We’re Asking the Wrong Questions

            If we compare conservative and progressive beliefs about our economic problems, we find both sides seem to agree on two points:

·      They agree it’s good for most people to be dependent upon the offerings of private enterprise to meet their daily needs, in ways that generate continuous profits for the owners of private enterprise. 

·      They agree that lately, too many citizens are no longer dependent in profitable ways on private enterprise because they’ve fallen into an unprofitable state of helplessness. They further agree that, for our economy to thrive, we must encourage the helpless back into profitable dependency, which means most robust adults must have jobs.

What both sides seem not to agree upon are the answers to these questions:

·      Why have so many become helpless, even though they still need to buy things from private enterprise to survive?

·      What’s the best way to move the helpless back into the workforce, so they can earn enough to buy what they need without government support?

Note that the way you answer the first question will determine the approach you support for resolving the second question.

            Conservatives propose that too many are choosing to behave in unprofitably helpless ways because the government has pampered them, encouraging them to rely on handouts instead of working. They believe eliminating government support for these lazy, irresponsible folks will force people to take responsibility for meeting their own needs.  Grover Norquist said, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” That desire reflects an urge to starve the beast they believe enables slothfulness.

            While it seems harsh, conservatives justify their strategy by claiming that raising taxes discourages hard work. They fear that taxing workers too heavily in order to enable the helpless remain helpless only drives more people to quit work and go on the government dole. They fear too much of that would collapse our entire economy.

            Alternatively, progressives blame businesses and the aggressive strategies they’ve employed to increase their profits at the expense of the working poor. Offshoring, wage and benefit cuts, and replacing workers with machines and computers have negatively impacted jobs. Progressives believe that’s driving the rise in poverty, which in turn undermines social services. They believe the poor have almost no chance to lift themselves out of helplessness and meet their needs without government support. As Bill Clinton once said, “America just works better when more people have a chance to live their dreams.”

            Progressives believe the answer is to tax profitable businesses at higher rates, eliminate subsidies and raise taxes on the wealthy. They want to redistribute that money to provide jobs and services to assist the helpless in becoming more self-reliant. While progressives are often accused of having “bleeding hearts” and disrespecting the rights of business owners and entrepreneurs, they justify their strategy by claiming that, in a civil society, those who’ve been gifted much bear the burden of supporting the less fortunate.

             What’s fascinating about that this debate, which has been waging for decades, is that neither strategy works. Perhaps that’s because we’re so busy arguing over our points of disagreement that we’ve not bothered to examine our points of agreement, to determine whether they’re guiding us to ask the proper questions.

            What if they’re not?  

            It’s an impasse similar to to our historic quarrel over slavery. Conservatives back then believed it was appropriate for masters to treat runaway slaves harshly, beating or lynching them to create reminders for others in case they too were considering escape. Meanwhile, progressives argued for new laws to force slave owners to treat slaves more humanely, believing slaves would then willingly serve their masters out of gratitude for their kindness.

            Ironically, the argument wasn’t resolved until both sides admitted (after a long and bloody war) that how to treat slaves was the wrong question. The correct question all along had been to ask whether slavery itself was spiritually aligned with who we are as a species. Was it life-affirming behavior on our part?

            The same, I suspect, holds true for our economy. If we stop quarrelling long enough over whether we should balance the budget or spend more money to fix our current system, the question that may at last surface is this: Is the way we’re operating spiritually aligned with who we are as a species?  Is it life-affirming?

            If the answer is no – and that seems to be the true answer – then we do next must, by definition, not support its continuation, but support our own shift to more life-affirming behavior.

Eating the Planet...One Buck at a Time

The problem with allowing a few folks to stockpile enormous sums of money is that money is not wealth. Money represents a future claim against wealth that a person holds, and which can later be presented in exchange for real wealth whenever that person decides to use the claim. Real wealth would be the natural resources, energy, goods and services that are provided by our planet and our society - the things that living beings actually use to remain alive. 

 So here's the tragic irony: Because we've designed a system where we must each amass enough of these future claims to ensure we'll be able to present them against society's future wealth once we're too old or sick to work - or once we've decided we no longer wish to work at producing more stuff that others can use - we're frenziedly destroying our real wealth in order to enable each other to amass enough claims against our future wealth to theoretically satisfy all our future needs.

If we continue to over-consume our natural resources (as we already are) by turning them into unnecessary junk and waste so we can amass even more claims against future wealth, the claims we're amassing will all lose their value over time. And the more we mindlessly damage the planet by destroying its air quality, corroding its healthy topsoil, polluting its fresh water reserves and decimating its living ecosystems, the less likely it will be to support our needs for more genuine resources in the future. That means those who've amassed the greatest monetary "fortunes" will find themselves unable to cash in the bulk of their claims against society's future wealth, because not enough real resources (genuine wealth) will exist on our planet to satisfy those stockpiled theoretical demands for actual resources.

