus spiritual and material energy to live, to create! But why is experience so often accompanied by jaded dreams? Some of our most brilliant cats and dogs are saved, so they need to believe, by their lust alone.

Remember - too many of us begin with no knowledge, no experience, no means of comparing the ideas thrust upon us: and we get hurt because we know nothing, but allow ourselves to be led, stupidly, blindly into old instincts of worn-out guilt and shame. Deep down, we want freedom and joy: the lust for slavery can get jaded. Despondency comes, neither so much from committing a sin, nor so much as from making a mistake, but from boredom: we can't escape that hopeless sense of limitation that undermines the last lurking wish to get more from time and imagination...

We pretend to need all the things we have not experienced yet. Freedom from inhibition is the new aim. The memory of sin and guilt fades as experience and imagination lead us beyond ourselves. We refuse to believe that we can be wrong anymore, because we presume an intellectual kind of conscience: it fits the bill for the past several generations of instinct-poets, each of whom knows best. All leaders of modern philosophy agree that thinking yourself out of a hole is preferable to fantastic beliefs in grace or blessing. Faith is fine, but only if you have something with which to pay for it. We're taught that joy is an expensive feeling! But that's nonsense. Even so, despair is still held to be cheaper - and more available. How come so many of us are righteous? While we criticize this or that politician as being a liar and a cheat, we hardly ever stand back to look into ourselves... We take good luck for granted. Yes we do. Otherwise, why should we feel so strongly that we deserve so much..?

Our emotions, the very substratum of our perceptual sensibilities, have been transformed by modern civilization. But we guess - we still only guess! Given our magical science and the blessings of technological civilization withal, nobody knows what it will be like in a hundred years!

To return to my original pang about indifference, and to ask, "Why?" is to watch people get angry with you! Don't ask why today! Who you are and where you are - that's all... It's like accusing someone of being middle class, a small shopkeeper - a bourgeois... You could get away with that fifty years ago, but not anymore. Today, people will only allow you to be as glib, blase, current and to the point as you possibly can. One of our greatest "problems" today is that people don't really want to see themselves at all...

But I'm going to start by not accusing anybody of anything. My point is plain: we're very good at forgetting how much we need to beget fresh bloodbaths... We're careful to promote crime - even as we pretend to ignorance, or worse - as we play at innocence and virtue... This is too simple for you? You don't believe that you ever committed any crimes? So many terrible things have happened this century, and so many uncontrollable realities threaten our security, that it's no wonder whole populations are immersed in pre-programmed fantasies of material consumption and the vain wish to emulate stardom! Oh I know, the wonders are many, but the disasters are too many and too costly, and they profit too few. More than ever, we need to escape responsibilities. So we do!

But you argue that most people are now material realists, and so, we have no need to question the pronounced and inherited hypocrisies that we live by... We all come to conclude: "I'm guilty, just as you." The new answer for the duration of modernity has said: "We're innocent because we're human beings, not gods." So, we're more limited by our collective self-conception than ever before! We even get angry at people when they accuse us of being hypocrites, and becoming evasively unconscionable... We're allowed to be bad because we need to "be ourselves." But usually, we couch it in other terms: that we behave as human beings - even if we don't want to...

I feel burdened with a wish not to oversimplify, and I want to reach a particularly modern conception of humanity... We have a propensity for idealism. We prefer such things to inner truth. Because - ideas are easier to live with! Not only that, but the knowledge that makes a man cannot be spoken with words. Indeed - it is a deeper wish and a subtler value that we long to re-experience. To establish our self-conception at last. But when we can't... Idealism enjoys a revival whenever the answers we most want aren't forthcoming: we grasp it to survive. Human beings will search for a harmony of heart with universe, incongruous as that may sound to some of you. We believe that the reality around us must possess some meaning intrinsic for us, exactly because we are here to experience everything, and for a purpose - to understand it... However, we don't really derive meaning from things "as they are." We like to imagine that "reality" has this intrinsic expression. Yet, in truth, we use the mind to express ourselves, if you like, through reality... In fact, we end up giving things the meanings that we desire for them. Yes, that's true. But are the meanings that we give to each thing really true? Our greatest thinkers teach us to doubt over the "wishful meanings" that we make of the world. Dreams and desires aspire to transmute the mundane reality into an expression of fulfillment. Often however, whatever we like to call the truth doesn't really come so very close... Articulation loses a lot of what we knew to be true - as primary intuitions and elations... (Maybe you think I'm too crass? And what about yourself? Whatever you attack, maybe it's lacking in yourself... How about that?)

