Saturday, June 16, 2018

Depth of Being, part 4: Complexity vs. Hypocrisy

Many of us live somewhere around the nexus of complexity and hypocrisy, consistent in our inconsistencies, predictably unpredictable.

Complexity is the product of intelligence and curiosity, a worldview that life is there to be explored. People who strive to learn something new every day are complex creatures, understanding that change is inevitable but mourning what must be lost.

Hypocrisy demands thoughtlessness, a base and utter surrender to the whims of the emotions of the moment. A worldview so narrow that it filters out all capacity for imagination, curiosity, compassion. Remember the etymology of "compassion"—to suffer with. I don't suffer, says the hypocrite; suffering is something you need to do. Suffering is for losers, one can almost imagine a hypocrite declaring, right before unleashing a tirade of poor, poor persecuted me...

Many of us encompass both complexity and hypocrisy in our day-to-day choices, encounters, decisions, articulations. To really understand one another—to decide who is friend and who is foe—requires a study of one another's worldview. Is one alive to explore the possibilities that tantalizingly brush up against the outer regions of our consciousness, urging us to expand that consciousness? Or is one constantly narrowing, narrowing that field of understanding down to a solid, reeking little nugget of cognitive excrement, mistaking the waste for gold?

Complexity leaves something creative, generative, useful in its wake.

Hypocrisy loves collateral damage, period.


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