stop building our masters' temples

this morning as i stroll through the town of luxor i walk by the ancient temple along the bank of the nile. i look directly upon its entrance, from about 1km away, and witness a distressing scene.

when i was growing up and learned about egypt, i learned first that the pyramids were fantastic monuments, to pharaos and immortality. not long after that i learned that it was actually slaves and the poorest people who were forced or coerced to build their temples. i always thought it was terrible that people broke their backs to make something that they didnt believe in, it just never sat right with me.

of course i thought the unjust relationship between those that built it and those for whom it was built was as ancient as the constuction itself.

clearly this remains to this day. first, because we still deify the pharaohs, and we worship their worship of power and control. we now make temples to their temples.

how could a truly divine temple be built without the consent of its workers? i mean, if the people who built it were being forced, then that is what the temple worships - force. not the pharaoh or deity that we remember. that temple represents coercion and force. this is not just a buddhist idea. what i mean is, if the majority of the people dont believe in the temple, what does it represent?

so today i watch a scene that has replayed over and over throughout the centuries. men breaking their backs in the sun, lifing dirt, rocks, swinging axes. today they do it to "restore" the temples. for what reason? is it to worship the temples of old? no, we dont do that. of course we dont believe in that nonsense of the ancients. but today they rebuild it for money and tourism. so whats the difference?

one thing is clear. the temples dont get built unless we build them. but the coersion and repression are very deep, within ourselves as well as within our society. as we speak we have little pieces of our subconscious, little poor workers, who are building a temple to the god of ourselves, to our egos. unless that deity is crushed out of the subconscious of our subconscious, then we still feel the need to build temples within. because if we dont fully liberate our minds then how will we have the clarity and strength to stop consenting to building the temples to gods of power and force (aka money in the parlance of our times) in this world.

ok, maybe the metaphor is too far for this early in the morning, but just stick with me!