Reply #22: And thank you. [View All]

[H2O Man]

On page 172 of James Hirsch's "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter," (2000) the author writes about the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. They recognized that human culture had a "thin film of false reality," which sounds very similar to Crazy Horse's perception in many ways.

"Theirs was a bleak view of human nature. They believed that people think they are 'awake' as moral beings, but in fact they are 'asleep,' oblivious of their own unconsciousness and unaware of the evil acts they commit. It is useless to blame them for their misdeeds because they are not even aware of what they are doing. The problem is not that the world is evil -- if that were so, what value has life? -- but that people do not realize that they are unconscious and that they are only a shell of what they could be. In The Fourth Way, Ouspensky described a man wjo attaches two horses to an airplane and uses it for a carriage. Then he learns how to use the engine and turns the airplane into a motor car. But the plane never takes flight. 'That is what we are doing with ourselves,' Ouspensky explained. 'We use ourselves as a carriage when we could fly'."

I suspect that the OP is hinting that as a group we remain unaware of that possibility of flight.