Tag Archives: Time

What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?

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By Kensy Cooperrider

Source: aeon

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.

These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.

In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.

But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us.

This marks a major change of course for our species. For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.

The WEIRD toolkit comprises our most basic frameworks for understanding the world. It touches on every aspect of experience: how we relate to space and time, to nature, to each other; how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention. Many of these mental frameworks are so ingrained we don’t notice them. They are like the glasses we’ve forgotten we’re wearing.

Consider our obsession with numbers. In global, industrialised cultures we take it for granted that we can – and should – quantify every aspect of experience. We count steps and calories, track interest rates and follower counts. Meanwhile, people in some small-scale societies don’t bother to track how old they are. Some couldn’t because their languages don’t have numbers beyond four or five. But WEIRD quantiphilia is quickly catching on. Hunter-gatherers in the Amazon are now eagerly learning Portuguese number words. In Papua New Guinea, once home to a rich variety of ‘body count’ systems – numbered landmarks on body, usually ranging to about 30 – children are learning English numbers instead.

Another peculiar part of the WEIRD toolkit is our fixation on time. We budget it, struggle to save it, agonise over losing it. We count days, hours and seconds. We are always oriented to exactly where we are on the long arrow of history. In the United States, for example, when doctors screen patients for cognitive impairment, one of the first questions they ask is the year, month and date.

To many in non-Western, non-industrialised groups, this fixation might seem odd. One early 20th-century ethnographer, Alfred Irving Hallowell, observed that the Ojibwe of native North America would be unruffled by not knowing whether it was a Thursday or Saturday. What would distress them, he remarked in 1957, is not knowing whether they were facing south or east. Not so for WEIRD people: our fixation on time appears to be balanced by a breathtaking obliviousness to space. A 2010 study found that Stanford students could not reliably point to North.

Now, such obliviousness to space is going global. Satellite-based navigation systems are displacing traditional techniques worldwide. It’s happening in the Arctic, as we have seen, but also in the Pacific. In Micronesia, seafaring was once accomplished with jawdropping precision by using a conceptual system so different from Western ones that scientists struggled to understand it. Today, this masterwork lives largely in museum exhibits.

Everyday ways of talking about space are undergoing a sea change, too. Very often, people in small-scale communities prefer to describe space using cardinal directions or local landmarks – often slopes, rivers or salient winds. Some of these systems, like the Gurindji compass terms, are highly elaborated. In contrast, WEIRD folks prefer to carve up the world in terms of their own bodily axes – their lefts and rights, fronts and backs. This ego-based frame of reference now appears to be taking hold broadly, spreading along with the influence of global languages such as Spanish.

Humanity is getting more ego-centred in other ways, too. It has long been observed that Western adults – and Americans in particular – privilege the individual over the group. We give our children unique names; we put them in bedrooms of their own; we emphasise their autonomy and needs. People in many other societies, most famously in East Asia, have historically privileged the collective instead. But Western-style individualism is gaining a foothold, even in the East. Japanese people have started giving their children unique names, too. A recent analysis of 78 countries found that, over the past half-century, markers of individualism have increased in the majority of them.

These are just some of the frameworks that are being displaced as global WEIRDing accelerates. Elsewhere, taxonomies, metaphors and mnemonics are evaporating. Many were never really documented in the first place. Researchers still don’t fully understand the conceptual system motivating khipus – the intricate string recording devices once made by the Inkas – but there’s no one left to explain it.

Human cognitive diversity joins a number of other forms of diversity that are disappearing. Diversity of mammals and plants, of languages and cuisines. But the loss of cognitive diversity raises issues all its own. Cognition is invisible and intangible, making it harder to track and harder to record. You can’t pin mindsets to a specimen board, or store them in a seed vault. It’s not easy to pose ways of knowing in a diorama. Thinking leaves footprints, of course – in language, in artifacts, in knotted string – but the act itself is ephemeral.

The loss of cognitive diversity raises an ethical dilemma, too. The forces that are eroding cognitive diversity – the forces of global WEIRDing – are often the same forces that are raising literacy levels worldwide, promoting access to education and opportunity in indigenous communities, and connecting people across the globe. Few would deny that these are positive developments for humanity. So we are left to ask, not only whether we can slow the loss of human cognitive diversity, but also whether we should even try.

Cognitive scientists such as myself are not used to grappling with these kinds of questions. Nor are we used to thinking about big trends in the human journey. But global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore, one with scientific, humanistic and ethical implications. For much of human history, one of our most distinctive traits as a species has been our sheer diversity. But then our course began to change – and it’s time that cognitive scientists joined the conversation about where we’re going.

3 EXTRAORDINARY PARADOXES OF PERSONAL AWAKENING

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

How do you reconcile the utter madness of the world with the overwhelming joy of being alive in it?

“Paradox: a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.”

Without question we live in interesting times. The deception, insanity and turmoil in our world has no end, yet when we tune in very closely to life’s pulse, we find softness and connection open to us at every step. These contradictory features of the human experience point to the dualistic nature of the universe, but ultimately offer a glimpse of a middle way, the center, where harmony resides in a sea of chaos. A seeming, but natural paradox.

“When people find one thing beautiful,
another consequently becomes ugly.
When one man is held up as good,
another is judged deficient.

Similarly, being and nonbeing balance each other;
difficult and easy define each other;
long and short illustrate each other;
high and low rest upon one another;
voice and song meld into harmony;
what is to come follows upon what has been.”

