To love, to befriend our neighbors, and improve the world we must allow the world to move us; allowing ourselves to be moved, I consider this a great value to humanity — emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally by the world. There is a spiritual, what I believe is a modern misunderstanding, idea that one should be so enlightened; he is above the troubles of the world. Most people live in deep oscillations between denial, despair, and apathy. All sitting on top of their chronic fear of the worlds potential to harm them. No one is born being an existential atheist; the world creates the conditions, both personal and social, to produce, the language that shapes, such an apathetic and greedy people. However, the responsibility to recognize the importance of building relationships, between brothers, must become our highest priority. Art, comes from this recognition of responsibility; the courage to shine light on the, potential, alliances between those with a kindred consciousness. Stories provide the sufferer with a sense of the possibilities within his torment; providing a, sort of, communion through our darkest hour. This communion is inarticulable and unexpressed, for the author and the reader never have an actual conversation, but the reader is affected from the creation of this intimate space. This creates a space to develop empathy; a impersonal recognition of the suffering between neighboring solitudes. A silence sits within the heart of every artist, especially those that consciously recognize the brotherhood between men — that motivates him, maybe, through empathy or compassion, to create a space for the sufferer to be seen. This empathy comes from listening to the world, having the confidence to see the world, and attempting to experience the world of your fellow man; through this process we elevate human consciousness.

We must become a people that can appreciate someone helping us live — and I do not mean a demagogue of a figure acting as the living persona of Christ — without idolizing the figure. We have to be clear-headed about each others potentials, faults, and humanness. No one is perfect, and once leaders reveal their mortality, anyone reveals their imperfection, escapes our fantasy of perfectionism; our image of them falters and we no longer trust their word. If someone walked up to us and said, “Here is the path to release all your suffering, follow these steps and you’ll be saved”. We would think they were insane; art, however, provides the impersonal wisdom to shift people; while having them believe it came from their own desire to be shifted. Can we blame them; how arrogantly of us, anyway, to believe we can tell people the way they should live their life. Through art we provide the words, wisdom, messages, symbols, and other, seemingly insignificant, parts of our lives that helped us survive. If this is how we move the world forward, then that requires us to tell the truth about our lives; because, as we can tell from everyone’s difficulty with being honest, the truth is so malleable and slippery, we have to reveal ourselves and lay it all on the table. Telling the simple truth is easy, but to allow yourself to feel, then tell, the affect of your history; to tell how you barely survived. Express through symbolism how everyday is a battle between life and death. That is the mission every artist must accept; we no longer must consider it a virtue to keep the peace, but must allow our, both collective and individual, stories to rot the assumptions, fantasies, and folktales of the world. We can only allow ourselves to be moved by the world if we are being honest about it’s affect on us; people are living a ghostly existence. Their consciousness resting outside their bodies; shielding themselves from experiencing all their pain.

Most of us live with an inarticulable distance between our feelings and their expression. While the artist, if patient and sensitive enough, learns to interpret this silence then create from it; the lover, his battle is slightly different from the artist, must learn to close the gap between the sensations and messages from the physical body. Many spiritualists would agree our bodies speak to us through pain, aches, markings on your eyes, and other physical expressions. Even going as far to say: the tightness in your stomach, the feeling of fire ants on your brain, the feeling of your body being placed in a oven, or the hesitancy to express a full thought. All these are signals from a personal, intimate, language that requires interpretation, so we can move deeper into an awareness with the self. Recognizing the connection, between your body and the world, can change your life; this recognition shifts our pursuits, and causes a collapse in our identity, there is no greater blessing than a mental breakdown. This breakdown creates the space to examine our fears, pursuits, desires, and blind ambitions allowing us to reexamine the value of everything we considered important. This reassessment would crack open our true possibilities. We already live in a tightly wound hell that prevents us from connecting. Being reminded of our internal repression causes a deep anxiety. This anxiety comes from recognizing the amount of time we have been sitting on a nail and ignoring its pain; however, the longer we sit, the deeper the pain, and more bloody the bruise. If we never rise from the nail, the demons of the past remain the demons of the present; rejecting the world is denying its affect on us.This rejection causes us to depart from our personality, and makes empathy impossible; we begin to deny that other people suffer. If we are to create from a place of revelation; we must claim our emotions and respond to the worlds affect on our spirit.

Hidden behind our contemptuous smiles, and critiques of the world, we all want to live and be apart of the world; we want to feel our lives have value and a connection to world around us. We want to feel like our absence from the world will affect human existence, maybe a primal combination of fear, dread, and regret; we want to feel that we have “used the time”. Every man must see something coming out of his suffering or his spirit will, if not already, be broken. I know the pain of feeling unimportant, useless, and expendable; acknowledging that pain did not make me want to prove my value, or even fight for a place in the world. I wanted to sit on a mountain and watch the world burn; I wanted to hide from everything: emotion, change, time, love, hate, sex, people. I wanted to create a distance between myself and any possibility of connection and pain; it seemed better to never experience it. I see the world moving with such a cauldron distance, between our consciousness and sensations, all our pursuits are guided toward degrees and certifications; we move with such frantic hostility stifling all potential relationships between each other. There is nothing wrong with taking control of your life, but the generation believes this will solve the despair and anxiety. We chase, in hope it’s true, the worlds’ definition of happiness and success; we can look at the Tv or social media for a few minutes, and see what the country deems successful. The most effective revolutionary action against the oppression/division of our personalities involves fighting these definitions, notions, convictions, and aspirations.

We must fight for our world; apathy and despair cannot consume us. This can only happen if we gain a sense of self within our own definitions; we cannot move unaffected through the world because you’ll grow pessimistic and silent believing nothing can be done about this catastrophe. But it has always been through the faith and love of the few, that the world has been held together; we are enraged, but this can not be a blind rage that destroys everyone around us. This has to be a calculated rage; we must use every emotion we have to fight. Befriending the body, I believe, leads to activism. Learning to allow all your sensations, anxieties, and fears to come as visitors; then, as the spiritualist say, allow them to make their exit. Many of us move through the world as phantoms attempting to escape our pain by not living within our bodies; I believe, this creates a kind of selfishness where we want others to experience the pain we felt. We want to see others suffering as deeply as we are suffering. Our own pain destroys our empathy; a warped, twisted hatred unintentionally blocking potential connections to the world around us. Activism is a fight for the individual to become himself, so we can gain empathy for the collective; then work to change the conditions that produced him.

We must not anesthetize our pain by getting caught up in the act of making bread. When the world moves us, I believe, we must allow the discomfort to shift us by recognizing its a message that something needs to change. Many of us live a phantom existence, creating enemies because they resemble the person that traumatized us. A people that can not experience, or face, their private life becomes a despairing, cynical, people. Only through the recognition of our fear — of the world and distance from experience — can we regain a reconciliation between our past and potential. The world must be allowed to move us; no more repression.