Alienation of the soul in today's society is a grand problem.
From my vantage point, it seems capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, emotion, intuition—is mobilized for currency and the benefit of financial hierarchies.
Industrial production quickly thrusted us into the age of technology that we look at as progress, while simultaneously alieninating us from and decimating the very nature that kept our soul's grounded. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens.
Workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and laptops, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and pharmaceuticals are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of demanding production. As a result, the conditions necessary for spirit to thrive in the community have run aground and new philosophical categories are being created to cope. Many of these new age practices make use of ancient tribal/shamanic/far eastern techniques to see past the individual ego and embrace collective consciousness for the common good of the entire planet.
Many people were born into this lifestyle so they know nothing different, and when they suddenly remove the black and white lens by which they've been viewing the current Paradigm through means of meditation or psychedelic plant ingestion, among many other methods, they are mystified by confrontation with whom they really are underneath all those years of cultural hypnosis, finally feeling that interconnectedness that many generations ago, we felt without having to use any exogenous products or mind-altering techniques. We felt this naturally by living as one with the natural rhythms of life. Those seasons, season the soul.
Alienating nature is alienating the psyche. This is because nature (to include human nature) is cyclical, not linear. It seems linear because of our short lives and the cause-and-effect makeup of our newfound, overly masculine left-brain dominant society, but it is irrevocably cyclical and any deviation from these cycles, which now happens mostly from lack of recognition of them for many generations, has enormous consequences for our health.
We are witnessing many of those consequences today. We forget how to relate to our Great Mother. Her “face” becomes lost in the world of human-centric words and overly-masculine attempts at conquering and controlling her. Even many of the women of our culture have been pigeonholed into overly-masculine mindsets. They’ve been forced into forgetting the face of the Mother within them.
So for those who can see this picture, I feel it is morally responsible to contest the atrophy of instinct and spiritual communion with earth in an age of rising mental illness and submission.
We must realize that by resonating again with the natural rhythms, through any multitude of spiritual practices, we create structure and meaning that give us great power in times of grief.
I'm not saying that all technology is bad or that it hasn't done us any good in many ways, but we must find ways to evolve with it and nature as harmoniously as possible, in a way that it does not inevitably destroy everything our souls yearn for, including but not limited to the natural world, our health, and our peace of mind.
Many people feel incredibly lost and they have no reason why, and they may end up dwelling in a psychiatrist's office looking for answers they are incapable of giving.
A great philosopher, Yogi Bear, once said, 'It's hard to get someplace if you don't know where you are going.'
They have forgotten where they have come from and they have forgotten where they are going. So when people say they seem lost, it is not that hard to figure out why. They are craving that long lost spiritual infrastructure that nature provides without any religion at all. It is the teacher that inspires religion.
In many ways, psychiatry tries to reduce things that can't be reduced. You can't reduce a person to a body. You can't reduce a mind or a consciousness to a brain. In fact, there is no scientific conclusion that conciousness resides in the brain at all. We are very much more that just those things in isolation.
We just are. And when you're aligned with spirit in the natural order, that message is clear and more than satisfying.
