Non Conformity

There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most requests is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance awakens us from a deep sleep and we find my self spinning with agreement. How did society get to the point of being a sharp judgmental instrument that cuts into the psyche of the individual? We allowed it to happen, no doubt. All the bickering about what is right and just and what is fair and honest are empty words that are thrown from one person to the next for control purposes. We give up control of my mind to a society that takes it to a mountain top filled with fear and anxiety and then it is immersed in the dark holes of religion, politics, history, war and science. We form a belief structure based on our distorted opinions of the self and we live those distortions through the experiences of society.

Conformity is our badge of honor. It is verification that we have handed over the keys to our objective consciousness to others who will use it for material gains and self righteous accomplishments. We find my self bowing down to a group of peers that have become lawmakers by their own dedicated design to serve, but then change that design to serve their own needs. We see a country that is unaware and belligerently conforming to values with no substance and laws with no compassion. We wonder why the diversity within this group of ignorance abuses itself with violent acts of separation that create more of what it fears. We ask the self why we are experiencing this blatant hypocrisy and then realize we want to feel the intensity and the emotions that boil over in this pot of emptiness.

Emerson famous statement, nothing is more sacred than the integrity of my own mind reminds us that we want to experience society in this form. We want to lose control and then regain it. We crave diversity and want to fight it, so we know what it feels like to be cut in half by our consciousness. We bring this reality into awareness and expand from it. Without it, we would not be who we are. We would not sense the meaning of life in every moment of it. We would drift into complacency only to be jolted back into another society that expresses the same lessons in a different way. This is our life and we choose to be physical at this moment in order to expand from the consciousness we accept in it.

Change, as the politicians say, is the answer, but change is not a hose pipe that is turned off and on. We exist in the action of change. Change is a quality of consciousness that assists us when we become aware of what it is and what it is not. Society and the fragmented groups within it are constantly changing in order to become aware of who they are and we are aware of those changes, so we can expand in our awareness.

Awareness is not conforming; it does not control or seek approval. It has no laws or judgments to express. Awareness brings another aspect of consciousness into being and we become that aspect. We accept what Iwe have created and will change it when we choose too. We live in a joint-stock company not to reap the rewards of conformity and power; we live it to become aware of the folly in it.