Chapter 1: Life Is Tough

“Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.”

—SUSAN GRIFFIN

“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

—DR. SUESS

This is a tumultuous and uncertain time to be living in planet Earth. We’re experiencing an accelerating convergence of change in all aspects of our existence. The intricately woven tapestry of the natural world and the human community is fraying and ripping, and it isn’t difficult to imagine the current social, political, and ecological chaos swirling into catastrophe. Indeed, we could make a good case that catastrophes of our own making are already upon us: endless war, random violence, terrorism, financial crises, social unrest, illness and disease. It isn’t life as usual anymore.

We sometimes find ourselves silently asking, “Does it have to be this way?” In modern society, our deepest and most essential concerns regarding the world and all of life are routinely marginalized. Although we may not always notice this marginalization, it’s breaking our hearts. We’ve all been carefully trained—and have trained ourselves—to avoid acknowledging or speaking out loud those things that might jostle our social networks or that might make us feel uncomfortable or vulnerable. We sense that our deepest concerns will have unsettling consequences if they rise to the surface of consciousness, and that if we fully recognize and voice our concerns about this rapid, unpredictable change that’s unfolding in our world, we’ll trigger invisible tripwires in our social relations and in the subterranean regions of our own psyche. It’s frowned upon to speak of our modern global and local infrastructures as the fragile house of cards that the most rational part of us increasingly recognizes them to be. It’s unsettling to think about extreme climate change, accelerating species extinction, and dwindling resources. It’s awkward to articulate how daily life has the potential to make our minds and emotions reel. It’s inconvenient to directly face how unpredictable and stressful our lives can be in modern society, and how much more unstable life can become in the blink of an eye. We’ve learned, often without being fully aware of it, that we’ll be dismissed or disadvantaged in some way for breaking this internalized code of conformity. We sense that we might be ignored—just as we’ve learned to ignore, silence, and medicate away our intuitions and sensitivities. So we keep our heads down, focus on life’s immediate needs, and stay busy, distracting ourselves from the tsunami of intensifying change.

This anesthetization of our sensitivity and intuition has left us alienated, infantilized, dependent, and vulnerable to exploitation. The banishment of our deep whispering concerns effectively undermines the ability to identify, assess, and manage the inevitable risks that accompany great change. Our institutions of education, religion, politics, commerce, entertainment, health, media, and advertising continually define for us, with great certainty and assumed authority, what the appropriate concerns and questions are, and they provide us with many insubstantial answers. We internalize this received certainty with a sense of hopeful relief, and we turn our backs on the whispering deep voice.

 
What We All Want

All living beings want to be contented and happy, but the human community no longer has a clear understanding of these states of being or how to experience them. The orthodox institutions and corporate organizations that dominate our society bombard us with seductive ready-to-wear narratives that attempt to define contentment and happiness for us. We appropriate these narratives and use them to construct complex narratives about ourselves and our world that we try hard to believe and try to convince other people to believe as well. We invest great amounts of time, energy, and money to create an impressive personal brand, with a color-coordinated lifestyle and a customized living environment that match the templates transmitted to us through our media devices.

These convenient templates for the mind reduce our lives to two discrete segments: a lovingly tended garden of desires and a junkyard of dissatisfactions. An ever-shifting thin line separates the garden from the junkyard. We’re incessantly told, via a steady bombardment of media messages, that “more is better,” but increasingly we’re finding that more is never enough, and that the cost of more is dangerously high. A life of grabbing at what we want and pushing away whatever prevents us from getting what we want distances and distracts us from the quiet voice of the deep and the realities of this quickly changing time. Those who have accumulated possessions and position, and who have experienced substantial pleasures and achievements, are frequently surprised and disappointed to discover that these highly valued ideals in our modern society only bring a shallow, fleeting satisfaction.

Like children, we move rapidly from one seemingly pleasurable or profitable experience to the next, attempting to acquire more status, possessions, and pleasant sensory stimulations. However, none of this results in consistent contentment or enduring happiness. American philosopher Cornel West notes that our constant consumer mentality leads to a personal, social, and ecological catastrophe, which, he says, is “promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists” (West 2011). Yet we’re unable to find a way to extricate ourselves from the discontenting and anxiety-producing patterns of daily life that consume our time and energy.

The Madness of Certainty

In this strange and quickly changing time, madness lurks everywhere. Madness is the inevitable result of the incompatibility between the conditioned and entrenched patterns of thought that drive our lives, and the reality of how things actually work in the natural world within which we exist. In our unexamined certainty, we’ve become dangerously disconnected from the very processes of the earth and sky that we depend on for our life and sustenance. We’re actively inflicting great harm on our bodies and on the fragile membrane of life in this planet to which we owe our existence. We’ve become consumed by personal and societal patterns that are out of sync with the realities of Earth and sky. We continuously cultivate this madness of alienation, while remaining nearly completely unaware of it, its effects, and our daily participation in its creation.

Increasingly, many of us sense that something larger than our habitual pursuit of pleasure and escape from displeasure is taking place all around us and within us. Nevertheless, we tend to confine ourselves to the dark cave of our habits, preferring the madness of our familiar narratives over uncertainty, even if truth and clarity are found within that uncertainty. We try to allay our constant discontentment with the balms of prescribed mood stabilizers, alcohol, and “recreational” substances. We subdue it under more and more work. We quell the whispering voice of truth with the raucous banter on our television screens and the endless entertainment offered by our media devices. We bury it in full shopping bags. But the resolution of our gnawing, whispering discontentment won’t be found in a pill, a bottle, a shopping bag, or on a screen. We’ve been lulled by media and the status quo into thinking that everything will be fine if we just buy more and work harder. We’re continually reassured by the experts of orthodox institutions and corporate organizations that they have everything under control and that we can, and should, just continue with our habits. But are they right?