The Cage of Conditioning

Yesterday a comment appeared on the short dialogue quote from The Two Towers. The comment quoted Yevtushenko

A child of captivity is too weak for freedom.
He who's conceived in a cage will weep for a cage.

This is so true. The domestication of civilized humanity has come at a cost. My teacher often used to say to me, “People would rather die than change.” Such people are defined by the cage they happily exist within. Take away the cage and suddenly they have nothing. The Hollow Men. Kinship nowadays is just a common cage. Walking through the City of London this morning I was struck how all the large modern buildings are steel structures clad in a thin veneer of polished pink granite or some other gaudy stone. And all the shops, vying for custom, are desperately presenting the glossiest surfaces imaginable. Fashion. Only ever skin deep – it's so easy to see or feel the vacuity beneath. Christmas. In a way its all topsy-turvy. When the meaning of life is to locate, nourish and develop one's essential nature so that the cage of conditioning can be released and one's energy and spirit can be free, instead society presents us with the opposite message – concentrate fully on the surface and you need never face up to the emptiness inside. Obsessing on the cage, whether by polishing it to make it look as attractive as possible or by aggressively trying to break it down, is not correct. We need to concentrate on the jewel at the heart of it all – our own essential core and the same in others. Communication happens when these touch and dance together. When these jewels become the focus of our hearts and minds then the grip of the cage (its grip on us and our grip on it) gradually releases and the hard shiny surfaces dissolve and we enter the realm of true softness. When you touch another, either physically or with your mind, heart or energy, unless you can abandon your cage then you will never be properly with that person and you will not be soft. A world without landmarks. A frightening prospect, but also an exciting one.

Once, after dining on a rotten fish,
I saw that the door was unhooked;
toward the stary abyss of flight I leaped
with a pup's perennial recklessness.

Lunar gems cascaded across my eyes.
The moon was a circle! I understood
that the sky is not broken into squares,
as it had been from within the cage.

Another thing my teacher used to advise was always try to have the courage to follow your first thoughts or impressions, and try to ignore the second ones - they're usually signs of fear creeping in.