~Tao Te Ching 2

This is what personal awakening means. To create a harmonious relationship with your own life. To solve the paradox. Have you experienced any of these 3 extraordinary paradoxes of personal awakening?

1. The Awakening is Triggered by Fear and Supported by Love

Like an invading virus triggers the immune system, fear triggers the awakening. War, strife, turmoil, conspiracy, control, death, suffering, theft, abuse. This is the world we have created for ourselves. The toll of such heaviness manifests as a dense type of contagious fear, a chronic trigger that perpetuates the fight or flight response, but without an immediate or tangible threat to face directly. But there is nowhere to run or hide from the fear. We can confront it or be consumed by it. Or transmute it.

And what is to found beyond the fear? Love. An endless stream of it. In the stream the fear makes sense as a force which guides us into the stream of love.

2. Healing Hurts

The awakening is ultimately a healing process, but it’s hardly free of pain, because it is in a sense a recovery from injury or illness, like a form of forgetfulness of who you really are. As such, it actually hurts. A lot. And just like the agony of having a broken bone set, or the pain of recovering from a difficult surgery, emotional and spiritual pain is a necessary component of healing.

Letting go into whatever it is, depression, sadness, boredom, or even grief, is how healing begins. There is no out, only through. The remembrance of the pain is there to forever color the outcome of the healing process.

“If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill.” ~Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi

3. The Void Has Everything We Need

Counter intuitive it may seem, but stepping out of the cultural and mental clutter and into the void, where being and non-being balance each other, reveals everything we truly need. It turns out that silence is the teacher. In silence the universe comes into focus. Time stops and morphs into timelines. Infinite possibilities all become clear at once. Everything we need to know and feel is in this space, but to get there, everything has to be stripped away.

“In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” ~Tao Te Ching

Final Thoughts

What lies above lies below. A proper life is about balancing the joy of being alive with the terror of being alive. Ignoring either side of the equation leads to chaos.

“Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.”

~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Upgrade to the Next Level of Now

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By High Vibe Tribe

Source: Waking Times

All things are new. The old systems and paradigms are crumbling before our eyes and minds. Outdated mechanisms of knowledge and understanding have shifted and are passing. For those who are open and ready, it’s an amazing time for letting go.

It can be conceived as timeline or dimensional shifts and bleed-throughs if you like. For those experiencing and tracking these changes you will understand, others may sense something fundamentally different but are having a more difficult time just yet, but all will continue to progress. For those wanting to move with this energetic shift it will come, and more understanding as well as awareness will seep in. It can be subtle, or sometimes one psychic or transdimensional experience can trigger a big leap forward.

While we have so much in common we are all on unique paths. There’s no “one way” but there are commonalities that we all experience.

This energetic shift simply requires letting go into it, because it just is. As sure as we’re alive and Source eternally exists, our progression is assured one way or the other. The move “forward” is always there if we’re willing to move into it, but even if we hang back the overall field is moving anyway. This gets to the crux of our learning experience here, as there are several paradoxical aspects to all of this.

Those who’ve been seeking and learning and growing and working to bring about a better world as well as a more realized self expression have gone through much. While our most profound realizations are incredibly simple, all we’ve gone through to get there has been essential. Each of our paths are distinctly individual, yet we are a form of collective soul at the same time, each yearning for mastery of our being with the best possible outcome for all. This obviously does not apply to all those we share the planet with at this point, but the opportunity is available to all.

While many of us have striven to bring truth and openness to a deliberately darkened world, we’ve gone through many stages in the process. We’ve been the dreaming child, the system slave, the dropout, the student, the philosopher, the hungry researcher, the activist, the warrior, the preacher, the pundit, the angry cynic, the tired observer, the insider, the outcast, etc. The list is long, but these stages, whatever they’ve been, were essential to our development.

We eventually learn we cannot impose receiving the truth on anyone, only offer what we individually have learned, and it’s up to others what they do with it. Increased communication has been one of the driving forces for this recent acceleration of awareness that’s sweeping the planet, in addition to other unseen influences. For those engaged in these activities it’s right at whatever level they’ve chosen, but we must be aware of being drawn back into their vibrational level.  We need to help in whatever effective way possible but we can’t force it or interfere with free will, despite the fact that the matrix operates this way.

It operates on a judgmental frequency. Source does not.

Whatever our outlook, a rising tide lifts all boats.

And the tide is rising.

The Dissolving Past

Not only is the external structure collapsing, albeit somewhat violently, old manners and frameworks of perception are dissipating. How much each old system is sustained depends on how many cling to these often self-projected or believed paradigms, as nothing can override our choice to progress or hold on to the status quo. This is causing a separation of worlds in many respects, as realities split apart, much like worlds or timelines.

This is real.

This is not always obviously manifested externally, certainly not to the satisfaction of the skeptic or naysayer. It is evident, however, in changed lives, raised and lowered vibrations, new discoveries and ideas surfacing, and new social trends taking hold. In fact, it’s quite remarkable once you can perceive them.

A Place Called Now

For the sincere seekers, our search has been for meaning, for the full experience of living, and the Truth that permeates all things. We look for answers to the fundamental questions of life and eventually come to realize we’ve contained them all along in our heart of hearts . We have a knowing about a Source that emanates from within and without and have always been set out to connect with it.

It appears in the timeless state of Now. We get glimpses of it; our feelings draw us towards it, and our hearts long to experience more of it. A certain amount of information helps us along the way, but the reality we seek is beyond it, as what we perceive through this limitation only provides arrows pointing towards the unspeakable which we experience in moments outside of time.

