Category Archives: Spirituality

OUR NEW, HAPPY LIFE? THE IDEOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT

Posted on by
2

By Charles Eisenstein

Source: Waking Times

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a moment when the Party announces an “increase” in the chocolate ration – from thirty grams to twenty. No one except for the protagonist, Winston, seems to notice that the ration has gone down not up.

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 percent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

The newscaster goes on to announce one statistic after another proving that everything is getting better. The phrase in vogue is “our new, happy life.” Of course, as with the chocolate ration, it is obvious that the statistics are phony.

Those words, “our new, happy life,” came to me as I read two recent articles, one by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and the other by Stephen Pinker in the Wall Street Journal, both of which asserted, with ample statistics, that the overall state of humanity is better now than at any time in history. Fewer people die in wars, car crashes, airplane crashes, even from gun violence. Poverty rates are lower than ever recorded, life expectancy is higher, and more people than ever are literate, have access to electricity and running water, and live in democracies.

Like in 1984, these articles affirm and celebrate the basic direction of society. We are headed in the right direction. With smug assurance, they tell us that thanks to reason, science, and enlightened Western political thinking, we are making strides toward a better world.

Like in 1984, there is something deceptive in these arguments that so baldly serve the established order.

Unlike in 1984, the deception is not a product of phony statistics.

Before I describe the deception and what lies on the other side of it, I want to assure the reader that this essay will not try to prove that things are getting worse and worse. In fact, I share the fundamental optimism of Kristof and Pinker that humanity is walking a positive evolutionary path. For this evolution to proceed, however, it is necessary that we acknowledge and integrate the horror, the suffering, and the loss that the triumphalist narrative of civilizational progress skips over.

What hides behind the numbers

In other words, we need to come to grips with precisely the things that Stephen Pinker’s statistics leave out. Generally speaking, metrics-based evaluations, while seemingly objective, bear the covert biases of those who decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what not to measure. They also devalue those things which we cannot measure or that are intrinsically unmeasurable. Let me offer a few examples.

Nicholas Kristof celebrates a decline in the number of people living on less than two dollars a day. What might that statistic hide? Well, every time an indigenous hunter-gatherer or traditional villager is forced off the land and goes to work on a plantation or sweatshop, his or her cash income increases from zero to several dollars a day. The numbers look good. GDP goes up. And the accompanying degradation is invisible.

For the last several decades, multitudes have fled the countryside for burgeoning cities in the global South. Most had lived largely outside the money economy. In a small village in India or Africa, most people procured food, built dwellings, made clothes, and created entertainment in a subsistence or gift economy, without much need for money. When development policies and the global economy push entire nations to generate foreign exchange to meet debt obligations, urbanization invariably results. In a slum in Lagos or Kolkata, two dollars a day is misery, where in the traditional village it might be affluence. Taking for granted the trend of development and urbanization, yes, it is a good thing when those slum dwellers rise from two dollars a day to, say, five. But the focus on that metric obscures deeper processes.

Kristof asserts that 2017 was the best year ever for human health. If we measure the prevalence of infectious diseases, he is certainly right. Life expectancy also continues to rise globally (though it is leveling off and in some countries, such as the United States, beginning to fall). Again though, these metrics obscure disturbing trends. A host of new diseases such as autoimmunity, allergies, Lyme, and autism, compounded with unprecedented levels of addiction, depression, and obesity, contribute to declining physical vitality throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Vast social resources – one-fifth of GDP in the US – go toward sick care; society as a whole is unwell.

Both authors also mention literacy. What might the statistics hide here? For one, the transition into literacy has meant, in many places, the destruction of oral traditions and even the extinction of entire non-written languages. Literacy is part of a broader social repatterning, a transition into modernity, that accompanies cultural and linguistic homogenization. Tens of millions of children go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; history, science, and Shakespeare, in places where, a generation before, they would have learned how to herd goats, grow barley, make bricks, weave cloth, conduct ceremonies, or bake bread. They would have learned the uses of a thousand plants and the songs of a hundred birds, the words of a thousand stories and the steps to a hundred dances. Acculturation to literate society is part of a much larger change. Reasonable people may differ on whether this change is good or bad, on whether we are better off relying on digital social networks than on place-based communities, better off recognizing more corporate logos than local plants and animals, better off manipulating symbols rather than handling soil. Only from a prejudiced mindset could we say, though, that this shift represents unequivocal progress.

My intention here is not to use written words to decry literacy, deliciously ironic though that would be. I am merely observing that our metrics for progress encode hidden biases and neglect what won’t fit comfortably into the worldview of those who devise them. Certainly, in a society that is already modernized, illiteracy is a terrible disadvantage, but outside that context, it is not clear that a literate society – or its extension, a digitized society – is a happy society.

The immeasurability of happiness

Biases or no, surely you can’t argue with the happiness metrics that are the lynchpin of Pinker’s argument that science, reason, and Western political ideals are working to create a better world. The more advanced the country, he says, the happier people are. Therefore the more the rest of the world develops along the path we blazed, the happier the world will be.

Unfortunately, happiness statistics encode as assumptions the very conclusions the developmentalist argument tries to prove. Generally speaking, happiness metrics comprise two approaches: objective measures of well-being, and subjective reports of happiness. Well-being metrics include such things as per-capita income, life expectancy, leisure time, educational level, access to health care, and many of the other accouterments of development.  In many cultures, for example, “leisure” was not a concept; leisure in contradistinction to work assumes that work itself is as it became in the Industrial Revolution: tedious, degrading, burdensome. A culture where work is not clearly separable from life is misjudged by this happiness metric; see Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvelous film Ancient Futures for a depiction of such a culture, in which, as the film says, “work and leisure are one.”

Encoded in objective well-being metrics is a certain vision of development; specifically, the mode of development that dominates today. To say that developed countries are therefore happier is circular logic.

As for subjective reports of individual happiness, individual self-reporting necessarily references the surrounding culture. I rate my happiness in comparison to the normative level of happiness around me. A society of rampant anxiety and depression draws a very low baseline. A woman told me once, “I used to consider myself to be a reasonably happy person until I visited a village in Afghanistan near where I’d been deployed in the military. I wanted to see what it was like from a different perspective. This is a desperately poor village,” she said. “The huts didn’t even have floors, just dirt which frequently turned to mud. They barely even had enough food. But I have never seen happier people. They were so full of joy and generosity. These people, who had nothing, were happier than almost anyone I know.”

Whatever those Afghan villagers had to make them happy, I don’t think shows up in Stephen Pinker’s statistics purporting to prove that they should follow our path. The reader may have had similar experiences visiting Mexico, Brazil, Africa, or India, in whose backwaters one finds a level of joy rare amidst the suburban boxes of my country. This, despite centuries of imperialism, war, and colonialism. Imagine the happiness that would be possible in a just and peaceful world.

I’m sure my point here will be unpersuasive to anyone who has not had such an experience first-hand. You will think, perhaps, that maybe the locals were just putting on their best face for the visitor. Or maybe that I am seeing them through romanticizing “happy-natives” lenses. But I am not speaking here of superficial good cheer or the phony smile of a man making the best of things. People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person. When I interact with one of them, I know that whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious. And I know that until we recognize it and turn toward its recovery, that no further progress in lifespan or GDP or educational attainment will bring us closer to any place worth going.

What other elements of deep well-being elude our measurements? Authenticity of communication? The intimacy and vitality of our relationships? Familiarity with local plants and animals? Aesthetic nourishment from the built environment? Participation in meaningful collective endeavors? Sense of community and social solidarity? What we have lost is hard to measure, even if we were to try. For the quantitative mind, the mind of money and data, it hardly exists. Yet the loss casts a shadow on the heart, a dim longing that no assurance of new, happy life can assuage.

While the fullness of this loss – and, by implication, the potential in its recovery – is beyond measure, there are nonetheless statistics, left out of Pinker’s analysis, that point to it. I am referring to the high levels of suicide, opioid addiction, meth addiction, pornography, gambling, anxiety, and depression that plague modern society and every modernizing society. These are not just random flies that have landed in the ointment of progress; they are symptoms of a profound crisis. When community disintegrates, when ties to nature and place are severed, when structures of meaning collapse, when the connections that make us whole wither, we grow hungry for addictive substitutes to numb the longing and fill the void.

The loss I speak of is inseparable from the very institutions – science, technology, industry, capitalism, and the political ideal of the rational individual – that Stephen Pinker says have delivered humanity from misery. We might be cautious, then, about attributing to these institutions certain incontestable improvements over Medieval times or the early Industrial Revolution. Could there be another explanation? Might they have come despite science, capitalism, rational individualism, etc., and not because of them?

The empathy hypothesis

One of the improvements Stephen Pinker emphasizes is a decline in violence. War casualties, homicide, and violent crime, in general, have fallen to a fraction of their levels a generation or two ago. The decline in violence is real, but should we attribute it, as Pinker does, to democracy, reason, rule of law, data-driven policing, and so forth? I don’t think so. Democracy is no insurance against war – in fact, the United States has perpetrated far more military actions than any other nation in the last half-century. And is the decline in violent crime simply because we are better able to punish and protect ourselves from each other, clamping down on our savage impulses with the technologies of deterrence?

