Time is Running Out E-Book

John Reed

• Herausgeber: Umbria Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 192

Beschreibung

In Time is Running Out: Reflections on an Alternative Way of Being, John Reed presents the reader with an honest and uncompromising appraisal of how politics, capitalism, social conditions and climate change are interrelating so as to constitute a 'perfect storm' of challenges that will determine the future of civilisation. John Reed explains that 'the ones most adaptable to change' will be those with the necessary psycho/spiritual resources. This book examines what that means and how human consciousness must evolve to make life sustainable in society and on the planet as a whole.This is an important and timely polemic.

Leseprobe

Copyright © John Reed 2020

John Reed has asserted his right underthe Copyright, Design and Patents Actto be identified as the author of this work.

Umbria Press

London SW15 5DP

www.umbriapress.co.uk

Printed in Poland by Totemwww.totem.com.pl

Paperback ISBN 978-1-910074-28-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-910074-37-4

To my grandchildrenJack and London

Contents

Introduction

I The Background

II State of the Union

III The Question of Community

IV Education

V The Case of Ladakh

VI Consequences

VII Dislocations

VIII The Anthropcene

IX Peak Civilisation

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Elegant Simplicity, written in 2009, was as a visceral reaction to events in 2008, when a breakdown of the world’s financial system was narrowly avoided and the world entered the severest recession since the Great Depression. At the time, I felt that this was a critical threshold, that our capitalist system based on limitless expansion and self-interest had reached its limits and could no longer continue on as before. The book took many directions - politics, finance, art, health, the environment, in a somewhat serendipitous fashion, the common thread being to show that events in the outer world we live in reflect and are determined by the condition of our inner world. It may bear repeating that if we wish to change the one, we are obliged to modify the other. And yet, very few people sense that causality. For them, conditions of life on the planet are brought about by autonomous economic and political forces beyond their control.

The purpose of this new book is to focus on this critical sequence of cause and effect as it affects different areas of life. We can then begin to sense our personal involvement and responsibility, not only for what is happening in our own life, but for society and the planet as a whole. Failure to understand this, has, in the past, created a major psychological barrier to the kind of transformational change we need today. At present, we tend to see life in largely Darwinian terms. Capitalism, rooted in self-interest and competition, is still about the survival of the fittest. The growing gap between rich and poor and the enormous wealth of the few, only serves to confirm this. The problem, as I hope to demonstrate in the book, is that, for different reasons, this way of conducting our lives doesn’t ultimately work to the benefit of the rich or the poor. Time is Running Out is rooted in the notion that there is a way of being available to everyone that brings dignity, graciousness, compassion and joy to our lives; qualities that are largely absent in the way we all live today.

In the view of most people, living a spiritually inspired form of simplicity is neither practicable nor realistic. In one sense, they are right. Egoism prevents our better angels from playing their rightful role in our lives. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is becoming increasingly evident that Darwin’s views, shared by all ‘realists’, is too narrow and limited in its scope. What these determined rationalists don’t see, but a growing number of people are beginning to understand, is that the urge to live in accordance with elegant simplicity is latent within all of us.

This higher expression of who we are is the ineluctable next step in our evolution. How long this will take to come about is the only question. From a non-Darwinian perspective, therefore, a flowering of humanity is, “the natural unfolding of a process that has been underway for millions of years…. we are on the threshold of an evolutionary leap”, author and lecturer Steve Taylor informs us. Looked at from this angle, a switch in consciousness away from the prevailing paradigm of self-interest (socially conditioned egoism) to a deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose of life, is not only possible but ultimately inevitable. In fact, it is already happening on a far larger scale than we can imagine. And there is nothing random about this development. The ‘new’ and emerging consciousness reflects the essential message of a body of knowledge (the wisdom teachings) that has existed for thousands of years - it is anything but new. I shall elaborate further on this in the course of the book.

It is also the purpose of the ensuing chapters to assess what has happened in these last ten years. Was there too much gloom in my view of the situation in 2008? Are things more hopeful today? Shortly after the original book was published, a number of people contacted me to say that my views were too pessimistic. Ten years later, I wonder if they still feel the same way. Critical as I was of politicians in general, the election of someone like Donald Trump as President of the United States would have been perfectly unimaginable to me at the time. The protest movements sweeping the planet, the deep fracture of American society and the severity of its mental health crisis, for example, were not on my radar either. Hard as it is to predict specific outcomes, I did address the alarming deterioration of our psycho/spiritual condition at some length. This more than anything else determines the rest. The key question now is where do we go from here?

