Yesterday morning a friend and I dropped by a local coffee shop to relax and chat a while. As we approached the entrance together, I happened to notice an elderly man sitting alone at one of the glass topped outdoor tables. A brown paper coffee cup was resting in front of him, but his hands were busy gesturing as he mumbled toward the sky, perhaps in response to a voice only he could hear. Something about his demeanor prompted me to approach him. I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, smiled and said, "Good morning, my friend."
His entire face lit up as his attention shifted away from the conversation he'd been having with himself and responded to the sound of my voice. "Hello there. Is this a Club Med?" he asked, motioning vaguely toward the bubbling fountain beside the coffee shop. With the temperature hovering in the mid-eighties, the late morning sun blazing in the cloudless blue sky and the merry burbling of the water beside us, I could understand the logic - if not the nature - of his reasoning.
"Not a Club Med, no. It's a coffee shop." I replied, unsure what else to offer.
"Too bad." He shrugged. "I used to live beneath this place, you know. Ask anyone who's lived here a while what it used to be like before this. Although my home wasn't here, on top. It was inside the Earth. Before it exploded and thrust me into the past, the present and the future all at once."
His face grew animated as he began to tell me his story. He spoke to me of the spaceships, and the awful people who were trying to steal his blood for its unique DNA configuration, which resembled the molecular structure of honey. His mission, he informed me, was to stop the Earth from falling into a hole it can never get out of. Those of us who were milling around the coffee shop - he kindly included me in this explanation - were part of the human Exodus, the souls he was here to protect from the invaders.
I noticed how his fingernails were encrusted with the deep layers of dirt that accumulate from too many days without access to clean running water. His clothes, while neat, were worn and threadbare. Off to one side stood a shopping cart neatly packed with whatever precious items he'd managed to collect for himself on his travels. A blue plastic tarp covered the entire basket, preventing me from seeing the treasures within.
As I listened to his story, I found myself shifting between awe at the level of intelligent coherence he projected as he spun his tale, and compassion based on the realization he occupied a world no one else could truly enter. It was a magical realm indeed, filled with demons and heroes and adventures and lots of danger, while at the same time it was tinged with hope and wrapped in a deep sense of purpose. When he finished speaking he gazed up at me expectantly, waiting for something. What though? What could I possibly have to offer a man I couldn't understand?
Suddenly, I realized what he most needed from me wasn't for me to validate (or challenge) his ideas. By some serendipitous miracle a stranger had reached out to him and, at least in this one precious moment, had gifted him the chance to make some - any - slim connection with another person. That was what I had to offer, and it was enough. I smiled and patted his shoulder once again. "Well," I said, "That is some story. Best of luck to you, and I wish you success."
He laughed and pocketed the cash I offered him as if it was more of a distraction than something to be noted and appreciated. "I'm gonna be alright," he said, eyes twinkling. "I know how to take care of myself. Don't you worry 'bout me."
I walked away then, aware I wasn't worried about him in the least. Somehow, despite whatever dark nights of the soul and tragedies of the heart he'd experienced in his charred and broken past, he'd created a new world for himself out of the ashes. It was a world in which other people played minor supporting roles now and again, but where his primary "reality" mainly unfolded through the story inside his own mind.
It's a place I happen to know all too well, because I've been there myself the past. It's called psychosis. The alien landscape where my new friend dwells, perhaps permanently, is a world of his own creation. His mind has gotten so rooted in its own thoughts that his body has grown physically disconnected from external reality. While the body checks into the world now and then to tend to its basic needs - mundane things like shelter, food and sleep - as soon as those needs are satisfied he retreats to the world inside his mind once again. For people in his condition, sensory input is experienced not for what it actually is, but for what the mind has chosen to believe it to be so it "fits" into the story his mind is telling.
Angry, judgmental people become the alien abductors; the distant sounds of airplanes become invisible hovering spaceships. Kindly passing strangers become members of the Exodus team; the shopping mall becomes a cover for a hidden underground world filled with strange plants and beasts. Luckily for him, the saga he's woven is epic; it's exciting and coherent and open to lots of interesting possibilities as time passes. It is, I suspect, a story with enough of a punch to carry him for years.
It occurred to me then, as I entered the cool shaded realm of the coffee shop, ordered my tall mocha with whipped cream and prepared to settle into a comfortable chair and talk with my friend about our intertwined lives, that the only difference between him and me was that I'd managed - with the help of a loving family, good friends and an excellent doctor - to pull myself back from the precipice of mental illness before I'd fallen in so deep no one could help me. Most days these days I find myself fully connected to reality, surrounded by people who perceive the same things I perceive. Still, every so often a panic attack overwhelms me, reminding me just how fragile is the mind, and how lonely and frightening a place it can be when we're trapped inside it alone.
That's why yesterday morning I gifted a piece of myself to the man from the center of the Earth. There but for the grace of God...go all of us.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
The Inherent Limitations of Capitalism
After much contemplation, below is a brief list of the inherent problems and fundamental shortcomings I've found in the capitalistic/for-profit paradigm. It's my belief that these problems reflect the adolescent mindset that created the system. Adolescents are fond of win/lose games, because they require external validation to feel good about themselves. Adults, on the other hand, prefer win/win games, because they validate themselves based on how much they are able to self-actualize and contribute to the well-being and success of others. Feel free to explore these issues more deeply, to ask questions and challenge your preexisting beliefs around capitalism for yourself. It's vital for humanity's social evolution and maturation that we let go of all the unexamined beliefs that have been instilled in us since childhood, and discern for ourselves what feels more right and true as we move forward...together.
1) Capitalism is designed to facilitate the flow of human creativity through a direct-exchange process (I'll give something to you if you give something to me) rather than an indirect one (I'll take what I need out of the larger system and when I'm able I'll give back whatever I can produce for everyone else's benefit.) Indirect exchange is nature's blueprint. The flower feeds the bee, which feeds the bear, which dies and feeds the insects, which nourish the earth, which feeds the flower. Because direct exchange is overly simplistic and highly limited - I may desperately need your corn but you have no present need for my masonry skills - we invented money to represent conceptual value and reduce the inherent problems with direct exchange. However, the human population and its concurrent ability to be more creative and productive over time have been expanding exponentially, so our need for money to change hands for an exchange to take place is actually hindering our ability to create and exchange all we're capable of doing and producing. There isn't enough money in the world to effectively match all our efforts and abilities; we now have to wait for it to become available BEFORE we can perform.
2)In a for-profit paradigm, "success" means continually taking out of the system MORE than you put into it. Even if you then reinvest your profits, you're doing so in order to take out even more than you extracted the first time at a later date. Since everyone is continually taking out more than they're putting in (or trying to) the system itself grows consistently more impoverished. One of the first rules of biology is that any whole must be greater than the sum of its many parts. Unless we design human society around that principle, the system is bound to collapse. Why be part of something that forces you to be "less than" you could be on your own? (The seething resentment this fosters explains why so many of us feel alienated and try to game or cheat the system.)
3)Allowing the "free market" (buyers and sellers) to dictate what gets produced and how it gets distributed is fundamentally undemocratic, because it denies a vote to those who don't have enough money to participate in the decision-making process. What gets produced is thus predicated upon who can afford to pay for it; how it gets distributed depends upon how much people are willing to bid for an item as they bid AGAINST each other. It's an amoral system conceptually; when applied to living beings it becomes profoundly immoral. When we fail to feed human beings who can't afford to buy the food they need to survive AND we've destroyed their ability to provide for themselves through ownership laws and other property restrictions, we're valuing monetary profits above life itself.
4)Capitalism requires constant growth and continual consumption to satisfy the ever-present profit motive and thus sustain itself. Our primary motivation is to acquire ever MORE. No living organism can consume and grow forever without destroying its host in the process, so capitalism is an inherently unsustainable model that must be released, or it will inevitably collapse.
5)Capitalism functions like a Ponzi scheme. All global lands have long been sold off and parceled out to the wealthy privileged few who got here first, so all new humans born into this world arrive with a huge disadvantage as the population rapidly expands. Like any Ponzi scheme, capitalism will thus always produce more winners than losers. Since the value of money is relative - I must have more money than you to outbid you for what we both want - no amount of cash infused into the system can correct that fundamental flaw. Prices will simply rise to siphon off the newly infused cash, enriching the wealthy even more.
6)Capitalism promotes unhealthy competition by fostering a 'destroy the enemy' siege mentality. A destroy the enemy approach promotes more, cheaply made products at lower prices, which cheapens society and creates more waste in the long run. Healthy competition asks the question, "how can I improve upon what has already been done by others?" Its aim is to elevate society by making it more beautiful, functional and long lasting.
7) Capitalism discourages cooperation. Anti-trust laws were invented because we can't trust our companies not to collude against the best interests of humanity in their quest to earn a profit. If companies were motivated and rewarded NOT by monetary profits, but because they performed a valuable service for the social good, they could get together and share ideas that could facilitate far more rapid advancement in how we produce things, as well as in what we're producing.