The entire society has truly gone insane in its quest for money, mostly because we've been conditioned to confuse money with genuine wealth. At this point, we're all so busy producing specific goods and services to satisfy the concentrated claims of those few who now hold the bulk of society's money that we're unable to produce the goods the bulk of us need to get by, right here and now. We're making expensive new toys and burning up our fossil fuels to deliver them to the 'wealthy' while the majority of humans on planet Earth go to bed hungry each night, with no idea how they might be able to stockpile claims against society's future wealth - because nobody wants what little they have to offer. Meanwhile, we've been increasingly mechanizing our workplaces, using machines, fossil fuels and technology to reduce the need for human energy to produce things. Our economies now require significantly less human labor  - the primary product we humans have to sell in order to amass claims against future wealth - in relationship to the goods and services we're producing to satisfy the claims of those who now hold the bulk of the money. Increasing productivity, coupled with an increasing population that desperately needs to amass more claims against society's future wealth, means that ever fewer of us will find ourselves successful at amassing enough claims against society's future wealth to be able to thrive tomorrow, no matter how hard and long we labor today!

As if that's not bad enough, the entire system has been rigged to extract massive quantities of  future claims against wealth from the masses before most people are able to stockpile a decent amount of them to guarantee a future free from lack. Those who hold the bulk of the future claims have no qualms about using some of them to purchase the power to determine the rules that the rest of us must live by - which means they design the tax codes and policies that demand the middle class pay to keep the poorest alive, while the rich are permitted to pay lower tax rates so they can amass even more future claims against the social wealth we all produce. They also pay to bombard society with propaganda in an attempt to convince us that if someone isn't successful it's all their own fault; that way, we don't notice the white collar crimes, the banking scandals, the way the system continuously picks the pockets of the masses to move those future claims against wealth into the hands of a few, to whom we continue to cede all the power to decide what our society will look like, create and become.

When will all this madness end? Most likely it'll come crashing to a halt before we've completely consumed all our planetary resources and rendered Earth unable to support human life in our vain quest to amass "enough" (spelled unlimited) future claims against the planet's finite resources, but not before we've generated enough suffering for ourselves that we're forced to come to grips with the absurdity and destructiveness of this system and release our shared delusion that "money is wealth" in order to live more fully and richly together...right here and now.

Different Questions; Different Answers

One of the challenges we're facing today is that we seem to be constantly, frustratingly at odds with each other about how to resolve our problems. On the surface, one might surmise this is because there are two seemingly contradictory ways to address our problems. I would, however, propose that the real reason we're stuck is because we've been asking ourselves all the wrong questions, which means we've been yo-yo'ing between the "conservative" non-responsive answer and the "progressive" non-responsive answer without making any real headway toward the correct solution. Usually when we're stuck it's because we've framed the question badly, not because we're too stupid to solve the problem.

For example, the question most of us are asking right now is, "how do we create more jobs for all of the people who need work?"

I would propose that this is precisely the wrong question. The question we ought to be talking about is this: "Do we need all every able-bodied human on Earth to invest forty hours a week into making more stuff so we can all earn money to buy the things we need? Or are we already making too much stuff we don't need and over-consuming our natural resources, just to ensure all the people have adequate jobs and can earn a living?"

This is a crucial question that nobody in the media or government seems willing to discuss. It's crucial because our economy isn't just a conceptual idea; it's materially tied to the natural resources available to us, as well as their natural replenishment rates. If indeed we're making too much stuff we don't need just so we can create jobs so that people can earn enough money, that means we're consuming our limted natural resources in wasteful ways that are damaging our planet's capacity to carry human life - all for the sake of generating man-made income and making a living.

It's important to note that a single gallon of gasoline does the same amount of work as 350-500 human labor hours, and it still only costs about four dollars. That means a machine running on a gallon of gas can, for a mere four dollars, replace minimum wage labor that would cost a business at least $2800, plus benefits and sick time. Is it any wonder then, that the need for human energy is declining in real terms and that the value of human energy has been falling right alongside it? That fact gets veiled by global expansionism, because so long as we're our global economy continues to expand more raw human labor will be needed, but as a percentage of total energy being employed human labor has fallen from literally 100% before the invention of tools, to perhaps 70% once we invented tools, to perhaps 40% once we domesticated animals, to perhaps 5% now that we have fossil-fuel powered machinery working for us today. That means in order for us to generate 100% employment we have to produce 95 times as much stuff per person than we used to produce for ourselves.

