It's not the news to either of us that life is constantly changing - this truth has become commonplace. But never before in the history of mankind have the changes been as profound and frequent as they are today, i.e. over the past ten to fifteen years. Watching the evening news on television or reading the newspapers gives us a real avalanche of statistics on violence, hunger and disease, environmental destruction and economic instability. All of these paintings paint a world that is literally falling apart.
On a personal level, the same bleak picture: you may have lost your job because of staff cuts, lost a loved one who moved to another country, fell victim to a crime, or lost a significant portion of your savings because of fluctuations in stock exchange rates. You may often be thinking about how to stay at work. You may not have been fired yet, but you have lost sleep waiting for the cuts to reach you and you will be fired like many of your colleagues.
Sociologists call our time a postmodern era. In the postmodern era, constant change becomes a way of life, and time-tested values and truths lose relevance. How to find your way in life, when it is already unknown where is the truth and where is the lie, when you do not even know from which side to approach the solution to your tormenting question? Maybe you should look at Yandex, Google, or new-fashioned visionaries or corporate CEOs for this and similar questions?
Despite the undeniable advantages of electronic communications, which have become an indispensable attribute of our lives since the 1980s, you may have noticed that the higher the speed and efficiency of the communications we use, the less we actually communicate with other people. This trend was perfectly reflected in a cartoon titled Vacation in the 1990s from Newsweek magazine. This cartoon shows a family vacationing on the oceanfront, with each member of the family equipped with their own electronic device: a mother talking on her mobile phone, a father surfing the Internet, one child receiving a fax, a second one messing with a pocket computer, and a third one checking voice mail messages. Everyone is completely absorbed in their work and does not pay attention to the others!
For such a life, you have to pay a high price. However, we are trying to ignore the fact that we are trying to focus on the positive and isolate ourselves from the negative. These are the negative consequences of this attitude towards life in the postmodern era.
- Anxiety and stress. When the ground begins to fall from under your feet, you experience anxiety, anxiety and stress. This reaction is programmed in our genes and is the result of millions of years of living in a world full of dangers. Nowadays, small and great fears are gradually accumulating in us, giving rise to constant tension and stress. Your body feels constant tension, you can not really relax and feel the taste of life. Meditation, by relaxing the body and reducing stress, helps to cope with the constantly accelerating pace of change.
- Fragmentation. In the old days, most Americans used to live, shop, work, raise their children, and spend their free time in the same circle of people. Now we often have to drive our children to a school on the other side of the city every day, drive to work for an hour and a half or two hours a day, and communicate with loved ones, mostly by mobile phone. We shop in large shopping malls, spend the evenings at the computer, surfing the Internet. We often change jobs and partners and our children move to another state or even another country as they grow up. To combat fragmentation, we can take advantage of meditation: it allows us to reconnect with a deeper essence that no external circumstance can disrupt.
- Alienation. When life resembles pieces of a puzzle that do not want to form a whole picture, it is not surprising that many of us have a sense of alienation. Although statistics are rude about the advent of an era of universal prosperity, many people are paid little for their work, which is barely enough to pay their bills, but even a high salary does not allow us to understand what the meaning of life is. According to one of the articles published in American Demographics magazine, more and more people are moving to small towns in an attempt to gain a lost sense of community with others, and fewer and fewer people are running for office. People don't believe they can make a difference and change their lives for the better. Throwing a bridge over the deep abyss that separates us from our own inner being, meditation can free us from the feeling of alienation with other people and the world at large.
- Loneliness and isolation. With people moving from place to place more and more and families breaking up, it's harder and harder for you to keep in touch with the people you know and love, especially because of lack of time. I recently heard an advertisement on the radio: since family dinners are a thing of the past, buy a family packet! We cannot undo the forces that separate us. But we can use meditation to turn every moment we're together into our "best time.
- Depression. When people feel lonely, alienated by oppressed stress and detached from the purpose and meaning of life, it is not surprising that many of them fall into depression. In a country where antidepressants are used from time to time by almost every person, there is a situation where it is necessary to use means that do not cause harm to human health, unlike psychotropic substances, to get rid of the pain caused by life in the postmodern era. Meditation connects you to your own inner source of satisfaction and joy, which naturally disperses the clouds of depression.
- Stress-related illnesses. Headaches, digestive disorders, heart disease, cancer, and the rise in stress-related illnesses are a reflection of the collective inability to cope with the instability and fragmentation that characterize our time. It feeds a huge and expensive "worthwhile health care system that only masks the deep problems caused by fear, stress and disorientation. Numerous scientific studies have shown that regular meditation helps to avoid many stress-related diseases.