The Cash Moved Them
photo credit: Jeff Topping, NYT
Today’s New York Times has an article titled “The Spirit Moved Them.”
It’s about rich folks that have supposedly found their spiritual centers by building multi-million dollar homes in formerly pristine wilderness areas so they’ll have a luxurious place to get some kundalini.
I suspect it’s easier to achieve kundalini when you have millions in your bank of America account, or is it?
Of course I have real problems with this type of development. Not only are the homes a blight to the landscape, they drive up the prices in the area to the point where it’s no longer affordable for the average schmuck just looking for a place to build a cabin or erect a yurt. Can’t have those folks around. Hippie wingnuts.
The Arizona “compound” featured in the story has a media room and security cameras designed to protect the owners from the Manson Family or Apache’s still lurking about. Must be scary living up there trying to protect all that expensive stuff. Outside of the massive windows that I’m sure require ten gallons of Windex to clean, the place looks pretty shut off from the truly glorious landscape it intrudes upon.
It’s easy for me to see why the Apache, the Comanche and the Sioux went to such extremes to protect their land. Surely, their elders could see the ultimate result of white encroachment; however, I doubt if they ever dreamed of massive cities and 10,000 square foot homes. Of people so completely disconnected from the land.
Want real spiritual enlightenment? Some of what Abbey called that “zen bullshit?” Get your ass out of the office. Out of your manufactured, polyethylene, central air cooled, Ethernet ready prisons and get outside. Breath fresh air. Walk in the pines. Better yet, sleep in the pines. Cook your food on a small fire. Soak your tired feet in a rushing stream. Listen to the chickadees and wrens by day and the owl by night. Feel the excitement of seeing a bear take off up a ridge or at a lynx chasing a snowshoe hare.
If you want to feel alive, quit building these ridiculous, silly looking contraptions that seal you off from your real home, nature itself.
It’s not possible to live “simply” in a multi-million dollar home. I’m sorry. I realize you’re trying to look cool, but you really just look ignorant, and you’re making life miserable for all of the rest of the life around you.
Too bad you believe everything you read.
You don’t know that these people have lived in their cars, lived in Zen monastaries, and lived on the land – in the middle east for 9 months – Pakistan, … in a tent. And if you read the article, you would see that the kundalini experience was during a sophmore year at a community college. But you didn’t read. You already thought you knew.
You think you know, but you don’t. Nice.
They fooled you.
We must be reading different articles! Seems pretty clear to me that these folks are on a self absorbed high, living what my grandmother used to call “the high falootin life.”
Kundalini. What a bunch of bullshit.
um, yeah – i am SO impressed with the “in-tune-ness” of these people.
i think just threw up in my mouth a little.
