tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8677708695310489772024-02-08T08:50:27.640-08:00Universe-ProjectUncommon sensibility and thinking outside the box.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.comBlogger65125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-8050390524292871882012-12-13T07:59:00.002-08:002012-12-13T08:16:23.201-08:00As Christmas Approaches<br />
<br />
<br />
Lately I've had a few conversations with Christian fundamentalists who've judged me harshly, and have told me I'm going to hell unless I repent and get "saved."<br />
<br />
Saved from what? They apparently want me to surrender what I have <i>experienced</i> as truth, in favor of what they imagine they know. They believe that by forsaking my own radically subjective life experience and embracing their Bible book learning I'll somehow come to a higher truth than the one I have come to already, through plunging into the depths of myself and surrendering to what I've met there. In their belief system, God rejects those who opt to experience the fullness of life through radical self-inquiry, while favoring those who study someone else's experience of life, and who choose to worship that.<br />
<br />
No, thank you.<br />
<br />
I was raised Catholic, but through my own inner work I've found a spirituality that far surpasses the limitations and boundaries of that Catholic doctrine. I no longer conceive of God as some good, big sky-man who judges humanity (and who rules over a place called heaven that's filled with people who are being rewarded for believing in Jesus) while engaging in a fierce war with a fallen angel named Satan (who inspires evil and rules over some fiery brimstone place down-under called hell, where the bad people go to get punished for all of eternity.)<br />
<br />
I have come to realize that God is infinite/eternal ALLNESS, so ineffable in its awesomeness that human language, thought, metaphor, story lines and beliefs can't possibly contain or capture it. It is <i>beyond</i> dualities, freer than thought, more spacious than the entire universe. It is all things, thus no-thing. It is absolute stillness, out of which all of creation, form, life, love and expression manifests. It has created, nurtures, contains - and flows through - everything, thus there is nowhere it is <i>not</i>. <br />
<br />
I therefore find all of reality holy; all life sacred and all relationships divine.<br />
<br />
To be told my thoughts are vile and I can only be saved from eternal damnation if I embrace Jesus as my savior hurts my heart. I've already embraced Jesus in a more profound way than just reading about his life and works and celebrating them, while rejecting all insights from anybody else. My love for Jesus's insights (and those of Buddha, and Krishna, and Lao Tsu, and Muhammed) is so great that I resolved to follow in his footsteps. From the depths of my personal suffering, and out of a desperate longing to truly <i>know</i> God and be free of the heaviness of my inner torment, I plunged inside myself and dropped everything that was of this world to beg God to reveal the truth of itself to me. And what I discovered during my journey is there is nowhere God is <i>not</i>...including inside those who are as yet unaware of the "godness" of their own nature. To condemn anyone then, is to condemn God. The God that made us, flows within us, contains us, nurtures us, and to which we will all return when our human forms disintegrate.<br />
<br />
Sadly, many Christians seem to be missing out on the point of their own faith. The ultimate message of Christ was to exhort us all to have faith in our own capacity to shed our egos, our stories, our dogmas, our beliefs, our desires, our ambitions, and our social conditioning at the unlocked doorway of our own heart; at which point we can enter - naked and utterly surrendered to the not knowing, like little children - to at last meet and fully realize the "godness" within ourselves. It has <i>always</i> been there, closer to us than our own skins, waiting patiently for us to stop seeking it somewhere outside of ourselves. The illusion that we have <i>ever</i> been separate from it is the Great Lie. Yet this lie can only be exposed for what it is when we personally take the trip inside of ourselves to discover the truth for ourselves. As Gangaji says, "The diamond was always right there, inside your pocket." <br />
<br />
This is also what's meant when the saints and mystics say, "die before you die." We <i>all</i> must die to self, sooner or later. By grace, we've been gifted the option to do so while still alive. What a gift that is! We can meet God <i>during</i> our precious lifetime, and by doing so we can become a conscious, living channel by which God's energy can flow freely into this world, through the gateway of our open heart. How wondrous it is to be a living, conscious witness to the joy of God's love flowing into the world through you, touching and serving others in ways that elevate and enhance the life experience of everyone and everything you meet. <br />
<br />
That experience <i>is</i> the story of Jesus, Buddha, and all the great mystics and saints who have graced this world with their presence. It can be your story as well. The truth is, you <i>are</i> worthy beyond measure of having that experience, through grace and by the existence of the ever-unlocked door that is your own heart. But you must <i>have faith</i> that you are worthy - despite your greatest fears that you are not - before you can pluck up the courage to seek and discover the truth of yourself.<br />
<br />
Fear of what you might find waiting for you once you turn around at last to face yourself is the only barrier that exists to entering the Kingdom of Heaven that exists inside you; and that fear has been created by your own mind. It's the monster under humanity's spiritual bed; the shadow that darkens so many of our nightmares. It's the interior story we carry that informs us we're not <i>worthy</i> of entering heaven, because we're somehow separate from that which is ALL-loving.<br />
<br />
You <i>cannot</i> be separate from that which you're inextricably and integrally a part of; you can only be smaller than its sum totality, incapable of mentally encapsulating the infinite vastness of the eternal whole. Is your blood cell unworthy of being a part of your body, although it has little knowledge of what it is in? Is a fly unworthy of being a part of its natural ecosystem? Is our sun unworthy of being a part of our Milky Way galaxy? <br />
<br />
Does not your body love and care for your blood cells? Does not the natural ecosystem provide for the needs of the fly? Does not the Milky Way hold our sun and energetically feed it? And are all these components not reabsorbed by the larger whole system that holds them upon their deaths? And do not each of these aspects - in their tiny but precious way - contribute to the miracle that is the whole?<br />
<br />
Because the mind, which is a temporary, physical expression of the body, cannot imagine that which is infinite and eternal, the mind fears it, so it conjures stories about how scary God must be. Your heart though, will always point you to truth - the True North that is unconditional love - if you set it free and allow it to guide you home. You have the power to shine the light of your own heart's unconditional love on the mentally generated monsters underneath your spiritual bed, and watch them vanish like the shadow wraiths they are.<br />
<br />
One of my favorite lines from a wonderful Sufi poet and mystic is this: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." ~Rumi<br />
<br />
And so I invite everyone, this blessed Christmas season, to make some time to explore the eternal field of love that exists within the infinite spaciousness of your own heart, and to realize God for yourself, alive within yourself...<br />
<br />
...and I will meet you there.<br />
<br />
Merry Christmas, my loves.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-2958753152475812662012-11-28T06:44:00.003-08:002012-11-28T06:48:08.879-08:00An Open Letter to Those Who Promote Private OwnershipI'm often confronted by those who feel affronted by comments I sometimes make about private property ownership, and how ultimately it enslaves us. We've been conditioned to equate ownership with freedom, as in the more we own, the more freedom we gain. Capitalism, of course, is founded on the principle of private property ownership, and we're taught that capitalism is the freest system ever designed. To that I say, rubbish. Life itself is the freest system ever designed! Capitalism is just another way to attempt to control life, so that some can claim disproportionally greater power than others. Here's my explanation, for what it's worth:<br />
<br />
I define capitalism as the aggregation of money (ie: capital) to fund
and direct investment, thus empowering those who have money to decide what gets created, and what does
not. Capitalism relies upon private property ownership, because it focuses on individual investors earning profits off
whatever they have purchased with their money. Without private ownership and the impulse to benefit personally from that ownership, there would be no need for individual investors. <br />
<br />
I don't perceive capitalism as a free system - though it's billed as
that - because ultimately those who amass the most capital gain greater control
over the economic system and use their power to disenfranchise, or
take advantage of, those who have little or no capital. If I have no
capital, I have no say in the creation/distribution process.
And the more money I have, the more say I have. Dollars vote in our markets; not
people. Because of that, people will always be unequal in our system,
although we supposedly have equal rights and - conceptually, at least -
are equally divine in nature. <br />
<br />
As for those who claim socialism requires violence and centralized control in ways that suppress
human freedom, they may want to consider the many Northern European nations
that are doing very well as socialist democracies...particularly Finland
and Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and so forth. These countries are are proving that
collectives with common goals can focus on serving the highest good for the individual
without subsuming individual freedoms, by removing the worst stressors
of capitalism and by encouraging self-actualization. What we believe then, does not always adhere to reality! We can shout all we want about the conceptual evils of socialism and stamp our feet angrily about how what horrid a system it is; meanwhile, those who are living happily and choicefully within social democracies laugh at our silly posturing and continue on with their lives. <br />
<br />
Personally, I am not capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist or
any other mechanical form of man-made conceptual "ism" that now exists. The
only "ism" I embrace is "organism." As an organism, I defer to nature's blueprint to
inform me how to relate to and engage with the whole of
reality...including all other living organisms. <br />
<br />
As a result of having consulted nature's blueprint, I'm no longer a fan
of private ownership of anything, or of the private sale of what we're each put
here to bring forth from our creative abundance and in self-fulfillment.
Everywhere I look in nature, I see helpless and newborn things taking
freely whatever they need from the larger environment until they're mature
enough to produce what they are born to bring forth; then they gift their
fruits back into the world without holding back or controlling their fruits
in any way. They surrender whatever they create to all manner of diverse beings who may be able to use them.
For most creatures, the act of creating what they are here to create is life fulfillment enough. The net result is natural abundance, because nothing is holding
anything back out of greed, or fear or the desire for greater power.<br />
<br />
I believe it's a conceit to imagine we humans "own" any part of what
we are IN, as we are IN a unified living field upon which we all depend
for our survival. To claim we own any part of that fully integrated
field is like your toe suddenly claiming it owns your foot. What if your
other toes were one day denied access to the crucial resources they needed from your bloodstream, because one toe claimed sovereignty over
all that passed through your foot? What if that one toe forced your other
toes to do only its bidding in exchange for having their needs
met, instead of allowing them to do the work of the larger body that
they were designed, created and born to do? <br />
<br />
Nature <i>abhors</i> ownership. Nature is all about the highest possible
manifestation and most efficient delivery and use of the greatest gifts each of its differentiated
aspects can produce. It inspires a FREE exchange of those gifts
across the entire system, so that nothing gets wasted
and all life forms are satisfied to the best of the system's capacity to serve them. In
nature, every differentiated (specialized) individual serves the larger
system that contains it by coming into its own and BEING what it was ever meant to be. In
return, the system offers every individual a unified reality far better and more
beautiful than what any individual could have provided for itself on
its own. <br />
<br />
We live in a world of systems within systems within systems. The
tragedy of human thinking is that we've been socially conditioned to perceive ourselves as
utterly separated - thus disconnected - from all else. What sorrow and loneliness that generates within the human spirit! <br />
<br />
Cells
belong to a body not so they can self-aggrandize, control or grab
additional power, but because by working together as a body they create something
that is far greater than the simple sum of cells would indicate. Each
cell gains real and lasting benefits by surrendering its independence,
without surrendering any of its uniqueness. Specialization enables
evolutionary advancement, but we can't specialize unless we allow
ourselves to depend upon others who specialize in different
areas to serve us, as we in turn serve them. The tradeoff for embracing the
freedom to become utterly unique and discretely specialized so we can activate our life passions is that, by doing so, we must then
shoulder responsibility for those who are surrendering <i>their</i> ability to
do other things, so they in turn can pursue their unique passions, which
they then agree to do on OUR behalf. <br />
<br />
Imagine if your blood cell charged your liver cell to deliver it
food, and your liver cell countered by charging the blood cell an even
higher tribute to remove the blood cell's toxins. How long do you
imagine your body could survive with such a for-profit "free enterprise"
system? The bickering, positioning, deprivation and inevitable piling
up of excess resources would quickly cause your body to break down. Such
a system leads inexorably to manufactured lack, not to free-flowing abundance. It CREATES poverty; it doesn't alleviate it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Long ago, when we humans first began to charge each other for our discrete
services and attempted to label some services more valuable or worthy than others,
we disrupted the natural flow of abundance and energy within our human
social system. Why is a plumber worth less than an office manager? Does a
brain cell deserve higher status than a heart cell, and should it
demand a greater reward in exchange for its work? <br />
<br />
Ownership, and the withholding of one's gifts until one is rewarded
for their delivery, may work as tricks of the human the mind to hold each other captive for a time, but our larger reality proves our belief in
ownership incorrect every time it changes without our
permission - through hurricanes, flood, earthquakes, fire, drought,
pestilence or any other such shift it chooses to make to "our" turf,
without our permission. Ownership implies domination and control, but
reality is inherently a free will system. It doesn't care a whit what we
humans <i>imagine</i> we control. Reality will act of its own free will despite our
best efforts to insist we're in control of certain pieces. It is, by the
way, our longstanding refusal to surrender to this universal truth that is the greatest single source of human suffering.<br />
<br />
In essence, since we can't truly control the things we claim to own,
ownership is really just a clever means we use to brainwash each other. We
use the belief in ownership to control other humans, by convincing them
they're not allowed to utilize some aspect of the fully integrated,
living system we all share. In that way we domesticate each other,
creating docile, obedient slaves to what is, at heart, merely a belief
system and not the truth of life.<br />
<br />
Our conceit can last a long time, and some of us may stumble
through our entire lives without being disabused of the notion that we
"own" some piece of this larger system in which we're embedded. Or you might (as I have) find yourself suddenly helpless
and broken, caught in a situation where the naked truth of your own lack
of control smacks you in the face in a way you can no longer deny...which in turn becomes a blessed invitation to surrender your grand illusions
of control OVER your own life to the overarching power that IS life
itself. Surrender, and it becomes possible to shift your focus away from
claiming ownership (driven by an urge for self-preservation within a dangerous,
uncaring system) toward the manifestation of whatever is urgently
wanting to birth itself into this world through you (full and free
participation in the loving system that created, contains and supports
you.) <br />
<br />
THAT is true freedom; surrendering your fears in order to activate
your birthright, so you can fulfill your life's destiny. <br />
<br />
Here's a test: If you truly own anything in this life, you should be
able to take it with you when you depart this Earth. That you can't
even take with you the body you claim as your own is a clue as to
the true nature of our residency in this world. Every atom,
molecule, cell, being and system that comprises this world belongs to
ITSELF - ALL is inherently free.<br />
<br />
Too many humans, alas, remain slaves to their
conditioned beliefs about the world, and about their "rightful"
place in it. For that false assumption, we pay dearly.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-3169738112081327282012-11-20T08:49:00.000-08:002012-11-20T08:49:29.531-08:00Follow The Money
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Let’s talk about wealth transfer, since that seems to be a
hot topic. Everyone’s complaining our government is transferring too much money
out of the pockets of working people, and putting it into the hands of the shiftless
poor. But what happens to that money once the poor receive it, and why are
their hands so empty in the first place?</div>
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<br /></div>
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When it comes to governmental transfer of wealth, the
primary beneficiaries have long been the wealthiest 10% of Americans, whose net
worth has doubled over the past twenty years. Meanwhile, the net worth of the
remaining 90% has barely risen, or – in the case of the poor – has declined.
But why, since so many insist lower taxes on the wealthy increases hiring (thus
wages and savings) is this so, since tax rates have been on the downswing for many
decades?</div>
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<br /></div>
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Over those same decades, the government has been supplementing
a steady decline in wages that resulted from the triple consequences of globalization
(which enabled corporations to hire foreigners at lower wages)
industrialization (which replaced workers with machines) and technological
innovations (which reduced the need for brainpower in the workplace.) In a free
market system, when demand for any commodity – in this case, human energy –
declines, and when supply (our global population) increases, the price of that commodity
declines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This holds especially true when
the commodity is labor, which is inelastic. Workers can’t just pull themselves
off the market because wages have fallen below their liking. They <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i> work, or their families starve.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The declining need for labor has been concealed by the
growth of industrialization, which triggered an offsetting (albeit temporary) acceleration
in global development. As we settle into this new reality, however, what’s
becoming clearer is that the world doesn’t need billions of humans working
forty hours each week to manufacture everything we need. In fact, growth is
becoming a problem. Today we’re producing – and wasting – more than is healthy
for us, or our planet, to make more jobs just so people can earn a living. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Over time, government spending rose to help offset the steady
erosion of wages. Money the government provided to the poor flowed directly to
business owners (the 10%) who sell merchandise to the poor. Those same owners receive
favorable tax treatments on their business income, as opposed to higher rates
paid on ordinary wages. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That places the
burden of caring for the poor on laborers, instead of on those who benefit most
from all that government spending.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Lately, because taxes no longer generate adequate income for
our expanding government programs, our government has been borrowing money to meet
its obligations. That borrowing also comes via the wealthy, while wage earners
pay interest on that debt through income taxes. <br />
<br />
The alarm being sounded about our need to impose fiscal austerity reflects a
growing realization that this massive scheme of wealth transfer from the 90% to
the wealthiest 10% cannot continue. The middle class is slowly going broke.
Meanwhile, the wealthy have discovered they can earn better returns by
investing their excess in exotic financial instruments, which disproportionally
cost workers additional money when they fail. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Current discussions about our need for fiscal austerity seem
disingenuous at best, immoral at worst. That’s because they’re focused on
blaming the poor for all our problems, to justify the sanctions being proposed.
Many propose to reduce the deficit by reducing or eliminating transfers to the
poor, while opposing tax increases on the wealthy – ironically, the very people
who’ve benefited most from this multi-decade supply imbalance of labor. Some
are even enlisting middle class support for their ideas by inciting outrage
against the “lazy” and “shiftless” un- and underemployed. The struggling middle
class can hardly be blamed for seeking any excuse to reduce its financial burden,
which has been extreme. The trouble is, we’re being seduced into looking the
wrong direction. We won’t salvage society by obliterating the poor, not without
destroying the best in ourselves. We can only save our society by embracing
equal access to life’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>necessities,
which involves reversing the flow of wealth redistribution – this time, from
rich to poor.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The challenge is that we no longer need all the labor hours that
are in existence today, so to some the poor seem increasingly expendable. That’s
why we’re hearing banal chatter about the “need” to reduce the world’s
population by as much as 50%, as if we’re talking about equipment, not living people.
That’s no accident; it’s easier to feel righteous about refusing to help the
poor once we’ve declared them to be society’s useless garbage. However, what we
may be missing in our refusal to stand up for the poor is that the middle class
is next on the hit list in this brave new, amoral and high-tech economy. Is
demonizing the poor truly a better solution than reducing the average workweek
and paying people living wages, at the expense of higher profits for the
wealthy? </div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“First they came for
the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they
came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't
a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for
me.”</i> ~Martin Niemöller</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-40316991625799559612012-11-14T05:49:00.003-08:002012-11-14T05:49:40.367-08:00The Tragic State of Modern "Science"Recently I got into a discussion with a very dear and intelligent friend about the current state of modern cosmology. When I began to challenge some of the existing theories and ideas that supposedly define our universe, his response to me was, "Well, then you don't believe in science, do you?" <br /><br />What appears below is my response to his assertion:<br /><br />
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<span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Who doesn't believe in science? I most assuredly do! I just don't believe
in everything the scientists postulate about the cosmos, given that many of their ideas are mathematically and theoretically driven, not observationally
and/or inductively driven. </span></span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">The thing is, when one is deducing the nature of reality based on
a theory, and the observations do not match the theory, the obvious conclusion
to draw is that one's theory is incorrect. That's because scientific deduction means, "to move from the general to the specific." Scientifically speaking then, a theory is a generalization of the truth, while the observations are the specific evidence being used to support that theory. In theoretical physics today, however, the
conclusion too often being drawn when the two do not match is that the theory remains correct, but
there exists "stuff" out there that would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">change</i> the observations to make them fit the theory but that we,
alas, simply cannot see.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That</i>, my
friend, is not science. It's religion, masquerading as science. The tragedy of
the above "process" is that it leads to billions of dollars being
spent, along with countless man-hours, on attempts to find the imagined elusive, exotic
stuff that will prove the theory correct. And even when something has been postulated
to offer indirect evidence of the existence of that stuff, often based on the
flimsiest of information, new observations made with better instrumentation almost
immediately throw another monkey wrench into these cosmic equations and theories. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">Today we have all grown way too comfortable with imagining
loads of new exotic, invisible "stuff" that simply has to be in the
universe – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because the theories demand
its existence!</i> – instead of asking the obvious question: "Hey, do you think there might be a better explanation for what we're observing?" </span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">Because, you know, careers and fortunes and
reputations have been founded on those theories, and the kings and kingmakers
do not suffer gladly being told their entire lives have been dedicated to
rationalizing a bunch of hokum. So now we have baked into our
"scientific" theories, things like black holes - which cannot be
seen, thus cannot be directly proved or disproved (which itself makes a
travesty of the scientific method) – and we instead look for indirect, trace evidence
of black hole existence that we can use to say, "See? Over there. That must be
a black hole, because nothing's there, but that's where a gravity field <i>has</i> to be
located for our theory to be correct." </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="uficommentbody"><span>And then one day new observations reveal high velocity jets of
energy shooting out of the so-called empty space that contains the mythical black hole – which, of course, totally
violates the theory that a black hole is so dense that nothing can escape </span></span><span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">– </span></span><span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">so
the physicists spend the next twenty years frantically scribbling new
descriptions of black holes and reworking their mathematical formulas to make
black hole existence possible in ways that do allow for high speed, glowing
jets of escaping energy to occur. Which in turn leads to the so-called "discovery" of new forms of exotic,
invisible black holes that periodically shoot jets of energy.<br /><br />So these days, whenever and
wherever jets are now observed, theoretical physicists confidently say, "Look! There's
another black hole!" And then pat themselves on the back for having
"proved" by virtue of jet observation that their imaginary friend, the
black hole, actually exists. Even though we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knew</i> such jets existed long before the mathematicians tortured their black hole formula into accepting
jets as part of their basic structure. </span></span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">Again, all this is being done without ever fully considering
whether there might be another, much simpler explanation for these jets that
does not require an invisible black hole to exist. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">This so-called “process” gets repeated ad nauseum in
modern cosmology. And what makes it worse is that much of this exotic
"stuff" we now imagine is out in space cannot be recreated or tested in our
laboratories here on Earth. We, however, allow our cosmologists the freedom to
insert that stuff into equations that supposedly define our larger reality with literally zero
evidence it can even exist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in</i>
reality! </span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">Such is the pathetic state of modern cosmology. It
has long ago left "science" in the dust, and has transformed itself
into a religious belief system filled with mathematical dogmas and supernatural objects that most dare
not challenge for fear of being excommunicated. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span><span class="uficommentbody">Last but not least, the handful of really,
really smart people who are able to understand the complex mathematics that
underpin all the above nonsense will, when confronted by those who say with great
sincerity, "But hey...your emperor has no clothes!" look at them like
they are handicapped children, pat them gently on the head and reply,
"I'm so sorry, but you're just not smart enough to see what we, the
Brilliant Ones, have been able to see and understand."</span><br />
<br />
<span class="uficommentbody">That in itself is infuriating to those
common-sensical types who simply wish to apply the process of direct observation to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contradict</i> all the crap being put
forth by the intelligentsia – which is how science was intended to work in the
first place. Science is meant to be a rigorous study filled with pain, frustration and disappointment,
because it is based on the understanding that a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">single</i> contradictory observation holds the power to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">falsify</i> an entire theory. It was not intended to be a imaginative journey down an exotic rabbit hole, filled with wondrous delights and fantasy creations that we can't observe in our everyday, regular world.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="uficommentbody"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That</span></i></span><span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, my friend, is the nature of science. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Not: "Hey, I know...let's invent some exotic new shit,
the existence of which nobody can challenge, so we can successfully bend our
disappointing observations to fit our theoretical design." </span></span></div>
<br />Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-59886687421967482222012-08-22T16:23:00.002-07:002012-08-22T16:23:24.737-07:00We’re Asking the Wrong Questions
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<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If we compare conservative and progressive beliefs about
our economic problems, we find both sides seem to agree on two points:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></span><span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">They agree it’s good for most
people to be dependent upon the offerings of private enterprise to meet their
daily needs, in ways that generate continuous profits for the owners of private
enterprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></span><span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">They agree that lately, too
many citizens are no longer dependent in profitable ways on private enterprise
because they’ve fallen into an unprofitable state of helplessness. They further
agree that, for our economy to thrive, we must encourage the helpless back into
profitable dependency, which means most robust adults must have jobs.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What both sides seem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> to agree upon are the answers to these
questions:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></span><span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why have so many become
helpless, even though they still need to buy things from private enterprise to
survive?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span></span><span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What’s the best way to move
the helpless back into the workforce, so they can earn enough to buy what they
need without government support?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Note that the way you answer
the first question will determine the approach you support for resolving the
second question. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Conservatives propose that too many are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">choosing</i> to behave in unprofitably
helpless ways because the government has pampered them, encouraging them to
rely on handouts instead of working. They believe eliminating government
support for these lazy, irresponsible folks will force people to take
responsibility for meeting their own needs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Grover Norquist said, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size
where we can drown it in a bathtub.” That desire reflects an urge to starve the
beast they believe enables slothfulness.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While it seems harsh, conservatives justify their
strategy by claiming that raising taxes discourages hard work. They fear that taxing
workers too heavily in order to enable the helpless remain helpless only drives
more people to quit work and go on the government dole. They fear too much of
that would collapse our entire economy.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Alternatively, progressives blame businesses and the
aggressive strategies they’ve employed to increase their profits at the expense
of the working poor. Offshoring, wage and benefit cuts, and replacing workers
with machines and computers have negatively impacted jobs. Progressives believe
that’s driving the rise in poverty, which in turn undermines social services.
