On occasion I'm blessed to read a book that radically changes my understanding of life by expanding my thinking in ways I never imagined. Recently, Dan Pink's excellent book, "Drive" has had that impact on me. The book details the many studies that have been conducted around human motivation, and reveals that - at least where our creative capacities are concerned - people are far more powerfully motivated by their intrinsic drives (energies arising from within) than they are by extrinsic pressures like rewards and punishments. This understanding actually violates one of the primary tenets of physics, which says that a body at rest tends to remain at rest while a body set into motion tends to remain in motion, but that principle - as is true of most strictly scientific principles - fails to account for the existence of consciousness and free will within the object.
If we look around today, much of our society is constructed around reward and punishment drivers. Our religions, for example, teach us that if we behave as we've been taught we'll go to heaven (eternal reward) and if we don't we'll go to hell (eternal punishment.) The thing is, once we know there will be a particular outcome based on our behavior, we're no longer truly free to choose how to behave. The certain outcome tips the scales, pushing us toward the behavior that will deliver the desired outcome. Under this sort of motivational driver, our attention shifts toward following a given set of rules to generate a specific outcome (the ends) and away from evolving and improving ourselves so we become more mentally and emotionally adept at determining how best to behave in any given situation (the means.)
Our educational systems use rewards and punishments to force children to learn what they're "supposed to" learn and make sure they feel shame and guilt if they do not. If they pay attention and regurgitate, as unaltered as possible, the information they're fed, they get good grades and are perceived as successes. If they ask too many questions, fail to agree with what they're being taught to memorize or find the whole process too boring to hold their attention, they're labeled stupid, failures or ADD/ADHD. They're even medicated (punished) back into compliance so they can be appropriately instructed and controlled. Teachers too are rewarded for getting their students to achieve good test scores, and are punished if they fail to teach to the tests. Somewhere along the way genuine learning, the art of critical thinking and the innate curiosity of children to ask and obsessively seek the answers to "why?" was squelched in service to spitting out compliant, high scoring data memorizers who could then neatly drop into our economic reward and punishment system.
It's not surprising then that we find the same sort of reward and punishment system underlying our economies. If we work hard and produce what our employers desire from us, we receive wages that will allow us to survive and possibly thrive. If, on the other hand, we fail to find an employer whose demands we can successfully satisfy, we're punished for it by the withholding of the money we need to survive. If we wish to start a new business a bank may lend us the capital we need to do so, but if we're not successful on our first go the bank will repossess what we've built and label us losers by damaging our credit ratings, making it that much harder for us to succeed in the future. This prevailing financial reward and punishment system does make certain grudging allowances for those who are old, infirm or ill (Social Security and Medicare are examples of this), but only to a limited extent and only for a specified period of time. We don't really like making these allowances for individuals, because we're not sure how many people are malingerers taking advantage of the system we've devised to benefit the truly needy. (Perhaps right there we find a clue that the reward and punishment system we've designed does not sufficiently motivate most people to attain their highest level of personal capacity.)
Modern justice systems are also grounded in rewards and punishments. Obey the laws and we're granted permission to live as we wish to within the restrictions and boundaries of those laws. Disobey the laws and we're punished with fines, jail time and criminal records that may haunt us for the rest of our lives. Interestingly enough, this system is grossly economically inefficient. For instance, a person who robs a convenience store and steals two hundred dollars may get arrested and jailed for seven years, at a net cost to the public of over two hundred thousand dollars. Economically we'd have been far better off - and the violence and suffering the offender created could have been avoided - by simply giving the individual the two hundred dollars he needed, or paying him an annual allowance so he could acquire the things he needs without resorting to social violence. That however, would violate our socially entrained sense of needing to "teach people how to behave," because we fear that by giving people what they need they won't learn how to behave properly. Ironically, the exact opposite seems to hold true. Deny people what they need and they may well begin to act improperly out of frustration, anger and physical desperation. Give them what they need and they will not feel compelled to violate their wish to live in peace.
Modern two-party governance is also founded on a system of rewards and punishments. If the party you support attains political power, you'll be rewarded by having the ideas you prefer be written into law, while the supporters of the losing party will be punished by not being able to test their ideas or have them properly heard and respected by the ruling party. Because neither party can maintain total political control long enough to actually see their party's platform executed and discover the underlying validity of its beliefs, the battle continues to rage because we never truly learn which way is better. We wind up with this policy contradicting that policy, or our ideas getting watered down so much that they aren't really the ones we wanted to test in the first place. This constant back and forth push of power means that whatever laws do get created can't even be counted on to last, because when the opposition regains power the first thing it does is attempt to dismantle the legislative efforts of the outgoing party. The people are the ones who suffer most during these push/pull struggles for the right to determine the nation's destiny, because instead of being able to charter a steady course for our own future we're blown about and battered beneath this typhoon of oppositional political energies.
While rewards and punishments may have served humanity to some limited extent in the past, these extrinsic motivational techniques of rewards and punishments no longer serve an intelligent, creative and empathetic adult population. They may in fact be what's hindering our ability to successfully evolve. By contrast, the intrinsic motivators Pink discusses in his book are drivers that are, by nature, hardwired into us to motivate us without the need for external sticks and carrots, and if nurtured and permitted to flower, they may well hold the power to propel society forward in great leaps of unleashed creativity.
According to the studies, our three primary intrinsic motivators are:
1) The desire for autonomy, in which we possess some element of control and choice over what we do, and how and when we do it.
2) The desire for personal mastery, in which we are free to take as long as we like and are given access to the tools we need to practice our passions, talents and skills until we've attained a satisfying level of performance proficiency.
3) The desire to serve a higher purpose than ourselves, such that we are free to apply the skills we've mastered in ways that uplift and support the rest of life.
When we observe children we see these three motivators at work. Children will cry when they are hindered from exploring what they wish to explore, when and how they wish to do it. They will spend endless hours developing their own innate skill sets...walking, talking, learning to use their fingers and hands and to coordinate their bodies. (For them this is play, not work!) They will also take great delight in bringing joy to the grownups around them, when we observe them achieving a new milestone and provide them with laughter as feedback. It's only through the process of socialization (in the schools, through parenting and in religious training) that these natural drivers become subverted and external drivers supplant them over time. By applying material punishments and rewards to motivate our children to do what we want them to do, we deny them the autonomy to figure out what they truly wish to do. We also convert their natural curiosity and play into grueling work, and we substitute external rewards (like grades and allowances) for the deep intrinsic joy of doing something well so they can bring joy to the world and be helpful to others.
How can our society best support these intrinsic motivational drivers that in turn would help us uplift the human condition? For starters, we could free up all humans from the need to labor in exchange for life's basic necessities. By giving everyone what they need, we free ourselves from the stress of having to work to earn what we need. Our time and energy could then be redirected toward determining what it is we want to create - as individuals, and for the benefit of our society. If we're no longer all slaving to earn our daily bread, we will each have more time and freedom to pursue our personal passions and develop our unique skill sets and abilities, so we can discover what unique gifts we have to offer the world and attain sufficient mastery to bring bring them forth. Because our attention will no longer be focused solely on providing our basic needs for ourselves, we'll be free to allow our intrinsic desire to serve a higher purpose to emerge and serve the collective needs of humanity, the planet and the living ecosystems that sustain us.
This single shift - from demanding that human beings each work to earn what they personally need to survive - to ensuring all human beings freely receive what they need from the larger society, holds the power to set alight human creative capacity and foster an explosion of energy that could, in turn, resolve the many, many challenges we face as a species today. Freed from the grinding need to provide all our basic needs for ourselves, we could turn all that newly unleashed energy toward cleaning up our planet, fully educating all children, protecting our delicate ecosystems, freeing ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, redirecting our shared resources with intelligence and compassion and setting a steady course toward a shared higher vision of where we'd like to see humanity go. In a very real sense, this is a higher-consciousness fractal of the seminal shift that single0-celled organisms made when they agreed to come together and be part of much larger multi-cellular systems. By sharing the burden of providing for each cell's basic needs, they in turn freed each other up to practice their unique talents and abilities, and to specialize in service to the formation of a greater whole living system. You and I would not be here today had not single-celled organisms attained this realization at the limited level of consciousness they possessed.
That we're hardwired to act in cooperative and intrinsically motivated ways means we're not really taking too much of a risk to let go of our old power-dominator systems of reward and punishment and allow nature to take its evolutionary course. Apparently God truly does not play dice with the universe; we've been gifted these intrinsic motivations - along with the desires for communion, peace, harmony, beauty, happiness and human companionship - for a reason. Let's purposefully use these gifts then instead of suppressing them, and perhaps we'll surprise ourselves by how much we're able to accomplish once we let go of our fears of how others will behave (which drives our present need to control each other) and instead trust higher nature to have provided us with the tools necessary to motivate and successfully activate ourselves in service to life.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Capitalism as Institutionalized Slavery
What we do to ourselves in the name of work is criminally insane. Most of us don't feel joy in what we do, we're struggling to get and hold a job so we can pay our bills and survive. We buy homes we rarely see because we're too busy out working; we have kids we don't raise because we can't afford to be home when they need our attention. We spend hours in our vehicles on smoggy, overly trafficked roads to get to and from where we need to go - not because our employers can't figure out ways to encourage us to work from home, but because they don't trust us to do the work if they're not watching over us.
In large part we make stuff nobody really needs, then convince others to buy it to satisfy the corporate profit margin. Meanwhile, the stuff we do need to accomplish to ensure the long term success and happiness of our species - infrastructure repair, much better schools, quality medical care for all, sustainable and green housing and food sources, environmental protection and thoughtful resource stewardship, scientific exploration and genuine advancements in human health and well being - don't get done because we haven't figured out ways to make those things monetarily "profitable."
The concept of developing free, clean and renewable energy so people can tap the energy grid of the planet wherever they may be strikes FEAR in the hearts of the corporate system. Why? because if we can all get our energy for free, corporations can't profit off our energy need in perpetuity! Ditto foodstuffs - corporations don't want us collecting our own seeds and growing organic vegetables in the backyard, or raising our own chickens. They want centralized control - they demand centralized control before they invest in new systems - because that way they get to control the distribution, the supply and the price of what we produce.
