What is progress?
Is it to clear a natural habitat, replace it with concrete walls, floors and pathways, to see numbers in the bank account upon the digital screen. What do these numbers represent? Future guarantees? Safety, security, walls against the reality that is so uncomfortable, wet, cold, hot, up and down, exhausting…
Is progress externally just a symptom of our inability to sit in discomfort? Where does this discomfort come from? Is it the weather, the rain, the physical strain of walking to work everyday? Yet we know that some discomfort is beneficial, for example, exercise. Is it our internal tolerance that needs our attention? Are we so precious, to think we cannot walk to work, or live in a tent, or grow our own food?
Our tolerance for discomfort has dropped considerably, and continues to as more convenient technologies are introduced.
‘Convenience is a con.’ - unknown West Ender Brisbane.
There is no inconvenience without convenience.
So as more inconvenience is introduced with every convenience, how are we progressing as humans? Outrage culture is a good signpost to the internal maturity of our age. Our tolerance for what people say has dropped near to zero, with little attempt to actually understand the meaning behind what is being said. We are internally weak!
This internal weakness crumbles the foundations of a society. Like addicts we are driven by our addiction to convenience and comfort so much that we do not know what we do. We take no responsibility and the earth and all living beings suffer for it.
The Mormons had a point. There was a limit to the technology taken on for it became destructive after a certain point. Separating us from the day to day meditations of physical exertion, contemplation, communication and problem solving. The processes that create elders of wisdom among us, the processes that tell us we are alive and engaged in living.
How many stories come from your day behind a computer? Compared to the day of a farmer out upon his property interacting with the world, animals and the environment. Now compare this to the life of an indigenous Australian 300 years ago, talking to the land, the plants, walking the earth with little to no belongings. Everyday would be filled with stories of the magic of surviving and there is no inconvenience because there is no convenience.
So what is progress?
Where do we end up? Dead?
How do we tend to the need for internal progress? Listening? Meditation? Periods of nothing? Tending to the void?
All of these things. Noticing everything once again. Asking questions, who am I? Is this the life I wish to lead? Dropping things and simplifying life.
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