Today is new day, a new year, a new age, and collectively we have awakened from a deep sleep.
Perhaps, we haven't been asleep at all –maybe we are all just learning how to stand up.
Perhaps, we haven't been asleep at all –maybe we are all just learning how to stand up.
We all understand that there is some sort of underlying poison in our societies. I think there is something behind the cracks.
I think Rumi knew this, and I think we all know this too.
There must be a fundamental endemic problem; a problem that causes all the other problems.
You see, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Probably the biggest story we told ourselves is the scientific story. Some of us tend to think that science is the ultimate truth, but Science is just a story.
Our current scientific story is more than 300 years old. It primarily describes a very reliable, and well behaved universe where separate objects operate according to fixed laws in time and space.
Those things together have fashioned our world. We are told that we operate in a certain way. We realize we are separate, and for me to do something to anyone else I have to do something physical to that person. I have to punch them, burn them, or give them a swift kick.
The picture that has emerged from science is that we are made up of material stuff, and work in mechanistic ways.
Science says, if we can't measure, manipulate or touch something... then it's not real.
There is something fundamentally different between machines and life....and we are running our society as if we are pieces of a machine; as if the world is a machine.
What we create from that, is a world –in a sense– based on the notion that we are all separate.
From that we create education based on the notion that we are separate, and so we honor and enforce independence and competition. We create our business environment based on the idea of scarcity and competition....and our towns and cities are all based on this idea of separation.
So we fashion our world on the idea of needing to be significant at someone else's expense.
That's pretty much the message I got as a kid.
"Separate yourself from the pack, and be number one...and win!"
There is this basic assumption that we are wired up to compete, and to gratify our own desires. To be these self interest machines.
Western society in general, we feel fundamentally as singular individuals, and only secondarily as social beings. That tends to create separations; it isolates you and tries to make you apathetic, and passive, as far as the political system is concerned.
Your job in mind is to not to be a citizen; it's to be a consumer; go out and shop –that was the message from the president after 9/11.
I think one of the fundamentally messages in the american marketing machine is that wealth and happiness are synonyms. If you want to be wealthy and happy you need to own stuff –go out and buy stuff.
In our culture, there are these foundational notions of our relationship to stuff, which are grounded on a truth and a lie.
In our culture, there are these foundational notions of our relationship to stuff, which are grounded on a truth and a lie.
The truth is, if your naked and cold outdoors, all alone in the forest, and it's raining; you are unhappy –we can all agree on that. If somebody opens the door and lets you in, and puts you in front of a fire, and gives you clothes, and a bowl of soup; suddenly you go from being unhappy to happy with very little stuff. But it's stuff that makes the difference; just like that.
So this is the Truth....
...and here is the Lie...
...if this amount of stuff will make you that happy, then ten times stuff should make you ten times happier, and hundreds of stuff should make you a hundred times happier...a thousand times much stuff should make you a thousand times happier, and Bill Gates must live in a state of perpetual Bliss!
It's a psychological problem, because it's not the reality; the reality is that if you have 2 billion instead of 1 billion, your not twice as happy. That is a ridiculous notion.
People are driven to accumulate, accumulate without asking the question if this will make me happy or not. Many people are unhappy even though they seem to have everything, even though they seem to be living that American Dream.
"Wealth actually does not in of itself give you the contentment you thought you would have" –Rumi
"be suspicious of what you want." –Rumi
That is so subversive in a consumer's culture isn't it? We are meant to multiple our wants, and indulge them.
But he says...
"You dig pits to trap others, and you fall in." –Rumi
"Plot to get what you want, and you end up in prison." –Rumi
"A ride after a deer I find myself chased by a hog." –Rumi
Jack Forbes, Professor of Native American Studies – UC Davis says,
"in our language we have this word –Wetiko; which means cannibal –one who eats (not literally the flesh) the life of another. We very quickly realized when the Europeans came over, they were infected with Wetiko; it's a mental illness."A Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others.
"Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease." –Jack Forbes, Founder of the Native American Movement
Wetiko is defined as a Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism. It's the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit.
Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil. A disease or the sickness of cannibalism, a socio-cultural epidemic of which Columbus was a major carrier.
These evils are not simply "bad" choices which men make, but are the symptoms of a genuine, very real, epidemic sickness, a wetiko psychosis. People who exhibit these symptoms are insane (unclean) in the true sense of the word; they are mentally ill.
One of the real problematic signs is the degree of loneliness in the American culture. What we lost is a sense of our communal tendencies.
