Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin February 19th, 2009

Although meditation has made a big difference in my life, it does take a lot of time and effort to do it meaningfully, and like many other practitioners, I periodically slowed down or stopped practicing at times. It was during one of those lulls that I became interested in simple living.

I always felt that the Church in general, and I in particular, had rarely come close to living the life Jesus taught and that the early Church practiced (think “Sermon on the Mount”) with a few exceptions like the Anabaptists. The older I’ve gotten, the more this has nagged my soul, so I finally began to investigate both simple living and Anabaptist history. After a short time I decided that I really did want to begin practicing simple living in an attempt to become a little more of a disciple and to find a meaningful Christian practice that had real roots.

I began changing my life style and encouraged others to come along as well. I determined to:
• Spend less money and buy less stuff.
• Stop buying so many hi-tech gadgets.
• Recycle everything.
• Become much more environmentally responsible in everything I did.
• Not have a cell phone (but I eventually did get one because my 13 year old car was no longer as dependable as I liked, so the cell phone was a security blanket on the road).
• Eat organic and eat less meat. I eventually became vegetarian (a heart attack hastened my decision to become vegetarian with the aid of the Dean Ornish plan, which fit perfectly in the simple living and environmental responsibility niche).

A lot in a short period of time. This did help me to feel a part of the centuries-old Anabaptist tradition, and I felt like I was doing a little something for the world as well. In fact it did feel more like I was practicing discipleship if only in a small way.

But there was something missing.

Since I had not practiced meditation regularly for a little while, the ‘old me’ was taking over again. For me, a basic premise in modern simple living is that our way of life, all of our daily actions, should be driven by love and compassion: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you; take care of your neighbors; welcome the stranger; first, do no harm (to borrow a medical dictum).

Although I think I was doing the right things based on this, it was sometimes hard to make decisions on how to live and what to do, because that basic feeling of compassion wasn’t there in my decision making, and there was less and less of a parallel between my simple living practices and how I was thinking about and treating people. So my living was probably not as helpful to me or others as it should have been.

I found that there was a big difference between just adopting voluntary simplicity practices, no matter how theologically well thought out they were, and having a deep, rich faith life out of which simple living emerges as an obvious response to Jesus’ love. After all, many secular people, organizations, and communities practice voluntary simplicity. Does that make them Christian Disciples? Probably not.

I think that not having a strong, vibrant faith life and practice leads to superficial and short lived behavior changes which can be ‘trendy’ rather than a deeply-rooted way of living. I realized that I had fallen off the wagon.

I began to see that prayerful meditation was my bedrock for simple living because it made living simply an intuitive and natural response rather than a slavish adherence to what can be politically correct or trendy practices (secular or faith-based). So I needed to reinvest myself in meditation and prayer so my soul could catch up with my head.

Doing that opened-up an entirely new universe for me – one that has, of course, always been there, but was hidden. Living simply as a practicing Christian became alive, intuitive, exciting, and joyful. Much better than politically correct!

My desperation began to lift. There was no longer the pressure to have the most up-to-date stuff. I didn’t feel like I needed much more of anything, felt more secure about it, and actually began to feel happy and contented with the “lower standard of living” that we had adopted. I also regained my ability to see people in a more loving way, and once again became less angry with myself and the world: it felt good! It felt right!

I know that many others before me and around me now are already joyfully living this non-compliant ‘other way’ – I’m just a slow-learning late comer! But, I suppose, “better late than never.” Living simply has become a joy and a meditation in itself, that reflexively deepens my spiritual life as well as the other way around. I hope that others, who have not already found a door to this universe will find their’s as well.

Please feel free to share your experiences in meditation, contemplation, or adopting simple living and their fit in your faith life.

Tags: Personal Experience

• Coping With Consumer Culture , Meditation and Prayer , Psychology , Spiritual Development
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admin February 13th, 2009

I grew up as a traditional small town, middle class Lutheran, but I never had a spiritual life to speak of other than going to church when my parents made me. I never understood or practiced prayer much beyond “Now I lay me down to sleep…” and praying along during church services, and I was never very joyful about it. So I can’t say that my ‘faith’ did much for me, or my desperation, or made me a very compassionate or loving person.

Oddly, at one point I decided that I could be a pretty good preacher and went off to get a Master of Divinity Degree. I was never ordained of course. That was a very good thing because a pastor should, above all other things, be a compassionate person who wants to be with, and help people out of a deeply held relationship with God. I, on the other hand, had always been pretty self-centered, a loner, and as I said above, not a very spiritual person. So my career went off in other directions – fat lot of good those four years did me!

There are some people who seem to be born naturally compassionate and caring and who focus more on others than on their own needs. These happy people sometimes wonder why others don’t live like they do since it seems like such a no-brainer.

I’m one of the people they wonder about.

But nearly 20 years ago I grew weary of desperation and feeling like a failure while living on the theological tidbits I had retained from my misguided youth. I decided that I needed a real spiritual life with depth and meaning. I needed spiritual substance in my life that would give me direction and purpose, and help me feel better about myself and my life. But I didn’t believe that ‘The Church’ as I knew it, was the answer. This, in spite of having been a very active member of a congregation nearly my entire life.

