Sometimes we don’t care because we don’t have to care.
At other times we care not because we wish to, but because questions sprang up around us and our lives were pre-enrolled as evidence; because if we do not speak our own words, who can speak them?
It’s a privilege to participate in a constructive conversation. It’s a separate privilege to be able to throw up deuces and move on whether the conversation is resolved or not.
It’s a privilege to be ignorant, and a greater privilege to stay so. Indifference is more powerful than both states.
Ignorance concedes to new information. Bigotry entrenches against it.
To learn, we open to new facets of reality, more experiences, more souls, integrating them into the knowledge we already have, allowing old and new truths to illuminate each other, and letting the obsolete fall away. Without these cycles of learning, engagement becomes more fury than sound, more self-reinforcing than system-improving.
A friend once taught me a military strategic process called the OODA loop: Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action.
Apathy and indifference camp in the Observation zone where information waxes and ignorance wanes. With indifference we can scan a world’s features as if we’re removed from the worlds we watch.
We can stand on the ground in this place, yet imagine our place as the Master Position. In so imagining, we fail to orient, and our decided course moves way off.
To orient, we must de-center ourselves and sense ourselves as part of the field, not beyond it. “You are all notes in the Celestial Symphony,” Neale Walsch has said. “Shall we decline to play the music because one note is no more crucial than another?”
Through apathy and indifference we most often answer “Yes. Yes, if we aren’t the keynote, we’ll decline to play, and we’ll devalue the song.”
I may never understand why this is so.