We privileged the ideas of self interest with the idea of materialism is a pathway to happiness.
We privileged the ideas of self interest with the idea of materialism is a pathway to happiness.
"All wars stem from the comforts of the body." –Plato
What he meant was that we are always trying to avoid unpleasantness, and we always want to pad ourselves; to consort ourselves. So we need more stuff, and to get more stuff and protect that stuff, we have to make war...whether it's an actual war, or an effective war; the rich against the poor.
A couple of hundred years ago, people believed in dragons and monsters....but today we have another monster, and it's called the economy.
A couple of hundred years ago, people believed in dragons and monsters....but today we have another monster, and it's called the economy.
If you read the Wall Street Journal, they treat the market and the economy as if they are a "thing". "Wait a minute now, the market isn't a natural force of nature we created the damn thing!"
I believe the heart of our problem is the separation of humanity from the natural world, and the sense that the economy is the most important thing in our lives.
We never ask the important questions like,
"What is an economy for?"
"How much is enough?"
About 20 years ago, Ivan Boesky declared, 'Greed is good', and that ideology spread like wild fire.
"Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." –Ivan Boesky
The problem is that it's no longer just a couple hundred million people in the United States.
Our way of doing business and our way of thinking has affected the world. This key idea that we embrace and is so dangerous is the idea that Humans belong to a species that is separate from the rest of the living community.
If there are still people here in 200 years they will not be living the way we live. They will not be thinking the way we think.
Every culture ultimately comes up against the limits of growth and either dies off, or reinvents itself in a way that is sustainable.
I think we will have to have shock after shock after shock before we finally wake up, as a species, to the fact that we have it all wrong.
World shaping changes are either going to come, or we are going to become extinct.
Is this just who we are?
Are we basically just greedy aggressive and violent creatures reaping havoc on the planet with each other?
What about Love, Compassion, Kindness, Empathy?
What is humankind's basic nature?
Is the essential nature of humans to cooperate with the dominate?
Is the essential nature of the humans to have kingdom or to have democracy?
If you talk with aboriginal and indigenous cultures, you find that the highest societal value is cooperation, and competition is a very low value. In some boundaries, competition is considered a mental illness.
If you look in our culture, cooperation is considered a relatively low value, and competition is considered our highest value. We seem to celebrate the most powerful competitors.
Part of the scientific story has been to say that human nature is competitive.
Nature can be read as tooth and claw –a Darwinian nature.
But the reality is that cooperation is as much a part of that "as survival of the fittest."
The story we all have been telling ourselves since Darwin, was that you have an alpha animal that was in charge, and everybody else bows down, and that justifies kingdom and hierarchy and why we should treat our president as a king, because that is the natural order of things....right?
If you have ever been scuba diving, you've probably seen a school of fish go from one direction, then all of a sudden switch direction.
How do they know?
They are voting a hundred times a minute. It's been studied in insects all the way up to primates.
The basis of nature is cooperation and democracy –it's in our DNA.
When Darwin wrote the Descent of Man, he mentioned survival of the fittest twice, and he mentioned the word LOVE ninety five times. He talked a lot about behaviors like conciliation and cooperation; the world is both cooperative and competitive.
The world is both cooperative and competitive.
Darwin was interpreted and popularized by Huxley, ("Darwin's Bulldog") who had a much more gloom look of human nature, and really stressed the idea that the natural world was an anarchy of the strong treading the weak.
That created this distorted thread that has been followed up to the present –the selfish gene.
The idea that when you get down to the smallest unit of human behavior and you find this selfishness.
Darwin wrote his first book about human nature, Descent of Man, and he wrote:
When you think about how we have evolved as a species, we are not fast, we are not strong, we don't have big fangs, we don't have the muscle mass that our primate relatives have. What we have is the ability to cooperate and take care of others.
"Sympathy is the strongest instinct in human nature." –Darwin
There are really sound reasons; deep survival, and reproductive related reasons why we have evolved to be good to others.
A solitary human being is literally an impossibility. You come into being because a communion (community) of two people came together. I wouldn't be able to know how to speak as a human being. I wouldn't know how to be human. I wouldn't be able to learn how to speak if it wasn't for a human being. I wouldn't learn now to walk if it wasn't for another human being.
I depend actually, and completely on other human beings in order for me to be human. The truth of who we are is that we are –because we belong.
How do people who follow that path behave?
How do they behave towards other humans?
How do they behave towards the earth?
How do they behave towards other living creatures?We need to look at the world in a new way, and trust that the future will have humanity arising from of the evils of the last five hundred years.
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