Joe Brewer it is as if you ended the story too swiftly. Spiritual practice has been around for ages, and it has not caught enough traction to become mainstream in its original form. What we have today is all kinds of washed up concepts, that start from their original eastern or western philosophies of detachment or attachment, but all that’s left are nuggets of wisdom interpreted so as to fit our pop culture machine.
The pop revolution of Andy Warhol was the best attempt to infuse higher consciousness in mass produced wealth, and the result was that after his death we’re bidding on the MM poster millions of dollars. He didn’t achieve what his greatness proposed, not even by far.
People are not willing to step out of their collective illusion just by simple discourse. There has to be connection, there has to be a society that welcomes them, there has to be, simply put,
another illusion to replace the one we’re abandoning.
What we require is active and directed effort to create a better set of conventions. I so much dislike this underground awakening currents that do not make anything lasting, just momentary fleeting epiphanies.
Martin Rezny in his response proposes Zen as an approach to resisting political correctness. The problem is that at the end of Zen you find out that nothing is. What good does that do to coalesce humanity?
I think there is a lot of confusion, because people mistake attention for awareness. Awareness is the constant sensation of the lack of knowledge, the more certainties you have the less aware you are. That is why meditation that reveals the nature of the universe transcends this place and moves one into Nirvana. But up (or down?) there, you are no longer aware, you are melted into the liquid of beingness.
Religion lowers awareness by giving answers to fundamental questions. Propaganda lowers awareness by giving answers to immediate questions. Family lowers awareness by giving answers to existential questions.
Meditation gives any answers, so go figure!
Attention, on the other hand, is the stuff will is made of. But will is only enticed when we have meaning around. We currently have no reason for existing other than the meaning we create ourselves. We are meaning machines. We create meaning in order to have a reason for existing. And this is the problem:
One of the most important discoveries to come out of this large body of research (spanning fields like psychology, linguistics, evolutionary studies, neuroscience, anthropology, and computer science) is that the human mind is physically structured to conceal the meaning-making process from conscious awareness. (source)
Concealing meaning is occurring because of lack of attention! Attention please 🙂
We require a body of knowledge that gets interpreted to create a better version of the existing by adding new meaning. We don’t require a revolution.Revolutions suck because they tear apart solid structures and fuck up foundations and then, when we start building again, we incorporate the same fucked up models we have used before because we didn’t want to make this crap, we have carefully crafted for a very different version of this present, but we’re constantly fooled by the parts of us which we don’t like to admit that exist.
More people who meditate will not solve the crisis the world heads into. We tried that. There were two decades last century brought down by the hope they drugged themselves with. By all means, more people could and should meditate, it helps find answers, but mind that every meditation will produce only one output:
specific subjective individual answers to all questions.
With that at hand the divisiveness will only increase. Just look at the new age scene. Yeah, I know people mock that as bullshit, but consider the fact that by definition it could encompass anything that is not atheist and neither traditionally religious. A huge string of humans there, any results?
The truth is we are not organized. The progressives and liberals are so happy they’re on the good side of history (fuck, what a stupid idea) that they simply employ high valyrian as the de facto language. We keep forgetting how people couldn’t understand God when his words were spoken in educated latin! We keep forgetting how french in England separated nobility from peasants for hundreds of years. We do it again today, because we know we’re the good guys. Fuck certainties.
There is not one single magic move today that creates global sense. The problem is sense is what makes mind control shatter: sense, direction, purpose all inciting the attention of people.
We need ways to:
Make life worth living again!