Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
Food
cooking
dieting
weightloss,
fitness
and yet on TV if you dial in for a single week, you will hardly find anything on nutrition.
dating
fashion,
sexy hair
sexy skin
nails
breath
appearance
sexual encounters
jewelry
clothing
and yet in a week of TV hardly any programming will define and describe and teach intimate behavior and self-knowledge that will encourage our becoming nurturing and understanding of ourselves and others so that we can have healthy relationships.
tools
skills
lessons
inventions
computers
processes
education
and yet there will be almost no attempt to assist people in terms of helping them understand how to lead more simplified and constructive lives in terms of our understanding what it means to be human beings.
money
finance
banking
real estate
get rich
lottery
condos
beach front
vacation
retirement
gambling
stock market
and yet no real lessons are taught about valuing human life and seeing ourselves in the larger scheme of existence and interdependent relationship with humanity or culture or world understanding among the species.
health
medical
drugs
ambulance
hospital
doctors
impotence
dysfunction
disease
emergency care
nursing home care
hospice care
and yet almost all of our attention is focused on discomfort and almost none of it on prevention of disease. We deal with problems we let fester and could have been prevented.
anger
animosity
politics
wrong thinking
fault finding
disclosure of others
news
humiliation
punking
reality TV
real life
drama
hidden secrets
hidden agendas
covert operations
lobbyists
special interests
There is an entire legion of programs meant to move us to give, work, deploy, dislike. understand, mitigate, disinform, re-educate, create division, get upset, stay confused, hate, become anxious, have fear, make irrational decisions, become rash, act out of reaction instead of out of response, and they are meant to keep us on the edge of our seat instead of relaxed and resolved and free from tension and feeling at peace with the world.
religious
psychological
panicky
emotional
desperate
lonely
needy
forgotten
abandoned
vulnerable
insecure
fearful
blaming
bigoted
biased
finger pointing
reactive
guilty
shame filled
unworthy
suicidal
unsuccessful
lost
hopeless
and yet, the answers are always for sale and never in the open, and when we do access them, they are usually bad book reports of old tired answers that never did free us. Worked up to buy a product that has no lasting effect.
Over and over and over, what we see happening in the media, and every show is the media, every book, every broadcast, every CD, every download, every song, every speech, every ad, every message, is that we are broken, we deserve better, things are less than, and that we need to buy into something that will fix us, and it will only cost us this or that amount of money, usually an arm or a leg, but wait, today for shipping and handling, we can have 2. Just $10. Or more.
Once you have that big money, however you got it, you will need to set up an entire array of things that will take a team of people, and they will suck you dry of all your resources keeping you going until the day you die. You need all these things to be comfortable and make your life easier because we can define life as having no real thoughts and no real connections and where we appear to everyone else as being happy, content, sexually satisfied, and living healthfully and problem free in the lap of luxury. And then we will be happy. Fit and sexy and wealthy and admired and famous, and that will do it. And who in the world is doing it on that formula? Maybe Taylor Swift, who has a hard time keeping boyfriends in the media circus and who writes and sings about what girls experience in the world of growing up in their teens. I’ll bet she never cries. She’s 21 and the 7th most powerful person in cultural media.
So, with all of this focus on our lives and our performance in life, why is it that we are not really getting any practical advice on how to keep our heads on and our hearts straight? Why do we only address the emergency and disease part of life? Why not spend more time on repairing and further enhancing and even augmenting our lives in practical ways that preclude most of the stress and anxiety of complex living? Natural remedies are out and store bought answers are in, why? Because we are consumers and not creators of our own happiness. We are, above all, irresponsible.
Those few people who really do live life are being used to brand name products that are used to sell the idea of freedom to others, but then we are socially enslaved to dogmatic rituals that rule over us in our attempt to copy someone else’s life. We are not taught and supported in our efforts to become ourselves; we are instead cloned by design to mirror the process that others seemed to take. And in our efforts to copy someone else we live a fake life that makes us ill-at-ease but we smile and look good for the audience and put on a horse and pony show until our bodies give out and our lives of pretending are over. Our lives are photo shopped.
