More and more the world has come to resemble ancient man’s depiction of the afterlife: A world of silent and purgatorial bound shades - reduced to the state of onlookers and voyeurs who do not live their own lives but follow the lives of others through social media, living vicariously, like vampires, devouring the emotional dramas of daytime soap operas, stars, serial killers, celebrity gossip, scandals du jour, actors, musicians, politicians. Perhaps this is why some Saints considered earth ‘the ghost plane.’ 

 

We are bored with all that.

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While certain segments of the population live in ceaseless activity, an even greater portion, year after year, move into a hazy bardo state of voyeurism and semi retirement, the world in between life and death. Many of us spend eternity not in a circle of hell but online, on our phones, on the couch or the EZ chair, with 200 satellite channels which allow us to toggle between all segments of history and time. We toggle backward and forward  stop, freeze and replay the moment. We relive traumas effortlessly on repeat to fetishize our anger and indignation. In such a way, life passes before our eyes. It is not living.  Life has been replaced by a dream world of images that exist at the push of a button or is just a few key strokes  - that allows us to to see anything we desire. Whole world’s avail themselves without the dangers of direct lived existence and experience.

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As Fuerbach noted:

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“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred."

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As the famed psychoanalyst Milton Erickson said, "Every 20 years wipes out half a generation. Their bodies remain alive, but their personalities have died." Thus explaining the modern obsession with zombie movies.

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It is said that St. Thomas was reading the newspaper  one day in his study one morning,  being served tea and biscuits while perusing the news, when he remarked to the butler, “How incredible it is to be in heaven,” whereupon the butler replied, “But sir, this is hell.”

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The situationist critique:

 

 Being has been reduced to "Having." / "Having" has then been reduced to Seeming to Have. Thus the predominance of what is called the Society of the Spectacle - a society based on creating the ilusions of having friends, lovers and fun, ie Facebook.

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One of the basic rules of dialectics is: the more something is represented, the less it exists in real life.

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 An anthropologist was visiting the Hopi nation once and made the following observation to an elder, "It seems that all your religion is about rain. Is that because you have none?" To which the elder replied, "It seems like all your religion is about love, is that because  you have none?"​

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