Google CEO Eric Schmidt August 4th, 2010.
By the end of 2010, information was doubling every 11 hours.
As we witness events unfolding at an accelerated rate we, as a collective, share in the confusion and anxiety of an uncertain future. Our world of the present has become disillusioned and disconnected; caught within the patterns of it's own making. Logic and rationality are our guiding principles as information itself has become a necessity, a drug for culture and society to function. Information is gold but the control for information has become priceless. We want to go faster, further, cheaper, and with bigger returns. We are a culture of desire seeking instant gratification, better reception, more choices, all of the above. We rationalize our leaders, our wars, our religions, and ourselves; our social status, how much we possess and our worth to society. Yet we are apathetic to the consequences that drive our desires. We delude ourselves on the affects to our health, to the well-being of others, and most importantly to the environment that sustains us.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Can we, creatures of pattern, continue to ignore the crisis we have created for ourselves and our planet? If society is a reflection of the individual then we, as a collective, are projecting our individual fears, our confusion... our neurosis out to the rest of the world. And as such there will only be more acts of aggression, acts of hatred, acts of despair unless one becomes aware of him or herself as a contributor to these acts, becomes aware that it was our collective fears that dictated the future path our civilization would take. It is only when we become aware of our fears that we may release them and it is only in the absence of fear where we would arrive at truth.
"It is my conviction that there is no way to peace - peace is the way."
Thich Nhat Hanh
Across the Threshold
Charles Eisenstein
The stories that undergird our civilization are crumbling. Two are primary: the story of the self, and the story of the people. The first is the discrete, separate self, a Cartesian mote of consciousness looking out onto an objective universe of soulless masses and impersonal, deterministic forces. In biology, the separate self manifests as the paradigm of the selfish gene seeking to maximize its reproductive self-interest; in economics, it is homo economicus, who seeks to maximize rational self-interest as measured by money. In psychology, it is the skin-encapsulated ego; in religion, the soul encased in flesh but separate from it. Such a self is naturally in opposition to all other beings, whose interests are indifferent to or at odds with its own. Spiritual teachings based on this story of self, then, tell us we must try very hard to rise above nature, to conquer our biological and economic drive to maximize self-interest at the expense of other beings.
Externalized, this war against the self manifests as the second defining story of civilization, the story of the people that I call "ascent", that says that humanity's destiny is to overcome and transcend nature. It perfectly complements the story of self, elevating the mental over the physical, the ideal over the concrete, and spirit over the body.
In describing these myths, I use the word "story" in a special sense, as an unconscious narrative that makes meaning of the world, that assigns roles to human beings, that explains the nature of life, the world, and the purpose of human existence, and that coordinates human activity. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are approaching the end of ours, of the stories upon which our civilization is built. To the extent those stories are no longer true for you, you do not feel like a full participant in this civilization.
They are becoming untrue for more and more of us, as the world built upon them falls apart. How can we believe in the conquest of nature, when because of our actions the ecological basis of civilization is threatened? How can we believe any more that the final triumph over disease is just around the corner, or an age of leisure, or space vacations, or a perfectly just society, if only we extend the realm of control just a bit further? And how can we believe any longer in the paradise of the separate self, independent of all, beholden to no one, financially secure, when we see first hand the alienation, the despair, the starvation for community that makes that paradise a hell? When depression, addiction, suicide, and family breakdown strike even the winners of the war of all against all?
The new story of self is the connected self, the self of interbeingness. The new story of the people is one of cocreative partnership with Lover Earth. They ring true in our hearts, we see them on the horizon, but we do not yet live yet in these new stories. It is hard to, when the institutions and habits of the old world still surround us. (Read More)
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power…the world will know peace."
Sri Chinmoy Ghose