Bang a Hole in the Wall Large Enough to Crawl Through - and Escape

[Hanzze]

Bang a Hole in the Wall Large Enough to Crawl Through - and Escape

Advertisers and marketers spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence you through conditioning, seduction, suggesting.

It is important to be mindful and have clear comprehension about the process of advertising and its effects on the mind.

Advertising is the opposite of meditation. Meditation is to develop contentment and happiness. Advertising is designed to cultivate discontent and unhappiness, so they can sell you something to relive this discontent and unhappiness. In advertising, this process is called "scarcity".

In advertising "need" means discontent. The advertisement is mining discontent, and cultivating desire.Marketing experts say the most valuable feelings inside the consumer are feelings of (1) fear, (2) loneliness, and (3) competition or self-doubt. so they must create fear in order to sell us security; must create feelings of loneliness in order to sell us comfort, virtual companionship; and create self-doubt in order to sell us self-confidence.

The self-doubt industry can even sell us "self-discovery" - Buddhist meditation, retreats, meditation-cushions, prayer beads, workshops, sell us enlightenment.Sell us a bill of goods. Give us the business, and make a killing.

We are so outwardly focused that inner experience itself has entered into the realm of scarcity, making it packageable and capable of being sold back to us as commodity. Our inner lives are now promotable back to us as products. we get to buy back what we have lost, in this modern consumer Technotopia.

We are now "alienated" from our own inner lives. Our inner life is removed, all feeling, from our immediate experience, and we are suspended somewhere in "the cloud" - in cyberland.

What are you looking for right now?

Writers like Guy Debord depict capitalist society as consisting of creatures who are resigned to live life as a representation of itself.

The role of advertising, the Situationists say, is to create a world of mirrors in which people can obtain new images of themselves that fit the overall purpose of the system.

The person becomes a spectator of his or her own life. Life becomes a spectacle.Then sell it back to them.

Be careful and mindful of what you see on television screens and computer screens too.Viewing these screens is dangerous because it focuses attention on events outside your own life, encourages passivity, inaction, discourages self-awareness, and personal initiative.

Watching computer and television screens anesthetizes the mind, anesthetizes anxieties. It is a drug to ease painful, confused, confined, channeled experience of modern life.

Watching television and videos, an surfing the web, is anti-experience. It is a "time out" that hypnotizes, mesmerizes the mind, focuses attention in images (flashing lights) and dimming awareness of the real world. This experience enhances/intensifies the "spectacle" of virtual life, by recycling knowledge and experience.

Television and computers are "decadent" in the sense that they destroy interbeing. They destroy the connection of people from community, people from people, people from inner experience (self). This computer is creating surrogate community (itself) and it becomes mother, father, parent, society, teacher, lover, friend.

taken from Santidhammo - blog

*smile*