What we used to call the "middleman," the broker between buyer and seller, has become the monster in the system. The companies that act as middlemen now take advantage of both buyers and sellers, carving off massive pieces of the exchange for themselves in the process and calling that "profit." They're starving the feedback loop between buyers and sellers, hampering the evolution of human society by rendering us incapable of functioning without the middleman, and consolidating power to ensure they continue to expand their reach and capacity to seize ever larger pieces of the social pie. The largest middleman today is the financial services industry, which represents a full 40% of our GDP. What is the function of financial "services," but to match those who have money with those who need it? Yet over the years, that function has lost sight of its purpose as the companies now pay lenders (savers) almost nothing and in many cases charge them for the privilege of saving their money, then they turn around and charge borrowers exorbitant rates of interest (or refuse to lend to them at all) for the right to borrow money that isn't even theirs!
What we call the 'free market' has never been truly free. He who corners the supply can dictate the price, and he who encourages demand by making his product appear indispensable to the public will also profit. He who has little or no money (either by accident of birth or social circumstances) to influence the flow of goods and services gets no vote in what gets produced, in how scarce global resources get used or in how he gets to live and work in this life.
Hint: if you don't get to decide what you want to do with the richness of your own life, you are NOT a free being living in a free society. You're a slave, only one without the benefits of having a master provide your shelter, clothing, food and medical care. Instead, your master provides you with some stingy amount of cash in exchange for your labor, and insists that you provide for yourself the things slaves used to get free from their masters. That way, the master can control his costs, better manage his profits and cut the slave loose if he or she becomes too much of a financial liability.
Capitalism isn't freedom, folks. It's institutionalized slavery being sold to the public as a "free market."
In large part we make stuff nobody really needs, then convince others to buy it to satisfy the corporate profit margin. Meanwhile, the stuff we do need to accomplish to ensure the long term success and happiness of our species - infrastructure repair, much better schools, quality medical care for all, sustainable and green housing and food sources, environmental protection and thoughtful resource stewardship, scientific exploration and genuine advancements in human health and well being - don't get done because we haven't figured out ways to make those things monetarily "profitable."
The concept of developing free, clean and renewable energy so people can tap the energy grid of the planet wherever they may be strikes FEAR in the hearts of the corporate system. Why? because if we can all get our energy for free, corporations can't profit off our energy need in perpetuity! Ditto foodstuffs - corporations don't want us collecting our own seeds and growing organic vegetables in the backyard, or raising our own chickens. They want centralized control - they demand centralized control before they invest in new systems - because that way they get to control the distribution, the supply and the price of what we produce.
What we used to call the "middleman," the broker between buyer and seller, has become the monster in the system. The companies that act as middlemen now take advantage of both buyers and sellers, carving off massive pieces of the exchange for themselves in the process and calling that "profit." They're starving the feedback loop between buyers and sellers, hampering the evolution of human society by rendering us incapable of functioning without the middleman, and consolidating power to ensure they continue to expand their reach and capacity to seize ever larger pieces of the social pie. The largest middleman today is the financial services industry, which represents a full 40% of our GDP. What is the function of financial "services," but to match those who have money with those who need it? Yet over the years, that function has lost sight of its purpose as the companies now pay lenders (savers) almost nothing and in many cases charge them for the privilege of saving their money, then they turn around and charge borrowers exorbitant rates of interest (or refuse to lend to them at all) for the right to borrow money that isn't even theirs!
What we call the 'free market' has never been truly free. He who corners the supply can dictate the price, and he who encourages demand by making his product appear indispensable to the public will also profit. He who has little or no money (either by accident of birth or social circumstances) to influence the flow of goods and services gets no vote in what gets produced, in how scarce global resources get used or in how he gets to live and work in this life.
Hint: if you don't get to decide what you want to do with the richness of your own life, you are NOT a free being living in a free society. You're a slave, only one without the benefits of having a master provide your shelter, clothing, food and medical care. Instead, your master provides you with some stingy amount of cash in exchange for your labor, and insists that you provide for yourself the things slaves used to get free from their masters. That way, the master can control his costs, better manage his profits and cut the slave loose if he or she becomes too much of a financial liability.
Capitalism isn't freedom, folks. It's institutionalized slavery being sold to the public as a "free market."
Saturday, March 26, 2011
The Vast, FREE Energy Field That We Are
What I've been mulling lately is the fact that humanity itself has for eons been an energy commodity, one we've self-directed and used in service to whatever it is we desired to create. Our energy has gifted us the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame. It's gifted us a global library of wisdom that is overwhelming in its breadth and scope. It's gifted us telescopes and space ships, electron microscopes and super-colliders. It's produced technologies to make our lives better, and technologies so destructive we could ruin the ability of this planet to host complex life forms for many thousands of years. Human energy is, when we examine it from this perspective, a great beast of a resource, one that - if we cooperated - could be consciously directed and applied in service to whatever shared vision we chose to hold as a species. Never mind fossil fuels, wind energy, geothermal or solar power; the greatest energy pool available to us is humanity itself. That's because solar, wind and fossil fuels can't think. They aren't creative, they don't know beauty, they can't feel what we feel, know what we know, love what we love or desire what we desire to create. While we can still steward them in support of our visions and ingenious designs, they can't produce those dreams on our behalf. Only we can do that.
For thousands of years, it seems that what we've chosen to create using our vast and growing repository of human creativity and physical energy has been a society that services the desires and whims of a wealthy few, whose happiness is attained by purchasing the energy and output of many, many others. In essence, that's because we've been selling our time and physical labor to the highest bidder, in exchange for the cash we need to purchase the products of other people's labor and creative output (energy = reward.) This arrangement has led to constant imbalances between the haves and the have nots, because in every era some few people have been able to capitalize more fully on what they had to offer in comparison to the offerings of others. They found themselves at the right time, in the right place, with the right idea to resolve the right challenge, and connected with just the right people to help them create it. Whatever it was that enabled the output of one person's creative energy to be desired by many, it's clear that a few humans in every generation have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, while the rest of the people struggled to put in their time and take out whatever they could get in exchange for their own hard work. The fundamental inequity in that system is that whenever someone comes up with something new that happily advances the whole of human civilization, our system rewards them with material wealth far beyond their capacity to spend it in a given lifetime. As more and more inventions explode on the scene, more and more material wealth gets bestowed on those few lucky persons. Because there's a limit to how much material wealth exists on this planet, while the human race can expand and reproduce indefinitely, we've lately run into trouble with that formula for success.
This defines the economic system we devised thousands of years ago when material wealth seemed infinite, much of the planet was still an unexplored mystery and the human population was but a fraction of what it now is. That system has not only caused imbalance, it's led to multi-generational imbalances, because monetary wealth (unlike stores of grain or cattle that rot and die) could be passed down from parent to child. Children of the wealthy quickly began to apply a whole new economic formula that trumped energy = reward. They found they could use the power of their inherited wealth to purchase whatever they wanted in the open market without having to invest their own energy in productive social pursuits (money = power.) Centuries ago we labeled such people royalty. Today they're simply called the upper class. In any case, for as long as we've employed an energy = reward system, it's fostered a division between those who daily have to sell enough of their energy to provide for their own survival, and those who do not. Of late the imbalance between these two classes has widened precipitously. It's gotten so bad that we're facing imminent social and economic collapse, because the billions of people who today need to sell their daily energy can no longer find buyers who will pay them what it takes for them to survive.
Technology is partly responsible for the fix we're in. Where technology has taken us over the past few hundred years is into a mechanical replacement cycle. Fossil fuels are now being fed into machines that, in turn, replace human energy in the production process. Machines don't demand wages, benefits, have medical issues or family problems or negative attitudes. They don't question authority, and they don't wonder why they're creating what they're producing. Fixing a machine when it breaks down is much simpler than dealing with a person and all their feelings, needs and wants. When we retire a machine we can throw it away without mercy or compassion, or take it apart and recycle its many parts.
In a post-industrial society, human energy is now no longer as necessary for the production of goods and services as it once was. We even measure that by tracking what's called "productivity." Productivity is a way of determining the amount of goods and services produced per man-hour of labor. As more and more products are produced using fewer and fewer man-hours, productivity increases. This is good news for producers since it increases their profitability, but it's bad news for humanity, which needs to sell more of its man-hours so it can pay its societal bills. Meanwhile, the pool of human energy (which translates into man-hours) has grown huge over the years - we now have nearly seven billion people on this planet! That means human energy, which is in lower demand, has been getting cheaper than even the price of fossil fuels. This increased competition to sell human energy to fill the few remaining slots where human energy is still required for production or service has driven down the price of human energy on the open market. Additionally, globalization has enabled businesses to seek out the absolute cheapest human energy pools and draw upon them to produce the goods they create. Unconsciously then, we've elevated the value of using technology to cheaply produce goods and services above the value of caring for the human lives that are supposed to consume those goods and services.
This imbalance is unsustainable. Not only because it cheapens human life, but because in the long run, the energy = reward formula entirely breaks down as the imbalance between the haves and the have nots widens. When people are denied the opportunity to input their energy into society via the open market, they are likewise denied the opportunity to earn monetary rewards. And what are those rewards, but cash prizes (allowances, really) that enable us to pay our mortgages, purchase cars, buy energy, food and clothing, provide education and medical care for our families - all of which ARE the products and services being offered for sale by the for-profit business establishment?
The are really only two ways around this systemic breakdown without redesigning the entire system. The first is to outright gift money to the people who can't get jobs, so they can infuse that cash into the for-profit engine and keep the machinery running and themselves alive. This is often derisively called, "the nanny state." The second option is for businesses (and the wealthy people who run them) to bypass serving most human needs altogether, mainly by making products that other corporations need and that governments will purchase, or by making products that primarily serve the needs of the very rich. An example would be the continuous production of new war machinery, which governments can then use to blow up other countries' war machinery, along with those expendable people who aren't contributing much to their society anyhow. Governments can then contract with the weapons companies and pay them to make more of the destroyed war machinery, only this time better and stronger, thereby keeping the business "economy" running. Where budget cuts occur in this type of corporate state are in the arenas of public health, education and welfare, as well as the arts and other human services that the jobless folks can't pay for anymore. The general population in such a state is provided only with as much as people need to barely survive so they can continue to energize the ongoing production of war machinery, and nothing more. Another example of how this type of state functions would be through a stock market and banking system where the wealthy can buy and sell each others' holdings and try to make even more money off of each other by using the money they've already made, without offering any new products or services to the general public. When companies in this kind of state do offer a service to the public, it's usually grudgingly, for their survival needs alone, and on such onerous terms it enables companies to bleed as much free cash as possible from a struggling, stressed population without offering them much value in return.
