Parasites

Our world is full of parasites. We all know about mosquitoes and tapeworms, but I'm talking about intelligent parasites -- what we've mythologized througout the ages to be bloodsucking vampires and what we know today to be international bankers, the Federal Reserve and the like. People who feed off human fear and ignorance. They who thrive in the dark and wither in the light.

I was just reading the first passage in the book Soul Stories by Gary Zukav. It was a masterful description of how the author's sister was in an accident and his mother, a hundred miles away, stood up and announced, "something's happened to Gail!" And I, who has long experienced and been fascinated by phenomena like this, sat up and exclaimed, "we *know* these things to be true! Yet we've been trained to disbelieve them!" Why? For what purpose?

Because, I answered myself, it would remind us how much power we have, how much more than our fragile bodies and five senses we really are, and that would take away from the power of those who would hold us as slaves.

Where did the idea of eternal hellfire come from? The idea that you need a bunch of fancy-pants rituals and middlemen to connect you with God, the universe, and anything else that's worth existing for?

Parasites. Bloodsucking parasites that feed off of other people's misery.

There are those (among these self-same parasites) that would have people think that feeding the poor and helping the weak amounts to a host/parasite relationship. They're wrong! There's a huge difference between charity and parasitism: awareness and intent (not to mention scale!). When you give an old lady a Thanksgiving meal, you know what you're doing and you can feel good about it. When you give Exxon-Mobile a couple thousand bucks in extra profit, you don't know that you've done it, you don't know what they're doing with it, and if you did I doubt you'd feel good about it.

There are some things I've become pretty sure of, and I wish others would become aware of as well, as this awareness would shine some light on these bloodsuckers (the first step towards getting rid of them!):

a) death isn't nearly as scary or as final as we've been led to believe
b) we are more powerful than we can imagine

We have a choice as to how we're going to live our lives. We might not control the weather, but we can adjust our sails to reach our destination. We might not be able to do it alone, but we can help each other. We don't need parasites to tell us where to go and how to get there.