SHIFT. WORK.

 

Written by Tariq Amawi, Faculty, School of Consciousness & Spirituality at the NewEarth University

We live in a modern world. Yet most of us grew up with a school system designed 150 years ago for factory workers and farmers. We’re taught to sit down and listen. We’re taught to take instruction. We’re encouraged to ask questions, but not too many. To be curious enough to find out how to best do your work, but not curious enough to question why you need to do this boring work in the first place. Children who want to play and laugh and share and draw and talk to each other are confined to static desks and chairs from 9am-3pm in relative silence…for years and years, throughout what become entire childhoods. It gets more absurd the longer you stop to consider it fully. Children can play whenever they want, so long as it’s between chores, homework, school and sleep.

We’re trained to be obedient followers. We’re taught a multitude of redundant subjects that ill prepare us for the outside world: Archaic science and doctored history, rudimentary physics and turn-of-the-century economics. We sit exams that are all based on rote memorization rather than critical thinking and lateral solution finding. We’re taught to wear a uniform. The more you take an objective view and correlate it with the behaviours expected of the average worker post education, the more you see that school is an employee-grooming academy — a worker state of the mind and a worker mind of the state.

Then what happens?

We emerge some 15 years later, into the outside world, a still fresh-faced but behaviourally conditioned, conformed adult. By now most of your creative flare and individual expression has likely be bludgeoned out of you through years of being talked at and, down to. Thus far in our lengthy training, there have been no classes and exams on tolerance, on consent, on compassion and empathy, on the vibrational nature of things, on growing your own food, on wealth creation, or spiritual development, on awareness and consciousness, on equanimity. We instead get his-story, math, geography, Newtonian science and the like. We walk out of this fabricated dreamspell and we swap our lunch box for a brief case. We swap the desk for the cubicle. We trade in the teacher for a boss. Our days now go from 9-5pm instead of 9-3pm. We still ‘get to’ have a lunch break. We still wear a uniform. Our “what felt like ever-lasting summer holidays” are reduced to two weeks a year.

We again, trade all our time each day and ‘live’ in the few hours in the evening. Menial task-based jobs are given little incentives to boost staff moral and satisfy our intrinsic desire for progression and development. Even fast-food companies have ‘career advancement’ options. Why? So you FEEL as if you’re getting somewhere. To mask the truth that in reality, you are on the same floor, but maybe pushed out to the corner office so you can now see out of the window of the same building, on the same street, answering to the same people.

It’s called a ‘weak end’ because it wasn’t a genuinely strong start. People go into Monday ‘mourning’ because they are quietly grieving the routine sacrifice of their time.  The fact that droves of people do it serves to create the illusion that it’s ok. And so we shuffle on, head down, comforted by the little pings and blips and badges and emojis on the blue screens of our phones in a sort of flash-mob, isolated, yet collective catatonia. This, is considered normal.

Think about that for a minute…

Ironically most can’t even see this form of subtle incarceration. Their silence is the tacit acceptance needed to perpetuate it. One day they will retire from work, not realising that they retired their dreams first, long long ago. We’re expected to delay our happiness until we are too old to fully enjoy it, until our joints aren’t strong enough to properly bolster us and our back is too hunched to stand up for ourselves. Let me say, that if you did what you loved each day of your life, you would never look forward to retiring.

What do we do to numb ourselves enough that we can tolerate this year in and year out for most of our lives? We gather around the television, which has replaced the tribal fire yet brings no elder to exchange knowledge and generational stories with lessons and wisdom and warmth. We shop. We pray that this next, new, shiny external thing will somehow fill the emotional and spiritual hole inside. We drink, but it’s a thirst that is never quenched evidenced by the fact that most drink every weak end if not at the end of each weak day. We eat so many animals along the way that we can’t sense that on some level we are also couped up, like the very battery hens we consume. So many of us live in towering apartment blocks with little space and meagre rations. We are complicit in the slavery and slaughter of some 60 billion animals a year and so cannot rise high enough in vibration to see the nature of our own cages. That is not abundance; it’s a bum deal – for all of us. We then bombard our bodies with toxic foods and chemicals and then use pills to suppress the symptoms of our own unhealthcare, without addressing the source.

What is that source you might ask? Our unhappiness. We try so very hard to pretend that this is normal. I have a wild and vivid imagination, but even I cannot stretch my imagination as far as needed to polish that turd enough to make it shine.

I’m not interested in being a hippy, but I am interested in being happy. And if I have to unbutton a shirt and loosen a tie and walk barefoot on the Earth to feel some connection to the living ecosystem I am a part of, then so be it. I can’t deny that when I hug someone there is a vibratory exchange that after a few seconds simply feels good. It is an oxytocin release that happens quite naturally. I can’t deny that when I feel full, I have far fewer selfish thoughts. As my cup spills over I naturally and innately want it to flow to others. We are human kind, not human cruel, but through a careful orchestration and stripping away of the essence of what makes us feel happy, content and alive, we become irrational, selfish and violent.

Don’t wait your entire life to realise you haven’t been living.

Stop eating from the energy of suffering and you’ll begin to see things with fresh and green eyes. Stop drowning your cells in poisons and they will heal, and you will heal, and your life will grow, like nature, into who you already are, but have forgotten to be. You are not only a member of the ‘created’. You are also a member of the ‘creators’.

Now, re-member.

It is the time to create as you see fit and to be fit as you create. To re-member. To remember that it’s normal to be happy.

Continue to work your shift. Or continue to shift your work.

Your choice.

 

Visit the NewEarth University’s School of Consciousness & Spirituality

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