Did You Forget Something?
Why is old considered useless? Because in old age the emphasis shifts from doing to being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of being.
— Eckhart Tolle
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Our modern democratic age has manufactured a personal spirituality to meet everyone’s needs, which is absolutely guaranteed to be calm, sweet, peaceful, polite, positive, comfortable, reassuring, unthreatening. And instead of leaving the sacred well alone … we domesticated it no less effectively than we managed to domesticate everything else; trivialized and thoroughly prettified it; agreed on making it into something politically correct.
But this happens to be almost the exact opposite of the ancient understanding — which is that spirituality and the sacred offer the profoundest challenge to our complacency, as well as presenting the most radical threat. The spirit is not only there to make us think deeply. It exists to take us into places where thinking becomes useless, and even our cleverest ideas are left behind. …
Well, there is no going on as before. Maybe we think we can act in the same way for a few more years; but what we are leaving behind us is a totally different world. And we have a certain responsibility to wake up to the awareness of what that means.
Everything that was implicit in our civilization from the very beginning, everything that was already contained inside the seed of Western culture, is being acted out now — in spite of us, and regardless of our best intentions — because of what we have agreed to forget.
— Peter Kingsley
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Don’t be afraid. You’re going to make it, but it’s always going to feel as if you’re not.
That’s the fun, you see.
— Alan Watts
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If it’s true that we belong to a collective that has forgotten its purpose, then why are we so busy? Why is doing more important than being, or is that what results from forgetting why we’re here? Are we just rushing around doing stuff so we can avoid facing ourselves? If that’s what’s happening, what are our personal responsibilities in such a society?
Alan Watts and Peter Kingsley seem to disagree about the likely outcome of how we live. Kingsley seems to be predicting inevitable catastrophe while Watts is reassuring us we’ll make it in the end. I’m also not sure how many of us are really having fun. The game is getting serious. I think we need more people remembering what’s important and reminding the rest of us that life is more than ‘doing around.’
Why would we, at the inception of our civilization, decide to forget our purpose and meaning? It seems like a strange decision to have a colossal culture with amnesia about who we are and why we’re here. Our frenetic ‘doingness’ looks impressive from the outside but inside our personal lives we harbor a spiritual poverty. Our saccharine religions make sure not to challenge us while at the same time they fix us at a childish level. They impede spiritual growth rather than promote it.
A whole civilization that has decided to sidestep the challenge to grow spiritually — because it’s uncomfortable — systematically leads us into a ditch as individuals. I think it behooves us to confront our personal inner situation, which is more barren than we admit. The complacency Kingsley mentions looks like a fatal flaw, a cultural Achilles heel.
The picture of a giant civilization sweeping up an unsuspecting humanity in a project of learning the dangers of self ignorance is not a lesson I’m very interested in. I’d rather challenge myself to see as deeply as I’m able. I think I’d rather put myself in service to expanded consciousness, for myself and for what I can contribute to others.
I agree that we need to realize we each bear some responsibility in this situation. We could question our beliefs a little more closely. We could wonder why there’s so much pain in the world. We might look in the mirror of relationship and face our fear, greed and principles of utility applied to the living earth and its living beings. Just seeing that would open our eyes and prompt some questions.
There have been cultures that evolved ways to grow spiritually by challenging assumptions and the complacency that results. Belief is not spirituality. Believing our religious stories doesn’t make us spiritual. Possessing a comforting belief looks like the opposite of spirituality to me. We need to experience something of the Mystery and actually feel the connectivity of the creative forces that animate everything. Forgetting that is no small thing, individually and collectively.
A culture that carries us along in its flux of not knowing, like driftwood, subject to the unpredictable ebb and flow of inscrutable forces, is not my idea of a well spent life. I prefer to explore consciousness to the degree I’m able. If that means I find things in myself that cause pain to me or others, I intend to face and understand them to the extent I can. The implications of who we are and how we got that way are obscure to us.
I think we have a responsibility to see the larger context of our lives and bring some awareness to it. Asking questions about what we’re doing on this planet and why we humans are so destructive is pretty important at this juncture. Those people who can do this work may look like eccentric and useless fools to the society we live in but I think they’re building little lighthouses and watchtowers in the wilderness.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here’s one:
Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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It will look like this:
