Balance Of Power

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance digs a deep trench in the synapses in our brains. We are on a three-dimensional balance of power roller coaster that takes us for a ride up the hills of renewal and deposits us in valleys of fear. We are lock in sidecars of doubt and are covered with the inconsistencies of religious politics. We ride and ride until brakes of awareness throw us in another cryptic moment. We are educated ignoramuses that reject anything that conflicts with our judgmental and conforming complacency.

The valleys of fear shroud us in sameness and transform us with bitterness. We blame our difficult adjustments not on choices, but on our associations. Our influences blind us from seeing the ruin of self-responsibility. Skin color and religion defines us and hatred brands us. Our self-created dilemmas confuse us and power separates us. We are sinking in worship, and we are drowning in rituals that make little sense.

We battle brothers and sisters and exile them in shame. The quest for power drains our ambitions and control sentences us to distasteful compliance. Ambiguous amelioration comes from the surrender of power, and we label our position free. The health of our nation is being siphoned off by the organized idiosyncrasies of government and the money-hungry vultures that banter in isolation.

The balance of power is skewed by subtle domination. Our physical and mental health is compromised by our irrational push against our innate wisdom. All these issues create the expansion we need for change and change we will in spite of our egotistical shenanigans. The balance of power roller coaster doesn’t stop at the top for long, and it always rises from the valleys as it reaches the continuous straight line of soulful expansion.