Avoiding the domination of lesser things

"The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world's domination of the human spirit."

-- Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club

"If I distract your attention with something compellingly complex, dangerously dramatic, icky and intriguing, juicy, sexy, and spicy, then I can then slip around your guard and take you out of the game of true life and keep you totally dead. If I only notice what you are interested in and where your attention naturally goes, and then use this to distract you towards or away from things as necessary, making these distractions really interesting by focusing them on what you consider emotional needs and ego-driven goals, then I have you where I want you, wrapped around your own axle, going nowhere."

-- Devil's related wish, in cooperation with "Big Brother"

"If you're not playing a big or meaningful enough game, you'll screw up the game you're playing just to give yourself too much to do to even look."

-- Related human warning

"Father, please grant me the grace to behold Your beauty in all that You have made (including me) and Your guidance in every situation that challenges, confronts, includes, seduces, surrounds, or upsets me, and to not be distracted into a 'domination of lesser things' than the exploration, discovery, and execution of Your will in my life."

-- Relevant and useful prayer in the face of the above

With the economy and other shaky circumstances scaring more and more people every day, the notion of devotedly following instruction, obeying, slowing down to surrender to calling, deeper meaning, and purpose (vs. a fitfull, frenzied focus on mere survival) seems to be even more obscure and unfathomable (making it even more compelling) than when I started living this life over 11 years ago.

As job and money fears mount - and confidence in human structures and systems wanes - media and technology seems to be working overtime to dazzle, delude, and distract, leaving people feeling more communicated to and about than ever before, while less intimately connected than ever before. Our heads are being increasingly fed and filled with garbage in every institutional and technological setting we find ourselves engaged in, leaving little room for deep explorations and profound personal journeys. There seems little patience for mystery at times like these.

And yet the journey boldly continues - undeterred, unmitigated, unrelenting, unshakable, unstoppable, unwavering in its pursuit of love, simplicity, truth, wholeness among equal and deeply connected human beings, celebrating and suffering with each other as brothers and sisters, all over the world. It takes a ruthless, kick-ass determination to break free of this world's stranglehold on the human spirit. You have to dig deep to find that place inside where your defiant scream lives - not so you can use it against other people, but so that you can muster the energy to break free of your own poor choices."

For the only real enemy here is your own
jaded, resigned, thoughtless compliance
and your unconscious submissiveness
to"the domination of lesser things."