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..:: Post Modernism ::..
By
Alan Schneider
Although authorities differ on the
criteria they apply to distinguish the advent of the Post-Modern
cultural era, and hence the onset of the phenomenon, it can generally be
placed at or near the late 1970s to early 1980s – essentially coinciding
with the first presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States. Reagan
began his first term in office with a demonstration of the kind of
discriminatory political agenda that typified both of his terms – the
suppression of the federal air traffic controllers strike by
terminating all of those individuals and replacing them with an
entirely new staff of significantly lower-paid newcomers. This was the
reality of “Reaganomics” in action – a callous disregard for human
rights coupled with the conveniently amoral exploitation of the public,
all justified by a murky “supply-side” economic rational, itself
questionably supported by unsubstantiated monetarist theory. And this
was also the very fitting introduction to the beginning of the
Post-Modern socio-economic era, and the adjoining phenomenon of the
replacement of the reality of general economic prosperity (at
least in the Western world) with the illusion of that prosperity,
accompanied by real socio-economic decline, diminishing
expectations, and lifestyle fragmentation, particularly affecting the
then-robust middleclass strata of the period. In the guise of
championing the middleclass value system, Reagan functionally
dismembered it, and transferred the resources of the thus assaulted
American middleclass to his real constituents – the wealthy and
ultra-wealthy upper classes.
Socio-economic decline, diminishing expectations, and
lifestyle fragmentation typify the Post-Modern condition as much as any
group of conditions can. Reagan recognized the challenge posed by a
truly independent and empowered middle class segment of American society
to the hegemony of the wealthy culture he epitomized through his own
personal affluence. And he also appreciated the desirability of the
broad middle class resource base – for acquisition by the wealthy
– and implicitly dedicated his presidency to the achievement of just
that goal. The result was the establishment of a bimodal social
structure of a tiny minority of extreme haves, a vast ocean of
grotesquely underprivileged have-nots, and the permanently
incapacitated, credit-crippled, and all-but-undermined middleclass
culture seen today. It is noteworthy that Post-Modernism only
peripherally affects the upper classes – they remain financially
shielded from its circumstances as the donors of resources through
credit and loans to the other remaining strata of the world mega
culture, which directly bear the full brunt of the decline in all three
of the key areas noted at the beginning of this paragraph.
The primacy of the profit motive in human affairs cannot be
denied – people will take as much as they can gain access to in a given
circumstance, particularly in the absence of any enlightened philosophy
functioning to the contrary. And people also may not distinguish the
relative levels of positivity or negativity involved in acquisition – we
seem to have a tendency to consume drugs, alcohol, food, and sex with as
much (or more) abandon as property, investments, and education. It
should be noted here, for the sake of fair portrayal, that the wealthy
are probably simply more fortunate as consumers, enjoying privileged
circumstances that enable them to consume more efficiently under
conditions that any of us would probably replicate, given the
opportunity. The cause of the Post-Modern decline is seen in inherent
human spiritual fallibility, not any specific cultural process in
evidence now, or at any other time in history. Let us undertake a
detailed examination of the collective spiritual Karma that has enabled
this regrettable condition to become manifest.
In the scheme of Hindu cosmology, there are four ages, or
cycles, of human involvement in the cosmos, referred to as Yugas.
The first great age is Krita Yuga, the age of paradise on Earth. In this
age, the Logos appears as His most valid form as a Yogi and
Saint. The following age of Treta Yuga is somewhat more fallen in
character, as the veils of Maya (worldly illusion and involvement)
become more pronounced. In this age, the Logos is reduced to the form of
a Pujari, a maintainer and practitioner of holy rituals and
observances. In the third age of Dvapara Yuga, the Holy Form is present
only implicitly as the Fire of Doomsday – remembered only as a forecast
of an eventual Presence at the end of time, but still present in
human consciousness.
We are currently living in the fourth, and presumably final,
age of humanity – Kali Yuga. In this age, the Divine Presence is
represented only in idealized form as the Buddha Mind – something only
perceptible in deep meditation, largely unattainable to the masses of
human beings, and perhaps even unheard of, as the material illusion of
Maya completely overcomes human consciousness, both individually and
collectively. To human beings living in Kali Yuga, the impressions of
the senses and the body are reality, and the only reality.
Under those circumstances, the influence of Kali as the destroyer of ego
perception becomes synonymous with the fear of absolute death as the
ultimate end of life and experience, and humanity lives in constant
apprehension of this end. Only an ongoing sequence of fundamentally
addictive life experiences is sufficient to distract attention away from
the impending doom that advances toward us daily with each tick of the
clock. This is life in the spiritual void, a terrible, suffocating
condition when it is finally seen for what it is in terms of its impact
on our consciousness. Life in Kali Yuga is Hell itself.
Under the influence of Kali Yuga, and the supreme
materialistic intoxication of the period – one driven forward by the
human ego – the eventual collapse of any and every otherwise stable
social system into the Post-Modern expression is probably inevitable. To
the Post-Modern mind, loving other people and using
objects is the ultimate absurdity – why risk love on something as
inherently unstable as a human relationship when objects appear to be so
much more predictable, consistent, and reliable as sources of
personal gratification? We generally do not consider the subtle truth
that objects are not capable of returning our love in any sense other
than the momentary distraction of our awareness, as, again, we become
addicted to any process that will assist our avoidance of contacting our
ego’s fear of its end. If Reagan had not appeared as a human
signifier to usher in this period, then someone else most certainly
would have – he was merely an interchangeable expression of the
persistent ego mania that was momentarily challenged by the cultural
Renaissance of the sixties and seventies, but not significantly altered
in scope or intent. The demon was never really exorcized, because we
were the demon ourselves, and could not see this through our
material eyes.
