Anxiety: Fear in Search of a Cause

Patri­cia Pear­son defines anx­i­ety as fear in search of a cause. Fear is an emo­tional response to a per­ceived threat, which results in feel­ings of appre­hen­sion, dread, ter­ror and panic. As Pear­son indi­cates, the cause of this fear is often veiled, mis­guided, or per­haps com­pletely imag­i­nary. In this sense, anx­i­ety is a self-inflicted state that degrades the qual­ity of our life. Our soci­ety has both a fas­ci­na­tion and addic­tion to anx­i­ety. We choose to immerse our­selves in it. The news media, in their attempts to retain view­ers, lever­age fear and anx­i­ety in order to hold our atten­tion and rarely, if ever, do any­thing con­crete to resolve the issues we face. In the midst of the global finan­cial cri­sis, a cri­sis orig­i­nat­ing in our own inher­ent greed and inabil­ity to act respon­si­bly.
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Education: Losing Your Element

Do schools kill cre­ativ­ity? This is the open­ing ques­tion of an inter­est­ing inter­view with Sir Ken Robin­son, an “expert” on cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion. The answer is decep­tively sim­ple: “Yes, of course they do.” Though this may sound some­what sar­cas­tic, the real­ity of school­ing is the sys­tem­atic oblit­er­a­tion of the indi­vid­ual includ­ing their cre­ativ­ity, and their ele­ment. The rea­son for this is quite sim­ple — all school­ing orig­i­nates in the con­cept of the pre­req­ui­site, that is, that one group of peo­ple who are deemed to be more knowl­edge­able enforce a sys­tem of knowl­edge and skills on those who are con­sid­ered less knowl­edge­able. What is most sur­pris­ing about edu­ca­tion is its per­sis­tent inabil­ity to ques­tion its own assump­tions den­i­grat­ing all “inno­va­tion and change” to mere pass­ing facade.
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Religion: Emergence of a Third Way

Reli­gious belief is often char­ac­ter­ized as being inflex­i­ble and closed. The source of the beliefs that give rise to a reli­gious sys­tem lies within the inter­pre­ta­tion of “sacred” doc­trine that in some man­ner orig­i­nates in an all pow­er­ful being, or God. The doc­trine is con­sid­ered to be an untouch­able, while the inter­pre­ta­tion of it may be widely var­ied. The notion behind many reli­gions is the implant a spe­cific set of beliefs into the minds of fol­low­ers in order to elicit spe­cific kinds of behav­iors. If the fol­lower is suc­cess­ful, they are granted some kind of reward in the after­life; if unsuc­cess­ful they are con­demned in the after­life. In this sense, reli­gion is a form of fear-based con­fine­ment and mind­less con­di­tion­ing. In Unformed Future Tom Roberts describes the emer­gence of a third-way, which is focused on chang­ing some of the assump­tions behind the con­struc­tion of a reli­gious sys­tem that fun­da­men­tally changes how peo­ple learn and inter­act within it.
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Disaster: The Breath of the Gulf Oil Spill

The end effect of the Gulf Oil Spill dis­as­ter will not be known for many years. Some of the effects will be imme­di­ate and obvi­ous, while oth­ers are far more mer­cu­r­ial and illu­sive. As with all dis­as­ters, a large con­tin­gent of peo­ple will be employed to dis­tract and counter both the breadth and depth of the oil spill’s full impact. Many of these peo­ple will be sci­en­tists and per­haps even health experts who are will­ing to be paid to man­u­fac­ture decep­tion and degrade the integrity of their exper­tise. The media, as they so expertly do, will col­lec­tively cre­ate a bog of infor­ma­tional stench that serves only to con­fuse and add to the decep­tion itself.
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Dark Night of the Soul: Learning on a dark night…

[Explor­ing Life] Dark­ness means an absence or defi­ciency of light. It cre­ates an intu­itive space in which the fragility of our own per­cep­tion becomes uncom­fort­ably appar­ent. Dark­ness immerses us in the unknown and ren­ders our beliefs inad­e­quate. On a dark night, when the veil of dark­ness merges with our sense of mean­ing and pur­pose our cer­tain­ties dis­solve — and we feel aban­doned. It is aban­don­ment that is, for me, the essence of a dark night of the soul. This deep and per­va­sive sense of aban­don­ment is not that which is cre­ated by lost friends or a lack of com­pany; we have lost our sense of self and place in the world. On a dark night we are embraced by a soli­tude of being which ampu­tates our sense of iden­tity. On a dark night, we reach a cross­road in which we can no longer be who we were and yet do not know who we are. A dark night of the soul is not merely an iden­tity cri­sis, it is the sud­den absence of iden­tity and an absolute loss of self. A dark night of the soul is the medium in which we learn about our own suf­fer­ing, and to learn about suf­fer­ing is to pur­sue the essence of pres­ence.
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Environment: The Hidden Life of Garbage

This speaks for itself…
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Environment: Distraction — Media Multitasking

Dis­trac­tion is an ill­ness that impairs our abil­ity to think, focus, and con­cen­trate. Chronic men­tal dis­trac­tion leads to chronic phys­i­cal symp­toms of anx­i­ety and stress. Multi-tasking is not only a decep­tion, it inspires men­tal and phys­i­cal ill­ness. New media rep­re­sent one of the most per­va­sive sources of dis­trac­tion on our planet, and there­fore one of the most per­va­sive sources of illness.

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Spirit: Spiritual Deception — The Spiritual Bypass

In The Spir­i­tual Bypass: Self Enhanc­ing or Self Decep­tion? Bernard Starr describes the idea of the spir­i­tual bypass, or using spir­i­tu­al­ity as a means to escape the real­ity of our exis­tence into some sup­posed “higher” state of con­scious­ness. In this way we pre­sume to “bypass” suf­fer­ing for some form of more peace­ful exis­tence. The idea is both seduc­tive and decep­tive. As Starr notes:

There­fore, the exclu­sive pur­suit of the spir­i­tual bypass is likely to inten­sify per­sonal issues. Denial and avoid­ance even­tu­ally lead to implosion.

Propos­ing that spir­i­tu­al­ity is a means to escape one form of exis­tence for the illu­sion of another is a recipe for denial, which in turn only serves to inten­sify the every­day pain and suf­fer­ing we expe­ri­ence. Spir­i­tu­al­ity is pre­cisely the oppo­site; it is the open­ness to the expe­ri­ence of pain and suf­fer­ing — not to encour­age it in our lives, but to accept, under­stand and effec­tively inte­grate it into our lives. Pure con­scious­ness and the every­day “self” are pre­cisely the same thing — they co-exist together as one inte­gral entity.

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Experience: Transience — Younger Next Year

Cul­ture can not only be con­fin­ing, it can be phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, and men­tally unhealthy. We live inside a set of cul­tural assump­tions that often remain invis­i­ble to us. Some­times, these sub­con­scious assump­tions can cause us to live in extreme cir­cum­stances. Reveal­ing and expos­ing under­ly­ing assump­tions and pro­vid­ing advice and meth­ods to escape from those assump­tions is the main­stay of many authors today.
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Experience: Random Musing on Mental Incontinence

I’m con­vinced that the great­est legacy of dig­i­tal media will be the emer­gence and per­va­sive assim­i­la­tion of men­tal incontinence.

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