Dr. Gary Null
An Introduction to the Life We Have Been Avoiding
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
The Question We Keep Postponing
At what point in our lives do we stop? At what point do we turn off the distractions — the screens, the notifications, the relentless noise of a culture engineered to prevent reflection — and ask ourselves the only questions that actually matter: What is the purpose and meaning of my life? Am I honoring that purpose and meaning? And where do I begin to question which pieces of this puzzle do not make sense to me?
I have found, over decades of this work, that there are thousands of pieces to the puzzle of a human life. And if they are all put together — through experience, through intuition, through proper conditioning, and through the genuine intent to make our lives work — then we can see when something is not right. We can feel it. Something is off. A piece has been forced into a place where it does not belong, and the picture it produces is distorted.
But that does not mean we are going to be motivated to change it.
How many times has something been wrong — visibly, obviously, consequentially wrong — and everyone knew it was wrong, and no one changed it? Like smoking. Like drinking. Like doing drugs and gambling and cheating. There are over 30 million Americans who joined websites that specialize in connecting people who want to commit adultery. Thirty million. That is not a fringe behavior. That is a culture. And the people doing the cheating are not the only ones affected. There are the partners they betrayed, the families they destabilized, the trust they incinerated. That is a piece of the puzzle that should never have been in the puzzle, because it did not represent the person they claimed to be.
And so we arrive at the first question, the one that Socrates staked his life on, the one that every serious philosophical and spiritual tradition has placed at its foundation: Who am I? Not who do I perform for the world. Not who does my family expect me to be. Not who has my conditioning programmed me to become. Who am I, underneath all of that?
But where do you begin to ask that question? You do not start a New York City marathon at the 25th mile. And yet we are always looking for the magic pill, the magic solution, the simplest shortcut to solve all of our problems. It does not work, does it? Sooner or later, we all benefit from positive input and choices and outcomes, or we pay a price for all the wrong ones. And the price compounds. It compounds in our bodies, in our relationships, in the slowly accumulating weight of a life that we sense is not quite our own.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard understood this dilemma at its root. He argued that the most common form of despair is not the dramatic kind — not the anguish that announces itself in crisis — but the quiet kind: the despair of not being oneself. It is the condition of living a life organized around other people’s expectations, other people’s values, other people’s definitions of success, without ever stopping to ask whether any of it reflects your own authentic nature. And the reason most people never ask is not stupidity or laziness. It is fear. The fear of what we might find. The fear that if we lift the hood and look at the engine, we will discover that it has been running on the wrong fuel for decades, and that changing it now will cost us everything we have built.
This essay is about lifting the hood anyway.
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” — Søren Kierkegaard
What the Boomers Never Understood: When More Was Never Enough
“To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” — Henri Frédéric Amiel
Parallel to the diminishing health and resources of our elders, I observe a growing segment of individuals among my generation — the children of our seniors’ Great Generation — who have no sense of knowing when more is enough. Regardless of how far they have climbed on the social ladder, regardless of how above average their salaries are, they still chase speculative gambling in hedge funds, in quick-revenue investments in food commodities, fuel, and housing that have a direct impact on the lives of others. Their exploitation of quick-wealth opportunities actively prevents our seniors from obtaining the very things they need to rise from an austere existence.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus — who is widely misunderstood as an advocate of indulgence when in fact he was a philosopher of moderation — distinguished between natural and necessary desires, natural but unnecessary desires, and vain desires. The vain desires, he warned, are the ones that have no natural limit: the desire for wealth beyond what is needed, for status beyond what is meaningful, for power beyond what can be exercised with wisdom. These desires, Epicurus taught, produce not satisfaction but anxiety, because their fulfillment is always temporary and their appetite is infinite. He could have been describing the boomer generation with surgical precision.
I have watched this unfold for decades. Smart, well-educated, accomplished people who do not want to walk away from the table if they are winning. It is a form of addiction — accomplishment addiction, wealth addiction, status addiction, relevance addiction. The need for external feedback to confirm that you are enough. And like all addictions, the tolerance builds. If your bonus this year was six figures, you think: maybe seven will change it. If you are working eighteen hours a day, you think: maybe twenty will fill the void.
It never does. Because the emptiness is not caused by insufficient achievement. It is caused by insufficient self-knowledge. And self-knowledge cannot be purchased, accumulated, or inherited. It can only be cultivated through the patient, uncomfortable, deeply unfashionable work of examining your own life.