In this book, my focus will be on real events, the purpose being to ground all spiritual or philosophical speculations in the material factors we can readily identify with and that impact our lives on a daily basis. This is where all abstract principles must be tested. It is where the secular and the spiritual become in-dissociable. With time, it is to be hoped that scientific rationalism will lose the tight grip it has over us and cease to condition the way we think. At present, we are stuck in a state of psychological paralysis, unable to switch gears and powerless to bring about the essential transformation in our ways of thinking and being that is so urgently needed. Going forward, new perspectives must emerge that involve not only our rational minds, but also our intuitions, insights, and the workings of the ‘right’ brain. Spirituality, removed from all association with religion, must be seen as the most pragmatic method to address our challenges and effect change. Having exhausted all conventional options, we are left with two possibilities. We continue along the path we are on, confronting ever greater difficulties we clearly lack the wherewithal to surmount, or we build a sustainable future for ourselves from a more evolved level of consciousness. There has been no time in history where the stakes have been so high.

I

The Background

King Lear asks the blind Earl of Gloucester,

“How do you see the world?”

The blind Gloucester replied, “I see it feelingly.”

William Shakespeare

When reduced to its essentials, our individual and collective goal in life is the desire to avoid suffering and experience happiness. Underlying this self-evident statement is the generally accepted notion that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is a human right (inscribed, as such, in the American Constitution). But it is not quite as simple or as straight-forward as it sounds. The path to happiness has one major obstacle. In our ego-centric condition, we take the continuous flux of thoughts and emotions and the succession of events we experience in our lives, to be who we are, our individual ‘story’. This is the foundation of the egoic sense of self that 17th century French philosopher, Rene Descartes, defined by the words “I think therefore I am”. This identity not only drives our lives but by continuously reinforcing an individualized sense of ‘self’ (as a way of affirming its existence), set in motion the essential dynamic of the modern world.

When the ‘self’ is perceived as an autonomous and separate entity in the universe, unconnected to the whole, it becomes protective of itself and self-interest necessarily becomes its primary impulse. This fact more than any other has determined everything about how we behave. On a collective basis and over time, this has conditioned the way we relate to each other, the structures of our societies, the cultures we have created and, ultimately, the nature of civilisation itself. So deeply rooted is this perceived view of ‘reality’ that for the vast majority of mankind it goes unquestioned.

The problem with this construct (and all its ramifications), is that it is based on an illusion. Buddhists have long understood that the superficial activity of the mind from which we derive our egoic identities, is not representative of who we are (Taoists had known this even longer). Six hundred years after the Buddha made this discovery Jesus Christ said much the same thing, albeit in very different terms. All the other great spiritual traditions have also confirmed this. Notwithstanding, for the last few thousands of years, this fundamental misperception has been the driver of our existence, cutting us off from the essential reality of things and from experiencing our natural connection to the universe. But as human happiness is nothing if not the expression of that connection, we continuously deprive ourselves of life’s sweetest fruit. While the wisdom teachings have been trying to correct this wrong view of life for millennia, with few exceptions, they continue to be largely ignored. Instead, in a subtle and generally unacknowledged manner, humanity remains mired in a low-level form of dissatisfaction that, 2500 years ago, the Buddha identified as ‘dukkha’ (Sanskrit for suffering). So common and widespread is this condition that we accept it as being an intrinsic part of the human condition; what French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre described as an existential malaise. The real problem, however, is that we persist in searching for happiness where it can’t be found.

Rather than addressing this predicament by taking to heart the advice of the Buddha, Jesus Christ and the host of spiritual teachers since, we have instead devised a wide range of measures designed to circumvent the effects of ‘dukkha’. The pursuit of power and material riches is, of course, the most common expedient. An abiding belief in the great promise of ‘romantic’ love is another. The quest for (and fascination with) fame and celebrity is yet another. In modern times, the world of sport and entertainment, by a massive exercise in distraction, tackles the issue from a different angle. When the absence of happiness becomes too intense, alcohol and drugs are the measures of last resort. But as all this is like searching for daylight in a dark room; none of these expedients work.