I have another hypothesis. The decline in violence is not the result of perfecting the world of the separate, self-interested rational subject. To the contrary: it is the result of the breakdown of that story, and the rise of empathy in its stead.

In the mythology of the separate individual, the purpose of the state was to ensure a balance between individual freedom and the common good by putting limits on the pursuit of self-interest. In the emerging mythology of interconnection, ecology, and interbeing, we awaken to the understanding that the good of others, human and otherwise, is inseparable from our own well-being.

The defining question of empathy is, What is it like to be you? In contrast, the mindset of war is the othering, the dehumanization and demonization of people who become the enemy. That becomes more difficult the more accustomed we are to considering the experience of another human being. That is why war, torture, capital punishment, and violence have become less acceptable. It is not that they are “irrational.” To the contrary: establishment think tanks are quite adept at inventing highly rational justifications for all of these.

In a worldview in which competing self-interested actors is axiomatic, what is “rational” is to outcompete them, dominate them, and exploit them by any means necessary? It was not advances in science or reason that abolished the 14-hour workday, chattel slavery, or debtors’ prisons.

The worldview of ecology, interdependence, and interbeing offers different axioms on which to exercise our reason. Understanding that another person has an experience of being, and is subject to circumstances that condition their behavior, makes us less able to dehumanize them as a first step in harming them. Understanding that what happens to the world in some way happens to ourselves, reason no longer promotes war. Understanding that the health of soil, water, and ecosystems is inseparable from our own health, reason no longer urges their pillage.

In a perverse way, science & technology cheerleaders like Stephen Pinker are right: science has indeed ended the age of war. Not because we have grown so smart and so advanced over primitive impulses that we have transcended it. No, it is because science has brought us to such extremes of savagery that it has become impossible to maintain the myth of separation. The technological improvements in our capacity to murder and ruin make it increasingly clear that we cannot insulate ourselves from the harm we do to the other.

It was not primitive superstition that gave us the machine gun and the atomic bomb. Industry was not an evolutionary step beyond savagery; it applied savagery at an industrial scale. Rational administration of organizations did not elevate us beyond genocide; it enabled it to happen on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented efficiency in the Holocaust. Science did not show us the irrationality of war; it brought us to the very extreme of irrationality, the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War. In that insanity was the seed of a truly evolutive understanding – that what we do to the other, happens to ourselves as well. That is why, aside from a retrograde cadre of American politicians, no one seriously considers using nuclear weapons today.

The horror we feel at the prospect of, say, nuking Pyongyang or Tehran is not the dread of radioactive blowback or retributive terror. It arises, I claim, from our empathic identification with the victims. As the consciousness of interbeing grows, we can no longer easily wave off their suffering as the just deserts of their wickedness or the regrettable but necessary price of freedom. It as if, on some level, it would be happening to ourselves.

To be sure, there is no shortage of human rights abuses, death squads, torture, domestic violence, military violence, and violent crime still in the world today. To observe, in the midst of it, a rising tide of compassion is not a whitewash of the ugliness, but a call for fuller participation in a movement. On the personal level, it is a movement of kindness, compassion, empathy, taking ownership of one’s judgments and projections, and – not contradictorily – of bravely speaking uncomfortable truths, exposing what was hidden, bringing violence and injustice to light, telling the stories that need to be heard. Together, these two threads of compassion and truth might weave a politics in which we call out the iniquity without judging the perpetrator, but instead seek to understand and change the circumstances of the perpetration.

From empathy, we seek not to punish criminals but to understand the circumstances that breed crime. We seek not to fight terrorism but to understand and change the conditions that generate it. We seek not to wall out immigrants, but to understand why people are so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and lands, and how we might be contributing to their desperation.

Empathy suggests the opposite of the conclusion offered by Stephen Pinker. It says, rather than more efficient legal penalties and “data-driven policing,” we might study the approach of new Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has directed prosecutors to stop seeking maximum sentences, stop prosecuting cannabis possession, steer offenders toward diversionary programs rather than penal programs, cutting inordinately long probation periods, and other reforms. Undergirding these measures is compassion: What is it like to be a criminal? An addict? A prostitute? Maybe we still want to stop you from continuing to do that, but we no longer desire to punish you. We want to offer you a realistic opportunity to live another way.

Similarly, the future of agriculture is not in more aggressive breeding, more powerful pesticides, or the further conversion of living soil into an industrial input. It is in knowing soil as a being and serving its living integrity, knowing that its health is inseparable from our own. In this way, the principle of empathy (What is it like to be you?) extends beyond criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal relationships. Agriculture, medicine, education, technology – no field is outside its bounds. Translating that principle into civilization’s institutions (rather than extending the reach of reason, control, and domination) is what will bring real progress to humanity.

This vision of progress is not contrary to technological development; neither will science, reason, or technology automatically bring it about. All human capacities can be put into service to a future embodying the understanding that the world’s wellbeing, human and otherwise, feeds our own.

Why ‘Conspiracy Theories’ & Spirituality Are Intimately Connected

Posted on by
2

By Joe Martino

Source: Collective Evolution

Is it considered ‘not spiritual’ to talk about an elite or cabal running our world? This has become a commonplace today, and there is a great deal of ridicule that comes when people feel looking at the truth of what is playing out in our world is ‘crazy’ or a ‘negative’ thing to do. In fact, the ‘negative’ label on conspiracy theories we place is one of the biggest spiritual bypasses we can do. Let’s dive into this.

The truth is, understanding the way our world truly functions and consciousness evolution (spirituality) go hand in hand. Why? Because it is all part of life here. It is not separate! You don’t have spirituality on one side and conspiracies or truth on the other. It’s all interconnected in our life and human experience. And it’s time to bring them together.

The Challenge

This isn’t true 100% of the time of course, but in a lot of cases, we see those in the truth-seeking realm feel consciousness or spirituality is airy fairy and has no place in the big picture and is just a new age distraction. On the flip side, we see those engaged in spirituality-seeking feel conspiracy/truth-seeking people are crazy and negative. While there is truth to some extent in both cases, there is a lot more to the discussion and a very important purpose for both.

You’ve probably experienced it at some point, it’s believable that GMO’s are unhealthy and corporations are using them to make money in a number of ways but it’s damaging to people and the environment, but yet there is no possible way that’s happening with vaccines… or that 9/11 was an inside job. Let me be the first to say, there are a number of conspiracy theories that have no backing, no facts, are far-reaching and in many cases don’t even help us along our journey. But this is not the case with many, in fact, the amount of evidence is often staggering and it’s simply that we don’t want to believe it.

I’m writing this because I’m calling for an end of the reduction of conversation to ‘that’s crazy’ ‘that’s fake news’ ‘that’s a conspiracy’ etc. as it does nothing but maintain division, a lack of awareness and a misinformed world that can’t thrive. Time and time again what is often called ‘conspiracy’ turns out to be true only a few months or a year later. We can end this cycle by learning and choosing to listen instead of dismissing, then checking in with our hearts/souls about what role this is playing in our experience so we can dissolve the need for the cabal.

Why They Go Hand In Hand

Some of us view spirituality as learning techniques to feel good, as ways to cope with life and the challenges we have in our modern world. Some view it as a means to begin to feel better about the prospect of death. Others view it as a way to explore what’s beyond the physical and who we truly are.

From a conspiratorial side, when we’re talking about digging past mainstream media to find out what’s really going on in our world, some view it as a way to disempower the elite that does not have humanities best interests at heart. Others view it as a way to take back our power. Some see it as a way to uncover the truth of how our world truly works so we can begin to thrive. Some react to these truths with wanting revenge or justice, this is an important thing to note as this is where the spirituality comes in.

So it appears we have ‘two sides’ as we often like to do within ego states of consciousness. But what role does the elite and cabal play in our experience? How has that served to suppress our spirituality and why has it all happened? The two are intimately connected because part of the game we are playing on earth here is that we have to uncover what has been happening in our reality and remember who we truly are. This is a spiritual journey, that involves understanding the players in the game and the roles they play.

I’ve been running a conscious media and education company for 9.5 years now. Our mission is to bridge the gap between truth-seeking and spirituality via exploring a shift in consciousness taking place on our planet. We understand that both are part of one big picture in life and you can only go so far in each before you MUST bring in the other to deepen your understanding.

During the 9.5 years since I started Collective Evolution, I have seen thousands of people go through various stages of discovering and learning, both in truth-seeking and spirituality, that has sent them on different paths. Some begin to discover our food system is rigged for a lack of health and they begin eating cleaner. This leads them to understand our entire world is ‘rigged against us’ and suddenly there is a shift in how they see the world. I have seen others attend a yoga class and this begins a journey into connecting with self deeply.

