Written on 2010-02-22 20:50:48
No, I’m not talking about the living dead (zombies), but the dead living. I see them every day on the subway here in Hong Kong. They wear the same pitiful, sad and hopeless looks on their faces, the look of the damned. These hapless commuters are on their way to the dreaded Dead Zone.
Work.
The dead living are breathing still, but they are dead on the inside. Their hearts still pump, but they have ceased to feel.
The problem is that as people grow up, and grow older, people give up listening to the call of their spirit. In his book Learned Optimism, positive psychologist Martin Seligman describes classic conditioning experiments, where dogs are confined to boxes and given small electric shocks. In some cases, the dogs are shocked if they go to one half of the box only. They soon learn to avoid that side. Interestingly, even if the charge is later disconnected, the dogs still tend to stay away from that previously electrified side of the box, even though it is perfectly safe.
Other dogs are shocked randomly. They have no way of knowing when or where they will receive the shock. Most eventually lie down, start whimpering pathetically - and give up.
The dead living are a bit like those dogs, and they have simply given up. The modern world delivers shock after shock to the spirit, till the spirit is never visited again.
We have all been conditioned to ignore our inner callings. It begins as children, where we are told to “be good”, and that we cannot have what we want. Then we are subjected to the education system, which jolts the last of the resistance out of us. When we get into relationships, we give our power away to the other, to win acceptance and approval. By the time we have reached adulthood, we have disempowered ourselves. Our souls have lain down and self-obliterated. Thereafter, we live lives of quiet desperation, cut off from our essence, our spirit. We become the dead living. Like the aforementioned pathetic dogs, a barely audible whimpering sound can be heard coming from them on a regular basis. It’s called complaining.
Let’s be honest. To some degree, most of us are like the dead living. Very few people are fully in touch with their spirits, with the deep essence that fires their souls. In all fairness, it is not really their fault. It is extremely difficult to even know about the human spirit in the modern age. The system produces zombies. That is its function, because the zombies are needed to crank the handles of the cash machine – consumer society. We are constantly being primed to move away from our essence, from the truth of who we are in this moment, by being placed in a state of constant desire, and constant dissatisfaction.
What we have been given is the here and now, but we are taught to reject it. “Now” is not enough - because we don’t have that job, that money, that perfect body... We are conditioned to reject life’s gifts. We reject God in the only place that God is ever found: the here and now. And we have forgotten the language of the soul: intuition. We do not, and cannot hear what lies within.
What can we do about this?
The first thing is to admit that you are, to some a degree, one of the dead living. You have lost touch with your essence. You do not live in the present. You have forgotten how to listen to your soul.
You then need to find the right ways, the right methods, to begin to connect deeply with the present, and with the voice of your spirit. This is not as simple as it sounds, because we are taught precisely nothing about this in education, society and the media.
Finally, we need to commit to unlearning, and then re-learning how to know, how to feel, and how to be. That commitment includes real world actions and follow-through. In truth, it is a life-time commitment, for the programming which turned us into the dead living has been intense – and it is ongoing in all that we see and experience in our social circles and the mass media. As soon as you turn away from this article, the programming will resume.
In the end, you have to want it badly, and you have to fight for your Bliss. You have to fight for your right to be authentically you. The necessity to fight emerges from the fact that you will often receive active hostility from those around you as you seek to choose life. Most will not understand. They will not know.
They will not be.
Comments:
by Simon Buckland
2010-02-27 12:56:26
That's so true, Marcus - and beautifully expressed. On the subway in Hong Kong, in London, in Paris, in New York, all around the world we see the armies of the self-lobotomized, the useful machines that we are all to a greater or lesser extent. As TS Eliot said over 80 years ago, observing the commuters swarm over London Bridge in the morning:
| A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, | |
| I had not thought death had undone so many. | |
| Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, | |
| And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. |
It would almost be comforting if we were all subject to some vast anonymous conspiracy controlled by Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and Blue Shield, but the cruellest irony is that we're our own gaolers. It's our own mechanicalness and lack of spiritual fire that makes it easier for us to fall into patterns and structures (which indeed do serve mega-capital's rather than our own interests) than to carve out our own path.
Unfortunately, anyone who isn't firmly committed to his or her own purpose is just waiting to be commandeered for someone else's.
Shame, that
by Marcus A.
2010-02-27 20:39:51
Interesting that TS Elliot used the same metaphor all those years ago, Simon! And yes, there is no grand conspiracy (although there are obvious power structures in play at a systemic level, and organisations, groups and governments do manipulate people very deliberately). The widespread belief in conspiracy theories is testament to the way people give their power away to others, but are not aware of the precise process and their central role in it.
Marcus