The question of happiness, however, is not a trivial matter. Arising, as it does, from the spiritual essence of our beings (and from nowhere else) our state of happiness is the single most reliable measure of our psychological health and well-being and for that reason should rightfully be viewed as life’s ultimate goal. In reality, we are only half alive without it. To have triumphed in every aspect of life but not find happiness (not uncommon) is like possessing a beautiful art collection but being blind. You can never enjoy the beauty that exists in and around you. In spite of this, like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit around a racetrack, we are ‘hardwired’ to believe that joy and fulfilment exist around the next corner. On the face of it, our predicament would seem to be strangely perverse and without remedy. Animals and plants are whole and enjoy the fullest expression of what they are. Only humans are deprived of this natural and spontaneous fulfilment. This is a source of bitter irony for many people. The suffering they see around them tests their faith in whatever belief they might have and out of anger, disappointment or frustration, they turn away from conventional religion and all forms of spirituality. This is unfortunate, because in reality the universe has been good to us.

In fact, far from being disadvantaged in any way, the essential condition of humanity is one of extraordinary privilege. Unlike plants and animals, we have been endowed with consciousness, the greatest gift in the universe and the only thing that allows us to rise above the sterile determinism to transcendent states of being. In fact, this miraculous possibility is our birthright but in order to experience it we must first understand and accept that it exists. Very few do. Only by means of greater awareness can we transcend the limitations that rationality imposes on us like shackles. No other species has that possibility. But if, through greater awareness, we are given the means to ‘awaken’, the possibility of not doing so must also exist, because it is only by striving to transcend the one that we come to the other. Awakening is the fruit of that struggle.

To the many people who would disagree with what I have just stated by claiming happiness for themselves just as they are, I can only say the following. It is certainly true that moments of contentment, elation, excitement and pleasure can be experienced, at one time or another, by anyone. The majority of those who would consider themselves to be happy, invariably mistake such moments for genuine happiness. They are mistaken, however. Unlike contentment, happiness does not depend on favourable outer circumstances to exist. It is essentially uncaused. No thing can make us happy. Unlike contentment, it also endures. Why? Because what we call happiness is just a word to describe the spontaneous expression of our spiritual nature. When we are rooted in that dimension of ourselves, no outer condition of life, no matter how dire, can prevent us from experiencing happiness. It is reported that even in the German concentration camps in the Second World War some people were in beatific states. Identification with the ego prevents this from happening. For this reason, an enduring state of happiness is a great rarity among human beings.

Another common misperception arising out of our egoic vision of life is that material prosperity is a vector of happiness. The evidence, alas, doesn’t bear this out. In the West, where most people enjoy high standards of living, the statistics from the World Health Organization reveal that people suffer from depression by as much as eight times the rate of poorer countries and that mental illness in general contributes to more disability in developed countries than any other class of illness. In the World Happiness Report, America, the world’s richest country, was ranked 18th, the lowest of all Western industrial societies including Australia and New Zealand. Henry David Thoreau’s, famous statement (made in the 19th century) that “most people live lives of quiet desperation”, echoing the Buddha’s findings, far from being invalidated by the enormous material progress we have made since his time, remains truer than ever.

The recorded history of mankind has been largely one of perpetual conflict and oppression. This was the case even after the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ when it was supposed that closing the chapter on the ‘Dark Ages’ liberated us from ignorance and superstition. Can we assume that today we have evolved beyond our Hobbesian past? Nothing is less certain. If humans had indeed evolved in modern times, how do we explain the slaughter of over one hundred million of our own kind in the 20th century alone, often in conditions of unspeakable cruelty? (In sheer scale and magnitude, there is nothing in human history comparable to what took place in the First World War, the Second World War, Stalin’s purge, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the Cambodian killing fields and, more recently, the Balkan conflict). For thousands of years of human existence we had few expectations and the search for happiness was synonymous with the need to survive. More recently, industrialization and technological development have radically altered the conditions of life on earth. While most of us (in the West, at least) now live longer, more comfortable lives, our options and expectations, having increased exponentially, and, by comparison with the past, it can even be argued that we live in more compassionate times - the goal posts of happiness recede as fast as we advance.