8)Because capitalism requires constant consumption to generate continuous profits, it must manufacture needs to induce spending by the wealthy once basic needs have been mainly satisfied. (An example of a manufactured need is a product like health insurance. Another would be cable TV.) Capitalism also creates artificial lack by deliberately keeping supplies of goods tightly controlled and limited, forcing people to bid up for them so adequate profits can be made. This keeps people trapped in the economic system by forcing them to continually labor to earn enough money to pay for the things they believe they need to ensure their own survival. It also destroys human trust and core competency by turning us all into children, entirely dependent upon an economic system that doesn't genuinely care about our well-being, to provide us with what we need.
9) Capitalism, through its use of money to represent conceptual value, has promoted the worship of an abstraction over a genuine appreciation of tangibles. As a result, our reverence for the importance of each thing based on its own inherent worth has been greatly diminished. For example, we intuitively consider a $10 hammer more valuable than a 20 cent orange - ask any schoolchild and they'll regurgitate the "correct" conceptual answer. Ask an indigenous person in the Brazilian rain forest which is more valuable however, and he'll tell you that if he's hungry, he appreciates the orange. If he needs to build something, he appreciates the hammer. One is NOT more valuable than the other - they're both priceless when they are necessary!
10)Capitalism fails to value the uniqueness of each individual. The social imperative to make money as a goal unto itself enslaves people to the labor force in exchange for their daily bread. People in need of a job to survive are not free to explore their skills, talents, passions and abilities and discern what they can best contribute to the whole over the long run. Capitalism therefore creates obstacles to genuine self-actualization.
11)Capitalism is a dangerous practice, in that it consistently undermines and exploits the one thing that can truly sustain us long-term - our planet - so a few people can gain short-term strategic advantage over the rest of humanity. It removes the sanctity of life - the undefinable aspect of nature that MOST defines us - from the social equation, by placing personal material success ABOVE the survival of the very fabric of life that supports us all.
12)Capitalism reinforces human frailty by blaming the "losers" for their failure to succeed in a system that - by definition - MUST always have more losers than winners for it to work. Since money is relative, I can't be successful unless I possess more of it relative to nearly everybody else. Clearly then, the more money I'm able to hoard, the more losers there will be in relationship to me. Blaming the so-called losers for not being able to lift themselves out of such a system destroys our trust in our abilities as a species, and discourages us from confidently and courageously exploring our own capacities. We "surrender" our dreams to the need to work for a living, rather than reach for the stars to discover and bring forth the best in ourselves.
1) Capitalism is designed to facilitate the flow of human creativity through a direct-exchange process (I'll give something to you if you give something to me) rather than an indirect one (I'll take what I need out of the larger system and when I'm able I'll give back whatever I can produce for everyone else's benefit.) Indirect exchange is nature's blueprint. The flower feeds the bee, which feeds the bear, which dies and feeds the insects, which nourish the earth, which feeds the flower. Because direct exchange is overly simplistic and highly limited - I may desperately need your corn but you have no present need for my masonry skills - we invented money to represent conceptual value and reduce the inherent problems with direct exchange. However, the human population and its concurrent ability to be more creative and productive over time have been expanding exponentially, so our need for money to change hands for an exchange to take place is actually hindering our ability to create and exchange all we're capable of doing and producing. There isn't enough money in the world to effectively match all our efforts and abilities; we now have to wait for it to become available BEFORE we can perform.
2)In a for-profit paradigm, "success" means continually taking out of the system MORE than you put into it. Even if you then reinvest your profits, you're doing so in order to take out even more than you extracted the first time at a later date. Since everyone is continually taking out more than they're putting in (or trying to) the system itself grows consistently more impoverished. One of the first rules of biology is that any whole must be greater than the sum of its many parts. Unless we design human society around that principle, the system is bound to collapse. Why be part of something that forces you to be "less than" you could be on your own? (The seething resentment this fosters explains why so many of us feel alienated and try to game or cheat the system.)
3)Allowing the "free market" (buyers and sellers) to dictate what gets produced and how it gets distributed is fundamentally undemocratic, because it denies a vote to those who don't have enough money to participate in the decision-making process. What gets produced is thus predicated upon who can afford to pay for it; how it gets distributed depends upon how much people are willing to bid for an item as they bid AGAINST each other. It's an amoral system conceptually; when applied to living beings it becomes profoundly immoral. When we fail to feed human beings who can't afford to buy the food they need to survive AND we've destroyed their ability to provide for themselves through ownership laws and other property restrictions, we're valuing monetary profits above life itself.
4)Capitalism requires constant growth and continual consumption to satisfy the ever-present profit motive and thus sustain itself. Our primary motivation is to acquire ever MORE. No living organism can consume and grow forever without destroying its host in the process, so capitalism is an inherently unsustainable model that must be released, or it will inevitably collapse.
5)Capitalism functions like a Ponzi scheme. All global lands have long been sold off and parceled out to the wealthy privileged few who got here first, so all new humans born into this world arrive with a huge disadvantage as the population rapidly expands. Like any Ponzi scheme, capitalism will thus always produce more winners than losers. Since the value of money is relative - I must have more money than you to outbid you for what we both want - no amount of cash infused into the system can correct that fundamental flaw. Prices will simply rise to siphon off the newly infused cash, enriching the wealthy even more.
6)Capitalism promotes unhealthy competition by fostering a 'destroy the enemy' siege mentality. A destroy the enemy approach promotes more, cheaply made products at lower prices, which cheapens society and creates more waste in the long run. Healthy competition asks the question, "how can I improve upon what has already been done by others?" Its aim is to elevate society by making it more beautiful, functional and long lasting.
7) Capitalism discourages cooperation. Anti-trust laws were invented because we can't trust our companies not to collude against the best interests of humanity in their quest to earn a profit. If companies were motivated and rewarded NOT by monetary profits, but because they performed a valuable service for the social good, they could get together and share ideas that could facilitate far more rapid advancement in how we produce things, as well as in what we're producing.
8)Because capitalism requires constant consumption to generate continuous profits, it must manufacture needs to induce spending by the wealthy once basic needs have been mainly satisfied. (An example of a manufactured need is a product like health insurance. Another would be cable TV.) Capitalism also creates artificial lack by deliberately keeping supplies of goods tightly controlled and limited, forcing people to bid up for them so adequate profits can be made. This keeps people trapped in the economic system by forcing them to continually labor to earn enough money to pay for the things they believe they need to ensure their own survival. It also destroys human trust and core competency by turning us all into children, entirely dependent upon an economic system that doesn't genuinely care about our well-being, to provide us with what we need.
9) Capitalism, through its use of money to represent conceptual value, has promoted the worship of an abstraction over a genuine appreciation of tangibles. As a result, our reverence for the importance of each thing based on its own inherent worth has been greatly diminished. For example, we intuitively consider a $10 hammer more valuable than a 20 cent orange - ask any schoolchild and they'll regurgitate the "correct" conceptual answer. Ask an indigenous person in the Brazilian rain forest which is more valuable however, and he'll tell you that if he's hungry, he appreciates the orange. If he needs to build something, he appreciates the hammer. One is NOT more valuable than the other - they're both priceless when they are necessary!
10)Capitalism fails to value the uniqueness of each individual. The social imperative to make money as a goal unto itself enslaves people to the labor force in exchange for their daily bread. People in need of a job to survive are not free to explore their skills, talents, passions and abilities and discern what they can best contribute to the whole over the long run. Capitalism therefore creates obstacles to genuine self-actualization.
11)Capitalism is a dangerous practice, in that it consistently undermines and exploits the one thing that can truly sustain us long-term - our planet - so a few people can gain short-term strategic advantage over the rest of humanity. It removes the sanctity of life - the undefinable aspect of nature that MOST defines us - from the social equation, by placing personal material success ABOVE the survival of the very fabric of life that supports us all.
12)Capitalism reinforces human frailty by blaming the "losers" for their failure to succeed in a system that - by definition - MUST always have more losers than winners for it to work. Since money is relative, I can't be successful unless I possess more of it relative to nearly everybody else. Clearly then, the more money I'm able to hoard, the more losers there will be in relationship to me. Blaming the so-called losers for not being able to lift themselves out of such a system destroys our trust in our abilities as a species, and discourages us from confidently and courageously exploring our own capacities. We "surrender" our dreams to the need to work for a living, rather than reach for the stars to discover and bring forth the best in ourselves.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Embracing the Flow of Creation
Lately I seem to be stumbling more frequently across a New Age teaching promoting the idea that reality is perfect just as it is, and that for us to criticize reality or try to change it in any way is to create suffering for ourselves and others. This seems to be an offshoot of an interpretation of certain Buddhist teachings, which propose that emptiness is our preferred state of being and that all human action is ultimately meaningless since the material world is impermanent.
