Have you wondered how we got to this point?  Why is that we’re so focused on our displays rather than reality.  I write this to you behind one.  The “ghost” in the machine taking my thoughts and making them visible to you from your side of the world.  All done through the network we have created… the constant, quiet replacement for reality in all of our lives.

Do you ever think about how much time you spend behind a display?  How many hours of your life you spend looking at a false representation of reality.  Made of pixels, cathode rays, electrocuted liquid crystals and plasma gases.  We craft the elements of the world we live in, the natural and free world, into ever evolving machines that present to us images of the “real world”.  Ironic.  TVs, computer monitors, laptops, iPhones, digital cameras, portable media players.  We are constantly looking at the world through a machine.

Do you still wonder why we behave like machines?

Disconnecting ourselves from reality, makes it easier for us to disconnect from one another.  We live in a world where people no longer talk, they text, email or IM.  Even the nuances of handwriting in a letter lost the war to the anonymity email provides us.  We disconnect from each other, and treat each other without common decency.  Human life is now a statistic we compare to previous reports on news shows of the past.  This years tsunami killed how many people?

We build machines to disconnect ourselves from reality.  Cars separate you from the rest of humanity, once we get into one we are in our own metal kingdom on wheels.

Our white headsets clearly announce to the world “leave me alone, I’m listening to my iPod”.

When we interact with one another, we don’t look into each other’s eyes.  We deal with one another under decorum.  We act like we do not see the person, only what role they play.  This saddens me most, because the very basis  for all known human religious doctrine is that mankind is divine and created by God with a soul; something animals didn’t get.  Yet we knowingly ignore each others souls.  We treat each other like animals.  You wonder why we treat animals in such an atrocious way?

All this because we are still children.  We never grow up in this new world of ours.  We live to satiate our appetites immediately.  There is no thought or analysis to our consumption.  We get what we want, when we want it.  Modern Homo Sapien is the mind of a child, in the body of an adult.

We take resources, not thinking about what it will do to our life support system… the Earth.  You can argue all you want.  The fact is, in a quiet moment alone, I know you know this.  You wonder, what is real?  So we seek solace in all the comforting gimmicks humanity has created to amuse itself until the ultimate reality hits, death.

Rather than live “alive” and awake acknowledging our massive responsibility to this planet, each other, and every other earthling experiencing the miracle of Life; we run to our social strata; we trick ourselves with religion; we hide behind our screens, and look at life through a lens; and we live the life we are told is reality.  But all we have to do is open our eyes, and just look at human beings.  Look at their product.  The answers are all there.

Horror films.  War.  Child pornography.  Poverty.  Genocide.  Religion.  Mass raping of 1000’s of other species.  Slavery of it’s OWN kind.

The list goes on.  Isn’t it time the story changed?  Why isn’t the story about how glorious Homo Sapien is.  How the billions of lives that came before modern mankind led up to something remarkable… and animal that has emotion, ethics, logic, and technology.  An animal that considers life precious takes it’s own dominance into consideration to preserve other forms of life?

I think THIS is who you are.  I really do.  I just know that you have been brainwashed.  Deep.  Very very deep.  Most people I talk to about this can’t even register how important they are.  Their perception of their role on this planet is that they were created to eat, work, buy things, marry, have kids, and die.  That’s it?

There is so much more to this world.  Look past your screens… the world is not American Idol, or Sex in the City, or Grey’s Anatomy, or CNN, or even the Discovery Channel.  The world is literally right outside your house.  And very of few of us live in it.

Most of us will wake up tomorrow, and go from one box (our house); get into another box (our cars).  Then you get out of that box and go to the 3rd box (our work place).  Once we’re done in that box, we’ll get back into the 2nd box, and go back to the 1st box.  Some people will go to a 4th box (a restaurant) with the 2nd box of course; before they go back to the 1st box.  Most of this is done while sitting.  Think of how this compares to our ancestors just 1000 years ago?  Do you still wonder why so many Homo Sapiens are fat?  If a person cut just one of those boxes out of the paragraph above, they would start to actually see the beauty of life around us.

There is so much to experience if we walked more.  Remember when we were kids, we used to play outside till the street lights came on?  Now look around in your neighborhoods.  The kids are products of the new screen age.  Screens are everywhere.  In this century, social networks aren’t maintained in the playground, they’re managed in the internet.

You can change all of this if you turn off your TVs; you are being programmed.
Unplug it.  Start living.

I’ve lived without television for 4 years.  When I say this to people, they look at me like I’m some unfortunate hunchback who just crawled out of a cave.  Yet, I am better informed about their world, science, politics, history than they are.  Not because I am smarter, but because I read.  Another ancient art form that few of us humans share.

Why are we so afraid of testing ourselves?  Challenge yourself.  See what would happen if you turned off your TV for 1 month?  2 months?   6 months?  Why can’t you do it?  Very few people actually can.  In fact, so far… I have only met one other person.  We find ourselves having a difficult time having a real conversation with people today.  Unless we can talk about the Lakers, or some celebrity on TV, or something on the news, or some TV show; people have very little attention span for reality.

Although, if you got this far of the article, there might be some hope.

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