Consciousness is causal A world that works for all of us
01/11/2010

Consciousness is causal -- Happy New Year

Two thousand nine ended with a blue moon—a rarity that won’t occur again until 2027.  In some ways, the entire year was a rarity:  the United States inaugurated its first African-American President, suffered its worst recession since the Great Depression, foreclosed more homes than ever before, saw 49 million Americans face food “insecurity,” while 15.3 million joined the ranks of the unemployed.  We debated the adequacy of the nation’s resources to cover the basic health needs of all Americans, yet saw fit to earmark another $30 billion to escalate our military presence in Afghanistan and to pass the biggest defense budget in history (between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion depending upon how you define “defense”).  Although 2,973 Americans died in 9/11, we have killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians since and still have not achieved our idea of justice.  Now we’re dispatching 30,000 troops to hunt down less than 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and sending drones to disrupt weddings in Pakistan.  There was an opportunity to channel some of this aggression into combating global warming at the International Conference in Copenhagen, but that opportunity went unfulfilled.

The year included bright spots, to be sure, particularly for Goldman Sachs employees.  For the rest of us, there was a silver lining in the recession: it resulted in a reduction in carbon emissions, slowing the pace of global warming.  A good thing, too, because in 2009 scientists also raised the alarm that their earlier predictions about the pace and impact of global warming may have been too optimistic. 

I’m focusing on the negative, however, to make a point—or several points.  One is this:  From peak oil to water shortages, worldwide famine to the melting of polar ice caps, global economic collapse to misplaced priorities at home, the path we’re pursuing is untenable—and a growing percentage of us knows it.

In a way, we’ve always known.  The diamonds on our fingers cost someone in Africa a hand.  The surfeit on our tables leaves millions of others starving.  While we celebrated Christmas, American-led forces pulled eight Afghani children (ages 11-17) from their beds and shot them.  They might have been terrorists, but does our security really require the execution of school children sleeping in poverty in one of the most remote regions of the globe?

We want to believe we live in a peaceable kingdom, but increasingly we know otherwise.  And this is the beginning of our conversion to the people we say we are—or at least the ones we want to be.  The knowledge of the pain we are causing others is the first step toward changing our consciousness, our behavior, our way of life.

Truly we are all connected.  As the poet foretold in 1913—without the benefit of an education in ecology or quantum physics—“Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.”  We are linked through bonds of DNA, experience, and consciousness.  We are more dependent upon each other—and upon the natural world—than we yet can quantify.  But a fish doesn’t need to understand how it depends upon water to gasp and die if it finds itself on land.  

So without knowing how we’re going to get there, my sense is that 2009 was the last year of an old way of living.  In the New Year, 2010, a new way of living is being born.  Last year saw the death of the ego on a grand scale.  The New Year—and the new future—is not about me.  Or you.  It’s about us.

We were not born to be consumers, but creators.  Beyond that which is necessary for survival, more things have never made anyone happy for long.  On the contrary, mountainous debt from acquiring all those things has kept millions in servitude for most of their lives. 

Our purpose here is not to amass as much stuff as possible, but to share all that we have with others.  Our purpose is to create—food, clothing, children, shelter, music, art, community, health, happiness.  A growing body of research is documenting that humans, despite our religious, cultural, and economic programming, are not hopelessly selfish, acquisitive, detached, autonomous, or even rational.  Instead, as the biologists and neuroscientists who are discovering mirror-neurons—the empathy neurons—are documenting, we are empathic creatures—able to feel and experience others’ situations as our own.  Thanks to the development and global deployment of communications technology and social media, we are now able to feel and respond to the experience of people on the other side of the globe.  We are now and more consciously aware of the fact that we “breathe together.”  We no longer want a world that works for just some of us.  We want a world that works for everyone.

The collapse of the economy and the impending collapse of global ecosystems have forced us to face facts.  We need to live simply, so that others can simply live.  We need to know where our tax dollars are going to ensure that we fund healthcare and education rather than high-tech weapons, private defense contractors, and nearly 800 military bases around the globe.  Instead of sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, how about 30,000 Peace Corps volunteers?  Or employing 30,000 Afghanis in construction of their national infrastructure?  Or employing 15 million Americans in rebuilding our own?

Consciousness is causal.  Now that we’re aware of the split in our world between the haves and the have-nots, between those who care about the earth and those who plunder it, the pain of that split is demanding attention.  There’s a new way of living being born. 

Consciousness is causal.  When we realize that we have all that we need within ourselves, we don’t need to acquire much of anything.  Instead, we can spend our time creating, growing, healing, sharing, enjoying, celebrating, being. 

This is not such a new idea.  It was practiced for centuries by the world’s indigenous peoples, who were aware of their dependence upon and connection to all of creation.  It has been predicted by futurists like Barbara Marx Hubbard and scientists like James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia hypothesis: we are all part of a single organism.  We are connected to this world and to the cosmos, and we influence it with our consciousness—which then influences our behavior.  Waking up to this fact will be the good news of 2010.