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?
