Fear

The more I look around me, the more clearly I see that it's all about fear. And what we fundamentally fear is death (FOD). Why are we so afraid of death? All the evidence from science, religion, and everywhere else points to the startling fact that death is an illusion, an illusion resulting from the illusion that the separate Self is real. As Wei Wu Wei put it,

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself--
And there isn't one.

So we're afraid of anything that might result in our death. If we could realize No-Self, we would fear nothing. As it is we've created a society/culture where that FOD, since we're unwilling to actively confront it, manifests itself in lots of smaller fears, all of which are bulwarks of and reinforcements for the Illusion of a Separate Self (ISS)

We're afraid of Not Getting Enough (NGE) and that if we don't get enough for long enough, we will surely die. But if we could realize No-Self, we would see that since Everybody Else is co-extensive with us, we would take care of each other as a matter of course. Love your neighbor as yourself (because that neighbor IS yourself).

The Not-Getting-Enough plays out as "I gotta make sure I get My Share." This leads us to guard and protect My Share. Even little children's first projection into NGE is "That's Not Fair!". See how early this sense of lack is conditioned. Prior that is the learned sense of "Yours and Mine". Again it's ISS.

The habit of NGE is institutionalized as Money. Money is there to make sure that each one of us Gets My Share. So NGE also points back to ISS. The first crime outside the Garden of Eden was Cain slaying Abel because he thought he wasn't getting his share. Envy and Jealosy are manifestations of NGE. NGE combined with these emotions translates to a new fear: I AM Less Than You (LTY) because I HAVE less than you. If I am LTY than it's natural to fear you--more ISS.

The fear of LTY plays out in a variety of ways. I can suck up to you to keep in your favor. That's institutionalized as feudalism. Or I can try to get more stuff than you so that I'll be more powerful than you. That leads to a Warlord mentality.
Our modern version of this is corporate power. If I have more employees and more profits than you, I have more power than you. I am not LTY, therefore I don't have to fear you.

So we have made Stuff (which is essentially neutral) merely a pawn in the game. Greed, too, is a manifestation of the fear of NGE. Looks like I'm going to implicate all the Seven Deadly Sins, doesn't it? Okay, let's look at the rest of them. The Seven Deadly Sins are Anger, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony. We've already covered Greed and Envy. Anger protects ISS, and so it points back to FOD. Pride is a cover for it's opposite fear: LTY. Lust is a manifestation of NGE, but it's really an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture. More on that later. Gluttony is clearly NGE, but the fact that we label it as one of the Seven suggests that it can be extended symbolically as Acquisitiveness, also an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture.

Sloth is a secondary sin. The real message of Sloth is "If you don't do your share, then you'll get some of MY share. So I'll be NGE and That's Not Fair." Contrast it with Gluttony where the message is "You're taking more than your share." Translation: "You're taking MY share."

That was easy, wasn't it? All this behavior is a manifestation or result of ISS, and to reiterate, if we see through, awaken from ISS, we would really see that our neighbor is ourself, and making sure the my neighbor is taken care of, has enough, becomes our default behavior.

Look for future posts on Lust and Stuff.