Since throwing the sacred image down from the sacred meeting place, predestination has been replaced with a "life project." Fate has been replaced with vocation. Human nature into which we are supposedly born has been replaced with identity which we are left to construct. In looking for a universal between cultures, the ability of self transformation/perfection is the only trait common to everyone.

Shattering the sacred image and melting the platonic solids was only so we could make new and better ones for human happiness, more solid and certain than the old ones managed to be.

The emancipation of the individual from ascribed, inherited social character is the most conspicuous feature of the modern condition but you have to determine your life for yourself {and even be compulsive about it to be successful at it}.

Class and gender hangs heavily over our choices and to most look like facts of nature. In the past the task was to try and fit in. Fitting in was something to be joined and had to be renewed and reconfirmed on a daily basis. The hard working and the work-shy alike have little or nothing they can do to guarantee the future through diligently following the current standards. The race track and the finishing line are rapidly being repositioned. Few if any beds look solid enough for sleeping in long term. There will be no rest and no satisfaction of arriving where you can disarm and stop worrying. Being on the road is the way of life not arrival.

The problem is not how to get the identity of your choice but which to choose and to be alert if that has been withdrawn from the market or stripped of its seductive power. The most nerve wracking worry is not how to find a place inside a solid frame of social class but that the frame will soon be torn apart.

Sameness and continuity are rarely coveted now anyway but if they are, they're contaminated with sinister premonitions and fear. The meta value is to keep your options open. You don't want an identity which fits too tightly. A desire for sameness and continuity forfeits your options in advance.

Identity is adopted and discarded like a change of costume so we are free to abstain from choosing a binding choice.

If you haven't already been hit by life's uncertainties, you can't be sure that future blows will pass you by. The confidence of being in control of our destiny is what our current society is denied. It is beyond the reach of modern democracies to save us but there can be no rational response as long as its confined to individual action. No hope to improve life in any ways that matter.

The self improvement section of the book store seems harmless until its seen as a retreat from politics. Compulsive shopping also features prominently.

Identity is a surrogate of community. Its only after the border posts have been dug that the myths of their antiquity are spun and the fresh cultural/political origins of identity are covered by the genesis accounts.

Identity does not signal a stable core of self. Identification is never ending, always incomplete, in which we all, by necessity or choice, are engaged. It doesn't arrest globalization but lubricates its wheels.

Turn off the internal electric fence. A bond agent for social consciousness you are not.
The mind is the vampire that you describe not the society where the "minds" believe in their
own victimhood. It is not external, rather it's an inside job...

Clear awareness, clean as sunlight, pure, untouchable, untouched,
that stuff is power itself, and that power is two things that are awesome beyond measure:

#1. Being present without any thoughts, no creeds, no beliefs, values or affiliations, just aware.

Not really that easy to do at first but not that hard either. This is the "kriptonite" to the devil because, simply, an illusion or lie needs an illusion or lie to play off of. If there is nothing to catch on then there is nothing to fake ...

Then #2, the interesting part, the part where the rubber meets the road . From clear awareness focus on something that matters to you. Only you can know what this is but usually it has to do with all the things that one would like to accomplish if they could just get enough time or money, free the mind or heal the body...

It may have to do with art but could be family or invention or compassionate action or all of the above; everybody knows what they need to do but don't like to admit it because we have been trained away from this by authorities that shouldn't be and who don't have our best interest in mind.

When action comes from clear awareness this is a force of inspiration to be reckoned with because
in the most basic sense you can't stop love in action.

jRj
*j*
.~

That wasn't me. That was a book publishing the results of the 2OO2 world symposium of the the International Society for Cross Cultural Psychology. Each chapter being written by a respected psychologist. I lean towards the findings of the PhDs in psychology from all over the world.