What? Why has this person woken up spontaneously at 5:55am on a Sunday — a person who most often prefers to share/express in personal terms or in short paradoxes (or not at all) about “universal” topics — to post at length a THIRD day in a row about that passage from Justice Kennedy that so many of us are passing around in celebration, not merely forgetting to understand and celebrate the real “win” but also propagating something harmful to genuine progress?
That passage has some terrible issues. I could write at length about how it undermines and hurts true understanding of union, family, sacrifice, profundity, humanity, love and a zillion other things (including human rights!), but that’s not even my central offer here.
Most importantly, do you see its fallacious attempt to “solve something in the same consciousness in which it was created”? (Einstein!) Do you see how it takes the *very same* artificial reasons some people were using to define marriage, family and love-expression in a certain way and *thereby* making it special or profound to some and withholding it from others … and now makes those the *very same* reasons to “give it to all”?!!! Do you see the terrible (and at once hilarious) irony, the circular nonsense of it all? And more significantly, do you see how, at this amazing juncture of transformation and greater possibility, we are actually propagating something toxic rather than genuinely healing division at its very foundation?
I speak up repeatedly because this error stands at the very HEART-AND-SOUL of what “matters” (all that is material!) — to all the big-big P-words that so many of us who are passing that paragraph around, so very deeply care about healing — POWER, PRIVILEGE, PATRIARCHY… things that I rarely, if ever, speak or write about directly (precisely due to the below)…!
All of these things have something fundamental to their core. They are rooted in a “problem” that first took something intrinsic and gave it extrinsic value in the world of form, creating the first separation/division that Nature never intended. (Examples of things intrinsically available to all within Nature’s harmonious design: belonging, value / worth, equality, access, agency, choice, freedom, movement, power, dignity, faith, Love…) Then they create the next separation/division Nature never intended, by withholding that supposedly “valuable” thing from certain specific others, saying “You don’t deserve it” for this reason or that. This “other” group (never divided by Nature, remember?) is first confused, and then feels hurt, maimed and oppressed, whether for moments or for millennia, internalizing this artificially created pain and imbalance (again, that Nature never intended or created in the first place) so much that it soon becomes the “truth” of their existence, and they are conditioned out of realizing that that extrinsic thing is within — it was and continues to be, intrinsic all along, available to experience and enjoy. Pure joy, accessible in a moment’s realization, is elusive, fleeting or altogether gone, and of course the external world of form has been radically and unnaturally reshaped to match and continuously reinforce this lack of access, both in concept and in actuality. While some quietly suffer this pain for eons, passing it on to generations and generations, other members of this group (or from a sympathetic group triggered to act and live by a “cause”), use all their incredibly valuable energy and life force to “fight” for recognition and rights in this extrinsic, artificially generated value system and world of form, all to claim back what was already theirs in Nature all along, and really already is — intrinsically — but is no longer accessible to experience and enjoy because the artificially created external world of form so greatly invisibilizes, reduces and removes access to it, and the shackles do manifest as so very real at the ankles and wrists. And so we go, round and round in nonsensical, futile circles, draining precious, precious life force energy and spirit and imagination — our most valuable resource of all and the very essence of being and Creation — that could be used to actually experience the gift of life and (exponentially!) generate peace, joy and love by simply being (human).
You see, dear friends? We’re keeping ourselves inordinately busy (first creating and then) fighting artificially generated division to avoid living and loving the true, wonderful life of our own greatest potential! This is the real cancer / auto-immune dis-ease / terrorism / war of the human condition — our own cells madly attacking our own life, manifesting repeatedly in the physical realm! Please let’s take ourselves off this illusory treadmill and then we can organically *go* somewhere! (And experience how there’s nowhere to go but here and now! Smile.)
Happy Pride — let’s be proud in the right way, be proud in our intrinsic value, be proud in our Nature!
P.S.
All that paragraph from Justice Kennedy needed to say is something like: “Everyone should have equal rights to experience and express their profound love, commitment, union and family unit through marriage, and we are so happy this is now the case across America.”
And if one wished to go a step further:
“We also recognize that in a truly liberated world, these very things can be expressed and experienced in a multitude of ways. *And* we recognize that rights are not necessarily the same as opportunity, so while fairness is now within our reach, justice is constantly under construction!”