They believe the poor have almost no chance to lift themselves out of
helplessness and meet their needs without government support. As Bill Clinton
once said, “America just works better when more people have a chance to live
their dreams.” </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Progressives believe the answer is to tax profitable
businesses at higher rates, eliminate subsidies and raise taxes on the wealthy.
They want to redistribute that money to provide jobs and services to assist the
helpless in becoming more self-reliant. While progressives are often accused of
having “bleeding hearts” and disrespecting the rights of business owners and
entrepreneurs, they justify their strategy by claiming that, in a civil
society, those who’ve been gifted much bear the burden of supporting the less
fortunate. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s fascinating
about that this debate, which has been waging for decades, is that neither strategy
works. Perhaps that’s because we’re so busy arguing over our points of
disagreement that we’ve not bothered to examine our points of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">agreement,</i> to determine whether they’re guiding
us to ask the proper questions. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What if they’re not?<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s an impasse similar to to our historic quarrel over
slavery. Conservatives back then believed it was appropriate for masters to
treat runaway slaves harshly, beating or lynching them to create reminders for
others in case they too were considering escape. Meanwhile, progressives argued
for new laws to force slave owners to treat slaves more humanely, believing
slaves would then willingly serve their masters out of gratitude for their
kindness. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ironically, the argument wasn’t resolved until both sides
admitted (after a long and bloody war) that how to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">treat</i> slaves was the wrong question. The correct question all along
had been to ask whether slavery itself was spiritually aligned with who we are
as a species. Was it life-affirming behavior on our part? </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The same, I suspect, holds true for our economy. If we
stop quarrelling long enough over whether we should balance the budget or spend
more money to fix our current system, the question that may at last surface is
this: Is the way we’re operating spiritually aligned with who we are as a
species?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Is it life-affirming?</i> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If the answer is no – and that seems to be the true
answer – then we do next must, by definition, not support its continuation, but
support our own shift to more life-affirming behavior.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-35443935388848153692012-06-07T06:19:00.002-07:002012-06-07T06:19:18.245-07:00Eating the Planet...One Buck at a Time<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}" style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3}">The
problem with allowing a few folks to stockpile enormous sums of money is that
money is <i>not</i> wealth. Money represents a future claim <i>against</i> wealth that a person holds, and which can later be presented in exchange for real wealth whenever that person decides to use the claim. Real wealth
would be the natural resources, energy, goods and services that are provided by our planet and our
society - the things that living beings actually use to <i>remain</i> alive. </span></span></h6>
<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}" style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3}"> So here's the tragic irony: Because we've designed a system where we must each amass enough of these future claims to
ensure we'll be able to present them against society's future wealth once
we're too old or sick to work - or once we've decided we no longer wish to work at producing more stuff that others can use - we're frenziedly de<span class="text_exposed_show">stroying our <i>real</i> wealth in order to enable each other to amass enough claims against our <i>future</i> wealth to theoretically satisfy all our future needs.<br /> <br />
If we continue to over-consume our natural resources (as we already are) by turning them into unnecessary junk and waste so we can amass even more claims against <i>future</i> wealth, the claims we're amassing
will <i>all</i> lose their value over time. And the more we mindlessly damage the planet by destroying its air quality, corroding its healthy topsoil, polluting its fresh water reserves and decimating its living ecosystems, the less likely it will be to support our needs for more genuine resources in the future. That means those who've amassed the greatest monetary
"fortunes" will find themselves unable to cash in the bulk of their
claims against society's future wealth, because not enough real resources (genuine wealth) will exist on our planet to
satisfy those stockpiled theoretical demands for actual resources.<br /> <br /> The entire society
has truly gone insane in its quest for money, mostly because we've been conditioned to confuse money with
genuine wealth. At this point, we're all so busy producing specific goods and services
to satisfy the concentrated claims of those few who now hold the bulk of society's money that
we're unable to produce the goods the bulk of us need to get
by, right here and now. We're making expensive new toys and burning up our fossil fuels to deliver them to the 'wealthy' while the majority of humans on planet Earth go to bed hungry each night, with no idea how they might be able to stockpile claims against society's future wealth - because nobody wants what little they have to offer. Meanwhile, we've been increasingly mechanizing our workplaces, using
machines, fossil fuels and technology to reduce the need for human energy to produce things. Our economies now
require significantly less human labor - the primary product we humans have to sell in order to
amass claims against future wealth - in relationship to the goods and services we're producing to satisfy the claims of those who now hold the bulk of the money. Increasing productivity, coupled with an increasing population that desperately needs to amass more claims against society's future wealth,
means that ever fewer of us will find ourselves successful at amassing enough claims against society's
future wealth to be able to thrive tomorrow, no matter how hard and long we labor today! <br /> <br />
As if that's not bad enough, the entire system has been rigged to extract massive quantities of future claims against wealth from the masses before most people are able to stockpile a
decent amount of them to guarantee a future free from lack. Those who hold
the bulk of the future claims have no qualms about using some of them to purchase the power to determine the rules that the
rest of us must live by - which means they design the tax codes and policies that
demand the middle class pay to keep the poorest alive, while the rich are permitted to pay lower tax rates so they can
amass even <i>more</i> future claims against the social wealth we <i>all</i> produce. They also pay to bombard society with propaganda in an attempt to convince us that if someone isn't successful it's all their own fault; that way, we don't notice the white collar crimes, the banking scandals, the way the system continuously picks the pockets of the masses to move those future claims against wealth into the hands of a few, to whom we continue to cede all the power to decide what our society will look like, create and become.<br /> <br />
When will all this madness end? Most likely it'll come crashing to a halt before we've completely consumed all our
planetary resources and rendered Earth unable to support human life in our vain quest to amass "enough" (spelled unlimited) future
claims against the planet's finite resources, but not before we've generated enough
suffering for ourselves that we're forced to come to grips with the absurdity and destructiveness of this system and
release our shared delusion that "money is wealth" in order to live more
fully and richly together...right here and now.</span></span></span></h6>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-91844199163461667142012-05-30T10:53:00.003-07:002012-05-30T10:53:30.395-07:00Different Questions; Different AnswersOne of the challenges we're facing today is that we seem to be constantly, frustratingly at odds with each other about how to resolve our problems. On the surface, one might surmise this is because there are two seemingly contradictory ways to address our problems. I would, however, propose that the real reason we're stuck is because we've been asking ourselves all the wrong questions, which means we've been yo-yo'ing between the "conservative" non-responsive answer and the "progressive" non-responsive answer without making any real headway toward the correct solution. Usually when we're stuck it's because we've framed the question badly, not because we're too stupid to solve the problem.<br />
<br />
For example, the question most of us are asking right now is, "how do we create more jobs for all of the people who need work?" <br />
<br />
I would propose that this is precisely the <i>wrong</i> question. The question we <i>ought</i> to be talking about is this: "Do we need all every able-bodied human on Earth to invest forty hours a week into making more stuff so we can all earn money to buy the things we need? Or are we already making too much stuff we don't need and over-consuming our natural resources, just to ensure all the people have adequate jobs and can earn a living?"<br /><br />This is a crucial question that nobody in the media or government seems willing to discuss. It's crucial because our economy isn't just a conceptual idea; it's materially tied to the natural resources available to us, as well as their natural replenishment rates. If indeed we're making too much stuff we don't need just so we can create jobs so that people can earn enough money, that means we're consuming our limted natural resources in wasteful ways that are damaging our planet's capacity to carry human life - all for the sake of generating man-made income and making a living. <br />
<br />
It's important to note that a single gallon of gasoline does the same amount of work as 350-500 human labor hours, and it still only costs about four dollars. That means a machine running on a gallon of gas can, for a mere four dollars, replace minimum wage labor that would cost a business at least $2800, plus benefits and sick time. Is it any wonder then, that the need for human energy is declining in real terms and that the value of human energy has been falling right alongside it? That fact gets veiled by global expansionism, because so long as we're our global economy continues to expand more raw human labor will be needed, but as a percentage of <i>total</i> energy being employed human labor has fallen from literally 100% before the invention of tools, to perhaps 70% once we invented tools, to perhaps 40% once we domesticated animals, to perhaps 5% now that we have fossil-fuel powered machinery working for us today. That means in order for us to generate 100% employment we have to produce 95 times as much stuff per person than we used to produce for ourselves.<br />
<br />
As if that weren't challenge enough, technology is also replacing the need for human computation in the workplace. While computers don't offer the mental flexibility and imagination that a human brain possesses, a computer can still store far more data and do its computations much more rapidly than do humans. All this means that computers and technology are fast replacing our former middle classes in the workplace. The work that remains for us is mainly blue collar (i.e.: tedious assembly line production) or highly imaginative, innovative, clever and strategic thinking (i.e.: executive and highly specialized skills.) Blue collar work remains available mainly because it can be expensive to build machines to do work that uneducated people will do for very little money, especially when they're desperate to survive. That explains why so many factory assembly lines have been offshored in recent years. Third-world citizens are willing to work for a dollar a day - a salary most Americans can't afford to live on. A dollar a day may still be more than the price of a gallon of gas, but it's less than the cost of machinery and maintenance. And when it comes to highly skilled and executive positions, machines don't yet exist with the capacity to utilize intelligence in the way that a person can use it, so those jobs will continue to be the most highly paid until we invent machines that are able to compete. <br /><br />If we're wondering why we are all in debt today, the above will serve to explain that. The fact is, most of us can no longer earn enough money to access the bulk of the goods and services that are mainly being created by our machines. Our labor isn't valued highly enough anymore for us to do so; yet the owners of the machinery won't just give us what the machines create unless they can earn a profit by doing so. Think about it. Human debt has skyrocketed at precisely the same time in human history that industrialization, fossil fuel consumption and technological innovation kicked into high gear, reducing the need for human energy in the workplace! Meanwhile government debt, which is in large part subsidizing our needs because we can't earn enough to acquire what we need, has also skyrocketed over the past fifty years. This is not coincidence; it's a real-world cause and effect.<br /><br />If we possess a lick of sense we can use it to see which way the economic winds are presently blowing. Our economic systems have been relentlessly replacing high cost human energy with lower cost machines and technologies that run on cheap fossil fuels, so they can make their goods more cheaply. That would be wonderful if we were able to enjoy the fruits of all this cheap production without struggle, but because we don't own either the natural resources that are being fed into these systems or the actual means of production, we're generally precluded from accessing all these goods...unless we <i>work</i>. <br />
<br />
And so it is that seven billion humans are now relentlessly competing for ever more scarce and lower paying jobs, with fewer benefits. Sadly, we're being pitted against each other in a war nobody can win. Eventually machines will be doing almost all of society's work, and yet we won't be able to grow anymore because we'll have hit the natural limits of resource replenishment. In fact, we may have already hit that tipping point. So what happens then? At the moment, those who apply their ingenuity and create new enterprises are still inventing newer and cleverer gadgets...but really, how much of what we're making is truly necessary and helpful, and how much is downright wasteful, in pursuit of money?<br />
<br />
That begs yet another question: "Are we here to earn a living, or do
we earn a living in order to make life more enjoyable
while we're here?" That is no small question. For some time we've been socially conditioned to believe that we first have to earn a living, then - if we accumulate enough free time and money - we can perhaps use it to enjoy
what's left of our lives by exploring those talents, skills
and abilities we neglected while in hot pursuit of a job that paid us
well. But what if we have life backwards? What if, given the modern state of things, we'd be
better off as a society if we encouraged everyone to pursue their
passions or master their own innate skills and then apply those to our shared
needs instead of demanding everyone first fit into the economic system as
it stands? It may be that our system is already so obsolete we're doing
ourselves a grave disservice by demanding that everyone conform to it, rather than that it conform to where we are today as an advanced species. <br /><br />I don't know the answers to the above questions. I suspect none of us do as yet. However, I suspect that if we're honest with ourselves we'll have to admit that some very large percentage of what we're currently producing isn't beneficial to either humanity or our planet. It's mainly crap.<br />
<br />
If so, what do we want to do about it? Are we going to wait until the job crisis becomes even more acute? Are we going to wait until the race to convert natural resources into consumables has triggered an irreversible depletion of planetary resources, so we have no choice but to watch our economies collapse out of lack? Or will we - because we're able to grasp that what we're doing is inherently unsustainable - take a moment to breathe into these questions and sincerely seek good answers? Will can calmly and thoughtfully respond to these challenges before we're forced to react to emergencies we're causing for ourselves?<br /><br />I don't know the answers to those questions either. My hope is that by shining a light on these questions and inviting people to give them consideration right here and now, we can perhaps avoid the worst outcomes to our challenges that we humans might have to face if we ignore them.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-6599209990802991952012-05-21T10:32:00.002-07:002012-05-21T10:32:21.658-07:00Divine Creativity and the Self<style>
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<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I have come to believe that the Divine is ALWAYS the doer in this world. These days I perceive that we humans are
simply temporary living tools through which divine energy flows and manifests into
this world, so I no longer claim to be "the doer" of anything that comes into this world
through me. I am merely a witnessing presence to divine energy sculpting
itself into ever higher and more complex order over time, while filling itself with
more love, joy, beauty, wonder, light, harmony, passion, talent and diversity. What a GIFT this
is...and how lucky I am to be the perceiver of all of it.</span></span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span class="commentbody">That, over billions of years of organic evolution, I have physically evolved into a complex human being within
the magnificent flow of living energy, such that I am today able to become a willing,
cooperative tool with Divine energy as it manifests more of its creative intentions within this field of matter is amazing.
</span><br />
<br />
<span class="commentbody">That, over thousands of years, I have - as an evolving human being - been gifted an increasing power of self-awareness so that I may literally witness and experience the expression of Divine creative energy
as it flows through me in the here and now and inscribes itself on the living canvas of reality, is a wonder. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="commentbody">That I today possess complex emotions and can <i>feel</i> the loving
presence of Divine Spirit as it flows through me and brings forth new concepts, new ideas, greater wisdom
and profound material changes is a blessing - one for which I feel unending gratitude.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="commentbody">I acknowledge that none of what I create, or have ever created, is "mine" to possess. Even my body is not mine to possess, but is a wondrous manifestation of the Divine; one I've been graced to occupy - as a witnessing presence - for the very, very short time this body will exist. Thus I willingly offer up all I am, do and will ever bring forth in loving service to the divine creative field of LIFE itself, with endless gratitude for its having
manifested me as its living, self-aware tool in this blessed space.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To be in touch with all the above realizations is to surrender: "Not my
will, but thy will be done." Out of that surrender arises incredible peace and relaxation, what some have called, "The peace that passeth all understanding."
To relax and allow life to move <i>through</i> you - not demand it be moved <i>by</i> you - is to experience the world as a far more
joyful place in which to live. To open the floodgates of creativity by letting go of the belief that the mind's purpose is to dictate what "should be" or "ought
to" be done, and to instead allow the mind to serve the Divine field of life by doing what feels energetically life-affirming is to plunge joyfully into the flow of creation and experience the self <i>as</i> divine energy, manifesting. </span></span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span class="commentbody">We know we're in the flow of creation when our actions are
effortless; when we don't feel a sense of strain or stress around what we are
manifesting. This doesn't mean that what we do is easy; because
at times our minds must work very hard to figure out <i>how</i> to do what needs to be
done, and our bodies must invest both time and energy to accomplish the task we've set forth. It does, however, mean that <i>what</i> we are doing is arising from joy, from love...and
from the profound realization that what we are doing is life-affirming and
will be helpful to the amazing field of life that contains us all.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="commentbody"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Our present desire for material rewards and for other, external trappings of success we've been trained to seek exists because, for the
most part, we've not been allowing Divine energy to flow through us, but have been (mostly unconsciously) blocking
its manifestation by doing what our minds have been programmed to believe we
"ought" to do. That doesn't usually feel very good; in fact, it's
a life path too often filled with stress, pain, suffering, resentment and fear. For submitting to those experiences we therefore demand some
tangible reward, like money or fame, otherwise we could not be motivated to put up with so much suffering. When, however, we
do what we do for love, with joy, feeling blissful because what is
flowing through us is tapping into the best we have to offer of this living instrument that is our body/heart/mind/spirit - and when that system is humming with pleasure to be working at maximum capacity - then even if
what we are doing seems difficult, it isn't ever <i>hard</i>. It's beautiful. <br /><br />And the doing becomes its own reward...particularly because we are doubly graced to be able to observe and relish the wonder of what has arisen and flowed through us!<br /><br />What a blessing is this life...what need have any of us for anything more?</span></span></div>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-26344069145382915582012-01-30T21:34:00.000-08:002012-01-30T21:37:02.540-08:00It’s all coming together!<style>@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This morning, I had a beautiful, divine epiphany. What I “saw” in my mind’s eye was that we are, as a species, approaching a crucial “jump time.” We’re preparing ourselves – and preparing the way – to jump to a higher level of order. By doing so we will empower ourselves to employ greater creative capacity, experience richer diversity, manifest more beauty and joy, and bring forth higher consciousness in service to all of life.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">What will this higher level of order look like? If we turn to our own biology for clues, we can compare where we are right now to where the single-celled organisms were in the time before they began to cooperate and build complex, multi-cellular organisms. In every multi-cellular organism, the whole is always greater than the simple sum of its individual parts. It is that “something more” that provides the reward for coming together, because each individual cell benefits <i style="">more</i> from the joining than it surrenders in the way of autonomy. For thousands of years now, humanity has been focused almost exclusively on promoting and preserving our individuality, on being “separate” from each other in order to maximize our personal potentials. That’s been a grand ride for all of us; it’s enabled us to know and love the joy of our special uniqueness. The thing is, we’ve likely reached the end of the road when it comes to our individual evolution. For us to jump as a species to a higher level of order, what is being called for now is for us to <i style="">consciously choose</i> to cooperate as a singular, unified body, in order to create a shared system that automatically delivers to every single being in the social body whatever it needs to be the best it can become.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">We’re being asked by life itself to fulfill the original promise of multi-cellular organisms, only this time with our individual consciousnesses as the drivers and deciders. We’re being invited to notice and appreciate that we work better together and accomplish much more than we can do on our own, to embrace the realization that when we come together and work together the whole is far greater than the simple sum of us. We’re the newest fractal of an existing social pattern: it’s life’s chosen design, only more complex because we’re bringing consciousness to the equation.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This mission is one we’ve been unconsciously undertaking for many years. We’ve already automated most of our production processes for goods and services, as well as our delivery capacities. Fewer and fewer labor hours are now required for us to make the things we need. In fact, so few labor hours are required to make the things we need that we’ve begun to invest our labor hours in making things nobody needs just to use them up! We’re “making work” to enable individuals to survive, instead of freeing individuals up to do the work that will help us <i style="">all</i> thrive.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">What if we embraced the idea that nobody needs to work full time anymore just to earn their basic needs, and that at most we may each need to invest a few hours each week to ensure everyone’s needs are met? What would we do with our free time and our creative capacity then? I suspect most of us would quickly get bored watching mindless entertainment, which has only served to distract us from the stresses of earning a living. Instead, I imagine most of us would eventually turn to our inner selves to seek and bring forth our passions, talents, skills, curiosity, and our grandest ideas – and apply those to the challenges we’re facing as a collective. What amazing things we might accomplish if our time and creative capacities were free to apply themselves to our serious problems! What wondrous dreams we might manifest if we were able to use our minds more effectively than by paying bills and taxes and worrying about our mortgages and debts. What beauty we might be able to bring forth if all our artists, architects and designers were free to allow their minds to run wild across the playground of their own imaginations, and call forth the amazing visions that dance in their heads!<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I believe humanity has already been working toward this jump point for many centuries, but has not yet been fully conscious of what it is doing.<span style=""> </span>We WANT to be free of the need to work hard to meet our daily needs, which is why we’ve automated so many tasks that nobody wants to do. We intuitively grasp that it’s in our best interest to set ourselves free from the daily grind for basic needs, so we can explore our higher capacities and discover what we’re truly capable of. We’ve continuously gravitated toward living in and building social systems because – consciously or not – we realize that what we can create together far exceeds what any one of us can do alone. We’ve <i style="">already</i> become a multi-cellular organism, but we haven’t quite made the final leap toward sharing and loving social cooperation. We’re still clinging fearfully to the last vestiges of our individuation in the form of self-sufficiency, which is what we need to let go of if we’re to thrive. We don’t <i style="">need</i> to be individually self-sufficient; we need to be individually manifesting the utter uniqueness of that which each of us is! In that shift we will find our strength, and make our way through the challenges that arise. Not by becoming exactly like each other, but by coming together fully as a diversely creative collection of unique and conscious beings in a shared social body. </p>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-79097969856052348162012-01-04T08:12:00.000-08:002012-01-04T09:59:38.498-08:00A Human Resolution for the 21st Century<style>@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0in; }ul { margin-bottom: 0in; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">As we enter the New Year, resolutions always seem to rise to the front and center of everybody’s thoughts. We make personal resolutions to lose weight, drink less, exercise more, spend more time with family and friends, eliminate all the clutter in our homes, etc. While we don’t always succeed at keeping our resolutions, it feels good to take stock of the things we feel might benefit us to change, and to make an honest effort to bring about those changes for our own good.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Why then, I’ve been wondering, doesn’t humanity as a whole make resolutions that would benefit our shared society? Wouldn’t it be helpful to us as a species if we could agree on certain behavioral shifts we think might improve the quality of life on Earth for all living beings? Worst case, making resolutions gets us thinking and talking about what we believe needs changing, which in turn elevates our awareness around what it is we might be doing better. And the thing is, the more people who consciously decide to pay attention to what it is we might do better, the higher the odds we’ll uplift our society.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">One of the amazing things about human consciousness is that, inevitably, we each must pass through a four-step process that transports us from ignorance of to absolute mastery of anything it is we wish to achieve.<span style=""> </span>For example, we can’t wake up one day and decide we want to be the world’s best novelist and then go out and achieve it tomorrow; it takes work. Hard work. It also takes commitment, struggle, effort and conscious focus, along with a willingness to look foolish when we inevitably stumble. The reward for undergoing this struggle is that, eventually, we feel joy when we perform the task because we do it so well and so effortlessly it becomes a pleasure for us instead of a chore.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It seems then, there’s a mechanism hard-wired into our consciousness that enables us to shift a task out of our bandwidth of conscious effort and into our unconscious bandwidth, but it requires time and effort for that to occur. Imagine, for example, what life would be like if you had to concentrate constantly on remembering to breathe to ensure your survival. How much ‘space’ do you think would remain in your conscious awareness for you to wonder about other things, or to tackle other, more complex thought processes? That we are able to master things like breathing through evolutionary design then and shift them to our autonomic nervous system is a tribute to the brilliance of consciousness itself. Whenever we master a skill and it becomes an unconscious process for us, consciousness rewards us with the freedom to tackle something new, something fresh, something even more complex and perhaps more beneficial to us than the task we’ve finally mastered. <i style="">Consciousness, it appears, possesses an eternal ability to collapse in on itself, thereby creating infinite volumes of space within its own awareness for higher learning to emerge as life evolves.</i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><br /><span style=""> </span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The four-steps we each must pass through as we move from ignorance to mastery of any given skill or ability are these:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">1)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Unconscious incompetence – this stage is represented by the Fool’s Journey in Tarot, and can best be described as the blissful ignorance of early childhood. Our journey begins the instant we decide we want to learn a new skill or ability, although we possess virtually no understanding of the effort it might require to master that skill. The Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden describes life just prior to the fool’s journey, when it speaks glowingly of the time before humanity undertook the Herculean task of mastering an understanding of the difference between good and evil. Had we known before we undertook that task how much evil we’d have to experience in order to learn the difference between the two, we might have been so daunted by the challenge that we’d never have found the courage to begin. Thankfully, ignorance truly <i style="">is</i> bliss when it comes to undertaking any fool’s journey! Being blissfully unaware of how much we don’t know, we cheerfully set out to fulfill our mission, confident (in our ignorance) of our innate capacity to achieve our objective.