More on the compelling inner life thing

Lifted from flibbertigibbet!

"There's nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions, talk and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you're hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you're looking at? The great Socrates said, 'the unaware life is not worth living.' That's a self-evident truth.

"Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts--generally somebody else's--mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions."

- Fr. Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

Lifted from Network! by Paddy Chayefsky:

"You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal! You do! Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!"

-Howard Beale

Lifted from a coffee mug that came with my space-age foam Tibetan meditation cushion from Zen Mountain Monastery:

WAKE UP!

I can't speak for all those people I suspect are just zombified by marketing, media and materialism. I can only tell you that I was 45 years old before someone finally explained to me what was going on with me, and gave me enough info that I could get myself started on the path that led to where I am tonight.

My therapist had worked as an adviser to a governor, so he knew whereof he spoke when he went down a list of people –– famous, powerful people in the state –– whom he personally knew and whom he suspected simply had no inner life or sense of introspection. Like De Mello, he was pretty sure that a lot of people weren't much more self-aware than a typical household pet.

There is a level in some forms of Buddhism called 'stream-enterer,' which is sort of like being a novitiate in some Christian denominations. A stream-enterer isn't enlightened, but has decided there must be some such thing as enlightenment and wants to find it.

(Remember what the Zen master said, though: "If you look at it, you will see it. If you look for it, you won't.")

But how do you start to look for enlightenment or anything else if you can't pry your eyes away from Desperate Housewives or the mail order catalogs?

I remember a time in which I was almost hypnotized –– or so it seems now –– by GQ, Esquire and other men's fashion magazines. All my desires were dictated by what I saw in ads. I didn't have time to think about what I wanted –– I was too busy processing what Ralph Lauren and other big-name '80s designers were telling me I should want.

I went to a movie at Quail Springs over the weekend. I used to go in the mall all the time and think nothing of it. Now, after years of inner city living and spending most of my consumer time in small, locally owned businesses, the mall seems like a freakin' space station. It's like Logan's Run in there. All the neon and processed air and animated kiosks. But it took me years to notice.

From the time it opened to about 1999, I was so used to wandering around in the mall with my eyes glazed over, bombarded by canned music and sale ads and mannequins in windows that I never even noticed how bizarre it was. I was a consumer, and it was my job to consume, dammit! Must... have... Mountaineer Jacket! Must... have... Adirondack Boots!

I was, as Howard Beale said, a human slowly turning into a humanoid.

Thanks to a series of remarkable incidents, I have gotten most of my humanity back, and I live among the other humans in the little human enclave in the old part of town.

Blow up your TV.

Get out of the mall.

Live.