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh called this ‘stopping.’ Before you can see clearly, he taught, you must stop running. Not stop moving through the world, but stop running from yourself. Most of Western civilization is organized around the principle that more activity, more acquisition, more distraction will eventually produce the peace of mind that we are seeking. Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight is the opposite: peace of mind is already present, beneath the noise, and the only thing preventing us from experiencing it is our refusal to be still long enough to find it.
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” — Seneca
The Interconnectivity of Past and Present
We are so captivated by the moment we are in — so transformed by our distractions, so habituated to having non-living entities make important life choices for us — that stepping back in time to examine how we arrived here feels almost impossible. But it is essential.
There was a time when a person had their family, and to a larger extent the community in which they lived, and to an even larger extent the state of mind of the leaders who set standards and guidelines. And frequently, those standards were wrong. The information people thought was right was terrible. They did not understand hygiene, did not understand clean water, did not understand the power of healthy choices. They were not acting with any intent to harm themselves, but the consequence was that they lived short, painful lives — until we began to learn from our mistakes. Until we stopped allowing 12-year-old children to work 12-hour days in front of hot furnaces for a few pennies. Until Ralph Nader created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and over 200 other protections that did more to safeguard the American public than any politician in the nation’s history. And yet we did not feel that he was capable enough to run the country.
Think about that. A man who demonstrably saved more lives through legislation than any president of the 20th century was considered unelectable. Meanwhile, we routinely elect pathological liars, sociopaths, people who use their power mercilessly to create wars and regime changes, who support manufacturers of products and services that cause us harm, who exploit our inability to pay bills, and who historically put us in debtor’s prisons. We have not been kind to one another more often than not.
The philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But the problem is deeper than memory. It is conditioning. We are being programmed, propagandized, groomed to be the perfect consumer, the perfect citizen. We do not examine the quality of the character of the person we are voting for, because if we did, we would say: You would not hire that person to babysit your children. Why would you hire them to be the most powerful person in the world?
And so we must understand the interconnectivity of our past and our present. We must be willing to dig into that past — into the family we came from, the culture that shaped us, the silent messages that were transmitted from generation to generation. The science of epigenetics tells us that this is not metaphor. Go back seven generations, and you will find that many of the positive and negative attributes of your ancestors are coming through your DNA as silent messengers, shaping your impulses, your vulnerabilities, your predispositions, your capacity for resilience or collapse. Our past does matter. And until we are willing to examine it honestly — to identify what kind of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents we had, and to understand which of their patterns we are unconsciously repeating — we will remain prisoners of a history we have never questioned.
Carl Jung called this the collective unconscious — the vast reservoir of shared human experience that operates beneath individual awareness, shaping behavior in ways the conscious mind cannot easily detect. He argued that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate. The epigenetic research now confirms what Jung intuited: the past is not behind us. It is inside us. And the only way to change its influence is to become aware of it.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner
A Chance Encounter at the Checkout Line
Yesterday, I was in a health food store. I was at the checkout line, helping a friend who is going through a major transition in his life. At the age of 57, after working in a family business for decades and feeling unappreciated, underpaid, and overworked, he finally said: Enough. He made a big change. He had to. He has developed serious health problems. He is a genuinely kind human being. He just did not surround himself with equally kind people. They exploited him because he was not assertive. He went along with things. And now he wants to start over.
He asked me for help, and I said: Sure. I have been learning for 40 years. Let us get your body cleaned up. And the remarkable thing is, he already knew what to do. He knew how to detoxify. He knew the difference between healthy and unhealthy food. He knew the power of exercise over sedentary living. He knew the value of meditation, of being in green space and blue space. He knew the dangers of tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medications. He knew that toxic relationships never have good outcomes. He knew that binge-watching Netflix at two in the morning instead of sleeping was destroying his immune system.
He was not unaware of the choices he had made. He just did not anticipate that one day karma would come knocking on the door and hand him a menu of all the diseases he had helped to manifest. Not a single person in his life had helped him see what was happening. But he had the courage, through his crisis, to say: I am done. I am starting over. I am going to be the architect of my own life from this point forward. I am going to be responsible for the choices I make. And every choice is going to honor the 37 trillion cells in my body.
