Mirror Mania - Part III

Terms of Engagement

Mirror Mania - Part III

Terms of Engagement

We live in a sea of screens. 

Surrounded. 

Inundated. 

Drowned? 

The undertow of technology and algorithmic commerce sucks us in and under. The ability to identify us and squeeze us into identity ghettos is staggering. 

The more we locate in categories, the easier we are commodified. As commodities we are easily sold back to ourselves. 

Media says:

“We know how to keep an eye on you.”

“We know who you think you are.”

“We know you are dissatisfied with you.”

“We know where it hurts”

“We know why.”

“We know what you want to ease the pain.”

“We know exactly what it takes to ease your pain.”

“We know how to find new pain points.”

“We know how to rinse and repeat.”

These are the circumstances of our lives when we allow mediated screen based technologies and social conformity to establish the rules of engagement around core questions of identity. 

We have been carefully conditioned to comply with institutional and social ‘suggestions.’ 

As promised - Vance Packard!

He was a Pennsylvania born “farm boy” turned journalist. Packard exposed the tactics and ethics that pervaded Mad Men culture with the 1957 publication of “The Hidden Persuaders,” which has sold more than a million copies.

“This book is about the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and out=r thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us, are often, in a sense, hidden.”  ~VP

Packard enumerated the Hidden Needs. 

- Identity

- Self Worth

- Affiliation

- Creative Expression

- Emotional Comfort/Happiness

- Love

- Power

- Immortality

In the aggregate we see that Packard’s Hidden Needs are elements of self identity. The ad makers and the ad machine, better known as media, recognized that we are Metaphoric Mammals. 

The MIC methodically mastered language and image so that we would see one thing as another in ways that suited their interests. Ultimately we were led to see ourselves as Consumers writ large, capable of meeting our needs, as determined by the Media Industrial Complex, with the products on offer and the means used to sell them. They packaged psychological needs as wants satisfied by products.

Status symbols like big, solid, fast cars and admired clothing to appeal to our needs for self worth; our need to attract attention. Our need to feel important, accepted, and secure. To see ourselves seen as glowing, sought by the crowd.

They saw the close connection between creative and erotic desires, using sexual images and language to seduce us to buy, buy, buy. 

Perhaps the biggest fear we have is of death, THE end. A feeling of primal danger, a dark vision of disappearing into nothingness. 

Ads fashioned to play to this deep insecurity with age-defying products and spry older people enjoying life are in regular rotation. They cast vibrant young people to help us avoid thinking about death and encourage us to recapture a lost youth.

The Mad Men knew that the key to their success was not so much in persuading us, but in conditioning us to persuade ourselves. To forge our identities using repeated impressions designed to pierce and stick in our Metaphoric Mammal minds. To firmly establish in us a limited, compliant, and fierce consumerist identity.

They have largely succeeded! 

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

I bet dollars to donuts that the first engagement that pops to top of most minds is -

Love and Marriage

Love has been commodified to the hilt. There is a Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC) is at work, full force, 24/7. It’s focused on Compound Annual Growth Rate. They’re not sentimental. They do hard, cold numbers.

A $414 Billion Global Industry Seeing Healthy Growth

Let’s start with the 10,000 foot view on size and growth:

The global wedding industry will reach $414 billion by 2030 according to Allied Market Research. The 4.8% CAGR from 2018-2030 signals healthy, sustained expansion.

Over the same period, the broader U.S. wedding services market will grow at a 5.4% CAGR to an expected $79 billion worth by 2030 according to IBISWorld.

Zooming in on 2023, U.S. wedding services revenue is projected at $70 billion already. That would mark a 21% increase over 2021’s $57.9 billion.

Bottom Line: Both globally and domestically, expect strong ongoing expansion of the wedding industry. We’re seeing no slowdown in couples wanting unforgettable celebrations. 

The WIC, which pimps out love, is but one, a quick example of an all encompassing array of business interests that have cluttered our way of life. We are in the clutches of a society with a powerful media voice. It shouts (sometimes in whispers) without notice or surcease it exerts a powerful pull.  

How’s this working for you? Are you thriving? 

Do you feel truly whole? Or, do you have a gnawing sense that ‘something’ is missing?

Are you comfortable? Content?

It’s easy to get distracted by what’s expected of us.

Nevertheless, I want to remind you that we, as humans, have the natural capacity to change the terms of engagement. 

With a shift in perspective, we can revision engagement as agreement, the terms of which are negotiable with practiced awareness and creative action. 

We can change how we agree to see ourselves, each other, and how we forge connections to life-force so as to live in (and of) the world together.

We can agree to immerse in a living Universe with rapt attention, with wonder, with an easy sense of belonging. With identities that emerge from free play and true discovery. We can reject imprisonment.

We can remind ourselves that change is the essence of life lived alive.   

“The truth of change can be seen at every level: the birth and death of galaxies, the rise and fall of civilizations, the change of climate and weather — and the momentary changes of our lived experience.” ~Joseph Goldstein

Life affirming change is what ACTING HUMAN practice promises. 

