But
when your “sense of self”, or your identity, gets bound up in a kind of
overwhelming obsession for a partial concept like city, region or country,
language and series of customs, or belief, creed or religion, your mind is in
trouble. Then it’s “your” identity against someone else’s. In a mental state
like this, too much emphasis is placed on comparisons, and intelligence only
revolves around the exclusive identity you have chosen to defend. In the final
analysis, this identification will result in apprehension, fear, aggression and
eventually violence. It is childish really, because just by chance of birth in
a certain part of the world, the human spirit becomes a prisoner of a mental
construct, of a kind of restricted “me” and “mine”.
Identifying
with limited concepts can never be truly conscious behaviour. It is a trick
played by the mind due to outside pressure, called propaganda. The ideal
situation is for a human spirit to be as all-embracing as possible; not to be
confined to a city, region or nation-state. Everything should be in the right
place. Yes, I was born in a certain part of the world; yes, I grew up there or
elsewhere; went to a certain school; rooted for a given sports team. Yes, I
learned a language, hopefully more than one... It is true I can feel a sense of
belonging to a city, region or nation. But if I cannot overcome the lesser
influences and rise above metropolitanism, regionalism and nationalism, my mind
is doomed to become small and petty, fault-finding and exclusivist. And that
will spell rejection of others who have different concepts in their minds, and
a kind of spiralling virulence that may turn into verbal abuse, mental violence
and actual physical aggression. “I’m right and others are wrong!”.
This
is why regionalism or even nationalism should always be kept in its rightful place, in its appropriate place. It is of regional or national importance only. It is
not something the mind should be obsessed with. Above the city, region and
nation stands the fact of sharing the human condition on Earth – we all eat
food from the same Earth, drink the same water, breathe the same air and enjoy
the same sunlight. Above and beyond any regionalism and nationalism is the
increasingly apparent reality of living alongside 7.5 billion other human
beings on a crowded and increasingly interconnected planet. Clan-like, tribal
and feudal societies have come and gone. Tyrannies and revolutions have brought
a semblance of democracy. There are human-made legal frameworks in place
wherever you go, even to remote islands and mountain retreats. For example, there
are some 3,000 abandoned villages or towns in Spain, and many of these are up
for sale, but the legal constraints of municipality, district, province,
autonomous community and nation and applicable EU regulations will still be in
place. There is no escape. So there is no such thing as “freedom” from the rule
of law in modern times; some kind of picturesque dream-like external “freedom”
to do as one pleases. Freedom can only be of the mind and spirit, not of the
body. And even mental freedom is incredibly difficult to attain, hence the emphasis
on “liberation” or mukti, in Asiatic teachings.
So
what is the rightful place of the feeling of being a “Catalán” in a population
of some 7.5 million, of whom 1.1 million, by the way, are actually foreign
residents? It should be sitting in between the fact of pertaining to a municipality
and belonging to a nation-state and the European Community. For the more
evolved, it is a convenient folkloric background, to be enjoyed and celebrated,
without forgetting the sense of being human and reaching for the stars, being
global and looking inward to the spirit. A limited Catalonian identity should
not raise its head to become ugly, exclude others and strive to become all-important,
crossing legal limitations and disrupting social life in cities striving to be
cosmopolitan. If it does fight to become overridingly important, it is because the
minds of some have become fossilised under an identity that is banal, limited,
pugnaciously constrained to its provincialism, and dangerous for children, adolescents
and immature adult minds.
Google
Maps (image above) paints a dotted line along an established boundary, but the satellite
image shows that Nature doesn’t care about man-made lines of demarcation.
More
later…
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