Hello again Beauty 🙂
In my last post, I shared with you how the whole system of economics dictates to you not only your perception of your ability to survive, but your ability to feel valuable, worthy and special.
Today, lets continue talking about how the system keeps you trapped, even when you think you are moving away from it, and what it really takes in order to properly break out of it - and why you should want to.
The System Is Thick
As a culture, we are so entrenched in the system, that we convince ourselves that we are outside of it, when really we are not at all.
Even the idea of 'manifesting abundance' or 'eating a pure and clean diet' totally fall into this category of consumerism. It is a spiritual spin on the same thinking that everyone else has.
The truth? abundance is. This earth has already provided enough for everyone. We just created a system that invented 'ownership' over natural resources, division of resources in an unequal way, and thus caused some to have way more than necessary, and others to have way less.
If you are wanting to be pure and clean in your eating or in your diet, what is under that? Why do you feel this need? This draw? Is it really spiritual? Or is it coming from a desire to fit in with the mould of what society says is valuable? Is it your special way of earning acceptance and approval of others? And if so, who are these others? Why does their approval matter to you so much?
Even in the self love/self improvement game - what are you really going after there? Where are you trying to get yourself? What is the goal? To be good enough? Thin enough? Smart enough? Detached enough? Spiritual enough? They may not be selling you external items, but they are STILL selling you on the idea that you are currently steps away from happiness and fulfillment, and if you just do X, Y and Z you will get it. And then, once you love yourself THEN you will be valuable. Once you are improved, THEN you will be acceptable, happy, free. But not before. Same old shit, dressed up in new clothes.
Under every one of your values, under every one of your neurosis, under every one of your anxieties - you will find a system that is continually asking you to prove your value, while at the same time is promising you that it can provide that value you for you - one purchase or experience or upgrade in status - at a time.
You Can't Play In The System And Replace It With A New System At The Same Time
This idea that you need to move away from consumerism, that you need to stop believing what the media is telling you, is a noble one. It sounds really good. Really spiritual. Really advanced and mature.
But most all of us are simply playing lip service to the idea that we want to let go of the world capitalism and consumerism has built. We are fooling ourselves and it is causing us to be more trapped than we have ever been.
You see, what you are most likely doing is looking at this capitalist society and tying to figure out ways of being 'spiritual' or 'non attached' or 'fulfilled' within it. You are trying to figure out a way of having all the things you want, all the things you think you need to make you happy, while still pursuing spirituality and higher consciousness and personal development.
You are trying to re-decorate a house that is sitting on a rotten foundation. You are trying to take something that is fundamentally flawed at its core, and shift around things on the periphery, in an attempt to make it look and feel better.
This can't work. This won't work. When the foundations are rotten, the foundations must be ripped out.
I know this, because I did it too. I am sure that I am still doing it on subtle levels I am yet to become conscious of.
I Was Trapped Too
I have always considered myself a spiritual person. A person who could see through the lies and superficialities of this life. I truly have always felt that I knew better, that I was some how exempt from what others were experiencing in their lives, being driven by fashion, cars, money, status and so on.
I prided myself on how I renounced the material world as much as I could, living under my parents roof, and later, being someone who wanted to be responsible and not a begging hippy on the street.
But I was still bought in. I still believed I needed to be thin to be valuable. I still believed I needed to be making this amount of money, or that I needed to be helping X amount of people. I believed that if I were not constantly improving, constantly providing more, constantly chasing bigger and better things - that I was a failure.
No matter how I tried to spiritualize this equation, I was never able to find happiness. Never able to find peace. Never able to find a place of feeling good enough.
Even when I was searching for my value in my spirituality, in my purity, in my giving, I STILL felt like a piece of shit. In fact, when I was trying to spiritualize this whole equation, I felt WORSE than most people who were playing the game for how it was meant to be played - as simple materialism.
It was the delusion that I had stepped out of the race when I was really just calling it by another name that made it all the more painful.
I had to tear down the system completely to find freedom. I could not find freedom within it, because there is no freedom within it. If there were, by definition it would not work.
The system needs you to be ever unsatisfied, ever searching, ever seeking, every feeling not quite good enough in order for it to continue working.