In my experience, these sorts of beliefs fly in the face of reality itself. While I can grasp a limited benefit to adopting them, I suspect they're really just conceptual intellectual exercises designed to train people to detach themselves emotionally from both the challenges and the seductions of this world so they don't suffer unduly when the world around them changes or the time comes for them to leave it all behind. The rationale goes something like this: If you don't attach meaning to anything that is temporary, how can you feel emotional pain when it inevitably disappears? Likewise, if you don't ascribe any value to your own actions or discern any purpose behind how you relate to the external (material) impermanent world, what does it matter if your actions are not appreciated by others, or if you fail to create the intended result through your actions? In short: if we don't care about anything we experience or do, nothing that happens (or fails to happen) can bother us.
To try and train one's psyche to detach from reality in that way seems absurd. Perhaps it helps lessen the fear of future suffering based on the fear of future loss, but at the same time - for me, at least - it would also require me to surrender all love, joy, appreciation for beauty and the intimate experience that comes from knowing myself to be embedded in, and participatory in, this ever-changing energy that is life.
Do we need to deaden our souls in order not to feel pain? Is the suffering that comes from losing something inevitable if we connect to this impermanent world in an intimate, loving way? Is suffering even something we want to avoid at all costs, or is it simply the price we're required to pay in exchange for experiencing joy? These are all open questions, and I find myself frequently exploring them as I continue my own exploration of this life.
What I seem to be discovering is this: it's possible to open-heartedly and completely embrace an experience, a task or a relationship without experiencing undue or endless suffering when it changes. It's possible if we ALSO embrace an attitude of gratitude, if we remain fully conscious of whatever is still PRESENT once the event we were experiencing or the person we were loving so completely has gone away. Yes, we may feel deep sadness at the loss of a loved one, a temporary hole where that person used to be, but that hole CAN be filled and joy can return to our lives if we make the effort to refocus our attention on giving that same amount of love to everything else around us that is manifesting.
The challenge then, is to discover within ourselves the capacity to be both fully present to life and remain lovingly engaged with it, while learning not to cling to the temporary form it happens to take or try to recover that which is irretrievably lost. A line from a song from the '60's expresses this idea rather nicely: "If you can't be with the one you love, honey...love the one you're with."
While some may interpret that to be a statement promoting free sex, I perceive it to be promoting a deeper truth. To love whatever you're experiencing in every moment, or at the very least to be able to accept your life situation and interact with reality so as to change it for the better if it's not exactly to your liking in the moment, is what life seems to be all about. After all, we were gifted a brain, a body, arms, legs and opposable thumbs for a reason - we're not ethereal minds floating disconnectedly through some vast expanse of empty space. Let's USE the gift of reason then - not to pretend that reality is an illusion, though it clearly is an illusory (temporary) experience in its present form - but to discern how we can make the BEST of what we have in every moment we have breath remaining in us.
Who cares if no one but me ever knows how much I've loved and appreciated being an integral part of this world, or realizes all the things I've done to add a bit more love to the space around me? That I know it of myself, and that when I die I'll get to appreciate both this amazing world AND the gifts I was able to bring into it is what ultimately matters for me in the end. I suspect I'd rather face death from a place of gratitude for having lived my life as fully and deliciously as possible, than from a place of regret that I failed to attach meaning to any of it and as a result lived a meaningless - ultimately wasted and emotionally unsatisfying - life.
I don't have any idea what comes next, or even if there IS such a thing as "next." The best I can do then, is embrace THIS, enjoy this, love this and appreciate this, and allow whatever wants to happen to be.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference."
In my experience, these sorts of beliefs fly in the face of reality itself. While I can grasp a limited benefit to adopting them, I suspect they're really just conceptual intellectual exercises designed to train people to detach themselves emotionally from both the challenges and the seductions of this world so they don't suffer unduly when the world around them changes or the time comes for them to leave it all behind. The rationale goes something like this: If you don't attach meaning to anything that is temporary, how can you feel emotional pain when it inevitably disappears? Likewise, if you don't ascribe any value to your own actions or discern any purpose behind how you relate to the external (material) impermanent world, what does it matter if your actions are not appreciated by others, or if you fail to create the intended result through your actions? In short: if we don't care about anything we experience or do, nothing that happens (or fails to happen) can bother us.
To try and train one's psyche to detach from reality in that way seems absurd. Perhaps it helps lessen the fear of future suffering based on the fear of future loss, but at the same time - for me, at least - it would also require me to surrender all love, joy, appreciation for beauty and the intimate experience that comes from knowing myself to be embedded in, and participatory in, this ever-changing energy that is life.
Do we need to deaden our souls in order not to feel pain? Is the suffering that comes from losing something inevitable if we connect to this impermanent world in an intimate, loving way? Is suffering even something we want to avoid at all costs, or is it simply the price we're required to pay in exchange for experiencing joy? These are all open questions, and I find myself frequently exploring them as I continue my own exploration of this life.
What I seem to be discovering is this: it's possible to open-heartedly and completely embrace an experience, a task or a relationship without experiencing undue or endless suffering when it changes. It's possible if we ALSO embrace an attitude of gratitude, if we remain fully conscious of whatever is still PRESENT once the event we were experiencing or the person we were loving so completely has gone away. Yes, we may feel deep sadness at the loss of a loved one, a temporary hole where that person used to be, but that hole CAN be filled and joy can return to our lives if we make the effort to refocus our attention on giving that same amount of love to everything else around us that is manifesting.
The challenge then, is to discover within ourselves the capacity to be both fully present to life and remain lovingly engaged with it, while learning not to cling to the temporary form it happens to take or try to recover that which is irretrievably lost. A line from a song from the '60's expresses this idea rather nicely: "If you can't be with the one you love, honey...love the one you're with."
While some may interpret that to be a statement promoting free sex, I perceive it to be promoting a deeper truth. To love whatever you're experiencing in every moment, or at the very least to be able to accept your life situation and interact with reality so as to change it for the better if it's not exactly to your liking in the moment, is what life seems to be all about. After all, we were gifted a brain, a body, arms, legs and opposable thumbs for a reason - we're not ethereal minds floating disconnectedly through some vast expanse of empty space. Let's USE the gift of reason then - not to pretend that reality is an illusion, though it clearly is an illusory (temporary) experience in its present form - but to discern how we can make the BEST of what we have in every moment we have breath remaining in us.
Who cares if no one but me ever knows how much I've loved and appreciated being an integral part of this world, or realizes all the things I've done to add a bit more love to the space around me? That I know it of myself, and that when I die I'll get to appreciate both this amazing world AND the gifts I was able to bring into it is what ultimately matters for me in the end. I suspect I'd rather face death from a place of gratitude for having lived my life as fully and deliciously as possible, than from a place of regret that I failed to attach meaning to any of it and as a result lived a meaningless - ultimately wasted and emotionally unsatisfying - life.
I don't have any idea what comes next, or even if there IS such a thing as "next." The best I can do then, is embrace THIS, enjoy this, love this and appreciate this, and allow whatever wants to happen to be.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference."
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Resolving Human Bipolarity
As a woman who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder for a while now, I've had the opportunity to observe how this so-called "disease" manifests inside me, as well as to notice when and why it manifests. I've also learned what to do to help myself move beyond it, to the point where it no longer feels like a medical disorder but has actually become a helpful tool for navigating reality.
The good news is, bipolar disorder isn't "personal." It's actually happening to a whole lot of people these days, which means it's probably something humanity has to move through as part of a collective evolutionary shift in our consciousness.
The best way to explain what I see as the cause of bipolar disorder is to use a computer metaphor most people can understand. Anyone who's ever owned a computer knows that they rely on a basic operating system to make them work. Programmers write applications specific to the operating system using languages the system understands. Things may run smoothly for a while, but inevitably we learn that the operating system we've been using has some serious limitations, so we upgrade to a new operating system. Unfortunately though, after we upgrade we often discover that our old applications will no longer run on the new operating system. That means we need to buy brand new applications (or application upgrades) to get our new system to work.
The modern human brain - like many computers nowadays - is concurrently running dual operating systems: let's call them Humanity 1.0 and Humanity 2.0. Humanity 1.0 has been mankind's default operating system for many thousands of years now. It's a system that basically tells us we're each separate from everything else and that life is a win/lose game. Humanity 1.0's programs are filled with usses and thems, victims and persecutors, the victors and the vanquished. In Humanity 1.0, mankind is the ruler of all that he sees and the entire natural world is his to exploit for strategic advantage. Virtually all our present social applications - our traditional religions, judicial systems, educational systems, economic infrastructures and political systems - were designed to operate effectively using Humanity 1.0.
Sometime in the recent past a new operating system birthed itself into being, one with fewer limitations and a lot of exciting possibilities for the future. It's a pretty cool system too, in that it removes the fear of loss from the game of life and replaces it with things like trust, love and social harmony. Humanity 2.0 informs us we live in a unified, interconnected and fully alive world in which our differentiation doesn't separate us from everything else so much as makes us more valuable to the whole, which in turn nourishes and supports us as individuals and as a collective. Humanity 2.0 proposes that, because everything in life is inextricably interconnected, the only way any of us can truly win is if we all play a win/win game. In Humanity 2.0, mankind's role is to carefully steward the world's natural resources for the long term benefit of all the life forms with whom we share our space. While Humanity 2.0 is a wonderful operating system, to date mankind hasn't written many applications that run on it. That makes it really hard for our brains to function well in 2.0, because our existing programs only run on 1.0.
