Simplicity - Take Only What you Need.

.Our society is afflicted with a plague of emptiness. Every where you look you will see people clinging onto this material world, impervious to the impending destruction that lies in wait. People everywhere reach out in an attempt to fill a void. This void has been created out of the utter lack of spiritual fulfillment, a lack of connectedness. Much like a black hole that consumes everything around it, we have consumed our environment in an attempt to satiate ourselves.... yet our desires can not be satiated in this way - in fact, the opposite happens, the more we feed our desires the stronger our desires become.

How can we break free from this self-destructive cycle of perpetual desire? The answer is simple, we must learn to take only what we need, embracing simplicity as one of our driving forces of the coming age. I have traveled all over America and talked to many people. Everyone in this country wants something, those who are more grounded in the material want money. Those who are immersed in Spiritual Ideals want enlightenment, people who are activists want change... people want all these things, yet so few are actually willing to give anything up, so few are willing to make a real sacrifice. Nothing in this universe comes without an equivalent energetic exchange. You can not attain anything without personal sacrifice.

One of the many the laws of nature is that If you want something to happen, you must first create the necessary space. In order for a change to occur, we must create space within ourselves. Sacrifice is perhaps one of the simplest ways to create this space. By giving up those things which we no longer need, a very fertile space is created within our being that allows powerful transformations to occur, which will then manifest externally in the world around us.

Most people seem to believe that we only need to make small sacrifices. So you drive a hybrid instead of a hummer, you don't eat meat anymore and spend ridiculous amounts of money on high-end-health food, you quit shopping at walmart but you still buy a $3 latte every morning....

The situation is much more serious than that, every time we drive a car, every time we feed the consumerism machine, every time we support the current system and the old paradigm we are causing great pain to the Earth; we're still feeding the dream that has enslaved humanities soul. You want change? Be the change. Quit your job, stop buying things, grow a garden, build community, make a difference, a real difference... Make a complete transformation, let go of everything that is not needed. Live your life in a way that will inspire others to do the same.

You can choose to tune this out, put up walls, make excuses for yourself, distract yourself with something comforting, try to find solace in the fact that everything will work out in the end. Of course it will, we can all just do nothing and the planet will kill us all off to stabilize it's own ecosystem. No skin off it's back if we decide we don't want to take personal responsibility for our mess.

Above all, don't feel guilty! Guilt is a useless emotion, it is a means of self-indulgence that we use to avoid personal responsibility. The energy we expend indulging in our guilt is yet another of the many barriers that trap us in these cycles...

Change, Transformation, Healing, Consciousness, Evolution. These are great buzz words we can throw around if we want to keep up with all these radical trends, but until we actually start doing something it's all still just words. If we don't start making a serious effort to transform ourselves through our actions, if we don't start walking our talk, we're still stuck in the same loop that we have been in for thousands of years.

In reality, the human actually needs very little. Food and water are generally essential, yet ironically this is something we lack in our society - most food contains more chemicals than nutrients and the water has suffered a similar poisoning. Some form of shelter is generally necessary, though this has been largely over-exaggerated in mainstream society. Community is another extremely important aspect - we are pack animals, though this is something that has also been largely neglected in the current manifestation of the society. A few other tools can be of use, but these are the core essentials. Our society denies us most of these basic needs yet most people still choose to remain complacent, people still sell their souls for material comforts and luxuries. People know this, and they still choose to drown themselves in apathy. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for the situation.

How is it that we have strayed so far from these very simple ideals? When did we get the idea that chopping down entire forests to build large houses was "Ok"? When did we collectively decide it was socially acceptable to rape our mother, the Earth. The reality of the human situation is that we are suffocating in our own shit. What is it going to take to actually convince everyone to clean up the mess we have created? How many people are going to have to die, how much suffering will need to happen.

I would love to think that we can make a smooth and painless transition into a new age, but the way things are going now, I simply just don't see enough effort. Everyone is too comfortable. Things are only going to get worse before they get better, and the amount of suffering is only going to increase until we decide to finally take responsibility for ourselves.

So the real question, to me, seems to be this - How much suffering do we want to manifest on a collective level during this transition? How much resistance to we want to create during this change? Everyone knows the truth, everyone knows what they need to do... just look within. The choice is ours.

Many Blessings...

In Lak'Ech, I am another yourself.