But in both cases, I often see an identity form. The yogi becomes identified as a ‘spiritual person,’ dresses a certain way, talks a certain way and may refuse to look at anything the ‘truth-seekers’ are saying because they don’t want to fall into that crowd. The truth-seekers are often angry, pissed off at the world, call everyone else sheeple and think the elite need to die in prisons. They might look at the ‘yogi’ or ‘spiritual’ crowd as having fallen into pseudo-scientific new age deception because they look at consciousness and spirituality.

Then there are those who have journeyed beyond that stage and are simply authentic and understand how both ingredients, truth-seeking and spirituality, are one in the same and part of the journey. They are both a part of this game we call life and if we truly want to evolve, move forward, remove the cabal and so forth, we must see the truth and learn why it was there in the first place for our own evolution in consciousness.

It’s A Role!

Remember, what the cabal and elite are doing isn’t negative in the big picture scheme of things. To our mind it might be, but not to our souls. This is why you must connect deeply with self to overcome the vengeful hateful view the mind creates when we observe them.

What they are doing simply is. And for our souls, it is the journey we asked for to challenge ourselves to remember who we truly are in a very disconnected system. The cabal, are just souls having an experience too, and we all agreed on this together. This doesn’t mean we accept what they are doing in the physical and just take it, no, it simply means we must evolve our consciousness and overcome the need for them for it to stop.

How does that look or happen? We must understand why it’s there by going beyond the judgement and the emotion and see what the trap it creates for us. With that understanding, we no longer can get trapped in the angry, hateful emotions that hold this world in place and instead we choose, from a consciousness point of view, to create a different world. This not only affects collective consciousness and helps others awaken, but we then now can create a new world, both physically and consciously, that comes from a higher state of consciousness and not one that is built in fear, anger and judgement of the old one. Remaining in that old state will only create more of the same world.

Again, I feel it is very important to listen to the podcast episode on this one as it goes into deep detail about this.

Final Thoughts

If you find yourself viewing matters in either of these polarized lights, challenge yourself to ask why? Why have this opposition to either side and why are we coloring things as positive or negative in the first place? What is that showing us about ourselves? Our fear of looking at our own ‘darkness?’ Collective ‘darkness?’ In many ways, what the elite/cabal are doing is just a reflection of our own journeys on a macro scale. It’s reflecting humanity’s current state of consciousness as we awaken to the truth. Change Starts Within.

Unsouling From the Wilderness

Posted on by
Reply

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.” ~Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

“Modern man, I dutifully noted, is in search of a soul, and the age is an age of longing.” ~Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

Perhaps the reason some of us are feeling a sense of loss and longing is that we are, as Black Elk informs us, living in the shadow world. Our reality on this side may only be the fleeting ghosts of a place that is more real somewhere else. On this side we have broken our commitment to the earth and have unsouled ourselves from the wilderness. By the first century CE, the essayist Plutarch was asking, “Why is it that the gods are no longer speaking to us?”

For a long time now, we have been trying to create a new and different image of ourselves. It is an image where modern humanity is placed at the center of its own universe. We learn by observing, probing, experimenting, and finally dissecting and destroying the dynamic world we live within. From this, the modern mind started to develop a new reality for itself.

The collective reality in which we now reside does not take kindly to opposing perspectives. We have inherited an alienated consciousness that views the world as an outside entity – a world of objects that move in mechanical motion. This alienated consciousness has substituted the enchantment and mystery of living within a dynamic and animated world with a dream of the artificial, and ultimately the unreal. The modern landscape is now more scattered with administration than adventure. The central image of our modern age has been that of consumerism: the ability of the average person to buy the material goods they require in order to have a decent standard of living. A standard of living albeit promoted to us through our mainstream media and glamorous propaganda.

Only recently have some of us come to realize that consumerism has now become a contemporary form of crash therapy for unsatisfied people wanting to buy their way into happiness to escape from the very system they are simultaneously supporting. The easy acquisition of things has become more about trying to cover up anxiety as a substitute for contentment. Modern life, especially in the highly-developed West, is now rife with people parading their false selves in place of authenticity.

The modern history of the West has been about the removal of mystery, mind, and magic from the world around us. In the past there were realms of wilderness that existed outside of the social order, and each culture had these ‘wild zones’ where people danced with the little folk in the woods, undertook initiations in caves, circles, and hard-to-find corners. There were pagan rituals, crazy ecstasies, and unknown zones where primal energies were released. These were the places of wilderness, where dreamtime reigned, and clock-time was banned. And now these wild places are fewer and fewer as a new ‘reality order’ becomes the manifesto of the day. Now it is many of us who are feeling haunted. We have lost the presence of the ‘transcendent’ within our modern societies.

We must now recognize that something has happened – a break, a mutation, has occurred that has placed us in an ‘intermediate’ stage between eras. Modern life is being not so much rewritten as reconfigured. We are seeing odd things occurring in relation to time, speed, and distance. It’s as if right now the clock, and our sense of timing, is malfunctioning. This ahistorical period is out of time, until it resets itself. And here, the possibility of transcendence lingers like a phantasma.

We are in a time of carnivalesque distortion where ‘fast food’ is a parody of our normal food preparation and consumption; mediatized sport is a spectacle of its original form; and the music industry is one huge commercial carnival that mocks genuine creativity. In the pop music industry, the spectacle, the live show – the ‘carnival performance’ – is often more important than the actual merit of the song (even when the performer mimes, as they often do). We are in a different world right now – or at least a seemingly different reality.

In this new world of different relations, symbols, and meanings we have become unmoored from our harbors. We are talking about the fractal, the quantum, the molecular, the nano, the bots, artificial intelligence, and the singularity – yet we find we have no soulful connection with any of these terms or their significances. Perhaps we have entered a void-time.

The Sense of the Void

With human life having lost its reference to transcendence and the notion of the sacred, there is the ever-present danger that we may descend to a form of human morality that lacks any real meaning or higher principles. It is not hard to believe that a degree of inertia has crept into our modern societies. The result is that many of us may now be finding ourselves with a hollow space inside. This space becomes the perfect seedbed for the consuming desires, distractions, and attractions of modernity’s excesses. Within such an environment we wonder whether we may find ourselves waking up to a world where the dream is still dreaming itself and we can no longer distinguish what is real.

An age of the quantifiable has been ushered in and everyone, and everything, gets given a mark or a measurement. Ever since the industrial age brought in the points system – the marking scores – into mass education we’ve been carrying numbers around with us. Before then, students were known as apprentices and they spent time embedded in their discipline learning its skills. They either learnt great skills or they didn’t; now they get an 85, a 78, a 66, or a 45. Now all modern institutions think in numbers and our social status is quantified by such numbers, or grades, that allow us into other specialized zones – such as the members clubs, the elite institutions, or even into the ‘good credit’ rating books. The organic nature and capacity of a person has been stripped down to the quantifiable, and this measures the worth of an individual according to such grades. These associated numbers then follow the person around for the rest of their lives, influencing their careers, associations, and social freedoms. Society is now painting-by-numbers.

The mesmerizing void that is modern life tries to appease us with simulated pleasures. Through our unsouling from the greater transcendent wilderness we have become all too easily appeased by seeking inadequate answers to life’s meaning. By not seeking for the essential, we cannot hope to be anything other than temporary. Within the past century millions of people in developed parts of the world have distanced and divorced themselves from nature. We are negotiating how to adapt to a world structured within an increasingly artificial environment. The mutational shift is well underway, and new arrangements will need to be sought.

A potential lack of understanding can disconnect us from a world that is at the same time becoming increasingly connected. For thousands of years our ancestors lived alongside natural forces, learning from environmental cycles, and reading the world around them. This uncoupling from the wilderness is not only in favor of urban settings but eventually artificially constructed settings that will soon be made ‘smart.’ The profusion of what are called ‘mega-cities’ are set to implement ‘smart’ technologies which will be a combination of connected information and communication infrastructures.

A Moment of Reflection

We are, it is said, the most highly-developed and articulate species on planet Earth, and yet we live in a world of reflections. We are doomed never to be able to see directly our own faces. Our face, as well as our ‘true face’ as they say, is non-visible to us; and so we are guided by reflections and their appearances.

There is a short-story from Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled ‘Fauna of Mirrors’ that tells of a time during the reign of the Yellow Emperor when the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, like today, cut off from one another.[i] Both kingdoms lived in harmony and each could come and go through the mirrors. Yet one night the mirror people invaded the earth and a mighty battle ensued until finally the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. The mirror people were pushed back and imprisoned into their mirrors, and punished by being forced to repeat, as if in a dream, all the actions of the world of men. They were stripped of their power and their forms and reduced to mere reflections. A day will come, however, when the magic spell will be broken and little by little these reflections will awaken and will slowly differ from us. Then they will stop imitating the world of humans and eventually they will break through the glass once again to enter the earth.