What, you're probably asking by now, does any of this have to do with human bipolar disorder? My proposition, based on my own internal experience, is that what we presently call bipolar disorder is actually a clinical observation of what happens to people under one of four problematic operating conditions:
1) Their minds are running on Humanity 1.0 and they perceive themselves as big losers in the game of life (depression.)
2) Their minds are running on Humanity 1.0 and they momentarily perceive themselves as huge winners in the game of life (mania.)
3) Their minds are running on Humanity 2.0, but they keep bucking up against those who are running on 1.0 and don't understand how to play a win/win game (depression.)
4) Their minds are running on Humanity 2.0, but they haven't yet found enough useful applications to help them manage the system's immense capacities and bring some working structure to the game of life (mania).
The trouble is, none of the programs we've written for Humanity 1.0 will run on Humanity 2.0, because win/lose games are fundamentally incompatible with a win/win operating system. If we try running a 1.0 program on the 2.0 system we wind up with a total system crash, which I can tell you REALLY hurts the head! A hard reboot will eventually restart the system, but it isn't a pleasant experience from inside.
For an example of the kind of system incompatibility I'm talking about, let's consider the environmental folks known as "ELF," which stands for "Environmental Liberation Front." As 2.0 operators, they fervently want all of us to do whatever we can to nurture and support the environment that sustains us. So far, so good. The trouble begins though, when they then go out and blow up automobile dealerships that sell gas guzzling trucks and SUV's to make their point. That's clearly a 1.0 solution for a 2.0 operation. It's also bound to get the attention of the 1.0 police, who perceive the new system as some kind of worm, virus or other no-good intruder and try to kill it, or at least box it up for a good long time so it can't create any more conflict with the 1.0 system.
An example of 2.0 software that some people tried - and failed miserably - to run on the 1.0 system would be (don't bite my head off!) communism. As an economic philosophy communism was a win/win application, written to illustrate what our world could look like if everyone supported everyone else in maximizing their talents, passions and skills, then we each gifted of our abilities freely to everyone else. It predicted a world of peaceful abundance, and would have been just fine running on Humanity 2.0. The trouble with applying communism to society at the time it was first implemented was that the 2.0 operating system wasn't up and running in nearly enough human beings, so the proponents of communism tried to jam it onto Humanity 1.0 using the power and fear of fascism to make it work. Win/win games can't succeed at the point of a gun, so the 2.0 program crashed and burned and everyone assumed the program itself was very badly written. Unfortunate, but predictable with the benefit of 2.0 hindsight.
The key to successfully navigating this complex systems/programming mess seems to be twofold. First, we must remember there is always an operator - our own internal sense of awareness - who can choose, at any moment, which operating system he or she wants to run. If we don't choose consciously, our unconscious mind will choose a system for us, which means by default we'll mainly be running the very limited Humanity 1.0, since it's the system most compatible with our existing applications. If we choose instead to consciously run Humanity 2.0, which is kind of like an iPhone on super steroids, we then have to take some responsibility for designing new software for everyone else so they can see what a really cool system we're able to run. The early software we write probably won't shake up the world, but if we can design a couple of really neat applications and begin using them consistently we're going to demonstrate swiftly how much more we can collectively accomplish - and how much faster - using 2.0. One amazing 2.0 application already in operation is the Internet itself, which offers a dizzying array of information and fresh new ideas to anyone with access to a computer...and does so for free, out of the deep desire to give and share of ourselves.
My recommendation is that everyone check out the new Humanity 2.0 operating system for themselves and play around with the possibilities. Let's then put our heads together and see what software we can come up with to make it work for us all. The sooner we do so, the quicker we can retire Humanity 1.0 with honors, and the sooner "bipolar disorder" will become a disease of the past.
The good news is, bipolar disorder isn't "personal." It's actually happening to a whole lot of people these days, which means it's probably something humanity has to move through as part of a collective evolutionary shift in our consciousness.
The best way to explain what I see as the cause of bipolar disorder is to use a computer metaphor most people can understand. Anyone who's ever owned a computer knows that they rely on a basic operating system to make them work. Programmers write applications specific to the operating system using languages the system understands. Things may run smoothly for a while, but inevitably we learn that the operating system we've been using has some serious limitations, so we upgrade to a new operating system. Unfortunately though, after we upgrade we often discover that our old applications will no longer run on the new operating system. That means we need to buy brand new applications (or application upgrades) to get our new system to work.
The modern human brain - like many computers nowadays - is concurrently running dual operating systems: let's call them Humanity 1.0 and Humanity 2.0. Humanity 1.0 has been mankind's default operating system for many thousands of years now. It's a system that basically tells us we're each separate from everything else and that life is a win/lose game. Humanity 1.0's programs are filled with usses and thems, victims and persecutors, the victors and the vanquished. In Humanity 1.0, mankind is the ruler of all that he sees and the entire natural world is his to exploit for strategic advantage. Virtually all our present social applications - our traditional religions, judicial systems, educational systems, economic infrastructures and political systems - were designed to operate effectively using Humanity 1.0.
Sometime in the recent past a new operating system birthed itself into being, one with fewer limitations and a lot of exciting possibilities for the future. It's a pretty cool system too, in that it removes the fear of loss from the game of life and replaces it with things like trust, love and social harmony. Humanity 2.0 informs us we live in a unified, interconnected and fully alive world in which our differentiation doesn't separate us from everything else so much as makes us more valuable to the whole, which in turn nourishes and supports us as individuals and as a collective. Humanity 2.0 proposes that, because everything in life is inextricably interconnected, the only way any of us can truly win is if we all play a win/win game. In Humanity 2.0, mankind's role is to carefully steward the world's natural resources for the long term benefit of all the life forms with whom we share our space. While Humanity 2.0 is a wonderful operating system, to date mankind hasn't written many applications that run on it. That makes it really hard for our brains to function well in 2.0, because our existing programs only run on 1.0.
What, you're probably asking by now, does any of this have to do with human bipolar disorder? My proposition, based on my own internal experience, is that what we presently call bipolar disorder is actually a clinical observation of what happens to people under one of four problematic operating conditions:
1) Their minds are running on Humanity 1.0 and they perceive themselves as big losers in the game of life (depression.)
2) Their minds are running on Humanity 1.0 and they momentarily perceive themselves as huge winners in the game of life (mania.)
3) Their minds are running on Humanity 2.0, but they keep bucking up against those who are running on 1.0 and don't understand how to play a win/win game (depression.)
4) Their minds are running on Humanity 2.0, but they haven't yet found enough useful applications to help them manage the system's immense capacities and bring some working structure to the game of life (mania).
The trouble is, none of the programs we've written for Humanity 1.0 will run on Humanity 2.0, because win/lose games are fundamentally incompatible with a win/win operating system. If we try running a 1.0 program on the 2.0 system we wind up with a total system crash, which I can tell you REALLY hurts the head! A hard reboot will eventually restart the system, but it isn't a pleasant experience from inside.
For an example of the kind of system incompatibility I'm talking about, let's consider the environmental folks known as "ELF," which stands for "Environmental Liberation Front." As 2.0 operators, they fervently want all of us to do whatever we can to nurture and support the environment that sustains us. So far, so good. The trouble begins though, when they then go out and blow up automobile dealerships that sell gas guzzling trucks and SUV's to make their point. That's clearly a 1.0 solution for a 2.0 operation. It's also bound to get the attention of the 1.0 police, who perceive the new system as some kind of worm, virus or other no-good intruder and try to kill it, or at least box it up for a good long time so it can't create any more conflict with the 1.0 system.
An example of 2.0 software that some people tried - and failed miserably - to run on the 1.0 system would be (don't bite my head off!) communism. As an economic philosophy communism was a win/win application, written to illustrate what our world could look like if everyone supported everyone else in maximizing their talents, passions and skills, then we each gifted of our abilities freely to everyone else. It predicted a world of peaceful abundance, and would have been just fine running on Humanity 2.0. The trouble with applying communism to society at the time it was first implemented was that the 2.0 operating system wasn't up and running in nearly enough human beings, so the proponents of communism tried to jam it onto Humanity 1.0 using the power and fear of fascism to make it work. Win/win games can't succeed at the point of a gun, so the 2.0 program crashed and burned and everyone assumed the program itself was very badly written. Unfortunate, but predictable with the benefit of 2.0 hindsight.
The key to successfully navigating this complex systems/programming mess seems to be twofold. First, we must remember there is always an operator - our own internal sense of awareness - who can choose, at any moment, which operating system he or she wants to run. If we don't choose consciously, our unconscious mind will choose a system for us, which means by default we'll mainly be running the very limited Humanity 1.0, since it's the system most compatible with our existing applications. If we choose instead to consciously run Humanity 2.0, which is kind of like an iPhone on super steroids, we then have to take some responsibility for designing new software for everyone else so they can see what a really cool system we're able to run. The early software we write probably won't shake up the world, but if we can design a couple of really neat applications and begin using them consistently we're going to demonstrate swiftly how much more we can collectively accomplish - and how much faster - using 2.0. One amazing 2.0 application already in operation is the Internet itself, which offers a dizzying array of information and fresh new ideas to anyone with access to a computer...and does so for free, out of the deep desire to give and share of ourselves.
