We have traveled so much these past twenty years. Over fifty countries. We are starting to get a taste of what is happening to humanity.

With our home base in the USA, it is hard to see a phenomenon that is the cause of so much suffering all over the globe. The phenomenon is so pervasive in the USA that every citizen is like a fish swimming around and not realizing we are in this huge artificial tank. What I’m talking about is the successful marketing that connects personal happiness and success with the accumulation of material things and money.

In the 1950’s, marketing got enhanced from simple persuasion techniques to a science of connecting to and manipulating basic human needs and emotions. For the last seventy years the science of manipulating human needs has been honed to a level that most of humanity is totally unaware of.

We all naively think we are making hundreds of decisions ourselves every day – about what to do, what to say, where to go, what to buy, etc.  But after over a quarter million ads digested, we need to understand that we no longer know that person inside us that does not have this thick advertising overlay.

Because of this bombardment of carefully crafted messages, it is reasonable to be suspicious about every want and desire and decision we experience.

On a global scale, we see the end result of this saturation of marketing messages as ever-expanding desire for material things and increasing wealth. I see it in China, SE Asia, India, Central and South America. Basically everywhere.

I am not talking about raising the standard of living of a population. What is happening is quite different from that. Those billions of people who are under the spell of marketing are not motivated to ensure basic human needs are met by the people around them. The marketing is programmed to create consumers whose motivation is personal gain, not community gain.

So is the situation hopeless? Are we going to continue eating up the resources of the planet to satisfy these material pursuits? Will the climate become unlivable? Will wars that are increasingly transparent grabs of resources continue to grow?

Of course each of us can’t be an agent for solving this problem if we ourselves are under the marketing spell. So the first order of business is to free ourselves.

When I first became aware of this issue, I believed I would have to flee to the pampas area of Argentina to get away from the marketing. I soon realized that the rural Ozark area would do as well. And gradually I have learned that the process of freeing ourselves from marketing can be done anywhere.

It is a gradual release that takes time, but anyone can pursue this path. James Joyce, in his novel “Ulysses”, talked about a character who lived a couple feet from his body. Not only are most of us not in touch with the direct experience of being a body, our minds are hinged on the past and future, when the only real experience is this present moment.

The process of getting free of the ‘fake news’ of marketing, often goes by the name of meditation. But it is much simpler than that label implies. Right now or any time (and regularly) you can close your eyes, relax, and place your attention on your breathing or any actual real sensation anywhere in the body. Your mind will resist and head off into the past or future, just keep bringing it back. Eventually your center of gravity will shift to more presence and less la-la. It’s when your mind is in la-la land that marketing slips into your being and sets to work manipulating your thoughts, desires and actions. You will find yourself more and more avoiding places, devices and situations where advertising is dominant.

As you continue to practice this focus on what is real, you will build up a bit of resistance or immunity to most of the effects of marketing messages. Marketers realize there is a certain small (less than 10%) of the population that is already virtually unreachable by all their methods. You can gradually move deeper into the ground of the ‘unreachables’.

In this place of the unreachables, you will find some pleasant surprises. There can be a bonding between unreachables that doesn’t happen when minds are in la-la land. There are sometimes deep agreements and consensus that seem to arise in unreachables as if they were part of the organic structure of the natural world (they are). We may even find that there is a critical mass that can be reached, where the world as we know it can be fundamentally altered.

You are in control of reality. You get to decide how your world works. Happiness does not depend on external situations. You can generate happiness by making the decision to create happiness. To create love. To create peace. To create freedom.

Living in Bali these past two months, I see an entire culture practicing resistance to rampant materialism. Four million people here and basically all of them are making daily offerings, “canang sari”, where it is a meditation to create these offerings, place them, and activate them. The offerings are meant to invite the positive and deter the negative and develop deep harmony with man, the earth, and the world of unseen forces. Even with five million tourists visiting each year, their culture remains strong, and they export happiness and send well wishes to all. Its an inspiration to know the work these people are engaged in.

