Sound and Fury
As the world spins faster, it’s time for a shift.
Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with family, and there was love, food, music, and television. As my very young nieces and nephews ran around, gleefully gifting me heartfelt stick-figure drawings on scrap paper birthday cards (with a couple staples “as decoration“), the images on the screen behind them stood out. First mostly light news – clips of new cars and technologically exciting test-drives, and popular vacation spots. Then more news, conversation I couldn’t hear, and later some music videos.
Seeing so many distant news images so quickly cycle in front of me, I was impacted by the flash of motion (I don’t have tv connected at home, I just choose videos online, and tend to watch slower things). There’s so much happening in the world, all the time, when you think about it – so much life and confusion and change. Looking at the screen, at a glossy version of the world, the line from Macbeth came to mind: “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” It wasn’t depressing, though, but subtly entrancing.
Look at all the new cars, the new phones and other gadgets. Look at the celebrity gossip, at all the change, and new stars you’ve never seen suddenly central to the moving spectacle of entertainment news. Look at more significant technological developments in healthcare and energy. Look at all the politics, the game of thrones of falling outs and power plays; at the shifting structures of global power that affect billions of lives, and at famous icons of selfish apathy and determined passion.
Most of us live in quickly shifting social structures, in personally transitory positions. We’re all growing older, our lives are always changing, and we’re almost always looking for something better. That “better” might be recognizably superficial, like a fitter figure, a new car, or a reality tv gig, or more meaningful, like a new degree, a significant development at work, or an influential seat in global affairs. But all is part of that moving, shifting bubble of winning and losing, of fortune and tragedy, sound and fury, and it spins ever faster as the world grows more developed and societies become more complex.
In Europe in the Middle Ages this was known as the wheel of fortune, or “the world.” The wheel of fortune spins and may seem to stop at random, dealing us events both good and bad. This is the experience of the world, or the worldly, and all its noise, pleasant and unpleasant. We can do the best we can to control that noise, inventing technologies and strategies to keep life more pleasant than not – that has been the largely successful focus of the Scientific Enlightenment and secular ethics that followed, and is the normal focus of most of our world today, on both collective and individual levels – but something is still missing, and noise remains noise. There is a depth and an awareness underlying that humanity has not yet collectively discovered, in the Middle Ages known as the divine, beyond the events and surface of the world.
While advancing technology is an increasingly potent tool that gives us greater control and “empowers” us, that’s not always good. A tool amplifies the will of its user, as an amp does the expression of a guitarist. If you’ve been to enough house parties, you know that such amplification can be either a great or a terrible thing. Jokes aside, the ever-increasing amplification of a fragmented and confused human will is the reason for this so brightly and quickly shifting bubble of sound and fury – and for the dark realities it implies, like mass consumption, deforestation, waste and climate change.
Of course, humanity has always been fragmented and confused in this way, and certain contemplatives, the most famous of which are central religious figures such as Jesus and the Buddha, have always pointed that out. It’s not that some previous age was “better,” and things are “worse” now, at least not in essence. Humanity has always been possessed by a degree of selfishness and streaks of cruelty, and generally we are now more materially comfortable and prosperous than ever before (as an entire race, despite vast inequalities between groups and individuals). Now, though, our central human confusion is magnified by the sophistication of our age. With more powerful tools, we are generally better (as compared to the Middle Ages, for example) at directing our immediate circumstances and preventing the kinds of bad events we can imagine and foresee – like famine, disease, blatant human rights abuses or animal cruelty – but are creating consequences of unprecedented scale (most evidently climate change) through our blind spots. Such mixed impacts of development in our world are the result of an amplified dysfunction in our collective state of being and perceiving.
Who are we, underlying all this noise? What is it, ultimately, that we’re endlessly seeking? This is the age in which that discovery becomes a collective imperative, because only a radical shift in humanity’s perspective will end the partly dissonant tune we are now playing so loudly that it’s throwing off the very planet. When we come into balance and clarity in ourselves, we’ll use technology differently, and globally it will empower harmony rather than a mixed bag of inspiration and dysfunction. As radical as it sounds, collectively that shift in perspective needs to be our primary focus now, and further development a supplemental, secondary focus. We are in a global crisis symptomatic of our underlying confusion. We must see that symptom for what it is and focus on resolving our central dysfunction, shifting our paradigm instead of further amplifying it.
Despite such global crisis, things are ultimately ok. Seeing who we are under all the world noise is seeing that we are actually much more than ok. Inwardly, deeply, we are always vibrant and healthy. Even while the planet begins to react to our noise, we are still ultimately one with it, at root, and in the potential realization of that oneness is the possibility of resolution. As the Buddhist analogy describes, we are also the water, not just the waves – and as such we can crash into each other and even into the planet, if we must, in a foam of rash destruction, and yet remain water: in essence what we are, have always been, and always will be. But that is where explanation ends, and you have to look inwardly for yourself, taking part in this global paradigm shift, to truly understand.
Can you step back from all the noise and, seeing through sound and fury, rest in the awareness of a simpler fulfillment? Can you internally let go of the burden of so much complexity, and awaken to the joys of being, breathing, playing, and connecting? Can you remember that spontaneous naturalness of childhood, returning to it with intention?
Near the end of yesterday’s birthday party my nephew asked, with an expectant, searching look, if I still had the card he’d given me. I opened my wallet and showed it to him, folded there, to his delight. We looked at each other and knew between us the same love, appreciation, and care, over a stick figure and a staple. After all, that basic connection was, from the start, the great meaning and intention of his gift. Isn’t it ultimately what we’re all looking for? Amidst the struggles of our day, nothing could be simpler, more pressing, or more important, and we’re always free to realize it.
Please feel free to get in touch for meditation classes or spiritual counseling over video.
Originally posted on my blog, Conor y El Ser.
