fractal007
Senior Member
since 06-01-2000
Posts 1972
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12 posted 09-01-2009 12:20 AM
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I hope I don't sound harsh or as though I am trying to rain on anyone's parade. However, you requested critiques. What I'm going to do here is not to condemn the idea of world peace or of harmony with other human beings. These are things which I love. What I'm going to do instead is to discuss how this piece interacts with what I, with what little experience of it I have, consider basic human nature.
Let me begin first with a few small details. The fact that we are at the beginning of the third millennium is more incidental than anything else. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because the year has just changed or because the numbers on the calendar are in a certain configuration something profound is about to happen. After all, look at the people who make and break new year's resolutions.
Getting more to my original purpose, there seems to be an implicit passing of the buck in this text. For example, it claims that "...there has been a raising of the consciousness from one of separation and isolation, to one of attunement, communion, and interconnectedness..." and that "The peoples of the world will band together to help our brothers and our sisters." What is lacking here is a sense of personal responsibility. The text is trying implicitly to create a kind of crowd mentality. "It is good to help your brothers and sisters and to break down walls of isolation because everyone else is doing it."
Furthermore, the text places its subject in the future in order to create a sense of hope. Hope tends to lack personal responsibility. I hope for something when I think that I have at best only a partial influence over its actually happening. "As this new world opens up within us, our eyes will open up to all the wonders of nature around us." Why aren't our eyes open now? Who says one cannot open one's eyes in the way the text suggests and see those wonders around one's self right now without the implicit blessing that a crowd of other people doing it too would convey?
With enlightenment comes an increased sensitivity to all the beauty and harmony around us, that our previously closed eyes and hearts could not perceive. All of our senses will be heightened as we connect with the Universal Life Force. This feeling of oneness with our Creator, with each other, and with the world around us, will move humanity forward beyond that which we could have ever imagined. There will be heaven on earth!
Don't get me wrong, we could all use a greater sensitivity to the health of the world around us. But this paragraph is another example of why this piece and pieces like it evoke an emotion that can only exist so long as the goal being discussed doesn't exist as well. There's a kind of joy and happiness evoked by texts about the new age (an era which must always remain just beyond our reach) that simply cannot exist when one contemplates the present. The present is so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of it and to take it for granted. This is human nature.
Feelings of oneness with the creator happen all the time. I thought they were called flow experiences. Feel free to let me know otherwise of course. Also I would appreciate it if someone could please explain to me what the "universal life force" is.
In sum, I like this piece but I think that it is doing something different from the message it's trying to convey. There is no profound new age in which everyone will be happy. It's like a spell, designed to evoke an emotional state through contemplations of a future which, as I've already mentioned, were it to come to pass would only be tossed aside and compared, in further wistful prose like this, with still better futures. To be sure it is quite possible that poverty will be eradicated and war will be discarded, but the times in which poverty and war no longer exist would be no more blissful than the present.
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