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What’s real and what’s not real about all these things
and self-expression?
[Advertising | Humanistic Slogans]
Even in a secular sense,
artists, writers, musicians, different types of artists,
they talk about finding their own voice
under the layers and layers of cliche,
of cliched artistic expression.
They talk about “trying to find your own voice.”
Even they know, they’ve written books: The Anatomy of Influence,
how you’re under the influence of those
who thought and expressed ideas before you.
So they’re talking about how to find your “true” artistic voice,
you know, your self-expression.
So even they recognise that;
they know, for the most part, what people express
is just their regurgitating what they’ve heard from others.
As Guru Mahārāj once said, what he liked about Saraswati Ṭhākur,
one of the things he liked about him,
he was not vomiting what he heard from others.
So, for the most part, people are just vomiting what they’ve heard.
And where do they hear it?
A famous playwright, Arthur Miller,
when playwrights were important people—
it was around the 1940s, 50’s,
when Americans and Europeans, particularly,
looked to playwrights as the interpreters of life,
what’s important, and such things as that,
and they would think that they present in their plays the big questions,
the things we should understand about life and existence and how to proceed,
so really they occupied the position of, like, the ‘kavi’,
the poet in the Sanskrit sense, the interpreters of reality.
But this man, he wrote his famous play, Death of a Salesman,
and they keep running it, but, they interviewed him a few years back
because now this art form is virtually vanished.
So they’re thinking he’s arguably one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century,
and “what do you have to say, Sir, about it all?”
And he said, quite simply and frankly,
he said, “Today, most people get their concepts about reality,
or life, or existence, from advertising.”
He said, “where they get their ideas.”
So we see, people see ads, and what are the ads?
Basically, they’re humanistic sloganeering.
Levi’s “Go forth!”, “You are you!”, “Go forth!” … Humanistic poetry.
Nike’s “Just do it!”, Loreal’s “I’m worth it!”
It’s all humanism; they’re humanistic slogans
that basically have pushed the notion, the concept,
the idea of God, out of the picture
and put man as the centre and measure of all things.
As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, “Man, with all of his innumerable defects,
he’ll be the measure of the value of all things.”
That’s humanism in a nutshell.
He calls it “the disastrous deviation of the Enlightenment”,
of Enlightenment thinkers.
So that’s the irony,
that this sort of dense darkness is being called Enlightenment:
“There is no God. There's no need for God. You are God.”