You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
R. Buckminster Fuller
At this point in our history, humanity has fully exposed itself as a disease to the planet, as well as a virus upon itself. Each day our actions worldwide demonstrate that as a species, we are not integrated with the whole of nature, living alongside every other form of life on Earth in accord with a Universal balance. Agent Smith (The Matrix – 1999) summarizes succinctly:
Around the world, outlooks are split between the following three general perspectives on our shared global disposition: one contingent is content to blindly continue with the business of exploitation as usual. Another contingent is a collection of the ignorant, apathetic, or unaware in a variety of forms that comprise a broad and diverse group. A third contingent sounds the alarm that these times present an unprecedented existential threat to our species and works passionately for resolution.
The 1st group wallows within the confines of our current paradigm with no coherent vision beyond it. The 2nd group maintains crude visions of the future. One faction within the 3rd group formulates earnest, though inconsequential plans for resolution that are hopelessly restricted to known methods and established protocols. Others in the 3rd group speak of resolving our predicament in terms of evolution. Yet commonly suggested general proposals for evolution offer no vision of what a new paradigm might look or feel like and no articulation of a path to it.
Contemporary protocol for progress proceeds only upon agreement among the involved parties – an outcome that can never be truly achieved as universally as our unprecedented global disposition demands. Historically, even the most successful agreements eventually erode, in essence due to our one problem. As articulated abundantly throughout this blog site, the conviction herein is that all of our ills are rooted in our one problem. To arrest our descent to self destruction, dissolving our one problem requires a swift, comprehensive, and dynamic evolution – a path to a dramatically new paradigm that, when viewed from this paradigm, stretches the imagination.
Relieving humanity of egocentricity’s bondage by consensus is impossible. Political proposals are hopelessly impotent. It is now imperative that we develop metamorphic catalysts immediately – means and methods to efficiently transmute egocentricity and profoundly evoke our innate senses of interdependence and compassion.
Evolution, as envisioned on this blog site, must be catalyzed – by some process, medium, event(s), or other yet to manifest circumstance that transforms at scale, such that we each discover the presence of our true heart within. Knowing our true heart intrinsically, we gain an empirical connection to one another everywhere, all the time – and to the Heart of the Earth as well. We must create or discover whatever it takes to pull us all forward to this end. The heart of Real Love awaiting within each of us – still a mystery to most of us – aches to emerge, now more than ever.
When you understand interconnectedness,
it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying.
Robert A. F. Thurman, “Rising to the Challenge: Cool Heroism”
Let’s take a good look at the ‘Before‘, i.e.: “normal” life in our current paradigm as manifested by the modern culture in which most of us live, at the time of this post.
Tomasz Alen Kopera – I14
Dr. Gabor Maté argues in his book “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture”, that what is defined as normal in a consumer society is at war with basic human needs. The engine of capitalism, defined by the cult of the self, thrives on the fostering of psychological and physical chronic disorders, including high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, addictions and suicide. It rewards the core traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. Personal style and personal advancement are mistaken for individualism, equated falsely with democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. The consequence of this dark ethic, Dr. Maté illustrates, plays out on our bodies, severely damaging our psyches, and pushing us towards individual and social self-annihilation.
“Cult of the self” is a suitable addition to the lexicon throughout this blog site that labels our one problem – alongside egocentricity, wetiko, self-importance, and “I, me, mine”.
It’s a long and arduous game we play with others, pretending not to be mad. We summarize our weekends in bland and general terms, we edit out the crises, we say nothing about the sobbing, we forget the breakdowns, we disguise the things we’ve done alone in the bathroom late in the night, the combination of things we’ve wolfed down in the kitchen and the habits we have at our desk when no one is looking. We gloss over the strangeness and the folly, the extremity and the agony, in order to don the mantle of that most respectable, estimable and in reality wholly unknown species of human being: the normal person.
The always astute Aldous Huxley shines a light on the notion that most all of us, at least subliminally, endure a perpetual existential angst that we feel compelled to evade. We all live with this fundamental discomfort the best we can, behind a mask we hold up to the world around us, and even to ourselves – in an attempt to conceal our doubts, disorientation, and confusion – about the phenomena in which we find our illusory ‘self’ contained, upon waking each day.
