Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

In essence, the news outlets hook you by constantly informing you about problems; most
often challenges that are far away from you; difficulties about which you can do very
little. And by doing so, by tempting you to continue idly watching while the world
writhes in front of your eyes, our mass media producers are encouraging you to avoid
doing anything about the more immediate troubles that are right outside your own door.
If you watch only 30 minutes of news programs each day, you will have idly wasted
almost 200 hours of your life every year until the day you die – 200 hours every year!
That’s 200 hours of smiling at strangers …
That’s 200 hours of community gardening …
That’s 200 hours of feeding the homeless …
That’s 200 hours of visiting prisoners …
That’s 200 hours of reading to the elderly …
That’s 200 hours of sitting with the sick …
That’s 200 hours of playing with your children …
That’s 200 hours of listening to your friends.
In essence, if you have the courage to stop watching the news, you will probably end up
spending your precious time helping to solve the problems in your own communities, as
opposed to worrying about the problems in others.
In the final analysis, there is only one question left to ask yourself: Is your “need to
know” really more important than your need to Live?
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. To watch a news
program is to refrain from gazing with love upon a neighbor in need. The first discipline
of education must be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. The
second discipline of education must be to demand resolutely that we rise to up to serve.”
~ inspired by Aleister Crowley
“As our dark nights deepen, we find ourselves recovering our love of mystery. When we
were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we
loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists
only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a
weakness … The contemplative spiritual life is
an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a
slow and sometimes painful process of becoming
“as little children” again, in which we first make
friends with mystery and finally fall in love again
with it. And in that love we find an everincreasing
freedom to be who we really are in an
identity that is continually emerging and never
defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in
fullness without having a clue about what the
steps are.” ~ Gerald G. May
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