Until we first realize this is exactly the kind of state that we're creating, and that the political battle being waged today is a war of values between the nanny state and the corporate state - neither of which serve humanity's long term interests - we can't fix it. When enough of us do realize it, painful as it may be to accept the unvarnished truth, we will likely need to redesign our entire economic paradigm. The old energy = reward formula clearly cannot hold, since it already failed us in the past. Meanwhile, it's getting clearer all the time that the money = power formula is only increasing our social imbalance and creating more suffering. So then, what formula might we wish to consciously adopt to replace those outmoded equations?
I would humbly suggest we go with something like wisdom = value added. Unless we end the practice of materially rewarding people (paying them allowances) in exchange for their physical effort and instead begin to celebrate the wondrous, diverse and unique creative capacity that is contained within every human life, our species is likely to continue to suffer, struggle and experience stress. The thing is, even while our supply of fossil fuels is running dangerously low and we're discovering the risks of nuclear fission, we still have plenty of energy available to us - it's called human creativity, ingenuity, talent, skill and physical ability. Wisdom, which emerges from the sum totality of every individual life experience, seems to be something we can produce in infinite supply as we employ our human energy for the sake of our own evolution. To value and nurture what we can produce in seemingly infinite supply (wisdom) means we can create eternal value added so long as we thrive. In a very real sense, humanity has the innate capacity to become a self-designing perpetual motion machine, utilizing the wisdom gleaned from past generations and all their trial and error experiments - combined with the energy, ingenuity and creative capacity of the people alive in the present - to construct an ever-better platform for new generations to then build upon. Right now, we have on this planet seven billion amazingly diverse minds and bodies that carry within them a vast potential to contribute the best of what they are to the world at large. We're just tragically wasting much of that energy, allowing people the world over to suffer and die unloved, unsupported and unappreciated, because we think we no longer "need" their human labor to earn a profit.
So here's the deeper question we may wish to answer: For what purpose are we focusing on earning a financial profit, if not to better the world in which we live so that all of us can thrive, ourselves included? What good will all our money be if we don't create and maintain a healthy, stable human society? And because happiness is a huge factor in maintaining human health and stability, shouldn't we be supporting the expansion of happiness in everyone?
Perhaps one solution to the imbalance that presently threatens to topple modern society is to cease perceiving ourselves (and each other) as mere energy units to be bought and sold, or as liabilities or assets on some vast global business accounting statement. Perhaps the solution lies in remembering who and what we are - living, feeling, reasoning creatures within a vast living ecosystem - and then asking ourselves why it was that we started evolving and building societies to begin with. Was it to ensure that everyone on the planet would be endlessly enslaved to a monetary for-profit paradigm (energy = reward?) Or was it so we could personally suck all the juice out of life at the expense of everything else (money = power?) Or was it, perhaps, to help everyone and everything alive live better, feel better and become the best they can be as they mature, so we can all benefit from what everyone and everything else has to offer?
Perhaps we'll never know what the original intent of societal construction was when it first began, but surely we can thoughtfully consider what we'd like it to become - what feels best for us to create in the here and now - and then aim for that.
For thousands of years, it seems that what we've chosen to create using our vast and growing repository of human creativity and physical energy has been a society that services the desires and whims of a wealthy few, whose happiness is attained by purchasing the energy and output of many, many others. In essence, that's because we've been selling our time and physical labor to the highest bidder, in exchange for the cash we need to purchase the products of other people's labor and creative output (energy = reward.) This arrangement has led to constant imbalances between the haves and the have nots, because in every era some few people have been able to capitalize more fully on what they had to offer in comparison to the offerings of others. They found themselves at the right time, in the right place, with the right idea to resolve the right challenge, and connected with just the right people to help them create it. Whatever it was that enabled the output of one person's creative energy to be desired by many, it's clear that a few humans in every generation have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, while the rest of the people struggled to put in their time and take out whatever they could get in exchange for their own hard work. The fundamental inequity in that system is that whenever someone comes up with something new that happily advances the whole of human civilization, our system rewards them with material wealth far beyond their capacity to spend it in a given lifetime. As more and more inventions explode on the scene, more and more material wealth gets bestowed on those few lucky persons. Because there's a limit to how much material wealth exists on this planet, while the human race can expand and reproduce indefinitely, we've lately run into trouble with that formula for success.
This defines the economic system we devised thousands of years ago when material wealth seemed infinite, much of the planet was still an unexplored mystery and the human population was but a fraction of what it now is. That system has not only caused imbalance, it's led to multi-generational imbalances, because monetary wealth (unlike stores of grain or cattle that rot and die) could be passed down from parent to child. Children of the wealthy quickly began to apply a whole new economic formula that trumped energy = reward. They found they could use the power of their inherited wealth to purchase whatever they wanted in the open market without having to invest their own energy in productive social pursuits (money = power.) Centuries ago we labeled such people royalty. Today they're simply called the upper class. In any case, for as long as we've employed an energy = reward system, it's fostered a division between those who daily have to sell enough of their energy to provide for their own survival, and those who do not. Of late the imbalance between these two classes has widened precipitously. It's gotten so bad that we're facing imminent social and economic collapse, because the billions of people who today need to sell their daily energy can no longer find buyers who will pay them what it takes for them to survive.
Technology is partly responsible for the fix we're in. Where technology has taken us over the past few hundred years is into a mechanical replacement cycle. Fossil fuels are now being fed into machines that, in turn, replace human energy in the production process. Machines don't demand wages, benefits, have medical issues or family problems or negative attitudes. They don't question authority, and they don't wonder why they're creating what they're producing. Fixing a machine when it breaks down is much simpler than dealing with a person and all their feelings, needs and wants. When we retire a machine we can throw it away without mercy or compassion, or take it apart and recycle its many parts.
In a post-industrial society, human energy is now no longer as necessary for the production of goods and services as it once was. We even measure that by tracking what's called "productivity." Productivity is a way of determining the amount of goods and services produced per man-hour of labor. As more and more products are produced using fewer and fewer man-hours, productivity increases. This is good news for producers since it increases their profitability, but it's bad news for humanity, which needs to sell more of its man-hours so it can pay its societal bills. Meanwhile, the pool of human energy (which translates into man-hours) has grown huge over the years - we now have nearly seven billion people on this planet! That means human energy, which is in lower demand, has been getting cheaper than even the price of fossil fuels. This increased competition to sell human energy to fill the few remaining slots where human energy is still required for production or service has driven down the price of human energy on the open market. Additionally, globalization has enabled businesses to seek out the absolute cheapest human energy pools and draw upon them to produce the goods they create. Unconsciously then, we've elevated the value of using technology to cheaply produce goods and services above the value of caring for the human lives that are supposed to consume those goods and services.
This imbalance is unsustainable. Not only because it cheapens human life, but because in the long run, the energy = reward formula entirely breaks down as the imbalance between the haves and the have nots widens. When people are denied the opportunity to input their energy into society via the open market, they are likewise denied the opportunity to earn monetary rewards. And what are those rewards, but cash prizes (allowances, really) that enable us to pay our mortgages, purchase cars, buy energy, food and clothing, provide education and medical care for our families - all of which ARE the products and services being offered for sale by the for-profit business establishment?
The are really only two ways around this systemic breakdown without redesigning the entire system. The first is to outright gift money to the people who can't get jobs, so they can infuse that cash into the for-profit engine and keep the machinery running and themselves alive. This is often derisively called, "the nanny state." The second option is for businesses (and the wealthy people who run them) to bypass serving most human needs altogether, mainly by making products that other corporations need and that governments will purchase, or by making products that primarily serve the needs of the very rich. An example would be the continuous production of new war machinery, which governments can then use to blow up other countries' war machinery, along with those expendable people who aren't contributing much to their society anyhow. Governments can then contract with the weapons companies and pay them to make more of the destroyed war machinery, only this time better and stronger, thereby keeping the business "economy" running. Where budget cuts occur in this type of corporate state are in the arenas of public health, education and welfare, as well as the arts and other human services that the jobless folks can't pay for anymore. The general population in such a state is provided only with as much as people need to barely survive so they can continue to energize the ongoing production of war machinery, and nothing more. Another example of how this type of state functions would be through a stock market and banking system where the wealthy can buy and sell each others' holdings and try to make even more money off of each other by using the money they've already made, without offering any new products or services to the general public. When companies in this kind of state do offer a service to the public, it's usually grudgingly, for their survival needs alone, and on such onerous terms it enables companies to bleed as much free cash as possible from a struggling, stressed population without offering them much value in return.
Until we first realize this is exactly the kind of state that we're creating, and that the political battle being waged today is a war of values between the nanny state and the corporate state - neither of which serve humanity's long term interests - we can't fix it. When enough of us do realize it, painful as it may be to accept the unvarnished truth, we will likely need to redesign our entire economic paradigm. The old energy = reward formula clearly cannot hold, since it already failed us in the past. Meanwhile, it's getting clearer all the time that the money = power formula is only increasing our social imbalance and creating more suffering. So then, what formula might we wish to consciously adopt to replace those outmoded equations?
