IT’S THE LAW
This is paper I have wanted to write for a long time and somehow just kept putting it off, but this evening it calls. Do you ever wonder why we have “laws”? Is it just a given to you that we must have laws and that they have been around forever? You know, we are the only species on earth who have “laws”. Now, there are all those “laws of nature” and “survival of the fittest laws” and on and on, but all those animals, plants and other living things do not know about all these laws. Only we do. Makes you wonder how they know to follow them.
So, again, why do we have laws? At first glance, it would probably be because we would have chaos and anarchy if we did not have laws to establish some kind of order. Or maybe you would believe that without laws everyone would constantly do harm to others. (this is the great fear of the original sinner thinkers) Or, some sincerely believe that the “laws” we have are God given and it is our duty to follow them. All kinds of reasons for this “law” thing.
Why did we humans make up all these laws? Even the God given ones are made up by humans, and that is a key to what this is all about. We want our law authority to be unquestioned. Here is the paradox of all this. We want “law” (whatever form) to be unquestioned because we want to keep people asleep. Awake people will question the law. And the people who control the law are equally asleep. Quite the assertion here, don’t you think?
When life is in it’s proper form, we humans did not need law. When people showed up fully conscious and present to the moment of the constant unfolding of living, we could “see” the movement of life and could “see” the connection of all things. ( Scientists and truly curious people still do this) Then we ate the apple of knowledge. From that point on, we needed to control the behavior of others. We substituted “law” for consciousness. We have people who have been conditioned into all kinds of self centered ideas about what was “right and wrong” in the world and this separation of humans, gave birth to the struggles humankind. Contradiction abounded in this new complexity of laws and rules. Do not kill but go to war. Do not steal but usurp native lands. It goes on and on.
We have been in this totally conditioned world for so long that no one ever asks this question anymore. “Why do we need laws”. Would you steal if it were not against the law? Would you kill if it were not against the law? Most of us would not, because there is a thread of that consciousness still in us that can see that harming others is harming our self or at least we have compassion for the other. We can still see that those age old adages of being our brother’s keeper. All well and good, you may say, but what about all those others out there who do not get this connection?
I am certainly not advocating eliminating all the laws we have (not counting all those superfluous ones), but I am simply asking people to wonder why we buy into the need for law. Why we have not had this conversation long ago? Why have we bought into the idea that we must be conditioned and therefore need laws to control us? Why does no one challenge the underlying reasons for our conditioned sleep walking thru this world. Why do we demand that we carry on our conditioning to our children? Why do we not want people to “see”, but to only “believe”? tlane 2/24/12