As if that weren't challenge enough, technology is also replacing the need for human computation in the workplace. While computers don't offer the mental flexibility and imagination that a human brain possesses, a computer can still store far more data and do its computations much more rapidly than do humans. All this means that computers and technology are fast replacing our former middle classes in the workplace. The work that remains for us is mainly blue collar (i.e.: tedious assembly line production) or highly imaginative, innovative, clever and strategic thinking (i.e.: executive and highly specialized skills.)  Blue collar work remains available mainly because it can be expensive to build machines to do work that uneducated people will do for very little money, especially when they're desperate to survive. That explains why so many factory assembly lines have been offshored in recent years. Third-world citizens are willing to work for a dollar a day - a salary most Americans can't afford to live on. A dollar a day may still be more than the price of a gallon of gas, but it's less than the cost of machinery and maintenance.  And when it comes to highly skilled and executive positions, machines don't yet exist with the capacity to utilize intelligence in the way that a person can use it, so those jobs will continue to be the most highly paid until we invent machines that are able to compete.

If we're wondering why we are all in debt today, the above will serve to explain that. The fact is, most of us can no longer earn enough money to access the bulk of the goods and services that are mainly being created by our machines. Our labor isn't valued highly enough anymore for us to do so; yet the owners of the machinery won't just give us what the machines create unless they can earn a profit by doing so. Think about it. Human debt has skyrocketed at precisely the same time in human history that industrialization, fossil fuel consumption and technological innovation kicked into high gear, reducing the need for human energy in the workplace! Meanwhile government debt, which is in large part subsidizing our needs because we can't earn enough to acquire what we need, has also skyrocketed over the past fifty years. This is not coincidence; it's a real-world cause and effect.

If we possess a lick of sense we can use it to see which way the economic winds are presently blowing. Our economic systems have been relentlessly replacing high cost human energy with lower cost machines and technologies that run on cheap fossil fuels, so they can make their goods more cheaply. That would be wonderful if we were able to enjoy the fruits of all this cheap production without struggle, but because we don't own either the natural resources that are being fed into these systems or the actual means of production, we're generally precluded from accessing all these goods...unless we work.

And so it is that seven billion humans are now relentlessly competing for ever more scarce and lower paying jobs, with fewer benefits. Sadly, we're being pitted against each other in a war nobody can win. Eventually machines will be doing almost all of society's work, and yet we won't be able to grow anymore because we'll have hit the natural limits of resource replenishment. In fact, we may have already hit that tipping point. So what happens then? At the moment, those who apply their ingenuity and create new enterprises are still inventing newer and cleverer gadgets...but really, how much of what we're making is truly necessary and helpful, and how much is downright wasteful, in pursuit of money?

That begs yet another question: "Are we here to earn a living, or do we earn a living in order to make life more enjoyable while we're here?" That is no small question. For some time we've been socially conditioned to believe that we first have to earn a living, then - if we accumulate enough free time and money - we can perhaps use it to enjoy what's left of our lives by exploring those talents, skills and abilities we neglected while in hot pursuit of a job that paid us well. But what if we have life backwards? What if, given the modern state of things, we'd be better off as a society if we encouraged everyone to pursue their passions or master their own innate skills and then apply those to our shared needs instead of demanding everyone first fit into the economic system as it stands? It may be that our system is already so obsolete we're doing ourselves a grave disservice by demanding that everyone conform to it, rather than that it conform to where we are today as an advanced species.

I don't know the answers to the above questions. I suspect none of us do as yet. However, I suspect that if we're honest with ourselves we'll have to admit that some very large percentage of what we're currently producing isn't beneficial to either humanity or our planet. It's mainly crap.

If so, what do we want to do about it? Are we going to wait until the job crisis becomes even more acute? Are we going to wait until the race to convert natural resources into consumables has triggered an irreversible depletion of planetary resources, so we have no choice but to watch our economies collapse out of lack? Or will we - because we're able to grasp that what we're doing is inherently unsustainable - take a moment to breathe into these questions and sincerely seek good answers? Will  can calmly and thoughtfully respond to these challenges before we're forced to react to emergencies we're causing for ourselves?

I don't know the answers to those questions either. My hope is that by shining a light on these questions and inviting people to give them consideration right here and now, we can perhaps avoid the worst outcomes to our challenges that we humans might have to face if we ignore them.

Divine Creativity and the Self

I have come to believe that the Divine is ALWAYS the doer in this world. These days I perceive that we humans are simply temporary living tools through which divine energy flows and manifests into this world, so I no longer claim to be "the doer" of anything that comes into this world through me. I am merely a witnessing presence to divine energy sculpting itself into ever higher and more complex order over time, while filling itself with more love, joy, beauty, wonder, light, harmony, passion, talent and diversity. What a GIFT this is...and how lucky I am to be the perceiver of all of it.

That, over billions of years of organic evolution, I have physically evolved into a complex human being within the magnificent flow of living energy, such that I am today able to become a willing, cooperative tool with Divine energy as it manifests more of its creative intentions within this field of matter is amazing.

That, over thousands of years, I have - as an evolving human being - been gifted an increasing power of self-awareness so that I may literally witness and experience the expression of Divine creative energy as it flows through me in the here and now and inscribes itself on the living canvas of reality, is a wonder.

