Simplicity and Competitive Society

There is a growing conviction within me of the need to move toward greater simplicity because simplicity is the only sustainable approach to life. We live in a highly competitive society. I live in a very competitive society and at some point I thought to myself that I would like to climb that ladder of social hierarchy.  And I tried. Succeeded at some level and fail at another but in the end it became very exhausting. But worse than exhausting is the depletion of the self, the alienation from the authentication of self. When we compete, we stand the risk of losing oneself. And the longer we go along this journey, the more we become someone else society has constructed as ‘good self.’ Only at the expense of self-alienation. I learn that what sparks this in the first place is category.  Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, smart and stupid, successful and failure. Once category is evoked, rest becomes and impossibility. Until the road leads us back to ourself again and the rest we find in contentment. Contentment does not mean laziness. It means doing from self-directedness. Because caught reminds me of wordings from the Eagle…you can check out any time but you can never leave.  I’m beginning to realize that Hotel California is not where I want to be. Instead my preference at this point comes from CCR’s Proud Mary…you don’t have to worry cause you got no money because people on the river are happy to give. Simplicity sustains itself. It is not merely a material thing where we just possess less. It is a philosophy where we learn to become ok with where we are in life. No need to strive to prove ourselves to any one. No need to feel bad to be less than others. And action emerges from a sense of connectedness within oneself blindly moving within the world of social hierarchy. 

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Toilet in My Dream

I woke up an recall an image of myself bending over my toilet bowl, sticking my hand in trying really hard to clean. In the dream there were many types of chemical that I used one after the other scrubbing as hard as I possibly could. I woke up with puzzles trying to decode my dream and perhaps the best I can come up with is that there are undesirable things in my life that I have purged from my system. But it feels like it remains within my system. The toilet bowl symbolizes at the unconscious level that it has already been removed from my system. What I’m more obsess with is how it appears to the public…that dirty toilet bowl. And I’m trying to get rid of it as hard as I possibly can using many psychological approaches I can draw from and finally realizing that it will always remain no matter how hard I scrub or how types of chemical I use. What is important to remember is that it no longer remains in my system internally. 

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