I would humbly suggest we go with something like wisdom = value added. Unless we end the practice of materially rewarding people (paying them allowances) in exchange for their physical effort and instead begin to celebrate the wondrous, diverse and unique creative capacity that is contained within every human life, our species is likely to continue to suffer, struggle and experience stress. The thing is, even while our supply of fossil fuels is running dangerously low and we're discovering the risks of nuclear fission, we still have plenty of energy available to us - it's called human creativity, ingenuity, talent, skill and physical ability. Wisdom, which emerges from the sum totality of every individual life experience, seems to be something we can produce in infinite supply as we employ our human energy for the sake of our own evolution. To value and nurture what we can produce in seemingly infinite supply (wisdom) means we can create eternal value added so long as we thrive. In a very real sense, humanity has the innate capacity to become a self-designing perpetual motion machine, utilizing the wisdom gleaned from past generations and all their trial and error experiments - combined with the energy, ingenuity and creative capacity of the people alive in the present - to construct an ever-better platform for new generations to then build upon. Right now, we have on this planet seven billion amazingly diverse minds and bodies that carry within them a vast potential to contribute the best of what they are to the world at large. We're just tragically wasting much of that energy, allowing people the world over to suffer and die unloved, unsupported and unappreciated, because we think we no longer "need" their human labor to earn a profit.
So here's the deeper question we may wish to answer: For what purpose are we focusing on earning a financial profit, if not to better the world in which we live so that all of us can thrive, ourselves included? What good will all our money be if we don't create and maintain a healthy, stable human society? And because happiness is a huge factor in maintaining human health and stability, shouldn't we be supporting the expansion of happiness in everyone?
Perhaps one solution to the imbalance that presently threatens to topple modern society is to cease perceiving ourselves (and each other) as mere energy units to be bought and sold, or as liabilities or assets on some vast global business accounting statement. Perhaps the solution lies in remembering who and what we are - living, feeling, reasoning creatures within a vast living ecosystem - and then asking ourselves why it was that we started evolving and building societies to begin with. Was it to ensure that everyone on the planet would be endlessly enslaved to a monetary for-profit paradigm (energy = reward?) Or was it so we could personally suck all the juice out of life at the expense of everything else (money = power?) Or was it, perhaps, to help everyone and everything alive live better, feel better and become the best they can be as they mature, so we can all benefit from what everyone and everything else has to offer?
Perhaps we'll never know what the original intent of societal construction was when it first began, but surely we can thoughtfully consider what we'd like it to become - what feels best for us to create in the here and now - and then aim for that.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Power of Perspective
It's easy to look around today and notice that our world is filled with chaos. State sponsored violence is on the rise in many parts of the world. All over this planet people are starving and dying, natural disasters are disrupting things, climate is changing, species are disappearing, resources are being rapidly depleted and civilization is quaking from massive shifts in human behavior.
Many of our traditional religious teachings inform us that humanity is in some sense broken, that we're atoning for the sins of our past human failings. The laws of karma and original sin are examples of such teachings. From the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve's consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a story most Muslims, Christians and Jews alike grew up hearing and believing. It teaches us that mankind disobeyed god's command to accept his law without question, thereby triggering a cascade of tragic life events that are still reverberating in our world today. That's why, whenever a global tragedy strikes, we hear biblical literalists describing the event as god wreaking vengeance upon humanity for having violated one of his laws. Now I don't know about you, but that description of humanity's relationship with god as one of a naughty child who's being punished has never felt to me like it's the truth. It's uninspiring, and it makes my heart clench with fear and guilt instead of expand with gratitude and love.
Meanwhile, I've noticed that our modern scientific teachings feel equally uninspiring. Scientists scramble constantly to design new mathematical formulas (or beef up the old ones) to explain the fascinating new things we're observing, but much of what they've been doing for the past fifty years has added little of genuine value to the compendium of human wisdom. If I discover a color I've never seen before and give it the name "lefleus," what have I actually learned about the nature of the color? Or about how colors work, or why they arise, or how they're all connected to each other? My sense of modern theoretical physics is that it's long been doing just that - creating complex mathematical equations and slapping them down like names on what we're observing - without really explaining what we're seeing or how the cosmos fits together.
After years of trying to reconcile the world's spiritual and intellectual teachings with my own experiences and observations of life, I've discovered that for me to feel happy and my heart to be at peace I must continually shape (and reshape) my own perspective of what and how I imagine this world to be, and then live according to my own realizations. Because my observations, feelings and life experiences too often contradicted what I'd been told to believe was true, the constant confusion I experienced had created within me a powerful cognitive dissonance that made me unhappy and downright mentally ill. That meant I either had to start trusting myself and my own sense of things, or else I had to accept without question the things other people wanted me to believe.
Tough call. Who was I to imagine I might better be able to understand and define my place in the cosmos than all the amazing gurus, avatars, thinkers and doers that have walked this world before me? Wasn't it true they were the smartest, most brilliantly innovative, most spiritually "tapped in" people who ever lived? Some have even been labeled gods and are worshiped by millions today. Then again, how did they get to be that way? By accepting everything they'd been taught without question, or by making the second choice - the harder choice - to trust themselves to be able to set out on a journey of intellectual inquiry and spiritual self-discovery and ultimately find a way home? What each of them had in common, I realized, was that they'd somehow found within themselves enough courage to trust in their own capacities. That empowered them to decide for themselves how they wished to perceive their singular precious life. Later, as their perceptions grew more clear, they then figured out how to expand that understanding through the broader lens of our shared humanity, so that others might find the courage within to embark upon their own journeys.
The moment I accepted my own truth - that I quite simply didn't believe a lot of the things I'd been taught since I was a child - I realized I needed to invest a lot more time in contemplation, study and actual experience of this mystery in which I am embedded. I also discovered, after much frustration and effort, that there exists a significant gap between what I know to be true about life when I'm in the thick of it (simply being) and what I'm able to say about it when I try to describe or define my experience in ways that other people can understand. I began to notice very quickly how many people seemed positively eager to argue with me over the descriptions of life I put forth, as if they could negate the truth of my experiences by challenging the language I used to describe them. What that's taught me is how to listen carefully and respectfully to others so I can hear how they are describing their own experiences, and to discern whether they're describing something that's similar to my own understanding using slightly different language, or if they're describing a life experience that's different from my own. I've found I can learn much from either situation without making anyone else's descriptions or experiences "wrong." I've also learned it's easier not to try to discuss what I've experienced or defend the way I've chosen to describe it other than with those who are - like me - sincerely trying to appreciate this mystery we're all experiencing, and who aren't convinced they already have all the answers.
If you're wondering by now where I've come to after years of intensive focus on the question, "what is life?" let me share with you what I've come to understand, which is precious little! You're free to quarrel with these thoughts, expand on them, embrace those that resonate with you or discard them in favor of your own interpretation. I simply offer them by way of explanation of what I've been doing, and am not attached to any as absolute truths. I change my mind all the time these days rather than allow it to grow calcified around concepts I'm not entirely sure are true, and am happier for the experience of that!
As yet, all I can know with even the slightest degree of certainty is that - most of the time - I'm sincerely grateful to be alive, and that the life force that has both created and moves through me seems to be a unified field that creates, animates and activates everything in this cosmos. I've come to perceive birth and death as doorways for consciousness, and sense that the life force that moves through those doorways is a force that has no opposite. I know that my spirit soars when I experience beauty, and it feels awe when it honors the vastness and diversity of this cosmos. Whenever I feel anything less than a soaring awe for life, all I need do is step outside and look up. In fact, I’ve learned that, no matter where I am, when I’m fully conscious of and present to life I hold the power to invite my spirit to soar continuously, because I can notice beauty anywhere and feel awe whenever I cease thinking and simply stop to BE with all that is.
I know my heart sings when it feels love, whether through the giving or the receiving. I know that when my heart sings of love I feel that every step I take is an act of grace. I've discovered I hold the power to invite my heart to sing all the time by unconditionally loving what I encounter, because I carry love within me in a seemingly endless supply. Loving life has become an important part of my conscious daily practice, and it's helped me to love myself as well as all else.
I know my mind rejoices whenever it reaches a breakthrough understanding around something it didn't previously comprehend. I've found that the truth is never mundane, never boring, never uninspiring or fear provoking. In fact, only my questions provoke my fears, never the answers I'm given. I’ve realized I hold the power to rejoice constantly, because I've come to recognize and appreciate my own astounding level of ignorance, so I now know I have the capacity to be continuously surprised and endlessly delighted by the introduction of new ideas and understandings.
As for my physical body, it feels relaxed and at peace whenever my spirit, heart and mind are in aligned focus around my spirit's intention. I know that I hold the power to feel relaxed and be at peace in every moment, because I've learned how to consciously align my spirit, heart and mind. When those three aspects of my inner being are working well together - with my spirit setting the highest intention, my heart pointing in the most loving direction and my mind selecting the wisest and surest approach - my body will not hesitate to calmly and peacefully take the desired journey, wherever it leads.
That's about it - all I really know about life in a few paragraphs. Along the way I've had to let go of many longstanding, firm beliefs I once held around concepts like liberty, the pursuit of happiness, patriotism, freedom, the value of material comforts, democracy, hard work, the special nature of humans and so forth, because I found them to be confusing to hold with real integrity. Most of the time I found I couldn't align my spirit, heart and mind around how to fully express those values in every situation, and that instead I was investing an inordinate amount of time asking my mind to explain to the rest of me why I wasn't able to do so. The only value I've found I can hold and express with any consistent degree of integrity, where all of me can remain in perfect alignment, seems to be around the value of love. In every situation I encounter, I've discovered that - if I don't know what to do - I can always ask myself the question, "Is this loving?" before I say or do anything to impact the life of another living being, or even the planet itself. If the answer is yes, I can feel confident that whatever I'm about to say or do will serve the situation, and that all of me will agree with it so there will be no self-rebukes or mental wars of rationalization later on.
Lately I'm even beginning to let go of my cherished beliefs around the existence of any original human wound, or sin. I've begun to wonder if we've been told for so long that we're wounded beings and have caused (and continue to cause) deep wounding to others and to this world that we've come to believe without question that this is truly who we are, that our human nature is such that we'll never be whole, or well, or healed. I'm even beginning to suspect that the wounds I worked so hard to "heal" in my earlier years may well have been the products of my fevered imagination, beliefs I created about myself based on the stories I was told (as well as the many stories I told myself) about the nature of this world and what we humans have believed ourselves to be.
What I'm discovering, as I center more deeply in the intention and direction of life being offered up by my spirit, is that my spirit feels indestructible, indomitable, irrepressible and fully empowered to take what may be an eternal journey toward infinite self-perfection. I don't have a clue how long it may take to get there, how many colorful body suits my spirit may try on and cast off along the way, how many sensory capacities, life experiences and thought processes my spirit may choose to cloak itself in, or how many uniquely different life forms it may wish to encounter and engage, but I'm okay with not knowing all that at this point in my journey. I have to be!