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would have recognized this moment as what he called radical freedom — the terrifying and exhilarating realization that you are free to choose, that no one else’s choices define you, and that the responsibility for your life belongs to you and to no one else. Sartre understood that most people flee from this recognition because it is overwhelming. We prefer to believe that we are determined by our circumstances — by our family, our upbringing, our economic situation, our biology. And those things do matter. But they do not have the last word. The last word belongs to the person who says: I am done. I am choosing differently. That person, in Sartre’s framework, has become authentic.
And then, as we were checking out, I happened to turn around. There was a very elderly couple behind us. I looked at them for a moment. They were both emaciated, out of shape, with thinning gray hair and excessively wrinkled skin. And I said, simply: It is good that you are buying some healthy food. They smiled and said: Yeah.
I said: Just out of curiosity, what year did you graduate from high school?
They told me. And I said: Me too. Same year.
And suddenly the smile turned to puzzlement. That is not possible, one of them said. They simply did not believe me. And what did they not believe? That if two of us graduated from high school in the same year, why did they look like my great-grandparents and I look like their grandson?
The concept of cause and effect. The concept of cumulative negative behavior and cumulative positive behavior. Cumulative healthy choices and cumulative unhealthy choices. Obviously, none of this had been apparent to them. Perhaps a doctor or a friend had recently told them they needed to change. Perhaps that is why they were in a health food store. But then again, you can buy profoundly unhealthy food in a health food store — it is an oxymoron that would be funny if it were not so revealing. One of the biggest health food chains in America has an alcohol department as one of its largest sections. Another is confections. Another is meat. None of that is healthy. All of it creates disease. And it is labeled a health food store. People with money go there and feel virtuous about it.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and became one of the most influential thinkers in Western history, taught a principle so simple that it sounds almost too obvious until you realize how thoroughly we violate it: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Our opinions, our choices, our desires, our aversions — these are within our control. Other people’s behavior, our reputation, our circumstances — these are not. The source of almost all human suffering, Epictetus argued, is the confusion of these two categories: we try to control what we cannot, and we neglect to control what we can. My friend at fifty-seven had finally stopped trying to control the family business that would never appreciate him and started controlling the one thing that was always within his power: himself.
“No man is free who is not master of himself.” — Epictetus
The Regression of Reason
Several of our nation’s most courageous social critics, including Morris Berman and Susan Jacoby, have — against much criticism — identified the growing anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism ravaging all levels of American society. Mark Twain’s remark remains as sharp as it ever was: there are no common people except in the highest spheres of society.
In 1965, approximately 75 percent of students entering college said they were pursuing higher education in order to discover something meaningful in life. By 2005, that same percentage of college students stated their goal was to become wealthy. Susan Jacoby noted that a National Science Foundation survey found one in five Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Approximately half of young adults between 18 and 24 are unable to locate Iraq on a map. A significant number are unable to locate the United States.
There is something seriously wrong with this scenario, and it forecasts a civic disaster. American culture is undergoing a collective, negative learning. The theory that each succeeding generation is actually regressing in its capacity for critical thought can be observed most clearly among today’s college students. A study of fourteen thousand students across 50 American campuses, published under the title “The Coming Crisis in Citizenship” by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found that students from the most elite universities — Yale, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Brown, UC Berkeley — performed far below students at lesser-known colleges. The schools in the top rankings included some I had never heard of: Rhodes College, Grove City College, Calvin College. This finding suggests that the principles for rational and spiritual character development, which contribute greatly to the healthy moral development of a society, are weakest among students raised in privileged families.
One reason is that many of our so-called brightest students believe they are entitled to a prestigious education without having to achieve personal merit through hard work and effort. This goes back to the culture of entitlement that raised them. And because our elite universities are held in such high esteem, we perpetuate the myth that these are the individuals best suited to run our institutions in the future.
The American philosopher John Dewey spent his career arguing that education’s primary purpose is not the transmission of information but the cultivation of the capacity to think. A democracy, Dewey insisted, can only survive if its citizens are capable of independent critical thought — if they can evaluate evidence, question authority, and arrive at conclusions through reason rather than obedience. When education becomes mere credentialing — when the diploma is valued not for what it represents about the mind but for what doors it opens in the market — the democratic experiment begins to collapse. And that collapse is not theoretical. We are living in it.
Thomas Jefferson saw this clearly two centuries before it happened. He wrote that no people can be both ignorant and free. That statement should be read as a prophecy. Because we have produced a population that is simultaneously the most entertained and the most uninformed in the history of the republic. We have more access to information than any civilization that has ever existed, and less capacity to evaluate it, less patience to engage it, less willingness to let it challenge our assumptions.
