Gnosticism (knowing God) versus Holy Books (learning about God)

When I hear people hold up their holy books as the definitive word of God and declare that all life's answers can be found in their chosen book, what comes to mind immediately is that here is a person who is unconsciously disconnected from the power of life that resides within him or herself. I feel compassion for that, because to surrender your power to decide for yourself how to be as you go through life is to feel a lack of trust and faith in yourself as an agent and creation of God - whatever you conceive God to be. It is to place a physical distance - the dimensions of your chosen book - between yourself and your creator. It is to render yourself a perpetual child of humanity's historical teachings, rather than view yourself as an evolving part of the larger creative life process.

As children, we do what our parents tell us to do without question, without thinking, and are taught that this is good. At some point in our maturation, however, we discover we must step into the fullness of our own capacity and discover for ourselves how to be, what we believe, and what feels right for us to do. We know our parents aren't always going to be standing right behind us, informing us how to act every step of the way. Becoming an adult means we must develop our own core competencies, even though that means we'll make a few mistakes along the way. We accept that challenge, because we know that eventually we must learn to trust in our own abilities to analyze and apply what we know, and what we feel to be true, to every new situation that arises. Only then can we feel any sense of confidence that we are prepared to raise our own children, to build a solid, stable foundation from which they can grow.

So it is in our relationship with God. Evolution, which is woven into the fabric of life itself, encourages us to continue to grow and mature. God wants this for us, wants us to learn how to use the gifts we've been given in ways that improve the quality of life for all of God's creatures on Earth. And although rule books written by the wisest men of their era were helpful guideposts for humanity when we were like children in our mental and emotional evolution, the complexity and constant challenges we experience today - as we move out of species adolescence and take our first tentative steps into species adulthood - have dramatically altered the way we relate to life, compared with how we did things thousands of years ago. Metaphorically speaking, holy books are like the training wheels we attach to children's bicycles. Eventually we are meant to cast them off, to learn how to ride the bike for ourselves without our speed and capacity being impeded by the limitations of the training wheels. That doesn't mean we must surrender or negate the benefits of having used the training wheels; far from it. It simply means we've advanced beyond what they are now able to teach us. To leave them behind - with gratitude for all their support - is the answer.

What we understand about the world in which we live - our perspective on how we fit into the larger scheme of life - continues to advance over time. Our understanding of science has helped us grasp that death is a physical illusion, that nothing in this world is ever lost or destroyed, it only changes form. Science has also helped us realize that what we perceive as "solid" isn't solid at all, it is mostly inner spaciousness, and that it is only our sensory perspective (designed to enable our "solid" bodies to navigate this reality without banging into other "things") that gives our world the appearance of solidity. We've come to realize we are not the center of the universe, but are infinitesimal specks of life on a rather unassuming planet, in the orbit of a very ordinary star in the midst of a massive galaxy that is but one of many trillions of galaxies within reach of our strongest telescopes - and that is only the fraction of the world we are able to view! We've come to understand that nature isn't "personal," and doesn't attack us out of spite or anger, but has its own long established processes and geological activities that we are sometimes, unfortunately, caught up in. We've come to realize that what we do in this world has consequences - always. For instance, there is no place to throw garbage "away," no action we can take that does not reverberate energetically, no damage we can do to this world from which we can walk away unscathed - not on a spherical planet where everything is utterly interconnected in space and time.

There is so much we have yet to learn, so very much we don't yet know, yet we endlessly strive to attain higher wisdom as we continue to evolve. In that larger context, whatever relationship we personally choose to forge with the creative process that is still acting within us, upon us and all around us holds the power to help guide us in ways that are fully relevant to life as we experience it today, as opposed to the limited guidance we're still able to glean from words that were written down long ago to explain life as it used to be to those (and by those) who did not hold our level of understanding.

To turn our attention within, and slowly learn to trust the essence of eternal life (God) that emerges when we quiet ourselves and listen to the wisdom that arises from the wellspring of the infinite inside us isn't easy, any more than that first tentative spin we took on a two-wheeler was easy. It is, however, a highly rewarding process. The best part about establishing and building a personal connection with God (gnosticism) is that we develop our own core competency in relationship to the world. The connection we open is there inside us everywhere we go, and can be instantly accessed in any situation. We don't need to call a "time out" to consult an ancient holy book, or to invest energy figuring out which group of conflicting instructions in a particular book ought to apply to a given situation. When we still ourselves, quiet our minds and open our hearts to truth, it always appears. If we really want to experience miracles in life, this is the place to begin. The relationship we're able to forge with the infinite/eternal within us when we discover we ARE that, manifesting here and now as this, a temporary form, is miraculous.

