An interesting read DharmaSpike. Always fun to speculate on such things. I immediately set to responding because it caught my imagination. But reading back what i’d feverishly scribbled and I could see how i might rub people up the wrong way with a really broad-brush approach and seemingly scattered bald assertions and ‘statements of fact’. That’s just the way i seem to go about things though. I prefer general principles to the nitty gritty. Anyway, thought i’d better add this ‘foreword’. LOL.
Empire and culture appear to me to be ‘natural’ building forces
They are always concerned with accumulation. Something is claimed and therefore requires protection from the forces of chaos and dissipation.
Layers accumulate upon layers and an edifice is built.
This is the process of empire; It is blind though.
All impulses to build eventually turn into their exact opposites.
The ‘building’ either runs out of steam and becomes abandoned or it is undermined from its foundations and topples spectacularly.
So called ‘elites’ have less freedom in all this than the rest of us! They are bound to the machine.
Culture and empire always begin consciously; personality is projected forwards with grand intentions, but in the end the process ‘itself’ takes over and anyone that has dealings with it are in danger of being assimilated and subsumed.
To the ‘primitive man’ the labyrinth was ‘of the other-world’. Now it has been built here. This is not ‘bad’ though. It just means the stakes are higher. More can be found and more can be lost.
We are ‘naturally spiritual’ beings. And this too is processed by the ‘machine’ and fed back to us. In the beginning religion might have been ‘mooted’ as a marvellous way to keep the masses in check, but really, the ongoing process has a ‘logic’ and momentum all of its own. No one is in control and those who think they might be, have the hardest time of it.
The process feeds on what lies in the ‘subconscious’.
The would be ‘power brokers’ eventually find out that attempting to dictate the pace, becomes more akin to trying to control a dream.