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
Good People, Bad Advice, Wrong Outcomes
Here is a paradox that confuses people, and it should, because it strikes at the heart of one of our most comforting assumptions: I am a good person, and therefore the things I believe and share must be good. But good people can share bad advice and produce terrible outcomes. It happens constantly. And the reason it happens is that we rarely stop to examine where our beliefs came from, who taught them to us, and whether they are actually true.
Think of how many of our actions today — how many of our daily choices — are based not on our own examined judgment but on the tribe, the sorority, the fraternity, the guild, the union, the family dynamic, the religion we belong to. We have all of this imprinted into us. The science of epigenetics tells us it goes back seven generations through our DNA. The conditioning is real. It is biological. It is not simply cultural memory or family tradition. It is molecular instruction, passed from ancestor to descendant, shaping our impulses and vulnerabilities in ways we cannot see without deliberate effort.
And one of the hardest things to let go of is knowledge — particularly the kind of knowledge that comes wrapped in authority. We defer to the so-called experts, the people who attend to our insecurity and our uncertainties. They tell us: You should eat this. You should take that medication. You should spend your money here and save there. And we do it. We do it because questioning authority requires energy, and we are already exhausted. We do it because standing up and saying, ‘I have a different opinion’ — saying, ‘I do not believe that what you are suggesting is healthy, I do not believe all these medications are necessary, I believe there are power-hungry people trying to control our lives’ — feels dangerous. It feels isolating. It feels like stepping outside the tribe.
The philosopher Michel Foucault spent his career examining how knowledge itself is structured by power. He demonstrated that in every era, certain kinds of knowledge are legitimized not because they are truer than other kinds, but because they serve the interests of those who hold power. Medical knowledge, educational knowledge, legal knowledge — all of these domains, Foucault showed, function simultaneously as systems of understanding and systems of control. The doctor who prescribes a medication is not only treating a patient. She is also enacting a power relationship in which her authority is assumed and the patient’s autonomy is diminished. And the patient who obeys without questioning is not only trusting — she is submitting.
Rare is the person who stands up, holds up her hand, and says: I am sorry, but I have a different opinion. I do not accept the premise. I want to see the evidence. I want to think for myself. That person is almost always punished for it — socially, professionally, sometimes legally. And the fact that we punish independent thought while rewarding compliance tells you everything you need to know about the actual values of our culture, as opposed to the values we profess.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain
Predators and Creators
The medical anthropologist and shaman Dr. Alberto Villoldo describes two co-existing universes: the universe of predators and the universe of creators. The world of corporate and political greed that we are witnessing today — the lack of ethics among investors and journalists, the ‘me first’ wealth-hungry values of our youth — embodies the predatory world. Alternatively, there is the world of creators: individuals who are gradually becoming the harbingers of a new culture based on enlightened reason, spiritual principles, and the restoration of social ethics grounded in compassion, community, and personal responsibility for one’s actions.
One of the salient reasons for composing this book is to provide readers with some hard-learned inspiration to become a creator of harmony while living in our predatory culture. Because when we are able to become creators in a predatory society, and can remain in balance while doing so, we then have the capability to implement genuine change.
And yet, the people who have the wisdom and courage to make the difficult decisions for real change have consistently received only a small fraction of support from the American public. Instead, Democrats and Republicans equally display their support for the leaders most invested in corporate interests, clinging to the illusion that these individuals will bring about the real changes our times demand. The public has neither the patience nor the vital curiosity to hear truth. Truth today is a sword of Damocles waved above our heads, and it is far easier to satisfy ourselves with blind faith in sound bites, catchy slogans, and the media’s unlearned commentaries than to hear truths that compel us to make dramatic changes in our lives.
On the flip side, faith in doctrinal laws increasingly dominates reason, and this is most evident in the continual growth of religious fundamentalist thinking. Our political arena has become one of the most fertile fields for faith-based missionary activity, with the underlying intention to impose irrational laws upon human nature and to subvert the very foundations of a free society. We are dressing ourselves in 17th-century garb — either as Puritans or Pirates — and charging blindly back to the past under a banner emblazoned with “Forward.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell saw this paradox with characteristic clarity. He observed that the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, while wiser people are so full of doubts. That asymmetry of confidence — the loudest voices being the least informed, the most certain being the least examined — is not a bug in our political system. It is the feature. It is the mechanism by which a population is kept obedient: give them certainty, give them enemies, give them slogans, and they will never notice that they have given up the one thing that actually matters — the capacity to think for themselves.
