If you don’t know who Russell Means is, put down your Twitter feed and look him up. I’ll admit, I didn’t know of him even three weeks ago, but his message means a lot to me now. You should read his speech to the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, it’s life-changing if you’re open to his words.

The idea that our abandonment of spiritual living was foolish to me makes sense. What have we gained through modern living besides avoidance tendencies and trauma, anyway? We could have found other ways to evolve instead of denying irrationality and making spirituality taboo. But, it doesn’t matter now, does it — The Enlightenment took care of that.

Nevertheless, it’s the responsibility of each individual to resist, to find some way to forget the world and reconnect with our older, less rational ways. The perfectly logical rendition of reality that we expect to find will never provide the knowledge we seek, so blending both the spiritual world and some level of rational science can’t hurt. (Here I think the Hindus have it right. Blatant exclusion of irrationality or even simple metaphysics from our scientific pursuits seems bad; doing so reinforces the idea of “positive” logic, as if that should be our optimal state and we should strive for the denial of emotion. Science based only on logic makes us all robots.)

By all of this I don’t mean to exclude the possibility that we are all some kind of biological “creation” in the sense that we humans create electronic mechanisms. Who knows how we got here. I just think our exclusions are stupid. We are missing an opportunity by denying our origin and moving forward intentionally as if irrationality has no purpose and never existed simply because it cannot be modeled.

I recognize the individual’s tendency in the absence of contemplation or well-considered personal conclusions to adopt those of society. That is the general definition of social value. But, isn’t it incumbent upon each of us to ignore the messaging society blindly transmits so that we can each on our own modify it and improve our self? Without some kind of personal reflection and resistance to the ease of simply adopting cultural values, we stunt our own spriti and limit our culture’s. Just look at the United States if you don’t agree. In spite of our wealth, by almost no measure are we the pinnacle of human society, and we know it. Yet we do very little to improve.