Just beyond the icy gates of winter, lies the open hearth of Christmas cheer. Or so goes, at least, the age-old lore. There is a vague, but persistent, lament that the great mangler and twister of human tradition -- otherwise known as "progress" -- has transformed the hearth into a stony altar of consumerism, as cold and unforgiving as winter itself. It is upon this altar, continues the lament, that the spiritual essence of the holiday is ritually and mercilessly sacrificed.
Is this lament a universal one? Is it shared by each of us, in the muted voicings of our inner "social critic"? But wait! Before we can answer, the critic makes another parry at the behemoth of collective life. "Do not the ritual sacrifices of modern life (always carried out under the aegis of the High Priest of Progress) extend beyond the consumerist crescendo of Christmas? Almost daily we witness other comparable rituals -- for example, in film and music, we constantly watch art being sacrificed at the altar of entertainment, and in the political realm, we watch our once jealously guarded freedoms being sacrificed at the altar of security."
But, the lament turns into trepidation as our inner social critic asks, "Has our society become more 'cult' than 'culture'?" In spite of the myriad examples in our daily life that provide an affirmative answer to this question, our inner social critic, having turned from lamentation to trepidation, settles on a kind of downtrodden complacency as it braces itself for the onrush of society's year end festivities.
Mass Market Manipulation
In the battlefield of history, the human spirit has been surprisingly resistant to overt displays of force. But, out of the wreckage of human conflict emerged a force more powerful than the iron fists of papal and imperial rule. This is the seductive force of persuasion.
Persuasion is the 'light', the 'heat', the very 'Sun' around which revolve the orbs of society's marketing agencies. Much like the namesakes of the orbs of our solar system, these agencies appear as 'gods' atop the 'mountain' of 'Corporate Olympus', from which high societal perch they intervene daily in the fortunes of us all.
The predominant discourse in our society is not scientific, nor political, nor religious, the predominant, some would say tyrannical, voice of social discourse is advertising. Buy! Buy! We must buy and be merry!
But are we merry? We laugh and realize the laughter does not come from within. We dance and suddenly feel empty. It is at Christmas that we are confronted with this feeling of emptiness in spite of the abundance of the season.
The age of consumerism began in the 1920s when Edward Bernays attempted to sell cigarettes to women -- who up until that time were much too intelligent to take up the habit. Bernays tapped into the subconscious desires of self he heard about from his uncle Sigmund Freud. As a result, women, who simply wouldn't touch cigarettes, couldn't get their fill of "Torches of Freedom" as Bernays renamed them and sold them through celebrity endorsement and mainstream media. The transformation of cigarettes into "torches of freedom" in one blink of the public eye was to form the paradigm for the manipulation of the masses through marketing based on the association of a product or service with subconscious desires.
Author David Kupelian summed up modern marketing as "manipulating the emotions and thereby restructuring the thoughts and beliefs of large numbers of people.” Car companies don't sell cars but status, power and sex; insurance companies don't sell monetary compensation for material losses but "peace of mind"; soft-drink companies, among others, don't sell soft drinks but celebrity; clothing stores don't sell clothes but style. The filling of the voids in ourselves has been called "the pursuit of happiness" -- and it has collectively been agreed upon to be the ultimate objective of life.
The True Hearth of Christmas
How do we overcome this consumerism? How do we get back to being our true selves? The void of longing and desire that we have been socially conditioned -- through advertising -- to believe is our "self" is, in fact, not our true nature. Perhaps this is why, since God first wound nature's clock, most major religions have taught that this type of "self" is an illusion, something that must be overcome if we are to succeed on our journey towards the realization of who we really are.
In fact, buried deep within us is only energy -- hampered by the very walls we build in order to protect it. An energy that each of us -- as we are ever so gradually recruited from birth into the 'survival game' of modern life -- are encouraged to forget. It is an energy of which, in the seemingly boundless vocabulary of the English language, only two words, "love" and "spirit", provide a vague attempt at representation. Perhaps "hope" is a third. It is an energy only vaguely hinted at in the boy-meets-girl romances of movies and novels that we are socially conditioned to believe is love.
It is an energy whose vibrations every writer, every composer, every master of the fine arts has attempted to mimic; it is a primordial and creative energy -- a microcosm of the very Chaos that was the source of all creation; it is an energy that sits as an ocean in the vast basin of our hearts, but wells up into our eyes when we see the good deeds and selfless works of those who are moved by it (the same energy that causes our eyes to smile through those tears); it is an energy that the world's great leaders have tapped into, like so much oil, in the vast reserves of the human heart, and that has served as 'spiritual fuel' for the Golden Age of Man (and Woman), which was perhaps a prologue to history. It is an energy too pure to be sullied by distinctions of race, ethnicity, age, gender, colour, political views. It is an energy that spreads beyond our finger tips and toe tips, above our heads and beneath our feet to form a "spritual internet" that connects us all; it is an energy that creates out of each of us an artist, to paint, with the abundant palette of experience, on the canvas of space and time; it is an energy shared by every individual, of which the 'hearth of Christmas' -- if it burns still -- is but a collective holographic projection.
Is it not one of irony's cruel twists that the epic myths and legends of man (and woman) stand as imitative monuments to this undying energy of love and spirit; while, the social infrastructure of humanity, the 'world system', if you will, stands before each individual as a kind of rampart against the spirit for which a single life of 60, 70, or 80 years seems all too short a time to overcome? Is the human spirit forever plagued to swim against the torrential stream of avarice in the world; and like the salmon, only live long enough, upon reaching the destination, to sow the seeds of the next generation? It appears that the poetic observation of Robert Browning rings as inescapably true in our era of 'technological marvels' as in any other: "Man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for."
But, perhaps Christmas is a time for us to peer over the spiritual rampart we have built for ourselves, and to gaze at the 'promised land' -- the final destination of our 'spiritual salmon' -- a land where spirits bask in the glow of their collective light; where the currency of love dwarfs the currency of money; and no one's light is dimmed by the spirit-draining business, or 'busy-ness', of daily life; where words of warmth are exchanged as easily as we exchange words of weather, and the emperor of our world, 'Fear,' stands clotheless, exposed in all his frailty and feebleness.
Just beyond the icy gates of winter, as another year is coaxed to sleep by the lullaby of time, may you catch the gaze of a stranger and share a moment's warmth. May you nestle in the arms of those you love, and have them see the flames of your 'spiritual fire' in the windows of your eyes. And in the warmth, may you remove the protective vestments of cold, hard experience and bask in the much lighter attire of a long-forgotten, but undying, innocence; the kind of innocence only children, our greatest treasure, remain unembarrassed to display.
"[F]or it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than Christmas," writes Dickens in A Christmas Carol, his literary monument to the season, "when its mighty Founder was a child himself."
Finally, cherished reader, let the 'Dollar Almighty' have the rest of the year to rule with its iron, or, rather, 'golden' fist. Christmas is a time for Spirit to reign supreme.
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