Materialism has bought our Environment & sold our Spirituality.

the below is still in rough-draft-rant form)

Let’s Take the Spiritual mask off $ucce$$. We don’t need it.

The good news is feeling like you’re drowning in bullshit means you haven’t drunk the kool-aid.

Sometimes—often—it feels as if we, you, don’t care.

Don’t care about integrity, or our planet, or walking the talk. I see companies succeed at the expense of their own original dreams, trading values for dollars happily, selling PR in the form of happiness and exclamation points and “gratitude” on Facebook. Our leaders are not leading, they are cynically ambitious, pushy, vicious even…and they wear a smile.

At the end of the day we have been sold a dream of commercialism, we give no thought to our trash and little to real gratitude…and the worst crime we perpetrate is to teach the next generation that it’s okay.

I want to live in a world where the confusion and longing and joy of We the People is met with wisdom, gentleness, patience. Where magazines that profess environmental responsibility and mindfulness are not made in China on glossy paper, their words, printed in petroleum, building up and marketing ego in exchange for facebook shares. Where natural products companies care about what’s in them and what packages them just slightly more than their vision boards of their second home in formerly pristine X.

As a society, we are date raping Mother Nature and selling false joy in exchange for objects that we have been told to desire, but are not what our hearts truly love.

A true smile is built on simplicity, on hewing close to our values. So if I don’t see you at the party, or the expo, or the forum, or the conference, it’s because I’m making my own success in my own time, in a way I can feel good about, writing my words on a banner that may serve as a fearless proclamation of truth to a world gone (mostly) deaf.

We can leave the happy mob behind. We can rediscover our relaxed breath. That breath will guide us to our spirit, and only that genuine confidence can show us the path of fulfillment, joy, sadness and health.

~

We’re surrounded by charlatans and, worse, they’re winning, and, worse, that success makes the next generation look to their path as the one to follow. Meanwhile, a few folks get rich and Mother Nature gets trashed and even raped, and the cosmic joke about it is…no one’s really happier for all the foolhardy consumption.

So many good causes are starving, unfunded, dying. So many sweet good people who walk their talk are losing out on life—they really need help, support.

The funny thing is that there is such a thing as Enlightened Society and things can work harmoniously: what Trungpa Rinpoche calls Great Eastern Sun vision instead of Setting Sun cowardice. It’s like when you go to a fair-trade shop and you see that all those gifts are made by good, real people trying to pay for their children to eat and get an education and there’s joy in that “consumption.” Suddenly we remember that dollars can be a vehicle for good. It makes me so sad to see all this too-happy social media marketing by our leaders and their followers, who is us.

Yesterday I interviewed this lion activist lady (she’s British, video up soon. A former ad exec and model…turned activist 10 years ago when she had a few encounters with lions and this shamanic momma down in Africa) and the lions are fucking dying, there’s hardly any left, and the world has essentially shrugged. And yet this one lady has secured 1000s of acres and created hundreds of jobs through protecting them and eco tourism, and is getting grants and speaking in front of 100s of politicians who want to know how to help.

The joke is it’s actually not that hard to do good and well at the same time, and yet 99% of us have been taught, or suckered, into thinking we have to roofie what we want to get it.

The more I’m around all these fucking conferences (I attend as press or a speaker) that could be soooo amazing the more I want to leave that world behind and work on my books and see if we can’t really make elephant work and lead. Because right now there’s very little out there for folks who want more or less than a shallow, fast food kind of happiness.