That I today possess complex emotions and can feel the loving presence of  Divine Spirit as it flows through me and brings forth new concepts, new ideas, greater wisdom and profound material changes is a blessing - one for which I feel unending gratitude.

I acknowledge that none of what I create, or have ever created, is "mine" to possess. Even my body is not mine to possess, but is a wondrous manifestation of the Divine; one I've been graced to occupy - as a witnessing presence - for the very, very short time this body will exist. Thus I willingly offer up all I am, do and will ever bring forth in loving service to the divine creative field of LIFE itself, with endless gratitude for its having manifested me as its living, self-aware tool in this blessed space.

To be in touch with all the above realizations is to surrender: "Not my will, but thy will be done." Out of that surrender arises incredible peace and relaxation, what some have called, "The peace that passeth all understanding."  To relax and allow life to move through you - not demand it be moved by you - is to experience the world as a far more joyful place in which to live. To open the floodgates of creativity by letting go of the belief that the mind's purpose is to dictate what "should be" or "ought to" be done, and to instead allow the mind to serve the Divine field of life by doing what feels energetically life-affirming is to plunge joyfully into the flow of creation and experience the self as divine energy, manifesting.

We know we're in the flow of creation when our actions are effortless; when we don't feel a sense of strain or stress around what we are manifesting. This doesn't mean that what we do is easy; because at times our minds must work very hard to figure out how to do what needs to be done, and our bodies must invest both time and energy to accomplish the task we've set forth. It does, however, mean that what we are doing is arising from joy, from love...and from the profound realization that what we are doing is life-affirming and will be helpful to the amazing field of life that contains us all.

Our present desire for material rewards and for other, external trappings of success we've been trained to seek exists because, for the most part, we've not been allowing Divine energy to flow through us, but have been (mostly unconsciously) blocking its manifestation by doing what our minds have been programmed to believe we "ought" to do. That doesn't usually feel very good; in fact, it's a life path too often filled with stress, pain, suffering, resentment and fear. For submitting to those experiences we therefore demand some tangible reward, like money or fame, otherwise we could not be motivated to put up with so much suffering. When, however, we do what we do for love, with joy, feeling blissful because what is flowing through us is tapping into the best we have to offer of this living instrument that is our body/heart/mind/spirit - and when that system is humming with pleasure to be working at maximum capacity - then even if what we are doing seems difficult, it isn't ever hard. It's beautiful.

And the doing becomes its own reward...particularly because we are doubly graced to be able to observe and relish the wonder of what has arisen and flowed through us!

What a blessing is this life...what need have any of us for anything more?

It’s all coming together!

This morning, I had a beautiful, divine epiphany. What I “saw” in my mind’s eye was that we are, as a species, approaching a crucial “jump time.” We’re preparing ourselves – and preparing the way – to jump to a higher level of order. By doing so we will empower ourselves to employ greater creative capacity, experience richer diversity, manifest more beauty and joy, and bring forth higher consciousness in service to all of life.

What will this higher level of order look like? If we turn to our own biology for clues, we can compare where we are right now to where the single-celled organisms were in the time before they began to cooperate and build complex, multi-cellular organisms. In every multi-cellular organism, the whole is always greater than the simple sum of its individual parts. It is that “something more” that provides the reward for coming together, because each individual cell benefits more from the joining than it surrenders in the way of autonomy. For thousands of years now, humanity has been focused almost exclusively on promoting and preserving our individuality, on being “separate” from each other in order to maximize our personal potentials. That’s been a grand ride for all of us; it’s enabled us to know and love the joy of our special uniqueness. The thing is, we’ve likely reached the end of the road when it comes to our individual evolution. For us to jump as a species to a higher level of order, what is being called for now is for us to consciously choose to cooperate as a singular, unified body, in order to create a shared system that automatically delivers to every single being in the social body whatever it needs to be the best it can become.

We’re being asked by life itself to fulfill the original promise of multi-cellular organisms, only this time with our individual consciousnesses as the drivers and deciders. We’re being invited to notice and appreciate that we work better together and accomplish much more than we can do on our own, to embrace the realization that when we come together and work together the whole is far greater than the simple sum of us. We’re the newest fractal of an existing social pattern: it’s life’s chosen design, only more complex because we’re bringing consciousness to the equation.

This mission is one we’ve been unconsciously undertaking for many years. We’ve already automated most of our production processes for goods and services, as well as our delivery capacities. Fewer and fewer labor hours are now required for us to make the things we need. In fact, so few labor hours are required to make the things we need that we’ve begun to invest our labor hours in making things nobody needs just to use them up! We’re “making work” to enable individuals to survive, instead of freeing individuals up to do the work that will help us all thrive.

