self interest is the prescription for mass extinction

[click image]

.

And I'm not just talking about other creatures. People even realize how murderous are their remarks when it comes to this stuff, but, since it interferes with their unswerving allegiance to taking care of number one, The American Way, they blank that out, turn everything that militates against their position into cartoons, abstractions, worthlessness. It is NOT only wealthy sociopaths who do this. There are plenty of not-wealthy-at-all sociopaths hard at it, and the more you hold up the mirror, the more bulletproof arguments you have against them, the more determined they become. They are locked in a dream, and it seems perfectly reasonable to most people that when one comes upon someone locked in this kind of nightmare for all living things, one shakes them awake and assures them it was all a bad dream, they're perfectly safe now. But no. Obviously, it doesn't work that way, now does it? The nightmares they form by taking untenable "truisms" like everybody-looking-out-for-number-one-is-the-right-thinking-adult-view-in-a-civilized-and-free-society are not the kind another can help them with, unless somewhere within their ability to discern real feelings there is an accompanying urge to uphold them, brave all the supposedly horrible consequences of loosing their death grips on murderously propagandistic bullshit that has been passed off as consensus so long it actually IS a type of consensus, to really SEE.

The ancients called this "stopping and looking". Sounds so simple. Enlightening beings cannot FORCE sentient beings awake. They have to want it like a drowning man wants air before they will take any guidance. Some of them are strangely drawn to it, but it is turned into entertainment—not serious, just soothing—most of the time. The number of people who are capable of "leaving the world" and "stopping and looking" at reality—which is never not right there under your nose—are very, very few indeed.

In all my decades of study I continually come across passages where masters remind one that it cannot be said. Well, in point of fact, it CAN be said. Straight out. Completely reasonably. But it sounds like wuwu gibberish to most people, and like, oh, well, right, of course, but... to others. There is no "but" about it. You ARE Charles Munger. You ARE the rings of Saturn. That fucking gnat batting at yer monitor is YOU.

I used to say you are life itself, but that doesn't quite cover it. Material we don't think of as sentient is us too. We all love the notion put forth, it's said, first by Carl Sagan: We are star stuff. But still almost no one grasps the import, even after our feeble science has either proven it or run up against it so many times even they are forced to say that everything there is or can happen seems so vexedly completely dependent on the observer.

Nope. It eludes you anyway.

This is why the crusty old Zen dudes of yore INSISTED that YOU do not exist. Once you've fully assimilated THAT, the rest becomes much easier to take in. I can't for the life of me understand why, with people being slaughtered by drones and squillions of gallons of dread toxins filling up the Gulf of Mexico and the Niger Delta and billions of people starving and polar bears drowning in droves and even America-the-Incomparably-Fat turning into a Third World bastion of neofeudalism before our very eyes, more people have not ceased staying within their own colored lines, mouthing platitudes, mouthing outrages, putting in their time for that almighty paycheck, squinting over the choice of lunchmeat to purchase, all of that, to give life to what HAS to be the most burning desire in anything capable of thought, to get to the truth and uphold it above everything else, treasure it above everything else, AND WORK TO MAKE IT INTO A BRILLIANT FUTURE.

Every single speck of everything, to include even what people call nothing, is nothing apart from YOU.

You are not it; it actually is you.

There. Piece of cake. I've told you. So now you can fix everything, right?

.
love, 99
.