Our culture can cause us to alienate ourselves from our selves. We can get estranged from ourselves by our culture, with all its expectations which are fueled by parents and school, and of course by the zeitgeist of our western civilization. The main problem is that we are so used to it, that we don’t see the nature of our civilization. Our industrialized society is very busy, active and busy with doing, more doing and more doing. Our work ethic, you have to work to get ahead, and the deadlines, it all has to be on time. To do lists. With all this doing, is there any time to just be?

School madness
Our school system is an artificial environment, in which we tell our kids that they are not yet fully qualified to be developed and worthwhile human being yet. It is also very artificial to separate kids in age groups. From a very young age, you are told you must perform and you are not complete yet. You need to improve. During school time you need to sit still, and your feelings and emotions have no value. You need to work to become, and right now you have no are not good enough yet. You need to work and prove that you deserve the right to exist. If you are lucky, you will get there sometime. During al this school and learning phase, you are not in the real world, you are not confronted with having to pay for rent of earning your own money to pay your own way. During this school and learning phase, you are in a artificial bubble. You are only making plans on paper, never really doing the things you do in the real world. You never asked to just be present here and now.

Please listen to this fragment

And this one

Life is not a race, and its not about the final destination (a hole in the ground), its not about reaching your pension. How about the quality of experience along the path?

There are lots of useful commentaries about the school system.

What I find even more important, is that our school system doesn’t teach us about life, but teaches us about dominantly pushing our will upon life. Our school system teaches us nothing about being in harmony with nature, having respect for nature, we don’t learn about emotions and stress, about resolving conflicts with others human beings. We are taught an illusion that technology will fix all our problems.
School teaches us that thinking is very important, that being serious is important, and that solving problems is important. But life is not a problem to be solved.

 

Homo ex machina
Since the growth of (the illusion of) technology in our modern time, there is illusion of malleability of life itself. We use the machine as a metaphor and model for our body. You look at the functions. The purpose of our body is more that just some functions. We treat our body as if it was a machine, which you can adapt and change at will. A machine looks at functions and efficiency. When we reduce the heart to a pump, we short change ourselves. Reality is more than this reduction. When you talk about organ transplantation, memories and character traits are transplanted along with the organs.

The body is not a machine. If you wish to be happy, you need to express your spirit through your body.

Violence on TV
When you look at the history of TV and movies, you clearly see that there is a steady increase of violence, it keeps getting more extreme. That is normal why?
In any case, lots of emotion is evoked, and this can be more threatening.

Economy
Economy is a series of abstractions that also lose contact with reality, which puts you smack in the middle of this separation sickness.  Fueled by greed and only interested in a few functions, you lose contact with the whole of the real world.

Wholeness
Wholeness should be the norm. Separating mind from body occurs more and more as we value mind over emotions and body. Of course most direct separation occurs due to trauma, threat, use of recreational drugs, etc.

As we value results over how that feels, we alienate ourselves from our bodies. Needing to perform, illusion that everything is for sale, everything is malleable. Cosmetic surgery, we will just fix it. We enter our heads as there are so many problems to analyze, and we need to control and manipulate everything. Life is a problem to be solved. You are not incomplete. Independence is an illusion. It is an illusion to think that you can live from you head only.

Our civilization comes with a side order of entitlement and having the right to feel good.

Life does not need to be easy. It is what it is.

Ir you demand infallibility from yourself, you can wait forever until you reach that perfection.  As you judge (in with that create separation, you make it really hard for yourself.

More about wholeness