During a visit to a doctor’s office, I was witness to an incredible phenomenon that reminded me of all the layers of assumptions we make every day about how our world works. I was in the office waiting for a friend for nearly 2 hours. On the table with the magazines, I noticed a tissue box that looked odd. Upon closer examination, I realized that the box was covered with advertisements from a drug company! That was just the beginning of an eye opening experience.
While sitting in the waiting room, working on my laptop computer, no less than 8 people representing 6 pharmaceutical companies came into the office. Every 15-20 minutes, a gift was given to the staff and armloads of free prescription drugs were given away.
When I asked about these visits, the receptionist confirmed that this happens all through the day, every day! I could not believe what I was seeing. During my short stay in the office, I observed:
1. Elaborate, polite bantering by one rep as she introduced her new replacement. “Oh, you’ll have to come visit us again,” the reception said to the woman who had been the rep assigned to the office. Then, the new rep got out her datebook and set up a time when she could take the staff out to lunch, “you know, like we did for you last Thanksgiving.” Then, they handed over four or five cartons of drugs.
2. Another rep walked up to the counter, very business-like, and handed a brightly colored plastic box containing candy to the receptionist. There were no words exchanged, no greetings. It was a ritual, acted out every week by this rep and the doctor’s staff. While the box was passed around, the rep handed over boxes and boxes of free drugs.
3. The next rep’s ritual involved cookies and she handed over a large tray, brightly wrapped with multi-colored cellophane. It was so odd to see such an elaborate gift given with no words exchanged, no “oh, I brought something for you” or “thanks!” Each was simply doing what was expected of them. Then, after handing over the boxes of her company’s drugs (at least 100 small boxes), the rep left the office to visit the next office, brightly colored cellophane trailing behind.
When I left the waiting room to use the restroom, I saw this gaggle of reps moving from doctor’s office to doctor’s office. They were running into each other in the hall, greeting each other warmly, then moving on to their next office.
This was simply business. All the reps were counting on a sacred truth of the pharmaceutical industry: the doctor with the most free drugs on hand is more likely to prescribe those drugs to their patients. But what about the TV commercial that proclaims “More doctors prescribe ______ over any other drug.” Sadly, they probably do so because that company is more effective at marketing (and has good gifts) than the others.
All this got me thinking about the pervasive influence that our corporate culture has on our lives. That influence is dramatic and insidious and interferes with our ability to make reasoned decisions, support effective legislation, and just live our lives according to the values we select. I think about this more and more as our environmental problems seem to get more complex and our leaders seem less likely to take action.
How many decisions and choices that we make are our own or actually the result of subliminal, repetitive, and constant advertising we have been exposed to from an early age? In fact, drug companies are now advertising in major newspapers and magazines and elaborate TV commercials with the banner “Ask your doctor about ______________.” Did you ever count the number of commercials you are exposed to? By age 5, most children in the U.S. see hundreds of thousands of commercials. We live in a culture which has 260,000 billboards, 17,000 newspapers, 12,000 periodicals, 27,000 video outlets, 400 million television sets, and well over 500 million radios (not including those in cars). We are awash with social conditioning that is virtually inseparable from our true self. Yet in order to fully comprehend our planetary (and personal) crises, we must learn to separate ourselves from the conditioning.
Our resistance to learning how to follow our heart may start early in school. Richard Heckler in Anatomy of Change offers a clue to the failings of our educational system:
Traditional education encourages us to live society’s image and discourages us from awakening to our deeper and more energetic impulses. We are not taught how to use ourselves in the learning process. Without knowing that, we lose our individuality by following the images that society and the media systematically place in front of us. We bury the intelligence of our body in order to be uniformly responsive and predictable, which marks the death of preverbal, preliterate wisdom.
The traditional, Western way of educating, particularly in science, by teaching facts and concepts and “scientific truths” results in a static and fixed sense of what is real. We grow up with the idea that there are absolute truths and that it is everyone’s goal to obtain a “stable” lifestyle that is free of change. How can a person so educated possibly feel a part of a universe that is based on constant change and upheaval? How can such a person ever feel comfortable identifying with the natural world? “We are never educated,” says Heckler, “into the how of living through change.”
