"Addiction! There is no other way to accurately describe America's energy habit."
--Jeremy Rifkin
Strolling along these Encinitas city streets, where spiritual materialism reeks like a noxious perfume, I discover the ABSURD. Walking into Whole Foods during my twenty minute break off from a spiritual retail job where the nick-knacks and mementos hold absolutely no sway over this Body Mind Heart Soul Spirit, I purchase a box of Organic Chocolate Chip Cookies. "This is my yoga," I say to my invisible friend, as I sashay out the sliding glass doors. "You lifta the cookie to your lips. You bite-a the cookie. Hmmmm... taste-a the cookie. Enoy-a the cookie." I call this the Cookie Monster Asana.
Sinking into the absurdity of all of this - of a world dangerously teetering on the brink of collapse due to an addiction to consumption by a culture hell bent on chasing death - is a wonderful antidote that I had, up until now, not even considered as a path for exploration. "You take-a your toe, and you place-a it in his ear-a. Now, you turn-a over and do a handstand-a." I call this the Tantra of the Absurd.
And, we've gotta laugh about it as well as cry our eyes out over it. We have to acknowledge that we have a serious problem here, my friends, and buying crystals is not going to solve it! It is time we leave the crystals where they beelong, and instead lift our lilting voices to say that what we value most is already right here, right now. There is no need for more. There is nothing to do. And, no one to beecome. THIS IS IT! Thich Nhat Hahn has been declaring it for decades. Are you ready to embody your words by standing by this truth with your actions?
Imagine that?
You don't have to prove that you're worthy.
YOU JUST ARE
SIMPLY BY BEE-ING.
"We have been destroying the planet, believing all the while that a ruined planet doesn't mean a ruined human. The advertising agency has served as the denial mechanism here, always promising that the next product, the next "fix," will do the trick.
We watch the Earth sicken and die. Yet we know that we are the Earth, we are the soils, we are the water, we are the air. We see our children die of maladies directly related to poisoned water, soil, air and we deny. The medical establishment serves our denial here - it keeps promising a cure. We avoid the question: "How will a species born of a healthy planet find a cure for itself within the context of a poisoned one?" We deny and we deny and deny. We consume in order to forget. But, as we consume, we eat the poisons of our prior consumption. When we drink, we drink the poisons of our chemical waste dumps. When we breathe, we breathe the exhaust from our last dream car. Yet, because we need to consume more and more to dull the pain of our degraded existence, we are forced to drink our own death, eat our own death, and breathe our own death. Worse, we must deny while we watch our children eat, breathe and drink their death."
--from Albert LaChance's Cultural Addiction: The GreenSpirit Guide to Recovery
