I submit to you, if you are willing to take your foot off the pedal of your out-of-control, wasteful life, that there is a deep intelligence...
I submit to you, if you are willing to take your foot off the pedal of your out-of-control, wasteful life, that there is a deep intelligence buried beneath your status anxiety.
This intelligence, so familiar to those who have not been ground through the unforgiving gears of the man-machine, yet misinterpreted by those who have, is knowing that things are not supposed to be this way.
Work isn’t supposed to suck. Leisure time isn’t supposed to be a “pie in the sky”. The air is not supposed to be saturated with smog. The Gulf of Mexico isn’t supposed to be drowning in spilled oil.
The Pacific Ocean isn’t supposed to be tainted with nuclear waste from the Japan nuclear plant disaster. Money is not supposed to matter more than the heart. Profit is not supposed to matter more than people. Most of all, love is not supposed to be something owned and clung to, but something lived through and then let go of.
If you can let these proclamations sink in –I mean really stop and feel the unhealthy fabricated reality that has been constructed around you without your permission– it will take your breath away.
It will, in fact, break your heart. Just remember: there’s nothing wrong with YOU. But there is everything wrong with the unhealthy culture you have been raised in. You do have a choice, however: become the change you wish to see in the unhealthy culture, or become a product of the unhealthy culture.
One of the best ways to become the change you wish to see in the world is to go on a spiritual journey. Here then are five signs that a spiritual journey is in order.
1. You Hate Your Job
“It’s not by accident that the main lesson taught in the publik skools is the skills necessary to survive and advance in a hierarchy: to identify the person in a position to benefit us, identify what that authority figure expects and then do it, to feel a temporary easing-up of our permanent state of unfocused anxiety whenever that gold star is stuck on our paper or that extra item is added to our resume.
“Those are exactly the skills a job calls for. A job, as opposed to work, involves infantilization: a man with a job is, while on his employer’s turf, a glorified third-grader trying to win Teacher’s approval.” – Kevin Carson
Sometimes a job can make you forget the beauty in life. Hard work is necessary to achieve anything in life, but even hard work can become a block if not done in a healthy way. When we are working at something that we are passionate about, work is a tool that we use to leverage success in our lives. It’s a means to a happy end.
But when we have a job, especially one that we are not passionate about, we inadvertently become a tool used to leverage the success of a corporation or boss instead. We become a means to someone else’s happy end.
One clear sign we are in desperate need of a spiritual journey is when we find that we have become someone’s tool instead of our work being a tool that we use for our own success.
Like George Carlin ingeniously surmised about what the system really wants from its citizens:
“They don’t want people who are smart enough to figure out they are getting fu***d by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? Obedient workers. OBEDIENT WORKERS!
“People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
Going on a spiritual journey has a way of putting what we’re passionate about into perspective. It reprioritizes our perspectives, and we become more likely to find out what we really love to do.
Doing what we love becomes primary and “doing what we have to in order to pay the bills” becomes secondary. We find that money becomes merely a side-effect of doing what we love instead of the reason why we are doing what we’re doing. It’s not easy, by any means.
The rarity of discovering sacred work is at the root of our despair. Going from a typical cog (a person with a job) in an unhealthy clock to a catalyzing cog (a person doing work they are passionate about) who is hell-bent on creating a healthy clock, is no walk in the park. It requires a complete and utter upheaval, exactly the kind of upheaval experienced in a spiritual journey.
2. You Have Too Many Things, Things, Things
Read More:
5 Signs a Spiritual Journey is in Order
This intelligence, so familiar to those who have not been ground through the unforgiving gears of the man-machine, yet misinterpreted by those who have, is knowing that things are not supposed to be this way.
Work isn’t supposed to suck. Leisure time isn’t supposed to be a “pie in the sky”. The air is not supposed to be saturated with smog. The Gulf of Mexico isn’t supposed to be drowning in spilled oil.
The Pacific Ocean isn’t supposed to be tainted with nuclear waste from the Japan nuclear plant disaster. Money is not supposed to matter more than the heart. Profit is not supposed to matter more than people. Most of all, love is not supposed to be something owned and clung to, but something lived through and then let go of.
If you can let these proclamations sink in –I mean really stop and feel the unhealthy fabricated reality that has been constructed around you without your permission– it will take your breath away.
It will, in fact, break your heart. Just remember: there’s nothing wrong with YOU. But there is everything wrong with the unhealthy culture you have been raised in. You do have a choice, however: become the change you wish to see in the unhealthy culture, or become a product of the unhealthy culture.
One of the best ways to become the change you wish to see in the world is to go on a spiritual journey. Here then are five signs that a spiritual journey is in order.
1. You Hate Your Job
“It’s not by accident that the main lesson taught in the publik skools is the skills necessary to survive and advance in a hierarchy: to identify the person in a position to benefit us, identify what that authority figure expects and then do it, to feel a temporary easing-up of our permanent state of unfocused anxiety whenever that gold star is stuck on our paper or that extra item is added to our resume.
“Those are exactly the skills a job calls for. A job, as opposed to work, involves infantilization: a man with a job is, while on his employer’s turf, a glorified third-grader trying to win Teacher’s approval.” – Kevin Carson
Sometimes a job can make you forget the beauty in life. Hard work is necessary to achieve anything in life, but even hard work can become a block if not done in a healthy way. When we are working at something that we are passionate about, work is a tool that we use to leverage success in our lives. It’s a means to a happy end.
But when we have a job, especially one that we are not passionate about, we inadvertently become a tool used to leverage the success of a corporation or boss instead. We become a means to someone else’s happy end.
One clear sign we are in desperate need of a spiritual journey is when we find that we have become someone’s tool instead of our work being a tool that we use for our own success.
Like George Carlin ingeniously surmised about what the system really wants from its citizens:
“They don’t want people who are smart enough to figure out they are getting fu***d by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? Obedient workers. OBEDIENT WORKERS!
“People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
Going on a spiritual journey has a way of putting what we’re passionate about into perspective. It reprioritizes our perspectives, and we become more likely to find out what we really love to do.
Doing what we love becomes primary and “doing what we have to in order to pay the bills” becomes secondary. We find that money becomes merely a side-effect of doing what we love instead of the reason why we are doing what we’re doing. It’s not easy, by any means.
The rarity of discovering sacred work is at the root of our despair. Going from a typical cog (a person with a job) in an unhealthy clock to a catalyzing cog (a person doing work they are passionate about) who is hell-bent on creating a healthy clock, is no walk in the park. It requires a complete and utter upheaval, exactly the kind of upheaval experienced in a spiritual journey.
2. You Have Too Many Things, Things, Things
Read More:
5 Signs a Spiritual Journey is in Order
