I love history. They say if you study it, you can learn from it. And if you can learn from it, you won’t be doomed to repeat it. The problem with that is that history is written by the victors who censure it, leaving the real history to be uncovered by those with the will and desire to know truth.
This leaves most people with the inability to know real history because they have no idea the stories they were told were not real. In a society where education is being attacked on all sides and the textbooks watered down, it leaves students with the inability to research topics or ask critical questions because, for the most part, these skill are not cultivated in them at an impressionable age.
History is always being repeated. In our individual lives we do the same things over and over again all the time. Most of these are benign habits that have some form of psychic or material reward in the form of associated pleasure or satisfaction. But some have negative consequences in our lives and we do them because we are compelled to do so by deep, subconscious imperatives we may not even be aware of.
Think of society this way. We have laws, habits and customs that bolster society’s foundations and that allow it to prosper and grow, to evolve positively and to live up to its promises to its collective citizenry in all of their grand diversity. And then there are the things society doesn’t like to talk about; the silent lotteries where the children are stoned, where some are sacrificed for the greater peace and perceptive prosperity of the majority.
It is a false dichotomy. In our personal lives and also in the life of society. The dark desires and subconscious imperatives that underlie our individual and collective actions affect each other fundamentally, taint the daylight life with false hilarity and bleak, tinny laughter, infused with the knowing that dark deeds must always come to light.
All things do. What is done in the dark will always be seen in the light of day. Some day. The wish seems to be, that a reckoning is postponed indefinitely. In the context of you and me, that means till tomorrow or next year or, when we’ve moved away or, when we’re dead. In the context of society it means paying the piper a ways on down the road of time: let our descendants deal with it. Inter-generational equity of the biblical sort. Sins passed down to the seventh generation and such.
Most are only subconsciously aware of these things. Live their lives blissfully unaware and willfully ignorant. But there are always those in society that do know. They play the role that our conscience plays for us, keeping tab of our sins, even when we silence that little voice inside that sometimes reminds us, to our everlasting chagrin. These men and women are often proud and aware that they keep the secrets that most do not want to know. That they are Gatekeepers of Collective Horrors. They know and keep the secrets openly, just as we may lay awake some nights staring at the ceiling in full realization of the things we’ve done, that we dare not think about during the day.
That history repeats is a great truth of civilization. That societies go through cycles of birth, growth, stagnation and death mirrors our individual cycle of life; all things seem to have their reflection at the micro and macrocosmic scales. What changes cycles into something else, though, is when they evolve. Shift higher. At that point, the cycle is no longer repetitive in the same sense and becomes, in all actuality, more of a Spiral of Growth and of conscious evolution.
This is the case for each of us individually as well. The Enlightened experience the same trials and traumas the unenlightened do, but their higher perspective allows them to deal with the situations differently and make informed choices leading to better outcomes. Enlightened society can do the same. This is the reason why all should seek out real histories and refuse to be satisfied with the sanitized and outright manipulated veneer of faux facts that pass as mainstream historicity today.
We deserve better. Our children deserve better. Their children do too. Some things cannot be changed, but they can be acknowledged. And when we see signs of history being repeated, we can do whatever is necessary to change our responses and shift higher on the Spiral of Growth and of conscious evolution. We can do this individually and collectively. Because, in the End, they are both the same.
