Elegant Simplicity E-Book

John Reed

• Herausgeber: Umbria Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 141

Beschreibung

In this important, challenging and timely book, John Reed makes reference to the millennial wisdom teachings of all traditions to indicate that the ego, by obscuring the need for inner change, is not only an obstacle to our survival in the future, but also to our happiness in the present. In face of the rising complexities of our modern world, the author reveals that only in inner and outer simplicity can true fulfillment be found. By demanding less, we should be ready to give more. Instead of using nature as a dispensable commodity, we can respect our natural environment, conserve its beauty and sense our affiliation to it. By freeing ourselves from the constraints of egoism, we discover that Elegant Simplicity is not only a fundamental expression of our true human nature, but also a possible solution to the mounting psychological, social, economic and ecological challenges that we face in the world today.

Leseprobe

Copyright © John ReedJohn Reed has asserted his right underThe Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988to be identified as the author of this work.

Designed by Louise Millar

Published by Calder Walker Associates

2 Umbria Street

London SW15 5DP

[email protected]

Printed by Bell & Bain,

Glasgow G46 7UQ

Paperback ISBN 978 0 9541275 5 8

Ebook ISBN 978-1-9107-36-7

Front cover illustrationby Marie Courtay

I dedicate this book to the memory of my maternal grandfather, Dr Floriano de Lemos, who devoted his life to treating the poor and needy of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This modest and selfless humanitarian was the very embodiment of ‘elegant simplicity’

Very special thanks are due for the assistance of my wife, Dominique and my sons Peter and James. I also value the wise council of Serge Beddington-Behrens, Alan Gordon Walker and Alasdair Forbes and I thank them for their contribution

Author’s Note

Most of what I have written in these reflections emerges from the experience of my personal egoism dancing and jousting through the course of an eventful life with urges of a more spiritual nature. This adventure, (complemented by readings of the Perennial Philosophy), have been my only true education. It is from personal experience, therefore, that I can say that egoism doesn’t deliver on its promise. There is a deceptive quality to the allure of a narrowly egoistic vision of life that I would challenge anyone to prove to the contrary. Victories are fleeting and hollow when the heart is not open and when life is viewed from the prism of one’s needs and desires alone.

In spite of the commonplace appearance to the contrary, the serene and humanly fulfilled egoist is an illusion. I am not naïve enough to believe that we shall collectively relinquish our egos and create a ‘new Jerusalem’ on earth. Sticking to the logic of self-interest we are all familiar with, I argue in favour of a more effective and positive form of selfishness, one in which our real needs are better served than by the ego and where our ultimate fulfillment can lie.

Foreword

Dr Serge Beddington-Behrens, PhD

I was delighted to be asked to write the foreword to this important book, as I have been a close friend of the author for over fifty years, and I have therefore been privy to observing the ideas explored here, quietly marinating inside him. What gives these words power and authenticity is that they emerge out of the integrity of John’s heart, his own life always having been the alter upon which he has conducted his own experimentation into truth. Thus, over the years, he has gradually evolved his own brand of Elegant Simplicity, having won most of his battles (which we are all called to wage) against the many seductive pulls in our society that instruct us to ‘sell our souls to the company store’!

Basically John’s thesis is that we need to re-claim our hearts and souls; we are challenged to live more simply and elegantly, and that this is the only way forward, if, as a species, we are to survive. However, we cannot effectively do this unless we first come to understand how ugly and convoluted our current world has become. Or as a character in a Thomas Mann novel once put it: ‘If a way to the better there be, it lies in our taking a full look at the worst.’ And this is precisely what John helps us to do. He does not pull any punches. He points out, as spiritual teachers have been doing since time immemorial, that our major stumbling block is that we believe that who we are, is what our egos tell us who we are! And the problem is that this view of the world is always a reductive and jaundiced one (our egos being ‘clever’ but not intelligent, ‘always dwelling on the past and the future but never able to be in present time’.)

Therefore, so long as we live through our egotisms, we remain cut off from who we really are and thus suffer from what John calls ‘societal de-spiritualisation’. Where there is no inner life, ‘one passes into the power of outer life completely. Man becomes a helpless creature of mass movements, mass-politics, of gigantic mass-organisations.’ What we need to learn to do, he tells us, is to move beyond our ego identities, so that we are no longer run by agendas impelling us to devote our lives only to becoming rich, glorious, famous and powerful. Instead, we are called to discover the authentic us. Only if we change inwardly and begin to do this, the author reminds us, can changes occur in our outer world.

