October 8, 2005

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  The Golden Apple

  
  

  It's easy to get lost in the modern world. We struggle our whole lives to find fulfillment, completeness, a sense of serenity. We search desperately, quietly for that thing to make us feel whole and at peace, always working to make sure no one knows how much we are really hurting on the inside. Some people give up and choose instead to escape, to run away, to flee. Some of us, however, choose instead to fight.

  
  

  But in fighting, it's important to carefully choose your battles. If you lash out at everyone in a blind rage, you'll quickly find yourself painted into a corner with no one to come to your aid. There's a reason why some of the wisest, most successful leaders of our time preached peace, not violence, and promoted understanding and love, not fear and hatred. It's because hate begets more hate and violence begets more violence. By fighting, I mean struggling against those forces which threaten to consume you and bring you down. It's so subtle, so discreet, so imperceptible, that the toughest, most steel-willed people succumb to it even once in a while. We're all only human, after all.

  
  

  There's a tale in Greek Mythology that goes something like this: A stubborn princess refused to marry any of her suitors and so the king arranged a contest. Anyone who could defeat her in a race would win the right to marry her. Unfortunately for the suitors, the princess was the fastest runner in the entire kingdom. The winner won her over with golden apples that he would throw in her path to distract her. She would inevitably pause to pick them up every time he did, and so he defeated her this way and won her hand in marriage. Our world functions much the same way as this suitor. Everywhere we turn, there are golden apples trying to lure us away from our goals, from out path, from our chosen futures. The lure is simply too strong to resist.

  
  

  So if life is the race and we are the princess, the suitor with the golden apples represents every force that exists in the world that's trying to bring you down. You learn too quickly that there is no fulfillment in the apples he offers you, no peace, no completeness. The apple does only what it was designed to do: distract you from your path.

  
  

  I know many of my readers read my page because it sometimes makes sense of a seemingly insane world, because it sometimes offers answers. Well, would it surprise you to know I'm the most easily distracted person I know? I'm not unlike Homer Simpson, in that when I see something shiny or interesting, I tend to go "Oooh!" and simply wander off towards it. But I also have the ability to hyper-focus and a tremendous willpower when I need it. Once I have my sights set on a goal, I will not give up or give in until I've reached it, or until I've determined it's not a goal I wish to fulfill. Part of the reason I don't seem to search for wholeness or completeness is because I don't need to. I am a whole, complete person.

  
  

  I have no answers as to why, because those reasons are my own. But what I can tell you, is that there is only one person who can change your life and that is you. The world around you holds no answers, only distractions. All of your searches and explorations, all of your seeking and discovering, all of your living life looking for answers, it will all lead you back to the same place: where you began: All roads lead you back to yourself. And as you experience more and more, you will slowly find that the answer is not outside of you, it's within you. You hold the power to your own happiness, to your future, to all the answers you seek. It's all there, locked away somewhere inside you, lost, misplaced, mis-filed in the wrong filing cabinet, under the wrong name. It's buried under the mountain of information, papers, and useless trinkets we've all collected from the outside world, hidden under layers of other emotions and feelings, memories and history, under all of the things the outside world has dumped upon us since the second we were born.

  
  

  Dig as deep as you can, farther than you've ever dared, to the very core of who you are. Be brave enough to really look in a mirror at yourself and search to the core of your being. Fight past your fear, sadness, loneliness, pain, and all the negativity threatening you, and there somewhere buried beneath the mountain of crap and junk you've collected will be the answer.

  
  

  (Note: This is a recycled entry from October 3, 2004. And yes, that particular golden apple is a teacher's award, but use your imagination.)

  
  

  -=* Edit *=-
  The Marxist Version

  
  

  

  
  

  
  

  the story of the golden apple also illustrates the concepts of false consciousness and commodity (or "golden apple") fetishism, wherein the nature of the relations of production is obscured by the products we consume. yay capitalism.

  
  

  Posted 10/8/2005 at 5:43 PM by postlogic

  
  

   

  
  

  Ah, Marxism. Well, let's examine that for a moment, shall we? In the story of the Golden Apple, the princess is blinded by the beauty of the golden apples and is unable to make the correlation that stopping to pick them up will ultimately result in her becoming married (an end result she apparently does not desire). By comparison, the products we covet seem to take on a life of their own in our society, independent of the processes used to create them. We are often only marginally aware (if we are even aware of it at all) of how these products came into being or who made them, and most of the time, we don't even really care. Like the princess, we want the apple and our desire to have it blinds us as to how exactly the apple came to be there and what may happen if we make a grab for it. The devious suitor who tosses the apples can be compared to the companies and corporations that produce these products, who throw these objects at us with the ultimate goal of insuring our loyalty to them, so that they may insure their future security and continued profit. The company, like the suitor, knows that in order to maintain success, they must continuously throw more apples at us, in order to keep us distracted. Or at least, that's the theory of it all. Ultimately this separates us from the entire process used behind the making of this object we covet, blinds us as to how it came into existence, and stops us from acknowledging anything except the product itself. Like Gollum and the One Ring, we don't care where the ring came from, what its origins are, or how it came into being, we only know that we want it.

  
  

   

  
  

  And so if you believe in the whole theory behind these ideals, then the story of the princess becomes a lesson of how capitalism essentially offers you golden apples that ultimately distract you from what it is the suitor is trying to do while you're busy trying to grab for the pretty apples, and that you should be cautious, or you might find yourself tied to a destiny you had not intended. (I.E. - married to a clever suitor you don't want to marry.)

  • 10:44 pm
  • 5 Comments