Doing Away With The Extraneous

Elton John recorded a song in the 1990’s called “Simple Life”.  It is a beautiful song that speaks to the way so many people feel even 22 years later.  He sings about wanting to get back to the simple life and the feeling that he cannot escape certain things that life has given him.  He speaks of “horoscopes and fate” as if there is really not anything that he can do to get away from what life has presented him with.  Don’t you believe it!  It is true that you were born with certain traits and abilities that are unique to you.  These traits are there to help define you but they are also in the form of challenges that you must overcome.  A person born with the sun sign Taurus has the propensity to be a very stubborn person but this is a challenge to them to know when stubbornness is useful and when it is not.

A simple life is one that meets your needs but in ways that have rejected or done away with the illusions and chaos that we many times create for ourselves which we do not realize will enslave us and prevent us from having the peace that our souls crave.  It is an incredible illusion to look at the lives of the rich and famous and believe that we will be happy if we can just have a life like theirs which appears to be wonderful and glowing.  They seem to be loved and adored for just existing, but do not be deceived.  Many of them work very hard for long hours and are virtual slaves to their masters who promote them and provide them with a vehicle for success at a very high price to them as human beings.

I never talk to anyone anymore who can say that they are happy.  You might look at Kim Kardashian and think that she is. She, and a few others like her, actually do make a living by doing nothing but attention seeking.  Prior to the current glory of Ms. Kardashian there was Paris Hilton.  Fame for nothing seems to be what most people (Americans, for sure) consider to be the ideal existence.    

 I see a culture that is tired of working for something that they do not benefit from except for with a paycheck, which most of the time will only cover the basic necessities of life, if that.  There are those who may enjoy the work that they do but they are so tired of the demands of the company they work for and the attention demands of their co-workers that they dread getting out of bed in the morning to face another 8 hours of it.  Our culture has become such an expensive place to navigate that crime and identity theft are the preferred ways of some people to manage a roof over their head and something to eat.  If you live in a country where it is not like this, you should thank God and your lucky stars.  And please tell me where you are so I can move there.

I don’t think that the generation before us could have foreseen what we are experiencing now.  They are, in part, responsible for how things are but it is a fact that we took the ball and ran with it when it was handed to us on an electronic platter. What you will find outside of yourself in the world now is not likely to make you feel good about yourself at all unless you are extremely fortunate.  If you can manage to never stop shopping or getting compliments from others or dining in restaurants or getting laid or being on the web you might have the formula for feeling the illusion of love and comfort. But if you have any sense of yourself at all you know that this is the shallowest and most hollow of existences and you will not be able to manage a steady diet of it for very long. The information age is a wonderful thing and it has allowed people like me and many others to have a voice in the world that we could never have had otherwise, but while most of us are using it to make life easier and less isolated we have actually made some things much more difficult and have given a forum to corrupters and the selfish which they are using to destroy much of what was good.  You are a human and humans are here to do more than continuously indulge in self interest.

The problem that I see with people like Kim Kardashian is that there are so many who aspire to be like her.  As long as this is what we value as a society she is going to benefit from a great life at our expense.  We will go to bed each night feeling empty and wanting.  She will have the things that we want while we indulge her.  The only way that you would recognize the illusion celebrity is feeding on from you is if you saw a video of her gorging on the things that you can only want and you could see her getting more and more obese on it.  It is so interesting that our culture hates the sight of overweight people.  This mentality goes back to the time when only monarchs and the affluent had enough food to gain any excess weight.  Those who had to do all of the work so the elite  could live high on the fruits of other’s labors is still stuck in our psyches as a left over in the collective unconscious.   We look at the people who are overweight and feel disgust for their perceived gluttony, but the real gorgers in current culture have managed to pull the wool over our eyes by staying as thin as possible to present a glowing portrait of themselves as the thing that we should aspire to and hiding the fact that their beauty and beautiful lifestyle is only there at the expense of you and your willingness to hand over your time and money and adoration to them for doing absolutely nothing of any real value.  This used to be the lot of the ruling class.  These people rule nothing, but you are willing to adore them because somewhere in you, you believe that this is the way life should be.  Congratulations for giving these people permission to be the self indulgent greedy bastards that they will always be if you don’t take back your power from them. 