The book is full of profound and rich observations into the anomalies of our modern culture. Here are just a couple of them: ‘In the 20th century we were liberated from the yoke of material want only to find ourselves now enslaved by the needs and desires that come with material abundance’. Commenting on what is amiss in the work place, he observes that ‘we throw our resources into financial activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity’! Such truisms pepper every page.

Whether John is decrying the lack of true statesmanship in our world leaders, the way ‘modern’ art has degenerated, or how prone we are to eat badly, everything he says is of crucial importance and this book is a ‘must’ not only for those who want actively to ‘make a difference’ but also for people who simply need to be clearer about civilisation and its many discontents. And it will certainly help them as this is very clearly written. I suggest you read it slowly and ponder over each sentence carefully, and that you continually ask yourself: ‘Do any of the author’s observations apply to me?’

For well they might! And if so, celebrate the fact. We cannot make changes in our lives unless we are very clear on what needs changing. This is a book about society, but since society is always a reflection of ourselves, it is also a book about you and me!

Introduction

I have been justifiably criticised for being excessively negative about the state of the world and for giving insufficient mention of the good and true in our midst. I acknowledge this wholeheartedly. Undoubtedly there are many wonderful, wise and dedicated people doing heroic and selfless work in the world. A tribute to these ‘Warriors of the Heart’, as my friend Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens describes them, is long overdue and deserves a book in itself, which he is writing now and which will soon be finished. I have not developed this positive side of the picture for one main reason. To have done so to the extent it deserves, would, I felt, dilute the impact of the clarion call for change that was my intention.

Much personal transformation has taken place in the world. At a grass roots level, in spite of the appearance to the contrary, a movement for change is gathering form. Eckhart Tolle writes about this in a hopeful and inspiring manner in his book A New Earth. Millions have begun to be disenchanted with an egoistic way of life and have quietly and without fanfare established saner and less selfish habits of being. Clearly, this reflection is not directed at them. They are aware of all this already. It is only by enlarging their ranks, however, that we can arrive at a point where change will evolve organically in the world as a reflection of the soul-based urge of each one of us. This, unfortunately, is not the case yet. As things are, we are on a collision course with a socio-economic and ecological disaster of an unprecedented nature. The Titanic has hit the iceberg but the majority of passengers has not understood the gravity of the situation and is still dancing in the ballrooms. My hope is that by demonstrating the relevance of the wisdom teachings in the context of current events in the world, this reflection will have meaning to those who would not ordinarily be interested in esoteric or spiritual matters. It is their change of heart that the world needs so urgently.

I

An Indian Professor of Economics stood up at the Davos Forum some years ago and said that the emerging countries of the world should not aspire to western standards of living but that we should all learn to live in elegant simplicity’. At the time this struck me as an unusually wise statement and one that I felt would probably not be understood by the majority of luminaries at the forum. Events since have proved it to be extremely prescient. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the world cannot continue along the growth trajectory of the past and that the inherent contradictions of our socio-economic order and the impoverished spiritual condition of Man, of which it is a reflection, are now causing us serious problems. The near collapse of the financial system in September of 2008 is only a symptom of dysfunction at the heart of our way of living and being. By resurrecting the same patterns in the future as have failed in the past, these deep-rooted anomalies will not go away and can only get worse. At present, the intention of governments worldwide is a rapid return to ‘business as usual’ by massive programmes of financial stimulation to resuscitate demand. The likely failure of these policies will force people to understand that the socio-economic challenges we face today are of a different nature altogether. Only a profound modification in our conception of the meaning and purpose of life can see us through this enduring crisis successfully.

