Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 4
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 8)
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Why Our Minds Race Constantly
The alienated person is driven by insecurities toward symbiotic relations with others. The compensatory mechanisms to stay “sane” are governed by deep anxiety. The anxiety limits the alienated person’s ability to experience his/her full range of feelings. Thus the alienated person connects to other people via the anxious mind, not his/her deep feelings. This is a chief defense mechanism in Western society. In our society the constant and busy thinking process is a defense mechanism against key feelings: mainly the fears over facing who I am and the failure to experience a deep grounded “I” that can connect to myself and others. Normally the full fermenting of such fears is expressed with anxiety and worry thoughts in the mind in regard to people in our daily routines. Many times underneath there is a feeling of despair — a despair that we fail to connect with others and ourselves via the depth of our warm heart.
So, we experience the abstractions of the mind with negative anxiety type feelings. Some in the new age spiritual movement believe that the dominance of the mind in our society indicates that the mind and the thinking process are hostile in general to spiritual human development[12]. I do not believe that this is the case. When a the human potential can develop, the thinking process is not rationalizations governed by negative emotions and fears. When a person can develop his/her full humanity, the thinking process does not stand in opposition to positive spontaneous feeling of joy and aliveness. The original thinking and reasoning of the independent person[13] does not stand as an alien to nature and other humans; such thoughts usually enhance the feelings of aliveness and deeper self, as well as feelings of deep grounding with nature, humanity and the universe.
With the growing levels of stress our thoughts reflect increasingly emotions that are largely “negative”. In our society thinking is associated with anxiety and the inadequacy of the ungrounded self. Most people repeat the same thoughts in their head and waste a lot of energy on that. Such thoughts are expressions of their emotional boredom and depression, of their anger and stress; they are painful remainders of separateness and loneliness. With negative emotions comes either abstract thinking or worried kind of thinking. When our thinking remains abstract or anxious it is in a sense dead, since it reflects feelings that bloc our growing aliveness and our ability to feel spontaneity — it reflects our ability to have alive thinking that is connected to our alive state of being.
The running mind that blocs our ability to relax and sleep manifests our fear of life. Few people dispute our need to sleep. How well people sleep in a given society demonstrates its health or sickness. The fact that tens of millions of Americans cannot sleep well at night because they cannot stop the thinking faucet in their heads and relax, demonstrate how sick and inhuman is our society. Growing number of scientists point out that only a shrinking minority of Americans have regular good night sleep. James Maas says in his book Power Sleep that the American economy loses at least $100 billion a year to the lagging productivity of tired workers and illnesses caused by sleep shortage. Most people need at least eight or nine hours of sleep nightly, Maas says. But studies show that the average person gets considerably less. Most people stop sleeping before they achieve a full dose of energizing sleep; most college students only get 6 hours of sleep a night, and less than one percent of them say that they stay fully alert all day long.[14] The data about the anxious sleepy person tells the indisputable story of deep alienation — of a person who is barely awake during day and poorly asleep during the night; this is the story of a person who is barely alive.
Sleep is natural and essential for the well being of a species. When a healthy species (an animal variety) cannot sleep it must be hungry. Yet many in our species are well fed but they do not get enough sleep. This indicates that our species is drastically overwhelmed by the misery of depression, anxiety, and general unhappiness. The natural connection between the physical body and the emotional well being of such a species is severely disrupted.
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[12] For a detailed examination on how the new age movement views this, see the chapter on the new age movement.
[13] This phrase does not mean that nobody else thought about it before, but that the thinking comes from the genuine self and not from the social pressure of society.
[14] Maas, Axelrod, et al., Power Sleep (Villard, 1998).