We can only learn to be in connection with the natural world, and with our fellows on this world, by being fully present in our bodies, following our energy, and trusting our perceptions. Yet we have been taught that learning occurs by sitting still in an uncomfortable chair (or in a comfortable chair in front of the TV) and having someone lecture to us about someone else’s perceptions of the universe. Heckler says:
We become swallowers of history, language, and mathematics but are rarely encouraged to let go of that which is not meaningful or relevant. We also need to be taught how to sit so we may better receive; and how to appreciate the actual process of writing and drawing; and how to participate in the joy of flourish when the name we write is connected to who we are; and how to follow the interest generated by our deeper levels of excitement. True learning, receiving the transmission of experience, happens at a level much deeper than cognition. It is in the experience of the lived body that we have the opportunity to contact and learn from the process of being alive.
There is a deep conditioning that we have experienced since the Scientific Revolution. This conditioning takes many forms, but the most common in the West may be our ability to intellectualize as a form of diversion and evasion, a way to circumvent feeling. Heckler says that “becoming overinvolved in our thoughts is a way to avoid the emotions, gestures, and expressions that were at some time in the past responded to unfavorably or with disapproval.” In addition to being told that the natural world was wild and unsafe, most of us were told that we were awkward in our movements, that we couldn’t draw or be creative, and that you risk ridicule and censure if you do those things. Hence, there are many resistances to thinking on our own and trusting our judgement.
The conditioning we experience is a powerful obstacle to learning and opening up to the connections that exist in the natural world. This conditioning is a complex web that has been woven for a number of generations. It has a solid foundation of faulty assumptions created in a post-war environment, particularly in the United States, where the world was taught that the most powerful people are those who consume the most and who shelter themselves the most completely from the natural world. Climate controlled, insulated homes filled with all the modern “conveniences” became the symbols of power and affluence.
These values became the foundational teachings of our educational system, a system built upon the premise that farmers had to be trained to be the factory workers required to churn out the goods that we all needed to consume. This conditioning is heavily influenced by our media saturation that begins at birth (some would say even before birth) as our parents create gender roles and participate in the stereotyping that insidiously exists at every turn of the head. Our definitions of what it is to be safe and secure are fixed at an early age as we are taught to shelter ourselves from even the mildest temperatures and protect ourselves from nasty bugs and dirt. Revulsion to insects, rodents, and soil (called “dirt”), begins at an early age. We are taught from an early age that we need the latest vacuum cleaner to get every last bit of “dirt” out of our homes. Things that our culture reviles are called “dirt-y.”
Moving less in order to be more efficient and productive is part of our early training as well. We are on a constant quest for “labor-saving” devices that give us more time to do things. We want cars so we don’t have to walk places and we design our homes so that everything is “at our fingertips.” Minimizing movement is emphasized – even our chairs have wheels so that we can move around in our office without having to move our bodies.
This trend toward virtual immobility as a goal in our Western culture has had profound implications on our ability to feel, not only a connection to the natural world, but a connection to each other and ourselves as well. Bringing movement back into our lives can have a profound effect on our well-being. Heckler says that
When we place our attention in our body, we begin to feel, and our feeling connects us to our energy. Our energy then informs us of our direction and meaning in life. If we respond from our energy, we are responding from that part of ourselves that is least conditioned. If we act from our energy, and not from our ideas, social images, or what others expect, we feel enriched with genuine expression and life.
Our “conditioning,” which varies from individual to individual in content and intensity, may be the greatest obstacle we face. Awakening a relationship to our bodies and our senses is a way around much of that conditioning. In movement therapy classes I have taken, people from all walks of life moved and felt together as if they knew each other. Often, however, we knew nothing in the traditional sense about each other. Rarely did I know where the other people lived or where they worked or what their interests, prejudices, or politics were. Yet in these sessions, through dance movements alone, with a partner, or in groups, issues such as trust, love, fear, giving, receiving, and other profound emotions and states of being were explored.
Words have been so abused in our world. Definitions of such fundamental concepts as trust, safety, and security have been so co-opted by political forces that we cannot rely on language as the sole communicator of awareness. The U.S. Department of Defense doesn’t like to use the term “peace” in their documentation. Instead, they say “permanent pre-hostility.” Instead of the word bullet, they prefer “kinetic energy penetrator.” The invasion of Panama was called a “pre-dawn vertical insertion” and instead of saying soldiers were killed, they say they were “arbitrarily deprived of life.” Wrongly amputated legs in military hospitals are referred to as “therapeutic mis-adventures.” I wish I were joking, but these are real examples.
