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Last night, I spent several hours lying in bed glued to my smart phone checking out WWE and their latest talent. In particular Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes.

WWE is an interesting phenomenon. It seems like all their fans (and even their performers) are constantly analysing it to death and talking about how much worse its gotten.

It seems like everyone is desperately waiting for someone to break-out and guide them into a new era where it’s not so forced, cringey and depressing.

It seems that this is the problem when one company becomes too dominant – they sort of lose their spirit. In this case the customers desperately want to be inspired but behind the scene it is run by executives for the benefit of shareholders.

It’s sort of like a microcosm of America, isn’t it? It seems that most people have given up on claiming their fair share of American prosperity and they are now grasping onto what seems like their part of American revivalism.

This is an interesting notion which seems to be based on the idea that economic growth can and will happen indefinitely – maybe because of the promise of space exploration and other new industries like that?

The problem is that the handful of super-giant companies (run by their soon-to-be-trillionaire founders) are the ones who, through an ethos of acquisition and innovation, capture all of the value. This is an oligopoly.

Oligopolies can be good for the consumer (if the firms are competitive) in that they drive prices down. However, what we are seeing in this specific situation is, an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of relatively few – and an alarming reduction in overall spending power and quality of life to the public.

It seems that this public who, from my standpoint, seems to be getting poorer and poorer are grasping onto some idea of American revivalism. Like “capitalism and meritocracy is what we believe in – we love our centibillionaires and big tech companies”.

That’s fine but keeping the revival going seems to rest on a set of requirements such as forever wars, economic hegemony, unlimited borrowing, digital maximalism and exceptionalism across the board. Overall this feels like it’s in scarcity and is desperately grasping onto all the value in can.

Everyone is at a different point in their spiritual development, so it’s difficult for me to speak for everyone – however I can speak for myself.

At this point in my journey I am sort of able to entertain conflicting beliefs and world-views.

Like for example I can step into my faith in Jesus and truly believe in God by feeling his presence. And yet on the other hand I am able to be of the western mind and understand that all faiths have religious experiences like this.

I believe that there is true wisdom in developing an attitude of “meta-faith” like this.

Indeed, it seems to be the only workable solution to a peaceful globalised civilisation which supports the human need for religious experience without any one faith becoming supreme – which tends to lead to persecution.

This past few months I have been thinking about building my own framework for synthesising the best ideas from different religious traditions.

It seems that simply plucking ideas out of religious traditions is doing a disservice to their depth of meaning.

It seems better, rather, to truly learn and appreciate the depth of different traditions – and then synthesise your own ideas to address the challenges of the time – in good faith.

This way you are allowing the foundations of the past to remain strong and to continue to provide for the needs of the public without destabilising them.

It seems that the act of learning and appreciating from different traditions in good faith (without denying, destabilising or outsourcing one’s own foundations) is a touchstone of this generation’s religious imperative.

During my meditation session this morning I had an interesting impression come to me.

It was that human civilisation is an animal civilisation. Human societies use resources, leave waste and jostle for position.

It seems that the indigenous peoples were the ones who truly lived in a sustainable and harmonious way.

It seems that there is much that they can teach us – so I wonder if there is some way we can learn from their wisdom and integrate it into our culture.

From my perspective, even though AI is improving productivity; people are getting poorer and poorer. Why might that be?

Clearly there is inflation – and it seems that wages are not increasing in tandem. In Australia, the cost of housing is pushing most people to the limit of what they can afford to pay.

In essence, it seems that those who have money are becoming richer and those who don’t have money are becoming poorer. After all, it is the shareholders who reap the benefits of increased productivity from AI.

And the shareholders (who own the proceeds of AI-augmented production) demand maximum productivity – what does this look like?

Basically they demand that workers be as productive as possible (which increasingly means using AI) and accept the minimal salary they will accept.

This situation seems unsustainable to me – because it’s trending that 99% of people will be working poor across all areas of life.

The sign of the times is that the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. The main differentiator seems to be owning capital.

People need to have capitalist mindset (by being entrepreneurs and investors) to be on the side which is breaking away. Those being left behind need to demand a fair go from their leaders.

How to do this without scaring away capital in the globalised financial system seems to be confounding factor and suggests the international institutions such as the UN and the Catholic church needs to take a more active role.

Maybe 2-3 weeks ago I went to the supermarket to get lunch during a weekday. I felt very good because I had meditated for an hour and prayed.

Perhaps because of some mild autism I have always been able to viscerally “feel” ideas. And I have always sort of had this persistent belief that my thoughts are sort of “out there” outside my head and in some kind of intersubjective reality. It’s caused me profound social anxiety over the years and has made fitting in incredibly difficult – but it’s also my unique gift because it’s like a reality distortion field.

Anyway, I was purchasing my lunch and the attendant there seemed to looked deep within me with utmost contempt. I just had this strong perception that she was judging me because I was not muslim.

This was the first time I felt truly judged for my faith and that my culture was at risk of being colonised. As a result I felt the need to build internal defence systems – and went through various stages.

• I tried firmly holding eye contact with muslims – and they would just struggle back and do it even more.
• I tried holding onto a mental set of arguments – they seemed to just hold onto their own counter-arguments.
• I tried learning about their beliefs – they seemed to just try to learn about my beliefs (as if their’s was the dominant paradigm).
• I tried temporarily worshipping Allah – they seemed to approve of me the next day.

In the end I just sort of got too frustrated and felt like Islam was too strong to struggle with within my own mind and the thing to do was try to colonise the Islamic world back by opening meetup chapters in Islamic countries – that seemed to give me the mental breathing room that I needed to feel at ease.

This experience has been quite frustrating because I don’t really like to feel like the culture I grew up in now has to defend itself within its own borders to a antagonistic group that seems to have a wholly alternative paradigm with the view to subsume my own.

Anyway, in the end I realised that trying to bully them as a majority isn’t really going to work because that seems to energise them – and that they probably have a more cogent creed that Christianity.

In the end what seems to work best is just focusing on one’s own faith and not getting roped into struggling for dominance in everyday life. One must operate from the Christian paradigm to maintain one’s centre – this is fundamentally about deifying Jesus and his mythos, embracing the Holy Spirit and reconciling oneself with God in earnest.