What makes people fear getting in sync with their own center? Generally american society specifically, but even the world as a whole by now is beginning to realize the need to get out, literally and figuratively. Literally, to stay at home less and less, to escape their self, the omnipresence of which to some is stifling, oppressive. Figuratively, they are afraid to be left alone by themselves, afraid to think, that perhaps too much thinking may drive them crazy. Or at the very least drive them down dangerous and unexpected paths.
Long ago, well not really that long ago, staying home meant a pursuit of a sought after hobby, which most people looked forward to, as part of their daily routine. Now staying home is tantamount to most people of couch potato routines, passing that mirror in the hallway and avoiding a sudden decompression of self image by the obvious reflections of bulges created by incessant snacking in between commercials. Or, get drunk early, and forget the sequence of masochistic thoughts, as to why someone should have to plan ahead, why meditation doesn't work anymore, or maybe a contraction of hiv last night wouldn't be such a bad thing anymore, since it will develop immunity against the onslaught of fears which accompany the terminal stages of life.
But there is a way, you say? Yes, regression into the private heavens and hells, of which most are so totally fearful of. Stay calm, don't get nervous, that's the key. The underworld is not waiting, it is here, the archetypes are present and accounted for, and for now, the center is in the eye of the hurricane of the here and now. We carry this storm with us, outside, at any rate, then the worry starts, that perhaps people will notice the obvious effort to keep a presentable face.
Here comes a clincher, and the cure. The clincher is, that this facade has to come down. The home should be without self pretense, it should be what it is, and if it has to create a home of total abstraction, or regression, then that is honest, that is of good faith. The self serves it's self well. Turn the tv off. Forget the ice box.
The cure is, as in nietzche, is to develop an internal clown within the facade, if all else fails. The clown nietzche talked of a persona who is able to laugh at himself, even if no one else is laughing…
Where is the comedy? Is it only for comic relief? Or is it purely for effect?
There is a speakeasy here in LA called comedy club. Recently, about a year ago,the owner of the club installed a full time psychiatrist in the dressing room,as a consequence of a comic shooting himself because no one laughed at his one liners. Was it the audience’s fault , or the lack of comic talent. Maybe both.
Remember the time when insightful parents took a good look at their failing children's potential and recognized the onset of early despair over their profound all encompassing lack of any kind of promise? There was an out for those kinds of kids back then: become a priest or a religious, take up a contemplative life as a friar or join a brotherhood of monks. Or, join vaudeville or the circus, and let them laugh at you! They caught on, and Emmett Kelley types were borne, becoming good at what they were doing. The traveling circus was always an escape, home was always the next town, the next stop along the open road.
The fellini film "La strada" comes to mind with the waif attached dependently to the strong man. There is some heart here, there is some very tenuously thin relationship between the character played anthony quinn and julietta massina, but one had the feeling in the earliest plot development, that one thing was missing in the relationship: knowledge that even the ever changing , absurdist view of this traveling circus, the waif's intelligence was her downfall. She became aware, humanly all too humanly, that the strong man ultimately had to play along certain, predictably prescribed courses. Her intrinsic center, although not yet manifest, predetermined her fate.
His prescribed course was to keep moving at all costs, and he understood her difference in her need to stake out somewhere, stop moving and settle down. He couldn't do it. It downs on the viewer, that after all,this was all a sham, he could never really love her center, because he could not realize his own.
Is our society becoming increasingly de-centered, programmed to be satisfied with the circumstantial over the essential? Can a general observation be made as a foreshadowing of more de stabilization of society? Or can improved technology and internet relationships adequately compensate?