They say that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Upon reflection, every culture and society claim a portion of our private psyche as its own. With the narrowing of our sensibilities comes not only a much-diminished reality but also a contracted perspective whereby this condensed form of perception and visibility becomes as hyperreality to us. If it’s true that modern life has muffled the call of transcendental mystery, then it is equally true that it has made transcendence both a more needed and yet more difficult promise. The cry for the ‘death of the soul’ and the unsouling from the wilderness has helped to pave the slippery path toward a simplified hyperreality that is now stealing the show. Fasten seatbelts…

A Bardo Chat with: Aranyani, Hindu Goddess of the Forests 

Author (A): Hello Aranyani. Are you there?

Aranyani (Ai): (short pause) Hello…hello!

A: Hello Aranyani. How are you today?

Ai: Today? Why today? I don’t have days like you do.

A: Ah yes, sorry. I was thinking in my own terms of time. It’s a frequent trap!

Ai: That’s okay, we understand. Traps are there to break out of. I am good, thank you. I am well.

A: That is good to hear. I am glad to know you are well amidst all this disconnection going on right now.

Ai: Disconnection? I am gently strolling through my forests. There is no disconnection (another short pause). All is well here.

A: Sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant disconnection between us, humans, and the natural world. It seems that we’ve done a terrible job of respecting Nature and our environment.

Ai: Mmm, yes, that is so. I am not fond of strolling too near to your civilizations. But why do you call it a job? You see, already you show a wrong way to look at things. Your way of words shows how your mind thinks. Looking after the natural world, as you put it, is not a ‘job.’ It is a recognition of respect, or mutual interdependence, and of compassion and love.

A: Sorry again. I know that I use my words too loosely. It is the way we use phrases here.

Ai: Yes, I know how your species is. For one thing, you don’t listen at all very well. You consider yourselves as a separate species. My dear, nothing is separate. You see space between bodies and you label this as separation. You think and behave like children, and Nature is your forgiving mother.

A: I know, we’ve got a lot of things back-to-front. Would you care to explain more on this relationship?

Ai: (a soft sigh) Maybe a little. Everything communicates here, it always has. You don’t necessarily need a mouth or words or letters to communicate. It all communicates energetically, and you humans are also attuned to this. Every part was supposed to work together. You are strange in that you forgot how to properly listen. And now you build devices outside of yourselves to wrap around the earth – but you don’t need them. And there will be a time when you shall know this, and learn to communicate correctly, as you were always meant to – and not with your machine things. All of nature is alive, don’t you know that?

A: Yes, some of us do; but not enough, unfortunately.

Ai: You knew better before, a long time ago.

A: Yes, I have a feeling we did. Yet we now need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: Well….. (long pause)

A: Hello, are you there Aranyani?

Ai: Oh yes, sorry, I was dancing. I have a tune in my head. It’s been given to me from the trees.

A: Wonderful! I was saying that we need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: That’s not really how it is. Learning, knowing, and all these things – it’s all head stuff. You live too much in your heads. You always think you need to grab onto something – to know better, and the like. I would say you have to open up more, and to remember everything that was placed inside you. You are coming to a different place now…

A: Yes, thank you. And what do you mean by ‘coming to a different place’?

Ai: I mean you are not in your little tribal units anymore. You are now all over the earth. You grew and connected as you should, and now you are coming to a time when you can really be of help to the earth.

A: You mean as a global species?

Ai: (laughs) You and your fancy words. Yes, you are connecting more strongly with the body of Gaia now. Soon you will find your minds being changed for you. That should be fun!

A: Ah, and what do you mean by that?

Ai: (hums to herself) I don’t feel I should reveal too much just now. Not too many of you have realized that your minds are attuned to Gaia, your planet consciousness. Consciousness is not only those thoughts in your head, silly! (laughs). This is the true language, the natural language, and it is everywhere. This language flows through the trees, the plants, the animals, and through all of Gaia. There is a language that connects, and the humans are disconnected from this. Yes, that is the true disconnection. You talk about disconnect from Nature, but really it is disconnection from your shared language. You speak in tongues but only babble silly words.

A: Yes, true – we do babble a lot.

Ai: Babble, babble, yes you do! Like that story you tell yourselves. You call it the Tower of Babel, right?

A: Yes, that’s true. And it’s a perfect analogy. We tried to build a tower to our Creator and we ended up being divided in languages through our ignorance.

Ai: Yes, that’s it right there. You were disconnected through your ignorance.

A: Mm…yes (sighs)

Ai: Don’t worry, dear. You still have it all inside of you. Your connection to Origin and the universal language is still there. And you are not disconnected from us either. You are always with us, and you always have been.

A: Okay, sure. And thanks. But by being with you always are we not making the balance of Nature worse?

Ai: Oh, dear ones – it’s always about you, isn’t it!? Let me tell you that Nature is far more capable of taking care of herself than you are. Things change, yes. And you are making a mess and not clearing up your mess, like children. This is true too. Yet so many more things come to pass that are not in your hands – that is Nature. She is so far beyond your comprehension of her. You think of these separate things within Nature, like the trees and the forests, and the rivers. But you cannot yet see them as being all together as a wondrous Being. She is a Being far beyond your little minds. And she cares for you. Little children, wake up!

A: Yes, yes.

Ai: Be more joyful and love the things you have, and which surround you. The disconnection you speak of is less from Nature and more from yourselves (starts to sing)

A: That is so true – thank you.

Ai: I have to go now…byeee (voice fades into distance)

A: Yes, thank you Aranyani – bye!

 

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

References:

[i] See his short-story collection The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Transcending the Hegelian Dialectic and Duality Reality

Posted on by
Reply

By Rosanne Lindsay

Source: Waking Times

In our ego-driven, divide-and-conquer world, we live in a duality reality. This reality reflects a matrix of opposites: introvert/extrovert, beginning/end, living/dead, mind/matter, wave/particle, self/other, material/spiritual, on/off, right/left. This is merely a separation of the mind that always wants to compare. We are both and neither. Humanity is a part of Nature and Nature is a continuum. In Nature, there is no separation, no opposition, no self and other, no conflict, and no destruction, unless destruction is balanced with creation. Just as Nature is self-sustaining and self-healing, so are we.

The hierarchical, dual systems in which we find ourselves, from prisons to politics, are grounded in duality, promoting separation over unity, creating leaders and followers. The system is served well by the Hegelian Dialectic.

The Hegelian Dialectic originated with George Hegel, a nineteenth century school teacher, who argued that human nature is a series of conflicts and resolutions that eventually elevate humankind to a unified spiritual state. The process is based in three easy steps: Problem-Reaction-Solution. Create a problem. Foment a reaction (of anger or sympathy). Provide a solution.

Two hundred years later, whatever Hegel’s good intentions, the goal to achieve unity from conflict-resolution has remained unproven and unachievable. Under duality reality, economic chaos has produced increased taxation. Shortages of oil and food have reinforced monopolies. The threat of pandemics has led to vaccine mandates. The threat of terrorism has resulted in restrictions on individual freedoms. Conflict has only bred more conflict.

The obvious truth that refutes Hegel’s idea is that unity is not uniformity. Unity follows no leaders and leads no followers. Unity does not restrict, limit, or conform through education or through more regulations and mandates. Unity fails where players must choose to align with a tribe and plug into the implicit biases of tribal programming. The tribe – wearing the suits of political parties or the robes of religious sects – reinforces the divisions and the information that we already believe and want to hear.

Hegel’s goal for unity can never work because in duality reality we naturally choose competition over compassion. In our system of choosing sides we lose our individuality. We hope for peace and wonder why nothing ever changes. Those who believe they are on the side of peace accuse others of being on the side of war. Each group fights with weapons of words, never able to find peace, unity, or common ground because the very foundation of the system keeps people divided.

Duality Matrix

Each side feels threatened by the other in a struggle over control. The duality matrix creates winners and losers. The media reinforces the infighting that keeps both sides distracted while an imbalance of power is maintained – the few controlling the many. The many are promised protection and security against all their fears. However, no guarantees are granted. As a consequence, the many are left feeling vulnerable and powerless, embracing their servitude and begging for greater protections at the expense of their freedoms.

As a nation, we experience the fear of vulnerability every time we are faced with the consequences of an unexpected natural, or man-made disaster. We have become dependent on the guise of security in the form of the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), so much so, that when the information is incorrect and the system fails, we are left helpless, not knowing how to forage for food, build shelter, or fend for ourselves as our ancestors did. We are a technically advanced nation without a community and without a connection to the land on which we live.

We believe that in giving our allegiance to the State and Federal government that we are protected. However, the State, including local law enforcement has no duty to protect us. The Supreme Court revealed this truth in 1856 in South v. Maryland when it ruled, “Local law-enforcement had no duty to protect individuals but only a general duty to enforce the laws. The Supreme Court uses the Constitution to protect the State in its ruling in Bowers v. Devito:

“there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties; it tells the state to let the people alone; it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order.”

