Meditation or Medication

Strange Reluctance

This article explores the serious subject of our species strange reluctance to wake up and become aware of the world as it truly is. The purpose of course is always the achievement of greater awareness and a higher level of consciousness concerning the true nature of reality. And along the way we look at the different ways in which we attempt to avoid not only our responsibiltity for the condition of our world, but the realization of the condition itself.

Medication

Medication of course represents the material world. Our response to the value and quality of the material reality that we created, is measured by the extent of our dependence and reliance on any substance or mental strategy that is able to numb or dull our senses, or in any way aid us in our desperate need to deny and or avoid the realization of the fact that we actually created this material reality in the first place.

We actually saw it back when we were kids when we looked at the world around us and wondered what the hell is this. So why didn't we just say oops! and start over again? I guess it was easier to get a prescription for vicadin or take up shooting heroin and hope that the reality would just go away all by itself. And by the time we realized that wasn't going to happen, we were so comfortable with our mothers little helpers that we had become essentially disabled. I wonder if this qualifies us all for a disabled persons license plate?

I know that I would much rather fire up a dooby than try to answer the question of how we allowed this material world to come about? And I would probably rather sign up for medical heroin than try to deal with the next question, which is what can we do to fix our mistakes?

Meditation

Meditation represents the spiritual world. And if you're in the mental habit of believing that this is an entirely different world from the material world, then you should probably back off the vicadin for awhile. Drugs for the Human life form don't always come in a pill, liquid or powder. We have the power to deceive ourselves simply by misusing our own minds. Yes, our ability to think is a two edged sword. Fantastic!

Meditation is a powerful tool, but it is just a tool and thus can be misused like any tool. As tools go, meditation is slightly different in that it does not lend itself readily to abuse when performed correctly, but one of its minor benefits is sometimes misused, which is the ability to relieve stress and anxiety, both of which are symptoms of life in today's material world.

The problem with meditation is that it isn't a walk in the park. And part of our strategy for dealing with the Frankenstein we created is finding easy ways to avoid responsibility for the monster, and therefore meditation doesn't qualify. But meditation is a tool that enables us to not only explore and realize the spiritual reality, but it works just as well for exploring and realizing the material reality. Ah, but it is so much easier to just drop another vicadin and keep pretending.

The Awakening

Will our species epitaph be "destroyed by fear and ignorance"? One of the strangest realities of today is that we may be the victims of the idea of comfort and security more than anything else. Yes, the single minded obsession with these two concepts leads to a kind of complacency and indifference which essentially shuts down the processes of learning and growing. Does that make you blink? Are you wondering what this idiot is talking about? Are you wondering what the hell learning and growing has to do with the price of tacos in Iceland? Well, there is one of the problems. We just don't have a clue about what is going on anymore, which assumes that we ever had a clue in the first place.

Does anyone even think about learning and growing? I know, but we lost track of things when we lost track of the actual real world that takes place as each second of our lives passes with the passing of time. But now it all passes without our even noticing it. We long ago stopped feeling the breeze on our skin, tasting the world around us and experiencing the rich array of phenomenon that each moment brings to our perceptions, but we are no longer there to experience the real world because we are almost exclusively focused on a static conceptualized version of reality, a reality made up of words and thoughts, a reality that rarely changes or challenges and from which we get our comfort and security, which we somehow have come to believe are the most important things in life. Meanwhile the decay of complacency and indifference works its corrosive influence upon our civilization as inexorably as the wind and rain bring down mountains.

So, meditation or medication? It is long past the time for the Human species to wake up and grow up and snap out of the self induced trance that is the result of our obsession with fear and ignorance, and take a long good look around us and recognize our mistakes and learn from them and figure out how to fix them and move on to explore and realize our infinite potential.