This has long been known, yet even this experience is transcending the old concepts and belief systems. We’ve accumulated many helpful understandings from past teachings, yet in the light of this truly new energetic shift even those are outdated in many respects. Reference points can be anchors if we’re not fully conscious, which is clearly seen in the fullness of a truly fresh Now experience.

The Now is a portal. It’s always there, it’s always here. The Now is the ever present zero point everyone is striving for, yet it is always with us. It exists – over and over, yet timelessly. It’s we who have the difficulty in turning into it fully. Again the paradox, finding no time while inhabiting a world seemingly bound by time.

The Now just is, yet we struggle to find it, to understand it, as it slips through our fingers. Or so we think. In fact we’re flickering in and out of it continuously. Sometimes we can feel its ecstasy, sometimes not. We know we should live in it, yet time sweeps us along like the current of a mighty river, only allowing temporary glimpses of the majestic Now. Our minds then scurry to understand what only the heart can perceive, our ever present conundrum in this denser world of duality.

How do we escape time and explore this amazing realm of Now? It’s not always easy, yet it happens spontaneously with little or no effort. Mind gets in the way to make work of it, or identify when it is happening. Filtration mechanisms working overtime dull our nowness. Concerns and habits shroud our sensibilities. Circumstances and physical conditions blind the senses. Ever new as well as old ephemeral belief systems cloak our awareness.

Yet inspiration opens the door continually. Imagination lights the way. Each of our developmental stages were paving stones that led up to now, and they will continue, albeit in continued transformational manifestations. Yet those too must be let go of in deep energetic and forgiving ways in so many respects so as not to hold us back from previous perceptions.

Everything Is New

The truth is we can all be more in the Now than we are, but the inspiring realization is we’re there a lot more than we think we are. Besides always being in it whether we’re fully conscious of it or not, our lives are filled with breakthrough Now experiences.

Techniques such as meditation and more quiet time and deep experience in nature enhance this, while moments of emotional release, insights and creative imagination and inspiration abound in our lives, often spontaneously, resulting in the same. Making room for more of all of these aspects being a higher priority than ever in our lives soon goes without saying, once we’re really serious about this transition personally as well as for all of humanity and our planetary condition.

Therein lies a commitment to be made.

The Letting Go

We each experience a great falling away of many things in this process. Old unfruitful relationships, locations, living conditions, modes of expression and cherished belief systems. All of these shift or evaporate altogether. Let them pass. The new will manifest almost immediately and in many cases concurrently.

While we may experience times of isolation and solitude, it’s all a wonderful growing opportunity. It can be quite an emotional journey facing ourselves honestly and seeing former close acquaintances or beliefs fade from our lives. The beauty here is that our true friends and family become manifest.

And we are many.

Depending on our rate of acceleration as well as preparation, this shifting process can be a bit disconcerting. While our previous efforts may appear to have been off course or pointless in light of what we learn down the road, they weren’t. Many ideas and concepts and viewpoints will prove to have been quite off course in relation to what we come to learn is true, but they were what helped get us here. It’s seeing that and letting the old go that are at issue.

It’s easy if we’re malleable and trusting. Call it faith in the divine nature of it all, but that is something we can all be securely confident of, despite the seemingly bizarre nature and consequences of many of the choices that have taken place on this evolving planet.

There are no mistakes. There is no condemnation except what we personally ascribe to. Outside of us everything is beautifully neutral. There is no judgement. We invent and comply with that, in accordance with separation. When we realize all is One in different facets and stages and in the process of expansion we don’t judge, we accept, and in love, seeing the wonder of Creation both seen and unseen.

The Paradox of Three Dimensional Life

Yet paradoxically there is the part we are each here to do, most of all to truly awaken and raise in conscious awareness and enduring unconditional love. The ultimate solution. Nothing to wait for. Just be it. The rest will follow as we let go of old triggers toward less fruitful endeavors. It’s very tempting to get into the fray and all things reactive and fight it out in our minds or on the streets or in the staged informational platform at their low density level, but it’s to no avail and only muddies the waters.

Steer clear. Don’t feed the miasma. Be aware of it but don’t even touch it. It’s a tar baby designed to short circuit our connectivity to Source and who we truly, deeply are. That’s what they fear. Not our activism or exposure, although that’s all part of it. It’s us getting the real understanding of our true power as well as what energizes them and keeps them in business, which we then refuse to supply as we rise to a higher vibration with much more effectiveness.

That’s non-compliance.

Get free. Stay free. Help raise the planetary vibration. Share love, speak truth, live in the true joy of real Knowing that transcends these tricks and traps and manifestations of ignorance. Live according to your passion. The world is starving for love, kindness, gentleness, hope and happiness. We’re awash in it if we look around. Don’t let them drag us down to their level.

Let’s rise up and be the living solution. All is well and right in the grand scheme of things, the BIG picture.

Creation keeps expanding and learning, and we are an amazing and integral part of it all!

What a wonder!

Saturday Matinee: Momo

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“Momo” (1986) is an Italian/German fantasy film directed by Johannes Schaaf and based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Michael Ende (The Neverending Story). The plot explores the concept of time through the journey of Momo, a girl whose extraordinary personality puts her at odds with the Men in Grey, shady representatives of the Timesavings Bank who steal the time of all her neighbors in the village. Momo features the final performance of writer/director/actor John Huston.

