Sunday 10 June 2012

Bread and Circuses

     An earnest life-long quest to discover what's real, what's meaningful is challenging, yet it's the only way to live authentically. It's a constant, intentional maturation or evolutionary process.
     Distractions - from daydreaming & "mindless entertainment" to frank addictions - are constantly screaming for our attention. It seems that the more troubled a historical stage, the more intense the distractions. Immediately before the fall of the Roman Empire, mobs were kept distracted with 'bread and circuses'.
     "Writer Chris Hedges argues that North American culture is dying because it has become transfixed by illusions about literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and democracy. Jim Brown explores Hedges' ideas about the mechanisms that keep us diverted from confronting the collapse around us."
"Ideas" CBC radio podcast:

     Mindfulness is a method and way of being: intentionally aware of what is happening right now, right here - "keeping it real". It's common knowledge among hypnotherapists that "most people are in a trance most of the time". But those in a trance are not aware of their own trance state. It takes skill and intentional effort to be awake and alert, and wake up we must!

Photo: Leo Downes   http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/weekly-wrapper


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