60s & Further
Photo Editorial Page

Centuries-old cultural conditioning has given us a nasty neurosis:
the belief that happiness must be "earned".
It can be "earned" only by enduring unpleasantness (eg work, pain, misery).
But how do you know if you've endured enough unpleasantness to deserve happiness?

Another unspoken game rule:
"responsible adults"
can never endure enough unpleasantness to truly deserve happiness.

Laid on top of the first neurosis is the idea that spending money will make you happy.
This is toffee coating on a bad puritan apple.
If you spend enough money to give you the (advertised) conditions for happiness,
the neurosis emerges in the form of apparently random worries, guilt, "feeling shitty", etc.
Worrying is the easiest and most popular way to negate happiness.

So:
we never stop working,
we never stop spending money,
we're never really happy
-ideal conditions, coincidentally, for a certain type of slave economy.


The New Paradigm
New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution
by Robert E. Ornstein, Paul R. Ehrlich

There is no longer sufficient time
to rely on the normal pace of cultural evolution to deal with today's dilemmas...
Human beings have always been the most adaptable creatures on the planet,
and they should be able to chart a new course for themselves.
Some of that charting is already being done.

The old mind today is being challenged and changed by many scattered efforts.
Can we bring these efforts together to produce
a large-scale program for a rapid "change of mind"?
We know what the problem is.
The "solution" is not simple--
to generate the social and political will
to move a program of conscious evolution
to the top of the human agenda."


Checkout my
MYSPACE BLOG

MORE COMING SOON!

LionHeart
November 2007

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