Why is it important for as many of us as are willing to do so to go within and connect with our truths? Because in life, no two situations are ever exactly the same. Every moment offers a confluence of different people, different times, different energies, different relationships, different histories, different outcomes. As tempting as it may be to cling to a "book of rules" that will inform us how to behave in every situation, it doesn't take most of us long to realize life isn't quite that neat. There IS no rulebook that will give us the definitive truth on how to BE in every situation, or how to think or feel about what is happening right here, right now. There are guideposts, yes. Approximations we can turn to. Insights that have been gleaned by others who have gone inside themselves and made their own deep connection with God. Interpretations of language by experts we can occasionally consult. But there are no fixed rules for life. There is only life, challenging us at every turn to step up and live it, fully right here, in this now. When those who have stepped into the truth as it is now come into relationship with those who are using an ancient book to inform them about the truth, conflict inevitably arises. That's because the past cannot inform the future from a place of genuine wisdom, for it does not possess the experience that is present in this moment. Past can only inform the future from its own historic perspective, which ends as of the writing down of the past. Thus, calling upon the past to inform us is like expecting the child we used to be to tell us how to behave as an adult. We can glean lessons from our childhood, yes. We can recall specific moments and act upon specific insights that are reflective of those past experiences. But we can only do so from the perspective of the adult we are today. Certainly we don't believe that the untrained, highly limited mind of the child we used to be should fully inform our behavior, without us adding our adult wisdom to the decisions we choose to make. That would be a far too limiting way for us to function.

Expecting our chosen rule book to provide all life's answers is equally limiting. Even "Thou shall not kill" - which seems like a pretty straightforward law - has asterisks attached! Thou CAN apparently kill if the other person is trying to kill you, or is harming another, or in the context of war, or (at least as some believe) out of vengeance or to mete out justice. And what exactly does "kill" mean? Does it refer to the tissue that is an as-yet unborn child? Does it limit itself to that which is already in existence as a separate human being? Does it apply to gently assisting another in their passing over to death if they are suffering beyond redemption? These are not questions for which any book offers real answers.

These days, I prefer to personally step into each new situation that arises with "don't know" mind, and then invite Truth to enter and inform me how to be in THAT given moment. I concern myself much less with how others are choosing to be, and instead focus on doing what I know to be good and right and true in the given moment - which becomes a full-time job once we commit ourselves to it. Nowadays I'm usually far too busy making sure I'm living in full integrity with my own inner truth to concern myself with how others are choosing to live. And as well read as I happen to be, because I genuinely love both reading and writing, no book I've come across yet contains the insight, the flexibility, the wisdom, to do that hard work for me, because words are dead. They cannot adjust to life, bend for it, flow with it, change as it does. They are fixed representations of what was alive at that time. We cannot breathe life into words, no matter how hard we try. Words are only thoughts that lived in a mind that lived in the past, reflecting the reality of the individuals who thought them. Even these words you're reading right now are already dead on the page. Our world has evolved beyond where it was when they first arose in my mind in the present moment. To carry the written word into the future and try to breathe life into it now, to expect those words to be utterly relevant to your own reality in this brand new moment, instead of CREATING YOUR OWN THOUGHTS is to waste your God-given gift to connect with life as life, to feel and think and experience life for yourself.

Knowledge is what we glean when we turn to the words of others to instruct us about how life is. Wisdom is what we gain when we enter into the experience of life for ourselves. Knowledge is two-dimensional, thus doesn't truly exist. Wisdom arises in the three-dimensional realm, which is where humanity lives. This doesn't mean we should throw away the compendium of collected human knowledge; far from it. Value lies within it, particularly as pointers from the past and important lessons around mistakes already made and overcome by the men and women who came before us. The key is to appreciate knowledge for what it is, a history of the journey of human ignorance to a place of higher understanding, and not the whole Truth of life, which is infinite and eternally unfolding.

The Paradox of the Modern Business Model

So often today we hear the crowd-pleasing mantra, “let’s starve the government,” being promoted by politicians and conservative economists, as if that would be a grand idea for us to implement. To force the government to cut spending to the bone, to put it on a financial austerity program that mimics what we would do in our own homes if we lost our jobs or other means of financial support, would at last put governmental power firmly in check, or so goes the theory. The question nobody seems to ask, however, is: in check to whom or what? Whose power will then prove greater than that of our starved, diminished government if we succeed in this proposed austerity mission?