What if we embraced the idea that nobody needs to work full time anymore just to earn their basic needs, and that at most we may each need to invest a few hours each week to ensure everyone’s needs are met? What would we do with our free time and our creative capacity then? I suspect most of us would quickly get bored watching mindless entertainment, which has only served to distract us from the stresses of earning a living. Instead, I imagine most of us would eventually turn to our inner selves to seek and bring forth our passions, talents, skills, curiosity, and our grandest ideas – and apply those to the challenges we’re facing as a collective. What amazing things we might accomplish if our time and creative capacities were free to apply themselves to our serious problems! What wondrous dreams we might manifest if we were able to use our minds more effectively than by paying bills and taxes and worrying about our mortgages and debts. What beauty we might be able to bring forth if all our artists, architects and designers were free to allow their minds to run wild across the playground of their own imaginations, and call forth the amazing visions that dance in their heads!

I believe humanity has already been working toward this jump point for many centuries, but has not yet been fully conscious of what it is doing. We WANT to be free of the need to work hard to meet our daily needs, which is why we’ve automated so many tasks that nobody wants to do. We intuitively grasp that it’s in our best interest to set ourselves free from the daily grind for basic needs, so we can explore our higher capacities and discover what we’re truly capable of. We’ve continuously gravitated toward living in and building social systems because – consciously or not – we realize that what we can create together far exceeds what any one of us can do alone. We’ve already become a multi-cellular organism, but we haven’t quite made the final leap toward sharing and loving social cooperation. We’re still clinging fearfully to the last vestiges of our individuation in the form of self-sufficiency, which is what we need to let go of if we’re to thrive. We don’t need to be individually self-sufficient; we need to be individually manifesting the utter uniqueness of that which each of us is! In that shift we will find our strength, and make our way through the challenges that arise. Not by becoming exactly like each other, but by coming together fully as a diversely creative collection of unique and conscious beings in a shared social body.

A Human Resolution for the 21st Century

As we enter the New Year, resolutions always seem to rise to the front and center of everybody’s thoughts. We make personal resolutions to lose weight, drink less, exercise more, spend more time with family and friends, eliminate all the clutter in our homes, etc. While we don’t always succeed at keeping our resolutions, it feels good to take stock of the things we feel might benefit us to change, and to make an honest effort to bring about those changes for our own good.

Why then, I’ve been wondering, doesn’t humanity as a whole make resolutions that would benefit our shared society? Wouldn’t it be helpful to us as a species if we could agree on certain behavioral shifts we think might improve the quality of life on Earth for all living beings? Worst case, making resolutions gets us thinking and talking about what we believe needs changing, which in turn elevates our awareness around what it is we might be doing better. And the thing is, the more people who consciously decide to pay attention to what it is we might do better, the higher the odds we’ll uplift our society.

One of the amazing things about human consciousness is that, inevitably, we each must pass through a four-step process that transports us from ignorance of to absolute mastery of anything it is we wish to achieve. For example, we can’t wake up one day and decide we want to be the world’s best novelist and then go out and achieve it tomorrow; it takes work. Hard work. It also takes commitment, struggle, effort and conscious focus, along with a willingness to look foolish when we inevitably stumble. The reward for undergoing this struggle is that, eventually, we feel joy when we perform the task because we do it so well and so effortlessly it becomes a pleasure for us instead of a chore.

It seems then, there’s a mechanism hard-wired into our consciousness that enables us to shift a task out of our bandwidth of conscious effort and into our unconscious bandwidth, but it requires time and effort for that to occur. Imagine, for example, what life would be like if you had to concentrate constantly on remembering to breathe to ensure your survival. How much ‘space’ do you think would remain in your conscious awareness for you to wonder about other things, or to tackle other, more complex thought processes? That we are able to master things like breathing through evolutionary design then and shift them to our autonomic nervous system is a tribute to the brilliance of consciousness itself. Whenever we master a skill and it becomes an unconscious process for us, consciousness rewards us with the freedom to tackle something new, something fresh, something even more complex and perhaps more beneficial to us than the task we’ve finally mastered. Consciousness, it appears, possesses an eternal ability to collapse in on itself, thereby creating infinite volumes of space within its own awareness for higher learning to emerge as life evolves.

The four-steps we each must pass through as we move from ignorance to mastery of any given skill or ability are these:

1) Unconscious incompetence – this stage is represented by the Fool’s Journey in Tarot, and can best be described as the blissful ignorance of early childhood. Our journey begins the instant we decide we want to learn a new skill or ability, although we possess virtually no understanding of the effort it might require to master that skill. The Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden describes life just prior to the fool’s journey, when it speaks glowingly of the time before humanity undertook the Herculean task of mastering an understanding of the difference between good and evil. Had we known before we undertook that task how much evil we’d have to experience in order to learn the difference between the two, we might have been so daunted by the challenge that we’d never have found the courage to begin. Thankfully, ignorance truly is bliss when it comes to undertaking any fool’s journey! Being blissfully unaware of how much we don’t know, we cheerfully set out to fulfill our mission, confident (in our ignorance) of our innate capacity to achieve our objective.