 

Modern Fictions – How the Sacred Manifests in Chaos, Superheroes and Outer Spaces

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By Kingsley L. Davis

Source: Reality Sandwich

The virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment
Erik Davis

…All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text…
Frederick Nietzsche

Science fiction is always more important than science
Timothy Leary

Everything that can be said has already been said, or something to that effect. It is not original to make the statement that originality no longer exists as it’s all been done before. Yet, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, ‘the medium is the message.’ So it may not be the message we are concerned with here but rather the medium of its passing. And the adage goes that everything exists according to ‘time and place.’ When the ‘sacred speaks’ – so to speak – it does so through the ways and means of the times. This could apply to prophets, oracles, and channelling as well as pop culture and its modern fictions. The sacred, the sublime, has always walked amongst the profane. The signs are everywhere, blended into the sidewalks, pulp fictions, and the kitsch ‘n’ kool of the art world. For iconic sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, most of the sublime things of his world were disguised as trash that seamlessly slipped into the background of a dysfunctional world reality. As modern society slipstreamed into a post-modern smorgasbord of chaos, clutter, poetically burnt outbursts, and beatific revelations, a new landscape of the sacred was scattered across the bedrock. The seeming trash of the everyday mundane clashed with the incoming cosmic, and a new urge for the transcendental found its way into so many popular cultural forms that it would take an encyclopaedic mobius-strip to recite it all. For my purposes here I will only all-so-briefly take a hop and skip around some of the budding flora that displayed a burgeoning sacred urge to blur the boundaries and reach for the sublime connection.

However paradoxical it may sound, one of the mediums for the sacred virus to spread came through the channel of chaos. Chaos, contrary to what we may think of it as being an anarchic and senseless cacophony, is actually a canvas for patterns to play out on. As the later emergence of the chaos sciences showed, there was a theory behind chaos – a method behind its apparent madness. Chaos, as we soon learned, did not operate in isolation. As the famous ‘butterfly effect’ was apt at promoting, a minimal disturbance in one part of the world (e.g., a butterfly flapping its wings) could result in a climate effect in another part (a tornado was often cited!). Everything thus existed in patterns, and not in arbitrary, random molluscs and mole-hills. The Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984) quickly became a prominent centre for the research into complex systems, otherwise known as chaos science. Yet the emergence of chaos science had been actualized earlier through many different cultural forms of recognizing ‘chaos’ as a precursor to states of consciousness. Many forms/functions that emerge as aspects of the human condition are first seeded in popular culture ahead of their wider actualization. After all, the basis of the sacred refers to actualized aspects of human consciousness. And what the sacred art shows us is that its presence in our reality-matrix is determined by our capacity of consciousness to receive and acknowledge it. Chaos, as well as being patterns embedded in physical, computational, biological, and social systems, is also patterns of our minds. In fact, it can be said that chaos is part of the order of the cosmos.

 

Chaos & the Cosmic

“Tis an ill wind that blows no minds” – Principia Discordia

The signs for magic, chaos, and transcendental byways were popping up almost everywhere on the western landscape in the post-war, post-modern years. Enochian magic, Golden Dawn rituals, and meta-computing of the self were seeding a growing experimentalism of the human mind. In the US especially, a blend of anarchic cultural subversions were manifesting that played upon known semi-mystical memes. One of these was the text of the Principia Discordia that emerged in the nineteen-sixties as a ‘sacred text’ of Discordianism. Written by Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill) and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (Kerry Thornley) it proclaimed “All hail Discordia!” in a mixture of goddess worship with the notion of order and disorder as balancing illusions. The fifth commandment of Principia Discordia states, ‘V – A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads.’ In mode with a rising tide of memes dealing with truth-through-contradiction the Principia Discordia also went on to claim that,

All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

Discordia came to influence the writings of maverick author-philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who popularised it further in his books, especially in ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy.’ These utterances were echoed by the writer William S. Burroughs who, besides experimenting in cut-up narrative techniques, proclaimed a Discordian-esque ‘Nothing is absolutely true – Everything is permissible.’ Burrough’s infamous outburst was a culmination of religious history (the Assassins of Hassan-i Sabbah) with anarchic chaos from his spirit-possessed universe.

Around this time literate and literary magicians were cropping up everywhere, writing tracts on magic for a modern reader. Many of these literary figures were connected to the Golden Dawn system of magic. Yet another emerging stream was that of chaos magic which originated in United Kingdom in the late seventies. This broader magical path was liberal enough to combine forms of neoshamanism, eastern philosophy, quantum science, visionary art, and later computer technology. This experimental perspective on magic was part of a wider trend in experimenting with known forms for new avenues of stimulating and awakening consciousness. These ‘chaotic’ paths were attempting to destabilize our conditioning patterns and our resultant consensus reality. They were all aimed at waking up the usually-slumbering human mind. As the seminal work Waking Up (1986) by Charles Tart showed, humanity was largely intoxicated with a ‘consensus trance’ that kept us from recognizing sigils of the sacred. In more recent years the metaphors and memes of being trapped within a waking dream, or of dreams within dreams, have been explored in such popular films as ‘The Truman Show’ (1998); the ‘Matrix Trilogy’ (1999-2003); and Inception (2010). Part of the myth we find ourselves popularising is the mythology that we are in some sort of constructed reality – a gnostic-inspired simulacrum of truth.

