*Anti-Alienation; how do You Reconnect?*

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for me too the idea of "connecting with the universe" feels very different than being "connected to humanity."

With effort, or even by chance sometimes, I can feel connected to the 'universe'. However I find I am hardly ever connected to other people. Not impossible, generally only with very special people, for example others in meditation/spiritual groups I'm in. A paradox: feeling connected to the whole universe, but not with the masses of people who are part of that very universe. Maybe they are disconnected? More likely that my consciousness is astray! If ever I feel some connection to the mass of humanity, then I believe I will have achieved enlightenment.




Any kind of God? If I can remember to do it when in the pits (and being in the pits is probably due to NOT remembering in the first place), I'll dig out some zen/gnostic kind of books or search the web for them and that can really help.


Yes, even wind and rain, although the standardUK drizzle is just depressing.


I often feel I *should*, but if I force myself to be other than my nature, than I'm not being myself. Music is more my thing, I always have a huge backlog of songs to write, pieces to learn and lessons to prepare. So much so that it gets overwhelming and I waste time on a computer game instead



Connecting:

One of the best for me is the smell of the sea. Unusual as I have a very poor sense of smell, but when walking on the beach, it's the smell that takes me off.

If I'm with my children, making the effort to give them better attention and trying to be really 'with' them can help. Very difficult as without effort we just slip into the 'irritating child & nagging parent' roles. Children *are* closer to life, the universe and everything, although they drift rapidly away from it as we all do.

Sex, for me, has the possibilty, although not every time. A key difference between sex with oneself and with another is that the 'bigger' emotional connection never happens unless with another. What peculier chemical factories we are.

Almost anything that breaks the inertia (inertia being my middle name).

Alienating:

Popular culture (that gets about 4 billion different things out of the way, but I'd like to draw special attention to the following high-alienation level things: clubbing, TV, weddings and high heel shoes)

Watching or reading news items. Especially those that wallow in human misery, when nothing changes to prevent the misery. Every year another famine, another war, another atrocity, another crisis.

Office Culture. A celebration of all that is grey and mediocre about humanity. Yet nearly ALL the money in the world is tied up in it.

Being in a any social situation with more than a small group, say 5 people.