http://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-39.html
Culture Change e-Letter # 39
Modern perception's
limitations
The curtain of materialist society's
illusion
by
Jan Lundberg
This essay was inspired by a scary, dream-induced
glimpse I had of the “curtain of perception” and the reality on the other
side. Since 2001, the organization
I write for has taken on subjects such as trends in
modern culture’s dwindling family cohesion, after ten years of publishing and
campaigning mainly to end new road construction. We believe the unraveling social fabric and global-warming lifestyles, for
example, are linked. In this essay
we go still deeper to reevaluate the alleged reality
of the social, materialist world.
by Tim Barton, Bluegreenearth
As so many of us have
noticed, day-to-day living in modern society has become alienated from
nature. It isn’t just a function of
being cooped up in buildings, traveling on roads in
motor vehicles, and obtaining our food off of refrigerated shelves. Increasingly, perceived reality
is also made up of society’s constructs. Our relationships have become more centered around money and
individual self-interest. So, the
individual's growing alienation in a material environment is
compounded by dominant society’s ever-expanding rules.
In our personal daily dealings, our time and thoughts are
taken up by unnatural outside stimuli: mass media, relationships with
people in the socioeconomic context, artificial living in modern homes and
offices, etc. These circumstances
shape our perception. However, we
may not realize how much our minds and way of viewing the universe have been taken over by the social system. It is sometimes only possible to grasp
it on a visceral- or altered-consciousness level, when we escape to a natural
environment and live without society or much technology.
The obscuring
curtain
The dominance of our society and
the material world in and around our lives is a monolith blocking out the real
or original universe. It's as if a large curtain
comprising materialist society is in front of us: so large and so close
that even the most conscious of us do not notice its massive presence. The
awareness we can muster while in front of the curtain is inadequate to see how
pervasive and false the illusion is. Perhaps the curtain not only
envelopes us but is us—our modern-made selves.
It is a chilling concept to think of our perception as incredibly narrow and
shallow due to our inability to see around the curtain or to tear it down. When did the curtain go up? We put it up ourselves, but increasingly
we were also born into it. Our
separation from nature only accelerates for humanity as a whole, so as
"progress" marches on, the younger a person is the more invisible and oppressive
the curtain.
What we increasingly see and feel normally is the need for more money, modern
housing, sex, entertainment, drugs, jewelry, family
attachment, escapism, etc. These valid wants, even if all satisfied in
moderation or excess, serve to impede our consciousness
all the more. Furthermore, many of us are drawn to
building "an identity" of social respect or power, whether as a gangsters,
politicians, or super consumers.
The most one can usually grasp about the limitations of today’s alleged "real
world" is in acknowledging the spiritual dearth of today’s modern living. Some will act on that sentiment
through meditation perhaps or, say, treesitting to
protect an ancient forest. Others may seek expanded awareness of the
universe by creating art or using hallucinogenic drugs to pierce the curtain, as
in The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
But this does not mean the curtain has been torn
down by or for any of those seekers.
Science has run into unknowable realms of the universe when physicists have
demonstrated that the observer of a given molecular or cosmic process helps
determine outcome. Society still
strives to turn us into numbers that follow, like sheep, the practical routes to
material security and safety from law enforcement or other unpleasantness.
We are to have no self-determination except for voting - almost always on false choices. The pervading mass
passivity is a domestication that probably began when people moved to cities and
lost their connections with their land. This long process has all but
blocked out a universe interactive and awesome.
What happens when we block out the universe or have it crowded out from our
daily experience? Our reality is what we create, and our perception or
observation of the universe helps shape the latter for us. We affect other species (kill them
off). But the overall effect of adhering to the
grand illusion takes another toll: on our mental health as we weaken the
survival of the planet as the source of life.
The
Matrix was
close
The popular film The Matrix
offered the viewer the idea that society has been constructed as fake,
manipulative, secretive, and corrupt. Audience reaction indicated wide
agreement among today’s real population. People enjoyed the film’s
exposing the truth of our slave-like existence and scaring us as to what is in
store (whether or not machines will take over from
humans). Calling this society "the matrix" has become an underground
American-English colloquialism. Thus, people have a growing sense of the
material world as a false construct due to the domination of law enforcement and
technology so evident in The Matrix.
I have not been influenced by The Matrix
in formulating my idea of today’s perception as being limited to
socio-materialist reality. The film entertained me immensely as an
allegorical expose on today’s actual regimentation and spiritually empty
living. "Life" is
enforced, in both The Matrix and today’s society and our
artificial environment, by the organized powers comprising and maintaining
government, business, and most aspects of our lives.
My decades of education on perception and awareness have
been influenced by Zen and living close to nature, as well as putting up
with living in
Understanding beyond the
curtain
Visualizing the concept of
the curtain as anti-consciousness came to me as a shocking revelation
that caused me to vibrate with uneasiness and concern, yet with gratitude for
its clarity. What may be original or rare is the idea that the normal
state of awareness and almost everything we perceive is a false construct of a
temporary sort. The false construct
is worse than having blinders on that we don’t know are
there, for the view straight ahead would still be clear with blinders. It
is worse than being blindfolded, because we could still
hear and think.
It is more like we don’t have much of an idea of
what we don’t know. The amount of
reality blocked from our view, I believe, turns out not to be 10%, 20% or 50%,
as some of us have suspected, but perhaps over 99%. That applies to all of
us who every day take so seriously the "real world" of the economy, law, the
written word, manufactured objects, and conventional social relations propping
up the status quo. With all of this
goes the modern tendency to relate to nature as something existing separate from
us: for example in parks instead of endless wilderness that we are one with.
People try to get a grip on the actual world around them and their place in
the cosmos without distracting thoughts or internal dialogue through
meditation. But their efforts go nowhere to liberate them if they fool
themselves into thinking they are seeing beyond the curtain. One cannot much see beyond it if
one isn’t living beyond it.
What it all suggests to me is that only a complete cultural change may offer
the hope of improving our perception or occasional enhanced consciousness to
include everything beyond the curtain of materialist illusion.
What would life be like without the curtain? Without
billions of people living as materialists? Without today’s extreme social strife? Without war, terror, and ecocide? Can we imagine doing without the
boxed-in thinking as practiced by all the alienated individuals coping with
survival in noncommunity?
On the other side
What’s on the other side
of the curtain? It would be
appealing to be there now or at least speculate on the "landscape" there. Time and space could be different. If this sounds like science fiction,
consider that time seems considerably slowed down when one is fasting; a
meditative state takes over and one’s emotions alter. As to time, when one eschews
technologically inhuman speed in travel, one’s personal environment becomes a
larger universe. Ancient forests once held enchantment for everyone due to
their perceived vastness.
Materialist culture put up a curtain between itself and the Garden of
Eden. The original garden of early
history (if a place and not an allegory) might have been bombed in the Gulf
Wars, despoiled forever by depleted uranium. Instead of finding paradise on the other
side of the curtain if we manage to get past it, we may have our breath taken
away by the awesome power of the universe as it may exhibit only cold fury or
hot hell.
Or if a form of
I’d like to think that besides appreciating the
wonder of beauty and clarity provided by unspoiled nature and a recovered sense
of cosmic awareness, we will act with the compassion of true wisdom implied in
the name Homo sapiens sapiens.
*****
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*****
Jan Lundberg formerly ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated
which once published "the bible of the oil industry." He has run
the Sustainable Energy Institute since 1988. It can use your assistance
and generous help.
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