Lost in the screens

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The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. ~ Samuel Johnson

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[jimtzu]

ironically, you'll be reading this on a screen:

Retribution for a World Lost in Screens

By Chris Hedges

September 27, 2010 "Truthdig" -- Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.
Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.

[Jana]

Hedges is definitely the Aton Wilson of our day...he is able to articulate our modern distopic disease.



FREEDOM BECOMING
When our present level of operation is failing us how can we get outside ourselves to set things right and discover deeper layers of being that revitalize and sustain life?

Whoever we "think" we are is a sham when we fail to hold the whole Universe in our Heart. Ecstasy (ekstasis) means standing outside one’s self to become more real, such that one feels oneself lifted above the merely human. Empathy and ecstasy arise from the same source…integration of the whole human through cosmic unification. The merely utilitarian socialized human, not yet ignited into their cosmic connection, is a fictitious entity, a chimera. The cankerous growth of accumulated sense data and half-baked ideas makes up the homogenized human. When spiritually disenfranchised we are hypnotized by sound bites, dead clichés, symbols, slogans and millennial old stories that have lost their true meaning. Without sovereign genesis we live in a reactive twilight zone of subservience and rebellion to all that impacts our awareness. Our will is thus not ours, and we are not our Selves…but merely a figment of a collective dream, with its underlying nightmare. The answer is not compliance or resistance to the herd, but to elevate our operating level by turning on all the lights in the human castle, to give our individual life and heroic journey meaning and perspective.

The myopia and fixity of Borg conditioning on our divine human organism is only penetrated through the progressive introspective awareness of the conditioning itself. Layer by layer we free our soul from the falsity of material and emotional usury, speculation, supposition, apathy and automation to abide in the scintillating living eros of divine imagination. Spiritual Eros you could call a higher priority drive for zoning into greater integration/integrity...ie: sanity. From the Ursprung always already higher modes of being await our surrender to their in-formation through clear perception and the déjà vu of the Witness. Beyond the treachery and perversion of “The Great Lie Of The Fallen” we return forever toward the beginning…the source of all things, our original “I.”

The goal and the ground of Being is Unity Consciousness or Freedom. We are “freedom becoming.”

(Ursprung: Superconscious Ground, the ground unconscious where exist all the higher structures in a potential form, ready to unfold into actuality, or to emerge in consciousness)

[jimtzu]

Layer by layer we free our soul from the falsity of material and emotional usury, speculation, supposition, apathy and automation to abide in the scintillating living eros of divine imagination. Spiritual Eros you could call a higher priority drive for zoning into greater integration/integrity...ie: sanity. From the Ursprung always already higher modes of being await our surrender to their in-formation through clear perception and the déjà vu of the Witness. Beyond the treachery and perversion of “The Great Lie Of The Fallen” we return forever toward the beginning…the source of all things, our original “I.”

The goal and the ground of Being is Unity Consciousness or Freedom. We are “freedom becoming.”

good stuff! i like that.  and to tie this in with the dominant left brained thread...  it is the paradox of the need for the left brain to develop enough to understand that the intellect, maps, theories are what is holding us back and are not necessary  beyond that (this) point.  we are "freedom becoming" when we  realize who is binding us (to paraphrase the old zen koan).

[Jana]

It is not a matter of either the left or the right. We need both order-reductionism and chaos-Urpsrung. We die of constipated  minutia when we fail let the ocean of the unknown everything wash through our pores. The knots of the left-brain control freak has bound us into the shackles of an existential crisis of surfaces. Life is essentially not worth living when commodification is worshiped at the expense of human truth. Thus we can go no further in our left-brained daze without further losing our souls and conspiring towards the collapse of the humanizing process.

[henry]

Marianthi, i thought dr. handsome understood and was engaged by your question and could have come up with a thoughtful answer,but there were time constraints in the Q&A, and he bailed with the default "exoteric trumps esoteric" answer... i trust your answer more anyway

[marianthi]

Yes Henry,

It can't be easy to fit all they want into these tele-seminars.  If only they could tell me that  a 'cool' brain with streamlined nerve impulses is definitely visible in their scans after the owner has undergone the right practices! 

