Grow things in the garden of your mind. . .

 

Let us talk a bit about Locality. There exists now a famous slogan making its rounds around the earth: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” But what does that mean? Local? Is that your household, your street, your neighborhood, your township or borough, your city, your state (or province as the case may be), your country, your continent, your planet, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Universe, the 3rd dimension? Which of these is local?

What the internet has done is to reinvent AT&T’s wheel. Despite distance, the internet suddenly tears through the limits of distance and someone in the US can talk to another one in the UK through Skype in what is called “Real Time”. A bored mother, while her husband may be at work and the kids at school (or a bored father) can sit and talk to her BFF on the other side of the planet through instant messaging. A teenager curious about the how the latest video games work (or perhaps the day it will be released) summons the great oracle Google and knows 1 million anwers from all over the globe in nine-tenths of a second.  So, what do you think when you think local? When you think of your friends, are they all offline? When you think of your aquaintances, do they all live in the same town as you?

If we cannot truly define “local”, then how is it possible to truly define right or wrong? What is against or for law? Or how do we define law?

Mom’s gonna fix it all soon.
Mom’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be. ~”Aenima” by Tool

Unfortunately, such philosophical wanderings belong to the future of humanity, where (perhaps through or with the help of advancements in technology and perhaps because through the internet one mind can read another) boundaries (which are not unlike prisons in some way, are they not? Imprisoned by one’s definition or opinion of locality?) are not prisons, but recognized as illusions, nothing more than shadows on Platos’ wall.

What of humans who realize without indoctrination or neuromarketing or teaching or conditioning that locality does not mean a space where one shares likeness of nationality, ideology, color, mentality, or philosophy?

What does that future hold?

Ours is a journey toward simplicity, toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time. In this journey out of time to “NowHere,” we are leaving behind every model we have had of who we thought we were. This journey involves a transformation of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It’s a journey that takes us from primary identification with our psyche to identification with our souls, then to identification with God, and ultimately beyond any identification at all. ~Ram Dass

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“Across The Universe no.49” by Derek Davalos
“Other Worlds (NASA, Sailing With NASA, 10/24/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
“Fantasia” by spitfirelas
“the guardian” by Chris Tarnawski