An unhinged opening rant from the good people at Profit-Driven Pharmaceuticals, followed by a mention of this very funny animation of Joe Rogan and I having a picnic together, this article about the parallels between the fall of Rome and right here right now. Then a mention of Kyle Thiermann’s chat with his dad, this conversation with psychologist Dan Ariely, a few Tiny Desktop Concerts I really enjoy, and the beauty of Tobias Wolff’s writing and the amazing Dispatches, by Michael Herr.
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Music: Watch It Fall, by Billy Strings; 8 Años, by Hermanos Guitierrez; How the West Was Won (And Where it Got Us), by REM; Time After Time, covered by Miles Davis (written by Cindy Lauper).
You don’t sound crazy. Corporations are indeed insubstantial ghosts. But through dharma practice and drugs, it has become pretty easy to see practically everything for what it really is — part of an insubstantial, karmically-engineered set of stories to which one is attached. That’s it, that’s the big dirty secret most of us are terrified of facing. Every argument we have about what is rational, what is reasonable, what is good or bad, what is real, what is crazy, can be understood as various parties needlessly grappling for control over a story that they happen to find particularly compelling. Even the most commonsense notion, like “I have a body,” is a story — it’s just one that we happen to cling to very strongly.
I have to believe that if we would see more clearly the insubstantiality inherent in all levels of our ostensible reality — from the most minute sensory phenomenon all the way up to our highest-level systems — and to understand that that’s perfectly necessary and OKAY, we would at once become free of this strange spell we’ve put ourselves in, which includes seeing corporations as our necessary overlords. What silliness! What a story!