There is something fundamentally different between machines and life, and we are running our society as if we are pieces of a machine and as if the world is a machine. And what we create from that is a world based on the notion that we are all separate. And from that, we create education, based on the notion that we are all separate, and so we honour and enforce dysfunctional independence and competition; furthermore, we create our business environment based on the idea of scarcity and competition, and our towns and cities are all based on this idea of separation. And so we fashion our world on the idea of needing to be significant at someone else’s expense. Is it any wonder why as a kid most of us learned that it is important to separate our self from the pack, to be number 1, to be “special” and win at all costs?
In the East, they often protest that the Western society in general, view their existence as fundamentally as singular individuals and only secondarily as social beings … that tends to create separations. With that, it tends to isolate one. It tends to make one passive and apathetic as far as the political system is concerned, and active as a maximiser of consumption. Your job and mine is not to be a good citizen, it is to be a good consumer. Was it not the great mantra after 9/11 go out and shop? Moreover, I think one of the fundamental messages in the American marketing machine is that wealth and happiness are synonyms. You want happiness, you have to have wealth, and you have to buy a whole lot of stuff, to own lots of stuff.
In a philosophy class many years ago, Plato said that all wars stem from the comforts of the body, and what he meant was we are always trying to avoid unpleasantness. We always want to pat ourselves and cosset ourselves; so we need more stuff, and to get more stuff and to protect that stuff, we have to make war, whether it is an actual war or in effect a war of the rich (have’s) against the poor (have not’s). The Canadian biologist David Suzuki once said, “I believe the heart of our problems now is the separation of humanity from the natural world, and the sense that the economy is the most important thing in our lives. We never ask the important questions like what is an economy for? How much is enough?”
I think at this juncture, it is important to understand what is consciousness? How do I define it? One of my great teachers once asked: Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?
