‘What we want makes us more susceptible to what we don't need’. That’s what I realized today and decided to write about it. Kind of appropriate for the season don’t you think? We buy things to celebrate baby Jesus’ birthday. What?
Black Friday is gone but the Christmas sales endure. Cyber Monday, Flash Sale. Signs decorated with Christmas decorations, red and green, proclaiming 15% off on everything. That’s a deal.
Anyways, what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to say . . . Well let me start from the beginning.
Somewhere around 6 o'clock in the morning on September 26, 1950, I emerged into this world. Or as Alan Watts put it we are not born into this world but we are born from this world, like a leaf emerges from a tree. And what a tree it is. The tree of life. With the rich mulch of all the fallen leaves that have come before us littering the ground and fertilizing our own selves. We are part of this world not separate from it.
I started my journey with a blank slate, like we all do, ignorant and utterly simple. I didn't know how to write my own name. I didn't even know my own name. I didn't know the name of anything or the purpose of it. I knew the warmth and the love and the sweet milk flowing from my mother’s breast, that blurry hazy creature that was holding me. I sucked and I slept and I had no more desire than to be content.
Flash forward 20 years. Now I am a grown man, a young one but mature like a sapling in a forest of trees. I have learned the names of many things and discovered many desires: to be successful, to have money, to have companionship and a place in society. Ah society, here it is, the thing that surrounds us and reminds us constantly of who we are or maybe, more accurately, who we are supposed to be.
We're all programmed. If you don't believe me go to some foreign country somewhere where people aren't at all like you and take a look around. That's how much programmed you are - just as much as that guy who seems to be so different from you; he wears different clothes, he speaks different from you, he has different mannerisms and different thought patterns, how things should be and how things should be done, endless subtle variations and all of it programmed by the society around him. Just like you.
And just like me. By the age of 20 I was fully programmed and ready to go, to be a productive member of society. There was only one small glitch, I was beginning to suspect how programmed I was. It started with my religious training, which was dense, heavy and thorough and then on to my public education, all the way back to 1 2 3 and A B C. Christopher Columbus and Manifest Destiny and Democracy and Charles Lindbergh and x+2=y. Why I don't know but it does.
All this programming described the world to me and what I should believe in and why but there was some quiet voice from somewhere that said, don’t buy it, find the truth, be free.
And that process is ongoing. Now at the age of 73 I still notice how programmed I am and I still attempt to unravel the tangled mass of concepts and presumptions and assumptions that inhabit my brain. I am more sensitive to the ongoing societal programming happening all around me now than I have ever been before, I think, but the process, doesn’t stop. Logos and pop up ads when you're just trying too get to the sports scores, sports scores. Yes even sports scores, the addicting idiocy of who won and who lost. Somebody won and somebody lost. It happens every time. But by this time next year I will have forgotten even who played. The signage, the verbiage, the incessant blather of the news telling me how bad things are.
We're all programmed and the largest portion of it, it seems to me, is the program to buy stuff. It's all about the money in other words.
This message in it's most devious form corrupts everything and everyone. We buy (especially at this time of year, Merry Christmas, ching!) things we want but don't need until our closets are full and our storage units too. Stuff piles up or gets dumped in the trash and winds up in the local municipal landfill. It’s hilarious. Good for business though.
I forgot what my point was. Did I even have a point? Yes at one point there definitely was a point. I think it was about the new future, what I imagine anyways, when the 22 year olds take hold of it. They will imagine and manage a new world very different from this. That’s my prophetic vision. Money is not everything. Being alive is. Systems of commerce are not the most important things - human beings are.
We knew this a long time ago but somehow forgot. Fell asleep. Enchanted and entranced by the magical power of stuff. Cool stuff, electronic stuff, glitzy stuff, stuff that can do amazing things (granted), but stuff. Just stuff. What human beings really need (let me remind you) is healthy food, clean water, comfortable shelter, effective health care and community or love. That’s it. Everything else is mind candy. Peripherals. Optional. Non-essential.
Think of wealth in terms of everybody having those things mentioned above. Not accumulating money but accumulating the general prosperity and well being of the whole species, the whole planetary biosphere for that matter. Wild idea, huh? That’s why it’ll take the 22 year olds (or maybe their kids) to do it. We’ll never get around to it.
music from 22-34 / thank you Liquid Bloom & PERE - the track is ‘Afar’
the new future