</p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">2)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Conscious Incompetence – Once her journey has begun, it doesn’t take the fool long to encounter unforeseen challenges. Quickly she realizes she isn’t yet all she’d imagined herself to be, and how much she needs to learn if she’s to succeed in her objective. The fool looks around and suddenly notices all the others who appear far more capable of performing the task she’s undertaken for herself. Conscious at last of her own ignorance, she feels humbled. She now understands the effort that will be required if she’s to succeed. She needs to become a sponge, actively seeking information and learning as much as she can – trying (and often failing) repeatedly – as practice, study and hard work supplant the bliss of her former ignorance. It’s here we so often give up in disgust, deciding we didn’t want to achieve our objective nearly as much as we’d once thought, because it’s harder than we ever imagined it’d be. This stage is represented by the student, the young acolyte coiled expectantly at the feet of an aging guru, eagerly awaiting the wisdom the master delivers.</p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">3)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Conscious Competence – In this stage of the learning process, our former student has pushed through the many frustrating struggles of learning, practicing, failing and learning anew and has finally hit upon a personal formula that enables her to achieve success in her chosen field. At times she even experiences flashes of brilliance, but it’s not yet consistent enough to depend upon. Here is where discernment at last arises, enabling her to weed through a massive influx of unhelpful or distracting information, so she can focus instead on the wisdom that moves her forward. She knows exactly what she needs to do to master her chosen skill; however, she needs to remain focused and maintain a conscious commitment if she’s to succeed. This is the stage of the scholar, the one who studiously dedicates herself to her work, and does it quite well when she puts her heart and mind to it.</p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">4)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Unconscious Competence – When we enter this phase, something amazing – miraculous really – transpires. Our former scholar no longer needs to read as many books or concentrate on her notes when speaking to others. The hard-won wisdom she's accumulated has become second nature to her. Others may ask her difficult or perplexing questions, challenge her or seek her out for advice. Whatever the situation, this master knows which answers to offer without having to refer back to her writings or read more books on the subject. She feels confident she can perform well at any moment without having to concentrate on performing her skill. This stage represents the musician who can play beautifully with total strangers, the poet who can offer a rhyme on the spur of the moment, the chef who can enter a strange kitchen and prepare a fabulous meal with whatever ingredients he finds. <span style=""> </span>It is at this stage we take our well-deserved rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor …before our now-empty consciousness grows restless and sets out on the next fool’s journey it’s chosen for our evolution!</p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">When we understand how our personal consciousness works, we can feel confident it works the same for the collective, because human society is but a fractal mirror of the many individuals it serves. That being the case, I have come to believe that when humanity first climbed down from the trees and began our long, slow march toward civilization, we were collectively undertaking a fool’s journey of breathtakingly epic proportions. For eons now we’ve been struggling to figure out how to build a civil society. We’ve taught ourselves how to feed, clothe, house and educate ourselves in ways that advance the human condition, and that improve the quality of life for all concerned. We’ve run countless social experiments over the ages, most of which have failed, but all of which have taught us valuable lessons. We’ve played with power/dominator social structures and have seen the great evil that arises when power becomes overly concentrated in the hands of just a few. We’ve exploited the resources of our home planet and have learned there’s a price to pay when we don’t respect her longstanding replenishment cycles. We’ve domesticated animals and plants for our advantage, and are coming to understand that risks accompany the benefits of tampering with natural evolution. We’ve improved our technology, expanded our creative capacities and put together a compendium of human wisdom that is breathtaking in scope and volume. Even so, we continue to struggle as a species for the simple things in life, which informs us we’ve not yet mastered the art of building a sustainable civilization.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">In that spirit - and given that the arc of human evolution is far broader and longer than the arc of personal human development - I would like to propose a New Century Resolution for all of humanity, and I invite you to hold this intention along with me. It is my fervent hope that we agree to decide that the 21<sup>st</sup> Century will at last be the one in which we come together as a species and focus our collective attention on ensuring that <i style="">all</i> people worldwide receive adequate food, shelter, clean water, clothing, medical care and a proper education without having to struggle so hard to acquire those things. I would like to see us develop a planetary infrastructure worthy of fulfilling this mission, so we can free up the hearts, minds and bodies of the seven billion remarkable others with whom we’re sharing this space. If we do that, we could then apply ourselves to tackling the enormous challenges we’re facing as a species. We already have enough productive capacity and technology to achieve this goal; we simply haven’t yet developed the willpower – inspired by a powerful supporting motivation – to attempt it. It’s therefore time, I believe, for us set out on this new fool’s journey as a species and commit ourselves to the mastery of this task, though as yet we have no understanding of the challenges we might face as we proceed.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Imagine what we could accomplish if most people didn’t have to work all day just to meet their basic needs! We could dedicate ourselves to replenishing the resources we’ve depleted through our ignorance of the natural living system in which we’re embedded. We could clean up the pollution we’ve created and better steward the delicate ecosystems we’ve carelessly damaged. <span style=""> </span>We could focus on building sustainable housing for all, using renewable resources and with zero carbon footprints. We could invite more of our artists, philosophers and research scientists to beautify society and expand our understanding of the cosmos. We could even explore the farthest reaches of space, not out of desperation or necessity, but driven by awe and a profound curiosity about the larger realm that contains our tiny, fragile world, and that has given birth to the wonder that is us.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">That dream explains why, these days, whenever someone laughs or calls me a fool for my ideas, I thank them with love. I can’t imagine a better fool’s journey for us all to undertake.</p>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-24813897049181194342011-10-04T05:38:00.000-07:002011-10-04T07:27:21.237-07:00First They Ignore You...As I observe the media responses to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, what comes to mind is a wonderful quote by Gandhi: <span jsid="text" class="commentBody">"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win."<br /><br />It seems to me that those opposed to the message of this movement have recently shifted from phase one - ignoring the energy of the movement - to phase two, which involves ridicule of the individuals who have dedicated themselves to the cause. On Fox News yesterday I watched the so-called "news" commentators belittling the protesters for using their laptops, as if somehow this protest against financial corruption implied a concurrent moral aversion to the use of technology. They also laughed along with Donald Trump, who had called in to the program, when he asserted his belief that most of the young people were probably there to "find dates." <br /><br />We're also observing a scaled implementation of phase three - fighting - which began with the mass arrests of protesters by police officers who aligned themselves with the power/dominator corporatists who fund and control our government officials. Ironically, those officials are paying police salaries using <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span> taxpayer dollars, which means the people we've hired to protect us have now become bullies who oppress us in the name of "social order" to preserve their own jobs. But as we've seen too many times before in human history, the fear of losing their jobs can cause people to behave in ways that run counter to their own moral code of conduct. That explains why so many police officers purposefully corralled a large number of peaceful protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, entrapping them into moving into the street. They then gave themselves permission to abuse their legal authority in an effort to intimidate the people and undermine the energy of the protest.<br /><br />Strangely enough, while the rather miniscule Tea Party movement was breathlessly covered by the media as a powerful social movement for change, the growing and highly energetic "Occupy Wall Street" movement was ignored for nearly two weeks. Why the difference? Perhaps it's because the message of the Tea Party aligned perfectly with the agenda of the media moguls who control the dissemination of information in our modern society. That message - to destroy governmental power and elevate corporatism as the highest form of social organization - grants enormous powers to those who control the global flow of money. Not coincidentally, it also robs the general public of the means by which to resist the power elite. The thinking goes something like this: take away a man's food, shelter, health and means of survival, and his ability to fight injustice diminishes because his attention becomes redirected toward simple survival. What that thought process fails to take into account however, is that a person who finally feels he has nothing left to lose is the most dangerous person of all. Even so, it seems those who are attached to the power/dominator social model, which relies on intimidation and coercion to control the behavior of others, are constitutionally incapable of overreaching to the point of self-destruction. Since aggressive domination lies at the very heart of the model, the model doesn't seem to know when to cease dominating others out of the realization that excessive domination turns an energy of resistance back on itself.<br /><br />"Occupy Wall Street," as opposed to the Tea Party movement, points its finger at the root of social injustice, and demands we solve the problem of aggressive domination instead of continue to mitigate the worst symptoms of continued social injustice. Welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, the renegotiation of criminally high mortgage loan balances and rates - all are attempts to mitigate symptoms instead of address the underlying social disease. So what IS the disease, and how do we cure it?<br /><br />I would postulate that the social disease we presently face is the false belief that everything is separate, and that so-called "individuals" can therefore freely exploit nature, resources, ecosystems and even other human beings for personal gain. For centuries now we've been enamored of the belief that everything we observe in our material world is a discrete object, a passive noun, and that when the noun is energized (by a verb) it is activated. What we're just now coming to realize is that nouns and verbs are human conventions, and that life itself is not so neatly divisible. No noun exists that is not internally verbing to some extent; likewise, no verbish energy exists that is not flowing and manifesting through some noun. The whole of reality is therefore already alive and humming with order and purpose; it's only our limited sensory perspective that causes us to miss this powerful Truth. We look at a chair and see a passive object, but if we turn an electron microscope onto it we discover that every atom within the chair is teeming with ordered activity. Every molecular bond that has formed to build and hold the form that is the chair represents a miniature social contract that obeys the underlying laws of our universe. The chair <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> chair because the atoms have all agreed to make it so, and will continue to do so until their contract ends - at which point the chair as we know it will cease to be. The atoms, however, will carry on, forging new social contracts with other atoms to bring other temporary forms into this world. They are assisted at times by cosmic consciousness flowing through human minds, and at other times by cosmic consciousness flowing through nonhuman forms. Always though, it is <span style="font-style: italic;">cosmic</span> consciousness that dictates the direction of life's evolutionary flow, whether it does so through human beings or through some other living means at its disposal. We are each therefore <span style="font-style: italic;">tools</span> of the ONE Source, not separate objects acting in disconnection from that Source. The only question then, is whether we <span style="font-style: italic;">realize</span> our true nature, or falsely <span style="font-style: italic;">believe</span> we are acting on our own. <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><br />If everything is alive, and everything is interconnected and directed by a single Source, there is no such thing in our world as a "self-made man." We are each here by <span style="font-style: italic;">grace</span>, and we reflect the evolutionary manifestations of all that has come before us. We exist because we are supported by the entire infrastructure of the cosmos, from our nurturing planet to our heat-giving sun, to the galaxy that controls and contains our sun, to the intergalactic cluster that contains and connects our galaxy to all others. If any one of those connections break, we are at risk of total species extinction. To understand that at the deepest level of our psyche is to realize our true place in the cosmos, and to humbly regard ourselves in our proper cosmic context.<br /><br />That humanity has, for many centuries now, placed our desire for money and power above a reverent relationship with our own living planet - and with each other - is a reflection of our lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of everything. It isn't evil that drives us then; it's childish ignorance. Even modern science has failed us here, because most of our scientific theories cling to the belief that what's alive and subjective inside every object is less material than its objective properties. The assumption that we can come to know the totality of the whole through the simple dissection of its parts down to some mythical lowest common denominator misses the highest truth of life itself, which is that the whole is - always and ever - <span style="font-style: italic;">greater</span> than the simple sum of its parts. Modern science fails to focus on these connections, and instead seeks to define reality by mathematically summing up all the supposedly observable and individuated objects in the universe, without concerning itself with the added benefit gained by such a conjoinment. Thus the ongoing search for a unified field to bring all of reality together is an impossible quest under the scientific method, because it seeks a summary answer "out there" instead of noticing that any unified field MUST first be found at the closest possible point to the observer - which by definition must be <span style="font-style: italic;">within</span> the<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>pure awareness of the observer. That awareness does not exist <span style="font-style: italic;">outside</span> of the unified field, as modern science seems to assume it does. Pure awareness thus appears to be the magical "something more" that reality has gained by summing itself into a living, unified field.<br /><br />With this new understanding, this new movement - which is comprised of young and old, rich and poor, people of color and people of Western European heritage - is not a movement designed to separate right from left or the wealthy from those who suffer. It is, at heart, a great leap forward in human consciousness, because at heart it's a celebration of life's rich and powerful <span style="font-style: italic;">interconnectivity</span>. As such, violence will not serve its ends, because to do violence against what we're connected to is to do violence unto ourselves. What does serve this rising movement - and will continue to serve it well - is the courage of gnostic conviction of the truth. The conviction that life itself is far more precious than money, that human creativity deserves to be unleashed so we can collectively tackle our problems, and that to trust and love and nurture each other will get us farther than trying to direct and control each other for short-term gain is the deeper message underlying this movement. Thus this movement represents the genuine energy of freedom, but a freedom writ large on the psyche of human beings all over the world, as one by one we step into the realization that we are here to serve <span style="font-style: italic;">life</span>, not just self; and that by serving life we ultimately are serving ourselves <span style="font-style: italic;">as</span> enlightened members of the larger living whole. This movement therefore represents the desire of all spirits to be free to self-express and bring their unique capacities and talents into our world. We long to do so in gratitude for this precious gift that <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> life, which we're experiencing as a temporary form we have come to call the "self."<br /><br />No amount of ignorance, ridicule or even force can long subvert the Truth of who we are. As Martin Luther King once said, "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." When we <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> ourselves to be inextricably embedded in the infinite, eternal field that is life itself, we discover we have all the time in the world to stand for Truth. That awareness is the ultimate strength of the movement. It will not be suppressed by fear for the survival of our personal bodies, because we recognize these bodies to be but temporary manifestations of the larger living whole that will - always and ever - contain everything that is us. To serve <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> thus becomes the highest calling a human being can answer. And it is in that service that we find both grace and peace.<br /><br />So to all those who would ignore, ridicule or attempt to coerce their brothers and sisters into falling silent and ignoring their deepest truth, I exhort you now...notice the truth of who <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> are and allow it to set you free. Feel your own inner energy vibrating in your own cells, and pay attention to the invisible umbilical cord that is your breath, and that connects you to this world through the gift of life. Accept that you cannot survive or thrive without a healthy, vibrant world to support your existence, and that you cannot feel joy without also feeling love for and toward your fellow man. Step into the truth of your own interbeing, and release the false belief that you are an island. Allow the grace of life to pulse through you and flow lovingly into this world that created and contains you, through you, <span style="font-style: italic;">as</span> you. Bring love into this world by being loving. Bring peace by being peaceful. Bring generosity by being generous of mind and heart and spirit. See where that shift gets you instead of succumbing to the fear that possesses you now. <br /><br />Fear cannot survive in the light of love, so set yourself on fire and banish the darkness within your own heart. Know there are millions of others who are ready and willing to midwife you into this new reality, and who desire - once enough of us are awakened to our interconnectedness - to design a new society that reflects this truth. A society that serves the whole by empowering all its parts to fully self-actualize will be a society blessed with love and fruitful abundance, and from that abundance all forms of life will be nourished. The whole is always and ever <span style="font-style: italic;">greater</span> than the sum of its discrete parts. So allow the One Source to carry you to greater heights of beingness than you imagine you can achieve or attain on your own. That's grace in action, and it brings to each the peace that passeth all mental understanding.<br /><br />Know yourself.<br /><br />Namaste, my brothers and sisters, one and all.<br /></span>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-86185464583930361372011-09-23T12:35:00.000-07:002011-09-23T13:32:08.544-07:00Advice to Start Up CompaniesHaving been part of a couple of Fortune 100 corporations in the past, I believe I've got a decent amount of experience with old economy thinking, as well as an understanding of its fatal flaws. What I've come to realize is that - as folks in the trenches begin to step up in an effort to shift our global economy toward serving a higher purpose and being supportive of all life and away from the current self-serving power/money paradigm - we <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span>, as individuals who are integral members of our economic system, not allow ourselves to succumb to pressures to continually duplicate the old paradigm just because its trajectory has been powerful. To repeat what isn't working because it's all we know how to do is the very definition of insanity. Conversely, to stand up to that old economic paradigm and be willing to put yourself on the front line for what you believe is true is a test of personal courage.<br /><br />Before I felt free to quit my job at Smith Barney I had to be willing to acknowledge that I had no idea how or if I'd survive that departure financially. I had to be fully accepting in my own mind and heart that the consequence might mean becoming homeless and eating out of dumpsters - as well as being shunned by former clients, family members and friends - for choosing to stand in my highest truth instead of continuing to "sell out" for the money and accolades that arise from succeeding in the existing social structure. From that place of humble acceptance, I found the strength to trust myself to do the right thing to the best of my capacity in every given moment. By being willing to surrender it all I discovered I had nothing left to lose, which meant no fear of loss remained to hinder my ability to strive to become my grandest version of my highest vision of myself.<br /><br />Having gone through that trial by fire and having personally discovered - once I stepped into the abyss of the unknown - that the universe is actually a benevolent place and supports those who have the courage of their own convictions, I would like to offer the following advice to anyone who is contemplating starting their own business (or making any other sort of radical life change.) If it doesn't resonate with you then it's not meant for you...let it go without judgment. All information finds its true home in its own way, which is part of the marvel of the cosmic unfolding of life.<br /><br />1) Before you begin the arduous process of creating something brand new, allow yourself to mentally "go to zero." Going to zero means having the courage to picture yourself in the worst possible outcome you can imagine, should you fail. If you can accept that outcome - if you are willing to live with the consequences of the worst possible situation you can picture as a result of your engaging in your new venture -you will discover that fear no longer has the power overwhelm your capacity to be reasoned and focused on whatever will enable you to succeed. If, however, you've been too afraid to look deeply into the darkness of your own imagination and discover if you're capable of living with the consequences of failure, you'll likely be unable to conduct yourself with the necessary level of integrity to succeed. That seems to be the way the universe works. We have to be willing to surrender it all in order to achieve our highest aspirations. Anything short of that is "hedging our bets." And when we hedge, we're acknowledging that we don't trust ourselves enough to invest everything we have to offer in our own success. But if you don't trust yourself enough to put everything on the line for the chance to succeed, why should anyone else place their trust in your ability? That insecurity will surely flow through to your decision making, and color the outcome of your venture before it begins.<br /><br />2) Give deep thought to what it is you are wanting to create, and focus the bulk of your attention on that. Don't invest energy into thinking about what you don't want to happen, because that dilution of focus will sap your capacity to direct the bulk of your energy toward your own success. All we need do is examine our world to find countless examples of situations where humanity is busy creating the very situation it does not want to happen, because its attention is focused on (and its energy is directed toward) <span style="font-style: italic;">prevention</span> of what it doesn't want instead of achievement of what it desires. We've made war on each other to stop war, which has only succeeded in creating new enemies. We've made war on drugs, which has only succeeded in generating new, more harmful drugs and organized crime that harms more people than the original drugs we set out to destroy. So set your vision, remind yourself of it regularly and often, and check yourself constantly to discover if you're straying from it because your fears are arising in your subconscious and subverting your higher intentions. Only when we are vigilant and consistently aware of our own undisciplined thoughts can we develop our core competency in this.<br /><br />3) Spend time thoroughly studying Dan Pink's amazing book, "Drive." In it, he dissects human motivation and what drives us all to succeed. As it turns out, Pink's book reveals that the drivers humanity has been focusing on for too many eons now - reward and punishment - are external motivators that are fear/greed based, thus are only under very limited and short-term circumstances. Many studies prove that human beings are actually far more driven by a universal set of intrinsic motivators than they are by the external motivators of reward and punishment. What are those intrinsic drivers? It seems they are threefold:<br /><br /> ---The desire for autonomy, which includes the freedom to be who we are and work without overly aggressive supervision, including when and how to do the jobs we've been tasked to accomplish.<br /> ---The desire for mastery, which involves taking as much time and investing as much energy as is necessary to master the skills pertaining to our passions, talents, abilities and desires.<br /> ---The desire to serve a higher purpose than ourselves, which involves knowing that the function we perform has the capacity contribute to the advancement of human society and be beneficial to life on Earth.<br /><br />Therefore, if you're going to start a new business, build a company where these drives are honored and fostered and you'll find yourself with employees who will go out of their way to serve the business's ends because they <span style="font-style: italic;">love</span> what they do. They will appreciate the trust and freedom they've been gifted, and will be grateful to have an opportunity to develop their core competencies. By creating a win/win scenario, you enhance the chances your company will succeed.<br /><br />4) Acknowledge from the outset that nobody starting a new venture can possibly know what they don't yet know. In Tarot, life is called the "fool's journey" for a reason. We discover our own ignorance piece by piece, only after we've foolishly - and perhaps with the arrogance of ignorance - delved into the depths of our own incompetence. It is from that place of humility, from our rising awareness of our own incompetence and our desire to attain mastery, that true learning begins. To therefore blame, shame or guilt start up employees for failing to grasp what they did not know at the outset of the venture merely creates a hostile working climate that may well derail your operation before it gets underway. Which leads me to my next point:<br /><br />5) Allow the unfolding of your venture to take as long as it takes to succeed. Impatience has killed more start up companies than any other personal and emotional failing. The desire to become too big too fast, to create a product before constructing a solid ground of operations, to meet some arbitrary internal deadline to the point that a steady, measured approach to success is tossed aside for the sake of meeting the target, is almost certain corporate suicide. Don't allow the existing human condition - which sets too much stock in time-based accomplishments and not enough in relaxing and allowing - to push you into being stressed and overworking to the point of exhaustion. An exhausted and unhappy employee (or employer) cannot possibly be bringing the best of themselves to the world. And if you're not doing that, then what on Earth are you doing? And for what reason?<br /><br />I invite all prospective jobs creators - as well as all existing employers - to ponder these things as we move forward as a society...together.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-48228887155357049542011-09-20T05:55:00.000-07:002011-09-20T06:59:54.490-07:00When Good People go CrazySeveral times in my life I've experienced the sorrow of witnessing the absolute emotional and psychological unraveling of another human being. I am, at the present moment, once again observing exactly such an experience. As I take a deep breath and step back from the self-induced, self-destructive, take-no-prisoners carnage that this individual is currently creating, I find myself examining the way the situation has been unfolding. I have been seeking to understand - with deep feelings of loving compassion for the individual in question - why it is that sometimes good people go crazy.<br /><br />The following quote by Albert Einstein has been most instructive: "The intuitive voice is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift."<br /><br />Irrationality, which is the energy that fuels mental craziness as well as all emotional reactivity, does not arise from the intuitive voice, which doesn't create fear or encourage fear-based thinking. The intuitive voice is - always and ever - arising out of the energy of unconditional love. Irrationality can only arise when the formerly rational mind - the faithful servant of the deepest essential self - has lost its way, and is no longer listening to the powerful intuitive voice that is encouraging it to value love <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> all else. What causes that to happen is a function of separation consciousness, the mistaken belief that each of us is entirely independent from one another, and from the larger world that has created and contains us all. It's hard to unconditionally love the external world (or its occupants) when we perceive it to be a dangerous and hostile environment for us to navigate, threatening to our very existence - because we imagine the totality of our existence to be <span style="font-style: italic;">only</span> our mind-based self. Of course, it is only the mind that is telling us that terrifying story; the mind - out of fear of its own mortality because deep down it knows IS a mortal element and will ultimately dissolve with the body - that has attempted to elevate itself to the level of the infinite, eternal One Source that is manifesting life through every one of us.