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” — Bertrand Russell
The Products of Our Making
Recently while scanning the news on the internet, there were three horrid stories. One just from yesterday involved 1,000 teenagers in a brawl. This would have been unheard of 20 years ago but today it is becoming too normalized. The second story was about a group of 12-year-old girls who filmed themselves beating up a classmate. A third was about a student who attacked a teacher while the other students egged her on. Labeling these children as monsters completely misses the urgency of our social crises. It is far more important to realize that our children are the products of our generation’s making. The real monsters are the institutions we have created — our failing political, educational, multimedia, medical, and religious systems — and the social values and motivations of the people who build and control them.
When we cease to find pleasure in entertaining our curiosities, when we stop learning about ourselves and the planet, the world becomes flat again. The pursuit of frivolous, virtual entertainment devoid of any higher purpose offers nothing for authentic character development. Instead, it has increasingly numbed our senses and buried the innate gifts each of us is born with. When the mind and senses are no longer active and vital throughout the majority of a population, life in society is no longer worth living. It becomes what the Latin phrase describes: abyssus abyssum invocat — hell calling hell — which invokes the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s residents in Dis, wallowing gleefully in the chaos and confusion of distorted earthly delights.
The contemporary theologian Matthew Fox outlined our predicament with precision. It is no longer sufficient for us to say, ‘Forgive us, for we know not what we do.’ The mantra today should be: Forgive us, for we do not do what we know we should do. It is our apathy, our complacency, and our deep-seated fear of change that prevents us from taking the first step forward to act as we ought to act.
Hannah Arendt, who spent her career studying how ordinary people participate in extraordinary evil, coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe what she observed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was not a monster. He was a bureaucrat. He followed orders. He did not think. And Arendt’s terrifying insight was that the failure to think — the simple, daily, habitual refusal to examine one’s own actions and their consequences — is not merely a personal shortcoming. It is the mechanism by which civilizations destroy themselves. Every parent who hands a child a screen instead of a conversation, every teacher who teaches to the test instead of to the mind, every voter who chooses the familiar lie over the uncomfortable truth — they are not evil. They have simply stopped thinking. And that is enough.
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” — Hannah Arendt
The Conditioning and the Choice
So when we look back, how many of our choices are truly our own? How many are the products of the tribe, the culture, the conditioning, the epigenetic echoes of seven generations of people who made decisions we never examined and passed them along like heirlooms we never asked for?
We are being conditioned — continuously, relentlessly, from birth. Conditioned to consume, to comply, to compete, to confuse activity with meaning, and acquisition with fulfillment. The conditioning is so pervasive that it becomes invisible, like the air we breathe. And the moment you point it out — the moment you say, ‘This is not natural, this is manufactured’ — you are dismissed as paranoid, or contrarian, or simply difficult.
The behaviorist B. F. Skinner demonstrated in the laboratory what Edward Bernays demonstrated in the marketplace: human behavior can be shaped, directed, and controlled through the strategic manipulation of reinforcement. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, is widely considered the father of modern public relations. He showed corporations and governments that you do not need to force people to buy what you are selling or believe what you are saying. You simply need to associate your product or your idea with their existing desires and insecurities. Want to sell cigarettes to women? Call them ‘torches of freedom’ and link them to the suffrage movement. Want to sell a war? Call it the defense of democracy and wrap it in the flag. The technique works because it bypasses the rational mind entirely and speaks directly to the emotional conditioning that was installed long before the conscious mind developed the tools to evaluate it.
And yet — and this is the essential thing, the thing that this entire book is about — the conditioning is not the last word. The conditioning can be seen. It can be named. It can be examined. And once it is examined, it can be changed. Not easily. Not without discomfort. Not without the loss of certain relationships and certainties that you have come to depend on. But it can be changed. The capacity to choose differently is the one thing that no amount of conditioning can fully extinguish, because it is the defining feature of human consciousness itself.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant called this capacity autonomy — the ability to give oneself one’s own law rather than simply obeying the laws imposed by others. Kant argued that human dignity rests entirely on this capacity: we are not merely objects to be used and manipulated but rational agents capable of determining our own course. Every time a person examines a belief they were handed and decides, on the basis of their own reason and experience, whether to keep it or release it, they are exercising the very faculty that makes them human.