Gnostic ideas are being gnawed over, processed, and consumed in ever more popular forms of culture. There’s an odd wave of mystical-spiritual impulses now radiating through popular culture that encourages us to throw ourselves into new world-spaces, fantastic realms, and mythological fictions and factions. These are new mash-ups of the counterculture now being packaged and presented as part of mainstream culture. And in recent years the most extraordinary success in this area has been the incredible, phenomenal rise of the modern superhero.

 

Superheroes & the Super-Self

Ever since Nietzsche first declared that ‘God is dead’ we have been reeling and dealing from our encroaching mortality – and trying to avoid this by seeking new technologies and cultural expressions of immortality. This collective experience on the possible ‘death of god’ is like a shock hammer-blow that propels us against the loss of sacred meaning and sublime mystery. Whether we admit it or not we fear the sense of absence, where nothing exists to which we can lend our communal assent. We don’t wish to struggle fragmented and bewildered, abashed by creative forms of indulgence. We cannot be left behind, losing our vital contact with the imaginal, the numinous, or the magical. We cannot be left untransformed in our vacant spaces as a paranormal pop culture washes over us. No – we need our superheroes, our possibilities, our potentials. We need to find a cultural expression for the human psyche; for our psychic currents and transmissions and sacred communication – our superheroes must live on!

Perhaps through the loss of our gods we have had to become our own multiple gods, as we realized a need to fill a vacuum left by myth. With the loss of the godly connection a different psychic wave was released upon the world to coincide with a rising arc of human consciousness. According to Jung, the gods gradually became our disease – ‘The gods have become diseases…who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.’[1] These diseases have now morphed into mutations that make us into a hybrid human-god, with superhuman capacities, yet shunned by the world for being heretical against the natural order. We have the X-Men walking amongst us, a mutant subspecies of humans. The natural order is evo-mythological – it is sacred, beyond human, and connects us with evolutionary currents. In the absence of our ancient myths we have ingested the sacred alchemical root and through pop-culture morphed this transformation into the new wave of superheroes – myth lives anew in spandex. Maybe it is a cliché because it is true; we wish to find the personal superhero within each of us – the journey of the individual, unfolding within the great cosmic drama. This myth – this journey – has largely been taken from us through scientific rationalism and an industrial modernity. Yet now, by becoming more than oneself, we serve the larger story arc.

Our popular subcultures are gradually becoming the norm.  It is not only a question of whether more people are interested or not, but rather that these ideas are more widely available now thanks to popular culture. As William Irwin Thompson notes – ‘We Americans, who are so intent on creating a culture of technological materialism, cannot take in esoteric lore directly; it has to find another way in, and so comic books, science fiction, and movies are the back door.’ [2] Popular culture has been the back door for most of us, and not just for the Americans. But now perhaps the door frames are merging into the background and disappearing altogether. The waking life and the dream are becoming part of the same movie plot, as in Richard Linklater’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (2006). We are more and more waking up into our own movie – our very own Truman Show – where ideas are seeded directly into our environments in order to catalyze our awakening. Like the ancient Eastern tales told us, we have been asleep in a distant land and now we are receiving messages – signals – flashing like neon signs through our popular culture. This marks our juncture, our crisis point, between moving toward waking up or falling back into archaic, catastrophic and catatonic slumber. Again, Thompson reminds us that we ‘intuitively sense our evolutionary crisis and are expressing the catastrophe bifurcation through art – primarily through science fiction.’[3]

Our ultra high-definition visual culture is acting like a portal for the otherworld to enter. The psychedelic experiences that were once fringe and condemned are being re-played out through modern fictions that blend Gnostic tropes, mythological memes, and multidimensional portholes. Transcendental states of consciousness, ratified by the far explorations of new science, are adding to the mix of a new 21st century mythology that as of yet remains unnamed. Perhaps we are emerging toward the birth of new sacred gods. These are the gods of mutations, of neurological and biological adaptations. And they are emerging first in our pop-culture as our superheroes and psychic mutants. In this initiation into a psychically enhanced future we will need more than ever to learn how to distinguish the demonic from the spiritual. Hence the current barrage of cultural tropes in our films, TV series, and fiction that show angels vs. devils, humans vs. vampires, and the whole gamut of the good vs. the bad that has crawled from the forest floor to enter into the quest for the holy grail. All the while the Fisher King sits immobilized, feasting on an orgy of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). In this way the gods will never be forgotten as they merge with a super-augmented mutant humanity in spandex. As psychologist James Hillman says,

Remember: what the Greeks said their Gods asked for above all else, and perhaps only, was not blood; it was not to be forgotten, that is, to be kept in mind, recollected as psychological facts… [The God’s] reality can never fade as long as they are remembered, that is, kept in mind. That’s how they survive. [4]

The real gods, as we knew all along and yet had forgotten, reside within our psyche – they are kept in mind. And yet they can only become real for us – to re-mind us – when dashing about on the stage and streets in front of our very eyes. We need the sacred to slap our faces in spandex gloves before we begin to blink a waking eye.

As Jeffrey J. Kripal writes in his Mutants and Mystics, we have entered the stage of ‘Realization’ whereby we begin to recognize that the events around us in popular culture are not only real but are participatory. That is, our sacred and supernatural fictions appear for us and require our engaged reading of them in order for them to read us. Kripal says that,

In some fundamental way that we do not yet understand, they are us, projected into the objective world of events and things, usually through some story, symbol, or sign. Realization is the insight that we are caught in such a story. Realization is the insight that we are being written.[5]

The latest revival in the superheroes genre is significant in how it takes the mutant trope further and projects it forward as a form of evolutionary mysticism. Our new heroes are displaying to us our latent capacities and powers that are yet to unfold. We are witness to the first wave of mutant evolutionary pioneers. The summit of human evolution is far in the distance, and yet its early stages are manifesting through the Marvel and DC Universes where god-like potentials await us. Through such characters as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine, and Doctor Strange, Marvel mesmerizes paranormal subliminals into popular cultural consciousness. And DC does the same with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, and Green Arrow. Then as gangs they come together as the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men (Marvel), or as the Justice League (DC). They are now our teachers, our guides, our mutant futures that are beyond human. As Kripal recognized, the mutants have become practicing mystics.

