"Talkin Bout a Revolution"
We need to be continually aware of the realities of existence that operate independent of our individual selves and lives.
For example (and this is the primary example), we should maintain a consistent awareness of death. Not merely an awareness of our own death, but an awareness of death as an existent reality that is as inherent as life and birth (and is a necessary compliment of life and birth). We also need to be aware of life- that is, the physical and sentinent qualities and characteristics that make up the jubilant expression of life, and not just our own life (or our own species’ life) but all life. Thirdly, we need to be aware of suffering- that tension between life-giving and life-maintaining forces (both physical and mental) and destructive, life-eroding forces. Here most of all we must be aware of suffering outside of ourselves, for although we will all experience physical death, and most of us can affirm having had some relatively pure experiences of life, it is impossible for us to understand the depth and range of suffering without looking outside of ourselves
The first indication that we need to be aware of these realities is that in them the specifics and minutia of our daily lives are intermittently subsumed. And we need to be aware of death because in it all of the specifics of our lives and personalities will be subsumed and destroyed permanently.
As our awareness of these realities grows, the focus of our energies and understanding should shift from our "self" to these real properties of existence. We should gradually become more and more concerned with them, not because they threaten or affect our own meager lives, but because they are enduring realities, in whose light we see the specifics of our own daily lives and personalities as chance, inconsequential, and fleeting. We should understand more and more that what we previously focused on as "our" reality- our particular desires and aversions, and the minutia of daily life and interactions- is not the true reality.
Existense, including our own existence, is at it’s stripped-down core a mix of life and death, both as natures (creative, corrosive) and as finalities (birth, death). Suffering is the human experience of the corrosive death forces, and the spirit to alleviate suffering is part of the life force.
What does this awareness lead us to in our daily lives? It leads us to a revolution- a revolution of the self, the only true revolution. It leads to a revolution of the way we operate, so that we will be able to operate with the continual lucid understanding of the realities of our existence, unaffected by the desires or specifics of an ego-centered consciousness. It leads us to a revolutionary approach to life, because it embraces the realities that obliterate specifics of time, place, and situation. So our action becomes guided by greater and purer forces than ego-desire and situation ethics. Within this truer understanding we will question why we kill, injure, incarcerate, and otherwise commit violence against creation. When we begin weighing our philosophies in the light of death, and in the light of the greater life force, we will begin rejecting the violenc that always stems from entrapment in situation and non-consciousness of the greater realities.
The more we embrace this revolution of continual consciousness of these realities, the more we will enmesh these realities in our own actions. The more we embrace this revolution the more free we will be. The more we embrace this revolution, the more authentically human we will become.