by Lily Ortero
for Writing and Rhetoric II: Honors
Wake up, cup of coffee to commence the day and quell anxiety shakes about a looming, never-ending to-do list. Next, engage in some ritual to prepare my avatar for engagement with the exterior world. Only once I’ve chugged the adequate amount of my dark roast delicacy can I even dream of stepping out the door. If I’m feeling like really being alive that day, I might indulge in some oatmeal. Phase one of consumption complete, I am now well equipped to go about my day. For some time, my atoms seem perfectly content carrying out their first mission, however, upon returning to my quarters, I am irked by the enticing taunts of indulgence. My avatar is anxious; I need pot, music, memes, food, water, allergy medicine, instagram, nicotine, really any form of relief. I do everything to entertain and distract myself in preparation for my next task, and so it goes. This routine persists throughout each day regardless of [however varying by] season and situation. My weekend diet of cheap red wine and adderall is no less indulgent than my mid-week-crisis, half-priced colombian cuisine and [could there be crack in this?] coffee. The material craving manifests itself tirelessly; it is crippling and wicked, perhaps the worst part being that I am hyper-aware of it; when presented with pleasure and vice it seems I cannot follow my own advice. My avatar has dissolved into ego- a disillusioned body of energy entertaining the belief that my dissatisfaction is deeply personal- I’ve bought into the facade. Upon awakening, I make the mistake of thinking that awareness makes me special. Plenty of people make it to the higher levels of Life’s Game in which truth is presented; few find themselves victorious battling against the Final Boss: manifesting those truths.
I don’t mean for this to sound cynical, for, in fact, it is quite the opposite. What an extraordinary sensation it is to realize how plain and ordinary existence is, to escape from the “glittering hyper-reality in which I immersed myself, driven by the belief that anything was possible because everything was available- me, myself, and I; ego” [Sian]. So many hours wasted trying to carve out my avatar’s individual destiny that even the times I remembered to stop and sniff fragrant flowers, the flower became merely that: a mechanism of temporary relief. I forgot that I myself am the flower. Not exclusively, and not just me, you see. We are all made up of matter and so is that flower; it’s got stems, sure, then there’s us with our limbs- but I encourage you to peep the scenario through a different lense. “A dancing, joyous harmony of energy transactions is rooted in the 12 inches of topsoil which covers the rock metal fire core of this planet” [Leary]. These energy transactions are constantly occurring between humans and humans, humans and their environment, and the plethora of life within those environments. Alas, our beauty is rooted not in our variances but in our similarities. “Neoliberalism has made us lazy; we are distracted by the mass churning of vacuous messages as ‘the self’ reigns prominent and the collective voice dismantled” [Sian]. This delusion of self-importance has become increasingly detrimental to our progression as a planet and species.
Aquarian Age Adherence to individualism prioritizes our personal pursuits and glamourizes consumption, thus pushing our collective mission to the backburner and in turn producing “an apathy that allows us to deny that we have blood on our hands” [Sian], to carry on consumption in an endeavor to quell our discontentment, and to mute our sacred mysticism. “A healthy neoliberal, I bought into that lifestyle… willing to keep paying to be a part of that enchanting world full of wonderful distractions. The cost… was the giving up of my soul, the silencing of my voice, and a profound depoliticization.” Now, wait a minute. It’s one thing to devote your life to consumerist ploys and dullness, but selling your soul? When did this become a spiritual quandary? How does detachment and dissociation coincide with delineating divinity?
“We are all born divine mutants,” [Leary] “but each baby, although born perfect, immediately finds himself in an imperfect, artificial, disharmonious social system which systematically robs him of his divinity.” The flower is the flower and so are you until Monsanto comes in with it’s pesticides and every one gets screwed. It’s rather bold to make assumptions about the inherent divinity of all beings, but I think Leary is on to something [or on something, but if it took a little Lucy to show him his celestial purpose, I don’t see the harm]. We’re all taught growing up that God is some detached Divine Being who’s chillin’ on the sidelines toying with our puppet strings and teaching us lessons. What a boatload of bullshit. There is divinity in our blood! And what a massive smack in the face to ourselves it is each time we dissolve it, each time we defer that divinity onto another being.
“God” is a blanket term. It emcompasses the entirety of human spirit and endeavor with other enigmatic universal forces- which makes for quite the cocktail. There is beauty all around in a dialect that could deny Darwinism, but we’re not here to define what’s divine, that’s not our mission; not here to expose celestial surface, that’s not the purpose. Giving one God a face and agenda, an address, a name? Puts beauty into a box, implies restrictions, a cost. It dignifies demons and cuts our heads off, leaving no gratitude for dancing fields of energy groovin’ upon Gaia- strips terrestrial triumph or the chance of space junk that could wreck us at any second. Who are we kidding? Passivity can be pleasant, but you’re cutting your throat if you don’t see where your soul lives.