My recommendation is that everyone check out the new Humanity 2.0 operating system for themselves and play around with the possibilities. Let's then put our heads together and see what software we can come up with to make it work for us all. The sooner we do so, the quicker we can retire Humanity 1.0 with honors, and the sooner "bipolar disorder" will become a disease of the past.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Your Money or Your Life
If you ever played the game of Cops and Robbers as a child, you know that one of the most common questions posed by the person who played the robber was, "your money or your life!" It seems on the surface like a very simple question, and as children most of us didn't hesitate to turn over our fake wallets and imaginary wristwatches to the kid who was holding the plastic gun to our head. In real life though, that question seems to have become more difficult for humanity to answer. What I'm wondering then is why, and how, we've reached a point where our collective obsession with money - with conducting business as usual even in the most unusual or dire of circumstances - has caused us to cling to our money instead of our lives.
I pose this question because I listened to President Bush in 2001 exhort Americans to do the patriotic thing and go shopping after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. I pose it because I witnessed the near-collapse of the entire U.S. banking system in 2008, which triggered a panicked government (spelled taxpayer) infusion of cash to encourage the banks got back to business as usual, even before we understood what caused the problem. I pose it as nation after nation and state after state are cutting essential human services out of concern for their "budget deficits." I pose it as I hear the citizens of the Gulf of Mexico demand in one breath that BP and the U.S. government immediately stop the oil spill that is gushing into the ocean, and in the next breath demand the president lift his temporary moratorium on deep water drilling so they can go back to business as usual.
Perhaps, if there's a lesson in all this, it's that there is no such thing as "business as usual." There is only the business of business, which focuses on earning a monetary profit; and there is the business of life itself, which focuses on conducting ourselves in a way that honors ALL life forms and the amazing ecosystems that nourish and sustain them...as well as us.
This planet is literally holding a loaded gun to humanity's head right now. The question she is asking us as she insistently reveals to us her eroding soils, her polluted rivers, her massive species extinctions, her corrupted and depleted oceans, her raped and pillaged resource reservoirs, is this: "Your money or your life?"
We can continue to stubbornly look away from nature's loaded gun and pretend to continue to go about business as usual. We can ignore the increasing desertification of the land, the destruction of crucial rainforests, the strip mining, the decline of organic food supplies, the disruption of crucial migration patterns, the frightening changes in weather patterns, the melting glaciers, the toxins polluting our water and our foods. Even so, the weapon remains cocked and loaded, and Mother Nature's finger is slowly easing off the trigger. How many of us, I wonder, will act surprised and appalled when the bullet at last hits our brain, claiming we never saw the gun or heard the question?
This is NOT a diatribe against business, or patriotism, or the right to earn a living. This is a diatribe FOR the essential nature of life, without which none of those other ideas are possible. This is a call, to all who read these words and grasp the truth of them in their hearts - to WAKE UP and be counted as one who speaks for life in all its beauty, magnificence and glory. This is a spiritual cry from the heart of one who loves this life and holds to the hope of us learning to thrive as an organism rather than a virus upon this planet, NOT to murder our mother, but to love and honor her as the beautiful being that birthed us and gives us life.
I pose this question because I listened to President Bush in 2001 exhort Americans to do the patriotic thing and go shopping after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. I pose it because I witnessed the near-collapse of the entire U.S. banking system in 2008, which triggered a panicked government (spelled taxpayer) infusion of cash to encourage the banks got back to business as usual, even before we understood what caused the problem. I pose it as nation after nation and state after state are cutting essential human services out of concern for their "budget deficits." I pose it as I hear the citizens of the Gulf of Mexico demand in one breath that BP and the U.S. government immediately stop the oil spill that is gushing into the ocean, and in the next breath demand the president lift his temporary moratorium on deep water drilling so they can go back to business as usual.
Perhaps, if there's a lesson in all this, it's that there is no such thing as "business as usual." There is only the business of business, which focuses on earning a monetary profit; and there is the business of life itself, which focuses on conducting ourselves in a way that honors ALL life forms and the amazing ecosystems that nourish and sustain them...as well as us.
This planet is literally holding a loaded gun to humanity's head right now. The question she is asking us as she insistently reveals to us her eroding soils, her polluted rivers, her massive species extinctions, her corrupted and depleted oceans, her raped and pillaged resource reservoirs, is this: "Your money or your life?"
We can continue to stubbornly look away from nature's loaded gun and pretend to continue to go about business as usual. We can ignore the increasing desertification of the land, the destruction of crucial rainforests, the strip mining, the decline of organic food supplies, the disruption of crucial migration patterns, the frightening changes in weather patterns, the melting glaciers, the toxins polluting our water and our foods. Even so, the weapon remains cocked and loaded, and Mother Nature's finger is slowly easing off the trigger. How many of us, I wonder, will act surprised and appalled when the bullet at last hits our brain, claiming we never saw the gun or heard the question?
This is NOT a diatribe against business, or patriotism, or the right to earn a living. This is a diatribe FOR the essential nature of life, without which none of those other ideas are possible. This is a call, to all who read these words and grasp the truth of them in their hearts - to WAKE UP and be counted as one who speaks for life in all its beauty, magnificence and glory. This is a spiritual cry from the heart of one who loves this life and holds to the hope of us learning to thrive as an organism rather than a virus upon this planet, NOT to murder our mother, but to love and honor her as the beautiful being that birthed us and gives us life.
Friday, June 4, 2010
From Short Term suvivial to Long Term Thrival
One of the greatest flaws of capitalism is the way it rewards short-term focus over long-term reasoning and planning. While short-term decision-making may briefly benefit an individual (or an individual corporation) because a single life span is typically shorter than the lifespan of the system that contains it, a consistent lack of attention to the long-term needs of the whole means the overarching system may well collapse within the lifespan of the individuals it holds. In other words, when individuals ignore or do damage to the whole for short-term personal gain, their choices eventually threaten the viability of the whole. Since the survival of any individual depends upon the survival of the whole, behaviors that place individual needs above the needs of the whole don’t serve the individual very long.
Imagine what would happen if all human beings cared more about their personal survival than they cared about the survival of the species. No woman would ever give birth because it wouldn't be worth the risk of her dying to bring children into the world. No man would ever venture outside his known environment, because the excitement and challenge of exploration and discovery would be less meaningful to him than his continued self-preservation. The fact is, if all of us cared more about ourselves than we care about each other, humanity would vanish within a single generation. Ironic as it seems, we’d become victims of our own fear of death and our longing to survive at any cost!
Likewise, no system can survive for long unless the individuals that comprise it feel happy and are thriving within the system. The only way a system can ensure that the individuals within it will thrive and be happy is for the system to honor and support the needs of its many members. To do so, the system must invest the full capacity of its surplus resources into supporting the growth and development of every young individual until each individual reaches maturity and self-actualizes to its highest creative capacity. That requires the system to demonstrate tremendous patience while it waits for each individual to reach adulthood. The system can’t demand that its youth make heavy sacrifices during their growth phase, nor can it make it harder on them to grow or cause it to take longer for them than necessary to reach their highest capacity – at least not without threatening its own continued existence.
What appears to have happened to humanity some 40,000 or so years ago is that human consciousness shifted beyond the collective unconscious embeddedness in the larger ecosystem, to one where we suddenly became more aware of ourselves as individuals. Self-awareness changed everything, in that it caused us to notice ourselves as unique players in the larger game of life. What we've been doing ever since has been learning to stand upright in that truth and balance ourselves accordingly, without falling.
Our first impulse was to focus on developing ourselves as individuals, and rightfully so. Babies aren’t expected to care for their parents, but to place their full attention on self-development. As an infant species we humans needed to discover what we, as individuals, were capable of doing and creating. We needed to push ourselves, to grow and learn and experience the ups and downs of life to the fullest extent. Like children, we needed to skin our knees and bruise our shins and occasionally break a bone or two, so we could understand ourselves better and become more competent as we grew. The natural byproduct of that childish exploration was a lack of awareness of our dependence on the planet that supported us while we learned. Our benign neglect of our planet has recently ceased to be benign as our individual skills and abilities have expanded and consumed ever more natural resources. The evidence of our continued impoverishing of our mother planet is only now becoming visible to us. We’re awakening to the ongoing distress of our patient and loving mother, who needs us to wean ourselves off our dependency on her so she can recover her strength and vitality.