We are seemingly living more and more in a mutational and metaphysical universe; and with the arrival of augmented reality our boundaries of interaction with the physical world around us will blur. And yet this suggests a return to the sacred perspective whereby the tangible and intangible worlds become an integral part of our holistic reality-matrix. And we are already well on our way as our outer and inner spaces explode into new blistering supernova.

 

Outer Spaces – Inner Spaces

Humankind has always been a child of the stars. Our early civilizations mapped the heavens before they mapped the terrain under their feet. The abode of the gods was amongst the glitterballs of the night sky, and their chariots blazed across the incandescent cosmic canvas. So it was no surprise then when the UFOs started to dart across our urban skies and come crashing down disguised as government weather balloons. Recent popular culture has nurtured a fascination with outer spaces and our galactic cousins from the Golden Age of science fiction of the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties to the new wave of the sixties and seventies. The concerns of our outer space relations shifted from how to make contact with our space cousins to the entropic death of the universe. And then the environmental trope entered our outer spaces, as if a subliminal projection from our very own inner spaces. The sacred inner space of humankind was now tethering with the galactic outer spaces concerned with our future place in the universe. The growing number of alleged UFO abductees that emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century began to relay messages of extraterrestrial concern for our planetary well-being.

John. E Mack, an American professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in his later years became a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational effects of the alien abduction experience. Mack came to view the alien abduction phenomenon as acting as a catalyst to ‘shatter the boundaries of the psyche and to open consciousness to a wider sense of existence and connection in the universe.’[6] For more than a decade Mack rigorously studied the alien abduction phenomenon and interviewed hundreds of people (whom Mack referred to as ‘experiencers’). What initially started out as an exercise in studying mental illness soon turned into an in-depth inquiry into personal and spiritual transformation. Mack eventually came to see the alien abduction phenomenon as one of the most powerful agents for spiritual growth, personal transformation, and expanded awareness – in other words, as a trigger for a sacred experience. Despite the external anxiety produced by the experience, it was clear to both Mack and his set of experiencers that a profound communion was being established between humankind and other realities. Further, that this interaction was catalyzing a shift in human consciousness toward collapsing the old models of materialistic duality and opening up a connection not only ‘beyond the Earth’ but with other dimensional realities. Mack notes that ‘the process of psychospiritual opening that the abduction phenomenon provokes may bring experiencers to a still deeper level of consciousness where the oneness or interconnectedness of creation becomes a compelling reality.’[7]

This interconnectedness became a channel for the experiencers (abductees) to receive an impressive range of information; such as healing knowledge, spiritual truths, science, technology, and ecology. A major part of the information was apparently concerning the status of the Earth and humanity’s relationship with its environment. Many of the experiencers referred to their own abduction phenomenon as participating in a trans-dimensional or interspecies relationship. The transformative effects of these unusual encounters were often remarkable. Mack’s experiencers talked about an expansion of psychic or intuitive abilities; a heightened reverence for nature; the feeling of having a special mission on Earth; the collapse of space/time perception; an understanding of multi-dimensions of reality and the existence of multi-verses;  a feeling of connection with all of creation; and a whole range of related transpersonal experiences. Significant from these accounts is that, according to the experiencers, the abduction phenomenon is sometimes accompanied by a sense of moving into, or connecting with, other realities or dimensions. The sacred space and outer space were becoming one and the same. Or to put it another way, the contact initiated from those ‘out there’ was having a catalyzing effect to trigger an awakening in the inner spaces way ‘down here.’ It made sense then that our human future was going to include space migration. And according to our galactic cousins, it may even be a necessity if we continued to mess up our planetary home as if it were nothing but a playground to scoff around in.

Inner space junkie Timothy Leary was already riding that space-me-outta-here ticket with his S.M.I.2L.E. philosophy. Leary’s S.M.I.2L.E. stood for Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension. Basically, these were all the tropes from the post-humanism melange added on to the sci-fi dream of humanity living off-planet. We also have now the commercial race to establish a new branch of space tourism, with Virgin Galactic being one of the visible and vocal frontrunners. SpaceX, another private enterprise, is banking its dollars on helping to colonize Mars. There’s no lack of vision, it’s now down to the know-how and the technological leg-up. Now that the space cat is out the bag (excuse the pun), it’s only going to be a matter of time before the picture we have of ‘being human’ will incorporate the starry, cold vistas of outer space. From the earliest sacred expressions in the cave art of our ancestors to the ideas of space migration, they all show two fundamental urges within the human being: i) I am human, I am here (recognition); and ii) Where is the heavenly connection? (contact). Human dreams have encompassed living on Mars, leaving and migrating beyond the solar system, and of contact with ‘Higher Intelligence.’ Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, managed to combine both contact and communication through his receiving of channelled information. It has been documented that Roddenberry was introduced to an entity called ‘Tom’ who represented the Council of Nine, through the channel medium Phyllis Schlemmer. Roddenberry was allegedly receiving information for a film script to be written that would help prepare the public for extraterrestrial contact. The alleged film never got made, yet we might wonder what ideas made their way into Star Trek (including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). It appears that there are those ‘out there’ who are concerned for our proper preparation for the sacred communion. And the archetypes are now flooding through our popular culture like an evangelical tsunami.

