Homo sapiens sapiens - OR - Mindless Consumers?

     "Our society values alert problem-solving consciousness and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any type of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today."

       Graham Hancock, writer, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" 2010 movie.


     "What scares me the most ... is that I think we live in an age of complacency. What we're being told is that what we are good at is to sit and watch television or movies. And I guess that stops you from taking risks and facing fears. ... we're being told that what we're capable of is just taking stuff in and buying stuff."                Jason Segel, actor, writer, producer

       Jason Segel interview on CBC radio November 26, 2014: http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2014/11/26/jason-segel-nightmares/

Michael Wood   https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152770060165664.1073741832.628775663&type=1&l=dd02666ee1

Existential Freedom

     "The term 'existential' derives from Latin exsistere, which means to come into being or to have real being whether material or spiritual. By the existential philosophy, we do not experience ourselves as our essences or principles, but as individuals living in the world, always facing our own fragility and mortality. It is precisely this 'passionate anxious freedom toward death' that enables us to construct a sense of purpose, freedom, and authenticity in life, the fundamental existential attributes."

 

       Okon TR. Palliative care review. Spiritual, religious, and existential aspects of palliative care. J Palliative Med 2005; 8(2): 392-414.

jp wildlife   www.dpreview.com

Loving-kindness - an Open Mind-Heart

     “Loving-kindness means … true friendliness to the reality of all things and all events – in their joy, in their suffering.”
 
        Halifax J. “Fruitful darkness. Reconnecting with the body of the earth.” HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 1993. 

 

Busy, Busy, Busy!

     “…how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our own thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range. Perhaps we fear that with silence we might hear the cries of our own suffering and the suffering in the world.”

        Halifax J. “Fruitful darkness. Reconnecting with the body of the earth.” HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 1993.

1 of 19 toxic tailings ponds in Alberta, by Garth Lenz, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Avoidance is Easy - but NOT Sustainable

     As with one's personal issues, dealing fully consciously with organizational problems is potentially gut-wrenchingly difficult.
     Can an organization's problems - even theoretically - be unrelated to its members' personal problems? Could an organization possibly remain the same if all its members were replaced by 
1) wise, mature, emotionally-intelligent people; 2) robots; 3) psychopaths?
     Many of us avoid addressing personal and organizational difficulties until the shit hits the fan. The most common vehicle for avoidance is frantic busyness. Cynical demeaning of attempts to address the real issues is another popular way of fearfully avoiding our own incompetence. Timely expert guidance helps thaw the glacial gridlock of psychological rigidity, allowing normal personal & organizational evolution to occur.

     "Ed Deming used to say that 97% of what matters in an organization can't be measured. Only maybe 3% can be measured.
     But when you go into most organizations and look at what people are doing, they're spending all their time focusing on what they can measure and none of their time on what really matters - what they can't measure. Why would we do this? We're spending all of our time measuring what doesn't matter. In fact, it's part of avoiding a lot of the really difficult and important issues, like virtue."
     Peter Senge in "Reflections of a Recovering Management Accountant"                     www.wisdomatwork.com

Mindless Consumerism & Unsustainable Global Misery

     Marx said religion was the "opium of the people" - and for some, it remains a stupefying force. Entry-level religion for the masses differs qualitatively from what the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and other founders of wisdom traditions intended. It's like comparing fast-food-induced morbid obesity with the ideals of nutrition - no comparison.
     But the masses today are under an additional devastating stupefying force - materialism. The answer to all our problems, including 9/11? - "Go shopping - to show the world what America's made of!" Yikes!!!!
     Multinational business, with the help of advertising psychology, is turning the masses of humanity into a herd of dumb cattle. Industry was supposed to make life better and easier for humanity. Instead we have hoarders, stress from too much choice(!!!), child labor, outrageous rich:poor disparity, and garbage that's smothering the land, air, oceans and groundwater. 
     We must WAKE UP - NOW - and be responsible caretakers of the earth and each other.

Maturation - Evolution of Consciousness

     "Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it. The goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what is already the case. Paradoxically this still requires discipline, and setting aside time for meditation is indispensable. But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one's life, to waking up from the dream of the self. We need not take anything on faith to do this. In fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds."

