Since the dawn of time, the human brain, the crucible of invention, has sought to facilitate if not entirely cancel out human involvement in many menial tasks.
From the lighting of fire, to the transport of goods, to the washing of clothes, to the cooking of food, all the way to validating tickets, soldering and stamping metal, to sorting and filing, technologies have absorbed too much of the tedium of our day-to-day existence.
The brain has also facilitated the way mankind has gone about the business of killing, whether it be animals in the wild, friends, foes or strangers in war zones. Drones and remote-controlled devices have the best deal of all – they appear purposeful and go where no man can or cares to go – these creations lead an interesting life!
Artificial creations loaded with artificial intelligence also work on our behalf. Some even breathe for us while others think for us. They are even tipped to soon be able to give us the minimal degree of affection that is not always given from our own kind.
Whatever the need or the vacuum, the brain welcomes the opportunity to create something new. The brain then creates a fix to rectify the complications that have inevitably arisen. Most often, and always in the fullness of time, the brain also creates fixes for the fixes.
Toys become tools and free time becomes as rare as oxygen on the steep flanks of Mount Everest, but the weird thing is that though this whirlwind of cerebral activity has gone on in one form or another for thousands and thousands of years, the human body has remained virtually unchanged for an equal thousands of years – and so, too, has our outlook on love, life, anger and death.
We cheat and love and hate in the same manner as thousands of years ago.
We are as sick and as healthy as humans have always been since the dawn of time.
We are as rich and as poor as we have always been.
We are as depraved and as kind and as glorious as we have always been.
Whoever doesn’t agree is … well, just plain wrong – as wrong now as in the long forgotten past.
Wisdom, these days, does not come from elders and wise ones. It does not come from the market place either. It comes to us filtered by the media and from websites – our peep holes into the world beyond our personal one. Through these windows we access the dark and the light recesses of our culture, of our civilization. Darkness and light dispense seamless knowledge.
We value facts of the sort that peppers dinner conversations with meaningful trivia. We value comedy and humor – a good laugh is said to be good for the soul. We value other people’s dramatic moments – why else would we watch the news? We also value personal dramas in the form of reality fiction. As a genre of entertainment, it offers a break from our reality.
We value the full color of blood, gore, murder and morgue on our home screens. Thousands of years ago, the foul smell and color of blood, gore, murder and gore rose from the dust at our feet. Now, we value – on screen and in print – fantasy as a break from it all. We value sex and drugs like never before in the past thousands of years, also as a break from it all.
Human nature is such that the very things we cannot have are the ones we lust after. Fortunes and massive brain power have been invested in search of the Fountain of Youth. In the meantime, the respect given to the Fountain’s avatars, the myriad of age-veiling products, is not commensurate to the miracles they fail to perform.
Though we neither understand it, nor control it, nor truly respect it, we are as hypnotized by all that is youth-oriented. Young by proxy is as youthful as we can get while we dream of, one day, bathing in that elusive Fountain – and cheat Death.
At another level, private dwellings have long supplanted communal living in caves and huts. These unobtrusive, open habitats that blended so well with nature were abandoned not so much to protect ourselves from nature, but to protect ourselves and our goods from each other.
We separated from our family clan and drew blinds over our windows.
Locks of all sizes were added to various objects and places, paving the way for solid front doors, fences and alarms.
Wherever we live, we are aware of the encroaching sex slaves and organ trafficking industries in our own backyards just as, wherever we live, we are aware of the wide palette of abuses that happen behind the closed doors. We call the police. We nod and we sigh: Yup, some people have it real hard.
The thick walls that used to be built around our fortified towns are now built around us – around our heart.
Though we still ache in the same way as our karmic ancestors ached all those thousands of years ago, we are lonelier than they ever were.
How is it that the myriad of Happiness-enhancers that money can buy are not delivering their promise? Could it be that the trace element of happiness in Happiness-enhancers is too faint to induce true happiness?
Let’s imagine we are on a mountain top and looking down. What do we see teeming below?
We see nature as nature has always been for thousands and thousands of years.
We see fields and flowers and forests. We see streams and seas that breathe and heave silently to a primal rhythm. Light has remained unchanged. Just as it was then, it is now.
We feel the sun, the wind and the rain on our face. Just as our karmic ancestors depended on them, we can’t live live without either.
We see birds that swoop, bank and squawk.
We see fish that frolic, swim and create life.
We see animals that kill the prey they need to feed their cubs, their pups or their chicks – but kill no more than that.
Each of nature’s elements, each flower, each animal, each insect does what each has been doing for thousands and thousands of years.
Looking further afield, we see the deep scars and the sealing roads that striate her crust. Massive occlusions, protrusions and obstructions block the view beyond.
