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Posts Tagged ‘politics’
I’ve been reading a few comments, and, frankly this has inspired me to write an addendum to The Value of Nothing and the Wisdom of the Bodhisattvas. One of my favorite movies is Oh God You Devil staring George Burns who plays both God and the Devil. One scene where someone is interviewing the devil goes like this…
Interviewer: What is your greatest invention?
The Devil: Language
Another approach to that concept was provided by on of my teachers who said, “Modern man has lost the ability to distinguish reality from symbolic abstractions.” Let me provide an example.
Most people would say that a flower is a real thing. Yet, if you get a room full of people together and ask them to write down a description of a flower you will get some that say “a plant”, others that say “a rose”, others that say “a tulip”, and so forth. So really, flower is really an abstraction for a category of things. It is not a real thing itself. What about a “rose”? If you go through the same exercise you will get “red roses”, “yellow roses”, “bush roses”, “climbing roses”, and so forth. So rose, as real as it sounds, is another symbolic abstraction. Well, you can keep taking this to the next level and the next level until it starts to drive you crazy. What about things like love, freedom, conservative, liberal, and all the other similar abstractions we find in our language. I suspect that no two people agree on precisely what any of those terms mean.
Let’s shift for a moment to human beings. When you think about it, all human beings have the same real concerns. They want to eat, they want to have a place to sleep, they want to feel safe, they want to have companionship. Whether you are liberal, conservative, American, Russian, Arabic, Christian, Jew, Socialist, Lawyer, Doctor, or Indian Chief, your basic needs are the same as other the needs of other people. That is what is real and that’s an extremely important to point. When it comes to the realities of living, all people — past, present, and future — face the same issues.
Yet, throughout history certain individuals have discovered that they can promote their own self interests by creating linguistic abstractions that obscure the sameness of all people and, instead create divisions. By creating the abstractions that mentally create the “good guys” and the “bad guys” somebody ends up with more money or power. Yet, that is precisely the illusion that many religions talk about.
So, the question is whether it is a higher value for everyone to focus on the abstract divisiveness in order to get what’s yours or to focus on the sameness and try to ensure that all people get their real human needs met.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Blessed are the peacemakers
Jesus clearly gives us the commandment to focus on the sameness of our neighbors and not on imagined diversity. That is our challenge in making the word better because it’s critical for us to understand that can only happen if it’s better for everyone. It is, again, the Bodhisattva Vow. Returning to the so-called “free market” value system, keep in mind that our cultural moral ideal overturned the tables of the money changers and said, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” Enough said.
Posted in People today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Raj Patel has written The Value of Nothing a new book inspired by this Oscar Wilde quote. I like to slightly rephrase this as the value of no thing. The basic idea in the book, is that the free market economy has failed us by shifting our thinking to believe that considering price is the only determining factor of value. Yet, there is value in other things that a price cannot be attached to. For example, a hamburger that has a price of $4 really should be priced at $200 if you factor in the environmental costs of producing the hamburger, but the markets work in a way to exclude things like the value of the air we breathe, the safety of the water we drink, and the damage caused by a junk food diet. Unfortunately we have learned that if we can’t or don’t attach a price to something it is valueless and, therefore unimportant.
Since the economic collapse we are discovering that the free market centric model of thinking is, in Alan Greenspan’s [former chairman of the Federal Reserve] own words, flawed. Those things to which a price cannot be attached have the highest value. Unfortunately, the flawed model of how things work has been dominating the USA, if not the world since the end of World War II. That means that one change in crisis of consciousness must be that we begin to understand what we really value and act accordingly. Free market thinking may have brought us lots of material prosperity at the cost of our fundamental values. The truth is that free market thinking is only one world view. There are others, and the shift in consciousness begins when you reassess your own values and begin to act on what your true values are. For example, is it more important to get a 15% pay increase that demands 20% more time or is it a higher value to spend time with your children. On a more global level, is it more value for you to get that new BMW every year or two or is more valuable to see that all Americans have reasonable health insurance.
The second example focuses on what I will call a “I’ve got mine and the hell with everyone else because I want to get more” way of thinking that has arisen out of market-centric views of the world. Suppose, instead, that we think in terms of “I’ve got mine now how can I help others” way of thinking, not at a billionaire philanthropic level, but at a day to day personal level. The best example of this that I can think of are Buddhist Bodhisattvas and the Bodhisattva Vow. In Mahayana Buddhism a Bodhisattva is sort of like a Christian saint. They are people who have achieved a considerable degree of enlightenment who but forgo their ultimate enlightenment to help others achieve liberation. In Christian terms they give up immediate rewards of heaven in order that other people might achieve heaven. The Bodhisattvas understand the interconnectedness of all human beings and that they will not be fully enlightened until everyone else is. The Bodhisattva Vow is simply the commitment that a monk may take to work as a Bodhisattva as his/her own wisdom increases.
Putting this in another context, are you willing to have a Chevy instead of a BMW so that everyone can have a car?
Today brings home the point because of the huge earthquake in Haiti. People are suffering unbelievably. So, what are your values? You can begin to restructure your life to fit your values using The Warriors Time Management System. Get it free by clicking here.
The Asteroid Disaster
Have you noticed that the SyFy and History channels seem to be airing one mega disaster show after another? What gives here? Recently there have been broadcasts about the mega tsunami coming from off the coast of Africa that destroys the east coast, the mega volcano from Yellowstone that destroys the middle of the USA, the earthquakes that destroy the west coast, the asteroid that destroys the entire planet… those are the scenarios that have some realm of possibility, eventually. Were also being fed stuff about shifts in the magnetic poles, gamma ray bursts, and anti-matter explosions.
There is some pretty strong evidence that violence on TV desensitizes us to real violence and that children who watch violence on TV tend to be more violent. That makes perfect sense because we interpret the sensory data from the world in terms of how our mind has been conditioned to think. So what’s up with these disaster scenarios? In the Master Key System, Charles Haanel describes a process that activates the Law of Attraction. In a nutshell, visualization directs the subconscious mind, which, in turn attracts the visualized to manifest. That’s a simplification of a 24 week course, but works for the sake of this post. The two big questions are…
Are we being desensitized to large scale distasters?
Is the Law of Attraction going to attract large scale disasters?
This is certainly food for thought. Those who lean toward conspiracies like the Bilberberg Group might even find some interesting dots to connect here. Despite the proliferation of TV channels on cable and satellite, there are only a handful of companies that actually own all these channels. In other posts the link of the media to the Bilderberg Group has been noted. So, the question on the table is whether there is some conscious decision involved in this programming. Watch Conspiracy Theory next Wednesday. I’ll be interested to see what Jesse Ventura says about 2012.
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