Political power, which could actually make a difference in this world has become nothing more than narcissism and the desire to control others. Not to mention that it has become so expensive to run for political office that people with any real virtue are prevented from even trying.  So many of our political representatives are affluent enough to have absolutely no clue about the lives of those they seek to govern. They do not represent us, they represent themselves.

If this scenario is disturbing to you it is a shame that you aren’t taking a hard look at how much you are supporting it.  There are numerous celebrities who have tried to speak out against injustice and inequality but many times they find that in doing so they take a career hit and have to back off or lose their status.  It is actually the people without notoriety who need to be working in support of what they try to accomplish.  Their voice will be heard before ours will but we have to make a difference at the grass roots level in order to accomplish any real change, and doing this requires us to know our true selves first and foremost.  It would be nice if a Wonder Woman or a Superman or a Robin Hood would step out and save us.  I speak of the legend of Robin Hood here, as I knew a fellow once who lived in the area of Nottingham and Sherwood Forrest in England and he told me that the story of Robin Hood’s exploits and altruism were grossly over rated and glamorized.  Still, if it were possible to have a hero emerge in this culture with the “legendary” traits of one who cares about his fellow citizens enough to make the effort to change the distribution of wealth  and fight injustice in the world it would be extremely helpful.  When people with a true voice in the media speak out, how many of us speak with them in our daily life?  I realize that we live in a culture now where many people want to trash us for being different in any way that goes against what they believe.  I have many friends who have deleted their profiles from Facebook because of the deliberate attacks on them for just having a dissenting opinion.  People who know themselves and are comfortable in their own skins are not going to behave like this.  Comedian Katt Williams said in one of his stand-up acts, “If you a real mutherf**ker they hate you with everything that they got.  They can’t stand it.”  It is only the people who need constant approval and have no real self worth who go on the attack and cannot stand to be wrong or contradicted.  If that quote was offensive to you I apologize but sometimes only the down and dirty truth can express the reality.  Katt knows that well, as do many other comedians.  And I don’t work for Sesame Street.

If we are ever going to get back to the simple life that Elton John sang about we will have to look back to our past and find the “Wonder Woman” or “Superman” who exist in our individual selves.  Using the great gifts that we were born with can make a world where the terrible greed and abuses of power cannot get a stranglehold on us again.  We have been lax and fearful of standing up to what has happened to us; each one of us for our own individual reasons.  Not everyone has it in them to be a world-beater but all of us have the ability to show others what a true to our self person looks like.  This kind of realism can be seen and felt by everyone that you come in contact with.  Some people may not like it, as Katt Williams said, but you weren’t put here to meet with their approval.  It is nice if it happens but constantly seeking that is a hunger that can never be truly satisfied.  I think that Kim Kardashian and others like her are proof of it.  The true you is the only one who can make any real changes in our world.  We have to stop waiting for someone else to do it first.    

The enemy for all of us is whatever keeps us from being what we were meant to be. You will never be truly happy with the you that others have created for you.  Who you are with their impositions on top was molded for their comfort and convenience, not for any other reason.   In the 1980’s film “Willow”, the High Aldwin challenges three would be wizards to tell him which of his fingers has the power to control the universe.  None of them pick the right finger because, as he tells Willow later, the real power is in one’s own finger.  It is our own power that we gave to politicians and narcissists that they take and in turn use against us for their own gain, even if they have given us the illusion that they want it to act on our behalf.  You will never know which power you gave to them if you don’t know what kind you have.  The only way to identify it is to get back to your original self and learn what powers and abilities you came here with.  You will be stabbing around blindly in the dark until you find the true reality within yourself that lies at the bottom of what has been told to you to gain control over you. That simple life that Elton John spoke about in his song will come to you as a result of deleting all that is not what you truly are.  The power is in your own finger and in a life that has rejected the lies and deceit of others who only want to use us to gain a false sense of superiority.  And if we wait until we are taking our last breath we have waited too late for ourselves and for those who are depending upon us to make this a world worth living in.