We see masses of heavy enormous, constructions that reroute the natural flow of nature’s movements. These detours constrict the way of the winds. They block the natural drain of rain. They block the flow of our rivers and streams. They block the natural stream of sun light while Tungsten guides our days.
And, then, occasionally, Nature has enough of our ‘antic disposition’.
She throws up our toxic fumes and she belches our toxic energies. She does for us what we don’t dare do ourselves – for ourselves.
In an act of symbolic detoxification, she floods our streets to cleanse them as our sewage bubbles upwards.
Her winds dislodge more than dirt and grit. They unroof our sturdiest buildings to release what has been repressed. Her winds reveal the tinsel-thin quality of all that our culture worships.
From the lap of Luxury, the winds pluck and crush all manner of toy boats and toy cars. They flick grandiose mansions off their hills and twirl planes out of the skies.
They swoop through our cities to expose our fortresses of 2 x 4 planks and plaster-thin walls.
Yet, we still depend on the winds to clear the pollution away from our eyes and lungs, to scatter life-giving seeds and turn our high-tech wind mills.
Nature rumbles and heaves – concrete and steel become rubble. Like a wild stallion, Natures frees herself of the leaden armor that has been sealed to her back.
When Nature keeps crops buried under her crust, she fixes the price of what harvest there is and
when she clips the wings of our planes to keep them grounded, the world is confounded.
Left to her own devices, Nature sheds the old while she heals and renews herself.
She is happiest when we leave her alone. In the meantime, she adapts – we don’t. We are still as dependent on her for the oxygen we breathe as we were thousands of years ago.
Because of the way the science of Man and its many tentacles have altered the air, the waters and destabilised the crust of our planet, we are more dependent on the rivers that course through her veins than our karmic ancestors ever were.
Nature has been doing her thing at her own calm and even pace, while we wander around, through and across the globe, always in search of something more than what we have,.
It would appear that, thousands of years later, this elusive something is still a combination called Money and Happiness.
We zigzag in its pursuit and we lose our way. We find it again, maybe, for a short span of time and off we go again. We think we are happy. We think we are rich.
We think we are happy because we think we are rich.
Maybe we never find our way and we give up.
We sit down and the invisible moss of passive-resistance hardens us from the inside out.
We work and we play but we are anxious.
We are both restless and complacent. We are tired.
We grow sad and we get sick.
We, as a species, die today just as we died thousands and thousands of years ago.
What keeps eluding mankind, because it has never been placed on the world’s agenda, is balance.
The key to an enhanced quality of life, to enhanced happiness, to enhanced personal satisfaction resides in the balance between the drive to excel, to accumulate and control and the drive to find an inner equilibrium – inner peace.
The compulsion to take and get needs a companion – the compulsion to accept and give freely from the heart.
The drive to achieve needs to be matched by the drive to be awake, to kindle a generosity of spirit and an integrity thought – in all the moments that present themselves under our feet, particularly when envy, resentment and anger raise their ugly little heads and roll up for the roll call.
The penchant for dreaming and hoping and apprehending needs a flip side: a genuine understanding that what befalls us in the string of moments that make up our hours, days, months and years – the pleasant, the unpleasant as well as the unexpected – are but karmic events engineered to make us stop and reflect on our intentions, purpose, spiritual energy and responses.
Yet, theoretically, though we are a couple of million-year wise, we are still as unaware of the true purpose of ego in our energy field and of the true purpose of our presence as individuals in this lifetime, as we had been of the effects of smoking on the lungs and as unaware as we had been of the hundred different germs on our hands and of viruses that sprayed from our cough.
Having said that, still today, in spite of millions of dollars spent yearly on national campaigns aimed at raising awareness, millions of people worldwide fail to change their habits.
The bottom line is that in spite of dazzling technological and scientific advancement, our species is basically as spiritually unevolved as it was thousands and thousands of years ago and, yet, scientists tell us to pack our bags for Jupiter, the planet that most resembles Earth.
And what would we do there that would be intrinsically different from what we have done since the dawn of time?
All I know is that if we were to all disappear tomorrow, Nature would sprawl inside our hallowed, hollowed halls.
If we were all to disappear tomorrow, Nature would have a field day and promptly forget we had ever been here.
Bamby
heather426
C.C. Saint-clair
alfiesgirl
It’s great to see this blog is finally getting the attention it totally deserves! Keep up the great thinking because I do enjoy the mental and spiritual stimulation it gives my tired old brain.
A wonderful journey and experience is what your are sharing. It’s a delight to read. Thank you.
why didn’t i see your blog before??? I love it.
I admire what you have compiled here. so much food for thought.