The point is - we no longer need to blame ourselves for being ourselves! We accept the paradox and still lie, but now, in the name of many personal emblems for the new age - in the names of Glory, Self, Faith, Righteousness - anything you need to believe is true... We try to beggar the truth with pride and so deny our hearts with fresh excuses. The new world is made of excuses and the mass mutual cognizance of sharing like dispositions. Being the same as each other gives great relief in many societies, especially in the far East. Westerners get a kick out of imitating each other's how-to strategies, and as we do so, we also pretend that we are clever enough to be original. So, we feel comfortable about being who we are; and we don't have to look too far for reasons not to be so good as we ought... The reason I truck circles round all this grey muck is brought on by the urge embedded in each of us: identity is a creative wish, that instinctive compulsion to stimulate creativity. Imagination gives us ideal actions...

Human identity responds to contemporary demands; consequently, imagination will surge or wane, and concepts of truth and error are molded into semblances of progress and sanity. We make believe that we understand the most "important" things. (Hopefully, this banal gloss doesn't sound too Orwellian for you...) I think many good examples abound... Look at how ideas for "democracy" and "freedom" are believed to equate with an idea of the good life. But for who? Perhaps only those who already enjoy the privileges of wealth can believe that concepts like "democracy" instantly deliver us into the good life... Of course, compelling dreams satisfy an adequate myth, no matter how meaningless those myths are for the real world of passions, social chasms, small plans and accidental good chances. In past times, personal and social lot were more viscerally attached to the hardships of life. Faith and fidelity were big truths long ago... But of course you can replace them with egalite and fraternite once it becomes acceptable, finally, to sleep with your neighbor's wife. You get my meaning, so I won't say it again...

A proposal for understanding: imagination is suspended from compassing the why and wherefore about the many belief systems that help us to conceive of all things. Dreams and traumas and obsessions are outside conscious help, too. Most of all, we are not free of ideas. We cannot usurp our natural estate, which is to suffer, and then rejoice in a heritage of accumulated and transformed ideas - ideas that compel us to complete the human equation... To sense, to believe, to act and to articulate. And yet, the human lineage is much shorter than we realize: we're made of ideas. Some maintain that all of us hold the same beliefs as ever, and that we formulate prejudices upon those values - upon the emotive interpretations by which we can most easily make "cosmic truth and eternal ideas" recognizable to our present dispositions, which are shaped from familial, socialized modes. We live, subjected to the world we try to objectify - with science and social plan. Humanity is a species of miserable knowledge. Before creation, at the foot of physical truth, the soul aspires upward to freedom, joy and perfect love; but life climbs in front of us to present us with serious limitations. Place and time of birth qualify your chances for identity.

Today, ugliness is the same thing as something terrifying. The amoral murder scares all of us, as does the banal acceptance of global mayhem, natural and man-made disasters - wars bought and sold - meltdowns, starvation, environmental genocide. We endure all this wrong, mostly by means of ignorance. Many of us feel it's quite acceptable to play at innocence and remain impotent. But this imbalance between the peaceful haves and warring have-nots - why doesn't it terrify us more? I don't really know... This disease of indifference inures us to the state of horror - perhaps because we have no choice but to abide with awareness and accept that we cannot change things with wishes alone. So, we escape consciousness. Many smugly pretend that escaping the horror is as easy as living in America or Europe. Maybe nobody knows the difference between a good life and an indifferent one... Then again, did you grow up in the ghettoes of Brooklyn, Detroit or Buffalo?

