Today's Transcendence

Just got back from New York a few hours ago, so I’m still adjusting to things (haven’t even unpacked yet), but I wanted to share this with you. It’s a few random thoughts about the synthetic society we live in and the effects it has on us.

This actually comes from a rough draft of one of the “Conquer Yourself” sessions >> the third to last one with all the analogies to sports psychology and athletic performance I’ll be releasing a round up and conclusion post for the series soon, but for now, peep this:

“…With that said however, understand that the inner critic’s real goal is TO KEEP YOU SAFE: even though it uses anything to rationalize fear and stagnation, it actually has a genuine purpose, because it operates on the instinctual drive to protect you from danger.

However, because we’re not genetically wired for the type of society we live in (where we have to deal with abstract concepts like debt or the value of digital information and where we do things like sit in traffic jams and build relationships over the internet), your protection-instinct learns to seek expression through irrational avenues.

Think about it like this:

- When you want water, you don’t go to a stream, you turn on a faucet,

- When you leave your house to go to work in the morning (if you even have to leave your house), you travel over predetermined concrete roads, not the natural terrain as it would be (you might not even see a tree), and

- If you live in a fairly urban environment, when you look up into the sky, you don’t see the vista as it is organically, you see a bunch of advertising billboards, skyscrapers, etc.

So in a sense, we live in an artificial environment: a synthetic bubble that we’re simply not wired for as human beings. And because we grow up in a man-made environment that was fabricated OVER the natural one, we’re disconnected from the natural processes that are meant trigger and develop certain aspects of ourselves on the instinctual level. Consequently, the genetic imperatives which would cause us to automatically evolve towards higher level of awareness end up being mal-developed in a way that elicits illogical behaviors and emotional habits (such as procrastination, depression, poor eating habits and other things that seem inappropriate for your current age and intellectual power).

For more information on this, you can check out books like 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television (by Jerry Mander) or Last Child of the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (by Richard Louv), but the point I’m making here is that you have specific survival imperatives and other instinctual drives that are being denied healthy development and expression because of the societal matrix that surrounds us on all sides…”

So I know this idea is underdeveloped here, but it’s something I personally believe in. Like I said, it’s part of a rough draft that I ended up tossing due to time constraints >> I was going to put it in a Conquer Yourself session, but decided against it because it was taking to long to fully refine.

In the session, I only wanted to use it to give a deeper understanding of fear and how it originates, but by itself, this idea is much deeper. Most people analyze oppression economically or socially, but never psycho-spiritually or bio-genetically (or how those two connect). Catch Bro. Phil Valentine breaking it down here:

And here’s a poem I wrote a few months ago on the same tip. It’s called “Nature’s Disciple.” See a link below to get a free download of the mixtape this poem is from…
Nature’s Disciple

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Peace,
+B

>> Attaining Peak Performance Through an Athlete’s Approach
>> A free mixtape of mine called “The First Forecast.”
>> Samurai Code: The 7 Principles of Bushido
>> Embracing Death…A Samurai’s Mentality
>> Some Thoughts on Depression

Filed under: Transcend w/ the Classics..., Uncategorized on March 23rd, 2010