What Are You Chasing And Why?

For two million years our species were hunter gatherers. We covered no less than six miles a day on foot and obesity did not exist among our ancestors. They all had the lithe and stealth bodies of the first Olympians. They would eventually develop cultures that made them one with nature and all its elements. Then about ten thousand years ago agrarian developments changed everything. Land was just land before agriculture. In the absence of agricultural practices, ownership of anything was an intelligible concept. This would birth the concept of wealth, greed, wanting more, and everything nasty that accompanies these things. I am not an anarchist that wishes to burn down the system and I do recognize the importance of the wholly artificial concept of money....but to a degree. At this time I ask this subjective question, what is it your want and why? For the majority the answer is more money. If we take time out to deconstruct this I believe we can all agree that money is important and necessary but to a degree far less emphasized than many of us realize. If you regularly have food on your table, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head research shows that anything in excess of that does not improve your life. That is not too say increased wealth does not afford one more choices and opportunities but I ask do these necessarily equate to a better life? Mastery and excellence can be pursued and obtained as long as we do have the subsistence levels we need. Every modern social and physical ill that exists today can be traced to behaviors developed from the agrarian reform previously mentioned from about ten thousand years ago. Once the concept of ownership surfaced the concept of greed did as well. And from this the concepts of money, banking, loans, mortgages, credit scores, greed, corporate profits, economic and political power would all be birthed. Inner peace is something we all desire whether we realize it or not. Peace is a frequency that resonates much higher than happiness which by the way has no neurochemical or physiological signature. Our brains don't know or care about what happiness is. We do have pleasure circuits but that is not the same as happiness. It is in the state of peace we can open ourselves up to creation and connection. We all get caught up and conditioned to chase this illusive happiness when it is peace we are truly after. We are led to believe that status, wealth, material items will bring this to us only to be fooled into wanting more of these things because once we achieve them we only temporarily feel good. This is what psychologists refer to as the hedonistic treadmill. The irony of it all is that once you get that taste of inner peace or achieve it, you are released from the desire of chasing all these wants we are fooled into believing we need. The Native Americans and other indigenous cultures had it right. They lived in accordance with how we evolved over those two million years. The path we have been on these last ten thousand years only leads to depression, anxiety, and disease. We must connect with ourselves and nature in order to truly effectively connect with one another. We should be chasing mastery and excellence in something of value we can then share. This is what brings us peace and really is the only thing worth chasing in any of our subjective lives.