There is an illness abroad in America. It is not the last pandemic, but it has the same kind of proportions. It is a uniquely American illness, a disease, or dis-ease. We have been disconnected from the ease of life; the thing that makes life worthwhile. Somehow, we have been separated from that inner sense of ease and are left with a great emptiness.
To deal with that emptiness we have been given many external alternatives, from entertainment to sports, from alcohol to drugs to other medications. We have been told to fill that emptiness by accumulating things, consumption and shopping (now so easy on-line). We have been told that money will solve all problems, so we work hard to accumulate it so we can spend it on what we are told will make us happy. We are told to give it to others who will invest it for us. We are told that money is the key to happiness. In that process, we may begin to take bigger and bigger risks, we gamble. We get addicted to those external fixes. There is always new technology to replace our empty reality with the pretense of virtual reality and artificial intelligence to replace what we were born with. And we still do not find the ease we are looking for. It is exhausting.
We are finally told that that ease is really just an illusion and that we should just be rational and deal with reality as it is. There must be something wrong with us if we feel "empty". Perhaps we have mental problems? And, of course, there are medications for that, too.
But when the pain of that emptiness becomes too much, when we feel we must do something, anything to deal with it before it consumes us, we begin to act out. We become self-destructive, we become violent, we lash out at whatever demons we have been told have caused all of this. We use our words, we use our fists, we use whatever weapons we can find, our omnipresent guns.
But, if we can catch ourselves before we reach that point, we remember that somewhere in our experience we had that feeling of ease, although it may have been only momentary or a long time ago. If we think about that we will remember how that occurred. We will probably remember that it was with someone special, or with friends and a kind of community. We felt connected and we had a sense of belonging.
It may have been a while ago when we went on a camping trip, or hunting, or fishing, or just a hike in a park.
We realize that it had not been about money or having stuff; it was about people and connection and being out in nature. We realize that all of the messages that encourage us to work harder to earn more money, to accumulate things and to have artificial experiences with masses of people were just distractions that often left us feeling empty afterwards.
We finally realize that the path back to our sense of ease about life is internally directed and that the other messages are just distractions to keep us within the system of work and mass production and mass consumption which ends up leaving us hollow and empty. We are, in effect, starving ourselves spiritually.
The only real nourishment comes from our connections with reality, no, not virtual reality, but the reality you can touch with real people and nature. It takes real human intelligence, not AI (artificial intelligence), to see what kind of human experiences it takes to fill that emptiness, that is what can actually nourish us and keep us spiritually well fed and healthy, replacing dis-ease with the ease of real life.
