The Quality of Life is Change

An individual's ability and power to change -- is the quality of life they experience. Implied in this, is that they are very much aware of their environment -- which is the context in which they live their lives, and successfully adapt to their specific and unique challenges, so that whatever arises, they are fully capable of meeting those challenges, and especially, to grow from them to even greater capabilities of expression and actualization.

That is what the schools were originally conceived for -- and not as they have become, merely to continue the status quo -- of not responding to the present circumstances and challenges, but to enshrine the past and previous responses, as the only ones still possible -- even though they are obviously not working and not responsive to the challenges of the present time -- only hoping that if they stall long enough, the old "normal" will return again.

Thus, there is really no belief and conviction that what they do really and actually matters, but if they keep on doing what they've always done before, that is what matters. So there is this disconnect between cause and effect --in favor of going through the motions as a ritual they hope will produce favorable results -- just as primitive people once danced to the gods, hoping to be favored. But that they could directly effect and influence any outcome, was an aspiration that was beyond belief and expectation; they were in fact, heretical and sacrilegious, and could even get one burned at the stake, or tortured in other ways until they capitulated to the futility of it all -- in God's master plan to keep humankind subservient, humble and powerless (despairing) -- as many still think is the way it should be.

That state of powerlessness and hopelessness, we now refer to as the Dark Ages -- in which few even thought to question authority, lest they face The Grand Inquisitor, which was that day's version of political/social/moral correctness -- as determined by the Church and its handmaiden, the universities, which was the training ground for the Church -- and not its antithesis modern scholars will now have us believe. They were rooted in the same institution, the same status quo -- of which anything else, was the excommunication from the society of the right-thinking brotherhood. Beyond was only the wilderness, perdition, hellfire, and unthinkable horrors.

So the thinking that any individual could control their own destiny and fate, is a recent development -- in the history of humankind, that once it got out, grabbed hold and accelerated in modern and contemporary civilization to where now, it doesn't seem far-fetched for those who want to, to custom-design their own best world -- without having to wait for it as the reward in the afterlife. But it is not just a matter of going out and buying it -- as the only thing available in the marketplace of ideas, goods and services, because it is out there with a million other things competing for one's time, attention and money.

The value of money, is the greater good one can exchange it for -- and not just because one has infinitely more money, but nothing of greater value they can exchange it for. In that case, their money is worthless, because they cannot exchange it for any greater good -- but like old King Midas, just have more gold -- and everything they touch, turns to more gold. But man does not live by gold alone. At some point, they have to be able to convert it to satisfy other needs -- like food, shelter, clothes, tools, etc. Sometimes, it is even the air, water, and sunlight -- that we take for granted, but is essential to life, and the very foundations of it.

But the hardest things to see, is that which is all around us -- as the premises of our existence. That, of course, is the obvious.