2) Conscious Incompetence – Once her journey has begun, it doesn’t take the fool long to encounter unforeseen challenges. Quickly she realizes she isn’t yet all she’d imagined herself to be, and how much she needs to learn if she’s to succeed in her objective. The fool looks around and suddenly notices all the others who appear far more capable of performing the task she’s undertaken for herself. Conscious at last of her own ignorance, she feels humbled. She now understands the effort that will be required if she’s to succeed. She needs to become a sponge, actively seeking information and learning as much as she can – trying (and often failing) repeatedly – as practice, study and hard work supplant the bliss of her former ignorance. It’s here we so often give up in disgust, deciding we didn’t want to achieve our objective nearly as much as we’d once thought, because it’s harder than we ever imagined it’d be. This stage is represented by the student, the young acolyte coiled expectantly at the feet of an aging guru, eagerly awaiting the wisdom the master delivers.

3) Conscious Competence – In this stage of the learning process, our former student has pushed through the many frustrating struggles of learning, practicing, failing and learning anew and has finally hit upon a personal formula that enables her to achieve success in her chosen field. At times she even experiences flashes of brilliance, but it’s not yet consistent enough to depend upon. Here is where discernment at last arises, enabling her to weed through a massive influx of unhelpful or distracting information, so she can focus instead on the wisdom that moves her forward. She knows exactly what she needs to do to master her chosen skill; however, she needs to remain focused and maintain a conscious commitment if she’s to succeed. This is the stage of the scholar, the one who studiously dedicates herself to her work, and does it quite well when she puts her heart and mind to it.

4) Unconscious Competence – When we enter this phase, something amazing – miraculous really – transpires. Our former scholar no longer needs to read as many books or concentrate on her notes when speaking to others. The hard-won wisdom she's accumulated has become second nature to her. Others may ask her difficult or perplexing questions, challenge her or seek her out for advice. Whatever the situation, this master knows which answers to offer without having to refer back to her writings or read more books on the subject. She feels confident she can perform well at any moment without having to concentrate on performing her skill. This stage represents the musician who can play beautifully with total strangers, the poet who can offer a rhyme on the spur of the moment, the chef who can enter a strange kitchen and prepare a fabulous meal with whatever ingredients he finds. It is at this stage we take our well-deserved rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor …before our now-empty consciousness grows restless and sets out on the next fool’s journey it’s chosen for our evolution!

When we understand how our personal consciousness works, we can feel confident it works the same for the collective, because human society is but a fractal mirror of the many individuals it serves. That being the case, I have come to believe that when humanity first climbed down from the trees and began our long, slow march toward civilization, we were collectively undertaking a fool’s journey of breathtakingly epic proportions. For eons now we’ve been struggling to figure out how to build a civil society. We’ve taught ourselves how to feed, clothe, house and educate ourselves in ways that advance the human condition, and that improve the quality of life for all concerned. We’ve run countless social experiments over the ages, most of which have failed, but all of which have taught us valuable lessons. We’ve played with power/dominator social structures and have seen the great evil that arises when power becomes overly concentrated in the hands of just a few. We’ve exploited the resources of our home planet and have learned there’s a price to pay when we don’t respect her longstanding replenishment cycles. We’ve domesticated animals and plants for our advantage, and are coming to understand that risks accompany the benefits of tampering with natural evolution. We’ve improved our technology, expanded our creative capacities and put together a compendium of human wisdom that is breathtaking in scope and volume. Even so, we continue to struggle as a species for the simple things in life, which informs us we’ve not yet mastered the art of building a sustainable civilization.

In that spirit - and given that the arc of human evolution is far broader and longer than the arc of personal human development - I would like to propose a New Century Resolution for all of humanity, and I invite you to hold this intention along with me. It is my fervent hope that we agree to decide that the 21^st Century will at last be the one in which we come together as a species and focus our collective attention on ensuring that all people worldwide receive adequate food, shelter, clean water, clothing, medical care and a proper education without having to struggle so hard to acquire those things. I would like to see us develop a planetary infrastructure worthy of fulfilling this mission, so we can free up the hearts, minds and bodies of the seven billion remarkable others with whom we’re sharing this space. If we do that, we could then apply ourselves to tackling the enormous challenges we’re facing as a species. We already have enough productive capacity and technology to achieve this goal; we simply haven’t yet developed the willpower – inspired by a powerful supporting motivation – to attempt it. It’s therefore time, I believe, for us set out on this new fool’s journey as a species and commit ourselves to the mastery of this task, though as yet we have no understanding of the challenges we might face as we proceed.

