Naked and spectacular

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2010-12-02

How safe is this world?

Late at night we all desire the warmth and comfort of dreams or love.  This seems to be a daily need.  We want nothing but to go somewhere we know we are safe, a place where we can become vulnerable enough to sleep or vulnerable enough to open ourselves up to another person.

And yet we spend so much of our time on the streets, where we do not feel safe.  What is the fear of spending a night on the streets?  That we can never allow ourselves to feel safe enough to be vulnerable enough to sleep.  We can sit down, we can rest, but we are not in dream, we are not in love.  We are guarded, we are clothed.  This is not satisfying because every day we must become naked, every day we must shed our protective barriers and reveal ourselves to a safe and contained section of the world; our bed or our partner.

We then ask ourselves why the streets are not safe.  Or rather, why do we perceive the streets as unsafe?  The streets are where the strangers come together and we have been taught to fear the stranger.  The streets are the inevitable realm of chaos in between our trips to the workplace, the school, the institutions of control and comfortable reassuring understanding.

We understand the social context of our institutions and we all play by the rules.  On the streets there are no rules.  We so fear the chaos of the streets that our politicians must create laws and hire gangs of intimidatory thugs to patrol the streets and enforce those laws which barely scratch the surface of restraining the chaos of the streets.

Life cannot be contained and even though we have created what we like to call civilisation and we participate primarily in consumption and production rather than the circle of life we are still living creatures and inevitably intertwined into life itself, despite our efforts to appear as robots or to behave as ants, busily selflessly serving our queen.

We are not like we talk about.  We are dynamic multi-dimensional creatures of infinite complexity and despite all these thoughts of fear that cloud our over-developed under-utilised brain we are living in a state of love and the streets are not actually dangerous after all and we all know that personally we prefer faith and trust and comfort to the ability to take advantage of some stranger by removing a few dollars from their sleeping pocket.

We don't want to walk through streets of fear and threat.  We think we must because we believe the news and the news tells us to be afraid of each other and this makes us confused rather than truly afraid because deep down we know that fear is boring and unnecessary and inappropriate.

Not so deep down, just below the surface thoughts of the incessant manic conscious mind, we realise that we have the ability to choose a place where we can sleep in vulnerability and dream of our most loved and know for sure throughout this restful night that even the possibility that our bag will be stolen is remote and even so the risk of losing the bag is insignificant in comparison to the value of knowing that we are safe in this world.  That we are in it together and that even when we have an unpleasant confrontational moment with another person we both carefully select and induce this experience from one another and perhaps we should appreciate each other afterwards.

However, culture is an organic living system and we decide every moment how it is going to manifest.  The limits of entropy as an explanation are limited in a world where millions of people are aware that their reality is their choice every minute of every day of their lives and that all their brothers and sisters are in on it too.

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."
- Robert Anton Wilson

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