In exchange for votes to uphold a dual system, people receive a false sense of security. However, our inherent rights do not come from the government, The Constitution, or The Bill of Rights, or any paper document. These are merely symbols. Inherent rights and freedoms are not dictated by regulations and statutes but by common sense and morals, as long as no harm or loss is caused. Inherent rights are higher, transcendent rights that are “unalienable.” These rights are God-given under the laws of nature, and can neither be granted nor withdrawn. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads in part:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

New Hampshire is the only state in the country to have an express, written right of revolution in the state constitution. The only concern is the non-negotiable prohibition against violence of any sort in the enforcement or manifestation of this right.

Text of Article 10: Right of Revolution:

Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

Transcend Duality Reality

The division of opposites will continue to play out in reality until we recognize that all war and peace, introvert and extrovert, light and dark exists within us. To attack another is to attack one’s very nature. To judge another is to judge one’s self. In peaceful resistance, we can either opt out or withdraw consent from any system that would subvert unity and cooperation. Just saying NO can be a powerful stance.

Transcending duality reality comes down to creating new rules under Natural Law, that does away with the hierarchical systems of authority. It also requires real choice. Choosing not to participate in a system that doesn’t serve the greatest good is making an energy statement as powerful as choosing to participate. Choice determines outcome. Withdrawing consent is not apathy but the opposite of apathy. Being vulnerable is not the problem, but fear is. F.E.A.R. is False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear is merely a construct of the mind, but it serves to hold humanity in shackles. The power to transcend conflict, and come together, is found in choosing kindness as our tribe.

Are we ready?

 

Slow suicide and the abandonment of the world

Posted on by
Reply

By Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”—R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967

“The artist is the man who refuses initiation through education into the existing order, remains faithful to his own childhood being, and thus becomes ‘a human being in the spirit of all times, an artist.’”—Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.

But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands. Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when not a surprise, allow for no return. Such sudden once-and-for-all endings are even more jarring in a high-tech world where people are subconsciously habituated to thinking that everything can be played back, repeated, and rewound, even lives.

If the suicides are celebrities, the mass media can obsess over why they did it. How shocking! Wasn’t she at the peak of her career? Didn’t he finally seem happy? And then the speculative stories will appear about the reasons for the rise or fall of suicide rates, only to disappear as quickly as the celebrities are dropped by the media and forgotten by the public.

The suicides of ordinary people will be mourned privately by their loved ones in their individual ways and in the silent recesses of their hearts. A hush will fall over their departures that will often be viewed as accidental.

And the world will roll on as the earth absorbs the bodies and the blood. “Where’s it all going all this spilled blood,” writes the poet Jacques Prévert. “Murder’s blood . . . war’s blood . . . blood of suicides . . . the earth that turns and turns with its great streams of blood.”

Of such suicides Albert Camus said, “Dying voluntarily implies you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.” He called this feeling the absurd, and said it was widespread and involved the feeling of being an alien or stranger in a world that couldn’t be explained and didn’t make sense. Assuming this experience of the absurd, Camus wished to explore whether suicide was a solution to it. He concluded that it wasn’t.

Like Camus, I am interested in asking what is the meaning of life. “How to answer it?” he asked in The Myth of Sisyphus. He added that “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” But I don’t want to explore his line of reasoning to his conclusions, whether to agree or disagree. I wish, rather, to explore the reasons why so many people choose to commit slow suicide by immersing themselves in the herd mentality and following a way of life that leads to inauthenticity and despair; why so many people so easily and early give up their dreams of a life of freedom for a proverbial mess of pottage, which these days can be translated to mean a consumer’s life, one focused on staying safe by embracing conventional bromides and making sure to never openly question a system based on systemic violence in all its forms; why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many people embrace getting and spending and the accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of a chimerical “happiness” that leaves them depressed and conscience dead. Why so many people do not rebel but wish to take their places on this ship of fools.

So what can we say about the vast numbers of people who commit slow suicide by a series of acts and inactions that last a long lifetime and render them the living dead, those whom Thoreau so famously said were the mass of people who “lead lives of quiet desperation”? Is the meaning of life for them simply the habit of living they fell into at the start of life before they thought or wondered what’s it all about? Or is it the habit they embraced after shrinking back in fear from the disturbing revelations thinking once brought them? Or did they ever seriously question their place in the lethal fraud that is organized society, what Tolstoy called the Social Lie? Why do so many people kill their authentic selves and their consciences that could awaken them to break through the social habits of thought, speech, and action that lead them to live “jiffy lube” lives, periodically oiled and greased to smoothly roll down the conventional highway of getting and spending and refusing to resist the murderous actions of their government?

An unconscious despair rumbles beneath the frenetic surface of American society today. An unspoken nothingness. I think the Italian writer Robert Calasso says it well: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” It’s as though we are floating on nothing, sustained by nothing, in love with nothing—all the while embracing any thing that a materialistic, capitalist consumer culture can throw at us. We are living in an empire of illusions, propagandized and self-deluded. Most people will tell you they are stressed and depressed, but will often add—“who wouldn’t be with the state of the world”—ignoring their complicity through the way they have chosen compromised, conventional lives devoid of the spirit of rebellion.

I keep meeting people who, when I ask them how they are, will respond by saying, “I’m hanging in there.”

Don’t common sayings intimate unconscious truths? Hang—among its possible derivatives is the word “habit” and the meaning of “coming to a standstill.” Stuck in one’s habits, dangling over nothing, up in the air, going nowhere, hanging by a string. Slow suicides. The Beatles’ sang it melodically: “He’s a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody/Doesn’t have a point of view/Knows not where he’s going to/Isn’t he a bit like you and me.” It’s a far cry from having “the world on a string,” as Harold Arlen wrote many years before.

Maybe if we listen to how people talk or what popular culture throws up, we will learn more through creative associations than through all the theories the experts have to offer.

There have been many learned tomes over the years trying to explain the act of suicide, an early and very famous one being Emile Durkheim’s groundbreaking sociological analysis Suicide (1897). In thousands of books and articles other thinkers have approached the subject from various perspectives—psychological, philosophical, biological, etc. They contain much truth and a vast amount of data that appeal to the rational mind seeking general explanations. But in the end, general explanations are exactly that—general—while a mystery usually haunts the living whose loved ones have killed themselves.

But what about the slow suicides, those D. H. Lawrence called the living dead (don’t let “the living dead eat you up”), those who have departed the real world for a conscienceless complacency from which they can cast aspersions on those whose rebellious spirits give them little rest. Where are the expert disquisitions about them?

We’ve had more than a century of pseudo-scientific studies of suicide and the world has gotten much worse. More than a century of psychotherapy and people have grown progressively more depressed. Large and increasing numbers are drugged to the teeth with pharmaceutical drugs and television and the Internet and cell phones and shopping and endless talk about food and diets and sports and nothing. Talk to talk, surface to surface. Pundits pontificate daily in streams of endless bullshit for which they are paid enormous sums as they smile with their fake whiter-than-white teeth flashing from their makeup masks. People actually listen to these fools to “inform” themselves. They even watch television news and think they know what is happening in the world. We are drowning in a “universe of disembodied data,” as playwright John Steppling has so aptly phrased it. People obsessively hover over their cell phones, searching for the key that will unlock the cells they have locked themselves in. Postliteracy, mediated reality, and digital dementia have become the norm. Minds are packaged and commodified. Perhaps you think I exaggerate, but I feel that madness is much more the norm today than when Laing penned his epigraphic comment.

Not stark raving screaming madness, just a slow, whimpering acceptance of an insane society whose very fabric is toxic and which continues its God-ordained mission of spreading death and destruction around the world in the name of freedom and democracy, while so many of its walking dead citizens measure out their lives with coffee spoons. A nice madness, you could say, a pleasant, depressed and repressed madness. A madness in which people might say with T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (if they still read or could remember): “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . . And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, / and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”

But why are so many so afraid? Everyone has fears, but so many normal people seem extremely fearful, so fearful they choose to blend into the social woodwork so they don’t stand out as dissenters or oddballs. They kill their authentic selves; become conscience-less. And they do this in a society where their leaders are hell-bent on destroying the world and who justify their nuclear madness at every turn. I think Laing was right that this goes back to our experience. When genuine experience is denied or mystified (it’s now disappeared into digital reality), real people disappear. Laing wrote:

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q.s if possible. From the moment of birth, when these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, as their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of it potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age. Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love . . . We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

So yes, I do think most people are victims. No one chooses their parents, or to be born into poverty, or to be discriminated against for one’s race, etc. No one chooses to have their genuine experience poisoned from childhood. No one chooses to be born into a mad society. This is all true. Some are luckier than others. Suicides, fast and slow, are victims. But not just victims. This is not about blame, but understanding. For those who commit to lives of slow suicide, to the squelching of their true selves and their consciences in the face of a rapacious and murderous society, there is always the chance they can break with the norm and go sane. Redemption is always possible. But it primarily involves overcoming the fear of death, a fear that manifests itself in the extreme need to preserve one’s life, so-called social identity, and sense of self by embracing social conventions, no matter how insane they may be or whether or not they bring satisfaction or fulfillment. Whether or not they give life a meaning that goes deep.