Not long ago the rashness and exuberance of human adolescence culminated in a few individuals putting their minds together and inventing nuclear weapons, at which point the rest of us suddenly realized that unfettered individual achievement had brought forth the power of species extermination. I suspect that realization marked the turning point in human development. It was the moment when our single-minded focus on individual development shifted, and we began to turn our attention to the health and well-being of the whole. The sixties reflected the birth of that shift with our thrust into outer space so we could look back upon ourselves, the environmental movement, more expressive human sexuality, popular resistance to the Vietnam War, early experimentation with communal living and the way Western thought (individualistic and selfish) began to embrace Eastern thought (collective and selfless) and meld the two into a spiritual perspective that has come to be known as "new age."
Meanwhile, the economic system that is capitalism, which originated from Western thinking and has since spread throughout the world, focused almost exclusively on the short-term needs, rights and capacities of the individual. It demanded that every individual care for himself first, his family and community second, the larger collective third and the greater world that contains him dead last. The underlying presumption of capitalism has been that what's good for the individual is necessarily good for the collective, so to give the individual free rein to be selfish and self-serving is to support the evolution of the whole. Were that true, we’d have no need for a legal system to harness the worst excesses of “human nature.” That we do have a legal system, and that its need to make new laws can’t keep pace with the continual expansion of human excess speaks less to “human nature” than it does to the inherent flaws in the capitalistic system that entrains and socializes human behavior.
We’re seeing the results of our overly capitalistic focus (the prioritizing of individual short-term needs over systemic long-term needs) playing itself out in the larger world today. Our corporations have long been rewarded for focusing on short-term profits over concepts like workplace safety or environmental concerns, and have been penalized for making investments in the future that may not pay off for many, many years - if they pay off at all. We’re witnessing the tragedy born of such short-term thinking as we watch oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico, where - despite the dramatic destruction of fragile habitat and the still-unchecked disaster - local politicians are already calling on the president to lift the moratorium on drilling so that individual livelihoods can resume. When making an individual living takes precedence over the essential preservation of life itself, something is gravely out of balance in our approach.
For years too, corporations have benefited by eliminating jobs, reducing wages and increasing their profitability in the short-term. Their methods of choice have been increased mechanization, the installation of technologies to increase productivity, and – where human labor is still necessary – the shifting of jobs to third world nations where people will work for lower wages and fewer benefits. The negative long-term systemic consequences of those choices are just now becoming apparent. As wages evaporate consumers disappear along with them, and corporate profits trend into decline. Without wages to generate taxes, government revenues also collapse and basic social services must be cut. Programs necessary to ensure the self-actualization of a new generation of healthy system participants – schools, hospitals, parks, nutritional programs, etc. – vanish. Programs to care for the elderly and infirm disappear as well, leaving those who’ve already given their life’s blood to a system that promised to support them feeling helpless and afraid, as well as angry and abandoned in their time of need.
Any system that for too long encourages its adult individuals to be selfish and shortsighted must collapse, because no one is paying attention to the young or the old. If the youth can’t depend on the adults in the system to nurture them into full maturity, we wind up with a stunted generation that’s forced to raise itself, one without the proper tools or supportive guidance to give it loving and appropriate direction. By the time those children reach adulthood, their resentments against the system that neglected them are well (and deservedly) entrenched. Why would they feel obligated to contribute anything of value to a system that abandoned them in their time of greatest hope? Likewise, if the elderly can’t trust the adults in the system to support then once they can no longer care for themselves, why would they feel obligated to contribute anything to the system while they’re still hearty enough to do so? Their fears (deservedly) are for their own survival, so they hoard their abundance to protect against being abandoned in their time of greatest need.
What’s the solution to the seemingly intractable mess we’ve gotten into? The first step is to acknowledge the existence of the mess, and – rather than try and impose blame, shame or guilt on each other for our present state of our affairs – accept that the development of a shortsighted system was likely a natural part of our evolution. Many good things have emerged from our extended adolescence, and there’s no need for us to reject or abandon the wisdom we’ve already gained as we move forward. The second step is to take personal responsibility for where we are right now, which means we must individually agree to take the actions necessary to shift the system into greater balance between the needs of individuals and the sustainability of the larger whole.
Making that decision requires us to “give up” a little something of our individuality. What we’re being asked to surrender, though, is our lack of awareness of our connectedness to the whole, our selfishness, our fears and our greed, all of which in the long run benefit us personally to eliminate! It's like asking a deciduous tree to surrender its dead leaves so the soil that nourishes it can revive itself in the spring. Additionally, if each of us give back even a little bit of the resources we’ve been hoarding to provide for ourselves in old age, we'll collectively restock the larder of the system and enable it nurture our young and provide more richly for the elderly – which we ourselves have been (and birthed) and will someday become.
For any system to thrive and remain sustainable, we know the whole must always be greater than the sum of its many parts. What makes a system sustainably great is threefold:
1. Its ability to love and communally support its young and nourish their hopes and dreams until they mature.
2. Its openness to gratefully accepting the unique creative bounty of all its adults and its willingness to continue to support them all in their diverse achievements as they flourish and gift richly of themselves to create more abundance for all.
3. Its respect and compassion for the elderly and infirm, and its ability to maintain their trust as it lovingly cares for them in appreciation for everything they’ve been, done and are until they die.
As capitalism continues to falter we must devise such a system for humanity going forward. In doing so we must also take into consideration the fact that life in the cosmos is a fractal experience; a series of individuals nested inside ever-larger wholes, eternal and infinite in breadth and scope. An individual person can be viewed as a cell in the body of humanity, but humanity in turn must be seen as an organ in the larger planetary body. We can’t do what’s best for humanity in the short-term without balancing our needs against the long-term needs of Earth and its ecosystems. In the same fashion, we can’t pollute our own cells with toxins and junk food and expect our cells to happily service our needs for many years. Giving joyfully and responsibly to that which is larger than ourselves - as well as taking loving responsibility for that which is smaller than us - anchors us firmly in the center of our own reality and provides us with balance as we step into our full maturity as a human species.
Surely we’ll make some mistakes as we tentatively take our first steps into species adulthood. Competence doesn’t come easy; it’s a slow, sometimes painful progression of trial and error, practice and learning, experimenting and discarding. What works against us may be our stubbornness, our impatience, our aggression and our out-of-proportion fears, which are hallmarks of adolescent thinking that we’ll hopefully outgrow before too long. What works in our favor is our capacity to persevere in the face of great adversity, our prodigious ability to learn from our mistakes, our virtually unlimited creative imaginations and an amazing wellspring of love from within us that guides us toward what is beautiful and true.
I wish us well as our human journey continues.
Imagine what would happen if all human beings cared more about their personal survival than they cared about the survival of the species. No woman would ever give birth because it wouldn't be worth the risk of her dying to bring children into the world. No man would ever venture outside his known environment, because the excitement and challenge of exploration and discovery would be less meaningful to him than his continued self-preservation. The fact is, if all of us cared more about ourselves than we care about each other, humanity would vanish within a single generation. Ironic as it seems, we’d become victims of our own fear of death and our longing to survive at any cost!
Likewise, no system can survive for long unless the individuals that comprise it feel happy and are thriving within the system. The only way a system can ensure that the individuals within it will thrive and be happy is for the system to honor and support the needs of its many members. To do so, the system must invest the full capacity of its surplus resources into supporting the growth and development of every young individual until each individual reaches maturity and self-actualizes to its highest creative capacity. That requires the system to demonstrate tremendous patience while it waits for each individual to reach adulthood. The system can’t demand that its youth make heavy sacrifices during their growth phase, nor can it make it harder on them to grow or cause it to take longer for them than necessary to reach their highest capacity – at least not without threatening its own continued existence.
What appears to have happened to humanity some 40,000 or so years ago is that human consciousness shifted beyond the collective unconscious embeddedness in the larger ecosystem, to one where we suddenly became more aware of ourselves as individuals. Self-awareness changed everything, in that it caused us to notice ourselves as unique players in the larger game of life. What we've been doing ever since has been learning to stand upright in that truth and balance ourselves accordingly, without falling.
Our first impulse was to focus on developing ourselves as individuals, and rightfully so. Babies aren’t expected to care for their parents, but to place their full attention on self-development. As an infant species we humans needed to discover what we, as individuals, were capable of doing and creating. We needed to push ourselves, to grow and learn and experience the ups and downs of life to the fullest extent. Like children, we needed to skin our knees and bruise our shins and occasionally break a bone or two, so we could understand ourselves better and become more competent as we grew. The natural byproduct of that childish exploration was a lack of awareness of our dependence on the planet that supported us while we learned. Our benign neglect of our planet has recently ceased to be benign as our individual skills and abilities have expanded and consumed ever more natural resources. The evidence of our continued impoverishing of our mother planet is only now becoming visible to us. We’re awakening to the ongoing distress of our patient and loving mother, who needs us to wean ourselves off our dependency on her so she can recover her strength and vitality.
