posted October 26, 2010 01:16 PM         

Enough of this Saturn bullsh!t.

Let's hear an outer-planetary perspective!

"It is no measure of health,
to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Seems to me the real problem is with the organization of a society which makes these absurd demands on people's energy and time. As a result, we point fingers at each other, and compete to live up to these absurd demands. The so-called good, responsible people are the ones who internalize the expectations of their culture and do their best to live up to them. The so-called selfish, lazy people are the ones who fail or refuse to conform to this backwards system.

Imagine a society where harmful action is demanded and awarded. The people who do the most harm will be seen as the models of how a good citizen behaves, while the people who do the least harm will be chastised and called useless. Many of them will also abuse themselves, having been convinced that they really are degenerates, and really ought to be doing much more harm. As I see it, this is not far from our situation. Certainly, not all labor is harmful, but, if you really take an independent look at it, you'll see that most labor is harmful, and that human beings were never meant to live like this.

In cultures where mindless productivity is not idealized, and where work for work's sake is not a virtue, these issues do not arise. Not nearly as much, anyway. The people spend most of their time relaxing, connecting, creating art, and exploring spiritual realms. When it comes time to work, they are generally happy and eager to do it. Perhaps this is why many of the greatest minds of recent decades have declared that the very future of mankind depends on a return to the values of indigenous peoples. The answer isn't to do more, but less.

If there's going to be a future for us, it's going to involve a huge scaling-back of our present activities. We have done far too much on the material plane, and left consciousness relatively unexplored. The result is that we've become slaves to a false ideal of productivity. We destroy vast treasuries of resources, including human resources, in order to manufacture and distribute junk. Why? To maintain the current of history. To keep from asking the big questions, and making the necessary sweeping changes to our way of life.

Many of us work like slaves, as opposed to many indigenous peoples, who work an average of sixteen hours a week. And our work is mostly meaningless. We produce an overwhelming and expanding variety of useless material junk. We don't make the food we're going to eat tonight. Rather, the things we need are far removed from the efforts we make to obtain them. And what do we find? That real food is harder and harder to obtain. Harder, and more expensive than ever. Of course, there is now plenty of garbage to choose from, at a minimal expense (just your soul).

The answer isn't to turn on each other, and point fingers at the people who aren't "pulling their weight" when it comes to supporting this top-heavy culture. Rather, we should consider that the true enemy is within; it's in our own unwillingness to challenge the assumptions we've been conditioned to accept as gospel truth. We need to step outside of our own cultural conditioning, and take a serious look at other ways of life. Once we start questioning the basic assumptions of our culture, we stand a chance of finding a solution that makes sense, and honors all of us as the divine children of God we are. This isn't so much something we do, as it is something we undo.