My friend at 57 exercised it. The singers in Young@Heart exercise it every time they step on stage. The question is whether you will exercise it — today, not tomorrow, not when the crisis forces your hand, but now, in the ordinary texture of an ordinary day, before the karma knocks on the door with the menu of consequences.
The Infrastructure of Consciousness
No major social issue — poverty, the drugging of our nation and our children, the endless wars and global conflicts, the political and health and educational crises that multiply with each passing year — can change for the better until we as individuals change. Our systems for social and environmental sustainability are collapsing. We are utterly bankrupt, borrowing more than we have. Brutal reality television programs have become postmodern gladiatorial sports, sanctioned by our culture because they provide a means to escape our hectic, busy lives and give us an excuse for not awakening from our cultural dream.
The addict with collapsed veins who has no money for the next fix is at a moment of great opportunity — the opportunity to let healing begin. But the needle and the drug must go. And just like the addict, we must free ourselves from our addictions and face the road to recovery. It will not be pleasant. Contrary to the dictates of many popular pundits of superficial, materialist spirituality, packaged as though they were lost secrets, it will not be an easy journey. It will test us to the very core of our being.
The infrastructure that most requires repair today is the infrastructure of consciousness. It is an infrastructure that needs to be cleansed of discredited and aging mythologies that continue to be enthroned as truths about the nature of reality and the meaning of human existence. It is an infrastructure built on unexamined assumptions about what constitutes a good life, a successful life, a life worth living. And until those assumptions are brought into the light and evaluated honestly, every other kind of infrastructure we attempt to repair will continue to crumble, because it is being built on a foundation of self-deception.
The philosopher and psychologist William James argued that the greatest discovery of his generation was that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. That discovery has been confirmed by a century of subsequent research in psychology, neuroscience, and epigenetics. The inner attitude is not a luxury. It is the foundation. And the foundation must be repaired before anything built on top of it can stand.
The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti put it even more directly. He said that it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And the corollary is equally important: it is no measure of failure to be maladjusted to such a society. The person who feels uncomfortable, who senses that something is deeply wrong, who cannot quite fit into the culture as it is currently constructed — that person may be the healthiest one in the room.
A Mirror, a Shock, a Beginning
This essay is intended to be a mirror to help us see what we have become. I hope we will perceive accurate reflections. I hope we can equally observe the signs pointing to our authentic, true nature. This book is not meant to make us feel bad or angry about ourselves. Its purpose is to bring a spiritual shock and awe that is desperately needed today — not the shock and awe of bombs falling on Baghdad, but the shock of recognition, the awe of seeing yourself clearly for the first time in years, perhaps for the first time ever.
Each of us possesses qualities that are universal — love and compassion, kindness and nurturance — and these can generate harmony throughout the human community when they are brought to consciousness and acted upon. But they must be brought to consciousness. They must be chosen. They must be practiced, daily, against the relentless current of a culture that would prefer us to remain asleep, consuming, compliant, and confused.
I have attempted to outline clearly, to everyone, regardless of the generation you find yourself born into, all of the tools that are needed to reclaim our dignity and return as spiritually realized members of the human race. It will require letting go of things you have held on to for a very long time — beliefs, habits, relationships, self-images that no longer serve you. And letting go is one of the hardest things a human being can do, because we confuse what we are holding with who we are.
The Buddha taught that attachment is the root of all suffering. Not love. Not connection. Not commitment. Attachment — the desperate clinging to things, people, ideas, and identities as though without them we would cease to exist. The work of this book is the work of learning to release that grip, gently, with compassion for yourself and for the life you have lived, and to discover that what remains when the grip loosens is not emptiness but freedom.
And freedom — genuine freedom, the freedom to think clearly, to act from your own center, to love without transaction, to live without performance — that is what it means to live in the moment. Not the shallow, bumper-sticker version of the phrase. The real thing. The lived experience of being fully present in your own life, awake to its beauty and its difficulty, responsible for its direction, and unafraid of its depth.
This essay is intended to provide and strengthen us with essential insights that will enable us to personally transform ourselves and thereby allow us to experience remarkable realizations of how extraordinary we really are. Because we are extraordinary. Every single one of us. We have simply forgotten. And it is time — it is past time — to remember.
*Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-live-conscious-life/5924679