       Sam Harris. "Waking Up. A Guide to Spirituality without Religion." Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Resilience via Mindfulness

     "Resilience is a 'class of phenomena characterized by patterns of positive adaptation in the context of significant adversity or risk,' meaning that resilience is largely the ability to remain at one's hedonic setpoint while going through negative experiences. Psychologists have identified various factors that contribute to a person being resilient, such as positive attachment relationships (Attachment Theory), positive self-perceptions, self-regulatory skills (Emotional Self-regulation), ties to prosocial organizations (Prosocial behavior), and a positive outlook on life. These factors can contribute to maintaining a happiness set point even in the face of adversity or negative events." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

     Mindfulness training is about developing intimate engagement with reality, as it unfolds moment-by-moment, regardless of whether we perceive reality to be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. While this may seem like a simple concept, it requires much patient training. Yet stabilizing in awareness, even for brief periods, is to enjoy a freedom and quality of life that makes the practice abundantly worthwhile.
     A nice 2014 summary of the neuroscientific understanding about how Mindfulness works from Scientific American: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/06/12/what-does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain/
     Ritchie Davidson PhD and Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD concisely summarize some of the neuroscientific data in this (6 minute) 2012 YouTube video:

Power OR Love ??

     I've had several conversations with decent, intelligent, well-educated men who were absolutely convinced that being open-hearted in "the real world" simply doesn't work - the world would take advantage of them. What does this imply about the average person?

     "Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites - so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. We've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time."        Martin Luther King, Jr.

     Mindfulness meditation is a skillful way of becoming familiar with the depth of our being, including both amazingly positive aspects, as well as "our shadow" - our less-than-flattering egocentric tendencies. By accepting, and thus clearly seeing our shadow, we're liberated from having to "act out" our shadow, and are able to awaken to our full human potential.

Shane Gross, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Reptilian Violence vs Evolved Mentoring

     The (2014) flurry about Jian Ghomeshi, the Dalhousie Dental students' Facebook group, the recurrent nightmare of "honor killings", regular gang rapes ± murders of women (occasionally of men also), are boils coming to a head from the underlying chronic, endemic psychopathology affecting too large a proportion of our species.
     The Oscar-nominated 2013 movie "The Invisible Woman", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1700845/ based on the true story of Charles Dickens' secret affair with a young woman, is a brilliantly crafted study of an infinitely more subtle form of violence against women.
     In this movie, the 18-year old female was fascinated by literature. Dickens could have easily mentored her to help her realize her full professional potential as an author - ideally, to surpass him. Instead, he abused his wealth and position in order to subjugate and keep her as a hidden possession. Dickens was blindly indifferent to her plight & ignorant of the violence he was unknowingly inflicting on himself.

     When a spiritually-mature person sees another who is relatively immature, the desire to mentor arises (rather than the predatory reptilian instinct to seize & control). An evolved, civilized human being nurtures fellow human beings (instead of enslaving them).
     Our own, individual spiritual maturation requires the urgency of attention "as if our hair were on fire". Mere identification with a religion or philosophy, by and of itself, does NOTHING for our individual spiritual maturation - it can even worsen our complacency or much worse. Waking up can't wait. Sleepwalking our way through life is causing tremendous suffering for all of us.

     See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/04/hatred-of-feminine-archetype-cynicism.html 

     and: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/11/communication-skills-start-with.html

greg mclemore   www.dpreview.com

Rushing - towards Happiness??

     We're inundated with the idea that the pace of life is insanely fast, and accelerating! We're mindlessly striving - we assume - to be happy. However mindlessness, time-poverty, and striving, in and of themselves, cause suffering, not happiness. Relentless workaholism is literally killing people - it's so common in Japan that they've coined a name for it: karoshi.
     Mindfulness is an intelligent, viable option!
 
     Mr. Singh in the picture below - the one pulling the rickshaw - is as happy as the average American. He's interviewed in the multi-award-winning 2011 documentary movie "Happy."

See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=time-poverty

Manoj Singh, rickshaw operator, Kolkata, India