The alienation in Western society is your ticket to awakening.
Published in Orient Yourself
Dec 30, 2023 (Medium.com)
It’s an all-too common story. You wake up one day, mid 20 or 30-something. Finding the color in your life is drained out. Nothing’s bringing you any real joy.
You try re-invigorating yourself. Yes, you do “yoga.” You meet some new people.
You form some silly attachment to something, just to get excited about the ‘little things’ in life.
But it doesn’t change the fact that at its core, this manifest world seems pointless.
People drudgingly go to their jobs, selling their time and energy for less than it’s worth.
They come home, dealing with it all by lowering the scope of their awareness — getting absorbed into a TV series, “relationship,” or side hustling obsession.
Others, tuned to a different calibration, see this for the trap it is.
They decide to bulldoze the difficult emotions & thought cycles back into the space they rose out of.
Not with painstaking effort.
Simply with spontaneous, luminous, and cognizant consciousness.
They apply what the self-help magazines are too soft to tell you.
MINDFULNESS REQUIRES BRAVERY.
They know if they chose temporary satiation & current comfort over long-term inner engineering, it does more than just sabotage their inner infrastructure.
It plants the seeds for a spiral with no light at the end of its tunnel.
Complacency with your consciousness ensures that you roll in the unsatisfactory nature of this world. You dualistically see yourself apart from it, rather than using it.
Now, what determines whether you fall or rise in awareness?
Inculturation.
This is the lump sum of all the values consciously planted in us by the environment we live in.
In ancient India, these were called sanskaras.
- The root san means ‘perfect’ or ‘formation’
- (S)kara is something that is done.
And what was their word for culture? Sanskriti.
That which collects and imparts these tendencies into us — for better or for worse.
I used to feel out of place, every day. As if I came into this modern world fresh from a different, more ancient era.
We’ve all felt that way, upon the slightest glimpse of spiritual awakening.
Then, we may have begun looking at everything around us, ‘low vibing,’ as if it weren’t worthy of being in the same room as us.
Yearning for escape comes.
A permanent pilgrimage. But that isn’t growth; it’s the same form of escapism that got us into this delusional world to begin with.
We need to transform ourselves at our root. How do we do that?
Inculturating ourselves, fully and consciously.
If we succeed, ‘belonging’ becomes a joke.
Living with total awareness of our actions vs. reactions, continously each moment from the moment we arise to the moment we fall asleep, magic happens. Your human potential just blossoms.
At that point, we’ve learned to make any place we inhabit into our battlefield. Because our inner space of transformation is finally noticed for the unchanging presence that it is.
If we can succeed at living and embodying what culture is supposed to do to us, ie, help us notice these aspects of human potential, then we literally become culture.
Which means we can help inculturate others for the better.
What does that do? It creates meaning.
Which fosters belonging. Barren soil gives rise to lush landscape, if only the pioneer species succeed at making it.
All it takes is for someone strong enough to begin planting.
Written by Rami Dhanoa
·Editor for Orient Yourself
Re-thinking human potential with meditation & Indic philosophy.