The effort to make life whole, to experience life meaningfully, and to live with a firm sense of self is deeply challenged. We feel extremely vulnerable. Love and wisdom are being twisted in a culturally specific ways, bent, inhibited and trivialized by the culture's own standards of success.
Though we suffer from these new assaults on our nature, the experience of suffering itself and its characteristic demands on our energy and attention are not new. The painful aspects of life are always present -- in this epoch piqued by this, in that epoch piqued by that. Clinging, dissatisfaction, delusion, fear, pain, self-indulgence, unmet desires, emptiness, restlessness, loneliness, alienation, abandonment, aging, illness, bereavement, loss and lack of control are anything but new. They are not occurrences unique to a historical moment, but are evocations of human nature, a kind of misery we have always endured, familiar and persistent, crossing all social divides, suffusing all stages of life, surfacing in different ways and with different emphases in different cultural settings, though wearing different garb, always covering the same body.
In our day and age, successomania, addiction, consumerism and juvenilization are the culturally specific pathways the universal and inevitable suffering takes, the particular manifestations of vanity and vexation in our time, their local coloration. All of them, as always, when closely studied, are dependent on cravings and delusions supported by a false understanding of the nature of the self .
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/05/98 (rge)