Certainly not the power of our state and local governments, who themselves have been too long starved for income, and who depend more and more upon the federal government for assistance in funding crucial aspects of their annual budgets. Who then truly benefits from a weakened and undermined federal government system? I would suggest that the beneficiaries, those who are promoting the idea of starving our government and who are selling that proposition to the public like so much snake oil, are the wealthy plutocrats, bankers and top tier mangers of businesses in this nation (along with the political puppets they fund and control.) Their mission is clear: to subvert the federal government’s agenda in favor of their own narrow agenda and worldview. But why? What does business have to gain by undermining the governmental structure that for centuries has coddled and protected it? Why has such enmity arisen now, such that the leaders of commerce would willingly and consciously attempt to defang the very beast they once created, the one that has jealously guarded and protected their interests since commerce first arose in human society? After all, the earliest forms of social governance came into being to protect personal property rights and to safeguard the possessions that wealthy people had begun to accumulate, shortly after the notions of individual ownership and personal success had been embraced by human society. In fact, government seems to have difficulty knowing what to do with itself without business interests – and the fruits thereof – to protect. Business has never truly existed without a strong governing arm to stabilize the larger society and ensure that businesses remain free to produce, profit and benefit from the fruits of their labor without public interference or without the greater society’s need stripping them of the results of their business efforts.

As is true when we seek to understand the driver behind any human behavior, we must examine business’s motives if we wish to understand why it’s now opposed to strong governance. Let us never forget that any business’s primary motive is to earn a monetary profit. All other motives we might wish to attribute to a business must align behind that singular prime directive. No profit; no more business. It’s that simple. It seems likely then, that the reason our business community today seems so eager to starve government funding must spring from the fact that, over recent centuries, whole functions of government have sprung up and been publicly funded that compete with business in the marketplace of ideas, and now threaten the supremacy of the monetary for-profit paradigm that is the corporate worldview.

Modern governments over time have broken a centuries’ old pact they once had with businesses (and the oligarchs who run them.) With the establishment of democracies and constitutionally based governing systems, the longstanding, primary role of government as the protector of its society (which in prior centuries meant the plutocrats and the monetary for-profit paradigm) shifted radically. Governments instead became the direct and primary protector of the citizenry, rather than simply the protector of the social operating system and the individuals who controlled the system and exploited the citizenry to keep it running.

Think about that. Over the past hundred years we’ve funded governmental scientific research that has discovered cures and vaccines (not just symptom alleviators) for many of the diseases that ail humanity and that disproportionately harm the poor. We’ve funded studies that tell us if the things we’re doing are harmful to human life. We’ve funded testing facilities and safety agencies to monitor business practices and protect the public’s health. We’ve funded consumer protection agencies to defend us against the most predatory activities of private enterprise. We’ve funded environmental protection agencies whose goal it is to balance the public’s long-term desire for clean water, air and unspoiled lands with business’s desire to exploit and pollute those resources for short-term financial gain. We’ve funded free public education, which has created a more informed public and a smarter labor force - one that now has the intellectual capacity to challenge business’s motives and practices, and that sometimes tries to steer our business model in new and disruptive directions. We’ve funded public broadcasting, which attempts to provide free and factual information to all citizens - which challenges the private sector’s ability to control the national agenda by controlling the information that flows to the public. We’ve also funded (via military spending and space exploration) the invention and development of advanced technologies that have been translated into inventions and communications systems. Those in turn have benefited humanity outside the control of the corporate plutocrats.

Nothing is more likely to enrage the plutocracy than having its for-profit model ignored or disturbed by upstarts who are working outside the model. The first approach the plutocrats take if an upstart creates a disruptive new technology is to try and destroy their model or undermine their credibility. If that doesn’t work the plutocrats eventually embrace the upstart, seducing the Steve Jobs and Arianna Huffingtons into becoming part of the business model by buying them out or by offering them an exclusive membership in the club of the corporate brotherhood. That guarantees the goals of the upstarts will shift into better alignment with those of the for-profit business model.

The plutocrats who run the international business machinery are ever eager to control the release into our society of any new ideas that may affect their ability to earn a profit. Only by rigidly controlling the flow and timing of new ideas can they ensure their profitability remains on firm footing based on their private agenda. That's why businesses lobby so hard to regulate or limit the expansion of inventions like the Internet – which, not surprisingly, flowed out of the government pool of ideas and took root before business could control the spread of it. Since the advent of the internet, which has empowered individuals to eliminate middle men, do their own research and make better and more informed decisions, businesses have had to invest inordinate sums of money to try and regain the power they lost to the individual via the net. Business wants to restrain and control all such potentially heretical ideas that may flow out of government, and that might benefit the citizenry in ways that could damage short-term financial interests.

Government, on the other hand, has no such financial constraints on what it does or creates, other than those its citizenry imposes. When we study the Declaration of Independence and at the Constitution of the United States as they are and not as we’ve been told they are, what we find is that, as initially conceived, our government's motives are to protect and defend the citizenry, to regulate commerce, to monitor and protect our natural resources and to protect and preserve the public commons for the sake of future generations. The government will (if not tampered with or bribed into silence by controlling business interests) release into the world whatever new ideas it brings forth, along with those studies and inventions it develops, based upon how informative and beneficial those things seem to be to its citizenry, and how protective they will be of the public commons. Furthermore, it will prosecute businesses that willingly violate public health and safety laws. Government also aggressively challenges companies when their practices grow too predatory and harmful to the citizenry they are supposed to be serving, not exploiting for their own financial benefit. Often that more principled governmental approach – based on its charter to defend the rights and wellbeing of its citizens ahead of the financial needs of its corporations and plutocrats - puts pressure on corporations to change the way they do business, or to change the composition or nature of the goods they produce. Corporations hate that, because those changes cost them money and reduce their profitability.

