Unquenchable Hunger

     In a healthy society, individuals are appropriately nurtured in their formative years to know that excessive: working, shopping, drinking, gambling, sex, etc cannot provide the profound peace & happiness that we all seek. See: http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Seeking-Authenticity/c17jj/569e31530cf2d42376d4d8f6
     Our society is far from healthy, desperately lacking nurturing supports, and actively promoting every form of unhealthy excess. On the excellent radio program "Ideas", Alan Lightman pointed out one of the causes of excessive shopping in our society:

     “More work is required to pay for more consumption fuelled by more production in an endless, vicious cycle. 
     And what is it that we are consuming so voraciously? What impels us to work faster and longer hours, even in the face of higher efficiency? What are these burning material needs, when Americans have become wealthier and wealthier, more than doubling their real income per person in the last 50 years? 
     One of the methods of capitalism is to create demand for its product, even when that demand did not previously exist. I was astonished to read this aim so unabashedly spelled out by Charles Kettering, a major inventor and general of GM Research Labs. In 1929, at the beginning of the automobile industry in the United States, Mr. Kettering wrote in Nation’s Business Magazine that business must create ‘a dissatisfied consumer’ and ‘keep the consumer dissatisfied.’ A more recent example of the same idea was voiced by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, as he surveyed the future of capitalism in an ever wealthier America. In his book The Affluent Society, in 1984, Galbraith writes that, in modern America, production will have to ‘create the wants it seeks to satisfy.’ In short, a large part of our consumption is what we are told to consume, told that we need, and the cycle continues.” 
       Alan Lightman. "The World is Too Much With Me: Finding Private Space in a Wired World." Second Annual Hart House Lecture, University of Toronto, aired on the CBC Radio program Ideas, April 18, 2002. www.cbc.ca/ideas

What Have You?

     Running on empty? In a dark place? What do you really need now to feel whole, complete, healthy, at peace, deeply happy & satisfied?

     YOU have that within you right now, & always have had. But many are hurting more than you. GIVE them this gift. Only in giving will you realize what you have, what you are, which is FAR, FAR more than you've ever realized. 
     Turn your love outwards - shine it on those who've forgotten their own immense power, their own amazing light - remind them (& remind yourself).

Connection, Wealth, Health & Evolution

     This morning on CBC radio's "The Current", social psychologist Paul Piff reviewed research that consistently shows how the wealthy tend to be disconnected from ordinary folks, tend to intellectualize (rather than empathize with) human suffering, and give a lower proportion of their wealth to charity than average folk. Wealth appears to act as a buffer - wall, armor, blockage - between the wealthy & reality.
     Yet isn't up-to-date accurate information about what's going on in society, preferably globally - connection - highly valued by astute business people, politicians, talk-show hosts etc? Isn't the ability to quickly fill a need in society - interbeing - the critical feature of successful start-up companies? Don't companies that "loose touch" with what's current & relevant, quickly become irrelevant & bankrupt?
     Isn't poor communication - with adjacent cells in an organism; between mind & body; between individuals in a couple, family or country; between nations, etc, etc, - at all levels of existence - pathological?

     Prioritizing or achieving great wealth & power seems to impede normal human evolution - food for thought in a culture obsessed with the "rich & famous".

     "... it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

     See also: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/05/healing-central-goal-of-life.html
     and: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/08/162-cheating.html

       For more on the artist below & other Florentine "pop up artists", see: http://www.theflorentine.net/articles/article-view.asp?issuetocId=9231

Blub   instagram.com/lartesanuotare   Florence, Italy

Am I Strong or Weak, a Success or a Failure?

     Don't we feel that our family, friends, and society in general expect us to work very hard, be very busy, very successful, wealthy, famous (at the very least locally), and acquire as soon as possible, most but preferably all the signs of success: million+ dollar MacMansion home, prestige cars, designer clothes, prestigious club memberships, private schools for the kids, prestigious summer home, large sail boat, fine wine cellar, regular exotic vacations, etc? The need to be seen as knowledgeable, to be seen as competent are very much part of our personalities - to be seen as successful is almost certainly also part of our makeup.
     And if we never acquire most of the (above) obvious external trappings of wealth, will we be perceived - by others & even ourselves - as weak, lazy and perhaps even a bit dull - a failure? How do we deal with this? Can we allow it?
     Not long ago, showing off one's wealth was considered to be in bad taste, uncouth, crass, "nouveau riche."
     What proportion of health-care professionals can - from practicing good medicine - earn the money required to pay for all that "bling" above? And of the tiny proportion who do, how hard do they have to work to do so? What must they give up in the process?

     If one's top priority is to be seen as "very successful" by material standards, many things can, and do go wrong.
     Constant dissatisfaction with our possessions, is a nightmare created intentionally by big business through advertising. One would hope that health-care professionals are wise enough to realize that "the one who dies with the most toys wins" is a joke, not our true calling.

     See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/12/250-presents-presence.html
     and: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/11/220-hows-work-working-for.html

 

Photo: UncleFai   www.dpreview.com