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You are here: Home / Buddhas in your Landfill / Salvation through a product

Salvation through a product

August 30, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The warm water that created the Hurricane Trump is advertising, the 60 years of TV advertising that sells us products we don’t need stamped with the Idea of permanent salvation from the feeling that I need something. The mutation of Trump occurred (this is just my ideas so I have to source) from the failure of selling concrete real estate property to selling the Abstract Idea (or brand) of Trump.

Suddenly he was free from the limitations of space and time. A hotel is limited by its location and the restrictions of the location, but an Idea has no boundaries. Trump began franchise his Name like McDonalds. You could buy Trump Wine, Trump Steaks, but you were not buying superior wine and steaks, you were buying an Idea wrapped in wine and steak. You ate the idea and drank the idea, not the wine and stake.

The next quantum leap occurred when Trump (probably bored with products selling his Name) got the Idea that he could brand the Presidency and sell that like wine and steak. The Presidency was a product! The irony is that you can sell a horrible wine if people just buy the idea or Brand. With products you could keep this scheme going as long as you kept creating new products as people got bored or disappointed with the previous product.

But with the Presidency as a product, the buck stopped here. You cannot create new presidencies to sell if the old product reveals that it has no taste. However, Trump keeps trying. He is constantly selling his Presidency, and constantly worried about signs that his product is losing flavor. Trumps Karma is catching up with him.

Mad Men was a study of the Alchemy of Advertising that rose with the advent to TV in every home, the new altar that replaced Jesus and Mary. People sat around this altar watching a test signal waiting for the magic to start. TV was from the beginning an advertising delivery system that our New Consumer economy needed in order to drive the new mass man to mass markets.

Gone was the particle store in your particular town that sold particular products for your particular need. The Idea was in the saddle now, and if you had an Idea, like for a hamburger, you could mass produce it, your could multiply the fishes and break through the sacrament (alchemy)  of advertising. A concrete particular bread and wine would be transmuted into the Idea of salvation. Just eat this and you will be saved from what? From the pain of feeling fragmented, from the suffering of being torn apart and dispersed from your previous home towns and family networks. The Mass fragmented modern man needed symbols to restore his lost unity.

Salvation through products, through religion as a product, through politics (our new religion), and through alternative realties and conspiracy theories that solve everything, that restore unambiguity. A product sells itself when it synthesizes the ambiguity of Me versus the Word. Products are conflict resolution. Buy this product and the ambiguity will be healed, the wound cauterized. Products are sold using religious symbols and metaphors, the language or the soul.

Modern politics has been selling the Party Idea as the product, but along came Trump and made the Idea flesh and blood, his flesh and blood. He, like Napoleon, crowned himself the god/man. Trump made the Office of the Presidency a commodity.

Those who still love Trump, right or wrong, are really just loyal to their brand, loyal to their Corporation and wear its logo tattooed on their brain. When we become branded, even though other products prove the better, we stick with our trusted brands. Our identity is at stake here. We brand with a sports team, whether they win or lose; we brand with a product and stick with it, flaws or not; our brand is our Idea family.

All of our commercial TV and entertainment is basically the War of Brands, each brand trying to get you to convert to it. Brand wars are religious wars of Identity. Remember the great Computer War of PC versus Mac. PC man was the robotic IBM man, the mass man, and the Mac Man was the true liberated individual. This basic theme gets translated into everything. Conservative is the MAC MAN and the Liberal is the PC MAN..with each side being subjectively the Mac Man and the other side the PC Man. All relationships all wars, are an inverse mirror reflection of the other. My side, my Brand, is the true Man, the other side is the False man or news.

The anger and despair of modern America is the fruit of 60 years watching and believing TV ads. A consumer society exists to consume, and passive consumption is the best of times. But these times are passing. We no longer live in a passive age of consumption. Media in interactive now, and the days of the whole nation watching one TV ad and rushing to the store to buy the Next Best Thing are over.

This is a paradigm shift of consciousness, of world views. TV created a passive consumer of images. You don’t interact with the TV. Unlike radio, you didn’t have to fill in the background with your imagined backdrops. TV supples everything. This is particularly dangerous for children because it interrupts the development of the brain and its ability to imagine alternative realties. Creativity requires imagination. Whole generations have been Brough up in this paradigm of being the created.

But the paradigm is shifting and now we know, now we want to be co-creators in the world we live in. Like a painter, we create the painting and then live in it, our painting changing us. Our world is interactive now, and there is no going back.

The Salesman understand this paradigm. He creates a world Idea where you have a problem, and then he solves the problem he suggested with his product. You are so relieved to get this salvation. He can’t stop you from buying it.

When Trump went up the spiral staircase from selling products to selling the Presidency, he moved from selling things to selling a performance. If the performance is good, you really don’t have to do anything. The performance is everything. If the Ad is convincing, your product doesn’t have to taste good. You have eaten the ad. If the menus has a great picture of the food, that’s what you eat, not the actual food. This is what the Image Mind looks like.

When my self is a self-image, then everything looks like an image. I consume images because that is what the Image Mind eats. Concrete reality, the ground of being, is actually a threat to the Image Mind, because it will make the Image Mind that it is not real. Again I come back to Mad Men.

Consumerism is a religion, a secular religion that is originated in the idea that man is created by God, and is totally separate from God, from the being of God. So given this existential separation from the ground of being, from the totality, one is in perpetual exile and in need of a mediator between man and God, since there can be no direct contact. There must be some ferry, or post office that carries the message to God and back. The Holy Roman Church was a dome religion in which the Church became the physical mediator between heaven and earth.

With the birth of the Rational Age, and with the scientific method to predict and control the future, God was no longer needed as the Boss who would intervene in. your behalf. The Rational secular age just bypassed God, making him as the Deists did, the clock maker who wound up the clock and stepped back, letting it fun by the laws of the clock that He invented but cannot interfere with.

But science did nothing to change the belief that man is created, a victim of strange circumstance, bad luck and fate. The cosmos was created by a fluke, a chance occurrence with no plan.

With man as the created, the warm water was available for the hurricane of Consumerism which just replaced the Holy Roman Church as the mediator between man and the totality, or God, or peace or completion..whatever you want to call it…just maybe being satisfied finally.

The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand in time, in your lifetime, as soon as you buy this Great Product. You can’t create satisfaction yourself, you have to be given it by the Grace of a Corporation. Each Corporation operates like a Protestant Church, an independent grace bestowing church through its sacraments or product. You brand to a corporate like you brand to your church.

Trump just took this concept, this system to its New Testament Level. I come to fulfill the Old Testament were Corporations will save. you. I am the Logos, the Word made flesh and blood in the human body of Trump. Through Me. you will be saved. I am the ultimate product. Believe in Me, that is all you have to do.

But the paradigm is changing. Man is becoming interactive with reality, a co-creator of reality, and the media. Everywhere everyman has the tools to created a new reality and then live it in. The Age of the Passive Consumer is coming to an end. Man is co-creator with God. God dwells within you as You.

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Filed Under: Buddhas in your Landfill, ZEN FITS Tagged With: consumerism, Trump as performance

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Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

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