The corporate plutocracy wants its financial for-profit model to reign supreme, and its agenda to be viewed as more crucial to the health and wellbeing of the citizenry than the governmental agenda. It therefore cloaks the government in a constant cloud of suspicion in an attempt to undermine it. For decades now, business has been conducting a covert political campaign to sway public opinion against the benefits of strong government by pointing angrily to what it terms the government’s weaknesses and moral flaws. By making a strong federal government seem dangerous and inept, international corporations have set themselves up as the “good guys” and their federal regulators as the “bad guys” in a war for public opinion and support.

As in any good war, the best defense is quite often a powerful offense. By labeling the government as dangerous and evil, and by screaming as loudly as possible about the government’s ineptitude and lack of moral fiber while using privately funded airwaves to wage their relentless attack, business has conveniently deflected the public’s attention away from its own ineptitude and moral failings. By funding the campaigns of business-friendly politicians, and by supporting their attempts to infiltrate the offices of government and attack it from within, business has enabled its own agents and lobbyists to create new laws that both shield it from prosecution and grant it greater control over public elections. The Supreme Court’s recent “Citizens United” decision (which was reached by a majority of justices who, in turn, have been appointed by politicians whose campaigns were funded mainly by business interests) tortured our constitution by interpreting it to mean that “free speech” is the same thing as spending money to fund political campaigns. That decision exponentially increased the plutocracy’s power to back more and more puppets to promote its agenda and undermine the stated purpose of our government.

What’s the net result of this ongoing war between a government that directly serves its citizenry, and a plutocracy that serves its own financial interests and controls the behavior of the citizenry - along with the use of national resources? For decades now, we’ve been bombarded with persuasive rhetoric and seemingly logical arguments that have been drawn against our genuine personal interests, and many people have been won over by the corporate worldview.

So what, exactly, is this worldview into which we’re being seduced? It’s the belief that money, and the short-term acquisition of enough of it, is more important in the short run than long-term human health, happiness and the wellbeing of our own living planet, because ultimately the acquisition of enough money will allow us to buy for ourselves those things we truly desire. Under that worldview everything we do, every decision we make, must be viewed through the financial, for-profit lens. If we can’t make money at something – or at the very least have it be revenue neutral - we simply won’t do it, no matter how crucial it may be for humanity’s long-term survival. The singular exception business seems willing to promote, the one aspect of government it seems willing to fund to a nearly unlimited extent, is the capacity to wage war against other nations to protect our business interests. And why not? War is an amazingly profitable enterprise for the business paradigm. In what other industry do we make breathtakingly expensive products – products funded and resourced by the public and not by private enterprise itself – that we blow up or destroy almost immediately, requiring us to then build them all over again and generate continuous corporate profits? Certainly the government can be allowed to run a monstrous deficit for the sake of feeding that highly profitable financial enterprise, so long as the public can be convinced a given war is righteous enough for it to pick up the tab in defense of those business interests.

The sobering truth is, for too long we’ve been sold a bill of goods that says we can use money to buy happiness, health and a sense of wellbeing. We’ve convinced ourselves it must be true, because the press constantly holds a few wealthy role models up to as all as evidence that we too, if we continue to work hard, not complain and do exactly what the plutocracy says, will eventually be in position to “have it all.” What we’re never told is that, under the existing scenario, it’s impossible for more than a few people to genuinely have it all. A power/dominator structure that supports and is controlled by a plutocracy – by its very nature – requires many more worker bees than it does overseers. The systematic dismantling of the middle class we’ve been observing for the past forty years has been the plutocracy’s attempt to prevent too many worker bees from becoming mid-level overseers wielding too much power, because a too-strong middle management power base threatens the pyramidical nature of the power/dominator structure that underpins the for-profit business model. That’s particularly true because most mid-level workers tend to rise from the families of lower level worker bees, thus feel some affinity for the struggle and suffering of the lower classes, whereas plutocrats tend to spring from the middle class or are born of other plutocrats, which insulates them from feeling empathy for the struggle of the lower classes.

