Being Post-Modern: “I Think, Therefore I’m Right”

POST #4

At first I didn’t even notice it.

A few days ago at work a group of us gathered around the TV to eat lunch and watch the news regarding Obama’s trip to Buchenwald. We were captivated by the scenes, Obama’s outward display of seriousness and the significance of the event itself. And then Elie Wiesel – the 80 year old Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner – spoke so beautifully, “Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place… It’s enough — enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It’s enough. There must come a moment — a moment of bringing people together.”
So it was a powerful moment to say the least.
And there was a 20-something assistant editor in the room, really nice guy, who sort of scoffed. I asked him why. “I don’t know…I don’t know why everyone is making a big about this visit, I really don’t.”

No one really said anything…I could tell we were going to move on and speak about something else. Then it hit me. Of course he was entitled to his opinion. But what seemed crystal clear to me was that this guy was equating his own reaction as being more informed and more significant than Elie Wiesel’s! I mean, he wasn’t even taking into account who this man was. There was absolutely no distinctions being made, no appreciation or respect for who Elie Wiesel is, what he has seen, and been able to make of his life in its wake.
In fact, the guy was weighing his own responses as MORE important, not valuing the decades of experience that his comfortable life will never come close to seeing. He obviously didn’t reflect for a moment – “Hey, I’m 24, I still live at home in New Jersey. The hardest choice I had to make this week was whether or not to buy the new Green Day CD or wait for my girlfriend to get for me for my birthday next week. I’ve never been west of Ohio and consider ‘breaking news’ to be when someone gets knocked off American Idol.”

All kidding aside, I did try to push the point a bit with him, but I could see it landed in that lovely green swamp and immediately became a pointless discussion.

It was a brief exchange and then the conversation moved right along without a hiccup. But in it, I saw the arrogance, ugliness, and delusion of the postmodern ego in a way I hadn’t so clearly before. And of course, recognized it immediately in myself. How many times have I weighed my own ideas, my own responses and opinions as being the same if not MORE the truth than who I was with, without ever taking into consideration who they are, what they know, and that – God forbid – they might actually know more than I do? That they might actually be a more significant or relevant person to speak about the topic? Too many to count for sure. It’s pretty much my main point of reference. “I think, therefore I’m right.”

What would it have been like if this young man had expressed his lack of understanding BUT seen that Elie Wiesel was obviously impacted, and by that very fact, been interested in what was going on? There is hierarchy everywhere and when us postmoderns REALLY start to see and appreciate that, we are left with something we hardly ever experience but DESPERATELY need: humility.

Being Post-Modern: Our Ideas of ‘Heaven’

POST #2

Postmodernism: what does that really looks like, feels like, and “is” in as, as us, in the world.

I just completed teaching my first Evolutionary Enlightenment Course in Philadelphia and was been struck by the angle Jeff has to keep making over and over to get us to see how our postmodern conditioning of designing most of our lives around our psychological and emotional comfort IS our version of ‘heaven’.

Most of us don’t believe in a ‘heaven’ up in the sky, a cloudy Club Med filled with our loved ones, angels playing harps, ancestors in while togas, and a huge old man – God- dropping by for a visit. BUT this notion that there is something better than what we have now, the idea that we are working towards something ‘out there’ that will make us happy, content, and fulfilled is VERY much alive and kicking in us. It’s a powerful point that Andrew has made in several retreats and is part of the course’s material.

So this idea that we spend our lives – our money, our time, where we put our ‘stock’ and our energy is in the future…things will be better when___. And we will go to great lengths to ensure our emotional and psychological ease and comfort. If we make a pie graph of what we spend our money on, we can see how much we value comfort, ease, peace, looking good, feeling good.

This is an expression of a value of postmodernism – the worldview of postmodernism. We’re not REALLY the process…the process is a “thing” outside of me, my sense of ME is my reality, and so everything else is NOT me. I can help the process, I can be interested in the process but it makes no sense that I AM THE PROCESS. To the individuated self-sense, we can never truly embrace the Kosmocentric perspective.
This is where the inner-journey has taken us. We have traveled the very important and very significant road of inner-awareness, inner-education, inner-development. And now, the narcissistic separate self has gotten lost on that road…so infatuated and obsessed with our inner life and psychological ups and downs, that our definitions of right and wrong become muddied by what is right and wrong FOR ME. And the emotional connections to a higher Self, for motives to act and be BEYOND the individual have not been developed.

In the course, we use the example of HEAVEN to show that while we don’t believe in a place called heaven anymore – most of us postmoderns that is – we still think the action is somewhere else. Now isn’t it. If your concern is just eating then heaven is a place where there is an abundance of food. If your psychological and emotional well-being is your concern, then heaven looks like peace and happiness. However, if we are the ones (and we are) who are going to carve out grooves for the next stage in human development, where insecurity and the unknown are the terrain…how much do our postmodern values of peace and “getting somewhere that’s better than here” help us?