Study the dead to bury the living, dear gentleman. Earn your respect. What is "oriental resignation" all about? Accepting your lot... People in the far East call it, "quietism." Actually, oriental quietism goes back to the time when the subjects of generals, warlords and emperors needed some more sophisticated method to be ineffectual slaves and flunky dummies; even today, calling oneself a "quietist" is less humiliating than "coward." Quietism and devotion weren't merely species of cowardice: they were a sign of honor. Sometimes, remaining silent was a sign of low birth, but being too close to power was also a good reason to remain a humble servant, no matter one's overall social rank... Long ago, some elements of Chinese society absorbed the foreign idea of "Buddhist acceptance" even as, later on, the strict domestic rules articulated by Confucius were universally promoted... It does seem obvious, however, that the term "oriental resignation" is a close correlative to the status quo of subservience. Indeed, it's easy to suggest that the rigid feudal order of the ancient society explains precisely why Buddhism was attractive to many Chinese, and Asians, generally. Perhaps the desirable peace of mind, and the correspondent social equation of "oriental acceptance, resignation and quietism," were intended by Buddha to mean that no matter what you do, you'll be at peace, and - enlightened - if you do not mind whatever it is you end up doing; in other words, working a fast food grill ought to feel as okay as being a hoity-toity aerospace engineer... Anyway, I suppose the one most important thing to keep clear is that Buddhism has had a deeper impact upon the character of Tibetans than the Chinese.

Back to my original thought: what's this thing called indifference? What do I mean - to suggest that it's some kind of disease..? Is indifference congenital or contagious? Maybe you believe that indifference is merely a symptom of some more prolix anxiety, like vanity... If you think I'm wrong, then that's fine. After all, what could I really intend by accusing you of indifference - besides screwing your head with that inappropriate pathological metaphor?

In everyday lingo, indifference is carelessness, or a lack of concern. And if we claim that we really don't care about anything that happens to us, then everyone would agree that that would probably be worse than indifference. At the beginning of the travelogue, I said that I didn't care about what happens to me - but I said so just to hook you. It's like saying, I enjoy being attracted to girls who wear cheap undress: my self-negligence is supposed to be, like theirs, lustfully alluring, and as affordable, too...

"Use me, use me, I don't care what you do to me." Those darling, cute pop-singers say the same thing in Swedish all the time. It's true: you really are encouraged to find a girl who wants to do anything, and she knows she'll enjoy it - shamelessly! ...To speak more honestly than I can: if I say I'm indifferent and don't care what happens to me, then you want to know why... It's only a line? A mockery upon self-pity? My failure is showing? Sure. So - what if I say I'm only carefree! You tell me, doctor...

For the last time, look at the core of the ultramodern situation: it is defined by our personal, collective disposition. We are the sum total of two thousand years and more of self-consciousness. Today, we are in love with self-hate because we can't abide with whom we've become. My mouthful demands more poetry than this truck allows. I'm exhausted by a desert midnight all too devoid of high-fat dairy drive-ins!

I light candles on top of indifference and feel absolved of all sins of omission... I'm doing a good thing, producing this CD ROM by myself; only a little bit of pocket change (which I have yet, and probably won't bother, to collect) comes courtesy of the Tibetan and Mongolian Affairs Department - one small division in the bureaucracy of a renegade concept for a state in absentia on a dinky island called Taiwan. The whole idea of a nation reminds me of that dear gent, the Dalai Lama, like a concept of freedom not yet attained... Like enlightenment itself. Then again, we needn't go too far back in time, when the Dalai Lamas were obliged to turn a blind eye, and in fact, depended on the miserably unfair feudal structure of Tibet for their livelihoods, too.

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copyright © 2001
by David Antoniuk