When we look at what’s happening in our society today - without shying away from what the evidence reveals - we can see what it is about the government’s activities that have so offended the business establishment. We begin to grasp why business today wishes to dominate government, to change the very nature of its function. Because the motives of government are life-oriented and long-term, while the motives of business are profit-oriented and short-term, these two competing viewpoints have been on a collision course for the past two hundred-plus years. In earlier centuries they operated in dynamic balance because neither system had the best interests of the citizenry at heart. But of late the balance has tipped precariously in favor of the power/dominator business model, at the expense of the rights and needs of the citizenry. It’s money that makes all the difference in a society where money equals power. And since business interests control most of the money in this nation, including how and where it is printed and to whom it flows, whereas the government remains deeply indebted and has not been permitted to accumulate excess cash, it is business that is funding – and winning – the war of public opinion.

If out business model wins this war and becomes the sole driver for human advancement, it means people will remain ever harnessed to the need to pay for what they use on a daily basis and to sell their labor from the time they're old enough to work until the day they can no longer physically do their work, so they can continually earn enough cash to pay businesses for the goods and services they need to survive. That model, unchecked, subverts a large part of what we are trying to accomplish as a species, which is to free ourselves from the need to physically work and to mentally struggle without any end in sight, and to eliminate our the endless need to pay those who control the world’s resources for access to what we need to be our best selves.

The irony is, humans continually seek freedom but have chosen (unwittingly, perhaps) to bind ourselves to a model that perpetually denies us our freedom. Why? Are we so afraid of what we'll do with freedom if we actually achieve it? Are we more enamored of the seeking of freedom than we are of the notion of actually being free from these self-imposed constraints? Are we more interested in controlling the behaviors of everyone else than in claiming genuine freedom for ourselves? The fact is, we can't have life both ways in this situation - we can't be personally free so long as we continue to support a system that manipulates and coerces us all into behaving in highly controlled, self-limiting ways.

The monetary for-profit business model, which intuitively many of us are coming to realize cannot serve humanity’s ends in the long run, does not seem to appreciate the fact that - first and foremost, human beings are LIFE forms with feelings and talents and skills and abilities, and imagination and immense creative capacities - not just physical assets or liabilities on some conceptual global corporate balance sheet. If anything, the business model manipulates that fact to its advantage by instilling fear in us that we won’t be able to survive unless we tow the corporate line, perform our duties in the way business prescribes, and accept our roles as good worker bees within the power/dominator structure. The business model justifies a reward and punishment, fear-based and externally driven "means" – which is to say it enslaves and coerces people, using their need to earn wages and to buy the goods and services they need to survive – because it claims to have humanity’s end goal in mind. Given that our end goals are personal happiness, planetary abundance and enough freedom and autonomy to live our own lives to our fullest capacities, how is it even possible for us to achieve them under the current business model, when businesses motives – and its very structure – is antithetical to long-term abundance, planetary wellbeing and personal autonomy?

I pose these questions not to attack business or to defend government. Nor do I believe this represents a purposeful war being waged, so much as it represents a reflexive reactivity that has been programmed into humanity for many thousands of years. While some people may be deliberately making and supporting choices that benefit themselves at the expense of the larger society, I do believe most are, as yet, unaware of the impacts of our choices – nor do we even clearly see our options – due to all the static being generated from the noise produced by the two opposing sides. I therefore pose these questions to invite us all to consider what our real goals are, and to examine the nature of the structures under which we’ve all been operating for centuries. Perhaps it’s time for us to sit down and look at our goals, and compare them to structures we’ve created over time, to determine whether or not these structures are taking us in the direction we wish to go. For what it’s worth, my personal opinion is not nearly so important as the decision that will be made by the human collective. I will surely die within the next fifty years, hopefully before we’ve so desecrated our planet that it’s unable to carry and nurture human life any more. Many of you who are reading this may also be dead very soon. What is important then, are the conscious choices we collectively make as a species today. Will we make those choices with the long view in mind, or merely to provide ourselves with some sense of short-term stability? How What we choose to be and what we choose to do right NOW will influence the state of the world we leave to future generations. How hard we work today to make the necessary changes – along with the amount of short-term pain we’re willing to endure – will determine how hard future generations will need to work, to either carry on our best practices or undo any structures we’ve created that are destructive to life and that imprison the human spirit.

Let me close with a couple of quotes from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican president who was elected shortly before this outright war between business and government heated up:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. “

And this one:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies – in the final sense – a THEFT from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

I ponder these quotes quite often as I observe the present direction of human society. They help me inform my choices when it comes to the worldview I am personally choosing to hold.

Of Clocks and Cash

Something that just recently occurred to me is the idea that money is to commerce as clocks are to time. Both were designed to serve as a unit of measure that all people everywhere could generally agree upon, they just measure two different concepts. Clocks measure the concept we call time; money measures the concept we call value. Clocks and money were originally important not because they possessed value in and of themselves (intrinsic worth) but because they empowered us to communicate with each other around abstract concepts using a common language, so we could reach a shared understanding (extrinsic worth).

