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Fighting For A Higher Self

Fighting For A Higher Self

Books, magazines, news articles and programs, talk shows, infotainment, and infomercials, tell us all how to make more money, live longer and healthier, be more physically fit, be more active, and have more fun and excitement. Such self-improvement advice for "success", and the market for it, is pervasive. But with the exception of religious preaching, which is usually quite narrow in its exhortations(1), there is not much in popular culture nor in schools today that beckons or challenges us to "be all that we can be" in regard to nobility of spirit and understanding, and in regard to striving for a higher plane of non-material self-actualization and fulfillment -- along with whatever else we do in life.

It is not that one has to give up worthwhile physical pleasures or material comforts, joys, and goods in order to achieve higher aspirations. Even instant or merely temporary gratifications are not necessarily incompatible with higher pleasures, unless they are all one is seeking. It is that the pursuit of the physical and material need not, and should not(2), preclude thinking and reasoning of the highest order; nor should they prevent the pursuit of what is best for the spirit. Yet, in our culture today, the pursuit of the higher self -- the development of our individual worthwhile talents and abilities, the development of our senses of curiosity, wonder, and awe (which should increase, not decrease, as we gain more knowledge), as well as our senses of humor, the playful, and the ridiculous; the pursuit of understanding and wisdom (as opposed to just specific, factual or technical and practical knowledge), the pursuit of understanding of and appreciation for the good and the beautiful, rather than the possession of the merely currently fashionable and popular or immediately pleasurable(3) -- is neither fostered in schools nor modeled very much in the media, if at all. It is a pursuit that does not occur to many people, and when...