When my nephews were young they would often shrug their shoulders and say “whatever”. Maybe a ‘can’t be assed’ attitude goes with the teenage years? And now we have the millenials who expect everything to be done for them without them having to lift a finger.
It’s all too easy for (us) older generations to judge them lazy or label them as spoilt. Maybe we’re just a touch jealous of how easy they seem to have it these days?
There is also another perspective and possibility. Maybe, just maybe, they’re in tune with their inner Zen Master and know that life shouldn’t be about striving? Maybe, deep down, they know that life should be flowing? If so, it’s quite right that they should resist the expectations of the established world! This could all be part of humanity’s evolutionary process.
And, all these reflections could just be the latest step on my personal journey of ‘accepting those things I cannot change’.
I suppose the only response is to shrug one’s shoulders and say ‘whatever’!
Conscious Evolution 
i say, in teenage years we ‘whatever’ with indifference, with age, we ‘whatever’ with wisdom. 🤔 maybe, maybe not..
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I like the distinction! Thank you, Monica.
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I was’t aware of the quantity of Zen masters around me! Whatever – maybe I haven’t noticed anything and I am a Zen master too. What a pleasure, what a peace, love and joy around me all day and whatever – I don’t realize it.
The fact that young people enjoy their lives for a few years is important and necessary. I hope you have had this time – I had it. And it is equally necessary for them to realize timely when the party is over.
Otherwise they end up meditating in front of the TV-set for the rest of their lives. And that is as I suppose not the calling of a Zen master.
Zen masters know that things are changing always and carry simply on being and watching but no TV.
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Thanks Frank. That raises an interesting question: would (do) Zen Masters watch TV? Whilst few and far between there are, I would suggest, a few programmes with sufficient depth and meaning to engage even an advanced Zen practitioner.
I’m also reminded of some anecdotes, from I think, The Autobiography of a Yogi, of a yogi who would deliberately smoke or eat burgers specifically to stay grounded. That is, the physicality of certain human activities helped to keep him present in the earthly plane.
Reflecting further on this, I’m finding that doing a conventional job and living in a city, embracing the fully conscious best and least-evolved worse of humanity as it does, is providing valuable lessons in grounding the sort of ideas we discuss at Conscious Evolution Today. All our theories, insights and ideas are of no value unless they can be applied in daily life: amidst blaring TV screens, for example.
K
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Hi again, Frank.
On further reflection another aspect of what you wrote has hit me as significant. You wrote “I hope you have had this time”: Yes, I had an enjoyable childhood, as I remember it. And I certainly don’t resent folks having years of joy in their lives. What I didn’t have and which some millenials seem to take for granted, is the (seeming) total freedom to do what they want without fear of criticism.
So I watch them. And I can’t help but feeling somewhat resentful that they ‘get away with it’: ‘it’ being behaviour that not only would I have been severely reprimanded for but wouldn’t even have thought of doing! I guess I’m jealous of such freedom. And that feeling is deep: presumably reflecting the gulf in what passes for acceptable behaviour in the 1960s or 1970s compared to today.
Thus, even if the change is, in long-term evolutionary terms, for the better, then this poor aspiring Zen Master has a bit of work to do yet!
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