 

Now that we have two very young grandsons, I want to record some of the stories from my life so they can enjoy them at some point in the future. Like you, I bet we would all love to see and hear our grandparents or great grandparents talking about how their life was ‘back in the day.’
So one of my retirement projects is going to be to make a series of YouTube videos to share with my new grandchildren – and who knows maybe their children and beyond too.
I want to start with the stories that had the most impact on me and I’ll share a written version of the first one here with y’all…
I want to tell this story, so it is in the record at least somewhere. The video version is here.
I believe it was the summer of 1960. I was living at 729 Irving Avenue in Elk River Minnesota. I’m not sure of the date, but it was during the summer and it was an almost clear day with very little breeze. I was in little league and had just played a game at what was then the Handke Junior High School down in the hole where we had an ice skating rink in the winters.
I was riding my red Schwinn bicycle back to home in the mid to late afternoon. I turned off Jackson avenue on 7th street and got on the alley to come the last block. I had on my red Texaco baseball cap (they were sponsoring my team) and I had my baseball glove in the front bent up metal bin.
As I approached the middle of the block, I jumped off my bike and began to walk it through the thick sand in the alley at the Madsen family house. As I got through the sand and came to our property, I looked up.
What I saw was a huge round object partially behind the north-most of our three large elm trees on 8th street. It was drifting, silently and slowly to the southeast.
I ditched my bike by the small Russian olive tree at the back of our yard and ran around the small hedge to get a better look.
The object was now beginning to go directly over our house. It was less than 100 yards away from me – maybe around 50 yards away. It was somewhat larger in diameter than our house was long, which would make it around 75 feet across. It was maybe 30 feet tall in the center. It was mostly a golden-brown color with some blacker areas. The panels around the edge were smooth. I didn’t see any windows. There were a couple thin silver or silver-black pole like objects coming out the top near the center. The object was barely rotating, if at all.
It was drifting just above the treetops, I watched it as I walked quickly toward Irving avenue. It went just above the row of tall poplar trees on the far side of Irving avenue. I stood at the top of our property on Irving avenue and watched it drift over the new addition and finally out of sight.
It seemed like a very long time, but it was probably less than 3 minutes that I saw it.
That evening at dinner I asked my parents about what I had seen. I was excited that it must be some new experimental aircraft that I hadn’t heard of. Neither of my parents could tell me what I had seen.
The next morning, very early, I went down to the post office before sunrise to get my bundle of Minneapolis Tribune morning papers to deliver. I usually spent a couple minutes reading a bit of the paper. On page 2 in the very leftmost column was a story about what people had seen and reported in the sky the previous day. The reports were mostly from northern suburbs of Minneapolis and included eye witness reports from police officers. Minneapolis northern suburbs were exactly in the direction I saw the object going. Their descriptions were like mine.
The newspaper called the object an ‘unidentified flying object’ – a UFO.
An experience like that is not easy to forget or dismiss. I really wanted a better answer to what I had seen. When I was a senior in high school I wrote my thesis on the UFO question.
A life time of thinking about this question has resulted in some shifting of my reality away from the consensus reality.
Are we the only intelligent life in the universe?
Once I understood how vast the universe was, it was clear to me that it was extremely unlikely that we would be the only intelligent life. And beyond that, it occurred to me that it was also extremely unlikely that we were the most intelligent life in the universe.
Has that intelligent extraterrestrial life made contact with earth?
That also seems extremely likely and it has probably been going on for many millenniums.
So, although most people are not inclined to give these questions much thought and simply subscribe to the consensus reality that we alone are the only intelligence in the universe, I live in a world where we human beings are of very limited, even primitive intelligence.
If we had just a smidgen more intelligence, we would see racism, war and suffering from poverty all go away. I have faith that much of humanity is moving, slowly, in that direction.
We think it quite stupid now to think the earth is the center of the universe, but that is what humanity assumed until just a few hundred years ago.
Soon after that, the notion that the solar system was the center of the universe collapsed.
And more recently it became clear that even the Milky Way Galaxy is not anywhere near the center of the universe either.
Someday, I hope very soon, we will realize that the seat of universal intelligence does not rest inside the human race on Earth. And with that realization we will see we have a long and exciting path of evolution ahead of us.

