Ok here are my thoughts on Christmas and life and technology and reality, at least for tonight. Its going to be really hard for me to not look at my phone before I go to bed. Maybe its something Im gonna have to work up to. Maybe for 30 minutes and then hopefully an hour and hopefully they just start making phones that dont alter our brain chemistry in such at least mildly undesirable ways or unsustainable we could say. But you know thats what I realize is the heart of the problems with our technology and the technology industries and the cultural institutions that support them and their ideologies and cosmologies. They are barreling towards change and nominally affecting and instigating change in the human, in society and in the self, without even a rudimentary understanding of themselves often times, of the singular self or ourselves collectively, in groups and as a larger sort of meta organism. Because if most people working in these fields had a mindful appreciation of whats going on they would be advocating for very different kinds of changes and instigating them in very different ways through technology. But I think this is hopefully changing and will come with time as the boundaries between disciplines and fields and institutions start to break down, built as they are on such shaky often imaginary conceptions. The other thing I realized today is that we all have so much in common spiritually. I mean duh but hear me out. We all, no matter where youre from and what tradition or confluence of traditions you and your ancestors emerge from and exist within, we all have the shared history of our ancestors living and breathing practices that honored how inextricable their lives were from the earth and the animals and plants and other humans and elemental forces and everything and the planet Herself, in all these different ways. We all have that in common before the so called dominant faiths came to dominate the globe - Abrahamic and Vedic being kind of the main branches extant now to be simplistic and reductive about it. Another thing we all have in common is that no matter where you live or who you are, we have all suffered in some way the effects of Abrahamic and specifically Christian colonialism - physically, nationally, culturally, spiritually, psychically - from oppression to genocide to slavery to capitalism, the monotheists have waged their wars and pushed their agendas on every continent at this point. And you know in the past that was a really painful thing for me to realize, and it is painful and should be felt and honored as such, but we dont have to let that experience continue to define us. Our collective traumas should bind us and unite us so that we can do things differently in the future, starting right now. Thats our task for 2015. Honor the pain and let it open us to a whole new way of thinking, a whole new structure for consensus reality. The future is totally unknown but in other ways has already happened. Its happening now.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 09:48:06 +0000