But for those who have taken their lives and are no longer among us, hope is gone. But we can learn from their tragedies if we are truthful. For them the fear of life was primary, and death seemed like an escape from that fear. Life was too much for them. Why? We must ask. So they chose a life-in-death approach through fast suicide. Everyone is joined to them in that fear, just as everyone is joined by the fear of death. It is a question of which dominates, and when, and how much courage we can muster to live daringly. The fear of death leads one to constrict one’s life in the safe surround of conventional society in the illusion that such false security will save one in the end. Death is too much for them. So they accept a death-in-life approach that I call slow suicide.

But in the end as in the beginning and throughout our lives, there is really no escape. The more alive we are, the closer death feels because really living involves risks and living outside the cocoon of the social lie. Mr. Pumpkin Head might seize you, whether he is conceived as your boss, an accident, disease, social ostracism, or some government assassin. But the deader we feel, the further away death seems because we feel safe. Pick your poison.

But better yet, perhaps there is no need to choose if we can regain our genuine experience that parents and society, for different reasons, conspire to deny us. Could the meaning of our lives be found, not in statements or beliefs, but in true experience? Most people think of experience as inner or outer. This is not true. It is a form of conventional brainwashing that makes us schizoid. It is the essence of the neuro-biological materialism that reduces humans to unfree automatons. Proffered as the wisdom of the super intelligent, it is sheer stupidity.

All experience is in-between, not the most eloquent of phrasing, I admit, but accurate. Laing, a psychiatrist, puts it in the same way as do the mystics and those who embrace the Tao. He says, “The relation of my experience to behavior is not that of inner to outer. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is outside in this room. To say that my experience is intrapsychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in. My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.” Reverie, imagination, prayer, dream, etc., are as much outer as inner, they are modalities of experience that exist in-between. We live in-between, and if we could experience that, we would realize the meaning of life and our connection to all living beings, including those our government massacres daily, and we would awaken our consciences to our complicity in the killing. We would realize that the victims of the American killing machine are human beings like us; are us, and we, them. We would rebel.

Thoreau said a life without principle was not worth living. Yet for so many of the slow suicides the only principals they ever had were those they had in high school. Such word confusion is understandable when illiteracy is the order of the day and spelling passé. Has anyone when in high school ever had Thoreau’s admonition drummed into his head: “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.” Of course not, since getting a “good” living is never thought to involve living in an honest, inviting, and honorable way. It is considered a means to an end, the end being a consumer’s paradise. “As for the means of living,” Thoreau added, “it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called—whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it.” Is it any wonder so many people end up committing slow suicide? “Is it that men are too much disgusted with their own experience to speak of it?”

What the hell–TGIH!

I believe the story has it that when he was in jail for refusing the poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American war, Thoreau was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau responded, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?” Today, however, most folks don’t realize that being outside their cells is being in them, and such imprisonment is far from principled. That’s not a text message they’re likely to receive.

I recently met a woman, where or when I can’t recall. It might have been when walking on the open road or falling in a dreaming hole. She told me “if you look through a window, you can see the world outside. If you look in a mirror, you can see yourself outside. If you look into the outside world, you can see everyone inside out. When the inside is seen outside and the outside is seen inside, you will know what you face. Everything becomes simple then,” as she looked straight through me and my face fell off.

Monuments to the Ego

Posted on by
2

By David Mattson

Source: CounterPunch

Some rich bourgeoisie newcomers have perpetrated yet the latest in a series of atrocities upon the small valley where we live, entailing an assault on the sensibilities of virtually everyone and everything living there. Adding insult to injury, this has all been done with apparent utter disregard for us, our neighbors, our dirt road, the wildlife, the native vegetation, and everything sacred and beautiful.

The newcomers scalped the hillside they’ve occupied, smoothed out the offending topographic wrinkles, tore up all the untidy native shrubs, hacked a bench in the slope, erected a large garish pole barn, chiseled out an impractically steep access road, covered every flat or otherwise traversed surface with thick coats of coarse and fine gravel, revegetated the raw soil with non-native plants, propagated massive amounts of weeds, and displaced the deer and elk…meanwhile afflicting all of the neighbors below their lofty perch with the endless noise of heavy equipment suited for construction of interstate highways and a ceaseless caravan of over-sized dump trucks kicking up billowing clouds of dust while assaulting us with their jake brakes. And, no doubt, these naïve newcomers will panic when they realize that mountain lions and bears prowl the ridge where they live, with resulting fatal consequences for any large carnivore ranging nearby.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the favorite pastimes among us and other long-term residents is grousing about the rich newcomers, especially the ugly monstrosities they’ve built in highly-visible places. Our nearest neighbor, a salt-of-the earth kind of guy, has a talent for naming the $1 million-plus edifices, including The Ugly House, The Chicken Coop, The Atrocity, and, most recently, The Abortion Clinic.  But the most compelling comment was delivered by yet another long-time neighbor, who billed all of these overbuilt ugly piles with-a-view as simply “monuments to the ego.”

Ego and Egotism…

Ego is an interesting concept upon which to hang the rapine pillaging in our little valley…as well as throughout the human-occupied world. Freud and Buddha would have us believe that all humans have an ‘ego’ (Anatta to the Buddhists), whether as a literal reality or simply as a useful partitioning of the psyche. By these conceptions, ego entails a way of orienting to the world that engenders survival and practical action by the ‘self’.

But, importantly, Freud allows for a curbing effect of the super-ego that embodies ethical concerns and cultural constraints, usually in service of some greater collective good. Likewise, Buddhists distinguish between the Small Self, entailing ego-based motivations, and the Greater Self that, like the super-ego, embodies evolution towards a maturity manifesting compassion and cognizance of connection with other beings. In both instances, ego unchecked by the super-ego or by evolution towards a Greater Self manifests as greed, selfishness, arrogance, fear, and hedonism, with resulting indifference, dishonesty, ruthlessness, and even cruelty exhibited towards others—especially others who are alien or otherwise different.

And Our Moral Universe

Another way of framing all of this is through the lens of moral universes. A person driven wholly by crass motivations originating in the brainstem and ego has a moral universe collapsed into the cesspit of Small Self. This is to say, essentially no moral universe. Expanding outward from this problematic condition are those who deploy notions of fairness, obligation, concern, and benevolence only to family members—as in the Mafia. Next beyond are those with a moral orientation that additionally encompasses those who are of identical or similar identity—national, tribal, ethnic, racial, gender, or the like. And, at the doorstep of enlightenment and transcendence, are those who extend moral concerns and deportment towards all humans—even towards non-human sentient beings.

Scholars such as Peter Singer and Shalom Schwartz have expounded on the importance of an every-expanding moral universe to the welfare and dignity of all humans, even of non-humans with varying degrees of manifest sentience. A world comprised solely of ego-driven humans operating with little restraint or related regard for the effects of their actions on others would be a truly horrific, eventually uninhabitable, place. As Steven Pinker has argued, our small Earth has become a more hospitable and charitable place largely because ever more people are regarding ever more beings of ever greater difference with ever more benevolence, despite what one might think reading vitriolic trash published in outlets such as Breitbart.

The Larger Psycho-Sociological Context

In the end, though, unchecked egotism and all the ills that flow from it flourishes only to the extent that such a condition is sanctioned, even encouraged, by culture, society, and institutions. People obviously shape all of these derivations of basic human behaviors, but human behaviors are in turn powerfully shaped by the higher-order social-psychological phenomena within which they are embedded, creating the potential for powerfully wicked—or powerfully benevolent—synergies.

Of relevance here, culture, society, and institutions ineluctably invoke the nature of our somewhat benighted nation and the more overtly benighted nature of the individualistic capitalist enterprise we have so enthusiastically embraced and codified.

Contradictions of Capitalism

Neoconservatives and their lapdog economists would have us believe that unchecked unfettered capitalism under-girds the best of all possible worlds. Moreover, freely but selectively quoting the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith, they would further have us believe that unbridled greed and unqualified self-interest, channeled by the invisible hand of free markets, is the surest means of furthering the well-being of all humans. Indeed, the Princes of Capitalism who run amuck on Wall Street proudly and unabashedly profess their greed and fundamental disregard for others, assuming that we who hear such professions somehow know it ends well for the rest of us due to the transformative magic of markets.

Never mind peoples’ unequal access to markets. Never mind inequalities in power and privilege. Never mind unequal access to information. Never mind the fundamentally irrational behavior of humans. Never mind the distorting effects of artificial demand created by manipulative advertising. Never mind the chronic gross distortion of markets by hidden (or not so hidden) subsidies created by power elites beholden to wealth elites. Never mind…ad nauseam. We have no free markets.