Not long ago the rashness and exuberance of human adolescence culminated in a few individuals putting their minds together and inventing nuclear weapons, at which point the rest of us suddenly realized that unfettered individual achievement had brought forth the power of species extermination. I suspect that realization marked the turning point in human development. It was the moment when our single-minded focus on individual development shifted, and we began to turn our attention to the health and well-being of the whole. The sixties reflected the birth of that shift with our thrust into outer space so we could look back upon ourselves, the environmental movement, more expressive human sexuality, popular resistance to the Vietnam War, early experimentation with communal living and the way Western thought (individualistic and selfish) began to embrace Eastern thought (collective and selfless) and meld the two into a spiritual perspective that has come to be known as "new age."
Meanwhile, the economic system that is capitalism, which originated from Western thinking and has since spread throughout the world, focused almost exclusively on the short-term needs, rights and capacities of the individual. It demanded that every individual care for himself first, his family and community second, the larger collective third and the greater world that contains him dead last. The underlying presumption of capitalism has been that what's good for the individual is necessarily good for the collective, so to give the individual free rein to be selfish and self-serving is to support the evolution of the whole. Were that true, we’d have no need for a legal system to harness the worst excesses of “human nature.” That we do have a legal system, and that its need to make new laws can’t keep pace with the continual expansion of human excess speaks less to “human nature” than it does to the inherent flaws in the capitalistic system that entrains and socializes human behavior.
We’re seeing the results of our overly capitalistic focus (the prioritizing of individual short-term needs over systemic long-term needs) playing itself out in the larger world today. Our corporations have long been rewarded for focusing on short-term profits over concepts like workplace safety or environmental concerns, and have been penalized for making investments in the future that may not pay off for many, many years - if they pay off at all. We’re witnessing the tragedy born of such short-term thinking as we watch oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico, where - despite the dramatic destruction of fragile habitat and the still-unchecked disaster - local politicians are already calling on the president to lift the moratorium on drilling so that individual livelihoods can resume. When making an individual living takes precedence over the essential preservation of life itself, something is gravely out of balance in our approach.
For years too, corporations have benefited by eliminating jobs, reducing wages and increasing their profitability in the short-term. Their methods of choice have been increased mechanization, the installation of technologies to increase productivity, and – where human labor is still necessary – the shifting of jobs to third world nations where people will work for lower wages and fewer benefits. The negative long-term systemic consequences of those choices are just now becoming apparent. As wages evaporate consumers disappear along with them, and corporate profits trend into decline. Without wages to generate taxes, government revenues also collapse and basic social services must be cut. Programs necessary to ensure the self-actualization of a new generation of healthy system participants – schools, hospitals, parks, nutritional programs, etc. – vanish. Programs to care for the elderly and infirm disappear as well, leaving those who’ve already given their life’s blood to a system that promised to support them feeling helpless and afraid, as well as angry and abandoned in their time of need.
Any system that for too long encourages its adult individuals to be selfish and shortsighted must collapse, because no one is paying attention to the young or the old. If the youth can’t depend on the adults in the system to nurture them into full maturity, we wind up with a stunted generation that’s forced to raise itself, one without the proper tools or supportive guidance to give it loving and appropriate direction. By the time those children reach adulthood, their resentments against the system that neglected them are well (and deservedly) entrenched. Why would they feel obligated to contribute anything of value to a system that abandoned them in their time of greatest hope? Likewise, if the elderly can’t trust the adults in the system to support then once they can no longer care for themselves, why would they feel obligated to contribute anything to the system while they’re still hearty enough to do so? Their fears (deservedly) are for their own survival, so they hoard their abundance to protect against being abandoned in their time of greatest need.
What’s the solution to the seemingly intractable mess we’ve gotten into? The first step is to acknowledge the existence of the mess, and – rather than try and impose blame, shame or guilt on each other for our present state of our affairs – accept that the development of a shortsighted system was likely a natural part of our evolution. Many good things have emerged from our extended adolescence, and there’s no need for us to reject or abandon the wisdom we’ve already gained as we move forward. The second step is to take personal responsibility for where we are right now, which means we must individually agree to take the actions necessary to shift the system into greater balance between the needs of individuals and the sustainability of the larger whole.
Making that decision requires us to “give up” a little something of our individuality. What we’re being asked to surrender, though, is our lack of awareness of our connectedness to the whole, our selfishness, our fears and our greed, all of which in the long run benefit us personally to eliminate! It's like asking a deciduous tree to surrender its dead leaves so the soil that nourishes it can revive itself in the spring. Additionally, if each of us give back even a little bit of the resources we’ve been hoarding to provide for ourselves in old age, we'll collectively restock the larder of the system and enable it nurture our young and provide more richly for the elderly – which we ourselves have been (and birthed) and will someday become.
For any system to thrive and remain sustainable, we know the whole must always be greater than the sum of its many parts. What makes a system sustainably great is threefold:
1. Its ability to love and communally support its young and nourish their hopes and dreams until they mature.
2. Its openness to gratefully accepting the unique creative bounty of all its adults and its willingness to continue to support them all in their diverse achievements as they flourish and gift richly of themselves to create more abundance for all.
3. Its respect and compassion for the elderly and infirm, and its ability to maintain their trust as it lovingly cares for them in appreciation for everything they’ve been, done and are until they die.
As capitalism continues to falter we must devise such a system for humanity going forward. In doing so we must also take into consideration the fact that life in the cosmos is a fractal experience; a series of individuals nested inside ever-larger wholes, eternal and infinite in breadth and scope. An individual person can be viewed as a cell in the body of humanity, but humanity in turn must be seen as an organ in the larger planetary body. We can’t do what’s best for humanity in the short-term without balancing our needs against the long-term needs of Earth and its ecosystems. In the same fashion, we can’t pollute our own cells with toxins and junk food and expect our cells to happily service our needs for many years. Giving joyfully and responsibly to that which is larger than ourselves - as well as taking loving responsibility for that which is smaller than us - anchors us firmly in the center of our own reality and provides us with balance as we step into our full maturity as a human species.
Surely we’ll make some mistakes as we tentatively take our first steps into species adulthood. Competence doesn’t come easy; it’s a slow, sometimes painful progression of trial and error, practice and learning, experimenting and discarding. What works against us may be our stubbornness, our impatience, our aggression and our out-of-proportion fears, which are hallmarks of adolescent thinking that we’ll hopefully outgrow before too long. What works in our favor is our capacity to persevere in the face of great adversity, our prodigious ability to learn from our mistakes, our virtually unlimited creative imaginations and an amazing wellspring of love from within us that guides us toward what is beautiful and true.
I wish us well as our human journey continues.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Humanity and the Money Game
The need for money is psychological barrier humanity has constructed to artificially separate itself from the earthly abundance that already exists. Everything we need to thrive – food, land, shelter, water, education, energy, clothing, home furnishings, travel, health care – exist in quantity on the other side of the money barrier. All we need do to access those items is to work continually for money, which we then give away in exchange for the things we need to survive.
The money game was already in full swing when all of us were born. We didn’t invent it, and we’ve not stopped playing it long enough to really study its flaws and limitations. We’re so focused on personally surviving in the game that we haven’t had time to consider the value of deconstructing this barrier to our collective abundance. We’ve instead turned our attention to finding new and clever ways to siphon more and more money away from each other, in the hope that we can individually accumulate enough cash to at last punch through the barrier and gain permanent access to the wild abundance that exists on the other side.
Every so often, a few people manage to accumulate so much money that other people’s profit-making schemes are no longer capable of siphoning away very much of their cash, and for those people the barrier falls for good. They find themselves in material heaven, with access to endless delights measured by all the best goods and services the money game has to offer. The Bill Gateses, the Sergei Brins and everyone who has ever won first prize in a lottery have all experienced the falling away of this psychological barrier to abundance, the same way the people of East Germany experienced the collapse of the Berlin Wall and at last felt physical freedom.
The rich, in turn, may retain enough compassion for their friends and neighbors still trapped behind the barrier to try and help them punch through it as well, but no wealthy person can give away enough money to make a significant difference in the quality of life for most of the rest of us.
If all the wealthy gave away most of their savings to large numbers of people who were still stuck behind the barrier, all they’d manage to do is to assist those people in permeating the barrier for a moment or two, before the barrier moved away from the crowd again. For example, if Bill Gates gave away forty billion dollars and created four thousand new millionaires, those millionaires would soon be competing with each other to purchase new houses, fancy cars and expensive services. Once the people who create those products and services noticed the increased competition, they’d raise prices to draw more cash away from those newly created millionaires and enhance their own efforts to punch through the money barrier and gain access to all the things the millionaires have.
It seems then, that the more money we invent, lend, grow and trade among ourselves behind the barrier, the more each of us will personally need to accumulate if we hope to punch through the barrier. That’s because the value of money is relative, not fixed. Whether or not we punch through to abundance then, isn’t a function of whether we’ve been able to accumulate a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand or a million dollars for ourselves. It’s dependent upon each one of us accumulating vastly more than most everyone else accumulates – no matter what that number of future dollars might turn out be. Yesterday’s millionaires don’t have nearly the clout they once did, since prices continue to rise and siphon off more and more of our cash as we play the game. Additionally, more people are entering the game every day through population gains and the ongoing exportation of capitalism, so more and more money needs to flow to entice those newcomers firmly into the game.