Actually, I'm doing my best these days to stop asking questions of spirit or imagining anything, and to instead notice what IS and discover if I can bring more love to whatever I encounter. When I love whatever is I no longer feel wounded, or broken, or fearful, or less than I imagine I ought to be, because those thoughts and feelings seem to dissolve in the wondrous ocean of love that fills me up as I give it away. I've therefore come to embrace that I'm eternally evolving, not endlessly healing, and to love my growth instead of curse my brokenness.
So then, now that all these thoughts and words and feelings have been committed to paper: What IS life, exactly? I have to confess that in truth, I still don't know. Then again, perhaps we're not individually meant to know the entire truth of life so much as experience it in its infinite unfolding, and if so I'm okay with this truly amazing journey!
Many of our traditional religious teachings inform us that humanity is in some sense broken, that we're atoning for the sins of our past human failings. The laws of karma and original sin are examples of such teachings. From the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve's consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a story most Muslims, Christians and Jews alike grew up hearing and believing. It teaches us that mankind disobeyed god's command to accept his law without question, thereby triggering a cascade of tragic life events that are still reverberating in our world today. That's why, whenever a global tragedy strikes, we hear biblical literalists describing the event as god wreaking vengeance upon humanity for having violated one of his laws. Now I don't know about you, but that description of humanity's relationship with god as one of a naughty child who's being punished has never felt to me like it's the truth. It's uninspiring, and it makes my heart clench with fear and guilt instead of expand with gratitude and love.
Meanwhile, I've noticed that our modern scientific teachings feel equally uninspiring. Scientists scramble constantly to design new mathematical formulas (or beef up the old ones) to explain the fascinating new things we're observing, but much of what they've been doing for the past fifty years has added little of genuine value to the compendium of human wisdom. If I discover a color I've never seen before and give it the name "lefleus," what have I actually learned about the nature of the color? Or about how colors work, or why they arise, or how they're all connected to each other? My sense of modern theoretical physics is that it's long been doing just that - creating complex mathematical equations and slapping them down like names on what we're observing - without really explaining what we're seeing or how the cosmos fits together.
After years of trying to reconcile the world's spiritual and intellectual teachings with my own experiences and observations of life, I've discovered that for me to feel happy and my heart to be at peace I must continually shape (and reshape) my own perspective of what and how I imagine this world to be, and then live according to my own realizations. Because my observations, feelings and life experiences too often contradicted what I'd been told to believe was true, the constant confusion I experienced had created within me a powerful cognitive dissonance that made me unhappy and downright mentally ill. That meant I either had to start trusting myself and my own sense of things, or else I had to accept without question the things other people wanted me to believe.
Tough call. Who was I to imagine I might better be able to understand and define my place in the cosmos than all the amazing gurus, avatars, thinkers and doers that have walked this world before me? Wasn't it true they were the smartest, most brilliantly innovative, most spiritually "tapped in" people who ever lived? Some have even been labeled gods and are worshiped by millions today. Then again, how did they get to be that way? By accepting everything they'd been taught without question, or by making the second choice - the harder choice - to trust themselves to be able to set out on a journey of intellectual inquiry and spiritual self-discovery and ultimately find a way home? What each of them had in common, I realized, was that they'd somehow found within themselves enough courage to trust in their own capacities. That empowered them to decide for themselves how they wished to perceive their singular precious life. Later, as their perceptions grew more clear, they then figured out how to expand that understanding through the broader lens of our shared humanity, so that others might find the courage within to embark upon their own journeys.
The moment I accepted my own truth - that I quite simply didn't believe a lot of the things I'd been taught since I was a child - I realized I needed to invest a lot more time in contemplation, study and actual experience of this mystery in which I am embedded. I also discovered, after much frustration and effort, that there exists a significant gap between what I know to be true about life when I'm in the thick of it (simply being) and what I'm able to say about it when I try to describe or define my experience in ways that other people can understand. I began to notice very quickly how many people seemed positively eager to argue with me over the descriptions of life I put forth, as if they could negate the truth of my experiences by challenging the language I used to describe them. What that's taught me is how to listen carefully and respectfully to others so I can hear how they are describing their own experiences, and to discern whether they're describing something that's similar to my own understanding using slightly different language, or if they're describing a life experience that's different from my own. I've found I can learn much from either situation without making anyone else's descriptions or experiences "wrong." I've also learned it's easier not to try to discuss what I've experienced or defend the way I've chosen to describe it other than with those who are - like me - sincerely trying to appreciate this mystery we're all experiencing, and who aren't convinced they already have all the answers.
If you're wondering by now where I've come to after years of intensive focus on the question, "what is life?" let me share with you what I've come to understand, which is precious little! You're free to quarrel with these thoughts, expand on them, embrace those that resonate with you or discard them in favor of your own interpretation. I simply offer them by way of explanation of what I've been doing, and am not attached to any as absolute truths. I change my mind all the time these days rather than allow it to grow calcified around concepts I'm not entirely sure are true, and am happier for the experience of that!
As yet, all I can know with even the slightest degree of certainty is that - most of the time - I'm sincerely grateful to be alive, and that the life force that has both created and moves through me seems to be a unified field that creates, animates and activates everything in this cosmos. I've come to perceive birth and death as doorways for consciousness, and sense that the life force that moves through those doorways is a force that has no opposite. I know that my spirit soars when I experience beauty, and it feels awe when it honors the vastness and diversity of this cosmos. Whenever I feel anything less than a soaring awe for life, all I need do is step outside and look up. In fact, I’ve learned that, no matter where I am, when I’m fully conscious of and present to life I hold the power to invite my spirit to soar continuously, because I can notice beauty anywhere and feel awe whenever I cease thinking and simply stop to BE with all that is.
I know my heart sings when it feels love, whether through the giving or the receiving. I know that when my heart sings of love I feel that every step I take is an act of grace. I've discovered I hold the power to invite my heart to sing all the time by unconditionally loving what I encounter, because I carry love within me in a seemingly endless supply. Loving life has become an important part of my conscious daily practice, and it's helped me to love myself as well as all else.
I know my mind rejoices whenever it reaches a breakthrough understanding around something it didn't previously comprehend. I've found that the truth is never mundane, never boring, never uninspiring or fear provoking. In fact, only my questions provoke my fears, never the answers I'm given. I’ve realized I hold the power to rejoice constantly, because I've come to recognize and appreciate my own astounding level of ignorance, so I now know I have the capacity to be continuously surprised and endlessly delighted by the introduction of new ideas and understandings.
As for my physical body, it feels relaxed and at peace whenever my spirit, heart and mind are in aligned focus around my spirit's intention. I know that I hold the power to feel relaxed and be at peace in every moment, because I've learned how to consciously align my spirit, heart and mind. When those three aspects of my inner being are working well together - with my spirit setting the highest intention, my heart pointing in the most loving direction and my mind selecting the wisest and surest approach - my body will not hesitate to calmly and peacefully take the desired journey, wherever it leads.
That's about it - all I really know about life in a few paragraphs. Along the way I've had to let go of many longstanding, firm beliefs I once held around concepts like liberty, the pursuit of happiness, patriotism, freedom, the value of material comforts, democracy, hard work, the special nature of humans and so forth, because I found them to be confusing to hold with real integrity. Most of the time I found I couldn't align my spirit, heart and mind around how to fully express those values in every situation, and that instead I was investing an inordinate amount of time asking my mind to explain to the rest of me why I wasn't able to do so. The only value I've found I can hold and express with any consistent degree of integrity, where all of me can remain in perfect alignment, seems to be around the value of love. In every situation I encounter, I've discovered that - if I don't know what to do - I can always ask myself the question, "Is this loving?" before I say or do anything to impact the life of another living being, or even the planet itself. If the answer is yes, I can feel confident that whatever I'm about to say or do will serve the situation, and that all of me will agree with it so there will be no self-rebukes or mental wars of rationalization later on.
Lately I'm even beginning to let go of my cherished beliefs around the existence of any original human wound, or sin. I've begun to wonder if we've been told for so long that we're wounded beings and have caused (and continue to cause) deep wounding to others and to this world that we've come to believe without question that this is truly who we are, that our human nature is such that we'll never be whole, or well, or healed. I'm even beginning to suspect that the wounds I worked so hard to "heal" in my earlier years may well have been the products of my fevered imagination, beliefs I created about myself based on the stories I was told (as well as the many stories I told myself) about the nature of this world and what we humans have believed ourselves to be.
What I'm discovering, as I center more deeply in the intention and direction of life being offered up by my spirit, is that my spirit feels indestructible, indomitable, irrepressible and fully empowered to take what may be an eternal journey toward infinite self-perfection. I don't have a clue how long it may take to get there, how many colorful body suits my spirit may try on and cast off along the way, how many sensory capacities, life experiences and thought processes my spirit may choose to cloak itself in, or how many uniquely different life forms it may wish to encounter and engage, but I'm okay with not knowing all that at this point in my journey. I have to be!
Actually, I'm doing my best these days to stop asking questions of spirit or imagining anything, and to instead notice what IS and discover if I can bring more love to whatever I encounter. When I love whatever is I no longer feel wounded, or broken, or fearful, or less than I imagine I ought to be, because those thoughts and feelings seem to dissolve in the wondrous ocean of love that fills me up as I give it away. I've therefore come to embrace that I'm eternally evolving, not endlessly healing, and to love my growth instead of curse my brokenness.
So then, now that all these thoughts and words and feelings have been committed to paper: What IS life, exactly? I have to confess that in truth, I still don't know. Then again, perhaps we're not individually meant to know the entire truth of life so much as experience it in its infinite unfolding, and if so I'm okay with this truly amazing journey!
Friday, March 11, 2011
When Propaganda Fails, It Fails Spectacularly!
