The body and its needs, the emotions and their drives, the ego and its ambitions, the passions and their imperatives…on examination they can seem all too indulgent and surplus to actual needs.  But in their day they drove us, the embodied spirit, to sample the many prizes, tempting but transient.

Of course we can always laugh at ourselves, at our prideful clowning.

Then we can see, all too clearly, how we entered incarnation, full of aspiration, but succumbed to that treasure trove of fears, anxieties and doubts as our inner bulb of knowing lit up their shadows. We covered up with the “common sense” that family, education, religion and society piles up around the anarchic spirit that all humans come armed with, the one that frightens those who have already absorbed some decades of rational conformity and feel wise in passing it along.

Mum and dad know best, let the school show you how, let the pastor interpret the prophet, let college corral you into convention. All, of course, is well intentioned and often comes with some money-back guarantee.  Society is investing in you because it needs willing participants. Those walls of fear require a constantly replenished population of contributors.

That’s you and me and everyone we know.