No one would argue that the industrial and technological developments of the last two hundred years have not been of great benefit to mankind. Industrialization has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty. The standards of living of many others have improved significantly. Progress in medicine has been nothing short of spectacular. But all this ‘progress’ adds up to a mixed bag of benefits and carries with it some unintended consequences. Climate change is one of them and now represents a ticking time bomb for humanity. Although the burning of fossil fuel bears much of the responsibility, the culprits are many. It is believed by some that science and technology, will find a way out of this fix. This is unlikely. Why? Because it is highly improbable that a problem such as global warming can be resolved by additional inputs of what created it in the first place. The challenge of climate change, requiring, as it does, a complete transformation in our ways of thinking, living and being, is of a different order altogether. Should there be a remedy (and that is far from certain at this late hour), it will call for an ‘inner’ transformation of mankind that has yet to emerge on anything like a sufficient scale on earth. But nothing less will suffice.

When it comes to the intelligence of the soul (which is what is needed) there is no place for individual or collective egoism. The new ways of producing and consuming that must inevitably emerge, will have moderation as the key. “Amazingly small means can lead to extraordinarily satisfactory results”, as E F Schumacher wrote in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful. At present, the idea that ‘less can be more’ would not be accepted or understood by most people. What does a consumer society, where more of anything is invariably the option of choice, make of such an improbable notion? Only from a spiritual perspective can we begin to understand this and see how effective it could be. As Einstein once observed, “the problems that exist in the world cannot be resolved by the level of thinking that created them.” That new level of thinking can only be brought about by a massive shift in consciousness.

For millennia we have overlooked, misunderstood or misinterpreted the great spiritual teachings in favour of a largely materialistic view of the meaning and purpose of life. This, as a growing number of people are beginning to understand, is not working. Others, having backed the wrong horse for so long, are left feeling empty and frustrated, hence the explosive rise of depression and mental illness. We see evidence of this fact behind the populist protest movements that are gathering momentum across the world. Capitalism, globalism and the neo-liberal policies that have resulted, are not functioning to the benefit of the vast majority of humanity and people are beginning to react. What went wrong with our globalized vision of prosperity? In spite of the lofty rationale accorded to it, globalization has been little more than a Trojan horse allowing international corporations and banks to move freely between national economies in search of cheap labour, resources and low taxes. Although, in a material sense, it works well for a small elite and hardly at all for the rest, it does little to nourish the soul of the rich or the poor, which is where the heart of the problem lies. The inescapable fact is that we are all living in a gaping spiritual void, slaves to the illusory enticements of self-aggrandizement, robbed of all that makes life meaningful. The blisters that fester in the world today are doing so as much for this reason as for any specific socio-economic or geo-political factor, the one being the direct result of the other.

Modern civilisation is like an aging adult with the mentality of a child. In spite of its great promise, the recent advances in technology are changing the psychological landscape of the modern world but not for the better, it seems. Instead of gaining in depth and maturity from the vastly increased access to knowledge brought to us by the internet, we find that the opposite is true; entire generations are slipping into a post-literate culture of digitalized ignorance. Where it might have been expected that our ability to relate to each other would benefit from the use of all the avenues of social media at our disposal, we discover that this is also not the case. M.I.T Professor Sherry Turkle in her exhaustive study, Alone Together, tells us, that in the rush to make use of these new possibilities, not only our ability but our inclination to have face to face communication has declined significantly. In a perverse and unexpected manner, technology is actually drawing us apart as never before. A sinister set of circumstances have come to pass whereby the new technology, all-pervasive as it has become, is able to profitably exploit the psychological vulnerability it creates.

In a moment of surprising candor, Sean Parker, one of the founders of Facebook, is reported to have said, “Facebook is a social validation feedback loop exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. God only knows what it is doing to our children’s brains”. Rumour has it that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would not allow their children to indulge in social media until relatively late in their teens. What did these titans of technology know that we don’t? Perhaps they were aware of studies revealing that the risk of depression increases 27 per cent when social media is used frequently and children who use their smartphones at least three hours a day (which is commonplace) are more at risk of suicide.

The advent of the ‘smartphone’ is clearly not making us smarter. Quite the contrary. The multiple ‘apps ’at our disposal are drowning us in a torrent of trivia that is not only affecting our ability to think (millennials have the unflattering distinction of being the first ADD generation) but by being a permanent source of distraction, have erected formidable obstacles to self-awareness. In South Korea they even have clinics to treat ‘screen addiction’. By lowering our capacity to contemplate and reflect, the sole and unique portal to higher forms of consciousness is being shut down, a problem of very far-reaching consequences.