Even in our common, everyday language, assumptions abound about the way the world and society work and phrases abound that have terrible origins. We will often casually say that we have given someone the “third degree” when referring to questioning someone for information. Few realize, however, that this phrase comes from the 300 years of horror when 9 to 20 million women (and some men) were burned at the stake for witchcraft. The third degree was the final, and most horrible, level of torture when any victim said what their tormentor wanted them to say.
We will say that some idea is a “rule of thumb.” Yet this phrase refers to the time in old England when it was legal, and recommended, to beat your wife. You simply had to use a stick that was no wider than the width of your thumb. That was the “Rule of Thumb.”
Ever call someone a “stool pigeon?” This phrase comes from the days of the passenger pigeon, an amazing bird whose flocks, in the 1850s, would darken the U.S. skies for four hours as a 240 mile long by 1 mile wide flock passed overhead. Such a flock contained over 2 billion birds. By 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo, the species driven to extinction by relentless hunting and a complete lack of understanding of the population dynamics of this bird. It seems that the reason why there were so many of them was because they, for some reason, needed huge communities of birds to be present for successful mating and reproduction. They were extremely social birds and it wasn’t long before someone noticed that a live bird could be used as bait. A living passenger pigeon would be tied to a stool which was put out into a field. Within minutes, hundreds of birds would gather, to be shot or clubbed. This was the stool pigeon.
The energy of these origins lingers on in us all. The witch burning times lasted for 300 years. Six generations of children watched their mothers burn. How can we come to terms with that horror? Gay men are stilled called “faggots” to this day. How many know that this term comes from the times of the witch burning as well? Gay men were often collected together, tied in bundles, and burned in the witches’ fire. The term for a burning bundle of wood is a faggot.
Many of the scientific tools developed during the Scientific Revolution came directly from the inquisition’s tools for torture. Few know this grisly origin of much scientific methodology. Special interest groups have crafted how people perceive science. How often do we wait for “scientific proof” of the health impact of a toxic exposure when many have already died? One sick child or one dead person should be enough to suggest caution, yet thousands of chemicals that are known carcinogens are on the market today for political and economic reasons. We must find another language while we redefine common terms and erase other terms of horror from common usage.
We may need some quiet to make some sense out of all the conflicting information. We may need to turn off our TV’s, close the newspaper, and look inward. Heckler says that
We may need some quiet to make some sense out of all the conflicting information. We may need to turn off our TV’s, close the newspaper, and look inward. Heckler says that
There is a time to quiet ourself so that we may look at and listen to who we are. There is also a time, and a need, to go with our desires and urges. This is the path of passion. It is the making of a seasoned and rich soup that we call our process, the all of who we are.
Maybe that is it: finding out who we are - or at least realizing that we need to. The only way to do that may be to stop listening to the voices on the outside – and listen to our hearts. Then it won’t matter whose selling what.
We look with uncertainty
Beyond the old choices for
Clear-cut answers
To a softer, more permeable aliveness
Which is every moment
At the brink of death;
For something new is being born in us
If we but let it.
We stand at a new doorway;
Awaiting that which comes . . .
Daring to be human creatures.
Vulnerable to the beauty of existence.
Learning to love.
-- Anne Hillman
RESOURCES
1. Learn more about the U.S. military from those in the business from the Center for Defense Information. Their video, “The Language of War,” discusses the abuse of language by the military.
RESOURCES
1. Learn more about the U.S. military from those in the business from the Center for Defense Information. Their video, “The Language of War,” discusses the abuse of language by the military.
2. Learn about society’s campaign against women and the Earth that began long ago. Learn of the times of the witch burnings when the Catholic Church tried to extinguish the last vestige of our connections with the Earth. The film, the Burning Times (National Film Board of Canada) will open your eyes. Learn about it at http://www.amazon.com/Women-Spirituality-Burning-Times/dp/158350026X.
3. If you live in the Los Angeles area, experience the power of movement with Eve Athey Ray, MA, MFCC through her Movement Expression classes. She can be reached at http://www.evearay.com/. You can take a 2 hour introductory session or an intensive 9-week program. It will change your life.
5. Follow those who watch the media for abuses. One group is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Visit them at http://www.fair.org/.
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