continues as always. With much more distraction factored in thanks to the phones, computers, tv, and social media. Most people lead non-stop distracted lives now without much stability and permanence. No doubt people’s preference for distraction over common sense, reflection, and thinking, especially of the critical variety, creates even more chaos in people’s lives.
Bringing the conversation back to the importance of individual choices, values, and beliefs in directing how one responds to the chaos, confusion, messiness, and madness of today. Ultimately, individuals have to assume responsibility for their own lives, the ways in which they cope and adapt in fulfilling themselves and realizing their potentials. No one else can turn the last tricks to survival, sane living, and self-actualization.
One needs, again, to make one’s own choices without distractions and without constantly trying to curry favor and approval from imagined, ‘fantasy’ others one imagines are more important and significant than self. No gurus or mentors are necessary for this process. One can figure out things on one’s own. One can follow one’s own bliss without being limited by others or even self. One, ultimately, can free oneself and bless oneself to find true liberation, contentment, and focused living. And it’s worth remembering that the worst chains are the “mind-forged manacles” (Blake) we place upon ourselves, doing it to ourselves.
Authorship has long been incorrectly projected on others and societal approval too much in modern times. The result is a profound, unnecessary alienation of individual from self.
Many people don’t really have a clue who they really are despite all the images they communicate to others. Many people do not truly live deep and spiritually in this commercialistic, materialistic society. They often lead death-in-life existences chasing after money and things as if these guaranteed the way to a meaningful life. There is a profound sense of ‘lostness’ to the lonely crowd. Anyone who is not centered in self with self-knowledge, viable common sense and positive values will be one of the lost, floating thru daze without much purpose, consequence, or meaning.
And yet all or most of the answers simply lie within, very near. But it takes certain acts and practices of consciousness, particularly self-consciousness, to free oneself, the individual self. The simple act and choice of not being distracted without perspective. the practices of thinking, reading, paying attention, meditation, and reflection. The most that we can learn, grow from, and benefit from comes from one’s own experience and knowledge–the significant information we glean from our curiosity and studies of self, others, and the world. In that–wisdom, perspective, and the emergence of deep daily focus and deeper living.
(Above, the first truly literary classic about non-stop change and modern chaos besetting the lost, alienated individual–Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)
