Higher Laws Part 5

In this complex world of making a living and obeying higher laws, I would be naive to suggest that we would all go one way or the other. It would be impossible, or next to impossible for all of us to throw away all confines to modern life and simply make art. It would not work. It just wouldn't. How could it? Who would teach the children? Who would grow the food? Who would fix our teeth? No, if all of us really listened to those higher laws, those driving forces, those things that compel us to make art, and then followed those laws to the letter, not only would the system vanish, we'd all die of starvation.

However, the opposite is nearly as bad. I do not want to make a grim prediction for the future much less the present. However, I think the higher laws are blatantly or at least lazily being ignored by way too many of us. I really do feel like we are bombarded by too much all the time. I feel like there is too much media, too much allure of the next great thing. I feel like the old fashion constrictions like church and state do not seem so bad now in light of pills and screens. Again, this is just my observation, and I am doing my best not to be so grim.

I have noticed that many people in this modern era have more free time than any of us should probably have. And rather than spending that free time wisely, it seems to me that most people burn that time being awake but half asleep idling in front of a screen. Remember this when I tell you, looking at a screen is looking at someone else's imagination. This other imagination is designed to place products and services for you to buy.

Improper use of free time is not just confined to screens. There are many ways to squander free time. There are the drugs, the inactive time and overeating. It's a culture of control and entertainment, I'm afraid. And of all the entertainment available for us, it's been my notice that eating and dining out is more of an amusement rather a time to take sustenance.

Please do not condemn idle time. Condemning idle time outright would be certain death. With idle time comes rejuvenation. There is creation, and there is recreation. I am a supporter of creation, especially the creation of art, of new ideas, of a better humanity. Recreation, in essence, is to recreate creation. Spending time with loved ones, with nature, with one's own thoughts may be idle time since there may not be work involved, but it is time well spent.

At the end of life, when we are withered bodies of old people dying in beds, we will not remember the television shows we watched. We will not remember the products we bought with the money we traded our time for or the fact that those products eventually made their way to landfills. We will not remember all the extra hours that we billed at work or the extra money we made. Those are all very temporary things that do not amount to much.

No, we will, at the end of the line, remember all the worthwhile human endeavors. We will remember the way certain light looked at certain times. We will think of our loved ones. We will remember our fulfilled hours. And perhaps that's really the task at hand: making more hours fulfilled than not.

Also at this end of life model, how many of us will wish that we had obeyed the higher laws more? How many of us will begrudge the time left because at the end of life it is not enough time to do all the thing we wanted to do? I suspect that there will be more of this sort of thought in the final days than how much money we made, or how successful our financial endeavors were. Remember all we have is time, and should be pursuit our higher laws, we have all the time in the world.

I know that we cannot let go of living or of making a living and dedicate ourselves to life, the life of those higher laws. It's just not feasible. But I know we can be selective over how we chose to spend out time. Should we need 8 hours out of the day for sleep and another 8 for work, that leaves us with another 8 hours, or a whole third of life. How do we choose to spend it?

Incidentally, being mindful of how spend our time and how we can put these minutes or hours to obeying our higher laws, may not make us happy. But it's got to make us happier than idling in front of mindless tv and arsenic laced deep fried chicken.