30. Of Babies And Blackbirds

To have a clear mind, you have to be aware of an enormous amount of cultural baggage and see through it. Baggage accumulated over a lifetime, some of which is hundreds of thousands of years old, inherited from our parents and educators and they from their parents and so on.

The whole set of societal values, ideologies, belief systems and so on has been handed down to us.

And we have assimilated it all so we can function and fulfill our role in society.

This is not wrong. It is necessary and inevitable, but it has also successively blinded us to life without culture, the natural world, the world of babies and blackbirds, of trees and stars, of life without language, without thinking, without naming.

This made us feel lost, homeless and lonely, longing for something we can't even put our finger on; something we have almost forgotten. It is buried deep, but it is still there, waiting, prompting us to search…

"The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute.
The good news is, there's no ground."

Chögyam Trungpa

There may be people who have flushed out all the culture at once, but that would be very rare. Anyway, it's not something you can just decide to do. It doesn't work that way. Your quest is not your quest. It is life that really wants to live and hear the call of the blackbird in that tree over there until tears run down your cheeks. It is that which you really, really want. But you are helpless. You do not exist as you think you exist. In the meantime, someone once said (well, he actually said it quite a lot: "you get what you get when you get it." (Robert Saltzman).