Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the direction our civilization is taking. It seems more and more obvious to me that Peak Oil is a reality and that there are innumerable changes coming our way, of which higher gas prices and foreign wars for oil are only the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve become pretty “fringe” in my political understanding over the past few years. That comes in part from having weaned myself from television and seeing more objectively the brainwashing effects of the media on people; and it comes partly from studying alternative medicine and seeing the anti-alternative propaganda that is fed to people by mainstream medical institutions (and even enforced by the government). Seeing such influences in our society has made me more and more cynical about it — it’s a world where people willingly spend more time watching “reality TV” than living in reality.

Things get stranger the more I look into them. Blogs like Rigorous Intuition touch on just how weird are the forces in the world that control our institutions. It makes more and more sense to me that people in high places in our government had a hand in engineering many things, from the JFK assassination to 9/11. There is so much strangeness out there that is not reported or discussed in the mainstream, from UFOs to “Manchurian Candidates” to child sexual abuse by government officials. None of which is paraticularly relevant to my life, but when taken as a whole, it makes me look at what is reported in the news with an extremely skeptical eye.

Why is this important? It has no bearing on how I live my life right now, so why focus on it at all? Because it’s the end of civilization as we know it, and everyone is expecting and hoping that our government has our best interests in mind, and that somehow it will guide us safely through hard times. But it doesn’t, and it won’t. If the debacle that was Hurricane Katrina is any indication of how we can depend on authorities to help us in times of crisis, if the US fomenting violence in the Middle East is supposed to make me feel safer in the world, then I think I’d better start figuring out where else I can place my faith.

Unfortunately, I’m just a graduate student in a tiny school, in a profession on the fringes of American health care. There’s not much I can do about most of that strangeness, injustice, or inhumanity. There’s not even that much I can do about driving a car; I’m not healthy enough to ride my bicycle everywhere I need to go, let alone walk or run. The only thing I can do right now is take what power and responsibility I have and increase it — by developing myself, by building my health and fitness, by stabilizing myself spiritually and increasing my awareness of myself and the world. Without these things, I’ll get nowhere.

I’ve got my eye toward the future, and I’m scared about what I see. I think it is imperative right now to learn all I can about being healthy and developing a spiritual equilibrium, to keep me sane through chaotic times that may lie ahead.

I was talking recently with one of my acupuncture teachers about what would happen to our profession if there was war with China or an energy crisis, or something like that. One reason that acupuncture interests me more than herbs is that it appeals to my sense of self-reliance. If we run out of oil, hospitals will be shut down — almost all of their equipment is electrical. There will be no getting X-rays or CT scans if the power is out. We Oriental medical practitioners will still have our senses; we can look at tongues and feel pulses. But if there’s anything that disrupts overseas shipping, then we’ll be hamstrung too, since we won’t have Chinese herbs; so then our ability to treat people may become limited to needles, bodywork, and qigong. (And if we cannot even get needles, then at least we can use our fingers — or rocks, thorns, bones, porcupine quills? What did the ancients use, before the days of metallurgy?) So we discussed the importance of learning styles of acupuncture that were designed to stand alone — for instance, acupuncture based on the Classics, as taught by Dr. Tran Viet Dzung and the late Dr. Nguyen Van Nghi, or Japanese styles of acupuncture like Toyohari — rather than those styles designed more as adjuncts to herbal treatments, as the very popularly practiced “Traditional Chinese Medicine” from the People’s Republic of China is.

All this to say that right now is a crucial time for gathering personal resources, for cultivating a sense of center and self-reliance and self-responsibility, developing what’s important and eliminating what isn’t, getting grounded in what’s real, integrating the self. Preparing for the vicissitudes of life. I suppose that’s important anyway, but contemporary events provide a little more incentive to build that foundation now.