<br /><br />Our society, such as it is, does not make it easy for those whose rational minds have (consciously or unconsciously) severed their connection to their deeper intuitive voice to find their way back to emotional wellness. As Einstein inferred, we have created a modern society that itself has elevated the status of mind to a level <span style="font-style: italic;">above</span> the intuitive voice, which means we have - for all intents and purposes - created an insane society. Love these days therefore takes a back seat to success; empathy and respect take a back seat to personal reputations and self-image; integrity takes a back seat to the fear-based drive to accumulate wealth and perceived security.<br /><br />Irrationality arises when the rational mind, faced with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to act out of accordance with its own highest principals in service to its own fears, chooses to invent a rationalization to justify the wrong action. The rationalization that occurs (which is actually irrational at the deepest intuitive level) goes something like this: "I can't afford to practice my highest values and be my best self at this point, because I'm not yet secure enough to do so. When I have attained the level of security I desire (or fame, fortune, public accolades, etc.) <span style="font-style: italic;">then</span> I will be free to be fully and truly myself."<br /><br />Having personally attained (and then willingly surrendered) the things I once thought I needed to feel security, if I've learned anything in this life it's that the search for one's self-image "out there" is an endless quest that is doomed to end in failure. Once we achieve what we believed we needed to be happy and feel secure, we discover either that it's relatively hollow and quickly loses its luster, or we discover we have to continually to battle the external world to hold onto whatever we've gained. The fact is, any quest to hold onto impermanent things is a fool's game, because all things must eventually dissolve. As Eckhart Tolle says so eloquently, "The things we think are so important in our lives, all the life dramas and suffering that consume so much of our attention and our energy, one day amount to the dash between the date of our birth and the date of our death on our tombstone."<br /><br />Therefore, how we choose to <span style="font-style: italic;">live</span> within the context of that dash matters more than all the narrative stories we're creating about ourselves to satisfy or quiet the fears of our mind.<br /><br />Yesterday I took a time out from life and strolled through an old Vermont cemetery. I noted the dates of birth and death on many tombstones, wondering at the life stories that lay beneath my feet. Who was Lena, aged 13, and what was the cause of her untimely death? I'll never know. I'm sure she had many amazing life experiences, suffered some tragedies, was mourned by her family members and friends. Yet all that remains to remember her by is that dash.<br /><br />This is true for most all of us. Most of us are not destined to become rich, or famous, or to go down in history as movers and shakers of human society. Most of us will live our lives quietly, and our bodies will dissolve as bodies inevitably do. The key then, is to be able to wake up every day - knowing it may well be our last day on this Earth - and to <span style="font-style: italic;">live</span> it as if that is so. That most of us fail to do that, imagining we will only be able fully live in accordance with our intuitive voice, the voice that is <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span> on the side of love, once we've accomplished our personal goals, is to put the destination ahead of the journey, allowing the end to justify the means.<br /><br />That is humanity's collective insanity, and it is indeed what causes good people to occasionally go crazy.<br /><br />NamasteEileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-58571231046182583722011-09-07T08:50:00.000-07:002011-09-07T08:52:32.515-07:00Money: A Manifestation of Separation Consciousness<style>@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }</style><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>There seems to be a fundamental misconception about the nature of money among many members of modern spiritual movements, as well as within many New Age and intentional communities.<span style=""> </span>I say that because frequently I read books or hear very well meaning people make statements like, “money is neither good nor evil; it’s our attitude toward it that determines whether we live in abundance or in scarcity.”<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>While that’s an interesting notion, and on a very limited personal level there is a certain amount of truth to it, what that assertion fails to take into account is that money is more than an idea or a projection of our personal beliefs; it is a very real medium of exchange that our society has designed over time to represent the way we’ve chosen to interact with one another. As such it carries its own DNA, one that gives it a physical structure and shapes it independent of our beliefs about its nature. Based on its inherent nature, money – at least as we are presently manifesting it in our world – makes it impossible for us <i style="">all</i> to live in harmony and abundance, no matter what our attitude may be. Why? Because in its present incarnation, money – much like the popular game of Monopoly® – sets up a collective win/lose game. The fact is, if I acquire and hoard money in a sufficient enough quantity so I need never worry again, I am in a very <i style="">real</i> sense contributing to the scarcity experiences and physical suffering of many, many others. <span style=""> </span>Perhaps that explains why our personal intuition, which inclines many of us to feel negatively disposed toward the energy of modern money, is more accurate than the beliefs we have about our need to magnetize more of it to ourselves.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>But why is that so? And if it’s true, what does it mean for us, as spiritual beings, that we desire ever more money in its current incarnation? Equally importantly, how might our desire to accumulate enough money to guarantee our personal security impact our ability to be in right relationship with one another, and with life? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">To understand these things in their deeper context, we need to first understand how money was – and continues to be – born into our world…and how, unlike all other natural life forms (and in direct violation of the natural law of impermanence) it does not ever <i style="">die</i>. Let’s begin with the birth of money in the form we know it today. (Should you be interested in understanding more about the history and various incarnations of money, I discuss them in depth in “Sacred Economics: The Currency of Life.”) In our modern world, money is born when our government – which represents the American people – borrows it into being from the National Federal Reserve Bank. The Federal Reserve then issues either digital credits or actual paper dollars and lends them out to its private member banks. That money then flows into general circulation through acts of additional borrowing. Banks lend their money (creating much more of it in the process) to private citizens and corporations. That transfers money out of the banking system and into the hands of the public. From there it can enter the economic flow and stimulate the exchange of goods and services. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>When however, we dissect this process, we uncover a major problem. That is, the Federal Reserve only ever issues into circulation the amount of principle each loan conveys to the borrower, even though every single loan comes burdened with the need to pay back all that principle <i style="">plus</i> some additional interest.<span style=""> </span>That means, on a societal level, it is structurally impossible<i style=""> </i>for all of us to live our lives free of debt. The very nature of the equation means that in order for one person to pay off her debts in full, some number of other people will have to lose most or all of their borrowed principle so she can accumulate enough to pay back <i style="">both</i> the principle she borrowed plus all the interest that she owes. Because not all our debts come due at once, we fail to notice the insidiousness of that system, but that doesn’t mean the problem isn’t there. The fact is, for every modern loan ever made and for every business enterprise ever undertaken through an act of borrowing, our society as a whole must go deeper into debt to make it happen, which creates a higher collective obligation that can never fully be repaid. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">What, you may be wondering, does any of that have to do with me? So long as I pay my debts successfully and accumulate money efficiently enough that I live in personal abundance, why is what happens to those who can’t pay their debts <i style="">my</i> problem? For an answer to those questions, we must draw upon the deeper spiritual and biological truths so many of us either intuit, or have gradually come to realize as our awareness of how our cosmos works has evolved.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">The monetary system described above is grounded in a longstanding (albeit false) belief that we are each separate from one another, as well as separate from our larger living world. That belief arose from a fractured worldview that assumed “we” must protect ourselves <i style="">from</i> “life,” and that – at whatever cost – we must protect these fragile forms from physical harm. That assumption springs from separation consciousness, the belief that somehow <i style="">we</i> are <i style="">other than</i> life itself. And when drawn out to its logical conclusion, that assumption of separation has led to the presumption that we each <i style="">have</i> a life we can lose, and that it must somehow be protected and preserved as if it is a distinct and precious object we possess.<span style=""> </span>But from what are we protecting this supposed life we “have,” if not from life itself? And who is this “we” who must protect this life we have come to believe we possess, and that we can lose? What <i style="">is</i> that, if not the very essence of life itself, which both creates and animates the world of form?<span style=""> </span>To recognize that is to recognize the absurdity of the original assumption, the belief that “I” am separate from “life.” That belief, that fractured worldview which imagines that “I am one and everything else is other” obscures a more potent truth: that “we are all.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Because the tool of money was originally conceived during humanity’s long and painful experiment with separation consciousness (which seems to be mercifully coming to an end in modern times) our monetary system fails to take into consideration – because when we created money we ourselves failed to understand – that we are in fact all inextricably interconnected, and that life is a process of cooperative <i style="">interbeing</i>; not, as we often imagine, a random collection of separate beings all “doing” life for themselves. As a fundamental tool of separation consciousness, money therefore demands that we each serve the needs of the personal me ahead of the needs of the we, rather than viewing the two as entwined and of equal importance. Through serving the self as supreme, individuals in our society gain economic privilege and social power by capitalizing on others’ bad luck, missteps and misfortunes. Money pushes us, <i style="">by its very nature</i>, to figure out new ways to commoditize, package and sell our natural world. We unthinkingly convert life itself into raw materials to be killed or exploited, manipulated, dominated and eagerly consumed for the sake of economic productivity and monetary profits. Because our collective focus is on serving the temporary form that is the individual by depreciating the infinite, eternal flow of creation that is the underlying life process, it fosters within us a constant fear of lack – not because we are spiritually unaware and thus failing to hold an appropriate attitude of abundance – but because we are devaluing what we <i style="">are</i> to serve what we believe ourselves to be, which is considerably <i style="">less than</i> the truth of what we are! Worst of all, this belief system desensitizes us to our own inner joy and overwhelms our innate desire to serve a higher purpose than our temporary self – to serve life, which we are – because it demands that we satisfy our personal debt obligations <i style="">before</i> we pursue joyful life service by fulfilling life’s deeper purpose for taking this form. <span style=""> </span>And then we wonder, when we look around, why so many of us are living isolated, fear-based lives of quiet desperation that require Prozac, alcohol, frantic overeating and mind numbing television programs to help us temporarily alleviate, though not dispel, that sense of despair!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">If that were all there was to it, we’d certainly have plenty of work to do as a species to redress that foundational misunderstanding of separation consciousness. But that’s not all. I mentioned earlier that money violates natural law, because (at least the way we’ve designed it) it does not <i style="">die</i>. <span style=""> </span>Let’s now examine how that negatively impacts our lives, and life itself. <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">As temporary life forms, we know that our body comes into being through the vehicle of conception and childbirth. Our body then matures, puts forth the fruit of its physical, emotional and creative capacities, and eventually decays. Death then, becomes the vehicle whereby our physical forms are broken down, fully consumed and then recycled by life itself, so life can use all of itself again to recreate itself anew. Once we embrace that truth, we come to understand that each of us is, in a very <i style="">real</i> sense, fully embedded in life’s infinitely creative and eternal cosmic dance of self-expression.<span style=""> </span>We are not separate or excluded from that process, nor are we disconnected from its boundless creative flow; we <i style="">are</i> the eternal dancer, infinitely dancing the dancer’s eternal dream. All that ever changes is the shape the dancer takes, and the ability the dancer gains (through a good deal of dedication and patient practice) to challenge itself to perform higher and ever more beautiful acts of amazing self-expression. Death then, is not our enemy, or something to be avoided at any cost. It is merely the vehicle by which life transports itself to a new and higher level of creative self-expression through the continuous process of destruction and rebirth.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">In our earliest social exchanges, shortly before separation consciousness rooted, the things we exchanged all decayed and eventually died. Grains rotted, and domesticated animals aged and died as well. Even the energy we offered to others in the form of our personal labor disappeared forever, unrecoverable even if our offering of time went unused. The creative fruits of our endeavors – be they pottery, textiles, woodwork, construction or art – also broke down or dissolved. No matter how hard we’ve tried through the ages, we’ve found we’re unable to preserve these temporary forms or prevent their natural decay. In the past that meant we were continually inspired to exchange what we had to offer, because if we didn’t either use or exchange our abundance we would lose it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">As separation consciousness took hold however, and with the advent of money to facilitate human exchange, we suddenly discovered we had the capacity to store value for a very, very long time. While our many goods and services (for which we were using money as the medium of exchange) passed away with time, the money itself did not. At first in the form of metal coins, then later in the form of paper and now in modern times as digital records, we found we could store value <i style="">in perpetuity</i> through the act of hoarding money to meet future needs. The unforeseen consequence of money’s eternal nature is that money – which was initially intended to be the primary tool we used to <i style="">exchange</i> human goods and services – took on a dual function. It also became our primary means to <i style="">store value</i>, so we might pay off our debts someday and set ourselves free from the need to do work in exchange for the means to survive. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>Unfortunately, by combining those two functions – the primary means of exchange and the primary means of value storage – we designed a tool of duality that is highly problematic. <span style=""> </span>If, for example, I need to use the money I’ve accumulated to store value so I have something in reserve to meet tomorrow’s needs, how can I use it as a means of exchange today? Yet the moment I remove my money from today’s flow of creative exchange and tuck it away in reserve to meet tomorrow’s potential needs, I’m hindering everyone else’s ability to exchange their creativity here and now, because I’ve reduced the means that makes such exchanges possible. The more money that gets hoarded, and that eventually stagnates in large pools of wealth – dammed up as a store of value held by the wealthiest few among us – the less means the rest of us have to fuel our creative flow and thrive together. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Each of us must constantly decide which of these two functions our money will serve, which creates stress within our psyches. If I use my hard earned money as a means of exchange today, I must remove it from storage and surrender its potential to meet my needs tomorrow. Likewise, if I store it away for a rainy day, my ability to share in life’s creative exchanges in the here and now gets reduced. If the value of money declined over time so we <i style="">knew</i> it would be worth less tomorrow than it’s worth today – the way our own mental capacity diminishes and our own physical forms deteriorate – it would be easier for us to strike a balance between these dual functions. What throws it out of whack, however, is the fact that we must pay interest on all borrowed money. Interest means lenders are rewarded for hoarding money to a point of excess, and then parsing it out to the needy so they can grow their own wealth at the expense of others. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">If I lend you ten dollars and demand that you return twenty to me next week, that twenty means I’ll have more buying power next week than I’d have if I’d spent the ten I have today. <span style=""> </span>You, in turn, will need to spend that borrowed ten dollars in a way that you’re able to use it to earn at least twenty more dollars within the next week.<span style=""> </span>If you’re unable, for whatever reason, to use the money I loaned you to earn more than twenty dollars by next week, you’re still obligated to pay me the twenty we agreed to, which leaves you worse off for having accepted my “help.” And what if you borrowed that money to put food on your table, care for your sick child, or to cover your electric bill so your family doesn’t freeze to death in winter? While those things are fundamental for your survival, they don’t go far in aiding you to be able to earn twenty dollars in the future, beyond the fact they allow you to live and strive for another day. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Clearly then, consumerism (spending money on end goods that we use instead of investing it in creative enterprises) robs us of our capacity to pay off our accumulating debts. Meanwhile, the very nature of money rewards hoarding far more than it rewards us for engaging in supporting the flow of creative human energy. That explains why today we live in a society where the pressure in on us all to consume more end goods, which render us deeper in debt and less able to effectively create, while at the same time we feel a countervailing pressure to save as much as we possibly can so we can use what we save to exploit the needs of others and grow our own wealth. Is it any wonder then that, even with seven billion of us on planet Earth today, we witness so much pent-up creativity – so much wasted human capacity – because most of us don’t have enough means to fully self-express and give our gifts in this world?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">When we look around us (if we’re honest, and not <i style="">imagining</i> all is perfect so we don’t have to respond to what <i style="">is</i>) we can’t help but notice the suffering on our planet. We see her soils being raped, her bowels being gutted to access her natural resources, her air being fouled by all our toxic emissions, her waters being denuded of life and severely polluted. We see ancient forests, fragile tundra and unique ecosystems being slashed and burned for short-term monetary profits; we see the extinction of untold species who have “gotten in the way” of our own economic growth. These are but symptoms, byproducts of the way we’ve constructed our relationships <i style="">with</i> life, which in turn is rooted in the false belief that we are separate <i style="">from</i> life, as well as from the larger living world that birthed and contains us. Money, as a symbolic artifact of that longstanding belief system, is not neutral. It is, in truth, <i style="">ignorant</i> of our newly emerging higher realization. It’s a reflection of an outmoded level of human consciousness, a byproduct of our experiment with the idea of separation. As such, we <i style="">cannot</i> shift our personal inner awareness and evolve our consciousness to a higher state of being while still binding ourselves to the energies and beliefs our existing systems continue to represent. The assumption that we are entirely separate <i style="">from</i> life, and the assumption that we are inextricably entwined <i style="">with</i> life <i style="">as</i> life, are fundamentally incompatible! Therefore, as we collectively awaken to the realization that the long social experiment we’ve been conducting to discover if we are indeed separate from life has proved false, we’ll have no choice but to rebuild our systems upon a new foundation – the understanding that all is entwined, all is alive, and all deserves to be treated in sacred manner. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>So what does all this mean for those of us who have awakened to the truth of our interconnectivity, yet find ourselves still embedded in outmoded social systems that don’t reflect that awareness, but contribute to the energy of separation consciousness? How do we navigate the reality of those social systems without strengthening them? How might we hospice them out of existence without rendering our newly awakened and interconnected selves helpless (and broke!) in the meantime? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I wish I could offer an answer, or wave a magic wand and make things fine. Unfortunately, all I can do is offer a pointer based on my own experience. The truly profound shift in my life occurred when I quit my job as a stockbroker in late 2007. I woke up one day and realized – down to the very depths of my being – that I’d rather surrender every material possession I’d accumulated in this world and live like a homeless bag lady (which, while not desirable, was doable) instead of continuing to feed the insatiable beast of separation consciousness through my fears and anxieties about the future. That for me was the pivot point, because surrendering my need to control the future empowered me to live as if I have abundance<i style=""> </i>in every moment. The fact is, I do have abundance in the only moment there is: this sacred Now. Nothing, I finally realized, could truly harm the infinite/eternal essence that is life, because that aspect has no oppositional force. While birth (creation) and death (destruction) are oppositional aspects of the process life uses to dances its way through an infinite number of temporary forms, life itself <i style="">has</i> no opposite. We <i style="">are</i> that, and will be always, in whatever forms or shapes life chooses to take.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>To come to know myself <i style="">as</i> life, to surrender my sense of self’s desire for immortality through my acceptance that this limited human form <i style="">is</i> impermanent and <i style="">will</i> die along with my sense of this form, which is but a brief reflection of all that life is, was to step into full alignment with nature’s flow. In that moment I ceased worrying about money as a store of value that could determine how much I could get for myself to protect myself from the future, and instead began to focus on how very much I had to give to this precious all of life that is here and NOW. In doing so, I set myself free from the shackles of fear that demanded I continually hoard more money for my physical protection. That, in turn, freed me to begin to consciously direct the flow of whatever money came my way toward those creative endeavors and spiritual ideals that honored life’s interconnectivity, instead of toward things I once believed protected me <i style="">from</i> life!<span style=""> </span>Once I realized I <i style="">was</i> life, and did not need to be protected from what <i style="">I am</i>, my fears subsided. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">This is not to say my fears have vanished, or that I am always and ever in full alignment with the wondrous flow that is life. The momentum of human history is powerful, and the deeply conditioned belief in separation takes time to unwind. What it does mean is that whenever my fears arise, as they inevitably do, I take a moment to look at the thoughts that are triggering those fears. Always I find they are “me” thoughts, questions my <i style="">sense</i> of self is asking about what will happen to it, should such-and-such occur. To gently observe those fear-based thoughts and recognize them for what they are, and then to release them without judgment, shame or guilt, is an ongoing part of my daily spiritual practice.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Will I run out of money before enough people wake up to the truth for us to change the nature of this sacred life experience? I don’t know. Will I lose my house in this current mortgage debacle, as seems to be a possibility now? I don’t know. Will I find myself, in my old age, penniless and homeless and unable to acquire the things I need to survive? I just don’t know. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>What I do know is I’m no longer content to live in a world where I’m not doing everything in my power, using every means available through this temporary expression that I am, to assist in humanity’s quickening to the realization of our magnificent and harmonious interconnectivity <i style="">as</i> life. <span style=""> </span>It’s why I give away money (or spend it) almost as quickly as it enters my physical realm, and why I look for places to help and serve and give. <span style=""> </span>For me, life is no longer about personal affirmations, or personal abundance, or even personal enlightenment. It’s about love – that boundless energy that always feels as good to give away as it does to receive. These days, and by life’s grace, I’m choosing to express from a state of love instead of a place of fear, and I do my best to affirm that choice each moment. Over time, I’m coming to appreciate the remarkable difference between dying rich…and dying, having richly lived. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I hope you are too.</p>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-75980004103134841662011-08-01T08:04:00.000-07:002011-08-03T09:01:05.739-07:00Gnosticism (knowing God) versus Holy Books (learning about God)<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>When I hear people hold up their holy books as the definitive word of God and declare that all life's answers can be found in their chosen book, what comes to mind immediately is that here is a person who is unconsciously disconnected from the power of life that resides within him or herself. I feel compassion for that, because to surrender your power to decide for yourself how to be as you go through life is to feel a lack of trust and faith in yourself as an agent and creation of God - whatever you conceive God to be. It is to place a physical distance - the dimensions of your chosen book - between yourself and your creator. It is to render yourself a perpetual child of humanity's historical teachings, rather than view yourself as an evolving part of the larger creative life process.</p><p>As children, we do what our parents tell us to do without question, without thinking, and are taught that this is good. At some point in our maturation, however, we discover we must step into the fullness of our own capacity and discover for ourselves how to be, what we believe, and what feels right for us to do. We know our parents aren't always going to be standing right behind us, informing us how to act every step of the way. Becoming an adult means we must develop our own core competencies, even though that means we'll make a few mistakes along the way. We accept that challenge, because we know that eventually we must learn to trust in our own abilities to analyze and apply what we know, and what we feel to be true, to every new situation that arises. Only then can we feel any sense of confidence that we are prepared to raise our own children, to build a solid, stable foundation from which they can grow.</p><p>So it is in our relationship with God. Evolution, which is woven into the fabric of life itself, encourages us to continue to grow and mature. God <em>wants</em> this for us, wants us to learn how to use the gifts we've been given in ways that improve the quality of life for all of God's creatures on Earth. And although rule books written by the wisest men of their era were helpful guideposts for humanity when we were like children in our mental and emotional evolution, the complexity and constant challenges we experience today - as we move out of species adolescence and take our first tentative steps into species adulthood - have dramatically altered the way we relate to life, compared with how we did things thousands of years ago. Metaphorically speaking, holy books are like the training wheels we attach to children's bicycles. Eventually we are meant to cast them off, to learn how to ride the bike for ourselves without our speed and capacity being impeded by the limitations of the training wheels. That doesn't mean we must surrender or negate the benefits of having used the training wheels; far from it. It simply means we've advanced beyond what they are now able to teach us. To leave them behind - with gratitude for all their support - is the answer.<br /></p><p>What we understand about the world in which we live - our perspective on how we fit into the larger scheme of life - continues to advance over time. Our understanding of science has helped us grasp that death is a physical illusion, that nothing in this world is <em>ever</em> lost or destroyed, it only changes form. Science has also helped us realize that what we perceive as "solid" isn't solid at all, it is mostly inner spaciousness, and that it is only our sensory perspective (designed to enable our "solid" bodies to navigate this reality without banging into other "things") that gives our world the appearance of solidity. We've come to realize we are <em>not</em> the center of the universe, but are infinitesimal specks of life on a rather unassuming planet, in the orbit of a very ordinary star in the midst of a massive galaxy that is but one of many trillions of galaxies within reach of our strongest telescopes - and that is only the fraction of the world we are able to view! We've come to understand that nature isn't "personal," and doesn't attack us out of spite or anger, but has its own long established processes and geological activities that we are sometimes, unfortunately, caught up in. We've come to realize that what we do in this world has consequences - always. For instance, there is no place to throw garbage "away," no action we can take that does not reverberate energetically, no damage we can do to this world from which we can walk away unscathed - not on a spherical planet where everything is utterly interconnected in space and time.