Admittedly, having a bit of disposable cash in the bank can give you a sense of Buddhistic calm, and despite the fallacy involved, that's probably preferable to the bonafide adventure of robbing a bank. A better alternative, however, is to learn to be at peace even when common sense (a highly overrated virtue) would lead you to believe that someone in your situation ought to feel threatened and insecure.
Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.
Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come.
Danger is to adventure what garlic is to spaghetti sauce. Without it, you just end up with stewed tomatoes.
What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird.
It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.
What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities." Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing 'Hamlet,' not to mention 'Tarzan of the Apes'), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.
Individualism is bad for business - though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent.
It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone.
Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.
The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes.
Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks.
In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.
Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions.
Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular.
Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.
The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.
Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.
Throughout most of our history, nothing - not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons - has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed.
The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically.
Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time.
The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending - and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever.
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