Choices

There are a whole lot of them and not all of them are simply either/or like Tony Blair was trying to tell people, it's not as easy as Should I stay or should I go? Unfortunately the choices he made weren't very popular since the people he trusted and that trusted him made some poor choices.



Through experience hopefully we learn from the consequences of our choices methods of making better choices. That doesn't always happen though, as George Santayana has often be quoted as saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The lessons of the 60's seemed to have been ignored, and we're having to face all of those tough choices again. I was very puzzled by that until I found a possible way to explain it by what Ken Wilber calls Boomeritis a pathological state of consciousness that particularly afflicts Baby Boomers. Boomeritis is characterized by relativism, narcissism, and an aversion to hierarchy.



Part of what the problem was in order to break the bonds of conformity the held the culture in sway beforehand was that people fell victim to narcissism so instead of protesting the war, civil rights and other freedoms for equality sake, a lot of peopl did it for selfish reasons, so that they have to face those choices again since they didn't learn from them the last time.

Boomers do happen to have a particular and, of course, unique historical role in this development. As Ken Wilber writes, "The Boomers, to their great credit, were the first major generation in history to develop this capacity. That's a very important point.... The Boomers moved beyond the previous cultural stages of traditionalism and ... scientific modernism ... and pioneered a postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural understanding.... And that is exactly why the Boomers spearheaded civil rights, ecological concerns, feminism, and multicultural diversity. That is the 'high' part of the mixture, the truly impressive part of the Boomer generation and the explosive revolutions of the sixties...." These revolutions, as partial as they have been, changed forever our sense of human possibility and refashioned the contours of human identity."

That was the part of the positive choices made from the lessons of history, but the part they are doomed to repeat are the narcissism, naturally. Wilber is certainly not the only one who has noticed—how could one not?!—that the boomer generation, which unself-consciously and even proudly wears the appellation "the Me generation," is more than a bit stuck on itself—and has left something sticky on the generations that have followed. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Robert Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart have beautifully and poignantly documented how self-involved and isolated we are. Concerned critics have despaired at how this inflated self-involvement has ripped the social fabric and, grasping to bring order to the chaos created by this unparalleled selfishness, they have often, futilely, called for a return to traditional values. Yet these problems can never be solved by looking backward. The world is changing at warp speed. There is no way back nor is there a "back" to go to. Wilber does what no other critic of the cultural scene has done: he not only elaborates in agonizing detail the corrosive effects of "that strange mixture of very high cognitive capacity... infected with rather low emotional narcissism," but he places it within an evolutionary context and, in so doing, points to a possibility for humanity beyond boomeritis. The solution to boomer narcissism cannot come from looking to the past but only in realizing the demand of the future.

So that some of the choices become somewhat of a paradox like that of the Bodhisattva in that Bodhisattvas take an extra vow of not attaining Enlightenment before all sentient beings have achieved complete Nirvana. But in order to balance things out you have to do both, work on own enlightenment and everyone elses at the same time

Part of that balance is having a good circulation of energy in the chakras that allows you to make better choices, since most of the poor ones come from being stuck in a single perspective with the others blocked

Anodea Judith wrote the best book about balancing your chakras, adding harmony to your life with them and now she produced the best video detailing that.

One of the harder choices how to use the fire in the solar plexus chakra since unless it is tamed and channeled it can burn.

Keeping the liberating current balanced with the manifesting current is a series of delicate choices.

But as Ken Wilber was talking about once you've gotten a more balanced viewpoint and past the "aversion to hierarchy" there is a priority that helps focus your judgement and refine your choices. The more views and perspectives that you can include, the better your choices can be.