We do not, in our practice, push for particular changes to remedy something that we see as wrong with us. We do not play a finite self-improvement game. We play life as infinite players.

Our intention is simple: to engage with life as emergent experience, always changing from moment to moment. To trust our lives lived alive in awareness. To sense our timeless belonging in a free, swirling, star studded Universe within endless Galaxies.   

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”

~Alan Watts

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”

~Martin Buber

MY BARBER SHOP EPIPHANY

Among my earliest memories, if not my first memory, is of a haircut. The contender is an evocative view of pastries in Pakula’s Bakery near Parkchester. Both are profound. 

When I was two or so my father took me see Mario, in his barber shop a few doors down from Jack’s Diner in bustling Westchester Square. It was while seated on a ‘pony’ chair that I had a mystical experience. 

As Mario cut and combed I noticed the Universe. It was spread out in all directions without end. No matter where I looked the Universe, including me and my pony, appeared at all angles and on every horizon.

Pure wonder. Spellbinding. Timeless.

In the fullness of ‘ordinary’ time I’ve come to know what happened, which doesn’t diminish the miracle of what I saw as a spectacular Universal vision. It remains a mystical experience.

Seen in a rational way it was what we’d commonly call an illusion.

I was centered between two walls of mirrors. All was reflected and re-reflected ad infinitum revealing Universal truth to an open child.

“What is meant by the term ‘illusion’ is that phenomena do not exist independently of other phenomena, that their appearance of independent existence is illusory. This is all that is meant by ‘illusion,’ that something is not really there.”

~Dalai Lama

Far be it from me to fly in the face of His Holiness, rather I am inspired by him to extend his language and expand our understanding of illusion.

Reality is here AND there, a matter of perception.

The stuff of magic. We live in mystery. It is only the quality of our attention, the way we see in any given moment, and the circumstances that create what we see that inflects our identity and exerts influence on what we seem to see.

Magic relies on misdirection; diverted attention.

To see one way not the other. Wisdom/Vision calls us to see ALL simultaneously. To see how the trick works as we are the nexus, both the magic and the magician.

To see clearly, as I did at two, that both/and gives rise to Universal vision, was and is a break through. A life changing change. We live as reflections in a mystery that bestows on us vast creative freedom.

I was, just a few years hence, to learn from learning to play the trumpet that subtle shifts make a BIG difference. There are break throughs awaiting in every truly lived moment.

ACTING HUMAN: A METAPHORIC PRACTICE

To engage life as actors playing ourselves, while alert to and intentional in what we are doing, is a practice rooted in skillful use of imagination.

We live in an unfathomable mystery.

We make creative sense of it all by storying. The ways in which we use curiosity and imagination to let story emerge is:

- How we find our place in the Universe

- How we discover our identities in each new moment

- How we recognize our needs and wants

- How we let out needs and wants move us

- How we form and navigate relationships

- How we respond to a persistent flow of changes

- How we live our lives alive

Acting is a learnable craft. So is life. They map over one another with almost complete congruence.

ACTING HUMAN is an innovative turn on mindfulness practice. A turbo-charged, always available version, a fascinating meditation in and on daily life. A way to play in in the realm of non-dual consciousness AND harmonize with our culturally conditioned brethren .

No woo-woo, weird costumes, nor dogmatic rituals.

ACTING HUMAN shows us a way to use attention to nurture curiosity and imagination in the service of creating life lived fully alive. To break free of conformity and servitude to commercial pressures. 

Rather, it urges us to serve, in daily life, for the benefit of ourselves AND others. To enliven the qualities of empathy, compassion, and kind action. To elevate the level of sanity and humanity.

We are multitudes held in confinement by sanctioned identities. Our tightly bound roles cause pain that gets exploited. The more we try to escape the pain by ordinary means the tighter the bind. The greater the pain.

It is hard to talk about, but when it happens the freedom from one’s tight, motionless identity comes as a welcome relief.

Life is like an unfolding story that we read and interpret, while identifying with the stars (i.e., gods) and immersing ourselves in the drama. When we start to notice this, life becomes lighter. The monotony fades and the magic begins. For when we turn our attention to our bodies, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness, we find that we are woven of the quixotic threads of ongoing stories. For only such a self can create and be created. A fixed, intractable one is as good as dead. 

~Stephan Batchelor  

We can only know ourselves in relationship. Not the least of which is our relationship to our momentary identity. Until identity flows in a life giving way we are stuck, and as Stephan Batchelor puts it, “as good as dead.”

As letting go and flowing with story becomes our daily way, we will find more fun, greater buoyancy, and evanescent joy in all we do and in everyone with whom we live.

Alas..

Contentment is wanting what you need,

frustration is needing what you want

and you can't always get what you want,

but if you try sometime

you find you get what you need.

(isn't that right Mr. Jagger?)

A sale is the purchase of a service or product

to gratify a want,

fueled often by the erroneous belief

that it will give the buyer what they need.

Therefore...

sell people what they want,

but give them what they need,

so they'll be around long enough

to get them where they really want to go.

(c) 2007 Mark Goulston

Until next time..

Lights Up!