</p><p>There is so much we have yet to learn, so very much we don't yet know, yet we endlessly strive to attain higher wisdom as we continue to evolve. In that larger context, whatever relationship we personally choose to forge with the creative process that is still acting within us, upon us and all around us holds the power to help guide us in ways that are fully relevant to life as we experience it <em>today</em>, as opposed to the limited guidance we're still able to glean from words that were written down long ago to explain life as it used to be to those (and by those) who did not hold our level of understanding.</p><p>To turn our attention within, and slowly learn to trust the essence of eternal life (God) that emerges when we quiet ourselves and listen to the wisdom that arises from the wellspring of the infinite inside us isn't easy, any more than that first tentative spin we took on a two-wheeler was easy. It is, however, a highly rewarding process. The best part about establishing and building a personal connection with God (gnosticism) is that we develop our own core competency in relationship to the world. The connection we open is there inside us everywhere we go, and can be instantly accessed in any situation. We don't need to call a "time out" to consult an ancient holy book, or to invest energy figuring out which group of conflicting instructions in a particular book ought to apply to a given situation. When we still ourselves, quiet our minds and open our hearts to truth, it always appears. If we really want to experience miracles in life, this is the place to begin. The relationship we're able to forge with the infinite/eternal within us when we discover we ARE that, manifesting here and now as <em>this</em>, a temporary form, is miraculous.</p><p>Why is it important for as many of us as are willing to do so to go within and connect with our truths? Because in life, no two situations are ever exactly the same. Every moment offers a confluence of different people, different times, different energies, different relationships, different histories, different outcomes. As tempting as it may be to cling to a "book of rules" that will inform us how to behave in every situation, it doesn't take most of us long to realize life isn't quite that neat. There IS no rulebook that will give us the definitive truth on how to BE in every situation, or how to think or feel about what is happening right here, right now. There are guideposts, yes. Approximations we can turn to. Insights that have been gleaned by others who have gone inside themselves and made their own deep connection with God. Interpretations of language by experts we can occasionally consult. But there <em>are</em> no fixed rules for life. There is only life, challenging us at every turn to step up and <em>live</em> it, fully right <span style="font-style: italic;">here</span>, in this <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>. When those who have stepped into the truth <span style="font-style: italic;">as it is now</span> come into relationship with those who are using an ancient book to inform them about the truth, conflict inevitably arises. That's because the past cannot inform the future from a place of genuine wisdom, for it does not possess the experience that is present in this moment. Past can only inform the future from its own historic perspective, which ends as of the writing down of the past. Thus, calling upon the past to inform us is like expecting the child we used to be to tell us how to behave as an adult. We can glean lessons from our childhood, yes. We can recall specific moments and act upon specific insights that are reflective of those past experiences. But we can only do so from the perspective of the <span style="font-style: italic;">adult</span> we are today. Certainly we don't believe that the untrained, highly limited mind of the child we used to be should fully inform our behavior, without us adding our adult wisdom to the decisions we choose to make. That would be a far too limiting way for us to function.<br /></p><p>Expecting our chosen rule book to provide all life's answers is equally limiting. Even "Thou shall not kill" - which seems like a pretty straightforward law - has asterisks attached! Thou CAN apparently kill if the other person is trying to kill you, or is harming another, or in the context of war, or (at least as some believe) out of vengeance or to mete out justice. And what exactly does "kill" mean? Does it refer to the tissue that is an as-yet unborn child? Does it limit itself to that which is already in existence as a separate human being? Does it apply to gently assisting another in their passing over to death if they are suffering beyond redemption? These are not questions for which any book offers real answers.<br /></p><p>These days, I prefer to personally step into each new situation that arises with "don't know" mind, and then invite Truth to enter and inform <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span> how to be in THAT given moment. I concern myself much less with how others are choosing to be, and instead focus on doing what I know to be good and right and true in the given moment - which becomes a full-time job once we commit ourselves to it. Nowadays I'm usually far too busy making sure I'm living in full integrity with my own inner truth to concern myself with how others are choosing to live. And as well read as I happen to be, because I genuinely love both reading and writing, no book I've come across yet contains the insight, the flexibility, the wisdom, to do that hard work for me, because <em>words are dead</em>. They cannot adjust to life, bend for it, flow with it, change as it does. They are fixed representations of what was <em>alive at that time</em>. We cannot breathe life into words, no matter how hard we try. Words are only thoughts that lived in a mind that lived in the past, reflecting the reality of the individuals who thought them. Even these words you're reading right now are already dead on the page. Our world has evolved beyond where it was when they first arose in my mind in the present moment. To carry the written word into the future and try to breathe life into it <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>, to expect those words to be utterly relevant to your own reality in this brand new moment, instead of CREATING YOUR OWN THOUGHTS is to waste your God-given gift to connect with life <em>as</em> life, to feel and think and experience life for yourself.<br /></p><p>Knowledge is what we glean when we turn to the words of others to instruct us about how life is. Wisdom is what we gain when we enter into the experience of life for ourselves. Knowledge is two-dimensional, thus doesn't truly exist. Wisdom arises in the three-dimensional realm, which is where humanity lives. This doesn't mean we should throw away the compendium of collected human knowledge; far from it. Value lies within it, particularly as pointers from the past and important lessons around mistakes already made and overcome by the men and women who came before us. The key is to appreciate knowledge for what it is, a <em>history</em> of the journey of human ignorance to a place of higher understanding, and not the whole Truth of life, which is infinite and eternally unfolding.</p></div></div>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-19692658725470055332011-06-06T08:41:00.000-07:002011-06-06T08:44:19.073-07:00The Paradox of the Modern Business Model<style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p { margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 10pt; font-family: Times; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }</style><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">So often today we hear the crowd-pleasing mantra, “let’s starve the government,” being promoted by politicians and conservative economists, as if that would be a grand idea for us to implement.<span style=""> </span>To force the government to cut spending to the bone, to put it on a financial austerity program that mimics what we would do in our own homes if we lost our jobs or other means of financial support, would at last put governmental power firmly in check, or so goes the theory. The question nobody seems to ask, however, is: in check to whom or what? Whose power will then prove greater than that of our starved, diminished government if we succeed in this proposed austerity mission?<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Certainly not the power of our state and local governments, who themselves have been too long starved for income, and who depend more and more upon the federal government for assistance in funding crucial aspects of their annual budgets. Who then <i style="">truly</i> benefits from a weakened and undermined federal government system? I would suggest that the beneficiaries, those who are promoting the idea of starving our government and who are selling that proposition to the public like so much snake oil, are the wealthy plutocrats, bankers and top tier mangers of businesses in this nation (along with the political puppets they fund and control.) Their mission is clear: to subvert the federal government’s agenda in favor of their own narrow agenda and worldview. But why? What does business have to <i style="">gain</i> by undermining the governmental structure that for centuries has coddled and protected it? Why has such enmity arisen now, such that the leaders of commerce would willingly and consciously attempt to defang the very beast they once created, the one that has jealously guarded and protected their interests since commerce first arose in human society? After all, the earliest forms of social governance came into being to <i style="">protect</i> personal property rights and to safeguard the possessions that wealthy people had begun to accumulate, shortly after the notions of individual ownership and personal success had been embraced by human society. In fact, government seems to have difficulty knowing what to do with itself without business interests – and the fruits thereof – to protect. Business has never truly existed without a strong governing arm to stabilize the larger society and ensure that businesses remain free to produce, profit and benefit from the fruits of their labor without public interference or without the greater society’s need stripping them of the results of their business efforts.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">As is true when we seek to understand the driver behind any human behavior, we must examine business’s <i style="">motives</i> if we wish to understand why it’s now opposed to strong governance. Let us never forget that any business’s primary motive is to earn a monetary profit. All other motives we might wish to attribute to a business must align behind that singular prime directive.<span style=""> </span>No profit; no more business. It’s that simple. It seems likely then, that the reason our business community today seems so eager to starve government funding must spring from the fact that, over recent centuries, whole functions of government have sprung up and been publicly funded that <i style="">compete</i> with business in the marketplace of ideas, and now threaten the supremacy of the monetary for-profit paradigm that is the corporate worldview. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Modern governments over time have broken a centuries’ old pact they once had with businesses (and the oligarchs who run them.) With the establishment of democracies and constitutionally based governing systems, the longstanding, primary role of government as the protector of its <i style="">society</i> (which in prior centuries meant the plutocrats and the monetary for-profit paradigm) shifted radically. Governments instead became the direct and primary protector of the <i style="">citizenry, </i>rather than simply the protector of the social operating system and the individuals who controlled the system and exploited the citizenry to keep it running.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Think about that. Over the past hundred years we’ve funded governmental scientific research that has discovered cures and vaccines (not just symptom alleviators) for many of the diseases that ail humanity and that disproportionately harm the poor. We’ve funded studies that tell us if the things we’re doing are harmful to human life. We’ve funded testing facilities and safety agencies to monitor business practices and protect the public’s health. We’ve funded consumer protection agencies to defend us against the most predatory activities of private enterprise. We’ve funded environmental protection agencies whose goal it is to balance the public’s long-term desire for clean water, air and unspoiled lands with business’s desire to exploit and pollute those resources for short-term financial gain. We’ve funded free public education, which has created a more informed public and a smarter labor force - one that now has the intellectual capacity to challenge business’s motives and practices, and that sometimes tries to steer our business model in new and disruptive directions. We’ve funded public broadcasting, which attempts to provide free and factual information to all citizens - which challenges the private sector’s ability to control the national agenda by controlling the information that flows to the public. We’ve also funded (via military spending and space exploration) the invention and development of advanced technologies that have been translated into inventions and communications systems. Those in turn have benefited humanity outside the control of the corporate plutocrats.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Nothing is more likely to enrage the plutocracy than having its for-profit model ignored or disturbed by upstarts who are working outside the model. The first approach the plutocrats take if an upstart creates a disruptive new technology is to try and destroy their model or undermine their credibility. If that doesn’t work the plutocrats eventually embrace the upstart, seducing the Steve Jobs and Arianna Huffingtons into becoming part of the business model by buying them out or by offering them an exclusive membership in the club of the corporate brotherhood. That guarantees the goals of the upstarts will shift into better alignment with those of the for-profit business model.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The plutocrats who run the international business machinery are ever eager to control the release into our society of any new ideas that may affect their ability to earn a profit. Only by rigidly controlling the flow and timing of new ideas can they ensure their profitability remains on firm footing based on their private agenda. That's why businesses lobby so hard to regulate or limit the expansion of inventions like the Internet – which, not surprisingly, flowed out of the government pool of ideas and took root before business could control the spread of it.<span style=""> </span>Since the advent of the internet, which has empowered individuals to eliminate middle men, do their own research and make better and more informed decisions, businesses have had to invest inordinate sums of money to try and regain the power they lost to the individual via the net. Business <i style="">wants</i> to restrain and control all such potentially heretical ideas that may flow out of government, and that might benefit the citizenry in ways that could damage short-term financial interests.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br />Government, on the other hand, has no such financial constraints on what it does or creates, other than those its citizenry imposes. When we study the Declaration of Independence and at the Constitution of the United States<i style=""> as they are and not as we’ve been told they are,</i> what we find is that, as initially conceived, our government's motives are to protect and defend the citizenry, to <i style="">regulate</i> commerce, to monitor and protect our natural resources and to protect and preserve the public commons for the sake of future generations. The government will (if not tampered with or bribed into silence by controlling business interests) release into the world whatever new ideas it brings forth, along with those studies and inventions it develops, based upon how informative and beneficial those things seem to be to its <i style="">citizenry</i>, and how protective they will be of the public commons. Furthermore, it will prosecute businesses that willingly violate public health and safety laws. Government also aggressively challenges companies when their practices grow too predatory and harmful to the citizenry they are supposed to be <i style="">serving</i>, not exploiting for their own financial benefit. Often that more principled governmental approach – based on its charter to defend the rights and wellbeing of its citizens <i style="">ahead</i> of the financial needs of its corporations and plutocrats - puts pressure on corporations to change the way they do business, or to change the composition or nature of the goods they produce. Corporations hate that, because those changes cost them money and reduce their profitability.<br /><br />The corporate plutocracy <i style="">wants</i> its financial for-profit model to reign supreme, and its agenda to be viewed as more crucial to the health and wellbeing of the citizenry than the governmental agenda. It therefore cloaks the government in a constant cloud of suspicion in an attempt to undermine it. <span style=""> </span>For decades now, business has been conducting a covert political campaign to sway public opinion <i style="">against</i> the benefits of strong government by pointing angrily to what it terms the government’s weaknesses and moral flaws. By making a strong federal government seem dangerous and inept, international corporations have set themselves up as the “good guys” and their federal regulators as the “bad guys” in a war for public opinion and support.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">As in any good war, the best defense is quite often a powerful offense. By labeling the government as dangerous and evil, and by screaming as loudly as possible about the government’s ineptitude and lack of moral fiber while using privately funded airwaves to wage their relentless attack, business has conveniently deflected the public’s attention away from its own ineptitude and moral failings. By funding the campaigns of business-friendly politicians, and by supporting their attempts to infiltrate the offices of government and attack it from within, business has enabled its own agents and lobbyists to create new laws that both shield it from prosecution and grant it greater control over public elections. The Supreme Court’s recent “Citizens United” decision (which was reached by a majority of justices who, in turn, have been appointed by politicians whose campaigns were funded mainly by business interests) tortured our constitution by interpreting it to mean that “free speech” is the same thing as spending money to fund political campaigns. That decision exponentially increased the plutocracy’s power to back more and more puppets to promote its agenda and undermine the stated purpose of our government. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">What’s the net result of this ongoing war between a government that directly serves its citizenry, and a plutocracy that serves its own financial interests and controls the behavior of the citizenry - along with the use of national resources? For decades now, we’ve been bombarded with persuasive rhetoric and seemingly logical arguments that have been drawn against our genuine personal interests, and many people have been won over by the corporate worldview.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">So what, exactly, <i style="">is</i> this worldview into which we’re being seduced? It’s the belief that money, and the short-term acquisition of <i style="">enough</i> of it, is <i style="">more important</i> in the short run than long-term human health, happiness and the wellbeing of our own living planet, because ultimately the acquisition of enough money will allow us to <i style="">buy</i> for ourselves those things we truly desire. <span style=""> </span>Under that worldview everything we do, every decision we make, must be viewed through the financial, for-profit lens. If we can’t make money at something – or at the very least have it be revenue neutral - we simply won’t do it, no matter how crucial it may be for humanity’s long-term survival. The singular exception business seems willing to promote, the one aspect of government it seems willing to fund to a nearly unlimited extent, is the capacity to wage war against other nations to protect our <i style="">business</i> interests. And why not? War is an amazingly profitable enterprise for the business paradigm. In what other industry do we make breathtakingly expensive products – products funded and resourced by the public and not by private enterprise itself – that we blow up or destroy almost immediately, requiring us to then build them all over again and generate continuous corporate profits? Certainly the government can be allowed to run a monstrous deficit for the sake of feeding <i style="">that</i> highly profitable financial enterprise, so long as the public can be convinced a given war is righteous enough for it to pick up the tab in <i style="">defense</i> of those business interests.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The sobering truth is, for too long we’ve been sold a bill of goods that says we can use money to <i style="">buy</i> happiness, health and a sense of wellbeing. We’ve convinced ourselves it must be true, because the press constantly holds a few wealthy role models up to as all as evidence that we too, if we continue to work hard, not complain and do exactly what the plutocracy says, will eventually be in position to “have it all.” What we’re never told is that, under the existing scenario, it’s impossible for more than a few people to genuinely have it all. A power/dominator structure that supports and is controlled by a plutocracy – by its very nature – requires many more worker bees than it does overseers. The systematic dismantling of the middle class we’ve been observing for the past forty years has been the plutocracy’s attempt to prevent too many worker bees from becoming mid-level overseers wielding too much power, because a too-strong middle management power base threatens the pyramidical nature of the power/dominator structure that underpins the for-profit business model. That’s particularly true because most mid-level workers tend to rise from the families of lower level worker bees, thus feel some affinity for the struggle and suffering of the lower classes, whereas plutocrats tend to spring from the middle class or are born of other plutocrats, which insulates them from feeling empathy for the struggle of the lower classes.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">When we look at what’s happening in our society today - without shying away from what the evidence reveals - we can see what it is about the government’s activities that have so offended the business establishment. We begin to grasp why business today wishes to <i style="">dominate</i> government, to change the very nature of its function. Because the motives of government are life-oriented and long-term, while the motives of business are profit-oriented and short-term, these two competing viewpoints have been on a collision course for the past two hundred-plus years. <span style=""> </span>In earlier centuries they operated in dynamic balance because <i style="">neither</i> system had the best interests of the citizenry at heart. But of late the balance has tipped precariously in favor of the power/dominator business model, at the expense of the rights and needs of the citizenry. It’s money that makes all the difference in a society where money equals power. And since business interests control most of the money in this nation, including how and where it is printed and to whom it flows, whereas the government remains deeply indebted and has not been permitted to accumulate excess cash, it is business that is funding – and winning – the war of public opinion.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>If out business model wins this war and becomes the <i style="">sole</i> driver for human advancement, it means people will remain ever harnessed to the <i style="">need</i> to pay for what they use on a daily basis <i style="">and</i> to sell their labor from the time they're old enough to work until the day they can no longer physically do their work, so they can continually earn enough cash to pay businesses for the goods and services they need to survive. That model, unchecked, subverts a large part of what we are trying to accomplish as a species, which is to <i style="">free</i> ourselves from the need to physically work and to mentally struggle without any end in sight, and to eliminate our the endless need to pay those who control the world’s resources for access to what we need to be our best selves.<br /><br />The irony is, humans continually seek freedom but have chosen (unwittingly, perhaps) to bind ourselves to a model that perpetually denies us our freedom. Why? Are we so afraid of what we'll do with freedom if we actually achieve it? Are we more enamored of the <i style="">seeking</i> of freedom than we are of the notion of actually <i style="">being</i> free from these self-imposed constraints? Are we more interested in controlling the behaviors of everyone else than in claiming genuine freedom for ourselves? The fact is, we can't have life both ways in this situation - we can't be personally free so long as we continue to support a system that manipulates and coerces us all into behaving in highly controlled, self-limiting ways.<br /><br />The monetary for-profit business model, which intuitively many of us are coming to realize cannot serve humanity’s ends in the long run, does not seem to appreciate the fact that - first and foremost, human beings are LIFE forms with feelings and talents and skills and abilities, and imagination and immense creative capacities - not just physical assets or liabilities on some conceptual global corporate balance sheet. If anything, the business model <i style="">manipulates</i> that fact to its advantage by instilling fear in us that we won’t be able to survive unless we tow the corporate line, perform our duties in the way business prescribes, and accept our roles as good worker bees within the power/dominator structure. The business model justifies a reward and punishment, fear-based and externally driven "means" – which is to say it enslaves and coerces people, using their need to earn wages and to buy the goods and services they need to survive – because it claims to have humanity’s end goal in mind. Given that our end goals are personal happiness, planetary abundance and enough freedom and autonomy to live our own lives to our fullest capacities, how is it even <i style="">possible</i> for us to achieve them under the current business model, when businesses motives – and its <i style="">very</i> <i style="">structure –</i> is antithetical to long-term abundance, planetary wellbeing and personal autonomy?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I pose these questions <i style="">not</i> to attack business or to defend government. Nor do I believe this represents a purposeful war being waged, so much as it represents a reflexive reactivity that has been programmed into humanity for many thousands of years. While some people may be deliberately making and supporting choices that benefit themselves at the expense of the larger society, I do believe most are, as yet, unaware of the impacts of our choices – nor do we even clearly see our options – due to all the static being generated from the noise produced by the two opposing sides. I therefore pose these questions to invite us all to consider what our <i style="">real</i> goals are, and to examine the nature of the structures under which we’ve all been operating for centuries. Perhaps it’s time for us to sit down and look at our goals, and compare them to structures we’ve created over time, to determine whether or not these structures are taking us in the direction we wish to go. For what it’s worth, my personal opinion is not nearly so important as the decision that will be made by the human collective. I will surely die within the next fifty years, hopefully before we’ve so desecrated our planet that it’s unable to carry and nurture human life any more. Many of you who are reading this may also be dead very soon. What <i style="">is</i> important then, are the conscious choices we collectively make as a <i style="">species</i> today. Will we make those choices with the long view in mind, or merely to provide ourselves with some sense of short-term stability? How <span style="display: none;">What </span>we choose to be and what we choose to do right NOW will influence the state of the world we leave to future generations. How hard we work today to make the necessary changes – along with the amount of short-term pain we’re willing to endure – will determine how hard future generations will need to work, to either carry on our best practices or undo any structures we’ve created that are destructive to life and that imprison the human spirit. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Let me close with a couple of quotes from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican president who was elected shortly before this outright war between business and government heated up:</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12pt;" >“</span><span style="font-size:12pt;">In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. “</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">And this one:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies – in the final sense – a THEFT from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I ponder these quotes quite often as I observe the present direction of human society. They help me inform my choices when it comes to the worldview I am personally choosing to hold. <span style=""> </span></span></p>Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-51936081516935031172011-05-06T05:47:00.000-07:002011-05-06T10:27:04.344-07:00Of Clocks and CashSomething that just recently occurred to me is the idea that money is to commerce as clocks are to time. Both were designed to serve as a unit of measure that all people everywhere could generally agree upon, they just measure two different concepts. Clocks measure the concept we call <span style="font-style: italic;">time</span>; money measures the concept we call <span style="font-style: italic;">value</span>. Clocks and money were originally important <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> because they possessed value in and of themselves (intrinsic worth) but because they empowered us to communicate with each other around abstract concepts using a common language, so we could reach a shared understanding (extrinsic worth).<br /><br />Time is not a thing; it's an <span style="font-style: italic;">understanding</span> about rate of change that is relative to humans, our sensory capacities and the planet on which we happen to reside. As things stand, we earthlings live on a planet that rotates on its own axis at a fairly steady and observable rate of change. Because we're a remarkably clever species, we've been able to devise a way to monitor that rate of change (based on our planet's relationship with the sun) and have divided the pace into bite-sized, standardized pieces we all call hours. We've also designed time pieces called clocks to enable us to swiftly compare and agree upon the time without each of us having to perform the tedious mathematical calculations that would be necessary if clocks did not exist. That makes life easier for everyone concerned.