Despotism…

In the end, people who are wealthy or powerful become ever more wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Despotism reigns in the sense that an ever smaller minority of people amass an ever greater portion of values, while everyone else becomes comparatively more impoverished. It is no coincidence that we have seen a trend, not only in the United States, but in most developed or developing countries, towards the amassing of more and more wealth in the hands of a mere 1%—even 0.1%—of the populace.

As the radical thinker and economist Charles Eisenstein pithily observed, the modern business enterprise operates on the basis of shifting costs onto others as a normal part of making profits; in other words, by privatizing profits while socializing costs. Put another way, profits—the fundamental underpinning of the capitalist enterprise—are axiomatically created by passing as many costs as possible onto the affected human community, the natural environment, and future generations, often in ways that are fundamentally destructive. The French economist Thomas Piketty offered a complementary argument in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, holding that ‘trickle down’ from wealth elites to the comparatively impoverished masses is, in reality, inconsequential and little more than cover for this despotic capitalist enterprise.

And the Problem of Externalities

But concern about the imperfections and problematics of capitalism are not limited to radical or revisionary economists. Indeed, the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith were acutely aware that, despite the hidden hand of markets, the monetary capitalist systems they championed would generate social costs and income inequalities that required rectification by governments.

Some of these social costs have been termed ‘externalities’ by succeeding generations of economists—an externality being a cost or benefit generated by a private economic transaction or activity, but incurred by those who did not chose to partake of the outcome. Classic examples of such externalities include air and water pollution, spillover effects of development on surrounding property values, and the loss of finite biota caused by profit-making enterprises.

Our society has, reasonably enough, responded to these sorts of externalities with laws that zone development, control pollution, and protect endangered species. Whether overtly or tacitly, most people realize that we do, in fact, live in community where considerations of the commonwealth occasionally weigh heavily in the scale of considerations. Indeed, every credible economic or political philosopher or theorist since Locke and Smith and afterwards, Marx, has viewed capitalism and property, not as ends in themselves, but rather as candidate means (dubious means, in the case of Marx) of uplifting humanity and enhancing the well-being and dignity of all—of promoting a flourishing commonwealth; something that many contemporary politicians, economists, and bourgeois capitalists seem to miss.

As it is, the pervasive systemic problem of privatized profits and socialized costs remains, especially in a society such as ours that is wedded to the justifying myth of capitalism and, in the minds of some, the virtues of unchecked greed and individualism—and where those who profit so much from displacing the costs of their activities onto society hold such sway over politicians. This insidious system continues to spawn the sorts of people who show up in our little valley with ill-gotten (by definition) wealth to manifest their ego in various physical obscenities.

Property…

The notion of ‘property’ is yet another pillar of Smith’s capitalism that factors into on-going devastation of the natural world by societies that have succumbed to the capitalist premise. More to the point, private property rights plays a central role in not only the unfolding ecological holocaust, but also in simultaneously catalyzing and justifying damage to human communities.

On the face of it, ‘property’ seems a benign or even beneficial concept. The term is generally understood in reference to anything owned or possessed by someone. Adam Smith even advanced the notion that one’s own labor and physical body are property held, by right of ‘natural law’, exclusively by the salient embodied person. Yet the notion of property has, in fact, been extended to possession of one human by another, most egregiously in the form of overt slavery, but historically (and, in places, still) even in application to dependent children and adult women.

And Its Problems

These latter extensions to other humans highlight an intrinsic, even potentially fatal, problem with the notion of ‘property’. Relegation of anything to the category of property constitutes the ultimate instrumentalization and related erasure of intrinsic worth. Through this, property has no rights, no prerogatives, and no claim to considerations of well-being and health.

Relegation of inanimate physical objects to the category of property is perhaps not problematic, but any application to another life form, especially one with plausible sentience immediately raises moral questions. Does a dog deserve consideration of its health and well-being, despite being property? Some people would say ‘no’, but our society has answered a resounding ‘yes’ through the passage, for example, of animal welfare laws and even serious consideration of whether chimpanzees deserve rights. But, then, do elk and bears and lions deserve consideration of their welfare? Do ecosystems have ‘health’ and, if so, do even these abstract entities warrant moral concern, especially when it comes to fostering and preserving ‘health’?

I hold that the manner in which a person orients to such issues offers a profound commentary on their ego maturity and moral universe—Small versus Greater. And, in fact, orientations towards living property end up being entangled with precepts of capitalism and consideration of ‘the other’ in choices people make regarding their use of property, specifically whether they care at all about the negative impacts their choices may have on others, whether human, animal, vegetal, or even spiritual. People with small souls and a small moral universe will probably not give a damn, and even actively resist any societal requirements that they be held accountable for the harm they cause, often by deploying the justifying rhetoric of libertarianism and the primacy of individual freedom.

Inanities of Property Rights

All of this comes to a head in considerations of private property rights, although it is worth first noting that property can be held privately, publicly, or communally, and also simply by societal consent without rising to the level of a ‘right’. But there are some ideologues and yahoos (not mutually exclusive) who hold that the only credible sort of property is private, and that all private property is axiomatically held by the owner as a ‘right’.

Such simple-minded constructions hardly pass the laugh test. On the face of it, public property has more intrinsic merit than private property simply because it is held in trust to explicitly serve the greater good of society. The same could be said for communal property, but with ‘the greater good’ reckoned at the scale of a given community.

Insofar as being a ‘right’ is concerned, Debbie Becher cogently observed in a 2015 article that “…social theorists have long understood that property is not the ownership of a thing or a set of individual rights, but a set of social agreements about what ownership entails…Property rules involve government intimately not only in creating value but also in determining who deserves which valuable resources.”

Notice ‘social agreements’, the role of ‘government’, and the invocation of ‘deserve’. None of this bespeaks a ‘right’ in the conventional sense that we think of such things, especially in application to human health and happiness (see my article on Human Dignity and Micheline Ishay’s book The History of Human Rights), although our society paradoxically—even perversely—holds that rights attach to our property but not to our health. In fact, property is held solely by the consent of society and ultimately (whether acknowledged or not) in service of promoting the commonwealth of human well-being and dignity.

Rich and Not-So-Rich Yahoos

Yet our country is filled with people who think that they not only have an absolute right to their property, but that this supposed ‘right’ gives them the prerogative to mete out use, abuse, destruction, and harm without restraint or consideration of impacts on other humans—much less impacts on other sentient beings, and certainly not impacts on the health and wholeness of the ecosystems they exploit.

Such seems to be the case with our new neighbors wreaking havoc upstream in yet the latest exhibition of stunted moral development by newly-arrived rich folk. Although these people are by no means the only ones.

Metamorphosis?

We all suffer sooner or later living in a world of unchecked greed, selfishness, and self-centeredness—understood by some to be the equivalent of ‘individualism’. This is especially true in a country such as ours where simple-minded conceptions of capitalism and private property encourage, if not sanctify, abusive relations with the land, other people, and other life forms. Under such auspices, people are prone to the fallacy of conflating ‘freedom’ with possession, which can never lead to contentment.

No doubt, most of us want the greatest scope of free choice possible, as well as assurance that the physical goods we depend upon and hold dear will be secure from depredation. Yet, more assuredly, I would hold that most of us—albeit inchoately—want to be part of a commonwealth of human dignity. Inescapably, such a commonwealth requires that we curb our actions out of respect for others and with due consideration of harm we may cause. Sadly, our society seems to be exhibiting less rather than more of such dignified self-restraint.

There are perhaps only a few ways that the current death spiral of our living Earth can be checked. The spiritually dead look to technological fixes. A highly virulent and contagious disease specific to humans might save the rest of life on this planet, but only through erasure of our species. More hopefully, we humans might evolve towards greater benevolence, generosity, and concern, not only for other humans, but for all of life.

But such evolution depends on the rapid expansion of our collective moral universe beyond the frontiers of humankind. To do so, though, requires that we transcend our delusional fixation with patently destructive ideologies, of which capitalism and private property rights are currently one of the most potent. Closer to home for me, I hope to live long enough to see the end of people scraping, gouging, chiseling, hacking, tearing, and uprooting the naked living Earth simply to build yet another monument to their ego.

A Zen Master Explains the Art of ‘Letting Go’, And It Isn’t What You Think

Posted on by
1

By Christina Sarich

Source: Waking Times

Thich Naht Hanh, the Zen Buddhist master, has some interesting advice about what it means to truly let go. Many people mistake detachment or non-clinging to be a form of aloofness, or emotional disconnect from others, but as Hanh explains, truly letting go often means loving someone more than you have ever loved them before.

The Buddha taught that detachment, one of the disciplines on the Noble Path, also called ariyasaavaka, is not a physical act of withdrawal or even a form of austerity. Though the Buddha teaches of a “non-action which is an integral part of the Right Way,” if it is taken out of context it can give the impression that we should develop a lack of concern for others, and that we should live without truly feeling or expressing our emotions – cutting ourselves off from life.

These type of misinterpretations are sadly common, since there are not always direct translations from the Paali language into English.

