Higher Laws Part 3

Something that has always dumbfounded me is the lack of time we are led to believe unavailable to us. It's like everything is instant,and instantly we have less time that ever. There are the 24 hour conveniences, the 24 delivery and the world of instant data at our fingertips 24 hours a day. And we are made to think we have no time?

I cannot and will not subscribe to this. I have all the time in the world, and time is all I really have. When we listless or perhaps haplessly float in a sea that pushes us this way and that at the whims of racketeers and marketers, we are too busy torn every which way. Our minds are muddled. We begin to comply with those terrifically organized things that make us a part of a whole. Being a part of a whole, despite sounding comforting, serves to make each of us slower as a group than any part individually.

We become pitted one against the other, at least in this modern age of commercialism. Buy this and be that and you will be happy. Buy more and be more. How does this serve anybody? This serves only to remove the image we hold deep inside and puts us in a state that shows not what we are but what others think we are, or should be.

It also persuades us to spend our time differently. When we have constant contact with an inanimate device that pantomimes life, we have less time for life. I was asked once, years ago, how I found the time to write. It was during one of those early years of my son's life when most of my day was taken up in caring for him. The question astounded me. How do I find the time? If you have a television, social media accounts and a smartphone (hopefully someday that term will sound stupid or passe) you have the time to write.

But it's more than all of that. It's more than the constant contact with the machine, the commercial machine, the propagator of fear and consumption. It's the rapid fire changing of images. It's the swiftly moving sidebars, periphery of too much of nothing at all. It's the constant distraction both external and internal. It's this notion that we have learned as multitasking. This splits our attention and our concentration in many, many ways. When we are fractured like this, we have lost our focus and therefore our concentration. Once our concentration is gone, we have no choice than to follow a predestined path chosen by those who want our money and therefore our time. Never forget than if time is money then money is time. Take money out of the equation and all we are left with is time.

When we think about our life, some 80 to 90 years for most of us, that's a whole lot of time. It's a whole lot of time only because I have never felt like life is short. So many statements, do this or that because life is short, and all of that. I think the opposite. I feel like life is very very long. Should we be unhappy, our life becomes exponentially longer. I also feel like the root of all unhappiness is the disconnect between the pursuit of what we do verses what we really need to be. Unhappiness is the deferred destiny in each one of us. It's the use of time to do something that lies outside of those Higher Laws we all need to subscribe to at every moment, at every turn.

There is this quiet that comes when we really focus on making our art. It's this point in our practice of making art when the world stills. It's this moment when we are free from the world of electronic gadgets and fossil fuels when nothing outside of our work matters. When we have dedicated the time, the energy, our very essence to a task of creativity, it matters not what sorts of clothes we wear, or what sorts of things we have, or what sorts of services we buy. We are consumed not by the system, but we are consumed into the eternal art that will last longer than any fleeting feeling of purchase or purchasing power.

Radically speaking here, I am suggesting a few things. First and foremost, I am suggesting that all of us immediately stop what we are doing and either resume or begin any creative act. At this moment, I am suggesting that we all start to write poetry or novels in notebooks, that we all start composing the next generation of music or scrap convention and build some jazz, that we all start to paint with water colors or charcoal or blood. I feel like is imperative to understand what it is to be human. I am suggesting that all of us seek out our higher laws and I believe these will lead us away from fast food and pills. I feel like we can make deposits to the larger bank of human endeavors and let the bank of our dross e-life go bankrupt.

When we strip the mundane, the superfluous and the unnecessary away I'm willing to bet that we lose the desire for fear and consumption. When we turn off the electric gadgetry and focus on imagination, I am willing to believe that we will all have ample time to make art. When we settle and find the quiet in ourselves we will hear and see and know our higher laws. I believe everyone has these higher laws and when we all follow them, what a world we will have.