I admit, I used to get angry. Now though, I'm starting to laugh whenever I hear the absurd propaganda messages coming out of the mouths of Limbaugh, Beck and so many others - including many of our politicians. The thing is, you can only tell the poor it's their own fault they're poor for so long. We've been doing that for decades now, effectively enough that most of the poor who were born poor have been made the scapegoats of the middle and upper classes. We've all been trained to blame the poor for being a drag on our economy, for crime, for the moral decay of our nation and for hampering our ability to "keep up" with the rest of the world. It's been a media campaign of hatred and division that has created some remarkable results, not the least of which is that it's obscured the ongoing, thirty-year confiscation of wealth by the power elite that's been happening right under our noses in this nation.
A problem arises though, because the elite don't know when to stop. The idea that "enough is enough" seems not to cross their greedy minds. And so it is that many new and clever wealth confiscation policies - implemented by the power elite - have lately begun to render poor the entire middle class. They've done so by systematically reducing the value of middle class homes, binding people to underwater mortgages, reducing average wages and benefits, increasing monthly costs for basics like food, energy and education, and offshoring jobs so workers must compete more fiercely with each other and have an even harder time making ends meet. While doing all that, the elite propaganda message that the poor are responsible for their own situation - accompanied as it is by the message that poverty represents a personal moral failing - has been ratcheted up within the right wing media.
What the elite, who are financially supporting this message by taking control of the mainstream media outlets, have failed to realize, however, is that the educated and hard-working people who are suddenly finding themselves poor as a result of predatory corporate activity, corruption in the entire banking/financial system and the elite's callous disregard for their workers' quality of life aren't pushovers. The former middle classes (including those who are still just managing to hold on) are presently waking up to the fact they KNOW they're not really to blame for their financial struggles and stress. And if they're not to blame for their own misfortune as is now being proposed by the elite, than the question that must arise in them - quite naturally - is whether perhaps those "other" poor people (whom the middle class have been blaming for decades as a result of the media propaganda machine) may also not be to blame for their poverty and misfortune.
These two former enemy classes have been pitted against each other for decades because the wealthy - rather than caring for the needs of the poor themselves or uplifting them out of poverty - have forced the struggling middle class (through modern regressive tax policies) to grudgingly provide necessities for the poor. As these two former enemy classes now unite in opposition to the pyramidical, financially based power structure that ruthlessly oppresses us all, they're producing amazing results - PEOPLE POWER!
United, the suffering create an enormous force that the outnumbered elite cannot control. Nor can the elite afford to physically destroy the masses through the use of military force, since the elite count on those masses to labor in the businesses that produce and support their luxurious way of life. Not to mention the fact that most military personnel, courtesy of the "all volunteer army" are the children of the poor and working class. They're highly unlikely to attack their families and friends in the streets where they live.
The more absurd and hypocritical the right wing propaganda gets, the more obvious it becomes that their arguments have no moral center. As more and more people grasp the true intent of the propaganda - which is what happened recently in Wisconsin - the more likely it is we're approaching a social eruption point. Frankly, what would be more worrisome to me than a continued ratcheting up of the lies and rhetoric would be belated attempts by the wealthy to "give back" tiny amounts of wealth to the masses to appease them temporarily. Thankfully, the greedy can't seem to find it in their frozen hearts to care enough about the plights of others to do that, as was proved by the recent demands for additional tax cuts for the wealthy. Even the political progressives, who support limited redistribution of wealth because they believe it will help to stabilize the overarching system, can't seem to convince the greedy to part with their plunder.
The ongoing and expanding confiscation of what is, in reality, our national wealth and resources, demands a massive counter-response from those from whom this wealth has been confiscated to forge a new and dynamic social equilibrium. The farther the scales of power and wealth continue to tip toward the very wealthy few, the more likely it is that the reactive energy from the growing ranks of those who are suffering will be volcanic, and will cause a social upheaval that won't be easily reversed.
The good news is, humanity is in dire need of a brand new social order. The best thing that could happen to us would be for us to gain an opportunity to design a world that is grounded in a win/win paradigm. That would enable us to consciously set a shared vision for what it is we want humanity to achieve, and to aim for that. Such a world would be founded on principles of regenerative and sustainable living, environmental and species preservation, less labor and more creative and scientific exploration, more harmony and cooperation and less cutthroat competition, an accumulation of wisdom instead of material possessions, and generosity of spirit rather than personal hoarding, fear and greed. Our achievement of that vision would depend upon the establishment of a vibrant, creative, empathetic and healthy human society that freely supports and willingly provides for human self-actualization and then elicits the grateful contribution of ALL its self-realized individuals, rather than one that promotes power and wealth for a lucky few and willfully ignores the suffering of all others.
I happen to believe that for humanity to survive, for us to overcome the many self-created challenges we face as a species today, we need to put an end to many millenia of win/lose human behavior. So I'm no longer interested in protecting the wealthy from the follies of their own choices, though I will continue to try to mitigate suffering wherever I encounter it in person. Even so, I sense we've already passed the tipping point, so when it comes to the coming social revolution I say...bring it on! Let's see what we can design with a higher vision for the greater good. Let's do so for the sake of future generations, as well as for all of life on this beautiful planet.
A problem arises though, because the elite don't know when to stop. The idea that "enough is enough" seems not to cross their greedy minds. And so it is that many new and clever wealth confiscation policies - implemented by the power elite - have lately begun to render poor the entire middle class. They've done so by systematically reducing the value of middle class homes, binding people to underwater mortgages, reducing average wages and benefits, increasing monthly costs for basics like food, energy and education, and offshoring jobs so workers must compete more fiercely with each other and have an even harder time making ends meet. While doing all that, the elite propaganda message that the poor are responsible for their own situation - accompanied as it is by the message that poverty represents a personal moral failing - has been ratcheted up within the right wing media.
What the elite, who are financially supporting this message by taking control of the mainstream media outlets, have failed to realize, however, is that the educated and hard-working people who are suddenly finding themselves poor as a result of predatory corporate activity, corruption in the entire banking/financial system and the elite's callous disregard for their workers' quality of life aren't pushovers. The former middle classes (including those who are still just managing to hold on) are presently waking up to the fact they KNOW they're not really to blame for their financial struggles and stress. And if they're not to blame for their own misfortune as is now being proposed by the elite, than the question that must arise in them - quite naturally - is whether perhaps those "other" poor people (whom the middle class have been blaming for decades as a result of the media propaganda machine) may also not be to blame for their poverty and misfortune.
These two former enemy classes have been pitted against each other for decades because the wealthy - rather than caring for the needs of the poor themselves or uplifting them out of poverty - have forced the struggling middle class (through modern regressive tax policies) to grudgingly provide necessities for the poor. As these two former enemy classes now unite in opposition to the pyramidical, financially based power structure that ruthlessly oppresses us all, they're producing amazing results - PEOPLE POWER!
United, the suffering create an enormous force that the outnumbered elite cannot control. Nor can the elite afford to physically destroy the masses through the use of military force, since the elite count on those masses to labor in the businesses that produce and support their luxurious way of life. Not to mention the fact that most military personnel, courtesy of the "all volunteer army" are the children of the poor and working class. They're highly unlikely to attack their families and friends in the streets where they live.
The more absurd and hypocritical the right wing propaganda gets, the more obvious it becomes that their arguments have no moral center. As more and more people grasp the true intent of the propaganda - which is what happened recently in Wisconsin - the more likely it is we're approaching a social eruption point. Frankly, what would be more worrisome to me than a continued ratcheting up of the lies and rhetoric would be belated attempts by the wealthy to "give back" tiny amounts of wealth to the masses to appease them temporarily. Thankfully, the greedy can't seem to find it in their frozen hearts to care enough about the plights of others to do that, as was proved by the recent demands for additional tax cuts for the wealthy. Even the political progressives, who support limited redistribution of wealth because they believe it will help to stabilize the overarching system, can't seem to convince the greedy to part with their plunder.
The ongoing and expanding confiscation of what is, in reality, our national wealth and resources, demands a massive counter-response from those from whom this wealth has been confiscated to forge a new and dynamic social equilibrium. The farther the scales of power and wealth continue to tip toward the very wealthy few, the more likely it is that the reactive energy from the growing ranks of those who are suffering will be volcanic, and will cause a social upheaval that won't be easily reversed.
The good news is, humanity is in dire need of a brand new social order. The best thing that could happen to us would be for us to gain an opportunity to design a world that is grounded in a win/win paradigm. That would enable us to consciously set a shared vision for what it is we want humanity to achieve, and to aim for that. Such a world would be founded on principles of regenerative and sustainable living, environmental and species preservation, less labor and more creative and scientific exploration, more harmony and cooperation and less cutthroat competition, an accumulation of wisdom instead of material possessions, and generosity of spirit rather than personal hoarding, fear and greed. Our achievement of that vision would depend upon the establishment of a vibrant, creative, empathetic and healthy human society that freely supports and willingly provides for human self-actualization and then elicits the grateful contribution of ALL its self-realized individuals, rather than one that promotes power and wealth for a lucky few and willfully ignores the suffering of all others.
I happen to believe that for humanity to survive, for us to overcome the many self-created challenges we face as a species today, we need to put an end to many millenia of win/lose human behavior. So I'm no longer interested in protecting the wealthy from the follies of their own choices, though I will continue to try to mitigate suffering wherever I encounter it in person. Even so, I sense we've already passed the tipping point, so when it comes to the coming social revolution I say...bring it on! Let's see what we can design with a higher vision for the greater good. Let's do so for the sake of future generations, as well as for all of life on this beautiful planet.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
When Waves Collide
What we're witnessing now is no less than an energetic collision of two major waves of human evolution, one receding and one just now arising. I exhort us all to rejoice in this, because although it means we're presently caught in a swirl of chaos and conflict, the opportunity is arising for us to catch the new wave and begin to ride the leading edge of a massive change in the way we "do" human society.
