I’m making another attempt to try to start this website. I’ve tried many times over the past several years, but I always end up not posting or deleting whatever I write. I think I just need to accept that whatever I write I am never going to feel good about. I am never going to feel that it accurately reflects what I think or feel or what the truth is in regard to anything. Maybe that is what I used to hope my writing would do, but I don’t necessarily feel that way now. But I want to try to use it as a way to organize my thoughts and facilitate discussions I have with people in the real world.
For many years of my life I’ve felt very alienated from other people. I have a great curiosity for people and a desire to be around people and talk to people. It just always seems that my interactions with others makes me feel that there is something fundamentally different about my own consciousness. I don’t know if it is just my ego or my lack of social skills or something that holds me back from connecting with others on a deeper level, but it seems when I try to connect with people on a deeper level it feels like there is a barrier to understanding each other. It feels like I have a deep and unending curiosity about other people and a strong commitment to not accepting anything I think I know as fact. It seems like the people I interact with do not have the same tendencies. It feels like whenever I try to connect with others they are making a lot of assumptions about me or about the world in general.
My interest for the past several years increasingly has been how to find or recreate community. To me this means people coming together and living together, helping each other in any way they can, and learning from each other. It has felt to me for a long time that this is missing, and it has been my strong desire to figure out why and how to get it back. I think this is key to solving many other problems in the world. The lack of community leads to a failure to share resources and a huge amount of waste. It seems to me that there are simple solutions to these problems.
At their root it seems most problems in the world are psychological problems. All the problems of waste and violence and greed and poverty ultimately come from a failure for individuals to grapple with their own inner demons or to recognize the inter-dependency of everyone and everything in the world. This is just one very simplistic interpretation, but I do feel it is worth keeping in mind that however you try to diagnose or solve problems in the world, you have to recognize that it is people who are causing the problems. It is possible the world itself has some type of corrupting influence in it that exerts itself on people, and that they have no free will over the actions they are led to take. I have not yet found a way to prove to myself that I do have free will. It seems that most decisions that people make are heavily conditioned by their habits, where they live, what resources they have available, their upbringing, and genetic makeup. Also, we assume we have conscious awareness, although we don’t know what it is or how it comes about. We don’t know necessarily if it is something peculiar to our own mind and whether or not the beings around us have their own unique consciousness or are just some type of automatons.
It seems important to me to recognize all of the things we don’t know in attempting to create or find community so that we can see all of the assumptions that the non-community we are living in are based on. Most modern civilizations seem to be based on a consensus that matter is real, consciousness is generated by the brain, and people are responsible for their actions. They also seem to presuppose that there is a clear chain of causality that can be deduced from the scientific method. In the United States, there is still the notion, probably not a consensus anymore, that America is a democracy, that the experiment of democracy has been a success and is a good model for the rest of the world, that the capitalist system allows for individuals to improve their situation in life, and that the institutions of government are legitimate and are working in the interest of the American people. I think any amount of research, or even a cursory search of the internet, can easily discredit any of those notions and reveal endless evidence to the contrary.
After recognizing all the false notions that the current society is based on, it becomes apparent that there are levels of awareness of the issues and levels of effort people are willing to exert to confront those issues. The question I am most focused on is how to find people who are most aware of the real nature of these issues and who are the most willing to work towards a change. So far it seems in my day to day, there are individuals who I encounter who have a picture of some aspect of what is happening in the world and are working in some way to stand up for what they feel is right, but it is very rare that I find someone who seems to have a clear comprehension of what is happening in the big picture. People seem to latch onto particular fields of human endeavor, such as trying to comprehend what is happening in terms of spirituality/religion, philosophy, politics, or other things, but people who are more focused on gathering this knowledge tend to be less focused on action and also to have a very pessimistic view on the possibilities of action. And it seems in general the people who are more knowledgeable seem to be less in touch with regular people and how they function, and what work life is like for the majority of people. I feel that my life experiences have put me in touch with all these fields of human experience and have given me enough of a framework to recognize what the problems are and be able to work towards a solution. I don’t know if anything I do in this lifetime will have enough of a fruition for me to consider it as a solution, but I have to frame whatever I do as just an iteration, in the hopes that others will see and learn from what I am doing in the same way that I have learned from others and have gained the courage to speak and to act from them.
So the real challenge right now is finding those people. I have met many people over the past few years who are exploring ways to make a better alternative, people with very different political views and from different parts of the country. But I haven’t been able yet to find the community I feel I am looking for, which is why I still feel the need to create it.
Beyond just finding people and having discussions about these topics, I have been wanting for a while to write about certain experiences I have had and what I have learned from them. There are certain things I have experienced that do not conform to anything I have read about or seen despite trying my best to research these types of experiences. I am hoping to finally begin exploring some of these things through this medium.