I won’t pretend to know these
women, or anything about who they were, prior to being kidnapped. We won’t learn that – we will however, learn
all about the madman who perpetrated the crime.
We are fed information in an ever shortening news cycle and we think we
know all about it, from those little snippets of news that are created solely to
create sensationalistic responses. No deep
thinking about things today, we only have a few seconds to dwell on this topic
and then it is on to the next tidbit of sensationalistic bullshit designed to grab
headlines and more importantly ratings points.
I wonder if everyone finds it
as scary as I do, the brief and horrifying vivid 30 seconds of the news cycle
that will indelibly stamp my cerebellum with some horror or heinous crime for
months or years. Doesn’t it seem WRONG how
often and briskly we are forced to acknowledge the horrors of human existence? Our world serves up the miseries of people’s
lives like the kid at McDonalds serves up a super-sized order of French fries. Does not our brain rebel from it all, the same
way a big mac meal deal will make me shit it back out within 30 minutes. My brain is repulsed by it all the same way
my stomach is repulsed by the crap served at McDonalds.
Some days, I want to and do shut
myself off from the world, ignoring television and radio news and sticking to
my internet radio stations that allow me to just listen to music with no interruptions. That is not a very good thing either though,
to insulate ourselves, to numb our feelings to pain and suffering. What happens then when a family member or
friend gets sick or is dying, has our empathy been over extended? When we get sick from eating too much McDonalds
do we stop eating that food – for a while we do. But sometimes we want to clean up our insides
with a salad and some water, water that is not bottled! What we can’t do is, stop eating all
together.
We are just not able to seal
ourselves off, unless we live in a cave on the Serengeti and our worries center
around which freaking animal is going to eat us. Unless we are that dude we will never to be
able to block the evilness that surrounds us from our lives. It will seep in, no matter where we
hide. Attempting to create a mental
panic room does not work and if it did it would be only temporary. The suffering always finds us, no matter what
walls and fortresses we build to protect ourselves.
We have to accept that evil
exists in the world, we cannot escape that fact. How do we deal with it? Especially when the news
cycle feeds it to us like a big mac, one every 38.2 seconds. How do
we get our brains to go from someone who lost their legs in Boston to Tiger
Woods new squeeze to the fact that Kate Middleton is wearing an Alexander
McQueen maternity dress in between which we are forced to decide what kind of
erectile dysfunction medication to use and what soda to wash the pills down
with.
It seems we take more time to
pick out the right breakfast cereal than we do actually experiencing fear,
terror, anger, envy and downright befuddlement.
The world spits out so much and spits it so fast that there is little
time left for contemplation. To wonder
what it all means. In one minute I am
having my righteous indignation raised by the Cleveland story, which is immediately
replaced by my repulsion over a thousand dollar maternity dress of the Princess. My pain about the Boston marathon murders
slams right into Tiger Woods’ sex life – like I give a shit about which girl he
is dating today, his is a freaking pig!
CNN or HLN or Fox or any
other, they are all selling to and celebrating our monkey minds. They have figured out how to turn us into automatons. It almost feels like they want us to react a
certain way, to feel fear or compassion, anger or joy, but only in the briefest
and most superficial of ways. We experience
a roller coaster ride and like all roller coasters, our adrenaline can only be
ramped up for so long before become accustomed to it. Much like a drug addict has to get the fix,
we need a fix of adrenaline to keep us going, they have conditioned us, much
like a man and his bell with his dogs.
We have had Philosophers over
thousands of years who have tried to explain war, violence and suffering. The search for understanding, happiness and
contentment is as old as life itself. Back
in the day, we used things like ceremony, tradition and spiritual introspection
to understand how we fit into the world, what our purpose was. Now we are getting it between ads for
personal injury lawyers talking about transvaginal mesh and long-lasting lip
gloss – neither of which I care about. I
am unsure how this will work in the long term.
Like anything, when it is new we don’t fully understand the consequences,
only after some time do we have some hindsight do the impact of things become clear. Our brains need a sick day folks, a break
from it all to contemplate the meaning of things.
Taking sick leave is a short
term solution, we can decide to shut off the news and sit with the facts for a
while. Not the details of how Jodi
terrorized that poor man before killing him but the facts of our very
existence. To practice Yama – or self-restraint,
self-control and discipline is what is needed.
The yamas comprise the "shall-not" in our dealings with the
external world just as the niyamas comprise the "shall-do" in our
dealings with the inner world.
We have monkey minds to begin
with, the brain is a trickster that roams from this to that and this again. The media has figured out the key, exploiting
our monkey minds and desensitizing us to the horrors of the world – with mostly
their opinions and not many facts anyway.
When someone died back in the day, it wasn’t a once-every-five-minute
event, it was not a blip in a 24-hour news cycle. When these things happened, they happened to
people we were intimately acquainted with. The story was very real to you, very
inescapable. We were forced to deal with
it, to contemplate the meaning of it. This
wasn’t entertainment, it was part of the healing process and you didn’t have
the luxury of changing the channel.
We are being taught by the
world that the monkey mind is a comfortable place to be, it is in actuality the
exact opposite. Introspection,
meditation, the slow and steadied examination of these questions is what leads
us to, if not peace at least acceptance. Slowing down and stepping back from it a bit,
we allow ourselves to move beyond the initial reaction of fear and despair. Fear is the emotion most often used by the
media to draw us into the news cycle. Those
snap judgments, that intense reaction to the horrors of our world, is only the
surface of a very deep ocean.
To meditate is to be a deep
sea diver. To meditate upon murder,
poverty, jealousy, joy, forgiveness, revenge, sickness is to slow the cycle to
a halt, to relax our monkey minds. When meditating
we are not preventing someone else from murdering, we are not preventing the
death of our loved ones or the loss of our job. We are preventing our brains from becoming a
flash-fried burger and fries. We are
keeping our heart open and our will strong. Meditation hopefully provides you with a
different kind of narrative to take out to the world, one that allows time for
suffering, grieving, healing, and time for peace and contentment.
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