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.