Time is not a thing; it's an understanding about rate of change that is relative to humans, our sensory capacities and the planet on which we happen to reside. As things stand, we earthlings live on a planet that rotates on its own axis at a fairly steady and observable rate of change. Because we're a remarkably clever species, we've been able to devise a way to monitor that rate of change (based on our planet's relationship with the sun) and have divided the pace into bite-sized, standardized pieces we all call hours. We've also designed time pieces called clocks to enable us to swiftly compare and agree upon the time without each of us having to perform the tedious mathematical calculations that would be necessary if clocks did not exist. That makes life easier for everyone concerned.

Nowadays, if I say I'd like to meet you at four o'clock in the afternoon, we can both check an entirely different clock and still be relatively confident our meeting will go off as planned. If, however, I can't seem to find a clock as our meeting time grows near, I may have to scramble to discover the correct time or guess what time it is before I show up. If I guess wrong or lose track of the time altogether, our meeting may not happen and you'll go away disappointed. That doesn't mean I ran out of time, don't have any time left or didn't have enough time to begin with; it simply means I was careless about tracking our agreed upon unit of measure so I could be where I needed to be when I needed to be there.

Modern society has grasped the importance of everyone knowing exactly what time it is, so we've made it easy for people to access that information. Imagine though, if as part of our arrangement for the distribution of our personal time you demanded I hand over a clock to you to reward you for agreeing to meet me as I'd asked. What if you had to reward me with a working clock every time you asked me to meet you? Pretty soon people would be stressing mightily about whether or not a particular meeting was important enough to be worth the surrender of a valuable clock, and we'd all be running around bemoaning the fact that we didn't have enough "time" to go around! People would start to worry they wouldn't have enough "time" in the future to ensure they could set up all the important meetings they might need to have someday, so they'd start hiding spare clocks under their beds or storing them in vaults to keep them safe.

As more people hoarded more and more clocks, even as more and more people were born on this planet who would need to set meetings to accomplish their objectives, we'd start to realize that we couldn't possibly create and distribute enough clocks to make everyone happy. In fact, most of our efforts and attention would shift from taking care of ourselves and our planet to creating, distributing and hoarding more and more clocks. Eventually we'd have to begin to make "hard choices" about who was really worth meeting and who wasn't so important as to deserve a valuable clock. Businesses and communities would surely suffer, because it would be difficult for us to come together around new ideas when we couldn't be sure the idea would amount to anything important. Why run the risk of surrendering a perfectly good clock on something that might not prove to be worth our time? Only those things that contributed to the production of clocks would get done, and all the rest of our needs would begin to suffer. Personal communications would lapse and relationships would lose their closeness and trust. In fact, the world would likely become a very difficult place for us to effectively navigate. Life would seem fraught with problems and obstacles, and we'd all become very suspicious and stingy around anything relating to someone trying to convince us we needed their time in exchange for a clock.

Luckily, we don't require each other to give away clocks in exchange for the gift of our time. I know that if I freely agree to meet with you because you have something important you need me to do - or simply because you want to relax and pal around for a while - that when the time comes and I need you (or somebody else) to meet with me because it's important to me, I can count on you (or somebody else) to be there - in time - for me. This understanding doesn't only relate to close family members or friends. Perfect strangers often agree to give us some of their time, because that's the way we've all agreed to socially manage time. I don't bother to keep a time card around how many hours I gave you versus how many you gave me, nor do we ever "settle up" with each other, because tomorrow we'll both have more time to pass around. So far as we're concerned it really doesn't matter who gave how much time to whom or who asked for the time and who agreed to give it, so long as all of us get all the time we truly need from one another. In fact, what I frequently find is that if I give my time to you I always benefit from that exchange, because I get to feel needed, appreciated and loved.

So much for how we measure and distribute the concept we call time. When we consider the way we measure and distribute the concept of value however, we notice an entirely different picture begins to form. Like time, value is not a thing; it's a conceptual understanding. Money, just like clocks, was originally conceived as a method to standardize how we measure the value of different objects or types of labor we wished to exchange. Its purpose was to enable us to communicate effectively when we traded our labor and the fruits thereof with each other. Money thus has become the universal language of value, the same way our clocks establish the language of time. Long before we invented cars and planes, before we discovered electricity and oil, before we realized we could harness the power of the sun - back indeed, to when human labor was the primary form of energy being used to produce goods and services - we imagined that measuring the amount of value moving around our system would enable us to make certain everyone was contributing to the economy by putting in as much as they were consuming.

A host of problems have arisen out of our attempts to measure value as compared with time, and even more arise when we insist on inputting into the economic system a tangible form of measure (money) whenever anyone extracts anything of value from that system (goods or services.) The main difficulty with applying this exchange concept to value is that it presumes the net value of everything we're collectively creating and consuming equates to a zero sum game. Money goes into the system from us when we consume value; money comes out of the system to us when we create value. Put another way, people collectively inject their labor, creativity and knowledge into the economic system; people then extract all the goods and services being provided.

