a reply to:
geezlouise
In general, the temptation to get 'angry' at another can seem pointless.
It's understandable as an existing feeling - but it should be explored and made coherent to the Self instead of
expressed at the Other.
Again, Self-Awareness. How do
you respond when another person, feeling negative feelings - at YOU - speaks with these feelings? It's almost
like a quantum effect is in motion: their way of attending and feeling to you PROVOKES the same sort of feeling relation.
If people simply pay attention to these experiences, HONESTLY, and no succumb to the temptation to dissociate and replace what is known with a more
desired (idealized) explanation, than Human beings wouldn't suffer the way we do.
Our suffering, and our problems, are fundamentally related to the economic system we live within and the metaphors - competititon/scarcity - that
mobilize our feeling-relations.
The Hebrew Bible makes just this statement - Cain vs. Abel - "CaYiN" from the Hebrew verb "QaNaH" - to buy. Abel, from the Hebrew HeVeL, "vanity", as
in Solomons statement "vanity of vanities".
It even locates this psychospiritual transformation in ways of being and surviving - the agriculturalist vs. the pastoralist. The World feels
different when you aren't stressing yourself for 12 hours in working the field - and then becoming "proud" of your accomplishments (Cain's son, Enoch,
literally means 'city' in Hebrew i.e. the agriculturalist's egoistic pursuits of material accumulation necessarily leads to cities).
Even worse, how does the stressed egotist experience the Abels - the people less constrained, more happy and at ease in their existence (and God
"accepted" Abels sacrifice; but refused Cains) - but with annoyance? It's true, because each of us can sense how it can sometimes feel when the
relaxed, feminine and at ease person seems to be succeeding - and a part of us, our "inner cain", having been groomed in a capitalistic and
competitive context, experiences their simple way of being as
pathetic and weak?
And so, the Cains kill the Abels because the former are insane - dissociative and idealistic - and don't see its fundamental relationship to their
desire to accumulate, build cities, and show off (ironically, to other people) how powerful they are.
Capitalism is as old as the neolithic. Whereas the pastoralist way of being goes back at least as far as 200,000 years ago.