This form of “detachment” is an erroneous understanding of the Buddha’s message. Master Hanh states that to truly let go we must learn to love more completely. Non-attachment only happens when our love for another extends beyond our own personal expectations of gain, or our anticipation of a specific, desired outcome.

Hanh describes four forms of complete detachment, which surprisingly, aren’t about holing yourself up in a cave and ignoring everyone who has broken your heart, or ignoring your lust or desire for a romantic interest. This is not detachment. Letting go, means diving in. For example:

Maitri (Not the Love You Know)

Hanh describes the importance of Maitri, not love as we normally understand in a Westernized use of the word. He states,

“The first aspect of true love is maitri (metta, in Pali), the intention and capacity to offer joy and happiness. To develop that capacity, we have to practice looking and listening deeply so that we know what to do and what not to do to make others happy. If you offer your beloved something she does not need, that is not maitri. You have to see her real situation or what you offer might bring her unhappiness.”

In other words, your detachment may come in accepting that certain things you would normally do to make another person feel loved and appreciated may not be what the person you are actively loving now, needs. Instead of forcing that behavior on another person, with an egoic intent to “please” them, you simply detach from that need in yourself, and truly observe what makes another person feel comfortable, safe, and happy.

Hanh further explains,

“We have to use language more carefully. “Love” is a beautiful word; we have to restore its meaning. The word “maitri” has roots in the word mitra which means friend. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship.”

Karuna (Compassion)

The next form of true detachment is compassion. When we let go, we don’t stop offering a compassionate touch, word, or deed to help someone who is in pain. We also don’t expect to take their hurt or pain away. Compassion contains deep concern, though. It is not aloofness It is not isolation from others.

The Buddha smiles because he understands why pain and suffering exist, and because he also knows how to transform it. You become more deeply involved in life when you become detached form the outcome, but this does not mean you don’t participate fully – even in others’ pain.

Gratitude and Joy

In truly letting go you practice gratitude. Mudita, or joy arises when we are overcome with gratitude for all that we have, such that we no longer cling to some other longed-for result. The Buddha’s definition of joy is more like “Unselfish joy.” It means that we don’t only find happiness when something good happens to us, but when others find happiness.

If you’ve ever had to say goodbye to a love or friend so that they could continue on their life’s path – one that may not have continued to intertwine with your own – you may have felt pain when they found someone new to love, or made a new friend that seemed to take your place. This is not true detachment. Joy arises when you find happiness even when others find joy – and it has little or nothing to do with you.

Upeksha (Equanimity)

Master Hanh describes the final quality of true love which sheds inordinate light on the true process of letting go.

He states,

“The fourth element of true love is upeksha, which means equanimity, non-attachment, nondiscrimination, even-mindedness, or letting go. Upa means “over,” and iksha means “to look.” You climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation, not bound by one side or the other. If your love has attachment, discrimination, prejudice, or clinging in it, it is not true love.

 

People who do not understand Buddhism sometimes think upeksha means indifference, but true equanimity is neither cold nor indifferent. If you have more than one child, they are all your children. Upeksha does not mean that you don’t love. You love in a way that all your children receive your love, without discrimination.”

Hanh explains that without this quality our love tends to become possessive – a stomping ground of the ego. We try to put our beloved in our pocket and carry them with us, when they are more like the wind, or a butterfly, or a stream, needing to move and flow, or risk dying. This is not love, this is destruction.

For love to be true love, it must have elements of compassion, joy, and equanimity – and this is truly letting go.

The Art of Letting Go is Artless

The real secret is that letting go is not an art, it is an allowing, a being. A non-attached relationship is healthy, strong and filled with effortless love, kindness and compassion. It is completely selfless because your sense of ‘self’ is no longer asserted in every situation. If you want to truly let go, you’ve got to love more, not less. This is the most common misunderstanding about this priceless teaching of the Buddha.

Suicide? American Society is Murdering Us

Posted on by
Reply

By Ted Rall

Source: CounterPunch

They say that 10 million Americans seriously consider committing suicide every year. In 1984, when I was 20, I was one of them.

Most people who kill themselves feel hopeless. They are miserable and distraught and can’t imagine how or if their lives will ever improve. That’s how I felt. Within a few months I got expelled from college, dumped by a girlfriend I foolishly believed I would marry, fired from my job and evicted from my apartment. I was homeless, bereft, broke. I didn’t have enough money for more than a day of cheap food. And I had no prospects.

I tried in vain to summon up the guts to jump off the roof of my dorm. I went down to the subway but couldn’t make myself jump in front of a train. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

Obviously things got better. I’m writing this.

Things got better because my luck changed. But — why did it have to? Isn’t there something wrong with a society in which life or death turns on luck?

I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self that suicide isn’t necessary, that there is another way, that there will be plenty of time to be dead in the end. I’ve seen those other ways when I’ve traveled overseas.

In Thailand and Central Asia and the Caribbean and all over the world you will find Americans whose American lives ran hard against the shoals of bankruptcy, lost love, addiction or social shame. Rather than off themselves, they gathered their last dollars and headed to the airport and went somewhere else to start over. They showed up at some dusty ex-pat bar in the middle of nowhere with few skills other than speaking English and asked if they could crash in the back room in between washing dishes. Eventually they scraped together enough money to conduct tours for Western tourists, maybe working as a divemaster or taking rich vacationers deep-sea fishing. They weren’t rich themselves; they were OK and that was more than enough.

You really can start over. But maybe not in this uptight, stuck-up, class-stratified country.

I remembered that in 2015 when I suffered another setback. Unbeknownst to me, the Los Angeles Times — where I had worked as a cartoonist since 2009 – had gotten itself into a corrupt business deal with the LAPD, which I routinely criticized in my cartoons. A piece-of-work police chief leveraged his department’s financial influence on the newspaper by demanding that the idiot ingénue publisher, his political ally, fire me as a favor. But mere firing wasn’t enough for these two goons. They published not one, but two articles, lying about me in an outrageous attempt to destroy my journalistic credibility. I’m suing but the court system is slower than molasses in the pre-climate change Arctic.

Suicide crossed my mind many times during those dark weeks and months. Although I had done nothing wrong the Times’ smears made me feel ashamed. I was angry: at the Times editors who should have quit rather than carry out such shameful orders, at the media outlets who refused to cover my story, at the friends and colleagues who didn’t support me. Though many people stood by me, I felt alone. I couldn’t imagine salvaging my reputation — as a journalist, your reputation for truthtelling and integrity are your most valuable asset and essential to do your job and to get new ones.

As my LA Times nightmare unfolded, however, I remembered the Texas-born bartender who had reinvented himself in Belize after his wife left him and a family court judge ordered him to pay 90% of his salary in alimony. I thought about the divemaster in Cozumel running away from legal trouble back in the States that he refused to describe. If my career were to crumble away, I could split.

You can opt out of BS without having to opt out of life.

Up 30% since 1999, suicide has become an accelerating national epidemic — 1.4 million Americans tried to kill themselves in a single year, 2015 — but the only times the media focuses on suicide is when it claims the lives of celebrities like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. While the media has made inroads by trying to cover high-profile suicides discreetly so as to minimize suicidal ideation and inspiring others to follow their example, it’s frustrating that no one seems to want to identify societal and political factors so that this trend might be reversed.

Experts believe that roughly half of men who commit suicide suffer from undiagnosed mental illness such as a severe personality disorder or clinical depression. Men commit suicide in substantially higher numbers than women. The healthcare insurance business isn’t much help. One in five Americans is mentally ill but 60% get no treatment at all.

Then there’s stress. Journalistic outlets and politicians don’t target the issue of stress in any meaningful way other than to foolishly, insipidly advise people to avoid it. If you subject millions of people to inordinate stress, some of them, the fragile ones, will take their own lives. We should be working to create a society that minimizes rather than increases stress.

It doesn’t require a lot of heavy lifting to come up with major sources of stress in American society. People are working longer hours but earning lower pay. Even people with jobs are terrified of getting laid off without a second’s notice. The American healthcare system, designed to fatten for-profit healthcare corporations, is a sick joke. When you lose your job or get sick, that shouldn’t be your problem alone. We’re social creatures. We must help each other personally, locally and through strong safety-net social programs.

Loneliness and isolation are likely leading causes of suicide; technology is alienating us from one another even from those who live in our own homes. This is a national emergency. We have to discuss it, then act.

Life in the United States has become vicious and brutal, too much to take even for this nation founded upon the individualistic principles of rugged libertarian pioneers. Children are pressured to exhibit fake joy and success on social media. Young adults are burdened with gigantic student loans they strongly suspect they will never be able to repay. The middle-aged are divorced, outsourced, downsized and repeatedly told they are no longer relevant. And the elderly are thrown away or warehoused, discarded and forgotten by the children they raised.

We don’t have to live this way. It’s a choice. Like the American ex-pats I run into overseas, American society can opt out of crazy-making capitalism without having to opt out.