Theoretically at least, if those items and values were well matched, our economy would work just fine. Unfortunately though, the zero-sum equation presumes that collectively we have a finite amount of available resources, a finite amount of human creativity and a matching pool of available human labor. It further assumes we can calculate how much money all of it is collectively worth and place precisely that amount - and not one penny more - into circulation to move things around and satisfy everyone's needs. But because it's untrue (and we know it's untrue!) we wind up with either inflation or deflation. Since what we create, produce, have learned and can do has expanded exponentially over time, we're always needing to inject more and more cash into the economic system to "monetize" the growing amount of energy, productivity and creative capacity that is coming online every year. When we do that, businesses automatically raise their prices to capture more profits for themselves. Because the cost to us of extracting things of value from the system typically rises much faster than do payments for value injected (in a post-industrial world we collectively have more labor hours to sell than businesses need, so the competition for jobs drives wages lower) people cease taking goods and services out of the system, which means money stops flowing into the system and production grinds to a halt. That leads to recession, which in turn forces businesses to lower their prices to induce people to extract goods and services from the production side again, until the system resets itself once more.

If we could "fix" prices and at least stabilize the equation that way, perhaps we could get a handle on the variable labor problem. Unfortunately, that notion presumes we've come up with a universally objective and agreed-upon way to measure and fix the value of goods and services, but we haven't. That's because the value of things isn't at all objective, it's highly subjective. Unlike time, where anyone can check another clock if they don't believe theirs is telling them the truth, we have no objective means of confirming prices or the cost of specialized services. If I tell you the new house I'm selling will cost you three hundred thousand dollars, it doesn't really matter how much genuine value I've invested in its construction. All that matters is whether or not I can convince you to buy the house, based on how badly you need it. Likewise, if I tell you the surgery you need will cost you twenty-five thousand dollars, you're really in no position to challenge the price. You can complain, but you can't demand I do it more cheaply because you don't really know how much value it offers.

The trouble with attributing value to goods and services is that - unlike time, which we can agree upon - value is always a highly subjective experience. Despite that, the system of measure we're using presumes we can objectively compare the value of say, an orange versus a hammer. The thing is, if I'm starving, that orange may well be priceless to me while the hammer is relatively useless. Alternatively, if I need to build a shed, the hammer becomes invaluable while the orange is but a distraction. Ditto our attempts to compare a surgeon with a plumber, and to declare one generally "worth" more than the other. Taken even further - in a society that assigns positive value to contributions and negative value to extractions from the system - children, the infirm and the elderly become financial liabilities, while hearty adults are viewed as financial assets. Unfortunately for humanity, these mechanical measures of value fail to take into account the organic ebbs and flows of life we all experience at one time or another. They also fail to account for the fact that although in a given moment a child may be extracting food, water, shelter and education from the system, that child is, at the same time, adding all that to improve herself, thus improving her capacity to contribute more in the future. The education being "consumed" and thus being charged as a negative value is not lost; it's creating value-added for the whole! Nor is the food being consumed (and thus charged for) lost forever; those calories are supporting the physical growth and nutritional strength of a living human being who will, in turn, provide major value-added to the whole, if given the chance.

In truth, the wiser we become as a species, the better we're getting at figuring out how to accomplish more using fewer manpower hours, as well as how to live and work more sustainably so we don't use up all of our natural resources. We also know that our human population has exploded exponentially, that people are living longer, are generally healthier than ever, and that new babies are being born on Earth every day, so it looks like there's going to be more manpower, creativity, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, passion, talent and skill to go around tomorrow than was available to us collectively yesterday. We've also invented machines and developed technologies to increase our productivity even more. All this means less and less human energy needs to go into our system to produce all the goods and services that are coming out of it - even though more humans and hours are now available to inject into the system. These factors completely upend the balance of the zero-sum equation. Ironically, they create excessive abundance that most of us can't afford, because what we're aiming (and failing) to do is force the system into flat mechanical balance: a specific amount of human labor goes into the economy and receives in exchange a set amount of monetary wages; then products and services come out in sufficient quantity to absorb all those wages back into the economic system, so they can go back out as wages all over again. None of this, of course, concerns itself with how fairly those wages are being distributed across a living population with very real needs, nor does it take into account the amount of hoarding that occurs, which siphons money out of the equation all the time.