The Yugas are, of course, allegories of the levels of
consciousness that affect the human condition at all times – not
just during the periods they pertain to in the Hindu Vedic Scriptures.
We have simply become captivated by machines as the ultimate
objects since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and by science
as the ultimate theology, the “God” who gave us those machines. This
captivation may be the ultimate manifestation of Kali Yuga. The other
Yugas are nonetheless still very present today, even the paradise of
Krita Yuga, where we can see and love God standing right before us in
the embodiment of the Yogi, as a living Saintly consciousness, but the
material condition, as augmented by the Machine Age, blocks our ability
to perceive and live in their states of consciousness. Perhaps Kali
herself is a mechanism of perception, one rendered inevitable and
necessary by the ego’s infatuation with itself and its toys! One is
struck by the First Commandment of Christianity – “Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all of thy Heart, all of thy Mind, and all of thy
Spirit” – the love of God is seen here as the utmost requirement
of spiritual life, transcending all others, and this is love for not
merely another limited human entity, but a supernatural Being
existing in the personification of the purified Soul – concepts as far
removed from material objects as is conceivable. This is the
expression of love that can carry us beyond Kali, and through the
darkness of Kali Yuga as well!
Something inherently present in the matrix of the human mind
called the Machine Age, Kali Yuga, and finally Post-Modernism, into
manifestation. What is this process that seems to eternally drive us
forth to invent more and more mechanisms that we then become hypnotized
by and addicted to? What is this great discontent present in the flesh,
which grants us no rest?
If we begin by examining the first “machines” used by human
beings – possibly, for example, the wheel and the bow –
some clues to the nature of this psychological force can be found. What
do the wheel and bow have in common? They both intrinsically
depersonalize the experience of living through making that
experience more convenient. The wheel made the transportation of
large, heavy loads possible without dragging, but dragging a load was a
much more personal (if difficult) experiential process. The bow made the
act of killing an animal or enemy at a distance possible, rendering the
need for face-to-face, hand-to-hand contact less critical, but these
original aspects of hunting and combat were also of the utmost
personal character. Even throwing a rock as a missal, or swinging a
club, was still significantly more contractual than firing an arrow at a
distant target. It would seem that our first experiences as sentient
organisms must have been oppressively personal in the extreme –
life was continually “in our faces” as we struggled for survival at
every turn with the odds heavily weighted against us. Under these
conditions, tool use accomplished two very important things: it gave us
clear survival advantages, and, possibly even more importantly, it
reduced the negative psychological impact of daily life on the
individual by interposing an object between the person and
personal experience as a buffer. To sum things up – sentient
self-awareness emerged into a living condition of pure, shear sensory
agony, and tool use medicated that condition. If one is in enough pain,
any relief is a blessing, and consistent relief is even more so.
However, the issue at the absolute foundation of this
discussion is yet to be explored. If Karma is the driving force behind
the actions in the world, including physical and spiritual evolution,
why did sentience and its inevitable partner, suffering, appear in the
first place? Why did the mammalian brain evolve to the size and
complexity required to experience self and others? Why not simply
plateau at some stage of development prior to the emergence of full
sentience? And if Karma is an expression of the Divine Will, why then
did that Will create the universe, and place humanity in it as the full
perceivers of experience?
Even considering all of the Yugas, the human organism and
human awareness are clearly still in their infancy when viewed from the
perspective of the cosmic time scale. We have barely just begun to exist
and perceive, and this at what remains the most primitive of levels. I
must suggest here that our evolution – the evolution of conscious
awareness – has just begun. At our current stage, we are still
semi-intelligent, rationating animals, and our version of
sentience is just present enough to sustain the most primitive type of
self-awareness – that of limited perception in linear time. We still
have a long, long way to go on the evolutionary path to the Divine level
that most of us cannot even imagine, let alone experience. But
this is nonetheless a beginning – the race of humanity has been created
out of the pre-conscious darkness of lumbering biological tissue.
We cannot, in most cases, see into the future and know, thereby, what
will come to pass as the evolution of consciousness hopefully continues.
From the perspective of our old nemesis, the ego, the future is like the
past – nonexistent. Only the moment of sensory experience is “real” as
it boils forth in the eternal dance of creation and destruction – the
Dance of Shiva in Hinduism. A few of us have learned to probe beyond the
ego and extend our consciousness into other, tantalizing realms of
perception, and this activity may well indicate the future path of
consciousness evolution, but it is almost certainly too soon to tell
what the outcome of extended psychic experience will be – again, we are
so new and young and vulnerable. I personally suspect that the Ages –
the Yugas – have been inverted in their sequence by the Sages in some
curious quirk of perception, and that Kali Yuga is the first age
of humanity, not the last, and that Krita Yuga represents our eventual
destiny as spiritual beings walking the path of conscious
perception. There may come a time when all of the apparent agonies of
the flesh are seen by our descendents as the transitory ripples of
spiritual evolution along the way to God Realization and Cosmic
Consciousness. Let us have hope in this as our eventual destiny
while we struggle along today through Kali Yuga and the Post-Modern
condition!
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2008, Alan Schneider)
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