(Unforced Hijab by Icy & Sot)
A couple of weeks ago I watched the Netflix documentary on the Fyre Festival. If you don’t know what that is, the Fyre Festival was supposed to be an incredibly high end party in the Bahamas for well-to-do folk, but ended up being a disaster, to put it mildly, and the main protagonist ended up in jail. What jumped out at me the most however, was not the insanity of the whole process, but the use of what are called Social Media Influencers. When the Fyre Festival was going to be announced to the public, the PR firm contacted about 100 influencers and paid one person $250,000 for a single posting about the festival. Social media has joined the fray in telling us what we want or what we don’t want and so on, whether we’re aware of it or not. No surprise here.
The Buddha talked about conditioning over 2600 years ago, but now there are even more ways we have to pay attention to what’s going on. We experience conditioning from the moment we’re born. Our families, friends, neighbors, teachers, etc. tell us what we can or cannot do, who we should or should not be, etc. Then there is the societal conditioning that seeps into everything. There is the systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and so on which shapes how we see others and ourselves. This can be the root of so much suffering if we don’t pay attention. I got to hear Lama Rod Owens speak to this last week. He said that although we can’t help our conditioning, we are responsible for it. Indeed we are. Take a look around and see how greed, hatred and ignorance are shaping the our world in incredibly overt ways.
The Buddhist path is one of disentangling ourselves from that conditioning and waking up to how we’re trapped by things we’re not aware of. It’s not an easy process but necessary for freedom. When we don’t pay attention we end up stuck in cycles of craving and aversion without questioning what we’re doing. We do things we don’t want to do and vice versa. It’s up to us to begin to question, especially if it causes harm to us or others. We have to be willing to look at things we may not have looked at. What does it take to cultivate a deep intimacy with our own experience, beyond preference? What does it take to find out who we were before the world got its hands on us? What does it take to wake up and pay attention and find out for ourselves what is true and what is conditioned? What does it take to ignore the fucking influencers?
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