The mythic archetypes from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces filled out the roles in George Lucas’s epic Star Wars universe. The good, the bad, and the hairy all took their cue and played along with the hero’s journey for an updated mythological rendering. Whilst the rise of industrial modernity and the secularization of culture may have contributed to an eroding of our myth-consciousness and a demotion of mystery, a new vital force has emerged that is shifting our planetary pranic energy. There may be those who bemoan that our current civilization does not have a mythic centre, yet they’re missing the point. And this point is that there is no exact point anymore. As hermetic lore states, the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The earlier gods retreated back on their sky chariots until we finally arrived at the point where we asked ourselves where all the gods went. The new sacred guides are now secreted in our popular texts that penetrate the outer and inner worlds. These post-historic mythic guides are first to be found within us – within our collective species psyche that gets projected out onto our celluloid and digital-scapes. These re-modelled chameleon mythic memes are telling us that we are not here alone, nor are we here for ourselves alone. The future is both arriving, is here now, and has already been.

We have such films as Back to the Future, Primer, Looper, Terminator, Interstellar, and all the rest to attest to our obsession with shifting our timely perspectives. Everything is now malleable, according to our new quantum sciences, and our sacred revival is knocking down linear walls of rigidity. Just when you thought that you were safe in stable comfort zones, the paranormal is getting ready to redress itself as the new normal. A Gnostic-like awareness of being embedded in a reality-construct will become ever greater as our technologies increasingly broker and interface our physical experience. There are a plentiful array of fictions and films that ply us with plots on technologically-driven machine gnosis. Perhaps they are trying to signal that we are entering the sacred space of hybrid awareness. The film Transcendence (2014), for example, showed humanity edging toward sacred sentience as a means for solving the world’s global problems. As Vaclev Havel stated in one of his addresses – ‘Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction’ (July 4th, 1994). Yet we are not on our way out, despite what the fear-mongering mainstream media may be trying to ram down our throats. Nor are we heading toward a techno-machine Overlord future with us as the slaves. Because the sacred works in multiple streams and never hedges all bets on a one-trick pony.

The game changer coming onto the scene is the participatory mind of human consciousness. The coming space migration is a reflection of our expanding inner spaces. We are toying with these memes in our popular culture now ahead of their coming actualization. What our fictions are dealing with are the blueprints before we’re ready to go the full hog. And that’s why we’re in a period of incredible experimentation – we are juggling with a new type of energy coming into our cultural realities. And this new pranic force is getting expressed in a myriad of multiple forms; be it creatively, chaotically, commercially, or crazily. It’s a cacophony of exuberance and experimentation trying to find its harmonic resonance. We are gaming, bopping, and trailblazing our way into a re-identification with a sacred energy. There’s a strong sense of the sacred filtering through our modern cultural memes, and it’s not all as chaotic as it seems.

 

References

1 Sabini, Meredith (ed) (2008) C.G. JUNG on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic Books, p98

2 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p218

3 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p223

4 Cited in Hollis, James (1995) Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life. Toronto, Canada, Inner City Books, p147

5 Kripal, Jeffrey J (2011) Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago The University of Chicago Press, p217-18

6 Mack, John, E. (1999) Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation & Alien Encounters. New York: Crown Publishers, p218

7 Mack, John, E. (1999) Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation & Alien Encounters, New York, Crown Publishers, p136

The Clock Inside Us

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By Eman Shahata

Source: The New Inquiry

Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”

Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.

The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.

Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.

Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.

One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.

If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.

This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”

It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out. 

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

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By M.J. Higby

Source: Waking Times

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Money has no intrinsic value yet we spend our days damaging our health and spirit in order to obtain it. Why do we sacrifice our well-being for it? Is it the cliché that “we just want to provide a better life for our kids than we had?” Is it just way of the civilized world? The most important question to ask, however, is what power do we have to change this way of thinking and living? The reality is simple: money is a vehicle for social control. Debt makes us good, obedient workers and citizens.

The traditional workweek started in 1908 at The New England Cotton Mill in order to allow followers of the Jewish religion to adhere to Sabbath.  With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the 40-hour workweek became the norm. Data from the 2013 American Community Survey showed that the average commute time in America is about 26 minutes each way. According to a Gallup poll, the average workweek in America is 34.4 hours, however, when only taking into account full time workers, that average shoots up to 47, or 9.4 hours per day during a 5-day workweek. Keeping averages in mind then, between commuting, working and figuring in an hour for lunch (usually less), that puts us at approximately 11 hours and 40 minutes for the average full time worker. If you have a family with young kids, just add in another few hours for homework, baths, etc.

When the day is done, how much time do you have for yourself? To exercise, meditate or otherwise unwind the way that all the healthy living gurus preach? And how much of yourself, your presence of mind, is left to devote to family? We give the company the heat of our most intense mental fire while our families get the smoke. Yet Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, says we need to work more.