The outgoing wave is represented by the power/dominator culture that has controlled human behavior for many thousands of years. The disintegration of this wave, which began over a century ago when angry citizens began to overthrow their oppressive monarchies, continues unabated. We've recently witnessed its expansion throughout the Middle East as dictator after dictator falls to the public outcry against tyranny. Because in the early part of this global revolution people didn't know how to create a non-dominator culture, the first rebels who overthrew their oppressors eventually repeated the mistakes made by their predecessors. The new governments that arose purported to be populist systems, but eventually they all fell back into old, unconscious patterns of dominating and controlling the many for the benefit of the powerful few. I include the United States in that assessment, because while our Founding Fathers had the foresight to envision and design a populist system, our government long ago ceased acting as a true democracy and has instead become a corporatocracy. The national agenda is now being controlled by the wealthy elite, who use manufactured lack and campaigns of fear to cow the suffering masses into submission. The recent Supreme Court decision that allowed businesses to fund political campaigns simply codified the silent overthrow of democracy that has been occurring beneath the surface for many years. Business interests now dictate to politicians what they wish to see occur. Our current crop of political puppets - particularly those who rose to power post the Citizens United decision - are allowing their strings to be pulled by these hidden overseers in exchange for status and privilege as members of the "ruling" class.
We see evidence of the old power/dominator wave wherever we notice energetic attempts to control the many (and the much) by an elite and powerful few, and wherever we spot high concentrations of global resources and monetary power creating suffering among the many have-nots. The last gasps of this wave are visible all over America today. They include recent attempts by the corporate controlled media to de-fund NPR and PBS so that in the future all conventionally conveyed information will be screened by the business community before it reaches the public. It includes the removal of longstanding safety nets from beneath the working poor, along with across-the-board reductions in government services, to cow people into working harder for ever less money and fewer benefits. We find it in the recent mortgage scandal and banking collapse, which was followed by a taxpayer-funded refueling of the very financial institutions responsible for the illegal activities that destroyed the wealth of a shrinking middle class. We see it in the recent foreclosure debacle (accompanied by illegal efforts to introduce forged documentation to accelerate the foreclosure process) which has laid the entire burden for this scandal on the backs of laborers and the poor. We see it in cynical attempts to sell the de-funding of Planned Parenthood to the masses based on the religious right's pro-life doctrine, so as to make abortions inaccessible and to deny birth control to the poor, which will ensure that the next generation of working stiffs will be born. We see it in attempts to "dumb down" education so that children are not taught HOW to think, but are instead force-fed WHAT to think and then required to submissively regurgitate that information without error in order to be considered "successfully" educated. We see it in the de-funding of college tuition for students, such that education is out of reach for most or else requires young people to shoulder huge debts that will enslave them to corporate America even before they've fully matured. We see it in the raping and polluting of our environment, the excessive consumption of nonrenewable resources, the careless extinction of other species, and in the production of cheap goods and services marketed constantly through a barrage of advertising and designed to part the masses with their hard-earned cash. We see it in the selling of so-called "services" like mortgage lending, utilities and credit card borrowing, which use ongoing debt to bind workers to corporate America, where they struggle to earn a paycheck to meet those endless obligations. We see it in our current medical system, which limits care to those who can afford it, promotes symptoms abatement instead of genuine cures, and supports the marketing of old age as a disease that must be overcome at any cost. We even see it in our religions, which train people not to question authority and teach us from an early age that we're broken, unworthy and must spend our current lives atoning for the sins of our forefathers if we hope to experience a happy "afterlife."
While looking at this outgoing wave isn't pleasant, we can't turn away from it and pretend it doesn't exist. It's very real, and the energy it is still producing is causing real human and planetary suffering. Certain factions within New Age and spiritual circles have taken the position that we should only look to the "light" and pay attention to the good things that are happening. But to ignore the shadow side of human behavior is to run the risk that this energy continues to collect in the depths of the shadow, where it might regroup (as it has in the past) to rise again.
Looking at the shadow side of the power/dominator wave - contrary to popular fears - doesn't strengthen it. It merely shines a light on it, bringing it to public attention where we have the power to consciously CHOOSE whether we wish to feed this energy or starve it. Meanwhile, the new wave of energy that's arising in human society is gathering momentum and developing global coherence, and it now seems strong enough and bright enough to overcome the heavy, depressing energy of the old wave.
The energy of the new wave can be identified by its grounding in a joyous and overwhelming love for life. It carries within it a reverence for this planet, for other creatures, for nature, for the interconnectedness of all beings and for the evolutionary thrust of consciousness. It values the environment and supports concepts like sustainability, renewable energy and regenerative living. It proposes we make less but make it better, consume less but consume it more wisely, work less but work smarter and with the intention of advancing humanity and stewarding our future. It values wisdom above information, realization above dogmas and spirituality above religious training. It approaches reality from a whole-systems viewpoint instead of objectifying and valuing separation, and knows everything to be alive, sentient and evolving. It defines success not through possessions or monetary wealth, but through the metrics of human happiness, planetary health, the well-being of other species and the ability of society to empower ALL individuals to self-actualize. It promotes self-governance, self-discipline and self-awareness as the cure for external domination. It views work not as jobs for pay, but as the necessary labor of humanity to advance the survivability of our species. It values play and social engagement as much as work, and honors the arts as creative expressions of human consciousness. It recognizes that the true resources of humanity reside not in how much sweat we produce in a day, but in our ingenuity, our creativity, our imaginative capacities, our passions, our talents and our skills. It values cooperation above competition and realizes that humanity advances through freely sharing our wisdom so we can build on what we've learned, not through the bottling of knowledge and selling what we know to the highest bidder. It recognizes that all the money ever created cannot possibly match those resources, and that trying to measure the worth of unique human beings through comparing them to each other is a hopeless enterprise. It learns from the past but does not cling to it; it leans into the future but does not fear it. In short, it is a wave marked by human maturation, where all the fears, insecurities, aggression, isolation, sexual obsessions, cliquishness, short-sightedness, rebelliousness and arrogance of youth are being replaced by a quietly growing desire to live and work in peaceful communion with one another - and with nature - for the benefit of future generations.
So again I say, let's rejoice as we midwife what's arising, and let's not shy away from consciously hospicing the old out of existence. The past served us once, and it serves us still by teaching us how not to be tomorrow. While at times it may appear that the old will never die and the new is too diffuse to overcome the density of the power/dominator structure, it is in that very diffuseness that the new is finding its footing and its power. One or two loud voices in the wilderness can be effectively stilled, but the voices of the many, joined together, will not be silenced. No messiah is necessary to lead this rising wave of human advancement. What will lead this wave instead will be a thousand, million points of living light. So I invite each of you to tune in, turn on and begin to shine your light right NOW...the world is waiting!
The outgoing wave is represented by the power/dominator culture that has controlled human behavior for many thousands of years. The disintegration of this wave, which began over a century ago when angry citizens began to overthrow their oppressive monarchies, continues unabated. We've recently witnessed its expansion throughout the Middle East as dictator after dictator falls to the public outcry against tyranny. Because in the early part of this global revolution people didn't know how to create a non-dominator culture, the first rebels who overthrew their oppressors eventually repeated the mistakes made by their predecessors. The new governments that arose purported to be populist systems, but eventually they all fell back into old, unconscious patterns of dominating and controlling the many for the benefit of the powerful few. I include the United States in that assessment, because while our Founding Fathers had the foresight to envision and design a populist system, our government long ago ceased acting as a true democracy and has instead become a corporatocracy. The national agenda is now being controlled by the wealthy elite, who use manufactured lack and campaigns of fear to cow the suffering masses into submission. The recent Supreme Court decision that allowed businesses to fund political campaigns simply codified the silent overthrow of democracy that has been occurring beneath the surface for many years. Business interests now dictate to politicians what they wish to see occur. Our current crop of political puppets - particularly those who rose to power post the Citizens United decision - are allowing their strings to be pulled by these hidden overseers in exchange for status and privilege as members of the "ruling" class.
We see evidence of the old power/dominator wave wherever we notice energetic attempts to control the many (and the much) by an elite and powerful few, and wherever we spot high concentrations of global resources and monetary power creating suffering among the many have-nots. The last gasps of this wave are visible all over America today. They include recent attempts by the corporate controlled media to de-fund NPR and PBS so that in the future all conventionally conveyed information will be screened by the business community before it reaches the public. It includes the removal of longstanding safety nets from beneath the working poor, along with across-the-board reductions in government services, to cow people into working harder for ever less money and fewer benefits. We find it in the recent mortgage scandal and banking collapse, which was followed by a taxpayer-funded refueling of the very financial institutions responsible for the illegal activities that destroyed the wealth of a shrinking middle class. We see it in the recent foreclosure debacle (accompanied by illegal efforts to introduce forged documentation to accelerate the foreclosure process) which has laid the entire burden for this scandal on the backs of laborers and the poor. We see it in cynical attempts to sell the de-funding of Planned Parenthood to the masses based on the religious right's pro-life doctrine, so as to make abortions inaccessible and to deny birth control to the poor, which will ensure that the next generation of working stiffs will be born. We see it in attempts to "dumb down" education so that children are not taught HOW to think, but are instead force-fed WHAT to think and then required to submissively regurgitate that information without error in order to be considered "successfully" educated. We see it in the de-funding of college tuition for students, such that education is out of reach for most or else requires young people to shoulder huge debts that will enslave them to corporate America even before they've fully matured. We see it in the raping and polluting of our environment, the excessive consumption of nonrenewable resources, the careless extinction of other species, and in the production of cheap goods and services marketed constantly through a barrage of advertising and designed to part the masses with their hard-earned cash. We see it in the selling of so-called "services" like mortgage lending, utilities and credit card borrowing, which use ongoing debt to bind workers to corporate America, where they struggle to earn a paycheck to meet those endless obligations. We see it in our current medical system, which limits care to those who can afford it, promotes symptoms abatement instead of genuine cures, and supports the marketing of old age as a disease that must be overcome at any cost. We even see it in our religions, which train people not to question authority and teach us from an early age that we're broken, unworthy and must spend our current lives atoning for the sins of our forefathers if we hope to experience a happy "afterlife."
While looking at this outgoing wave isn't pleasant, we can't turn away from it and pretend it doesn't exist. It's very real, and the energy it is still producing is causing real human and planetary suffering. Certain factions within New Age and spiritual circles have taken the position that we should only look to the "light" and pay attention to the good things that are happening. But to ignore the shadow side of human behavior is to run the risk that this energy continues to collect in the depths of the shadow, where it might regroup (as it has in the past) to rise again.
