Scribe
Scribe
2014
A Matter of Will
It occurs to me that an early shielding from the ugliness of life can be a good thing for children: growing up in a relatively safe, predictable environment.
Being surrounded by a huge extended family of doting elders, teaching and role-modeling family mores, gave me an important structural stability. As such, this is sorely lacking for kids around the world, with strife and warfare at their doorsteps from the very beginning of their sojourn here.
On the other hand, the necessary growth beyond conditioning to achieve one’s own world view and separate it from an internalized conditioned one is the challenge of living an authentic, personal life. The old cliché reference—if you will—of “You can take the kid out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the kid” is apropos. To literally take the “country out of the kid” is something that we must all do for ourselves. Else we are simply products of nurture, closed off to the essential nature of our ultimate being
(whatever that may be).
The oft-spilled blood of religious fervor is historically linked to the outside nurturing of a conditioned-nature self-identity, internalized into a selective “others” rejection and expendability, and sanctified as “God’s will.” A matter of will that really matters to how we live with ourselves and with others.
Carl
Sunday, May 18, 2014