It’s interesting for someone who lived through the strange days of the 1970s to see the fear around the world at the moment. Fear of financial difficulty. Oh dear. It makes me realise how far we have become removed from the things that really do matter in life.
The dinner parties of the west have been obsessed by the cataleptically uninteresting topic of property prices for some years, it has become the refuge of the unimaginative, the bland and the complacent. I urge anyone to read Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds by Charles Mackay to see that what we are experiencing is far from new.
It seems that we have all thrown our lot in with the vagaries of the stock market and the never ending bull market since the 1990s. It had to come to an end, all things have their season, all things have a cycle.
Our perception of relative wealth has been tied into the fantasy of a never ending bull run that would buy us a place in some nirvana like state of being. Yet we find ourselves swamped by a tide of psychosis, mental disturbances and the palliative medications that accompany them, and the symptoms of a deep a presiding unsettlement that holds sway over the urge to surround ourselves with material possessions.
The material can never fill the gap that has been created by a neglect of the spiritual side of our existence. Perhaps individually you are fully emancipated, I know I’m not, and witness the folly of humans as the Gods did on Mount Olympus, deciding the fates of those mortals who dared to step up to the plate.
Development can only be accomplished by a rigorous and thorough appraisal of oneself and the path you have taken to get to the place you are at now. No matter how huge the opposition you face, no matter what infamy has befallen you, there is a Universe within and without you that resonates on a different frequency. Your allegiance to the world is based upon an education that the world gave, it sold itself hard to you and then persuaded you to jump aboard.
Who would not do that? And yet, in the stillness of the night, in the majesty of the stars that swirl like a frozen wave in the heavens there is something that does not recognise the world we have made. We are the children of a system that we created, a reflection of ourselves, not of the Universe.
Amid the teeming sea of influences there is a thread. A thread that connects you to your point of origin. This is the place to be, this is the thing to be connected to.
In the 1980s, Wayne Anthony was one of the big promoters on the rave scene in the UK. This particular scene, the UK has since the war been made up of various youth scenes that have produced a vibrant underground culture, was especially hedonistic and heavily drug dependent. Having seen so much crash and burn he says:”Rehab won’t sort you out; self-discovery, yoga and meditation will. I think a lot of the rave generation got into that stuff. They discovered something more to life and found something that could still give you a high, a natural high.”