Why is It Difficult to Know and Obtain What We Want?

The concept of linear history is a centerpiece of the primary and college education of children. This concept is baked into the Christian religion and is maybe where it originated. In prior eras, everyone knew and accepted that civilizations come and go like annual leaves. Today, you can browse a catalog of ruined, forgotten civilizations via google images. Everything is temporary. The system, though, really wants us to believe it is eternal and that it is big and we are small and insignificant.

One of the elements of the movie Dances with Wolves that's a good depiction of real life, is how Costner's character really doesn't know what he's doing out on the frontier. On some deep level he knew he had to be there, but didn't figure out why for a long time (it's a three fucking hour movie). He didn't know why the wolf was there all the time, either.

Our ancestors spent the vast majority of their time in a natural setting where the cues of nature were immediate and in their faces all the time. Their family and extended family approximated some prototype of civilization, but even that was probably more of a reflection of the natural order of human life rather than some type of system. 

In that circumstance, the immediacy of the natural world probably reduced the role of language in life. People's experience must have been more direct and also more readily shared. That type of knowing and understanding has been totally swamped by civilization and language.

Language has the illusion of high information density because there's such an emphasis on it by the system. The reality is language has very, very low information density. A book like War and Peace has less information than one crummy JPEG image for example.

A modern western human is convinced, however, that they know and even act via language. They even think they're really smart because of that. However, what they don't understand is the system itself made them believe that. It put their consciousness into that word and symbol prison.

A person today, for example, might live in a huge McMansion with a 0.1 acre lot that's mostly covered with concrete. They'll be in a neighborhood with 200 similar homes. They'll have $1M in debt, but when they look at a bank account and see $100,000 on the computer screen they'll feel at ease and wealthy and secure. They'll think, "aha, I can go to the beach vacation and spend 6 months of my savings in a week... that'll be very relaxing."

Similarly, a person who lives in a trailer who has no debt, owns their car, their home, and has a 10 acre lot might look at a bank account screen that shows only $500 and will feel poor, and frantic.

In the above examples, even the cues of common sense are gone, let alone the cues of nature. The person in the McMansion will feel closer to the goals set out for them by the scripts of civilization itself and might feel more fulfilled because they're entirely a creature of the system. They might have a middle management job, for example, where they sit in meetings all day feeding the system.

Anyway, the reason it's so apparently difficult to get closer to what we want and who we are is because our consciousness has been sucked into a place in our brain that has very little access to that. It's really quite remarkable.