Anyone who has ever attempted meditation knows what happens to you when you set out to do something extremely simple- in this case, just sitting on a cushion and doing very little else with your mind. This simple idea turns out to be more or less impossible in practice. At some point, say 5 seconds in for most of us or an hour for the more experienced, the mind becomes lost in the typical thought orgy going on all the time- why did I say that to that to so and so, why won't so and so be nicer to me, how am I going to manage to get that project started tomorrow etc. For advanced meditators, this distracting voice ceases to be our daily life making demands on us and begins to manifest as obsession about ways to improve the practice: obsession with uncovering secret knowledge that will unlock their practice, concentrating the unbearable room temperature is, if only they had a better cushion, and so on. All of these thoughts are nothing but obstructions, lies that keep the meditator from attaining self-control, as any accomplished monk will tell you. We continually seek improvements and advancements in all the wrong places; what we are really saying is, "anything to get me off of this cushion!" But of course, the point of the practice lies in realizing that there is nothing more to it than sitting on the cushion.
"Anything to get me off of this cushion" is pretty much the official slogan of my generation, and our liberal culture's attempted march into a green future. Our culture suffers from a catastrophic lack of self-control, self-denial and the reflective capacity to realize just how spoiled we are. We are pretty good in every other respect; we have the huge advantage of having come around to a pretty good worldview- we are scientifically informed, environmentally conscious, pro-tolerance, and we have a general distaste for war and corporate control of our lives. But our attempt to actually do anything is completely inadequate. We focus far to heavily on political machinations and not nearly enough on our own lifestyles. We spent 8 years blaming all the world's problems on the Bush administration as if the Iraq war had nothing to do with the way we live. Let me tell you something- we invaded Iraq because we demand cheap oil, every single day, and lots of it. It was just convenient that the political powers that be had a few extra dubious reasons to go to war. We hate Bush but if someone suggests that you do something that really has an impact on worldwide oil consumption, like giving up coffee, it's like- "woah, that's going a little far, don't you think?"
95% of the produce at Whole Foods comes from California! This is insanity, evidence of a completely spoiled cultural movement. We love organic food, we love how earth and body friendly it is, we write articles about in magazines that get transported to our local WH for us to consume and bask in the goodness of our leftist culture. Can you even wrap your head around how much oil was used to get that article into that magazine, that magazine into your store and then into your home? And it promotes a form of consumption, healthy or not, that uses massive amounts of oil to get produce from California to North Carolina!
It is an understatement to call this unnecessary. The real thing to do is far simpler. Buy produce from local farmer's markets and then stay home. But that means denying yourself the day-to-day fun of going to a store and consuming, it means denying yourself crops that aren't in season. It means denying yourself things that you don't really need- just sit on the cushion. Everything we do works this way; if we become vegans, we get more consumerism, not less: more vegan friendly brands, more advertising dollars spent marketing to vegans, more hip vegan culture, etc. Just stop eating animals, isn't it as simple as that? We won't stand for simplicity. We have to keep generating consumer culture, even if it is 'green'. Milton Freidman said a few years ago that we're not having a green revolution, we're having a green party. And he's absolutely right. No matter how much steam we gather up, we cannot break the gravity of this frenzied, consumer culture. We just keep putting a greener face on it, which has some mild effect on the general state of things but falls completely short of stopping us from racing head-first into planetary destruction. There's a commercial where U2 appears on a glimmering, sexy CGI stage and sets a very progressive tone, revving up our deepest feelings of hope and change as Bono starts up, "every generation gets a change to change the world, pity the nation that won't listen to you boys and girls, 'cause the sweetest melody is...:" and then the whole thing erupts into non-sense, a big sexy rock chorus with soaring guitars and people screaming and something about "go crazy tonight" and then, dum dum dum, the logo for Blackberry. What? What is that all about? For decades now we've been marrying the best and most noble intentions and values to unrelated consumer fetishism (starting with starbucks) but it shocks me to see that it hasn't slowed down... at all!
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