If it were to ever actually deliver to you happiness, satisfaction, peace, joy, contentment - you would stop playing. You would stop buying stuff. You would stop perpetuating the idea that resources make you valuable - and thus the whole thing would collapse.
So the system works precisely - keeping you convinced that you are one accomplishment, one asset, one purchase, one raise, one marriage, one tax bracket, one Kundalini awakening, one yoga retreat, one certification, one degree, one level of emotional mastery, one level of physical mastery, two pounds - away from pure bliss.
And you are always, always, always one step away from pure bliss.
Always.
Because the second you believe you are good enough, the whole system crumbles.
So do not be fooled. This whole world has been made a commodity.
It is not just the cars, the houses, the fancy clothes that make you a part of the system.
It is the spiritual gatherings, and spiritual teachings, the self development, the personal growth, the education systems and religions too.
ANYTHING that does not tell you that you are already perfect, that what you seek is within - is a part of the system. ANYTHING that tells you that there is any satisfaction 'out there' is lying to you.
Plane and simple. No ifs, ands or buts.
How Do You Get Out?
The truth is, the idea that you have value to earn, or that control of resources makes you more important is a complete delusion. It is a fantasy. It is made up.
The other truth is that our world is SO invested in the system, that breaking free of it is really, really hard work. It takes total dedication. It takes total commitment. It takes the ability to sit with yourself, and question everything you believe, everything you hold sacred, every need and desire you have. It takes you being willing to die to pretty much everything that you have ever held as 'true' and 'real.'
If you are still looking to ANYTHING outside - your job, your car, your money, your body, your friendships, your children, your degree, your 'personal growth,' your 'levels of self love,' your marriage - you have yet to take the first step towards happiness.
Because if you are looking outside yourself for satisfaction, or if you are looking for some different version of yourself for satisfaction, this means you know so little about the 'self', that finding a way to soothe or fulfill it is impossible.
This journey starts only when you begin investigating what your 'self' actually is. Until you start looking for your 'self', you are in a hamster-wheel that will continually take you no where.
So long as the question you are asking is "how do I satisfy myself?" You are trapped in a game where you perceive yourself to be a player, when really you are what is being played.
You cannot step out until your question becomes "Who/what/where is the Self?"
It is not about being in society or totally rejecting it. If it were that easy, everyone would have caught on by now.
It is about realizing that to accept or reject the system are simply two sides of the same illusion. It is about realizing that the system is what it is, and that it is your job to figure out who you are.
What you are.
Where you are.
What does satisfaction actually mean.
Who are others.
What is approval.
What is real.
What is illusion.
When you start looking in, you have begun. Until then you are simply re-decorating a house that never actually existed.
To step out of the system requires that you realize that the system never really existed. It is founded on the idea that you lack something that can never, ever be robbed of you.
You do not want to know your value. You do not want to be important. You do not want fame or notoriety or even survival really.
What you want is to know yourself.
You want to know the self.
You want awareness.
You want to touch God.
Which is something that has always, and will always be available only to you through you.
You need to be brave enough to go within, and to look for these things yourself. Satisfaction is a guarantee if you do it, but you must do it. And you must do it alone. No one can do it for you.
You must go in and seek this experience for yourself. You must allow yourself to release all that was never real anyway, so that you can have a direct experience of something that has always been and will always be. You are not finding anything you didn't have before. You are simply re-discovering that thing you thought you had lost.
This journey is worth it. It is hard. It is scary. It is like a million deaths.
It is also the only way.
And the irony is, on the other side of this experience, is where life starts to feel fulfilling. On the other side is where food is nourishing. Relationships expanding and rich. Experiences of travel, work, communication - blissful. All the things you are searching for now, are on the other side of you releasing the prison bars that you are holding up in front of your own face.
So be brave enough to go within. To look for yourself. To abandon everything that separates you from your true essence. Let everything that has never worked, fall away. Look into your neurosis and find that thy are simply inventions of a system that makes no sense. Look into your addictions, your need to please, your purity complex, your self improvement endeavours and see what lies beneath them.
Leaving the system is the hardest, and most valuable thing you will ever do.
All that remains is this;
Are you brave enough to go find yourself?
<3