<br /><br />Nowadays, if I say I'd like to meet you at four o'clock in the afternoon, we can both check an entirely different clock and still be relatively confident our meeting will go off as planned. If, however, I can't seem to find a clock as our meeting time grows near, I may have to scramble to discover the correct time or guess what time it is before I show up. If I guess wrong or lose track of the time altogether, our meeting may not happen and you'll go away disappointed. That doesn't mean I ran out of time, don't have any time left or didn't have enough time to begin with; it simply means I was careless about <span style="font-style: italic;">tracking</span> our agreed upon unit of measure so I could be where I needed to be when I needed to be there.<br /><br />Modern society has grasped the importance of everyone knowing exactly what time it is, so we've made it easy for people to access that information. Imagine though, if as part of our arrangement for the <span style="font-style: italic;">distribution</span> of our personal time you demanded I hand over a clock to you to reward you for agreeing to meet me as I'd asked. What if you had to reward me with a working clock every time you asked <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span> to meet <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>? Pretty soon people would be stressing mightily about whether or not a particular meeting was important enough to be worth the surrender of a valuable clock, and we'd all be running around bemoaning the fact that we didn't have enough "time" to go around! People would start to worry they wouldn't have enough "time" in the future to ensure they could set up all the important meetings they might need to have someday, so they'd start hiding spare clocks under their beds or storing them in vaults to keep them safe.<br /><br />As more people hoarded more and more clocks, even as more and more people were born on this planet who would need to set meetings to accomplish their objectives, we'd start to realize that we couldn't possibly create and distribute enough clocks to make everyone happy. In fact, most of our efforts and attention would shift from taking care of ourselves and our planet to creating, distributing and hoarding more and more clocks. Eventually we'd have to begin to make "hard choices" about who was really worth meeting and who wasn't so important as to deserve a valuable clock. Businesses and communities would surely suffer, because it would be difficult for us to come together around new ideas when we couldn't be sure the idea would amount to anything important. Why run the risk of surrendering a perfectly good clock on something that might not prove to be worth our time? Only those things that contributed to the production of clocks would get done, and all the rest of our needs would begin to suffer. Personal communications would lapse and relationships would lose their closeness and trust. In fact, the world would likely become a very difficult place for us to effectively navigate. Life would seem fraught with problems and obstacles, and we'd all become very suspicious and stingy around anything relating to someone trying to convince us we needed their time in exchange for a clock.<br /><br />Luckily, we don't require each other to give away clocks in exchange for the gift of our time. I know that if I freely agree to meet with you because you have something important you need me to do - or simply because you want to relax and pal around for a while - that when the time comes and I need you (or somebody else) to meet with me because it's important to me, I can count on you (or somebody else) to be there - in time - for me. This understanding doesn't only relate to close family members or friends. Perfect strangers often agree to give us some of their time, because that's the way we've all agreed to socially manage time. I don't bother to keep a time card around how many hours I gave you versus how many you gave me, nor do we ever "settle up" with each other, because tomorrow we'll both have more time to pass around. So far as we're concerned it really doesn't matter who gave how much time to whom or who asked for the time and who agreed to give it, so long as all of us get all the time we truly need from one another. In fact, what I frequently find is that if I give my time to you I always benefit from that exchange, because I get to feel needed, appreciated and loved.<br /><br />So much for how we measure and distribute the concept we call time. When we consider the way we measure and distribute the concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">value</span> however, we notice an entirely different picture begins to form. Like time, value is not a thing; it's a conceptual understanding. Money, just like clocks, was originally conceived as a method to standardize how we measure the value of different objects or types of labor we wished to exchange. Its purpose was to enable us to communicate effectively when we traded our labor and the fruits thereof with each other. Money thus has become the universal language of value, the same way our clocks establish the language of time. Long before we invented cars and planes, before we discovered electricity and oil, before we realized we could harness the power of the sun - back indeed, to when human labor was the primary form of energy being used to produce goods and services - we imagined that measuring the amount of value moving around our system would enable us to make certain everyone was contributing to the economy by putting in as much as they were consuming.<br /><br />A host of problems have arisen out of our attempts to measure value as compared with time, and even more arise when we insist on <span style="font-style: italic;">inputting</span> into the economic system a tangible form of measure (money) whenever anyone <span style="font-style: italic;">extracts </span> anything of value from that system (goods or services.) The main difficulty with applying this <span style="font-style: italic;">exchange</span> concept to value is that it presumes the <span style="font-style: italic;">net</span> value of everything we're collectively creating and consuming equates to a zero sum game. Money goes into the system from us when we consume value; money comes out of the system to us when we create value. Put another way, people collectively inject their labor, creativity and knowledge into the economic system; people then extract all the goods and services being provided.<br /><br />Theoretically at least, if those items and values were well matched, our economy would work just fine. Unfortunately though, the zero-sum equation presumes that collectively we have a finite amount of available resources, a finite amount of human creativity and a matching pool of available human labor. It further assumes we can calculate how much money all of it is collectively worth and place precisely that amount - and not one penny more - into circulation to move things around and satisfy everyone's needs. But because it's untrue (and we know it's untrue!) we wind up with either inflation or deflation. Since what we create, produce, have learned and can do has expanded exponentially over time, we're always needing to inject more and more cash into the economic system to "monetize" the growing amount of energy, productivity and creative capacity that is coming online every year. When we do that, businesses automatically raise their prices to capture more profits for themselves. Because the cost to us of <span style="font-style: italic;">extracting</span> things of value from the system typically rises much faster than do payments for value <span style="font-style: italic;">injected</span> (in a post-industrial world we collectively have more labor hours to sell than businesses need, so the competition for jobs drives wages lower) people cease taking goods and services out of the system, which means money stops flowing into the system and production grinds to a halt. That leads to recession, which in turn forces businesses to lower their prices to induce people to extract goods and services from the production side again, until the system resets itself once more.<br /><br />If we could "fix" prices and at least stabilize the equation that way, perhaps we could get a handle on the variable labor problem. Unfortunately, that notion presumes we've come up with a universally objective and agreed-upon way to measure and fix the value of goods and services, but we haven't. That's because the value of things isn't at all objective, it's highly <span style="font-style: italic;">subjective</span>. Unlike time, where anyone can check another clock if they don't believe theirs is telling them the truth, we have no objective means of confirming prices or the cost of specialized services. If I tell you the new house I'm selling will cost you three hundred thousand dollars, it doesn't really matter how much <span style="font-style: italic;">genuine</span> value I've invested in its construction. All that matters is whether or not I can convince you to buy the house, based on how badly you need it. Likewise, if I tell you the surgery you need will cost you twenty-five thousand dollars, you're really in no position to challenge the price. You can complain, but you can't demand I do it more cheaply because you don't really know how much value it offers.<br /><br />The trouble with attributing value to goods and services is that - unlike time, which we can agree upon - value is always a highly subjective experience. Despite that, the system of measure we're using presumes we can objectively compare the value of say, an orange versus a hammer. The thing is, if I'm starving, that orange may well be priceless to me while the hammer is relatively useless. Alternatively, if I need to build a shed, the hammer becomes invaluable while the orange is but a distraction. Ditto our attempts to compare a surgeon with a plumber, and to declare one generally "worth" more than the other. Taken even further - in a society that assigns positive value to contributions and negative value to extractions from the system - children, the infirm and the elderly become financial liabilities, while hearty adults are viewed as financial assets. Unfortunately for humanity, these mechanical measures of value fail to take into account the organic ebbs and flows of life we <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> experience at one time or another. They also fail to account for the fact that although in a given moment a child may be extracting food, water, shelter and education from the system, that child is, at the same time, adding all that to improve herself, thus improving her <span style="font-style: italic;">capacity</span> to contribute more in the future. The education being "consumed" and thus being charged as a negative value is not lost; it's creating value-added for the whole! Nor is the food being consumed (and thus charged for) lost forever; those calories are supporting the physical growth and nutritional strength of a living human being who will, in turn, provide major value-added to the whole, if given the chance.<br /><br />In truth, the wiser we become as a species, the better we're getting at figuring out how to accomplish more using fewer manpower hours, as well as how to live and work more sustainably so we don't use up all of our natural resources. We also know that our human population has exploded exponentially, that people are living longer, are generally healthier than ever, and that new babies are being born on Earth every day, so it looks like there's going to be more manpower, creativity, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, passion, talent and skill to go around tomorrow than was available to us collectively yesterday. We've also invented machines and developed technologies to increase our productivity even more. All this means less and less human energy needs to go into our system to produce all the goods and services that are coming out of it - even though more humans and hours are now available to inject into the system. These factors completely upend the balance of the zero-sum equation. Ironically, they create excessive abundance that most of us can't afford, because what we're aiming (and failing) to do is force the system into flat mechanical balance: a specific amount of human labor goes into the economy and receives in exchange a set amount of monetary wages; then products and services come out in sufficient quantity to absorb all those wages back into the economic system, so they can go back out as wages all over again. None of this, of course, concerns itself with how <span style="font-style: italic;">fairly</span> those wages are being distributed across a living population with very real needs, nor does it take into account the amount of hoarding that occurs, which siphons money out of the equation all the time.<br /><br />Unlike time, for which we have an agreed upon system of measure yet are willing to exchange it freely with each other, we refuse to freely exchange the things we create. Instead of accounting for the overall energy flow taking place in our economy so we can observe and track the <span style="font-style: italic;">net</span> value we're collectively creating, we're demanding that each individual on the receiving end of every value transaction provide the giver with a physical representation of the value received to prove to the world the transaction has occurred. We've thus turned money, a conceptual unit of measure, into something to be valued all by itself, and out of that one simple choice we've created for ourselves all kinds of planetary hurt and human suffering.<br /><br />The same problems that would besiege us if we were required to give away clocks in exchange for someone else's time now besiege us around the exchange of money for value. Because we never seem to have enough money <span style="font-style: italic;">in circulation</span> to match all the human energy, ingenuity, creative capacity and wisdom out there - ready, willing and hungry to be exchanged - we now find ourselves wringing our hands over how many things we ought to be doing but simply "can't afford." We're being called upon by our politicians and corporations today to make "hard" choices, to sacrifice benefits and wages that would offer us better lives, to forgo better educational processes and schools for our children, to forget about building (and repairing) quality infrastructure for the benefit of our society, to forgo nicer parks, well maintained roads, social services, elder care, medical and nutritional support, quality housing for all people, healthy food, clean water and air, renewable energy systems and so forth. We've all been born into and have bought into this longstanding culture of lack, even though it only exists because we don't have enough <span style="font-style: italic;">money</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">in circulation</span> to ensure all the things that truly need doing get done.<br /><br />It's not that we don't have enough <span style="font-style: italic;">value</span> to achieve whatever we want, it's that the units we use to measure that value have been systematically hoarded by a few individuals. That gives those who hold the most hoarded units unbelievable personal power - they can wave those monetary units around and everyone else will jump through hoops to serve their every need, so as to accumulate more units for themselves. The wealthy can also direct the flow and consumption of limited resources in ways that suit their agendas, which usually revolve around earning them even more money. They can determine what goods will be produced, in what quantity they will be produced, and how much (or little) the rest of us will earn while doing that work at the behest of the wealthy. They can tell us what we can and can't own or have based on the number of monetary units we've managed to store for ourselves, and they can deny us life's necessities if we fail to accumulate enough of those units to satisfy them. The more time that passes under this system, the more everything that doesn't have to do with the production of ever more money slows down or stops. So many of us are myopically focused on making more money so we can buy the things we're producing that we don't have enough time to focus on producing the things we need to thrive as a species! Our modern lives, it seems, are so highly stressed and revolve around lack and struggle <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> because we don't have enough <span style="font-style: italic;">value</span> in the world to go around or enough creative energy to exchange with one another, but because all our human labor and creative energy is jammed up in the bottleneck being created by this highly controlled exchange of money for "value."<br /><br />Throw away clocks and we'll still have plenty of time to go around. We wouldn't suddenly all decide we'd rather sit at home forever, or grow unwilling to go anywhere or meet anyone else. We don't need to know what time it is to still desire companionship, connections, relationships and the chance to meet new and interesting people. Likewise, throw away money and we'll still have plenty of value to go around. We wouldn't suddenly stop taking care of our own basic needs or stop working to meet the pressing needs of other human bengs (or of this planet) simply because we no longer assigned an arbitrary monetary value to the work we were doing. In fact, throw away money and we'd stop doing things that weren't important to us, or that were causing serious harm to life and the planet. Much of that work is presently being done simply so someone can accumulate lots of dollars, not because it's helpful or good for us all. Eliminate the value distortion created by money and at last we'd be able to see that the so-called value much of our work is providing doesn't outweigh the damage it is causing. This make-work (work done for the benefit of the wealthy to generate more profits) would vanish, and real work (the work humanity really wants done and needs to do for its own sake) would take its place.<br /><br />Just think about that for a moment, and you'll realize that freedom would suddenly break out all over our planet! All the laid off school teachers, along with those who can't get hired because there's no money to pay their wages, would be able to live out their passions and help <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> children learn. We might see student/teacher ratios as low as five to one, enabling teachers to work with students individually and nurture their personal passions, skills and talents. Firefighters, policemen, construction workers and engineers could all go back to work. We could build adequate housing for everyone in the world, in ways best suited to their local climates and using local materials to make them more sustainable over time. We could design renewable resource technologies, and everyone could have access to the free energy such technologies would provide. We could restructure our manufacturing systems so that waste, planned obsolescence and throwaway products are no longer manufactured, because our focus will have shifted to producing genuine <span style="font-style: italic;">value</span> - not paper profits - for the sake of the world. Last but not least, we could learn once again to trust each other, to give and share and support and nurture each other and our home planet, because the question we presently ask ourselves before today we do anything in exchange <span style="font-style: italic;">for</span> value: "What's in it for me?" would gradually shift to, "How will my effort (or my consumption) <span style="font-style: italic;">add</span> greater value to myself, to humanity, to our community and to our living world?"<br /><br />The fact is, there is no <span style="font-style: italic;">shortage</span> of genuine value, no shortage of natural resources (when they're distributed fairly, used intelligently and not exploited wastefully) no shortage of human creativity, labor or innate drive to achieve. We already have within us and all around us <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> the value we need to accomplish everything we need to do for humanity and our planetary system to thrive, <span style="font-style: italic;">if</span> we relinquish the power money holds to prod us into working...or to hold us back from doing the things that need done.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-9818539009821275342011-04-20T06:48:00.000-07:002011-04-20T08:40:27.937-07:00Designing A Freer Social SystemOn occasion I'm blessed to read a book that radically changes my understanding of life by expanding my thinking in ways I never imagined. Recently, Dan Pink's excellent book, "Drive" has had that impact on me. The book details the many studies that have been conducted around human motivation, and reveals that - at least where our creative capacities are concerned - people are far more powerfully motivated by their intrinsic drives (energies arising from within) than they are by extrinsic pressures like rewards and punishments. This understanding actually violates one of the primary tenets of physics, which says that a body at rest tends to remain at rest while a body set into motion tends to remain in motion, but that principle - as is true of most strictly scientific principles - fails to account for the existence of consciousness and free will within the object.<br /><br />If we look around today, much of our society is constructed around reward and punishment drivers. Our religions, for example, teach us that if we behave as we've been taught we'll go to heaven (eternal reward) and if we don't we'll go to hell (eternal punishment.) The thing is, once we know there will be a particular outcome based on our behavior, we're no longer truly free to choose how to behave. The certain outcome tips the scales, pushing us toward the behavior that will deliver the desired outcome. Under this sort of motivational driver, our attention shifts toward following a given set of rules to generate a specific outcome (the ends) and away from evolving and improving ourselves so we become more mentally and emotionally adept at determining how best to behave in any given situation (the means.)<br /><br />Our educational systems use rewards and punishments to force children to learn what they're "supposed to" learn and make sure they feel shame and guilt if they do not. If they pay attention and regurgitate, as unaltered as possible, the information they're fed, they get good grades and are perceived as successes. If they ask too many questions, fail to agree with what they're being taught to memorize or find the whole process too boring to hold their attention, they're labeled stupid, failures or ADD/ADHD. They're even medicated (punished) back into compliance so they can be appropriately instructed and controlled. Teachers too are rewarded for getting their students to achieve good test scores, and are punished if they fail to teach to the tests. Somewhere along the way genuine learning, the art of critical thinking and the innate curiosity of children to ask and obsessively seek the answers to "why?" was squelched in service to spitting out compliant, high scoring data memorizers who could then neatly drop into our economic reward and punishment system.<br /><br />It's not surprising then that we find the same sort of reward and punishment system underlying our economies. If we work hard and produce what our employers desire from us, we receive wages that will allow us to survive and possibly thrive. If, on the other hand, we fail to find an employer whose demands we can successfully satisfy, we're punished for it by the withholding of the money we need to survive. If we wish to start a new business a bank may lend us the capital we need to do so, but if we're not successful on our first go the bank will repossess what we've built and label us losers by damaging our credit ratings, making it that much harder for us to succeed in the future. This prevailing financial reward and punishment system does make certain grudging allowances for those who are old, infirm or ill (Social Security and Medicare are examples of this), but only to a limited extent and only for a specified period of time. We don't really <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> making these allowances for individuals, because we're not sure how many people are malingerers taking advantage of the system we've devised to benefit the <span style="font-style: italic;">truly</span> needy. (Perhaps right there we find a clue that the reward and punishment system we've designed does not sufficiently motivate most people to attain their highest level of personal capacity.)<br /><br />Modern justice systems are also grounded in rewards and punishments. Obey the laws and we're granted permission to live as we wish to within the restrictions and boundaries of those laws. Disobey the laws and we're punished with fines, jail time and criminal records that may haunt us for the rest of our lives. Interestingly enough, this system is grossly economically inefficient. For instance, a person who robs a convenience store and steals two hundred dollars may get arrested and jailed for seven years, at a net cost to the public of over two hundred thousand dollars. Economically we'd have been far better off - and the violence and suffering the offender created could have been avoided - by simply giving the individual the two hundred dollars he needed, or paying him an annual allowance so he could acquire the things he needs without resorting to social violence. That however, would violate our socially entrained sense of needing to "teach people how to behave," because we fear that by giving people what they need they won't learn how to behave properly. Ironically, the exact opposite seems to hold true. <span style="font-style: italic;">Deny</span> people what they need and they may well begin to act improperly out of frustration, anger and physical desperation. <span style="font-style: italic;">Give</span> them what they need and they will not feel compelled to violate their wish to live in peace.<br /><br />Modern two-party governance is also founded on a system of rewards and punishments. If the party you support attains political power, you'll be rewarded by having the ideas you prefer be written into law, while the supporters of the losing party will be punished by not being able to test their ideas or have them properly heard and respected by the ruling party. Because neither party can maintain total political control long enough to actually see their party's platform executed and discover the underlying validity of its beliefs, the battle continues to rage because we never truly learn which way is better. We wind up with this policy contradicting that policy, or our ideas getting watered down so much that they aren't really the ones we wanted to test in the first place. This constant back and forth push of power means that whatever laws do get created can't even be counted on to last, because when the opposition regains power the first thing it does is attempt to dismantle the legislative efforts of the outgoing party. The people are the ones who suffer most during these push/pull struggles for the right to determine the nation's destiny, because instead of being able to charter a steady course for our own future we're blown about and battered beneath this typhoon of oppositional political energies.<br /><br />While rewards and punishments may have served humanity to some limited extent in the past, these extrinsic motivational techniques of rewards and punishments no longer serve an intelligent, creative and empathetic adult population. They may in fact be what's hindering our ability to successfully evolve. By contrast, the intrinsic motivators Pink discusses in his book are drivers that are, by nature, <span style="font-style: italic;">hardwired</span> into us to motivate us without the need for external sticks and carrots, and if nurtured and permitted to flower, they may well hold the power to propel society forward in great leaps of unleashed creativity.<br /><br />According to the studies, our three primary intrinsic motivators are:<br /><br />1) The desire for autonomy, in which we possess some element of control and choice over what we do, and how and when we do it.<br />2) The desire for personal mastery, in which we are free to take as long as we like and are given access to the tools we need to practice our passions, talents and skills until we've attained a satisfying level of performance proficiency.<br />3) The desire to serve a higher purpose than ourselves, such that we are free to apply the skills we've mastered in ways that uplift and support the rest of life.<br /><br />When we observe children we see these three motivators at work. Children will cry when they are hindered from exploring what they wish to explore, when and how they wish to do it. They will spend endless hours developing their own innate skill sets...walking, talking, learning to use their fingers and hands and to coordinate their bodies. (For them this is <span style="font-style: italic;">play</span>, not work!) They will also take great delight in bringing joy to the grownups around them, when we observe them achieving a new milestone and provide them with laughter as feedback. It's only through the process of <span style="font-style: italic;">socialization</span> (in the schools, through parenting and in religious training) that these natural drivers become subverted and external drivers supplant them over time. By applying material punishments and rewards to motivate our children to do what we want them to do, we deny them the autonomy to figure out what they truly wish to do. We also convert their natural curiosity and play into grueling work, and we substitute external rewards (like grades and allowances) for the deep intrinsic joy of doing something well so they can bring joy to the world and be helpful to others.<br /><br />How can our society best support these intrinsic motivational drivers that in turn would help us uplift the human condition? For starters, we could free up all humans from the need to labor in exchange for life's basic necessities. By giving everyone what they need, we free ourselves from the stress of having to work to earn what we need. Our time and energy could then be redirected toward determining what it is we <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span> to create - as individuals, and for the benefit of our society. If we're no longer all slaving to earn our daily bread, we will each have more time and freedom to pursue our personal passions and develop our unique skill sets and abilities, so we can discover what unique gifts we have to offer the world and attain sufficient mastery to bring bring them forth. Because our attention will no longer be focused solely on providing our basic needs for ourselves, we'll be free to allow our intrinsic desire to serve a higher purpose to emerge and serve the collective needs of humanity, the planet and the living ecosystems that sustain us.<br /><br />This single shift - from demanding that human beings each work to earn what they personally need to survive - to <span style="font-style: italic;">ensuring</span> all human beings freely receive what they need from the larger society, holds the power to set alight human creative capacity and foster an explosion of energy that could, in turn, resolve the many, many challenges we face as a species today. Freed from the grinding need to provide all our basic needs for ourselves, we could turn all that newly unleashed energy toward cleaning up our planet, fully educating all children, protecting our delicate ecosystems, freeing ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, redirecting our shared resources with intelligence and compassion and setting a steady course toward a shared higher vision of where we'd like to see humanity go. In a very real sense, this is a higher-consciousness fractal of the seminal shift that single0-celled organisms made when they agreed to come together and be part of much larger multi-cellular systems. By sharing the burden of providing for each cell's basic needs, they in turn freed each other up to practice their unique talents and abilities, and to specialize in service to the formation of a greater whole living system. You and I would not be here today had not single-celled organisms attained this realization at the limited level of consciousness they possessed.