The Culture of Business and Cult of Personality

I hate the culture of business although I know it's the methodology of capitalism. It's so unthinking and insensitive. Its bottom line is always money, and every thing and every value is subservient to that. The ethic is not "Do Unto Others" as in the Golden Rule; it seems to be "See what you can get away with and what can be exploited in the process." For what? Greed, I guess. Money and power. It is against my personal spiritual value system. The downside of being exposed to and participating in a workplace like that is the fact that others are continually making judgments and playing games motivated by the lust for power and authoritarianism. The judgments are those they have no right to make and which are based on an ego-intense perspective. Why do we continue in this madness? It is truly an insane world we have created. Is it because we don't know how to sustain our lives in a satisfying way without money? Money is, after all, just a symbol and a tool that keeps us from killing each other for food. It is also a tool that keeps us killing each other for territory, food, resources, property, and power. Money is all things to all people.

It is only through self-discipline and sometimes repression that my anger is held in check. It's taken me years to get to the place where I am not chewing nails and spitting metal shavings. I am not sure there is any good or effective way of divesting oneself of all the jumbled emotions that arise from political or personal trauma. I could seek the mind-numbing effects of drugs, alcohol, addictions of various sorts, or fucking with people's heads, but I choose to remain sober and somewhat attuned to a spiritual value system that includes empathy and a semiglobal understanding of our true purpose on earth. There is a kind of selflessness in that which can be healing and peacegiving, but the fact remains that unless we are totally inured to the urgings of the ego, we still harbor anger, resentment, regret, and a screaming feeling of unbelievable unfairness. Perhaps I should be in a monastery---raising goats, gardening, painting, writing, listening to music, and not having to listen to and interact with all the insanities of the world at large. Maybe then I could gain the inner peace necessary to prevent bruising encounters with politics and personalities. Another alternative is to be so filthy rich that one could buy inner peace and profound privacy (total avoidance). Perhaps one could also achieve that by living in a refrigerator box under a viaduct. The secret, I suppose, is keeping a balance in the midst of insanity.

We are constantly creating the effects of our lives; in fact, we cannot avoid creating the effects of our lives. I believe that the creative power or energy that put all of this in place is a responsive one and that it responds to our thoughts and feelings. A creative energy/power cannot NOT create in every instant of time; therefore, whatever our mental energies envision (good, bad, or indifferent), this envisioning itself creates our circumstances. If we do not like our circumstances, we have only to do one thing: Change our minds and our ensuing behaviors. Every moment of life depends upon one thing and one thing only: Our perception of it. People who express anger, fear, self-doubt, violence, hatred, and so forth, have only to change their minds if they don't like their circumstances. The expression of anything begets that very same thing. Love begets love, fear begets fear, anger begets anger. Test it. Love does not beget fear, anger does not beget peace, and serenity does not beget agitation. The only way to have peace is literally to have peaceful thoughts and do peaceful actions. Doesn't this seem logical? The founder of Morita therapy (as described in many books by David Reynolds) expresses a central concept: Don't do as you feel; feel as you do.

How do we stop the emotions? How do we stop feeling angry or resentful or a jarring sense of unfairness? I think we don't and shouldn't stop emotions. Emotions come and feel like a certain state of mind. However, emotions also go, and one can stop the emotions from creating the effects of those emotions (in one's body, mind, and spirit) by letting the emotions pass through and becoming aware that one is letting go of all thoughts and feelings that do not resonate with a feeling of peace, love, beauty, or truth. I believe it is the stopping up of negative feelings, emotions, or thoughts and focusing on them that creates a permanent manifestation. If the energy keeps flowing, it will flow away and won't become part of one's physical, psychological, mental, or spiritual architecture.

That might sound like repression, but I believe that it is not just the covering up of negative emotions. It is truly the allowance of flow. The more we rehearse anger, hatred, fear, self-doubt, and violence, the better we become at it. We become what we practice. If we desire a sense of timelessness, a slowing down of this frantic lifestyle we lead, a feeling of integration, wholeness, healing, peace, joy, or simplicity, then that is what we must practice. We cannot keep practicing impatience, anger, irritability, and ignorance and expect to be peaceful, loving, and empathic. Whatever we reinforce in ourselves and others is what evolves into behaviors that are either desirable or not. It takes much courage and awareness to step out of the path of everyone else's vortex and into our own sense of wholeness, balance, and peace. Energy is very "catching." Vibrations from others that jar our sense of calm are very disruptive. If we sense that is going on, we must redouble our efforts to focus on our center and not on the frantic and chaotic energy that is around us or beside us.

It hurts when others think badly of us, but when we cogitate on those negative judgments, the "bad shit" is what we are taking into ourselves and making the ruler of our emotions and lives. We have to resist others' bad opinions of ourselves, not by lying to ourselves but by recognizing that we are a creation of God with all the purity, innocence, respect, and empowerment that is ours by nature. When others who used to love us suddenly despise us, that reflects a change in their attitudes; hence, it is out of our control, but we do not have to soak up that negative judgment and internalize or live it. We can simply realize that they are misguided about us and, furthermore, their misguided or negative judgment about us is creating nonpeace, nonlove, nonempathy, and chaos in their own lives. It is impossible to hold a negative or unforgiving thought about anything or anyone and maintain peace inside. To have peace is to forgive all. If peace is more important than anything, we have to give up bad or unforgiving thoughts about anyone or anything, and we have to recognize that others' bad/unforgiving thoughts about us hurt them, not us. We always have a choice at every moment how we want to feel, think, be, and act. Even in the most threatening and devastating of circumstances, we can choose how we want to be. That is a tremendous power, and most people either don't realize it or don't want to realize it because to realize this power is to take total responsibility and accountability for one's own life.

Many people don't want to take total responsibility for their lives. They are busy trying to make others take responsibility (You make me so mad; you drive me nuts; the cashier pissed me off; my boss hates me; God hates me; you are the cause of my unhappiness; you made me do it; if it weren't for you, I would be _____).

Many people (sometimes our loved ones) are so immersed in their unhealthy emotions that they want others to underwrite their lives and take care of them. Whenever we encounter a person who wants to be "taken care of" unreasonably, we have to be careful not to enable that person to continue in self-destructive behavior. In the end, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Namaste.