Goldilocks as Buddha
There is a fundamental divide – let’s call it The Divide – running through our world and ourselves. It pitches the masculine against the feminine, quantity against quality, economics against ecology, hierarchy and ‘power-over’ against empowerment, the external against the internal, and ‘doing’ against simply ‘being’. And these are just a few examples drawn from the many in the same theme.
The divide runs either side of a middle fulcrum point. But the scales are not in balance, having long been tipped over to one side.
The modern world slides down this incline. The prevailing quantitative and material view of things fuels the ongoing drive to try and turn pretty much everything (even fresh air and dreams) into either a saleable commodity or a mere numbers game where the questions are reduced to ‘how much’, ‘how many’, ‘how big’, ‘how fast’?
Thus economics – the study of the dimensions of our home (our world, our planet) – usually triumphs over ecology, the study of the inter-relationships within our home. And so the world mostly focuses on that which is measurable, whilst generally downgrading that which is not measurable or not easily measurable … or even deeming it not to exist in the first place.
This same drive has now entered even into the sphere of the mind. The dominant medical model attempts to categorise more and more incidences of emotional, personal and mental distress, turning them each into a neatly labelled ‘disorder’, ‘illness’ or ‘syndrome’. And the people involved become mere patients … passive recipients and consumers of the doctor-prescribed drugs that the commodity/material/bio-physical world-view – here in the shape of mega-businesses like Johnson & Johnson or GlaxoSmithKline – wishes to sell as the best treatment.
Spiral Scribbles 