The rising crescendo of egoism of the last half-century presaged our troubles today. After the Second World War, French Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, was famously reported to have declared that ‘the 21st Century will be spiritual or it will not be’. Given the context at that time, he was probably referring to the danger of nuclear extinction. The threat of financial and ecological breakdown probably would have seemed remote. All of these possibilities exist today and always for the same reasons. The excessive way in which we, as individuals or collectively as nations, advance our selfish interests is and has always been at the root of all our personal and societal problems. Malraux no doubt recognised that these contradictions could not continue indefinitely, and that, we either master our egoistic ways by some form of moral transcendence or they would prove to be our undoing. That time is now. With six and a half billion people on earth, we know that we can’t dispense with a system of economic organisation such as capitalism. We have experimented with alternative systems without success. Since it was our limitless expectations that gave rise to the excesses and abuses we are witnessing today, there is no reason to believe that, by modifying those expectations, we can’t alter the nature of capitalism to our ultimate benefit. The new balance and moderation in habits of living and being implied by the idea of ‘elegant simplicity’ is an invitation to explore these possibilities.

II

The underlying rational for capitalism has always been that each person, by pursuing his or her self-interest, would contribute to the good of the whole. This idea has been accepted as a self-evident truth by the modern world. At the heart of this belief lies the conviction that the satisfaction of our material needs and desires lead to individual happiness. In fact, the right to the unhampered pursuit of such happiness is the cornerstone of the American Constitution and the foundation of the ‘American way of life’. But is this really true? Do material comforts make us happy? The evidence would suggest that this has been a flawed concept from the start. In every spiritual tradition going back thousands of years, we have been told in different ways that ‘man does not live by bread alone’, which is to say, that we also have spiritual needs that cannot be answered by material means alone.

In every attempt to establish a workable vision of society, this central truth has never been given the consideration it deserves. Our liberal capitalist model is the culminating example. Centuries of materialism at the expense of the spirit are now causing it to unravel from the weight of its contradictions. Sub-prime problems and greedy bankers are merely the symptoms of this disorder. They are not the cause. Rapacity and greed have dominated history. There is nothing new about all this. In the middle ages the subjugating power of the Church made religious practice a crude and perverse caricature of spirituality. In subsequent centuries, material progress was achieved to the benefit of the few by oppressing the many. Finally, in the 20th Century we were liberated, in the West, at least, from the yoke of material want, only to find ourselves enslaved by the needs and desires that come with material abundance. What all these epochs have in common is the essential de-spiritualisation of society. The great mystical teachings never took root. We long ago gave up our souls hoping to ‘gain the whole world’.

Quite recently, in a moment of extraordinary hubris, it was widely asserted that the free-market system, by being globalised, would ultimately cure the woes of the world. Such enthusiasm even gave rise to the view by Francis Fukyama, Professor of International Political Economics at John Hopkins University, that we had achieved the ‘End of History’, meaning that democratic capitalism could never be surpassed as a socio-political model of society! Now that it is clear that this assessment was somewhat premature, are we any closer to recognising that we must re-appropriate our souls so as to establish a more balanced and enduring concept of society? Not yet, I don’t believe, but we will be under increasing pressure to do so in the years ahead. Belief and confidence in our established ways of living is beginning to falter but we don’t know what ‘model’ of society to turn to. We don’t know where to find meaning. ‘Soul’ is and will always be the expression of our spiritual nature. It’s what enables us to ‘sense’ our way to the essential meaning of things. Without it we are unregulated by the spirit and become destructive to ourselves and to the planet we live in. What we see happening around us today is the result of this disconnection. C. G. Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychiatry, made these important observations:

When you study the mental history of the world, you see that people in times immemorial had a general teaching or doctrine about the wholeness of the world. In our civilisation this spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrine has lost its grip to an appalling extent, largely because people don’t understand it anymore. Thus one of the most important instinctual activities of mind has lost its object. As these views deal with the world as a whole, they create also a wholeness of the individual... Among all my patients in the second half of life every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of the past have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his spiritual outlook.1

III

But what is it that we need to understand so as to re-activate our souls? In essence the message has always been the same. The millennial spiritual teachings (the Perennial Philosophy) tell us that we are part of an intelligent energy force or collective consciousness that we can loosely call ‘God’. Our presence on earth in body and mind tempt us to believe that we live as separate and distinct entities. The identification with this sense of separateness gives rise to the ego. This illusion at the core of our beings has continuously robbed us of our true inner identity and with it, our capacity to live to the fullest expression of what it is to be human. The failure to rise above our egoistic ways has fashioned a ‘civilisation’ far less glorious than we would like to believe, and one that will slowly destroy itself. That process is currently underway.