Looking at the shadow side of the power/dominator wave - contrary to popular fears - doesn't strengthen it. It merely shines a light on it, bringing it to public attention where we have the power to consciously CHOOSE whether we wish to feed this energy or starve it. Meanwhile, the new wave of energy that's arising in human society is gathering momentum and developing global coherence, and it now seems strong enough and bright enough to overcome the heavy, depressing energy of the old wave.
The energy of the new wave can be identified by its grounding in a joyous and overwhelming love for life. It carries within it a reverence for this planet, for other creatures, for nature, for the interconnectedness of all beings and for the evolutionary thrust of consciousness. It values the environment and supports concepts like sustainability, renewable energy and regenerative living. It proposes we make less but make it better, consume less but consume it more wisely, work less but work smarter and with the intention of advancing humanity and stewarding our future. It values wisdom above information, realization above dogmas and spirituality above religious training. It approaches reality from a whole-systems viewpoint instead of objectifying and valuing separation, and knows everything to be alive, sentient and evolving. It defines success not through possessions or monetary wealth, but through the metrics of human happiness, planetary health, the well-being of other species and the ability of society to empower ALL individuals to self-actualize. It promotes self-governance, self-discipline and self-awareness as the cure for external domination. It views work not as jobs for pay, but as the necessary labor of humanity to advance the survivability of our species. It values play and social engagement as much as work, and honors the arts as creative expressions of human consciousness. It recognizes that the true resources of humanity reside not in how much sweat we produce in a day, but in our ingenuity, our creativity, our imaginative capacities, our passions, our talents and our skills. It values cooperation above competition and realizes that humanity advances through freely sharing our wisdom so we can build on what we've learned, not through the bottling of knowledge and selling what we know to the highest bidder. It recognizes that all the money ever created cannot possibly match those resources, and that trying to measure the worth of unique human beings through comparing them to each other is a hopeless enterprise. It learns from the past but does not cling to it; it leans into the future but does not fear it. In short, it is a wave marked by human maturation, where all the fears, insecurities, aggression, isolation, sexual obsessions, cliquishness, short-sightedness, rebelliousness and arrogance of youth are being replaced by a quietly growing desire to live and work in peaceful communion with one another - and with nature - for the benefit of future generations.
So again I say, let's rejoice as we midwife what's arising, and let's not shy away from consciously hospicing the old out of existence. The past served us once, and it serves us still by teaching us how not to be tomorrow. While at times it may appear that the old will never die and the new is too diffuse to overcome the density of the power/dominator structure, it is in that very diffuseness that the new is finding its footing and its power. One or two loud voices in the wilderness can be effectively stilled, but the voices of the many, joined together, will not be silenced. No messiah is necessary to lead this rising wave of human advancement. What will lead this wave instead will be a thousand, million points of living light. So I invite each of you to tune in, turn on and begin to shine your light right NOW...the world is waiting!
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Ego and Labeling
Lately I've been noticing the amount of labeling we're doing as a species. When we label another person as "this" or "that" (or even as "not this" or "not that")we are reducing what is essentially the irreducible aliveness of an ever-changing being to a limited mental projection we have created in our own minds. We then give ourselves permission to treat that person as if they are the label we've assigned to them, rather than as what they truly are. By doing so we unconsciously allow our ego to circumvent the energy of Spirit, which knows all beings are a loving emanation from the One infinite/eternal field of life, temporarily existing as differentiated forms.
The human ego loves its mental labels! Once we've attached a mental label to something, the ego then feels free to judge it as good or evil, right or wrong, the same as "me" or different from "me," because discerning these patterns is the primary function of ego. Discerning patterns allows us, as human beings, to position ourselves in space-time and to form patterns of understanding about the world by which we can successfully navigate our sensory reality. As soon as a label has been attached to something, it becomes "objectified." The ego then grants itself permission to behave toward that object the way it believes best for itself based upon what that label tells us about the object, without any further concern for the life force moving within the object that the ego has judged. The ego then, is never in full relationship with the energetic field of life, because it concerns itself mainly with static objects and forms relationships with the world on that limited level. The ego's relationships consist of surface labels and judgments, learned patterns and conditioned, mainly unconscious responses to the various objects it imagines it encounters.
On a certain level of behavior the labeling function performed by the ego can be very helpful to us. If I notice a "rock" I become instantly aware I cannot pass through it and must instead go around it. I don't need to stop and contemplate the rock (or the tree, or the river) to know how to be in relationship with it for my own physical safety. This allows me to move through the world of form easily and quickly, so I can accomplish much more than if I were required to treat each object I encountered as if it were a brand new experience and as if I had no understanding of my surroundings or how best to relate to them.
On another level though, this process of labeling and reducing can be very harmful to us, as well as to those we encounter. When I meet another human being, perhaps in a restaurant, and label him as "waiter," I then give myself permission to behave toward him as if his sole purpose in life is to take my order, serve me my food and clear away my dirty dishes without disturbing my meal in any way. Unless a deeper awareness rises below and behind the surface level of egoic conditioned labeling, I will therefore miss the opportunity to interact with that being who is doing the serving on a soul level, where I can honor the depth and beauty of his aliveness and invite him to honor mine.
For a very long time - probably since the evolution of human language - humanity has learned to move through the world using labels and forming conditioned mental patterns with respect to objects. This behavior has allowed us to evolve rapidly, to create new technologies and to advance our capacities and objective understanding of the world. And yet...because we have become so attached to our labels and comfortable with our judgments, the technologies we've created and the ways we're interacting with our living planet and with each other often fail to root deeply enough to form loving, lasting relationships on the level of life itself. This explains why we can pollute a river without relating to it as something more than a "convenient place to dump waste," and why we can bomb a city and not relate to its suffering occupants as anything more than "enemies." Most of the suffering we observe in our world - and most of the damage we've done to our living planet - can be traced directly to our habit of objectifying and reducing life to mere mental concepts, and then relating to it in a limited way as if the concept we've formed is the whole truth of what we're experiencing.
I believe the evolutionary shift that is occurring right here and now in human consciousness is an internal thrust toward greater awareness of the limitations of assigning labels, as well as an awakening to the deep and energetic interconnectedness of all things. The realization that we can't neatly reduce the energetic field of life - in any form - to a static label and relate to it only in that limited way is a change that enables us to shift our present social systems (which are failing) toward new, deeper and more meaningful ways of being in relationship with one another and with the living world that contains and supports us all. That internal movement is urging our long-subdued spirits to awaken. An awakened spirit recognizes and honors the limited but crucial role being played by ego in keeping the body safe, even as Spirit steps forward and claims its rightful place as "captain of the ship." We're not here to eliminate our egos or blame and curse them for performing their given functions, but to direct them where they belong, in service to Spirit. That new contextualization allows Spirit to engage more fully and richly with itself in the field of life - as it meets and honors its infinite/eternal self in the form of all other beings with whom we share this living world.
The human ego loves its mental labels! Once we've attached a mental label to something, the ego then feels free to judge it as good or evil, right or wrong, the same as "me" or different from "me," because discerning these patterns is the primary function of ego. Discerning patterns allows us, as human beings, to position ourselves in space-time and to form patterns of understanding about the world by which we can successfully navigate our sensory reality. As soon as a label has been attached to something, it becomes "objectified." The ego then grants itself permission to behave toward that object the way it believes best for itself based upon what that label tells us about the object, without any further concern for the life force moving within the object that the ego has judged. The ego then, is never in full relationship with the energetic field of life, because it concerns itself mainly with static objects and forms relationships with the world on that limited level. The ego's relationships consist of surface labels and judgments, learned patterns and conditioned, mainly unconscious responses to the various objects it imagines it encounters.
On a certain level of behavior the labeling function performed by the ego can be very helpful to us. If I notice a "rock" I become instantly aware I cannot pass through it and must instead go around it. I don't need to stop and contemplate the rock (or the tree, or the river) to know how to be in relationship with it for my own physical safety. This allows me to move through the world of form easily and quickly, so I can accomplish much more than if I were required to treat each object I encountered as if it were a brand new experience and as if I had no understanding of my surroundings or how best to relate to them.
On another level though, this process of labeling and reducing can be very harmful to us, as well as to those we encounter. When I meet another human being, perhaps in a restaurant, and label him as "waiter," I then give myself permission to behave toward him as if his sole purpose in life is to take my order, serve me my food and clear away my dirty dishes without disturbing my meal in any way. Unless a deeper awareness rises below and behind the surface level of egoic conditioned labeling, I will therefore miss the opportunity to interact with that being who is doing the serving on a soul level, where I can honor the depth and beauty of his aliveness and invite him to honor mine.
For a very long time - probably since the evolution of human language - humanity has learned to move through the world using labels and forming conditioned mental patterns with respect to objects. This behavior has allowed us to evolve rapidly, to create new technologies and to advance our capacities and objective understanding of the world. And yet...because we have become so attached to our labels and comfortable with our judgments, the technologies we've created and the ways we're interacting with our living planet and with each other often fail to root deeply enough to form loving, lasting relationships on the level of life itself. This explains why we can pollute a river without relating to it as something more than a "convenient place to dump waste," and why we can bomb a city and not relate to its suffering occupants as anything more than "enemies." Most of the suffering we observe in our world - and most of the damage we've done to our living planet - can be traced directly to our habit of objectifying and reducing life to mere mental concepts, and then relating to it in a limited way as if the concept we've formed is the whole truth of what we're experiencing.
I believe the evolutionary shift that is occurring right here and now in human consciousness is an internal thrust toward greater awareness of the limitations of assigning labels, as well as an awakening to the deep and energetic interconnectedness of all things. The realization that we can't neatly reduce the energetic field of life - in any form - to a static label and relate to it only in that limited way is a change that enables us to shift our present social systems (which are failing) toward new, deeper and more meaningful ways of being in relationship with one another and with the living world that contains and supports us all. That internal movement is urging our long-subdued spirits to awaken. An awakened spirit recognizes and honors the limited but crucial role being played by ego in keeping the body safe, even as Spirit steps forward and claims its rightful place as "captain of the ship." We're not here to eliminate our egos or blame and curse them for performing their given functions, but to direct them where they belong, in service to Spirit. That new contextualization allows Spirit to engage more fully and richly with itself in the field of life - as it meets and honors its infinite/eternal self in the form of all other beings with whom we share this living world.
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