Unlike time, for which we have an agreed upon system of measure yet are willing to exchange it freely with each other, we refuse to freely exchange the things we create. Instead of accounting for the overall energy flow taking place in our economy so we can observe and track the net value we're collectively creating, we're demanding that each individual on the receiving end of every value transaction provide the giver with a physical representation of the value received to prove to the world the transaction has occurred. We've thus turned money, a conceptual unit of measure, into something to be valued all by itself, and out of that one simple choice we've created for ourselves all kinds of planetary hurt and human suffering.

The same problems that would besiege us if we were required to give away clocks in exchange for someone else's time now besiege us around the exchange of money for value. Because we never seem to have enough money in circulation to match all the human energy, ingenuity, creative capacity and wisdom out there - ready, willing and hungry to be exchanged - we now find ourselves wringing our hands over how many things we ought to be doing but simply "can't afford." We're being called upon by our politicians and corporations today to make "hard" choices, to sacrifice benefits and wages that would offer us better lives, to forgo better educational processes and schools for our children, to forget about building (and repairing) quality infrastructure for the benefit of our society, to forgo nicer parks, well maintained roads, social services, elder care, medical and nutritional support, quality housing for all people, healthy food, clean water and air, renewable energy systems and so forth. We've all been born into and have bought into this longstanding culture of lack, even though it only exists because we don't have enough money in circulation to ensure all the things that truly need doing get done.

It's not that we don't have enough value to achieve whatever we want, it's that the units we use to measure that value have been systematically hoarded by a few individuals. That gives those who hold the most hoarded units unbelievable personal power - they can wave those monetary units around and everyone else will jump through hoops to serve their every need, so as to accumulate more units for themselves. The wealthy can also direct the flow and consumption of limited resources in ways that suit their agendas, which usually revolve around earning them even more money. They can determine what goods will be produced, in what quantity they will be produced, and how much (or little) the rest of us will earn while doing that work at the behest of the wealthy. They can tell us what we can and can't own or have based on the number of monetary units we've managed to store for ourselves, and they can deny us life's necessities if we fail to accumulate enough of those units to satisfy them. The more time that passes under this system, the more everything that doesn't have to do with the production of ever more money slows down or stops. So many of us are myopically focused on making more money so we can buy the things we're producing that we don't have enough time to focus on producing the things we need to thrive as a species! Our modern lives, it seems, are so highly stressed and revolve around lack and struggle not because we don't have enough value in the world to go around or enough creative energy to exchange with one another, but because all our human labor and creative energy is jammed up in the bottleneck being created by this highly controlled exchange of money for "value."

Throw away clocks and we'll still have plenty of time to go around. We wouldn't suddenly all decide we'd rather sit at home forever, or grow unwilling to go anywhere or meet anyone else. We don't need to know what time it is to still desire companionship, connections, relationships and the chance to meet new and interesting people. Likewise, throw away money and we'll still have plenty of value to go around. We wouldn't suddenly stop taking care of our own basic needs or stop working to meet the pressing needs of other human bengs (or of this planet) simply because we no longer assigned an arbitrary monetary value to the work we were doing. In fact, throw away money and we'd stop doing things that weren't important to us, or that were causing serious harm to life and the planet. Much of that work is presently being done simply so someone can accumulate lots of dollars, not because it's helpful or good for us all. Eliminate the value distortion created by money and at last we'd be able to see that the so-called value much of our work is providing doesn't outweigh the damage it is causing. This make-work (work done for the benefit of the wealthy to generate more profits) would vanish, and real work (the work humanity really wants done and needs to do for its own sake) would take its place.

Just think about that for a moment, and you'll realize that freedom would suddenly break out all over our planet! All the laid off school teachers, along with those who can't get hired because there's no money to pay their wages, would be able to live out their passions and help all children learn. We might see student/teacher ratios as low as five to one, enabling teachers to work with students individually and nurture their personal passions, skills and talents. Firefighters, policemen, construction workers and engineers could all go back to work. We could build adequate housing for everyone in the world, in ways best suited to their local climates and using local materials to make them more sustainable over time. We could design renewable resource technologies, and everyone could have access to the free energy such technologies would provide. We could restructure our manufacturing systems so that waste, planned obsolescence and throwaway products are no longer manufactured, because our focus will have shifted to producing genuine value - not paper profits - for the sake of the world. Last but not least, we could learn once again to trust each other, to give and share and support and nurture each other and our home planet, because the question we presently ask ourselves before today we do anything in exchange for value: "What's in it for me?" would gradually shift to, "How will my effort (or my consumption) add greater value to myself, to humanity, to our community and to our living world?"

The fact is, there is no shortage of genuine value, no shortage of natural resources (when they're distributed fairly, used intelligently and not exploited wastefully) no shortage of human creativity, labor or innate drive to achieve. We already have within us and all around us all the value we need to accomplish everything we need to do for humanity and our planetary system to thrive, if we relinquish the power money holds to prod us into working...or to hold us back from doing the things that need done.

Designing A Freer Social System

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.

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."

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.

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!