The answer to why we put ourselves through this daily grind is multifaceted. The most pervasive reason is workplace and societal pressures. We are raised in a matrix of sorts. The cycle starts around the age of five when we are expected to adhere to a regimented 8-hour day of school. At this age, we don’t have the intellect to question why, so we mechanistically follow the path that’s laid out. This daily path becomes engraved in our minds and becomes as automatic as the sun’s daily journey. Our school system is adept at churning out working class individuals en masse.  We are taught along the way not to question authority, again adhering to the working class mentality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are those in power. They are the ones that like to color outside the lines. Many books abound with titles such as The Wisdom of Psychopaths that illustrate how people with psychopathic traits, ones who don’t tend to follow rules, are often found in managerial roles such as CEOs all the way up to presidents of countries. With these rare manipulative, coldhearted personalities in place and the rest of us following like good sheeple without questioning, the stage is set for compliance.

If you have been in the working world long enough, then the following statement should ring true: if you work extra hours, you are a great worker; if you decline, you’re useless and apathetic. In the work world, there’s typically no in between. The pressure to succeed for the pride and benefit of the company unfortunately supersedes that of the pressure to be a good parent, sibling, son or daughter. According to a study done by the economic policy institute, between 1948 and 2013, productivity has grown 240% while income for non-managerial workers has grown by 108%. To make up for this discordance, pride of doing what’s best for the company has been employed as a motivational tactic. This tactic has been used as a sharp IV needle that’s been inserted into our veins and we have willingly ingested the contents that are injected through it. Pressure to conform toward achieving the company’s goals has overcome our will to be compensated accordingly.

The other side of this pressure comes from society as a whole outside the education/workplace. A close friend of mine works for a state court and makes about $40K/year. He is also a self-employed business owner on the off hours. I estimate that he works about 70-80 hours a week. He owns a home in a well-to do neighborhood and he drives a seventy thousand dollar luxury car. This crystallizes the saying ‘big hat, no cattle.’ But when a lie is told over and over, the lie becomes the truth.

When we look at someone who drives a luxury car and lives in an upscale part of town, we see this as success because of how often that visual of it has been pounded tirelessly into our minds. We fail to see that these are nothing but symbols of success and false ones at that. They appear real because as a society, we have been conditioned to see them this way by the advertising industry. In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, the authors annihilate this illusion. Numbers don’t lie and the statistics show that most true millionaires, those with a net worth of over one million dollars, do not own those luxuries that we typically associate with success and wealth. They view them as the reality of what they are: a depreciating liability. According to the book, the typical millionaire owns a home in the two to three hundred thousand dollar-range and a non-luxury automobile. If something goes wrong with either, they have the cash reserves to fix it. On the other hand, the commonplace owner of the luxury home and car can’t afford the roof and the tires respectively without going deeper into debt if they should need replacing.

Ownership of these symbols of wealth becomes a self-perpetuating illusion to satisfy the psychological need for acceptance. Unfortunately, human behavior dictates that emotional needs often override logical thinking. It’s been said that the borrower is slave to the debt-owner and with luxury items, debt is the rule, not the exception. Debt is healthy for those in power and contributes to a needy and thus obligated worker.

The current wisdom of slave, spend and save for retirement has only one destiny. That destiny can be summed up in three sentences. Spend your healthiest and most productive years working to support a life of materials and thus illusions of success while elevated stress damage your health. During this time, be sure to save enough money for retirement so you can enjoy those years of the subsequent poor health. And lastly, do it in the name of pride for your company and country.

I take pride in being American, as I’m sure most Americans do, however, if you’re reading this you’re likely smart enough to see the holes in the daily grind. It saps our creative potential and our physical, as well as our spiritual energy. We don’t need any studies to tell us how stressed we are and subsequently, how unhealthy we are. The physical manifestations of stress such as obesity, hypertension, heart disease, increased risk of cancer, depression, anxiety and many others tell us all we need to know. They tell us that we need a better work/life balance. They tell us that the pendulum has swung too much in the direction of work and away from life. Fortunately, there’s a way that we can take it back.

The most important way to restore this balance is to realize the power that we, as consumers, hold. Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the film, Fight Club said it best…

“…advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

The marketing and advertising industry know, more than anyone else, what motivates the human mind and how to tap into those instinctual drives. To defend against this industries seductiveness, we need to journey within ourselves and bring to light what’s really important to us. What most of us will find is that experiences and time well spent, not materials, are what makes us happy. In the book, aptly titled Well Being, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter discuss how experiences have been proven to make us happier than material posessions.

We revel in the anticipation of the experience, we enjoy the experience itself and we look back on it fondly for as long as we live. We do this while the expensive car or house that we borrowed money long ago to obtain falls apart causing us to borrow more money. If we live according to the rule that everything we purchase, with the exception of a home, is acquired by cash, then we fail to become slaves to debt and by extension, work. We no longer relinquish our power to creditors.

Oscar Wilde was famously quoted as saying that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. Materialistically speaking, living by this notion will bind us with shackles to a life of debt servitude. When we rip those shackles of debt from our wrists, our minds become clear and we see what truly makes us happy. We spend more time with friends and family. We focus on our passions and hobbies. In essence, we get back to the foundation of what it means to be human. After all, none of us will ever arrive upon the mountain of our last moments of existence wishing we spent more time at the office. We will instead arrive wishing we completed that book, that painting or that experience with those we love most. For those can be purchased not with debt, but with time. And there is no more cunning, covert and deceitful thief of time as that villain we call debt.

 

About the Author

M.J. Higby practices medicine in Phoenix, AZ. He is passionate about martial arts, most notably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He enjoys writing about mental, spiritual and physical well being and questioning the methods by which we attain it. You can reach him on Facebook and Twitter @MJHigby