What do we get out of tragedy?
May 22nd, 2007April 18th, 2007.
So, I’ve been thinking… I want to make this forum helpful to people, so I am considering it my homework, from now on, to cook interesting things on a regular basis and report them to you. That way, I can pass on the cooking inspiration and WE CAN SAVE THE WORLD.
Speaking of the world, the whole Virginia Tech thing went down this week. No words can even get close to the horror of it, and yet, the universe has made it so that we are each housed within our personal shells, and so “tragedy” is only ever felt one person at a time. In this circumstance, many, many individuals are feeling excruciating pain, but it actually never more than one person doing the feeling. The media, because of the numbers, is using this drama to create a hugeness, to lance a boil, that doesn’t actually exist. Just as love can be felt only on an individual basis, so can grief. One is much more pleasant than the other, and requires less support, but all perceptions are essentially subjective. I wonder if the movie we are creating on TV right now is not TEN THOUSAND TIMES more dramatic–and violent–than what is actually happening to the individuals whose lives have been touched.
I am not suggesting that we have no compassion for the suffering–that is natural. And saying prayers or raising our vibrations to send support to them is good. But to engage in the orgy of the media is another thing all together–it is a mass hypnosis that leads to… God only knows… mass confusion? Rage? Paranoia?
But perhaps there’s actually a deeper reason for it. In my lifetime, we have gone from three major channels on the TV (yang–contracted, focused, fewer in number) to hundreds (yin–multiple, expanded, unfocused). We record, rent and download our personal media worlds from our laptops. Instead of three anchormen doing the hypnosis (and creating collective minds), thanks to the internet, there are now billions and billions of options, like a spray of fiber optics, splitting information into bits and pieces that we each, subjectively, grasp to create what we call “the world”.
I saw a Time Warner ad the other day that said “The world revolves around you” and I found that frightening. Yes, we create our own reality. Yes, we are watching our own inner “movies” all day, created by our own subconscious minds. But to have the actual external world actually bend and craft itself around the individual to suit that person’s subjectivity seems like the death of the collective–the death of any group-think at all. And group think–although it sometimes gets a bad rap–is not always bad. Groups do things like march on Washington against policies they collectively agree are destructive. They strike. And they vote. But most of all, in a group, all those subjectivities are actually made stronger, creating an entity larger than any small self. They hypnotize each other, and their energy grows through their collection. Think of the civil rights movement. The suffragettes. Hippies. Yes, there were Nazis too, so group think is not inherently good, but we’ve never gone a generation without it. Until now. I don’t really feel any group think anymore. Do you?
So maybe we milk the Virginia Techs not only because they are awful, and therefore bypass the the monotony of our conscious minds, but because they are our opportunity to come together–if only in horror–and experience something collectively. There is a real need for any entity, whether it’s an individual, a family, a nation or a planet, to experience its wholeness, its oneness, its larger self. We have split our consciousness into so many shards that we don’t get to feel that wholeness much anymore; instead, we are supposed to be comforted by the unique and fabulous “worlds” that the media are allowing us to fashion for ourselves. It is only when an unhappy self, bent on busting out of his isolation, sprays bullets into strangers, that we bother to look up from our ipods.
Eat whole grains.
