Essay for
Jan 2004

Macdonalds Spirituality

There appears to be a growing trend toward instant everything, neatly packaged and easy to assimilate. Thinking is being bound within minimization, which does have its upside side as it is easily digested and recalled or thoughtlessly regurgitated. This minimization may be neat packaging, but the substance, depth and breadth of what is packaged is missing or obscured by the quick assimilation. And it is substance that gives lasting spirit nutrition, creating experiential growth. Being spiritually undernourished arises from the constant consumption of intellectually prepared fast foods that have no lasting substance. Spirit hunger will never be satisfied with neatly packaged quotations or memorable pronouncements, no matter how good they are. They are dessert but the main course is missing. You will constantly crave more of the same, wondering why you continually remain famished. Minimization can be a superficial intake of plastic food, posing as real. It is easy and quick to obtain, but also an artful deceit that is becoming the norm, as plastic has replaced the reality of experientially knowing the substance — neatly packaged. That does not mean plastic food is indigestible and ineffectual, just plastic. When you are starving to death plastic food may artificially suppress the appetite. But it never satisfies.

Neat packaging is undeniably supportive, but the substance is missing. The substance is discoverable only when you tear the package apart and probe for the filling, and that takes effort and risk. Effort, as you actually have to work at it; and risk, as you can easily get burnt. Substance is depth of understanding that is personally useable and directional in your daily life — breadth is insight. Neat packaging is attractive and can be inspiring, but the depth and breadth of the package requires you to open it and investigate what is inside and how it has been made. Neat packaging, for all its benefit, can instill investigative lethargy leading to empty intellectual parroting. The value of the package is easily missed, like eating dessert with no main meal. Dessert is great, but endless consumption will make you sick while still left craving something of substance.

The amount of information that is now available, on any subject, is staggering. Minimization may appear as a necessary distillation to present a core understanding. And it easy to forget or skip over the enormous amount of investigative work of those who created that core understanding, and simply take the core as what the understanding is. But the core is just a distillation of the total, and although it may stand on its own it is not the total: the total still requires individual effort to discover the core for oneself. The presentation of the core is only a pointer; it is not the substance. The core is the dessert whilst the experiential understanding is the substantial main course. The core or the neat package is easily devoured, but the hunger remains. As pleasant as dessert is, it is still just dessert.

The neat package, core or dessert, is someone's experiential condensed wisdom. That neat package is not yours; unless you can make it yours by going through the same or similar processes the other person has and arrive at the same end. Once there, then it is yours as well, but not until then. Until you arrive at that end, the repetition of that neat package is superficial wisdom, having no experiential depth and no personal substance. Superficial wisdom is parroting digestible bits of condensed wisdom, presenting a facade of experiential wisdom. Or, it can simply be the sharing of dessert.

Prepackaged information can be the deceit of learning by exploiting chunks of condensed wisdom at the expense of experiential knowledge, creating a society of secondhand one-liners. The superficiality of this form of learning can best be described as Macdonalds spirituality: their are many outlets producing the same form of food, their product is quick to get, easily digested and best of all it requires no effort on your part.

Are we developing into a Macdonalds society where only the superficial is necessary? Where 'things', neatly packaged, become more important than understanding the 'how' and 'why' of what is packaged. Where we invest the majority of our time upon some form of work, relationship or prosperity issues that are all security based. Where how you look, dress or live is more important that how you think and act. Where we become armchair witnesses to suffering, encapsulated in three to five minute bursts on the television, followed by another and then another, ending with a story to leave feeling better about the world. But we can forget today's disasters, for tomorrow's news will bring more of the same, just somewhere else.

Are we losing our ability to feel compassionate simply because we are learning to block it due to the impersonal endless onslaught of media induced pain. Witnessing children dying of hunger, mutilated bodies from war, ravished economies that create greater pain to follow, natural disasters, local shootings, terrorism, vandalism, road rage and local family crises demand a response, and yet before one can grasp the extent of one disaster another is in your face. Are we being immunized against compassion by the constant drain upon it by the series of endless tragedies, with one disaster following another? Are appeals for disaster funds beginning to fall upon deaf ears, as the string of successive tragedies requires you to choose the disaster that affects you the most? Are we becoming desensitized to the pain of others, simply by the overwhelming amount of instant world information that we are afflicted with daily? Is our compassion being neutralized simply to survive in our modern industrial and technological society?

A hundred years ago known disasters were local and anything further than your locality took communication months before you heard of it. In days past living was simpler, possibly harder but simpler. Today all world disasters are in you face on the news, albeit superficially, but in you face just the same. Instant world news of endless tragedies and suffering can potentially be breeding a race of desensitized human beings that can no longer access that compassion unless it affects them directly or personally. As a society are we standing upon the threshold of an uncompassionate abyss that could consume our feeling thoughts and actions, eliminating a personal capability that could have potentially defined our existence? Is the abyss becoming visible by the directional manipulation of endless five-minute media coverage of ceaseless dramas throughout the world? The dramas, played out somewhere else, relentlessly come at us in rapid succession providing little to no space to assimilate before another is in you face. And here is where nicely packaged plastic food comes to the rescue, easing an unrealized compassionate burden to once again make you feel good. This does not even take into account how those media dramas are portrayed, as the drama can be directionally manipulated and colored by which part of the whole is emphasized. Daily news, for all its importance, can be a nightmare of hidden deceit and controlled deception, desensitizing and exploiting individual compassion.

Is the animal nature of man controlling human potential? Or is human potential being manipulatively entrapped, destroying the potential by the endless plastic food we consume, both physically and metaphorically. Is our mutilated or unrealized compassionate responses pacified by the consumption of assimilated neat packages to prevent us from getting sick? Or is it really making us sick and we have become so desensitized we cannot recognize it? Is the demand upon our compassion so great that we have gone into overload and shut the lot down to preserve our human integrity? Whatever happened to simplicity and sincerity?

Plastic food, whether you appreciate it or not, will ultimately make you sick no matter how neatly it is packaged. Eating and assimilating plastic food in neat packaging is superficial nourishment, and all of the forgoing is plastic food. It is dessert in many forms, albeit containing some that has gone off, but dessert nonetheless. Dessert does not get to the core of 'why' and 'how', and there is a 'why' and 'how'. It just takes courage to look and tenacity to continue looking. Investigation into your existence goes from simple to complex, and wonderfully enough returns to simplicity. It is an interesting journey that does end in simplicity and sincerity, with an enormous amount of trying times in-between. But then you can eat your dessert, as you know where the main meal is.

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