Some Thoughts on Philosophy and Free Time
Jann Burner
May 07, 2006
People spend their lives trying to buy their freedom; trying to retire-- some day, and yet the ones who manage it usually haven't a clue what to do with it when the day finally comes. The competitive goal oriented programs necessary to play at business and acquire money are useless as process for enjoying freedom. People who are compulsive action addicts, who never read for pleasure, theorize, imagine, philosophize, engage in life's many hobby's or even keep pets or gardens, throughout their lives somehow think that when they retire--some day--they will automatically be masters of leisure. Of course this is far from true and they often find themselves lost in a world of choice.
The choices represent either chaos or boredom. To truly enjoy freedom and leisure takes talent and practice over many years (possibly over many lifetimes). Why you might ask, should anyone even want free-time? After all isn't free time just wasted time? Time better spent making money, collecting stuff, getting ahead? Why should one want the freedom to read, explore, study, wander, speculate...imagine? That's for college kids. Why would anyone want to lead their life as an artistic adventure or a beloved hobby when one could be out their collecting more stuff and making serious money?
It would be laughable if it didn't generate so much pain throughout the world. We might instead, move together like a flock of birds with a common goal, or like a symphony or even better, a jazz group. The process and experience of life should be like music. It's really time to move the model of adult behavior out of the high school. I have the feeling that within the communal herd is a sizeable number of very bright conscious people ready to throw off their cloaks of anonymity and expose their light, but something is holding them back. What is to be the trip mechanism to call us all to attention?
In order to not merely survive but to thrive, it is good to have a deeply felt personal philosophy. I continually run across people who see life as grim reality and only grim reality. They will not even grant the option that just possibly man is a philosophical creature and that "life should be a pastime and not a hardship" ( H.D. Thoreau said that).
As humans we are grounded in our philosophical attitude towards reality. We are not animals grounded in reality who merely entertain the idea of a philosophy. A spiritual based philosophy is what allows us to metabolize our emotional nutrients. A philosophy is a necessity! The world picture might be painted by the reality of survival but it is viewed, reviewed, and assigned value or dismissed by the ol' philosopher that lives within us all and sleeps in our heart.
The lust for money and all the fame and gain games combined are just distractions. Sooner or later each and every one of us must exchange all of our hardware and credit cards for a deeply felt personal philosophy that we've crafted with our own hearts and minds....There is no way out. We're here to grow a soul.
We tend to forget that by nature, we are explorers, and adventurers. This is "new" revelatory experience. We are continually pushing back the edges of the dream (our communal human dream). Thus we need to keep track; take notes, keep journals, create art, tell stories and write songs. We need to talk, discuss, share. Too often we tend to take life as a given with a fixed program. Especially after we reach the age of physical maturity, we often assume that the life experience is a game with fixed, rigid rules and all that's left is to compete and somehow win! It is our job to guard against becoming fixed like a photograph in a dish of developer or worse, a bug in amber. The image coming through is never fixed, never ending. Life is not only heliotropic it is also holographic.
Watching television, movies, reading books and newspapers and magazines as well as observing people in the street you can see a spiritual power sculpting the human entity; turning it first this way and then that way, pushing in at one point, pulling, stretching and stressing points and aspects here and there. Meanwhile humans continue to strut their dance and see things as individual threats or rewards or phenomenon, isolated and interesting but utterly disconnected one from the other. We fail to recognize even the simplest patterns. We are all just little chips off the diamond, facets to refract The Light. We seem utterly unconcerned as well as unconscious of the fact that we are being turned upon a heavenly lathe.
The choices represent either chaos or boredom. To truly enjoy freedom and leisure takes talent and practice over many years (possibly over many lifetimes). Why you might ask, should anyone even want free-time? After all isn't free time just wasted time? Time better spent making money, collecting stuff, getting ahead? Why should one want the freedom to read, explore, study, wander, speculate...imagine? That's for college kids. Why would anyone want to lead their life as an artistic adventure or a beloved hobby when one could be out their collecting more stuff and making serious money?
It would be laughable if it didn't generate so much pain throughout the world. We might instead, move together like a flock of birds with a common goal, or like a symphony or even better, a jazz group. The process and experience of life should be like music. It's really time to move the model of adult behavior out of the high school. I have the feeling that within the communal herd is a sizeable number of very bright conscious people ready to throw off their cloaks of anonymity and expose their light, but something is holding them back. What is to be the trip mechanism to call us all to attention?
In order to not merely survive but to thrive, it is good to have a deeply felt personal philosophy. I continually run across people who see life as grim reality and only grim reality. They will not even grant the option that just possibly man is a philosophical creature and that "life should be a pastime and not a hardship" ( H.D. Thoreau said that).
As humans we are grounded in our philosophical attitude towards reality. We are not animals grounded in reality who merely entertain the idea of a philosophy. A spiritual based philosophy is what allows us to metabolize our emotional nutrients. A philosophy is a necessity! The world picture might be painted by the reality of survival but it is viewed, reviewed, and assigned value or dismissed by the ol' philosopher that lives within us all and sleeps in our heart.
The lust for money and all the fame and gain games combined are just distractions. Sooner or later each and every one of us must exchange all of our hardware and credit cards for a deeply felt personal philosophy that we've crafted with our own hearts and minds....There is no way out. We're here to grow a soul.
We tend to forget that by nature, we are explorers, and adventurers. This is "new" revelatory experience. We are continually pushing back the edges of the dream (our communal human dream). Thus we need to keep track; take notes, keep journals, create art, tell stories and write songs. We need to talk, discuss, share. Too often we tend to take life as a given with a fixed program. Especially after we reach the age of physical maturity, we often assume that the life experience is a game with fixed, rigid rules and all that's left is to compete and somehow win! It is our job to guard against becoming fixed like a photograph in a dish of developer or worse, a bug in amber. The image coming through is never fixed, never ending. Life is not only heliotropic it is also holographic.
Watching television, movies, reading books and newspapers and magazines as well as observing people in the street you can see a spiritual power sculpting the human entity; turning it first this way and then that way, pushing in at one point, pulling, stretching and stressing points and aspects here and there. Meanwhile humans continue to strut their dance and see things as individual threats or rewards or phenomenon, isolated and interesting but utterly disconnected one from the other. We fail to recognize even the simplest patterns. We are all just little chips off the diamond, facets to refract The Light. We seem utterly unconcerned as well as unconscious of the fact that we are being turned upon a heavenly lathe.
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