Here are 5 things we can do to change that:
1. Let’s let the media and the consumer culture go for a minute and think what we would be doing if none of this existed.
2. Let’s think of our values and what we say we like and dislike as projections of abstractions that we have been subtly taught to divide in our minds and then go back and re-engineer our appreciation of all life.
3. Let’s think about the smallness that we are in the vast ocean of existence, the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, the planet, the continent, the country, the town, the street, the house, the room, and the point of reality where we are and think about what difference we make in the scheme of things as being the sum total of the intimacy we have with others that affects them and their quality of life for their knowing us. Scary, huh?
4. Let’s think about what we say and think and project about the world and write that all down on a balance sheet and see whether or not the source of negativity in our lives is not our own heart and mind.
5. Let’s take everything we say and apply it to ourselves so that anything we can think of at all becomes a point of logic that is all about us. Our advice to others is advice we should take. Our taking time out to complain about others is our own judgmental attitude. We ourselves are the source of the horrors that we see in the world. We are the emotionally disturbed center of a psychotic world. We are the perpetrators of our lives. We are owned by the things and ideas we own and clutch and fantasize about. Grace is being delivered from ourselves.
A practical world view would see the idea that life is truly difficult and with the information in front of us it is hard to become responsive and free of limiting and discouraging thinking, and so we need to adopt a way that allows us to see everyone as worthy and ourselves as being a part of the whole, interdependent and free of bias and objectifying thoughts and feelings of fear and shame. This is very difficult to do in a culture that uses the media to humiliate others daily if not minute to minute.
“Everyone is worthy, and when we learn better, we will all do better, and so I will strive to understand how to become more responsive and less reactive, to see things as they are and not how I am told they are,” we can think to ourselves.
This means getting our hands dirty and messing around with being on the front lines of life and not either immersed in our own problems or chasing unicorns and abstractions that are trumped up by the media machine to delve into our psychometric patterns so that we can be decoded and used for the consumerist culture of someone else’s getting our time, energy, resources, money, life force, feelings, thoughts, or efforts to use on their behalf. We need to proactively work on resolving and not escaping our responsibilities. Our ability to respond is the actual freedom we have to act with free will.
We need to come to a point where no amount of seduction, money, fame, pride, revenge, envy, food, or disharmony can own us, but we are humans learning to cope with our weaknesses. In the meantime, we need an idea that we can use to keep us centered, and this is where universal worthiness comes into play. Instead of shame and guilt, we can know that every person, beast and child, every vista is here for a reason, not to be exploited or abused or objectified by us or through us, but to be appreciated, and then we can feel that we ourselves are a part of that group of beings that are loved unconditionally. We will never have peace by first objectifying others and seeing ourselves as having an increasing number of enemies in the world. We get rid of enemies by coaxing them to be friends, but first we have to convince ourselves that we are friends to ourselves by our learning to be responsive and not reactive.
runningturtle87
Christopher Deane, associate professor of percussion at the University of North Texas, will perform with the SFA Percussion Ensemble in a recital at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25, in Cole Concert Hall on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University.
You’ve heard the old saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Many Nacogdoches residents have held their own garage or yard sale to get rid of all that extra stuff that is no longer useful. But, in the City of Nacogdoches’ case yard sales simply don’t suffice. 
On 02-08-2013 the Nacogdoches County Sheriff Office executed a search warrant on Fore Street in the city of Nacogdoches that resulted in the seizure of crack cocaine and marijuana. Sheriff Bridges stated that his office has had an ongoing investigation in the distribution of narcotics from this residence for the last month. The Sheriff Office was able to collect and gather enough information and evidence to establish probable cause for a search warrant on the residence Friday evening.
