Rules & Approval: part 2

Posted on August 7, 2007 By OneMysticalMonkey

……… continued from yesterday’s post ………

With this cultural conditioning intact, we manage to make it through school, with a variety of peer and social pressures surrounding us, pushing us away from our own pure, loving, natural essence and very often away from our own emotional and spiritual truths. And thus we enter the adult world, isolated from ourselves on an intensely deep level, continually surrounded by the same types of expectations: seek approval, do what is socially or culturally expected. Don’t listen to yourself, for the self (the inner voice) is irrelevant – assuming you can hear it any longer.

Professional life continues to encourage us to look for external approval and to compete with our peers on a variety of levels: get the job, seek the promotion, play the politics, fit in to the social groupings there in order to succeed professionally… yada yada yada. How many single 20-somethings are feeling the pressure of marriage and children whether they have found the right partner and are ready for that step or not? Or how many of us feel a certain pressure to possess certain items: a specific car, a bigger house? A boat. An airplane? Does it ever stop?

We are constantly bombarded by billboards, insidious magazines, ads and commercials in every form of media (entertainment and informational) – each telling us that we are faulted and flawed, each encouraging us to buy their product or to seek out the appropriate external “professional” authority so we may become acceptable. How much of this “beating over the head” of our imperfection can even the most sturdy and confident among us take without subscribing to the brainwashing on some level or another? The thing is, these things, these unobtainable physical ideals, these possessions, are really just an attempt to compensate for those essential things about which we have long forgotten… that of confidence, of trust and belief in ourselves.

Is it any wonder that there is such confusion and insecurity in the world? Is it a surprise that there are previously unaccounted-for levels of obesity, depression, violence, greed, hatred, corruption, and an overbearing sense of entitlement strewn throughout so much of our world? Where is the personal responsibility for ourselves, for our actions, for our lives and our decisions? Where is our conscience?

Does this sound like a healthy adulthood to you? Does this sound like the basis for a secure, healthy, sincere, well-balanced society?

……… to be continued ……

(Re)Examinations

• ← Rules & Approval: part 1
• Rules & Approval: part 3 →