We’re More than Just I Robot

I’d like to continue the discussion of structure vs. flow cultures. (1)

In my view, a society that imbibes the view of life as an ongoing situation of struggle, conflict and punishment reduces its members after a while to simply moving structures.

It obliges its members to imbibe over time so much suspicion and skepticism that the finer sentiments are lost. It reduces itself to endlessly analyzing its component parts and mostly in the name of threat reduction.

Nightly on TV we’re shown crime dramas, in which murderers, terrorists, aliens and others prey on society. They could be our neighbors, colleagues, or family. To this stultifying view of the social process is added documentaries on border guards, state troopers, customs officers, etc., all of whom again are apprehending people who break the law as a career.

What results, if I’m correct, is a society that’s always looking over its shoulder and becoming sclerotic with fear and anxiety. We cannot dine on such a diet every night without assimilating its fundamentally-fearful view over time.

Linear thinking, analysis, and deductive logic are all favored. But what is lost is what, in my view, turns out to be the higher-dimensional side of life – the experience of flowing together. Rather than being moving structures whose linear, calculating ways are scrutinized, what is lost is the view of people as engaged in ongoing constructive relationships of trust, love and compassion.

Just as a depressed person gradually restricts his or her movement until they end up sitting in a chair, so a society that takes in so much mistrust as is being touted on the airwaves, I believe, ends up not wanting to mix and mingle or to build together.

It isn’t that people are not moving structures. They are. But they’re more than just I Robot.

However only if we trust each other and care for each other is that more seen. If we’re afraid of each other, then the only utility to being in relationship with one another is to see who has our back. And numerous TV programs are reduced to the exploration of that theme.

We’re much more than simply wooden structures moving. To see us that way is called reductionism. We’re reduced to our moving parts and seen only from a vantage point of protectionism. What is lost is spontaneity and aliveness, trust and love.

It may be a long, slow climb out of this pit that we’ve dug for ourselves (or not. It could also be quick) but we’ll have to reconstitute our view of ourselves and society. We’ll have to return to our view of ourselves as a society in flow – in a flow of love, compassion and trust towards one another.

Never mind freeing the republic. We need to free our minds and our hearts or any freed-up republic will become moribund over time.

The Growth Movement of the 1960s-80s explored that domain and then was snuffed out by the financial warfare and attack on constitutional rights that happened before and after the New World Order declared war on society.

The way of the future is none other than the way of Lao Tzu, Lin Chi, and heaven knows how many other masters, which Lao Tzu called “the watercourse way.”

It‘s time to add process to structure, flow to analysis. The physical being needs to become an emotional and spiritual being again as well. The human is a total being and not the cardboard creation of a group that wants control over us.

We need a process-sensitive language. We need to honor process-alive individuals, and in other ways nurture this old/new plant. We need to tweak and discard all that reduced us to moving but wooden structures, heartless and predictable machines.

The human being is a totally alive and spiritual being, the well-spring of love, and deserves to be seen that way. And a lifestyle based on process and flow and mutual love needs to be brought back and re-enshrined among us.

We need to risk throwing away the technology of detection and the weapons of mass propaganda that our popular media have become. We need to return to a body-centered and a heart-centered consciousness in which being together is not a threat to be avoided but a relationship to be mutually enjoyed and encouraged.