Loren Parmley  said as a comment to a video we posted on Facebook of this week’s rental space: “I don’t get it. Rich American’s live well in foreign countries while the native people’s are displaced or live in squalor. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older?” https://www.facebook.com/luke.lundemo/posts/10157363978090299?comment_id=10157366483475299

Loren raises a deeply important issue.

Charlotte and I have traveled all over the world – every continent – with the aim of understanding and appreciating this amazing planet and its people.

For the last 20 years our ‘home base’ was in Jackson, Mississippi. While in the USA we worked hard on several causes we believe in:

Local Sustainable Food Systems

Renewable, Sustainable Energy Systems

Economic and Environmental Justice

Protection of the Climate and Environment

And more…

Everywhere we go, in the US or elsewhere we actively and directly work on these issues. We believe that if you are American and you are rich, you are not using your wealth wisely. You should be giving all the financial resources you don’t need to causes and organizations you believe to be doing the most effective work in relieving suffering. We have never paid ourselves more than $10.50 an hour and lived at the lowest level of middle class income and supported our two kids through college graduation.

As for being Americans, we believe it is much more important to identify as human beings. Becoming aware of our inherent privileges that we nearly all have should be a big issue for us privileged folks. With those privileges comes a responsibility to work toward a world with less privilege where basic needs of all people are provided.

Worldwide poverty is a moral problem. We can end poverty by redirecting military budgets to meeting real human needs. But in Mississippi candidates that have that morality either never make it to the ballot or get less than 1% of the vote.

So here is the bottom line for us. We are glad to be away from the US economy where we are no longer being consumers (as conscientious as we were) feeding the corporate greed that is destroying the livability of the planet and the main force behind obscene levels of income inequality in the US and around the world.

We now only own what we are carrying with us. We are closer in terms of possessions to the world average than we have been in fifty years.

We feel really good about putting a bigger portion of our money directly in the hands of people who really need it and will use it to directly improve the quality of their and their families lives.

As we get older, we are constantly trying to refine our lifestyle to be ever more effective agents of positive change. There is no reason for that to let up or stop because of age.

Wherever we are we can try to learn and understand the languages that people around us are using. We can try to understand, respect and appreciate their cultural values. We can use our skills, our intelligence, our privileges, our wealth toward the goal of reducing suffering.

It was easier to see, understand and work with suffering in Mississippi than in Minnesota where I grew up. It was easier to see, understand and work with suffering in urban Bali than in Mississippi. And now it is easier to see, understand and work with suffering in rural Bali than the urban, more Westernized areas.

Although being new in a country, a good deal of attention has to go toward getting settled in, finding a place to live and a community, learning the language and all the styles of living – at the same time a person can continue some of the easiest ways of being a social and environmental activist.

The single use plastics of the global petro-chemical industry are washing up on every shore in the world. Here is certainly no exception. We’ve collected and filled large bags full of plastic from beaches here. We refuse plastic bags. We support restaurants that use non-plastic straws and recyclable containers. We talk with people to build support for a ban on single use plastics.

More and more farmers here are buying in to another aspect of the petro-chemical industry and spraying their rice fields with poison. We seek out organically grown rice here in stores and restaurants.

We express kindness and respect to absolutely every person we meet – regardless of their economic standing. We use the services of people we have found to be community activists.

We use the Indonesian language every change we get and study it every day to increase our vocabulary. We support, respect and participate (to the extent allowed) in local religious ceremonies.

Financially every day we are transferring wealth from the US to Indonesia with a significant amount going directly or almost directly to local people with very little.

We have a daily practice of meditation which helps us keep focused on what is important and helps us to remember to also be kind to each other and ourselves.

To bring all this home, I’m going to slightly rephrase Loren’s comment:

“I don’t get it. Rich American’s live well in America while the Native American people are displaced or live in squalor. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older?”