Of Unity

Of Unity

By Mark Berelekhis I offer thanks to Jobs and Gates for helping me erect a thousand shiny screens between me and the world, a neighbor’s icy gaze, another human heart. Encased in an impregnable cocoon– coasting on hashtags, bouncing off Facebook walls– I toil from dawn till dusk to sow and harvest the illusion of connection. What do I know of unity? A transient alliance against a rival sports team, against an ideology, against the one percent. Discordance makes a flimsy foundation– values shift, teams relocate, fortunes are lost or gained. The lens inside my skull is on the fritz, capturing stills of enmity and strife, where there is only love. But this, alas, is all I know of life....
The Ego and Public Feedback

The Ego and Public Feedback

When we examine nature and human behavior, we discover that it is driven by ego, which cares about only two things: feeling pleasure and avoiding pain. If we examine ourselves closely, we will realize that apart for basic necessities, we inherit all desires from the society we live in: what we eat, how we dress, the jobs we choose, the goods we covet, and our attitudes toward the rest of the world. We acquire our preferences from those whom we are taught to respect and admire.   Moreover, once our basic needs are secured, some develop a desire to rule over others and take advantage of them. Once we determine what we want, we start looking for ways to get what we want. This is why we are so dependent on the society – it is a supplier of our desires and the means to satisfy them. For this reason, if we build a society that values cooperation and compassion for others, we will avoid selfishness, over-consumption, and pursuit of fame, fortune, and power in order to gain others’ recognition and approval. One way or the other, the ego demands connection with the society while envisioning itself as the ruler. But society can “implant” us with the opposite values, without shattering the ego: Do be great, be proud, be all you can be and more! But do it in a constructive way rather than destructive. In other words, the ego, which is used to gaining personal benefit at the expense of others, can gradually be transformed – through the influence of the environment, the society we are in. Picture a person...
Internal Enemy

Internal Enemy

We have always been egoistically pushed forward by nature; we have always followed it blindly; in other words, we were instinctively pushed forward by our desire to keep fulfilling ourselves, and as it kept manifesting in us, we strove towards wealth, fame, power, knowledge—anything at all. As a result, we have reached certain satiety, and our egoism has come to a dead end; we cannot even say that it keeps growing. On one hand, there is a certain line of reevaluation of our values: “Is it right to continue to strive towards the attainment of fame, knowledge, wealth, and power? Is this the meaning of our development?” On the other hand, we see that our dependence on each other forces us to introduce some other international economic formulas, which must take our interdependence into consideration, in other words, if I will suffer, you will also suffer, no matter how egoistic it now appears to be. Even today, I still try to build my happiness on the suppression of others, base my power on being stronger than others, and by collecting more. We must take the integration of the world into consideration. And if we do not correspond to this integration, we will not be able to understand the way we are supposed to advance in accordance with the world and nature. Today we feel nature’s challenge, its pressure on us with the only purpose of making us gradually begin to change ourselves to become like it. This has never happened before. If we were to look at it from an ontological perspective, we would see that nature has always...
Jerry Mander Interview

Jerry Mander Interview

http://youtu.be/Y_ptn-cNBJA Jerry Mander, executive director of the International Forum on Globalization talks about the centralization of media and effect of...
Ego – From Birth to Adulthood

Ego – From Birth to Adulthood

By Irene Rudnev We are an old species!  Nobody knows where we came from, but we certainly have a long history – by our standards at least.  Scientists tell us we started as goo, while creationists insist we were sculpted from clay by the divine hand.  But regardless of how we began, it was from one seed, one lump of clay, or one puddle of goo. And if dust is what we all are returning to, then there is going to be one cloud of it flying around the earth. No matter the matter, this is what we are all about – oneness. Either way, once we took human form, we became mankind and embarked on exploring the allotted dimension.  We floated on Tatum’s[1]back through infinite celestial waters, dwelled on a vast, lavish island carried by three giant elephants[2], and roamed virgin flatlands resting on three cosmic whales[3]sleepless in their sacred duty.  All these empyrean colossi were doing an excellent job until we found ourselves on the round globe, where point A has the same address as point Z.  The primordial beasts were laid off and their phantoms discarded.  We finally reached point Z, and a millennia long, blindfolded journey came to an end. The bandeau concealing reality was removed, and we entered a round world, which turned out to be surprisingly small – in fact, perhaps even smaller than our previously occupied, flat habitats.  At least in those bygone days, we could still dream about some distant terra incognita[4], filled with imaginary wonders and captivating riches, where we would be able to move one day, in case we...
The Story Of One

The Story Of One

By Irinaru My dear souls, behold your story: How eons ago you fell from your glory And crushed in abyss and broke in sparks, And darkness swallowed one loving heart… We lost our memory, lost our wholeness, And got entranced in the ego’s call, It gave us orders, it sang lullabies, “Hey mortals, go reproduce, survive!” We took its course, we did as it told, We sold each other for a pinch of gold. We ran for pleasures, we killed and stole, We threw the others against the wall… The time ran out; there is no more- Today tsunami, tomorrow – war! Wake up, my siblings! Dig out your sparks! Dust off your wings; link-in your hearts! My dear souls, remember your story- We fell in this world to live for bestowal! We’re good for nothing but only that, So, saddle your ego and make your bet! Unsheathe your sword made of love and light, Attack your hatred, come out and shine – Shine for the others, to them be true; Heal them, show them the loving you! And then, when all of us do the same, We’ll earn the right to be one again…   art by Alexander...