The “soul” can never contained to the individual; it is the whole cluster of cosmic energy, and in reducing “spirit” to an individual phenomenon, we’ve compromised our divinity. Plastic sure is tragic, especially when life itself is magic. Why would anyone wish to mutilate the magnificent momentum of our communal commentary? Ah, yes, duh- because Capitalism makes dollars, not sense. Capitalism in theory is “the relentless pursuit of profits by individuals and firms in virtually every instance of production, distribution and consumption” [Douglas]. It is a system hyper fixated on the importance of the individual; holism has been tossed out the window. “Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into non-adaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individuals behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot” [Leary].
The vicious vacuum of the Capitalist agenda hurls our divine bodies onto their godless assembly lines and we come out on the other end as gleaming metallic dead robots- cold and clueless of our collective consciousness- “concerned with celebrification and consumerism… detachment, and narcissism.” [Sian] The appeal of it, maximizing ego and material success, leaves very little room for emphasis on collective consciousness, as success is measured in a caste system. In order for one to feel elevated, he must be okay with the oppression of some brothers of bodily energy. “Capitalism was a force that could not be denied; its emergence was inevitable,” but why? How could a species whose advancement is dependent on symbiotism be at ease with the exploitation of itself? If all energy is interconnected, then there must be consequences when it turns on itself.
“The social group acts like one mind,” [Douglas] “the individual within the collective is never, or hardly ever, conscious of the prevailing thought style which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsory force upon his thinking, and with which it is not possible to be at variance.” While we may disillusion ourselves into believing intelligence is limited to an individual level, our behavior says differently. Even cultural leaders and remarkable speakers offered more so an “echo of what everyone else was saying.” So, our sentiments are coalescing, however, they encourage clashing. Capitalism is a system that thrives and monetizes from insecurities bred by comparison; we consume to conceal our dissatisfaction [which, again, is a result of comparison]. All emphasis is placed on our differences, leaving our intrinsic kinship in the dust. “Each period is marked by its own thought style tailored to the concerns of the dominant class” [Douglas], alas, mankind remains mindlessly meandering about in servitude of those Dollar-hoarding-Devils, chasing a desperate dream that one day we too can be Dollar-hoarding-Devils. And the deception that defends it all? That the Dollar is Divine. “The character of the sacred is to be dangerous and endangered, calling every good citizen to defend its bastions” [Douglas]. Virtue has been consumed by vice.
“To list atrocities would be platitudinous and boring. We know them so well… Just turn on the radio… big statements about the condition of the world seem unnecessary. Everyone knows it’s a mess” [Valentine]. He’s exactly right. Just turn on the radio- or the Television- it will tell you everything They think you need to know. “What the public sees day after day becomes natural, a presentation of the way things are” [Cummins & Gordon]. We are subject to deviant distortions of reality. Institutions “endow themselves with rightness and send their mutual corroboration cascading through all the levels of our information system. No wonder they easily recruit us into joining their narcissistic self contemplation” [Douglas]. Mass media surely has proved to be a seamless method of cultivating a sedated, crap-consuming collective consciousness. The only cosmic thing about any of it is the Brownies and Space-Soap-Opera Specials. “As much as we think we are in charge, T.V. overwhelms us with sounds and pictures so vivid, tangible, and dominant that we can’t resist” [Cummins & Gordon]. Can’t resist television, can’t resist a smoke, can’t resist a cup of coffee- you bet your store-bought Pillsbury Doughboy biscuits that we can’t resist the Capitalist Regime.
It’s truly not our fault, us poor pitiful persons. We simply “participate in the institutions and learn the parts that society has prepared” [Harris]. There are a few concepts to consider in dissecting our descent into Dollarism as a species and its many societies. First, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts and cannot be reduced to them” [Harris]. It was never about any sole soul, it’s about the whole soul. Even beneath brutal buying schemes, we’re still functioning as an entire unit- a unit that believes it ought to be pitted against itself. Second, “The whole determines the nature of its parts” [Harris], we step into the pearly-white positions set up for us regardless of permission because our collective consciousness has consented to such. And third: “the parts cannot be understood if considered in isolation from the whole” [Harris]. This is methodological holism, and it is a behavior that persists regardless of the state of our species. Capitalism has been doomed from the start because it relies on self-importance and isolating the individual from its species. Competition within the species then becomes destructive, differing from the advancement that competition under natural selection allows. It is survival of the richest; they’ve said fuckall to the fittest- who needs them when we’ve got guns, steroids, dieting pills and plastic surgery?