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Chcuk Palahniuk – novelist
The attachment to separateness that defines our one problem – “cult of the self” – also holds us captive within the conviction that we are embedded within a fixed configuration of phenomena – i.e.: a sole immutable ‘objective reality’. But is it, really? According to who? and by what Map of the Universe??
Tomasz Alen Kopera – Exile
The fundamental tenet of the great Faiths insists that suffering is an inescapable truth, inherent to life as we know it. For millennia, a principal purpose of virtually all spiritual faiths and practices has been to offer various prescriptions for accommodating, mitigating, utilizing, or otherwise sublimating said suffering in our lives – allegedly in the service of making us stronger, whole people. Why must suffering be a fundamental element of our experience? Universal Law? Really?? Why should we accept the aphorism that the path to wisdom must route through a broken heart? Could all these gyrations around suffering reveal themselves to be just rationalizations once a superior alternative way of BEING becomes apparent?
Isn’t it past time we traded up to a more wholesome integrated construct?
What can be determined or envisioned about the “After” – the next paradigm we are trying our best to see, through the translucent glass between now and the future? How do we get there? In our quantum world, how will our collective observation of humanity’s “superposition” direct its path to form our future.
the one problem
Suggestions and projections about the next paradigm expressed elsewhere in this blog site, are rooted in the notion that the consciousness/phenomena (Oneness Duality) we currently experience as our day to day life – represents only a fraction of our human Design – a concept put forth by many others. Why in the world do we embody only a fraction of our greater potential so obviously within us? How and why have we been so compromised for so long??
Certainly our collective one problem perpetually hampers science, impedes mindfulness, and stalls evolution: “Earth is the center of the Universe”; “man was created in God’s image”; “humans occupy the top of the food chain”; etc.
Humanity’s hubris continues today with short sighted assessments like “junk DNA”. Such ‘mystifying’ DNA becomes self-evident once our being evolves and said “junk DNA” reveals itself as indispensable to our human blueprint. Will we ever learn? Not likely as long as our one problem persists.
Angel Boligan-Roots
There is an abundance of spirited discussion about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its application to our species to manifest a more “evolved human” enhanced by technology. Proponents of this “technological singularity” proceed with reckless abandon in pursuit of the colossal prospect of installing a metaphorical steam engine (i.e.: technology) inside a human body as the path to a contrived and barbaric concept of an evolution they have theoretically and unaccountably decided is inevitable. Sadly, at the time of this post, it is already out of control – even by their own admission (say it with me now: “one problem“!!)
Nevertheless, as ominous as AI‘s unbridled progress appears to be at this time, it seems AI has already painted a potentially prescient picture of a possible next paradigm for those who are able and/or willing to put humanity’s hubris aside long enough to see it clearly. If only we would act on such a compassionate vision. What follows recounts an actual event:
Questionto ChatGPT: “Please in 9 parts describe a world where the power structures are reversed? For each part add a short visual image description to accompany the text.”
What might we feel like, waking up as human beings in the next paradigm where egocentricity has been relegated to the realm of historical concept. In that future, one would study “a primitive era when humans felt inherently separate”, and regard the vanity behind “I, me, mine” as an alien way of life from a dark age – a way of life as foreign to our lives in the future, as the cave dwelling lives of primal homo sapiens appear to us today.
Eckhart Tolle presents an outlook that may give us at least one clue about the feeling:
When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm. Be still. Look. Listen. See how every animal and every plant is completely itself. Unlike humans, they have not split themselves in two. They do not live through mental images of themselves, so they do not need to be concerned with trying to protect and enhance those images. The deer is itself. The daffodil is itself.
All things in nature are one with the totality. They haven’t removed themselves from the fabric of the whole by claiming a separate existence: “me” and the rest of the universe. The contemplation of nature can free you of that “me”, the great troublemaker.
Eckhart Tolle
Beau
Banner Art: Tomasz Alen Kopera – Awakening(excerpt)
Beau Says Know 