Psychic nomad made a useful comment on the 1 Key / 9 Commitments post in that I seemed to be prioritising the Greater Work (the struggle against the false self / nafs / Ego) over the Lesser Work (the struggle against injustice and mass brainwashing in the real world), when really they should go together. He (please correct for gender if necessary) was right, in principle. However, as VI Lenin said, one has to bend the stick to the needs of the present moment. And this ties in with the face that my political mentor (who's obviously kind of enlightened in his own way, although a traditional Marxist and therefore a hard-core atheist) told me ages ago I needed to be "more humble and less sensitive".
The essential reason for the shift of emphasis is the shift of emphasis on real life. It's a combination of two things:
- the actual political experiments I've been involved in have been, to use a Spinal Tapism, quite "selective" in their success;
- the realisation of what my mentor meant by humility; i.e. that so much of my political activism had not, in fact, been motivated by an intent to make it work. Rather, it had been motivated by Ego as we have been discussing it - the desire to be a "bad ass revolutionary" so that people would think I was cool and sexy, carrying with it the concomitant desire to never be wrong about anything, which led to avoiding criticism (and therefore accurate feedback) at all costs, which is obviously certain death to a political project which means actually talking to real people in the real world who don't share your assumptions and whom you can't control.
So I've negotiated a brief leave of absence (certainly not a resignation) from the Lesser Work to put serious effort into the Greater Work for a while. So this means that I need you the viewers at home to give more feedback on whatever you might have been doing in the actual real struggle against injustice. Me, I'll be sitting at home for a while, listening to my Ego screaming at me and waiting for it to be quiet for a little while.
