Comparisons are odious

 

Cervantes said that and later Kerouac quoted him “It don’t make a friggin bit of difference whether your in The Place or hiking up Matterhorn, it’s all the same old void, boy”

 

Yeah, that’s it just life, the oneness, flowing. All of us in a huge void that is bigger and more powerful than any of us can comprehend. Our worries about who has what and where and with whom and “she’s younger” and he’s “got the Benz”, who gives a rat’s___

Who? I’ll tell you who. We do and that is our problem. I consider everyone I work with an artist; in fact we are all artists, creators of our reality, of our life.  As artists we need to be authentic and true to who are and our creation. As soon as we start to alter the creation to fit someone else’s’ idea of what we should be, we lose the power to create. In fact at that point we are merely replicas of somebody else’s idea of who they think we are and how we should act. Now I’m not saying run amok and commit random acts of violence, lord knows the world is violent enough, but we have to accept who we are as individuals. And in order to do this, we have to stop comparing ourselves to others, we need to stop trying to fit in, and be accepted. There was a play many years ago about a salesman, perhaps you’ve heard of it. In the play the salesman says that the most important thing in life is to be “well liked”.  This is a very American sentiment which I do not subscribe to nor do I believe any true artist can afford to entertain. What is liked mean?  What I like, what he likes, what they like – who cares – opinions are like…well you know everybody’s got one.

 

What about the “void” that Kerouac mentions  - sounds kind of depressing doesn’t it?  Well I look at the void as the universal consciousness. That means there is a cosmic energy that never began and can never die. This energy is an infinite field of which a very tiny tiny infinitesimal part is you, me and the life we are living here for the 70-80-90 years or so that our skin and bones can last out against the chemicals and the wars, the drugs and the violence.

 

Incidentally my theory on violence in society  – THEY SHOULD ALL BE IN ACTING CLASS.  People have repressed emotions and hurts pent up from childhood and in most cases no place to express them. So they get bottled up and in extreme cases explode in horrific attacks against humanity. Put it into a scene!  Do a “vent” exercise – flail your body through the air screaming your lungs out  - get it out, so you don’t have to go around hurting other people or hurting yourself.

 

Back to the void, since we are such a small part of the big picture – the equivalent of one grain of sand in contrast to the size of our entire planet – then comparisons within the planet itself are indeed not only odious (which means offensive, disgusting and horrible) but moronic and idiotic. And yet many of us have not only grown up hearing comparisons in our own families (“why can’t you be more like Howard Glassman, he’s such a hard worker”) but every day in every news publication advertisers are trying to compare you to someone else in order for you to by their product. They create and then amplify the sound of separation between people which leads to isolation, loneliness and more violence.

 

How do I get this intellectual understanding into my body, Meditate. There are hundreds and hundreds of meditation books out there. Try anyone of them – check out Paramahansa Yogananda, anything by him will help you to see that it is the ego and its need to be right and dominate that leads us into many of our neurotic complexes and personal frustrations.

 

Create art; write thoughts down, work on a monologue or scene for in creating art you are expressing the best of you and at the same time when you work on a character, you are learning something about the human condition, something about compassion, something about love.

 

Work, love, laugh…

 

Skkurt