Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Imagine ‘the little people’

If you’ve got no purpose or worth, if you’re a selfish bastard and if you suffer from too much hubris it’s likely you’ll have deadened your imagination a long time ago. You dare not imagine what horrors the future holds in store. Whether we are optimistic or pessimistic, imagining what the future holds is a favourite game most of us play. By projecting the picture in our head we get to know where we should stand on things in relation to that picture. And this is where idealists sort out their aims.
Non-idealists just can’t imagine that far ahead, not in positive terms, so to them a ‘vegan world’ might simply be wishful thinking. Imagination is considered by them a scourge. To many of us though it’s a boon. To imagine puts a more interesting spin on things. To NOT imagine makes the most interesting things seem fearful.
To take this out to what some might think is the extreme, we may like to imagine the ‘little people’, the invisible guides or guardians of our soul who live on our shoulders. They whisper in our ears and suggest great possibilities or they tell us things we’d rather not hear about. Some people are quite at home with them, others have never even allowed ‘such absurdity’ to enter their heads.
For those who can ‘imagine’ it would be these ‘little people’ (or I might like to call them ‘devas’) who do a lot of the difficult work for us - they suggest we take notice of things we could easily have missed, they alert the conscience when we’re in danger of doing something we don’t need to do. You might imagine ‘the little people’ as coming from another world or as an invisible ‘organ’ which relies on conscience to find it and use it. Or it’s just a dimension to life which we can only know instinctively. But whether we acknowledge such things or not the whole matter of ‘the unknown’ interests most of us. We are attracted to the unknown. Anything from an unknown world gives us a chance, however slim, of escaping ‘the pit’. And there’s nothing we like better than peering into the unknowable future - we call it ‘having aims’, we call it projecting goals, we’d like to know that it’s for and on behalf of our childrens’ generation and their welfare, with the view to allowing them a true chance to escape ‘the pit’.

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