I knew that many people found Eastern meditation practice to be a good way of silencing the internal dialog and producing a deep sense of peace, so I began to learn and practice Vipassana (Vee pas’ an ah) insight meditation.

After practicing for a few months, it became a revelation to me.

Vipassana means insight or mindfulness – seeing things as they really are. It enables people to alter their consciousness so they are able to observe themselves, others, and the world around them without analysis or criticism so that they can see things without making judgments. It is non-egotistic alertness and appreciation.

It tends to produce an attitudinal change and moral conversion from ego-based analysis to a more peaceful, respectful, understanding of things. This makes it possible for practitioners to become more peaceful, compassionate, and caring.

It began to feel to me like the “peace that passes all understanding” – even for a hard-headed Attention Deficit disordered person like me.

Some Christians believe that there is no room for Eastern-style meditation in the church, while a large number of other Christians have started a movement to reclaim the ancient Christian practices of meditation and contemplation as a key Christian practice that was nearly lost. (See the Our Spiritual Lives page on the www.christiansimpleliving.org site for information and resources on this movement.)

When I began to combine traditional Christian prayer with meditation it made my prayers, for the first time in my life, come alive. It seemed like a miraculous difference – prayer became deep and meaningful. I felt like I was in the presence of the Holy Spirit, and this regular practice changed how I saw myself, other people, and the world as a whole. Over the years since I began it has opened me up to the possibility of actually being more compassionate and caring. But I’m certain that I’m only at the beginning of this journey and have a very long way to go.

My growth in meditation and prayer seems to come in spurts – I’ve never totally arrived at the goal line, just close. It reminds me of a scene in the movie The Right Stuff, where Chuck Yeager attempts to break the world altitude record for jets well before John Glenn’s orbital mission. On this sunny day, as he passes through the stratosphere the sky becomes a deeper and deeper blue until patches of pure black begin to appear through thinning clouds with stars shinning through. He is right on the edge of space. And then his plane flames-out and he comes ingloriously back to earth. He was almost all the way there without a space program to put him there!

That’s very much like my prayer and meditation journey – seeing fleeting glimpses of what a true compassionate, peaceful life could be. It’ll take a few more years.

I began to experience the reality that the money and stuff of modern life was at very best, ephemeral and didn’t last. So depending on those things for anything other than basic needs was a waste of time and led to, guess what? Desperation and unhappiness!

Precisely paralleling this, Christ taught that we should be loving and compassionate towards everyone and not to pile up money and stuff for ourselves. Unfortunately, He didn’t teach the actual skills we need to change our ego-focused personalities so that self-centered people like me could become loving and compassionate. If he did, it wasn’t recorded in the Bible.

But I felt Jesus was leading me to meditation and a new prayer life as though he were personally providing me the missing skills I needed to begin to change from an angry, self-absorbed, pessimist to something better – someone who could actually be helpful to people and have a little more joy and compassion in his life.

This not only feels right, it makes sense because I believe that God is still revealing Himself to us. Maybe it’s grace, because my experience with prayerful meditation just feels full of grace.

Have you had similar experiences?

In my next post I’ll try to tie together this spiritual experience with Christian Simple Living.

Tags: Personal Experience

• Psychology , Spiritual Development
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admin February 8th, 2009

True story: I spent a lot of years feeling pretty desperate.

Ironically I became increasingly desperate while searching for happiness, success, and security. But the search always foundered on the daily pressure to find and keep a (more important) better-paying job and of course worry about performing well once I had the job. Then there was wanting a new car, or furniture, or camera, and at the end of each month there was still more worry about how to pay the bills.

It made me feel like I simply wasn’t good enough, smart enough, or ambitious enough to be a real success, and I felt like everyone else knew it, especially my Dad, my sister, wife, kids, friends, and colleagues. Well OK, the whole world!

When I’d finally manage to acquire something I wanted, it almost never actually produced the advertised nirvana, success, respect, or even simple happiness for very long. The stuff turned out to be largely marketing lies that had appealed to my ego rather than my practical needs or my spirit, which was flagging badly:

The shiny, great-smelling new car became scratched and dented, and eventually broke down;
The new computer became obsolete in 3 years;
Folks admired my new house until bigger ones were built down the street;
The new job was great except that it came with more headaches and I wasn’t performing in it any better than the last job;
My marriage folded
and the pile of bills got still higher.

I felt victimized, frustrated, and angry at myself, and after a lifetime of this vicious circle I was a cynical, unhappy, tired, and desperate person. There had to be more to life, to my life, than disappointment and anger.

Perversely, all the time I was worrying about this, my income actually did go up, I did have a nice home (though fairly simple), my health was good, I had time to pursue hobbies and sports, and I did new and interesting things. But I didn’t really notice those details and therefore failed to experience or appreciate them because I was fixated on what I didn’t have, and so my desperation just grew.

It all felt like the classic nightmare in which you are being chased and you try to run but your legs feel like they’re stuck in thick mud and they just won’t move, or the infamous dream of finding yourself in a very public place in your underwear, or worse!

At this point you’re probably expecting me to say that simple living saved me from all this… but it didn’t, at least not all by itself.

I’ll write about why, and what I believe saved me in my next couple of posts.

What has your experience been like?

Tags: Personal Experience

• Coping With Consumer Culture , Media , Psychology , Spiritual Development
• Comments(1)