Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

My son and I went together on a Bangkok River Boat Tour. It was a nice relief from the bombardment of advertising that floods the senses downtown. It was a reprieve from constantly making choices, yet, ironically, it was a restoration of our judgment.

One of the key aspects of restoring our own ability to judge is recognizing the roles of time and money, our physical sensory space, and our attention. Our attention is our entry into this world and it is a two-way street between our authentic self and the world we inhabit. But we don’t just inhabit this world; it also inhabits us. However, mass media vies for our attention which connects the former two to our physical sensory space. Mass media uses our attention to occupy and colonize our identities. A smell triggers a craving; a sight instigates a desire; a temperature moves us to a behavior.  But mass media occupies our attention, our time, our sound and smell environment and takes up the time of our attention to effect us to certain choices.   

We live in an age of information overload. Our televisions and the Internet are flooding our senses with a myriad of things. Researchers carefully craft all the advertisements we see to prime us to think certain thoughts and take certain actions. A particular color, a special tone in the voice, a slight gesture with the eyes—all are designed to do one thing, and one thing alone: influence our minds. They affect us just enough that the subsequent thoughts we have seem like our own, as if they are rational.

The result is a constant process of external acquisition – of material goods in the market, of connection on social media, of sex, of thrills, of entertainment. If, on occasion, we do look inward, we feel a sense of emptiness and fear. Not knowing what to do with it, we try to fill that emptiness with some external source of gratification.

Yet emptiness is important. If we experience that emptiness as a negative we have become disconnected from who we are. This disconnect is one of the main reasons why we end up in painful life situations.

Yet the emptiness can be experienced positively. Is there a way to rediscover that connection with ourselves? To feel centered, and confident about who we are; to experience and understand our emotions, feelings, and desires clearly; to know our strengths and acknowledge our limitations?

Can we know ourselves from moment to moment, every day, not with words or descriptions, but with an actual perception of our inner selves being intact and authentically ours? In other words, we do not have to live out a story, but instead, we experience a reality.

A strong connection like this is sometimes all we need, and in some cases, all we have, to keep us sane in this evolving world.