Imagine what we could accomplish if most people didn’t have to work all day just to meet their basic needs! We could dedicate ourselves to replenishing the resources we’ve depleted through our ignorance of the natural living system in which we’re embedded. We could clean up the pollution we’ve created and better steward the delicate ecosystems we’ve carelessly damaged. We could focus on building sustainable housing for all, using renewable resources and with zero carbon footprints. We could invite more of our artists, philosophers and research scientists to beautify society and expand our understanding of the cosmos. We could even explore the farthest reaches of space, not out of desperation or necessity, but driven by awe and a profound curiosity about the larger realm that contains our tiny, fragile world, and that has given birth to the wonder that is us.

That dream explains why, these days, whenever someone laughs or calls me a fool for my ideas, I thank them with love. I can’t imagine a better fool’s journey for us all to undertake.

First They Ignore You...

As I observe the media responses to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, what comes to mind is a wonderful quote by Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win."

It seems to me that those opposed to the message of this movement have recently shifted from phase one - ignoring the energy of the movement - to phase two, which involves ridicule of the individuals who have dedicated themselves to the cause. On Fox News yesterday I watched the so-called "news" commentators belittling the protesters for using their laptops, as if somehow this protest against financial corruption implied a concurrent moral aversion to the use of technology. They also laughed along with Donald Trump, who had called in to the program, when he asserted his belief that most of the young people were probably there to "find dates."

We're also observing a scaled implementation of phase three - fighting - which began with the mass arrests of protesters by police officers who aligned themselves with the power/dominator corporatists who fund and control our government officials. Ironically, those officials are paying police salaries using our taxpayer dollars, which means the people we've hired to protect us have now become bullies who oppress us in the name of "social order" to preserve their own jobs. But as we've seen too many times before in human history, the fear of losing their jobs can cause people to behave in ways that run counter to their own moral code of conduct. That explains why so many police officers purposefully corralled a large number of peaceful protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, entrapping them into moving into the street. They then gave themselves permission to abuse their legal authority in an effort to intimidate the people and undermine the energy of the protest.

Strangely enough, while the rather miniscule Tea Party movement was breathlessly covered by the media as a powerful social movement for change, the growing and highly energetic "Occupy Wall Street" movement was ignored for nearly two weeks. Why the difference? Perhaps it's because the message of the Tea Party aligned perfectly with the agenda of the media moguls who control the dissemination of information in our modern society. That message - to destroy governmental power and elevate corporatism as the highest form of social organization - grants enormous powers to those who control the global flow of money. Not coincidentally, it also robs the general public of the means by which to resist the power elite. The thinking goes something like this: take away a man's food, shelter, health and means of survival, and his ability to fight injustice diminishes because his attention becomes redirected toward simple survival. What that thought process fails to take into account however, is that a person who finally feels he has nothing left to lose is the most dangerous person of all. Even so, it seems those who are attached to the power/dominator social model, which relies on intimidation and coercion to control the behavior of others, are constitutionally incapable of overreaching to the point of self-destruction. Since aggressive domination lies at the very heart of the model, the model doesn't seem to know when to cease dominating others out of the realization that excessive domination turns an energy of resistance back on itself.

"Occupy Wall Street," as opposed to the Tea Party movement, points its finger at the root of social injustice, and demands we solve the problem of aggressive domination instead of continue to mitigate the worst symptoms of continued social injustice. Welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, the renegotiation of criminally high mortgage loan balances and rates - all are attempts to mitigate symptoms instead of address the underlying social disease. So what IS the disease, and how do we cure it?

I would postulate that the social disease we presently face is the false belief that everything is separate, and that so-called "individuals" can therefore freely exploit nature, resources, ecosystems and even other human beings for personal gain. For centuries now we've been enamored of the belief that everything we observe in our material world is a discrete object, a passive noun, and that when the noun is energized (by a verb) it is activated. What we're just now coming to realize is that nouns and verbs are human conventions, and that life itself is not so neatly divisible. No noun exists that is not internally verbing to some extent; likewise, no verbish energy exists that is not flowing and manifesting through some noun. The whole of reality is therefore already alive and humming with order and purpose; it's only our limited sensory perspective that causes us to miss this powerful Truth. We look at a chair and see a passive object, but if we turn an electron microscope onto it we discover that every atom within the chair is teeming with ordered activity. Every molecular bond that has formed to build and hold the form that is the chair represents a miniature social contract that obeys the underlying laws of our universe. The chair is chair because the atoms have all agreed to make it so, and will continue to do so until their contract ends - at which point the chair as we know it will cease to be. The atoms, however, will carry on, forging new social contracts with other atoms to bring other temporary forms into this world. They are assisted at times by cosmic consciousness flowing through human minds, and at other times by cosmic consciousness flowing through nonhuman forms. Always though, it is cosmic consciousness that dictates the direction of life's evolutionary flow, whether it does so through human beings or through some other living means at its disposal. We are each therefore tools of the ONE Source, not separate objects acting in disconnection from that Source. The only question then, is whether we realize our true nature, or falsely believe we are acting on our own.

