Last Australian winter I found myself walking around in Canberra with Jenny Puisto when we stumbled upon a history museum, walked in and got into a projection room.
There were playing a short movie about the hippie movement in the 60’s or 70’s and Woodstock so there were some young people there and they were talking about love and peace, and the fair distribution of our planet wealth and resources.
So Jenny started laughing and said “look these people were fighting for the exact same things we are fighting now, and this was like 40 years ago, have they achieved anything? No, we have now even much more inequality, 1 % of the population owns 40% of the planet’s wealth, 34,000 children die every single day from poverty and preventable diseases, 50% of the world’s population lives on less than 2 dollars a day[1], so what’s the point of keeping the fight, if things are just getting worse”*
That got me thinking, are we wasting our time here? Is the occupy movement doomed to fail just because previous movements have failed before them? Should we just give up like our parents did? Is there any better thing to do?
And then it came to me, I thought to myself, what do the world peace movements, the hippies, the vegetarians, the Buddhist monks, the new age, the occupy movement all have in common?
MEDITATION
We’ve seen the meditation tents at different occupy movements, that’s what brings us all together!
When you practice meditation you feel happier, in peace and harmony with the universe.
So why don’t we all practice meditation? there are hundreds of benefits and no side effects. [2]
Because we are being kept distracted, so we don’t see things clearly.
We know people think the way they do because of the environment they are in, so if we could start teaching meditation from early ages we would be shaping the new generations into being the change and not just asking for someone else to change things like we are doing.
Unfortunately, the education has also been compromised, and as a way of social control, we are taught what it needs to be learned in order to keep the machine running and to keep the inequality building up, instead of being taught what is good for us and makes us happy and healthy.
And in some countries, even people are being forced by the system to take loans, to pay for this education that will brainwash them for several years and turn them into compliant pieces of a system designed to perpetuate the inequality system.
So what to do, what’s the solution?
Get out of it, stop supporting the system. When enough people stop supporting it, it will collapse by itself.
And maybe try to be a bit kinder to people around you, and give without expecting to receive something back. that usually makes us happy.
But we always forget, I always forget.
so, I’m gonna go out and do it today. will try to be kinder to everyone around me.
[1] Note: she didn’t actually quote statistics, I added that to make her sound smart
[2] http://www.ineedmotivation.com/blog/2008/05/100-benefits-of-meditation/