Since it’s impossible for every one of us to accumulate relatively more money than everybody else, the money game sets up a reality where – in order for there to be any winners – there must always be a far greater number of losers who remain stuck behind the barrier and continue to work very hard to play the game. They may be willing or unwilling participants, but they must not be allowed to quit the game or the winning players will have no one with whom to continue to play.
Modern creations like interest, mortgages, insurance policies, taxes, utility fees, etc. ensure that money will continue to be siphoned away from most of the players before they manage to accumulate too much. These “fee traps” help ensure that the majority can’t quit playing the game without surrendering the necessities of life. People who try to go around the barrier by taking what they need or by refusing to pay trap fees are labeled “criminals” and are punished for their refusal to play the game.
The wealthy can afford to invest some of their money into finding creative new ways to avoid having their hoards of cash siphoned off by the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier. They invent tax shelters, move their production facilities to countries where labor costs are cheaper, install automated assembly lines that eliminate human jobs, and make workers compete with each other for increasingly scarce positions, which gives them the power to pay out lower wages. They also reduce paid benefits, eliminate retirement plans and force workers to cover more and more of their daily costs of living. Through taxation, governments try to provide a safety net for those who can’t manage to meet their daily needs, but because government is controlled by the wealthy it creates that safety net by taxing worker wages instead of hoarded wealth, which siphons even more money away from the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier.
The danger for us in continuing to endlessly play this game can be seen by noticing what is at stake – for us as individuals, and for life itself. Unlike a board game, this game allows people to die if they can’t pay for what they need to survive. People therefore become enslaved to the game through the ongoing (and very real) fear of death. Meanwhile, those who appear to be winning must continually hoard more money to retain their access to abundance and privilege. They wantonly use up scarce resources and damage the entire planetary ecosystem in a relentless quest to manufacture more and more “necessary” goods and services they can then impose on the workers who live behind the barrier. Clever advertising seduces workers into believing they need more things, and social laws (auto registration, property taxes, water bills, etc.) force them into spending their hard-earned money on life's necessities. Long term, this game cannot continue without destroying the entire field of abundance that sustains us. There can BE no absolute winners in the money game; only a few who may beat the system in the short run but who help bring down our entire civilization in the end.
The point of the money game – which places huge emphasis on material consumption and the ‘need’ for us to work to pay for life’s necessities – is to continue to siphon money away from the masses of working people so they can’t ever punch through the barrier themselves. That means they must remain slaves to the game for their entire productive lifetimes, after which they become society’s discards and are considered financial “drains” on public assets.
Children too, are not revered as gifts for whose nurturing and care our society is responsible in this game. They're treated as future business commodities – potential workers who will step into the money game at maturity and support its continuation. We educate them only so far as their knowledge can be “standardized” in a way that will enable them to plug seamlessly into the system when they reach working age.
The money game offers no vision for the future. It holds no promise for humanity as a species, for our planet as a sustainable and abundant source of life, or for the higher evolution of human consciousness. All it promises to do is to bleed the life energy out of most of us in exchange for our short-term survival. The questions we must ask ourselves then, are these: Do we want to continue to play this game? If not, how do we stop? How can we tear down the psychological barrier to our own success that we’ve erected inside our own minds?
I suspect the answer is for enough of us to love life - in all its many forms - fiercely enough to come together and "just say no" to the game.
The money game was already in full swing when all of us were born. We didn’t invent it, and we’ve not stopped playing it long enough to really study its flaws and limitations. We’re so focused on personally surviving in the game that we haven’t had time to consider the value of deconstructing this barrier to our collective abundance. We’ve instead turned our attention to finding new and clever ways to siphon more and more money away from each other, in the hope that we can individually accumulate enough cash to at last punch through the barrier and gain permanent access to the wild abundance that exists on the other side.
Every so often, a few people manage to accumulate so much money that other people’s profit-making schemes are no longer capable of siphoning away very much of their cash, and for those people the barrier falls for good. They find themselves in material heaven, with access to endless delights measured by all the best goods and services the money game has to offer. The Bill Gateses, the Sergei Brins and everyone who has ever won first prize in a lottery have all experienced the falling away of this psychological barrier to abundance, the same way the people of East Germany experienced the collapse of the Berlin Wall and at last felt physical freedom.
The rich, in turn, may retain enough compassion for their friends and neighbors still trapped behind the barrier to try and help them punch through it as well, but no wealthy person can give away enough money to make a significant difference in the quality of life for most of the rest of us.
If all the wealthy gave away most of their savings to large numbers of people who were still stuck behind the barrier, all they’d manage to do is to assist those people in permeating the barrier for a moment or two, before the barrier moved away from the crowd again. For example, if Bill Gates gave away forty billion dollars and created four thousand new millionaires, those millionaires would soon be competing with each other to purchase new houses, fancy cars and expensive services. Once the people who create those products and services noticed the increased competition, they’d raise prices to draw more cash away from those newly created millionaires and enhance their own efforts to punch through the money barrier and gain access to all the things the millionaires have.
It seems then, that the more money we invent, lend, grow and trade among ourselves behind the barrier, the more each of us will personally need to accumulate if we hope to punch through the barrier. That’s because the value of money is relative, not fixed. Whether or not we punch through to abundance then, isn’t a function of whether we’ve been able to accumulate a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand or a million dollars for ourselves. It’s dependent upon each one of us accumulating vastly more than most everyone else accumulates – no matter what that number of future dollars might turn out be. Yesterday’s millionaires don’t have nearly the clout they once did, since prices continue to rise and siphon off more and more of our cash as we play the game. Additionally, more people are entering the game every day through population gains and the ongoing exportation of capitalism, so more and more money needs to flow to entice those newcomers firmly into the game.
Since it’s impossible for every one of us to accumulate relatively more money than everybody else, the money game sets up a reality where – in order for there to be any winners – there must always be a far greater number of losers who remain stuck behind the barrier and continue to work very hard to play the game. They may be willing or unwilling participants, but they must not be allowed to quit the game or the winning players will have no one with whom to continue to play.
Modern creations like interest, mortgages, insurance policies, taxes, utility fees, etc. ensure that money will continue to be siphoned away from most of the players before they manage to accumulate too much. These “fee traps” help ensure that the majority can’t quit playing the game without surrendering the necessities of life. People who try to go around the barrier by taking what they need or by refusing to pay trap fees are labeled “criminals” and are punished for their refusal to play the game.
The wealthy can afford to invest some of their money into finding creative new ways to avoid having their hoards of cash siphoned off by the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier. They invent tax shelters, move their production facilities to countries where labor costs are cheaper, install automated assembly lines that eliminate human jobs, and make workers compete with each other for increasingly scarce positions, which gives them the power to pay out lower wages. They also reduce paid benefits, eliminate retirement plans and force workers to cover more and more of their daily costs of living. Through taxation, governments try to provide a safety net for those who can’t manage to meet their daily needs, but because government is controlled by the wealthy it creates that safety net by taxing worker wages instead of hoarded wealth, which siphons even more money away from the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier.
The danger for us in continuing to endlessly play this game can be seen by noticing what is at stake – for us as individuals, and for life itself. Unlike a board game, this game allows people to die if they can’t pay for what they need to survive. People therefore become enslaved to the game through the ongoing (and very real) fear of death. Meanwhile, those who appear to be winning must continually hoard more money to retain their access to abundance and privilege. They wantonly use up scarce resources and damage the entire planetary ecosystem in a relentless quest to manufacture more and more “necessary” goods and services they can then impose on the workers who live behind the barrier. Clever advertising seduces workers into believing they need more things, and social laws (auto registration, property taxes, water bills, etc.) force them into spending their hard-earned money on life's necessities. Long term, this game cannot continue without destroying the entire field of abundance that sustains us. There can BE no absolute winners in the money game; only a few who may beat the system in the short run but who help bring down our entire civilization in the end.
The point of the money game – which places huge emphasis on material consumption and the ‘need’ for us to work to pay for life’s necessities – is to continue to siphon money away from the masses of working people so they can’t ever punch through the barrier themselves. That means they must remain slaves to the game for their entire productive lifetimes, after which they become society’s discards and are considered financial “drains” on public assets.
Children too, are not revered as gifts for whose nurturing and care our society is responsible in this game. They're treated as future business commodities – potential workers who will step into the money game at maturity and support its continuation. We educate them only so far as their knowledge can be “standardized” in a way that will enable them to plug seamlessly into the system when they reach working age.
The money game offers no vision for the future. It holds no promise for humanity as a species, for our planet as a sustainable and abundant source of life, or for the higher evolution of human consciousness. All it promises to do is to bleed the life energy out of most of us in exchange for our short-term survival. The questions we must ask ourselves then, are these: Do we want to continue to play this game? If not, how do we stop? How can we tear down the psychological barrier to our own success that we’ve erected inside our own minds?
I suspect the answer is for enough of us to love life - in all its many forms - fiercely enough to come together and "just say no" to the game.
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