If everything is alive, and everything is interconnected and directed by a single Source, there is no such thing in our world as a "self-made man." We are each here by grace, and we reflect the evolutionary manifestations of all that has come before us. We exist because we are supported by the entire infrastructure of the cosmos, from our nurturing planet to our heat-giving sun, to the galaxy that controls and contains our sun, to the intergalactic cluster that contains and connects our galaxy to all others. If any one of those connections break, we are at risk of total species extinction. To understand that at the deepest level of our psyche is to realize our true place in the cosmos, and to humbly regard ourselves in our proper cosmic context.

That humanity has, for many centuries now, placed our desire for money and power above a reverent relationship with our own living planet - and with each other - is a reflection of our lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of everything. It isn't evil that drives us then; it's childish ignorance. Even modern science has failed us here, because most of our scientific theories cling to the belief that what's alive and subjective inside every object is less material than its objective properties. The assumption that we can come to know the totality of the whole through the simple dissection of its parts down to some mythical lowest common denominator misses the highest truth of life itself, which is that the whole is - always and ever - greater than the simple sum of its parts. Modern science fails to focus on these connections, and instead seeks to define reality by mathematically summing up all the supposedly observable and individuated objects in the universe, without concerning itself with the added benefit gained by such a conjoinment. Thus the ongoing search for a unified field to bring all of reality together is an impossible quest under the scientific method, because it seeks a summary answer "out there" instead of noticing that any unified field MUST first be found at the closest possible point to the observer - which by definition must be within the pure awareness of the observer. That awareness does not exist outside of the unified field, as modern science seems to assume it does. Pure awareness thus appears to be the magical "something more" that reality has gained by summing itself into a living, unified field.

With this new understanding, this new movement - which is comprised of young and old, rich and poor, people of color and people of Western European heritage - is not a movement designed to separate right from left or the wealthy from those who suffer. It is, at heart, a great leap forward in human consciousness, because at heart it's a celebration of life's rich and powerful interconnectivity. As such, violence will not serve its ends, because to do violence against what we're connected to is to do violence unto ourselves. What does serve this rising movement - and will continue to serve it well - is the courage of gnostic conviction of the truth. The conviction that life itself is far more precious than money, that human creativity deserves to be unleashed so we can collectively tackle our problems, and that to trust and love and nurture each other will get us farther than trying to direct and control each other for short-term gain is the deeper message underlying this movement. Thus this movement represents the genuine energy of freedom, but a freedom writ large on the psyche of human beings all over the world, as one by one we step into the realization that we are here to serve life, not just self; and that by serving life we ultimately are serving ourselves as enlightened members of the larger living whole. This movement therefore represents the desire of all spirits to be free to self-express and bring their unique capacities and talents into our world. We long to do so in gratitude for this precious gift that is life, which we're experiencing as a temporary form we have come to call the "self."

No amount of ignorance, ridicule or even force can long subvert the Truth of who we are. As Martin Luther King once said, "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." When we know ourselves to be inextricably embedded in the infinite, eternal field that is life itself, we discover we have all the time in the world to stand for Truth. That awareness is the ultimate strength of the movement. It will not be suppressed by fear for the survival of our personal bodies, because we recognize these bodies to be but temporary manifestations of the larger living whole that will - always and ever - contain everything that is us. To serve that thus becomes the highest calling a human being can answer. And it is in that service that we find both grace and peace.

So to all those who would ignore, ridicule or attempt to coerce their brothers and sisters into falling silent and ignoring their deepest truth, I exhort you now...notice the truth of who you are and allow it to set you free. Feel your own inner energy vibrating in your own cells, and pay attention to the invisible umbilical cord that is your breath, and that connects you to this world through the gift of life. Accept that you cannot survive or thrive without a healthy, vibrant world to support your existence, and that you cannot feel joy without also feeling love for and toward your fellow man. Step into the truth of your own interbeing, and release the false belief that you are an island. Allow the grace of life to pulse through you and flow lovingly into this world that created and contains you, through you, as you. Bring love into this world by being loving. Bring peace by being peaceful. Bring generosity by being generous of mind and heart and spirit. See where that shift gets you instead of succumbing to the fear that possesses you now.

Fear cannot survive in the light of love, so set yourself on fire and banish the darkness within your own heart. Know there are millions of others who are ready and willing to midwife you into this new reality, and who desire - once enough of us are awakened to our interconnectedness - to design a new society that reflects this truth. A society that serves the whole by empowering all its parts to fully self-actualize will be a society blessed with love and fruitful abundance, and from that abundance all forms of life will be nourished. The whole is always and ever greater than the sum of its discrete parts. So allow the One Source to carry you to greater heights of beingness than you imagine you can achieve or attain on your own. That's grace in action, and it brings to each the peace that passeth all mental understanding.

Know yourself.

Namaste, my brothers and sisters, one and all.