Our Mortality Should Unite Us by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2022-09-19 at 23:02:54 )

Our Mortality Should Unite Us by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

Listen to a reading of this article:

"We are all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it does not. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing."-Charles Bukowski

A jet airliner opens up and sends its passengers falling to earth. You would expect them to scream, to cry, to cling to each other in fear, to prepare for the end, to pray, to think about their loved ones, but they do not. Instead, they turn on each other and start fighting.

"I hate you! I hate you!" they scream while flailing their fists at each other on their way down.

Some try to strangle each other to death. Some try to steal from each other. Some try to climb on top of others so that the other will die a fraction of a second sooner. Others cling to their possessions yelling "You will never take what is mine!" and kick at anyone who comes too close.

They are all headed toward the same fate at the same time, but they turn on each other and try to get one over on each other during their short plummet instead of making peace with each other and with what is to come.

That is what our bizarre relationship with mortality is like. A giant vagina opens up in the sky and births babies who grow as they fall to their deaths, and they spend that short time hating, fighting, manipulating, and scheming against each other.

Of course it does not feel quite that way. Because of the way humans happen to perceive time it does not feel like a fast plummet toward death. From our point of view it seems to last just long enough for us to forget what is happening, to get distracted and get caught up in drama and conflict and opinions and grudges, and lose our focus on the great splat that awaits us below.

But that is what is happening.

We are all engaged in an intimate dance with death, whether we acknowledge that that is what is happening or not. We are in the thick of it. Everything we do in life is a ball that we are bouncing off the wall of that definite end from wherever we happen to be standing. It is the other end of the span of time where we get to be doing stuff on this planet, opposite where we are now. Death is standing on the same court as we are, hitting back every ball we serve.

It is easy to avoid coming to an authentic relationship with this predicament if you are not an authentic person, or if you do not expect to die any time soon, or if you do not love anyone with much depth. To truly, deeply love someone is to immediately plunge into an acute awareness of death, because the more intensely you love another the more that relationships inevitable end moves into your attention. But as long as you avoid taking that leap and live a life of distraction and shallowness, it is possible to spend a long time pretending your dance with death is not happening.

And that is how we are able to pretend we are at odds with each other. To pretend it makes sense to live in a competition-based society where we need to claw our way overtop everyone else in order to get ahead in a zero-sum rat race that can not exist without losers. To pretend it makes sense to live in a world where there are wars, where there is militarism, where there is hatred and selfishness and greed and defensiveness. The whole game depends on everyone spending long expanses of time forgetting that none of us get out of this alive.

And then before you know it you are sitting alone in a frail, feeble body, wondering why it hurts to walk and where your lover went and what the hell that whole mess was all about.

None of the achievements you spent your life chasing mean anything anymore.

None of the times you got picked over someone else for something you wanted feel special or significant anymore, and you can not remember why they ever did.

You are certainly not sitting there wishing you had spent more time at the office or bought fancier clothes or had a car that could impress your neighbors. All you want is to see the people you do not get to see anymore, and maybe a hug.

If we could see it all play out quickly, or just perceive what we already know with greater consciousness and lucidity, we would never choose to live our lives the way the powerful want us to live them. And there is no way we would consent to systems which demand that we do. A whole lot of perception management goes into keeping us from seeing clearly what is going on here, and what they are taking from us, and how much better this world could be.

What a circus is right.

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