<br /><br />That we're <span style="font-style: italic;">hardwired</span> to act in cooperative and intrinsically motivated ways means we're not really taking too much of a risk to let go of our old power-dominator systems of reward and punishment and allow nature to take its evolutionary course. Apparently God truly does <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> play dice with the universe; we've been gifted these intrinsic motivations - along with the desires for communion, peace, harmony, beauty, happiness and human companionship - for a <span style="font-style: italic;">reason</span>. Let's purposefully use these gifts then instead of suppressing them, and perhaps we'll surprise ourselves by how much we're able to accomplish once we let go of our fears of how <span style="font-style: italic;">others</span> will behave (which drives our present need to control each other) and instead trust higher nature to have provided us with the tools necessary to motivate and successfully activate ourselves in service to life.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-88438890339632954072011-04-07T08:04:00.000-07:002011-04-07T08:08:48.456-07:00Capitalism as Institutionalized SlaveryWhat we do to ourselves in the name of work is criminally insane. Most of us don't feel joy in what we do, we're struggling to get and hold a job so we can pay our bills and survive. We buy homes we rarely see because we're too busy out working; we have kids we don't raise because we can't afford to be home when they need our attention. We spend hours in our vehicles on smoggy, overly trafficked roads to get to and from where we need to go - not because our employers can't figure out ways to encourage us to work from home, but because they don't trust us to do the work if they're not watching over us.<br /><br />In large part we make stuff nobody really needs, then convince others to buy it to satisfy the corporate profit margin. Meanwhile, the stuff we do need to accomplish to ensure the long term success and happiness of our species - infrastructure repair, much better schools, quality medical care for all, sustainable and green housing and food sources, environmental protection and thoughtful resource stewardship, scientific exploration and genuine advancements in human health and well being - don't get done because we haven't figured out ways to make those things monetarily "profitable."<br /> <br />The concept of developing free, clean and renewable energy so people can tap the energy grid of the planet wherever they may be strikes FEAR in the hearts of the corporate system. Why? because if we can all get our energy for free, corporations can't profit off our energy need in perpetuity! Ditto foodstuffs - corporations don't want us collecting our own seeds and growing organic vegetables in the backyard, or raising our own chickens. They <span style="font-style:italic;">want</span> centralized control - they <span style="font-style:italic;">demand</span> centralized control before they invest in new systems - because that way they get to control the distribution, the supply <span style="font-style:italic;">and</span> the price of what we produce. <br /><br />What we used to call the "middleman," the broker between buyer and seller, has become the monster in the system. The companies that act as middlemen now take advantage of both buyers and sellers, carving off massive pieces of the exchange for themselves in the process and calling that "profit." They're starving the feedback loop between buyers and sellers, hampering the evolution of human society by rendering us incapable of functioning without the middleman, and consolidating power to ensure they continue to expand their reach and capacity to seize ever larger pieces of the social pie. The largest middleman today is the financial services industry, which represents a full 40% of our GDP. What is the function of financial "services," but to <span style="font-style:italic;">match</span> those who have money with those who need it? Yet over the years, that function has lost sight of its purpose as the companies now pay lenders (savers) almost nothing and in many cases <span style="font-style:italic;">charge</span> them for the privilege of saving their money, then they turn around and charge borrowers exorbitant rates of interest (or refuse to lend to them at all) for the right to borrow money that isn't even theirs!<br /><br />What we call the 'free market' has never been truly free. He who corners the supply can dictate the price, and he who encourages demand by making his product appear indispensable to the public will also profit. He who has little or no money (either by accident of birth or social circumstances) to influence the flow of goods and services gets no vote in what gets produced, in how scarce global resources get used or in how he gets to live and work in this life.<br /><br />Hint: if you don't get to decide what you want to do with the richness of your own life, you are NOT a free being living in a free society. You're a slave, only one without the benefits of having a master provide your shelter, clothing, food and medical care. Instead, your master provides you with some stingy amount of cash in exchange for your labor, and insists that <span style="font-style:italic;">you</span> provide for yourself the things slaves used to get free from their masters. That way, the master can control his costs, better manage his profits and cut the slave loose if he or she becomes too much of a financial liability.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Capitalism isn't freedom, folks. It's institutionalized slavery being sold to the public as a "free market."Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-14288324994450452692011-03-26T06:41:00.000-07:002011-03-26T09:23:11.347-07:00The Vast, FREE Energy Field That We AreWhat I've been mulling lately is the fact that humanity itself has for eons been an energy commodity, one we've self-directed and used in service to whatever it is we desired to create. Our energy has gifted us the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame. It's gifted us a global library of wisdom that is overwhelming in its breadth and scope. It's gifted us telescopes and space ships, electron microscopes and super-colliders. It's produced technologies to make our lives better, and technologies so destructive we could ruin the ability of this planet to host complex life forms for many thousands of years. Human energy is, when we examine it from this perspective, a great beast of a resource, one that - if we cooperated - could be consciously directed and applied in service to whatever shared vision we chose to hold as a species. Never mind fossil fuels, wind energy, geothermal or solar power; the greatest energy pool available to us is humanity itself. That's because solar, wind and fossil fuels can't think. They aren't creative, they don't know beauty, they can't feel what we feel, know what we know, love what we love or desire what we desire to create. While we can still steward them in support of our visions and ingenious designs, they can't produce those dreams on our behalf. Only <span style="font-style:italic;">we</span> can do that.<br /><br />For thousands of years, it seems that what we've chosen to create using our vast and growing repository of human creativity and physical energy has been a society that services the desires and whims of a wealthy few, whose happiness is attained by purchasing the energy and output of many, many others. In essence, that's because we've been selling our time and physical labor to the highest bidder, in exchange for the cash we need to purchase the products of other people's labor and creative output (energy = reward.) This arrangement has led to constant imbalances between the haves and the have nots, because in every era some few people have been able to capitalize more fully on what they had to offer in comparison to the offerings of others. They found themselves at the right time, in the right place, with the right idea to resolve the right challenge, and connected with just the right people to help them create it. Whatever it was that enabled the output of one person's creative energy to be desired by many, it's clear that a few humans in every generation have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, while the rest of the people struggled to put in their time and take out whatever they could get in exchange for their own hard work. The fundamental inequity in that system is that whenever someone comes up with something new that happily advances the whole of human civilization, our system rewards them with material wealth far beyond their capacity to spend it in a given lifetime. As more and more inventions explode on the scene, more and more material wealth gets bestowed on those few lucky persons. Because there's a limit to how much material wealth exists on this planet, while the human race can expand and reproduce indefinitely, we've lately run into trouble with that formula for success. <br /><br />This defines the economic system we devised thousands of years ago when material wealth seemed infinite, much of the planet was still an unexplored mystery and the human population was but a fraction of what it now is. That system has not only caused imbalance, it's led to multi-generational imbalances, because monetary wealth (unlike stores of grain or cattle that rot and die) could be passed down from parent to child. Children of the wealthy quickly began to apply a whole new economic formula that trumped energy = reward. They found they could use the power of their inherited wealth to purchase whatever they wanted in the open market without having to invest their own energy in productive social pursuits (money = power.) Centuries ago we labeled such people royalty. Today they're simply called the upper class. In any case, for as long as we've employed an energy = reward system, it's fostered a division between those who daily have to sell enough of their energy to provide for their own survival, and those who do not. Of late the imbalance between these two classes has widened precipitously. It's gotten so bad that we're facing imminent social and economic collapse, because the billions of people who today need to sell their daily energy can no longer find buyers who will pay them what it takes for them to survive.<br /><br />Technology is partly responsible for the fix we're in. Where technology has taken us over the past few hundred years is into a mechanical replacement cycle. Fossil fuels are now being fed into machines that, in turn, replace human energy in the production process. Machines don't demand wages, benefits, have medical issues or family problems or negative attitudes. They don't question authority, and they don't wonder why they're creating what they're producing. Fixing a machine when it breaks down is much simpler than dealing with a person and all their feelings, needs and wants. When we retire a machine we can throw it away without mercy or compassion, or take it apart and recycle its many parts.<br /><br />In a post-industrial society, human energy is now no longer as necessary for the production of goods and services as it once was. We even measure that by tracking what's called "productivity." Productivity is a way of determining the amount of goods and services produced per man-hour of labor. As more and more products are produced using fewer and fewer man-hours, productivity increases. This is good news for producers since it increases their profitability, but it's bad news for humanity, which needs to sell more of its man-hours so it can pay its societal bills. Meanwhile, the pool of human energy (which translates into man-hours) has grown huge over the years - we now have nearly seven billion people on this planet! That means human energy, which is in lower demand, has been getting cheaper than even the price of fossil fuels. This increased competition to sell human energy to fill the few remaining slots where human energy is still required for production or service has driven down the price of human energy on the open market. Additionally, globalization has enabled businesses to seek out the absolute cheapest human energy pools and draw upon them to produce the goods they create. Unconsciously then, we've elevated the value of using technology to cheaply produce goods and services <span style="font-style:italic;">above</span> the value of caring for the human lives that are supposed to consume those goods and services.<br /><br />This imbalance is unsustainable. Not only because it cheapens human life, but because in the long run, the energy = reward formula entirely breaks down as the imbalance between the haves and the have nots widens. When people are denied the opportunity to input their energy into society via the open market, they are likewise denied the opportunity to earn monetary rewards. And what are those rewards, but cash prizes (allowances, really) that enable us to pay our mortgages, purchase cars, buy energy, food and clothing, provide education and medical care for our families - all of which ARE the products and services being offered for sale by the for-profit business establishment? <br /><br />The are really only two ways around this systemic breakdown without redesigning the entire system. The first is to outright gift money to the people who can't get jobs, so they can infuse that cash into the for-profit engine and keep the machinery running and themselves alive. This is often derisively called, "the nanny state." The second option is for businesses (and the wealthy people who run them) to bypass serving most human needs altogether, mainly by making products that other corporations need and that governments will purchase, or by making products that primarily serve the needs of the very rich. An example would be the continuous production of new war machinery, which governments can then use to blow up other countries' war machinery, along with those expendable people who aren't contributing much to their society anyhow. Governments can then contract with the weapons companies and pay them to make more of the destroyed war machinery, only this time better and stronger, thereby keeping the business "economy" running. Where budget cuts occur in this type of corporate state are in the arenas of public health, education and welfare, as well as the arts and other human services that the jobless folks can't pay for anymore. The general population in such a state is provided only with as much as people need to barely survive so they can continue to energize the ongoing production of war machinery, and nothing more. Another example of how this type of state functions would be through a stock market and banking system where the wealthy can buy and sell each others' holdings and try to make even more money off of each other by using the money they've already made, without offering any new products or services to the general public. When companies in this kind of state <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> offer a service to the public, it's usually grudgingly, for their survival needs alone, and on such onerous terms it enables companies to bleed as much free cash as possible from a struggling, stressed population without offering them much value in return.<br /><br />Until we first realize this is exactly the kind of state that we're creating, and that the political battle being waged today is a war of values between the nanny state and the corporate state - neither of which serve humanity's long term interests - we can't fix it. When enough of us <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> realize it, painful as it may be to accept the unvarnished truth, we will likely need to redesign our entire economic paradigm. The old energy = reward formula clearly cannot hold, since it already failed us in the past. Meanwhile, it's getting clearer all the time that the money = power formula is only increasing our social imbalance and creating more suffering. So then, what formula might we wish to consciously adopt to replace those outmoded equations? <br /><br />I would humbly suggest we go with something like wisdom = value added. Unless we end the practice of materially rewarding people (paying them allowances) in exchange for their physical effort and instead begin to celebrate the wondrous, diverse and unique creative capacity that is contained within every human life, our species is likely to continue to suffer, struggle and experience stress. The thing is, even while our supply of fossil fuels is running dangerously low and we're discovering the risks of nuclear fission, we still have plenty of energy available to us - it's called human creativity, ingenuity, talent, skill and physical ability. Wisdom, which emerges from the sum totality of every individual life experience, seems to be something we can produce in infinite supply as we employ our human energy for the sake of our own evolution. To value and nurture what we can produce in seemingly infinite supply (wisdom) means we can create eternal value added so long as we thrive. In a very real sense, humanity has the innate capacity to become a self-designing perpetual motion machine, utilizing the wisdom gleaned from past generations and all their trial and error experiments - combined with the energy, ingenuity and creative capacity of the people alive in the present - to construct an ever-better platform for new generations to then build upon. Right now, we have on this planet seven billion amazingly diverse minds and bodies that carry within them a vast potential to contribute the best of what they are to the world at large. We're just tragically wasting much of that energy, allowing people the world over to suffer and die unloved, unsupported and unappreciated, because we think we no longer "need" their human labor to earn a profit. <br /><br />So here's the deeper question we may wish to answer: For what purpose <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> we focusing on earning a financial profit, if not to better the world in which we live so that <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> of us can thrive, ourselves included? What good will all our money be if we don't create and maintain a healthy, stable human society? And because happiness is a huge factor in maintaining human health and stability, shouldn't we be supporting the expansion of happiness in everyone?<br /><br />Perhaps one solution to the imbalance that presently threatens to topple modern society is to cease perceiving ourselves (and each other) as mere energy units to be bought and sold, or as liabilities or assets on some vast global business accounting statement. Perhaps the solution lies in remembering who and what we are - living, feeling, reasoning creatures within a vast living ecosystem - and then asking ourselves <span style="font-style:italic;">why</span> it was that we started evolving and building societies to begin with. Was it to ensure that everyone on the planet would be endlessly enslaved to a monetary for-profit paradigm (energy = reward?) Or was it so we could personally suck all the juice out of life at the expense of everything else (money = power?) Or was it, perhaps, to help everyone and everything alive live better, feel better and become the best they can be as they mature, so we can <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> benefit from what everyone and everything else has to offer? <br /><br />Perhaps we'll never know what the original intent of societal construction was when it first began, but surely we can thoughtfully consider what we'd like it to become - what feels best for us to create in the here and now - and then aim for that.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-54643141641718964992011-03-21T07:13:00.000-07:002011-03-22T18:34:59.802-07:00The Power of PerspectiveIt's easy to look around today and notice that our world is filled with chaos. State sponsored violence is on the rise in many parts of the world. All over this planet people are starving and dying, natural disasters are disrupting things, climate is changing, species are disappearing, resources are being rapidly depleted and civilization is quaking from massive shifts in human behavior. <br /><br />Many of our traditional religious teachings inform us that humanity is in some sense broken, that we're atoning for the sins of our past human failings. The laws of karma and original sin are examples of such teachings. From the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve's consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a story most Muslims, Christians and Jews alike grew up hearing and believing. It teaches us that mankind disobeyed god's command to accept his law without question, thereby triggering a cascade of tragic life events that are still reverberating in our world today. That's why, whenever a global tragedy strikes, we hear biblical literalists describing the event as god wreaking vengeance upon humanity for having violated one of his laws. Now I don't know about you, but that description of humanity's relationship with god as one of a naughty child who's being punished has never felt to me like it's the truth. It's uninspiring, and it makes my heart clench with fear and guilt instead of expand with gratitude and love. <br /><br />Meanwhile, I've noticed that our modern scientific teachings feel equally uninspiring. Scientists scramble constantly to design new mathematical formulas (or beef up the old ones) to explain the fascinating new things we're observing, but much of what they've been doing for the past fifty years has added little of genuine value to the compendium of human wisdom. If I discover a color I've never seen before and give it the name "lefleus," what have I actually learned about the nature of the color? Or about how colors work, or why they arise, or how they're all connected to each other? My sense of modern theoretical physics is that it's long been doing just that - creating complex mathematical equations and slapping them down like names on what we're observing - without really explaining what we're seeing or how the cosmos fits together. <br /><br />After years of trying to reconcile the world's spiritual and intellectual teachings with my own experiences and observations of life, I've discovered that for me to feel happy and my heart to be at peace I must continually shape (and reshape) my own perspective of what and how I imagine this world to be, and then live according to my own realizations. Because my observations, feelings and life experiences too often contradicted what I'd been told to believe was true, the constant confusion I experienced had created within me a powerful cognitive dissonance that made me unhappy and downright mentally ill. That meant I either had to start trusting myself and my own sense of things, or else I had to accept without question the things other people wanted me to believe.<br /><br />Tough call. Who was I to imagine I might better be able to understand and define my place in the cosmos than all the amazing gurus, avatars, thinkers and doers that have walked this world before me? Wasn't it true they were the smartest, most brilliantly innovative, most spiritually "tapped in" people who ever lived? Some have even been labeled gods and are worshiped by millions today. Then again, how did they get to be that way? By accepting everything they'd been taught without question, or by making the second choice - the <span style="font-style:italic;">harder</span> choice - to trust themselves to be able to set out on a journey of intellectual inquiry and spiritual self-discovery and ultimately find a way home? What each of them had in common, I realized, was that they'd somehow found within themselves enough courage to trust in their own capacities. That empowered them to decide for themselves how they wished to perceive their singular precious life. Later, as their perceptions grew more clear, they then figured out how to expand that understanding through the broader lens of our shared humanity, so that others might find the courage within to embark upon their own journeys. <br /><br />The moment I accepted my own truth - that I quite simply didn't believe a lot of the things I'd been taught since I was a child - I realized I needed to invest a lot more time in contemplation, study and actual experience of this mystery in which I am embedded. I also discovered, after much frustration and effort, that there exists a significant gap between what I know to be true about life when I'm in the thick of it (simply being) and what I'm able to say about it when I try to describe or define my experience in ways that other people can understand. I began to notice very quickly how many people seemed positively eager to argue with me over the descriptions of life I put forth, as if they could negate the truth of my experiences by challenging the language I used to describe them. What that's taught me is how to listen carefully and respectfully to others so I can hear how they are describing their own experiences, and to discern whether they're describing something that's similar to my own understanding using slightly different language, or if they're describing a life experience that's different from my own. I've found I can learn much from either situation without making anyone else's descriptions or experiences "wrong." I've also learned it's easier not to try to discuss what I've experienced or defend the way I've chosen to describe it other than with those who are - like me - sincerely trying to appreciate this mystery we're all experiencing, and who aren't convinced they already have all the answers.<br /><br />If you're wondering by now where I've come to after years of intensive focus on the question, "what is life?" let me share with you what I've come to understand, which is precious little! You're free to quarrel with these thoughts, expand on them, embrace those that resonate with you or discard them in favor of your own interpretation. I simply offer them by way of explanation of what I've been doing, and am not attached to any as absolute truths. I change my mind all the time these days rather than allow it to grow calcified around concepts I'm not entirely sure are true, and am happier for the experience of that!<br /><br />As yet, all I can know with even the slightest degree of certainty is that - most of the time - I'm sincerely grateful to be alive, and that the life force that has both created and moves through me seems to be a unified field that creates, animates and activates everything in this cosmos. I've come to perceive birth and death as doorways for consciousness, and sense that the life force that moves through those doorways is a force that has no opposite. I know that my spirit soars when I experience beauty, and it feels awe when it honors the vastness and diversity of this cosmos. Whenever I feel anything less than a soaring awe for life, all I need do is step outside and look up. In fact, I’ve learned that, no matter where I am, when I’m fully conscious of and present to life I hold the power to invite my spirit to soar continuously, because I can notice beauty anywhere and feel awe whenever I cease thinking and simply stop to BE with all that is.<br /><br />I know my heart sings when it feels love, whether through the giving or the receiving. I know that when my heart sings of love I feel that every step I take is an act of grace. I've discovered I hold the power to invite my heart to sing all the time by unconditionally loving what I encounter, because I carry love within me in a seemingly endless supply. Loving life has become an important part of my conscious daily practice, and it's helped me to love myself as well as all else.<br /><br />I know my mind rejoices whenever it reaches a breakthrough understanding around something it didn't previously comprehend. I've found that the truth is never mundane, never boring, never uninspiring or fear provoking. In fact, only my questions provoke my fears, never the answers I'm given. I’ve realized I hold the power to rejoice constantly, because I've come to recognize and appreciate my own astounding level of ignorance, so I now know I have the capacity to be continuously surprised and endlessly delighted by the introduction of new ideas and understandings.<br /><br />As for my physical body, it feels relaxed and at peace whenever my spirit, heart and mind are in aligned focus around my spirit's intention. I know that I hold the power to feel relaxed and be at peace in every moment, because I've learned how to consciously align my spirit, heart and mind. When those three aspects of my inner being are working well together - with my spirit setting the highest intention, my heart pointing in the most loving direction and my mind selecting the wisest and surest approach - my body will not hesitate to calmly and peacefully take the desired journey, wherever it leads.<br /><br />That's about it - all I really know about life in a few paragraphs. Along the way I've had to let go of many longstanding, firm beliefs I once held around concepts like liberty, the pursuit of happiness, patriotism, freedom, the value of material comforts, democracy, hard work, the special nature of humans and so forth, because I found them to be confusing to hold with real integrity. Most of the time I found I couldn't align my spirit, heart and mind around how to fully express those values in every situation, and that instead I was investing an inordinate amount of time asking my mind to explain to the rest of me why I wasn't able to do so. The only value I've found I <span style="font-style:italic;">can</span> hold and express with any consistent degree of integrity, where all of me can remain in perfect alignment, seems to be around the value of love. In every situation I encounter, I've discovered that - if I don't know what to do - I can always ask myself the question, "Is this loving?" before I say or do anything to impact the life of another living being, or even the planet itself. If the answer is yes, I can feel confident that whatever I'm about to say or do will serve the situation, and that all of me will agree with it so there will be no self-rebukes or mental wars of rationalization later on.<br /><br />Lately I'm even beginning to let go of my cherished beliefs around the existence of any original human wound, or sin. I've begun to wonder if we've been told for so long that we're wounded beings and have caused (and continue to cause) deep wounding to others and to this world that we've come to believe without question that this is truly who we are, that our human nature is such that we'll never be whole, or well, or healed. I'm even beginning to suspect that the wounds I worked so hard to "heal" in my earlier years may well have been the products of my fevered imagination, beliefs I created about myself based on the stories I was told (as well as the many stories I told myself) about the nature of this world and what we humans have believed ourselves to be.<br /><br />What I'm discovering, as I center more deeply in the intention and direction of life being offered up by my spirit, is that my spirit feels indestructible, indomitable, irrepressible and fully empowered to take what may be an eternal journey toward infinite self-perfection. I don't have a clue how long it may take to get there, how many colorful body suits my spirit may try on and cast off along the way, how many sensory capacities, life experiences and thought processes my spirit may choose to cloak itself in, or how many uniquely different life forms it may wish to encounter and engage, but I'm okay with not knowing all that at this point in my journey. I have to be!<br /><br />Actually, I'm doing my best these days to stop asking questions of spirit or imagining <span style="font-style:italic;">anything</span>, and to instead notice what IS and discover if I can bring more love to whatever I encounter. When I love whatever is I no longer feel wounded, or broken, or fearful, or less than I <span style="font-style:italic;">imagine</span> I ought to be, because those thoughts and feelings seem to dissolve in the wondrous ocean of love that fills me up as I give it away. I've therefore come to embrace that I'm eternally evolving, not endlessly healing, and to love my growth instead of curse my brokenness.<br /><br />So then, now that all these thoughts and words and feelings have been committed to paper: What IS life, exactly? I have to confess that in truth, I still don't know. Then again, perhaps we're not individually <span style="font-style:italic;">meant</span> to know the entire truth of life so much as experience it in its infinite unfolding, and if so I'm okay with this truly amazing journey!Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-33444820342335489502011-03-11T07:35:00.000-08:002011-03-11T08:57:54.506-08:00When Propaganda Fails, It Fails Spectacularly!I admit, I used to get angry. Now though, I'm starting to laugh whenever I hear the absurd propaganda messages coming out of the mouths of Limbaugh, Beck and so many others - including many of our politicians. The thing is, you can only tell the poor it's their own fault they're poor for so long. We've been doing that for decades now, effectively enough that most of the poor who were born poor have been made the scapegoats of the middle and upper classes. We've all been trained to blame the poor for being a drag on our economy, for crime, for the moral decay of our nation and for hampering our ability to "keep up" with the rest of the world. It's been a media campaign of hatred and division that has created some remarkable results, not the least of which is that it's obscured the ongoing, thirty-year confiscation of wealth by the power elite that's been happening right under our noses in this nation.<br /> <br />A problem arises though, because the elite don't know when to stop. The idea that "enough is enough" seems not to cross their greedy minds. And so it is that many new and clever wealth confiscation policies - implemented by the power elite - have lately begun to render poor the entire middle class. They've done so by systematically reducing the value of middle class homes, binding people to underwater mortgages, reducing average wages and benefits, increasing monthly costs for basics like food, energy and education, and offshoring jobs so workers must compete more fiercely with each other and have an even harder time making ends meet. While doing all that, the elite propaganda message that the poor are responsible for their own situation - accompanied as it is by the message that poverty represents a personal moral failing - has been ratcheted up within the right wing media.<br /><br />What the elite, who are financially supporting this message by taking control of the mainstream media outlets, have failed to realize, however, is that the educated and hard-working people who are suddenly finding themselves poor as a result of predatory corporate activity, corruption in the entire banking/financial system and the elite's callous disregard for their workers' quality of life aren't pushovers. The former middle classes (including those who are still just managing to hold on) are presently waking up to the fact they KNOW they're not really to blame for their financial struggles and stress. And if they're not to blame for their own misfortune as is now being proposed by the elite, than the question that must arise in them - quite naturally - is whether perhaps those "other" poor people (whom the middle class have been blaming for decades as a result of the media propaganda machine) may also not be to blame for their poverty and misfortune.<br /><br />These two former enemy classes have been pitted against each other for decades because the wealthy - rather than caring for the needs of the poor themselves or uplifting them out of poverty - have forced the struggling middle class (through modern regressive tax policies) to grudgingly provide necessities for the poor. As these two former enemy classes now unite in opposition to the pyramidical, financially based power structure that ruthlessly oppresses us all, they're producing amazing results - PEOPLE POWER!<br /><br />United, the suffering create an enormous force that the outnumbered elite cannot control. Nor can the elite afford to physically destroy the masses through the use of military force, since the elite count on those masses to labor in the businesses that produce and support their luxurious way of life. Not to mention the fact that most military personnel, courtesy of the "all volunteer army" are the children of the poor and working class. They're highly unlikely to attack their families and friends in the streets where they live.<br /><br />The more absurd and hypocritical the right wing propaganda gets, the more obvious it becomes that their arguments have no moral center. As more and more people grasp the true intent of the propaganda - which is what happened recently in Wisconsin - the more likely it is we're approaching a social eruption point. Frankly, what would be more worrisome to me than a continued ratcheting up of the lies and rhetoric would be belated attempts by the wealthy to "give back" tiny amounts of wealth to the masses to appease them temporarily. Thankfully, the greedy can't seem to find it in their frozen hearts to care enough about the plights of others to do that, as was proved by the recent demands for additional tax cuts for the wealthy. Even the political progressives, who support limited redistribution of wealth because they believe it will help to stabilize the overarching system, can't seem to convince the greedy to part with their plunder.<br /> <br />The ongoing and expanding confiscation of what is, in reality, our national wealth and resources, demands a massive counter-response from those from whom this wealth has been confiscated to forge a new and dynamic social equilibrium. The farther the scales of power and wealth continue to tip toward the very wealthy few, the more likely it is that the reactive energy from the growing ranks of those who are suffering will be volcanic, and will cause a social upheaval that won't be easily reversed.<br /><br />The good news is, humanity is in dire need of a brand new social order. The best thing that could happen to us would be for us to gain an opportunity to design a world that is grounded in a win/win paradigm. That would enable us to consciously set a shared vision for what it is we want humanity to achieve, and to aim for that. Such a world would be founded on principles of regenerative and sustainable living, environmental and species preservation, less labor and more creative and scientific exploration, more harmony and cooperation and less cutthroat competition, an accumulation of wisdom instead of material possessions, and generosity of spirit rather than personal hoarding, fear and greed. Our achievement of that vision would depend upon the establishment of a vibrant, creative, empathetic and healthy human society that <span style="font-style:italic;">freely</span> supports and <span style="font-style:italic;">willingly</span> provides for human self-actualization and then elicits the grateful contribution of ALL its self-realized individuals, rather than one that promotes power and wealth for a lucky few and willfully ignores the suffering of all others. <br /><br />I happen to believe that for humanity to survive, for us to overcome the many self-created challenges we face as a species today, we need to put an end to many millenia of win/lose human behavior. So I'm no longer interested in protecting the wealthy from the follies of their own choices, though I will continue to try to mitigate suffering wherever I encounter it in person. Even so, I sense we've already passed the tipping point, so when it comes to the coming social revolution I say...bring it on! Let's see what we can design with a higher vision for the greater good. Let's do so for the sake of future generations, as well as for all of life on this beautiful planet.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-35962874410377060882011-02-26T05:40:00.001-08:002011-02-26T07:48:01.661-08:00When Waves CollideWhat we're witnessing now is no less than an energetic collision of two major waves of human evolution, one receding and one just now arising. I exhort us all to rejoice in this, because although it means we're presently caught in a swirl of chaos and conflict, the opportunity is arising for us to catch the new wave and begin to ride the leading edge of a massive change in the way we "do" human society.<br /><br />The outgoing wave is represented by the power/dominator culture that has controlled human behavior for many thousands of years. The disintegration of this wave, which began over a century ago when angry citizens began to overthrow their oppressive monarchies, continues unabated. We've recently witnessed its expansion throughout the Middle East as dictator after dictator falls to the public outcry against tyranny. Because in the early part of this global revolution people didn't know how to create a non-dominator culture, the first rebels who overthrew their oppressors eventually repeated the mistakes made by their predecessors. The new governments that arose purported to be populist systems, but eventually they all fell back into old, unconscious patterns of dominating and controlling the many for the benefit of the powerful few. I include the United States in that assessment, because while our Founding Fathers had the foresight to envision and design a populist system, our government long ago ceased acting as a true democracy and has instead become a corporatocracy. The national agenda is now being controlled by the wealthy elite, who use manufactured lack and campaigns of fear to cow the suffering masses into submission. The recent Supreme Court decision that allowed businesses to fund political campaigns simply codified the silent overthrow of democracy that has been occurring beneath the surface for many years. Business interests now dictate to politicians what they wish to see occur. Our current crop of political puppets - particularly those who rose to power post the Citizens United decision - are allowing their strings to be pulled by these hidden overseers in exchange for status and privilege as members of the "ruling" class. <br /><br />We see evidence of the old power/dominator wave wherever we notice energetic attempts to control the many (and the much) by an elite and powerful few, and wherever we spot high concentrations of global resources and monetary power creating suffering among the many have-nots. The last gasps of this wave are visible all over America today. They include recent attempts by the corporate controlled media to de-fund NPR and PBS so that in the future all conventionally conveyed information will be screened by the business community before it reaches the public. It includes the removal of longstanding safety nets from beneath the working poor, along with across-the-board reductions in government services, to cow people into working harder for ever less money and fewer benefits. We find it in the recent mortgage scandal and banking collapse, which was followed by a taxpayer-funded refueling of the very financial institutions responsible for the illegal activities that destroyed the wealth of a shrinking middle class. We see it in the recent foreclosure debacle (accompanied by illegal efforts to introduce forged documentation to accelerate the foreclosure process) which has laid the entire burden for this scandal on the backs of laborers and the poor. We see it in cynical attempts to sell the de-funding of Planned Parenthood to the masses based on the religious right's pro-life doctrine, so as to make abortions inaccessible and to deny birth control to the poor, which will ensure that the next generation of working stiffs will be born. We see it in attempts to "dumb down" education so that children are not taught HOW to think, but are instead force-fed WHAT to think and then required to submissively regurgitate that information without error in order to be considered "successfully" educated. We see it in the de-funding of college tuition for students, such that education is out of reach for most or else requires young people to shoulder huge debts that will enslave them to corporate America even before they've fully matured. We see it in the raping and polluting of our environment, the excessive consumption of nonrenewable resources, the careless extinction of other species, and in the production of cheap goods and services marketed constantly through a barrage of advertising and designed to part the masses with their hard-earned cash. We see it in the selling of so-called "services" like mortgage lending, utilities and credit card borrowing, which use ongoing debt to bind workers to corporate America, where they struggle to earn a paycheck to meet those endless obligations. We see it in our current medical system, which limits care to those who can afford it, promotes symptoms abatement instead of genuine cures, and supports the marketing of old age as a disease that must be overcome at any cost. We even see it in our religions, which train people not to question authority and teach us from an early age that we're broken, unworthy and must spend our current lives atoning for the sins of our forefathers if we hope to experience a happy "afterlife."<br /><br />While looking at this outgoing wave isn't pleasant, we can't turn away from it and pretend it doesn't exist. It's very real, and the energy it is still producing is causing real human and planetary suffering. Certain factions within New Age and spiritual circles have taken the position that we should only look to the "light" and pay attention to the good things that are happening. But to ignore the shadow side of human behavior is to run the risk that this energy continues to collect in the depths of the shadow, where it might regroup (as it has in the past) to rise again.<br /><br />Looking at the shadow side of the power/dominator wave - contrary to popular fears - doesn't strengthen it. It merely shines a light on it, bringing it to public attention where we have the power to consciously CHOOSE whether we wish to feed this energy or starve it. Meanwhile, the new wave of energy that's arising in human society is gathering momentum and developing global coherence, and it now seems strong enough and bright enough to overcome the heavy, depressing energy of the old wave. <br /><br />The energy of the new wave can be identified by its grounding in a joyous and overwhelming love for life. It carries within it a reverence for this planet, for other creatures, for nature, for the interconnectedness of all beings and for the evolutionary thrust of consciousness. It values the environment and supports concepts like sustainability, renewable energy and regenerative living. It proposes we make less but make it better, consume less but consume it more wisely, work less but work smarter and with the intention of advancing humanity and stewarding our future. It values wisdom above information, realization above dogmas and spirituality above religious training. It approaches reality from a whole-systems viewpoint instead of objectifying and valuing separation, and knows everything to be alive, sentient and evolving. It defines success not through possessions or monetary wealth, but through the metrics of human happiness, planetary health, the well-being of other species and the ability of society to empower ALL individuals to self-actualize. It promotes self-governance, self-discipline and self-awareness as the cure for external domination. It views work not as jobs for pay, but as the necessary labor of humanity to advance the survivability of our species. It values play and social engagement as much as work, and honors the arts as creative expressions of human consciousness. It recognizes that the true resources of humanity reside not in how much sweat we produce in a day, but in our ingenuity, our creativity, our imaginative capacities, our passions, our talents and our skills. It values cooperation above competition and realizes that humanity advances through freely sharing our wisdom so we can build on what we've learned, not through the bottling of knowledge and selling what we know to the highest bidder. It recognizes that all the money ever created cannot possibly match those resources, and that trying to measure the worth of unique human beings through comparing them to each other is a hopeless enterprise. It learns from the past but does not cling to it; it leans into the future but does not fear it. In short, it is a wave marked by human maturation, where all the fears, insecurities, aggression, isolation, sexual obsessions, cliquishness, short-sightedness, rebelliousness and arrogance of youth are being replaced by a quietly growing desire to live and work in peaceful communion with one another - and with nature - for the benefit of future generations. <br /><br />So again I say, let's rejoice as we midwife what's arising, and let's not shy away from consciously hospicing the old out of existence. The past served us once, and it serves us still by teaching us how not to be tomorrow. While at times it may appear that the old will never die and the new is too diffuse to overcome the density of the power/dominator structure, it is in that very diffuseness that the new is finding its footing and its power. One or two loud voices in the wilderness can be effectively stilled, but the voices of the many, joined together, will not be silenced. No messiah is necessary to lead this rising wave of human advancement. What will lead this wave instead will be a thousand, million points of living light. So I invite each of you to tune in, turn on and begin to shine your light right NOW...the world is waiting!Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-48917759169902032342011-02-23T07:49:00.001-08:002011-02-23T11:55:28.835-08:00The Ego and LabelingLately I've been noticing the amount of labeling we're doing as a species. When we label another person as "this" or "that" (or even as "not this" or "not that")we are reducing what is essentially the irreducible aliveness of an ever-changing being to a limited mental projection we have created in our own minds. We then give ourselves permission to treat that person as if they <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> the label we've assigned to them, rather than as what they <span style="font-style:italic;">truly</span> are. By doing so we unconsciously allow our ego to circumvent the energy of Spirit, which knows all beings are a loving emanation from the One infinite/eternal field of life, temporarily existing as differentiated forms. <br /><br />The human ego loves its mental labels! Once we've attached a mental label to something, the ego then feels free to judge it as good or evil, right or wrong, the same as "me" or different from "me," because discerning these patterns is the primary function of ego. Discerning patterns allows us, as human beings, to position ourselves in space-time and to form patterns of understanding about the world by which we can successfully navigate our sensory reality. As soon as a label has been attached to something, it becomes "objectified." The ego then grants itself permission to behave toward that object the way it believes best for itself based upon what that label tells us about the object, without any further concern for the life force moving within the object that the ego has judged. The ego then, is never in full relationship with the energetic field of life, because it concerns itself mainly with static objects and forms relationships with the world on that limited level. The ego's relationships consist of surface labels and judgments, learned patterns and conditioned, mainly unconscious responses to the various objects it imagines it encounters. <br /><br />On a certain level of behavior the labeling function performed by the ego can be very helpful to us. If I notice a "rock" I become instantly aware I cannot pass through it and must instead go around it. I don't need to stop and contemplate the rock (or the tree, or the river) to know how to be in relationship with it for my own physical safety. This allows me to move through the world of form easily and quickly, so I can accomplish much more than if I were required to treat each object I encountered as if it were a brand new experience and as if I had no understanding of my surroundings or how best to relate to them. <br /><br />On another level though, this process of labeling and reducing can be very harmful to us, as well as to those we encounter. When I meet another human being, perhaps in a restaurant, and label him as "waiter," I then give myself permission to behave toward him as if his sole purpose in life is to take my order, serve me my food and clear away my dirty dishes without disturbing my meal in any way. Unless a deeper awareness rises <span style="font-style:italic;">below and behind</span> the surface level of egoic conditioned labeling, I will therefore miss the opportunity to interact with that being who is doing the serving on a <span style="font-style:italic;">soul</span> level, where I can honor the depth and beauty of his aliveness and invite him to honor mine. <br /><br />For a very long time - probably since the evolution of human language - humanity has learned to move through the world using labels and forming conditioned mental patterns with respect to objects. This behavior has allowed us to evolve rapidly, to create new technologies and to advance our capacities and objective understanding of the world. And yet...because we have become so attached to our labels and comfortable with our judgments, the technologies we've created and the ways we're interacting with our living planet and with each other often fail to root deeply enough to form loving, lasting relationships on the level of life itself. This explains why we can pollute a river without relating to it as something more than a "convenient place to dump waste," and why we can bomb a city and not relate to its suffering occupants as anything more than "enemies." Most of the suffering we observe in our world - and most of the damage we've done to our living planet - can be traced directly to our habit of objectifying and reducing life to mere mental concepts, and then relating to it in a limited way as if the concept we've formed is the whole truth of what we're experiencing.<br /><br />I believe the evolutionary shift that is occurring right here and now in human consciousness is an internal thrust toward greater awareness of the limitations of assigning labels, as well as an awakening to the deep and energetic interconnectedness of all things. The realization that we can't neatly reduce the energetic field of life - in <span style="font-style:italic;">any</span> form - to a static label and relate to it only in that limited way is a change that enables us to shift our present social systems (which are failing) toward new, deeper and more meaningful ways of being in relationship with one another and with the living world that contains and supports us all. That internal movement is urging our long-subdued spirits to awaken. An awakened spirit recognizes and honors the limited but crucial role being played by ego in keeping the body safe, even as Spirit steps forward and claims its rightful place as "captain of the ship." We're not here to <span style="font-style:italic;">eliminate</span> our egos or blame and curse them for performing their given functions, but to direct them where they belong, in service to Spirit. That new contextualization allows Spirit to engage more fully and richly with itself in the field of life - as it meets and honors its infinite/eternal self in the form of all other beings with whom we share this living world.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-867770869531048977.post-73776054075552977702011-02-13T07:38:00.000-08:002011-02-13T09:08:28.482-08:00The Rising Feminine as Evolutionary ForceIf you're a woman and reading this blog, you may recall adolescence as a turbulent emotional time, fraught with insecurity. We worried about our bodies - would they mature to resemble those of the supermodels being held up as paragons of beauty? We worried about relationships - would we be able to attract and develop an intimate, loving relationship with another without having to exchange sexual favors before we were ready? We worried about pregnancy - would we be able to make it through the "danger years" of adolescence without finding ourselves saddled with a child before we were ready and able to fully care for one? We worried about protecting ourselves from sexual predators - would we, innocents that we were, be able to recognize that danger before it was too late? We worried about accidentally bleeding all over ourselves at the most inopportune times, and we suffered through the pain of menstrual cramps as well as the emotional ups and downs of our own hormonal tides. We worried about belonging to the right clique, about wearing the right clothes, about saying the right things, about (heaven forbid!) not embarrassing ourselves to the point of no redemption. In short, we worried. Constantly. At least most of us did. Even those of us who were popular and expressed supreme confidence on the outside, on the inside still felt occasionally diminished by the uncomfortable changes of our adolescence. <br /><br />The result of all this was that during adolescence, the happy, energetic girl-child who held her own with the boys during prepubescence lost her confidence. As she looked around, she noticed the boys getting bigger, bolder, stronger, more aggressive, more assertive with every passing day. Masculine energy, fueled by a massive increase in testosterone, became something against which she could no longer physically hold her own. By contrast, and out of an innate desire to protect herself, the feminine retreated into the safety of her own psyche while the masculine practiced expressing himself and manifesting his own ideas into the world. <br /><br />Why is this so important for us to discuss? I believe it's crucial because if we look at how we develop on an individual basis and recognize that, as has been scientifically validated, our cosmos applies patterns and uses fractals to replicate itself, we can see that the social behavior of humanity seems to be reflective of the behavior of human individuals as we mature. In other words, the way we each evolve as individuals is very likely indicative of the way we've been evolving as a species. <br /><br />What can we observe about human society today that gives us clues about our species evolution? To begin with, we can observe that it is indeed still a male dominated society, and that - at least when it comes to social design - women have yet to fully reclaim their status as equal partners working in communion with their men. We can also observe the behavior of humanity and draw some conclusions from that. For example, we're still a highly aggressive and competitive species, which is reflective of the adolescent male. We're short-sighted, selfish, narcissistic and highly self-conscious, all of which are also classic adolescent characteristics. We're still fear-based, and many of us continue to harbor the sense that, deep down, we're just not good enough. That too reflects our adolescence and the lack of competency juveniles feel, even as they desire more personal freedoms. At the same time we project arrogance and an unwillingness to acknowledge we might just be wrong and perhaps have much yet to learn. What stage of your own <span style="font-style:italic;">own</span> life do <span style="font-style:italic;">those</span> traits remind you of? <br /><br />On the bright side, we're also a bold species: adventurous, clever, resourceful, imaginative, and courageous. Still, we have yet to solidify a common dream toward which we collectively aspire, a shared intention toward which - laser-like - we can focus and direct the vast amount of human creativity and energy we have at our disposal. We're still floundering to define humanity's purpose, still seeking and searching and questioning who we are, and why we're here. <br /> <br />If all this is indeed true and humanity is making an evolutionary turn from adolescence to species adulthood, we can look to our personal evolution for clues as to what we might expect to happen next. We know adolescent boys kill themselves at a rate of six times the suicide rate for adolescent girls, have 20% more accidents than do girls, and that four in five adolescents who commit murder are also male. From those statistics we can extrapolate that so long as we remain a male-dominated, primarily adolescent society, we're far more likely to destroy ourselves (purposefully or inadvertently) and to continue to recklessly kill each other than we will be if/when we make the successful transition into our species adulthood. While those may seem frightening statistics and perhaps cause for some pessimism, we also know that the female brain fully matures at 22, while the male brain doesn't mature until the age of 25. If we include that information in our template for our species evolution, it becomes clear that, on whole, the feminine aspect of humanity, which was diminished during adolescence, will awaken, rise and enter the fullness of human adulthood <span style="font-style:italic;">before</span> the male aspect of our species steps into its full adulthood as equal partner with <span style="font-style:italic;">her</span>. While male energy may have led the shift from our species childhood to our adolescence, it's more likely that female energy will lead the way from our adolescence into our adulthood. <br /><br />Perhaps this explains why modern spiritual movements, ecological movements and social equality movements are populated more richly by women than by men. Perhaps it also explains why humanity's modern challenges reflect our neglect of tasks that would have traditionally fallen to women to perform in the typical home of old. When we observe our society today, we note that our infrastructure is crumbling; our planetary garden is not being tended; the other animals living with us are not being properly cared for; not all humans are being fed, housed, clothed, educated or nurtured properly, and the elderly and infirm are not being well treated. Because our society has had a predominantly masculine <span style="font-style:italic;">thrust</span> over the past few thousand years, what has been neglected (or gone underground during our adolescence) is the womb-like environment that is our planet, which both birthed us and continues to provide us with necessary sustenance. We've been growing frantically and furiously, as is typical of adolescence, but the time has come for us to cease our rapid growth and enter into a more thoughtful, introspective age. <br /><br />As we leave behind the industrial age and the age of information (the sponge-like period of adolescence where we gather data without too much discernment) what comes next? Here again we can look to our individual shift toward adulthood for clues to add to our species' evolutionary template. <br /><br />The key to becoming successful in young adulthood is the development of our core competencies. Competency arises through experience, failure, learning and growing...in wisdom, rather than in size. We discover - through painful trial and error - how to live in harmonious relationship with one another; how to choose partners with whom we can work to raise a family; how to set long-term goals and delay our personal gratification to enhance the odds of our success; how to validate ourselves and make sacrifices for the sake of others (especially the helpless innocents who look to us for support) and how to love others for the sheer joy of it, without any expectation of a reward. We also learn that we're not in control of life's events, and that life has a way of expressing itself that is presently beyond our ability to comprehend. We learn to surrender our egos to that truth, to relax and allow life to be as it chooses to be, even as we use our skills, talents, passions, abilities and drives to shape it as best we know how. We let go of our need for continual drama to stimulate our adolescent psyches, and settle into a pleasant state of peace. Though that state may be broken externally by circumstances beyond our own control, we allow our emotions to rise, pass and return us to peace once we've weathered the storms we must face. Through it all, we remain humble in our awareness that - no matter how much we learn about life - there will always be more to learn, to experience, to honor. Last but not least, we trust the inner compass that is our heart (our feminine self) to guide us through the unknown wilderness of the ever-unfolding moment as our mind (our masculine self) continues to mature. <br /><br />Today, as we ponder these things, let us take a moment to honor the feminine, rising. Let us not in any way diminish, blame, shame or make "wrong" the masculine for being as it is - as it was <span style="font-style:italic;">meant</span> to be - even as we allow ourselves to feel freer to reveal the feminine heart-light which has for too long been hidden from the world. I call to the rising feminine within us ALL - male <span style="font-style:italic;">and</span> female - to step into the fullness and richness of your own truth, your own deep sense of purpose, your own desire for harmony, and <span style="font-style:italic;">embrace</span> those divine and beautiful aspects of yourself. The cosmos itself, by forcing us to confront so many challenges all at once, is calling for us all to shine in the here and now, to mature into the ripeness of human adulthood. Allow your own heart to glow and become giddily pregnant with the infinite possibilities, and let us see what wants to transpire next.Eileenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01230791277314505158noreply@blogger.com0