I’d like to reiterate that i do not mean for this to be cynical. Purely my intent lays in “evoking some mystic entity, the social group, and endowing it with super organic, self-sustaining powers” [Douglas] for our ethereal essence is evanescing. We are trapped by the dichotomy of the individual against the entirety, trapped because we’ve carved a canyon in between the two and rendered them mutually exclusive, instead of “working up from the individual to the higher-order abstractions and then back down to the individual again” [Harris]. Social order is intoxicating, we cling to it. “Individuals carry the social order around in their heads and project it out onto nature.” [Douglas] But at the end of the day, it’s just that: illusions of self-importance that make us too focused on our conscious relationship to our external avatars that we fail to see the vast vines and cosmic reckonings of the conscious that intertwines us all. “The body itself is a machine to move you through the sequence of chess game movements that makeup your symbolic day” [Leary]. Buildings and titles provide us the temporary bliss of permanence, permanence being something that our fluid, dancing frequencies can never live up to. We exist in a continuous cycle of “Death. Life. Structure.” [Leary]. We can’t really live up to anything, but we can live.
In a recent interview concerning his identity and philosophies, Jim Carrey said: “if you wake up every day with the feeling that you are the universe, you don’t have to reach for the stars.” You are the universe because the universe is everything and you are a part of everything. If you are the universe and the universe is divine, then it may ring true that elemental ecstacy is conceived within yourself. We are given bodies, avatars, which our soul then uses to seek its Angelic Food Cake [baked with a pinch of love and physical sensations]. Our bodies exist to enhance our soul’s experience, not to limit it; “many religions have been founded on revelations from the sensory level of consciousness” [Leary]. We’re allowed the leeway of how we wish to embark on our spiritual journey, but the path can get clogged up with frivolous earthly pleasures if we’re not careful. “Plastic steaks from Safeway still don’t make any sense to my cells” [Leary]; the absurdity of plastic becomes apparent after I realize the vitality of bodily magic. According to Leary, “Everyone has his favorite level of consciousness,” we can call God or the Higher Power by whatever name we please so long as we don’t alienate ourselves from the cosmic cornucopia of energy and consciousness. The divinity of the entirety is not contained to such but rather spread about all of its parts. Leary urges us to “get in touch with [our] cellular wisdom” [and he wasn’t talkin’ bout no T-Mobile gizmos].
In my radical rambling and intimate purging of prose perhaps you’ve come to terms with our commonalities. Truth be told, I could have used any pronoun in this piece, but the prospect of placing this experience in first person allows you [dear reader] to recognize your own role within the system. The point is that the current values of our social structure pit passion against profit, efficiency over ecstasy. If we’re to transcend the trauma, togetherness is imperative. “Your divine body has been around a long, long time. Much longer than any of the social games you play. Trust the evolutionary process” [Leary]. There is God within us all, it is elemental, sentimental, and these bodies are purely rentals. “Have you ever personally experienced that the world is round and whirls around the sun?” [Leary].
We spend far too much time consuming everything but the truth, pointing fingers and aiming missiles at one another, becoming more and more marginalized as each day passes and the ocean acidifies. Because we’ve lost sight of divinity in both ourselves and the surrounding world, it makes the damage we’re doing to each other and our planet easier to stomach. In separating ourselves from God, we defer the responsibility of our actions, making it easier to sleep at night [certainly the Melatonin helps]. If we’re too busy fighting amongst ourselves, concerned with the next consumable pleasure and dispensable relief, there’s no way we can progress as a species. The decline of our species and its cosmic consciousness affects us as an entirety, but leisure induces apathy, leaving the majority of the population unconcerned about larger social issues, ever-consumed by own daily routines. We are God and the Devil and the Universe and everything that could ever encompass; avatars and missions can be fun but we’re kidding ourselves insane if we think that’s the point of the game. So on to the next level; you are the flowers of truth manifested in its petals, and succumbing to Satan’s schemes of separation is the greatest loss. Godspeed, terrestrial traveler- I hope you defeat the final boss.
Works Cited
Cummins, Walter, and George Gordon. Programming Our Lives: Television and American Identity. Praeger, 2006.
Douglas, Mary Tew. How Institutions Think. Univ. Pr., 1988.
Harris, Marvin. “Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times .” Goodreads, Goodreads, 16 Oct. 1998.
Lachman, Gary. Turn off Your Mind: the Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001.
Leary, Timothy. Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out. Ronin, 2001.
Sian, Katy P. Conversations in Postcolonial Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.