Even though I can't see mine, a good chant of the Guru Gita sure makes it feel cooler and streamlined.   

What about you?

[Jana]

Our prior state determines our experience, our memory and our lens. Thus Samskaras, or the tendency to build a cocoon composed of negative imprints, is dissolved by a change of heart...in being willing to let go of the way we hurt, torture, scare or undermine ourselves with our interpretation and reaction to events or qualia. The more we cultivate a peaceful bodymind temple...the more peace and Presence we enjoy.

• Solar Sphinx—Sit with your back against a wall or tree, knees pulled up close to the chest. Put hands between thighs and touch finger tips together in a solid wakeful press. Imagine you are sitting in a Merkaba (Chariot of Ascension), that is a 3D star tetrahedron of a married upright and down triangle. Feel the center of the Merkaba at the core of the body between the spine at the 12th thoracic and the solar plexus. Imagine rays of light pouring forth from this internal sun. Now turn the minds eye up to generate the Uraeus and sustain the serpent’s head as an emergent extension out of the top of the forehead. Drop tongue and deepen breathing as usual for sovereignty exercises. Shift awareness between Merkaba, internal sun, finger press and Uraeus until you can comfortably keep all in your mind's eye at once. This practice builds integration and lessens anxious tension in body's core, generating coherence of light. The merkaba is the vehicle for experiencing the eternal in the temporal world and allows the union of body, mind and soul. Such unification is what the symbol of the sphinx means.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugql6D4pFKM

[henry]

M. i just listened to the Guru Gita all the way through, and for the first 1/2 hour i was swept away and transported by its beauty, but over the next hour :bla, i began to hope the Episcopalians would invade the sub-continent again. enough already. Let's come up with a shorthand for Bhakti 

[marianthi]

I leave the classic version of the Guru Gita for long monastic retreats, Henry.  In my busy life I do a fast, staccato version that lasts a bare 20 mins. No C.D, no music.  Most invigorating to the spine. 

I used to escape from the temple in Ganeshpuri,  in my first visit there in the 70's, after the first 15 mins of chanting (with the excuse of 'tummy ache'), cause I could not believe anyone in their right mind would do what was required -and in Sanskrit!.  Eventually I went through the 90 mins. 'agony'  out of curiosity and the benefits hit me.  A Martika Shakti transmutation mystery.

Ah, the memories.
M.

[henry]

M., i enjoyed the bhajans and serenading young Malti , but i don't remember the Guru Gita being that long......i may have told the story of bolting from our meeting room in new mexico and finding myself alone in a hall facing Muktananda; i don't think my startled "wassup!" greeting met sannyasin standards

[Liz]

Henry and Marianthi,

I can't help thinking how much I'd love to be in the same room with you 2 watching you have this conversation.
Liz

[marianthi]

Hi Liz and Henry,

Another meeting in those latitudes MUST be arranged.  We'll bring Venezuelan Rum.  Any chance of  Scotch from Scotland  and Moonshine from Appalachia?

My Sannyasin days are long over.   I now dance the night away: a doomed woman.  I'd love to know the deep dark thoughts of  heads of lineages or 'spiritual movements' or churches over the years.  Your greeting to Muktananda sounds the  perfect 'bumped into in the corridor' one to me, Henry.  Shaktipat can't be denied, no matter what.  The carrier and what is carried don't appear to mind each other. 

Hugs. M.

[henry]

Beautiful thoughts and picture M. ....can't believe you could imagine i know anything about Moonshine ...i certainly have the spaces and inclination for hospitality and if i can un-mire myself from existential property exasperation , i would be honored to host a gathering to sample that good ole' mountain dew

[marianthi]

Enriquenanda,

Steven just read your post and said:  "We'll hold him to that!".

We can also vent property exasperations and lamentations.  My house is over 650 sq. m. of  built space of demand upon demand - soon to be delegated to another owner, the lucky poor bastard!  .

M.

[Liz]

OH fun. Party! I will indeed bring the Scotch!
Lovely picture Marianthi.