Seeds of Simplicity

We live in a crossroads time. While the old order decays, lurching through economic, social and ecological crises, the seeds of the new age are being sown. I like to think that simplicity and sustainability will be two of the watchwords for the coming time, and find it heartening that so many people are embracing life that’s more in tune with the planet and their humble part in its great journey of evolution. I see it in something as simple as the explosion of people riding bicycles in my home city, Melbourne. Often we think that the small things we do are nothing at all, so missing the big picture. In reality, everything has meaning, every act large or small is purposeful and contributes to the whole – a spiritual orientation allows us to see this.

Two local writers who carry the torch for simplicity and sustainability are Michael Green and Greg Foyster. I commend their work as we bring forth the new world: http://www.michaelbgreen.com.au/ and http://www.simplelives.com.au/

And recently a local artist called Dale Cox came to my attention. I'm inspired by his depth of vision on the relationship between nature and humanity: http://www.dalecox.com.au/

And, finally, a gem of an interview with American author and thinker Richard Tarnas on Understanding Our Moment in History: http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/tarnas.html

     

More than Shades of Grey - a Journey into the Nature of Freedom

I submitted the following memoir essay last year to the Griffith Review for its issue, "Such is Life: Life Stories". It didn't make it into the magazine, but I think still has merit.

My first few years were a colourless melange of images – a kind of papier mache world of greyness; the colour of falling dust in an empty room.  I can vaguely picture the flat we lived in, my kindergarten, the strictness of the teachers and the grim faces of the other children. There were long lines of people in the street and walls with ubiquitous pictures of stern-faced officials. It wasn’t all bad – I remember moments of joy tobogganing down a frozen slope in winter, the smell of pine woods in summer, the warm and reassuring waft of my mother’s cooking. Somehow, though, an insipid flatness seemed to penetrate everything.   

When I was six the greyness lifted; rose like morning mist and parted into shreds under the torch of the sun. I was with my parents on a train that had just crossed the border into Austria from Czechoslovakia, from behind the Iron Curtain into the “free” West.  We were refugees, Jews, fleeing the Soviet Union.  

It was January 1977 and travelling from eastern Europe to the West was like peeling off a shroud across the brain. Even at the age of six I could feel it. As the train puffed into the outskirts of Vienna, it was the colour that amazed me. The colour! Even in the middle of winter in Austria there was colour, shape, difference, variety. To a young boy fascinated by cars and used to the four or five makes in the Soviet Union, which were a shade of nothing, the Austrian cars were a riot of colours, shapes and curves.

The Soviet Union was a country controlled by fear with a political/economic system equivalent to a chain around the neck of every person living there. A work colleague who in the late 1980s visited the place we left, Kiev, had one word to describe it: “miserable”. His job as a photographer was to follow the children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster after they returned home from a charity-sponsored stay in Australia. In Kiev, the nearest city to Chernobyl, he found endless food queues and a dour and mostly sullen population.

Nowadays the Soviet Union, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), is consigned to the “failed experiments” section of the dustbin of history. Then it was a behemoth with more than one hundred nationalities under a rigid communist ideology policed at the point of a gun; a creaking industrial giant that could barely feed its own people, pouring what wealth it had into an arms race with its capitalist foe, the USA.

The Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev coined the term “homo sovieticus” to describe the kind of person created by the communist system. That person had to deal with a grinding life of material shortages, official hostility and corruption, and a cultural blandness and uniformity that stifled creativity.  As a result there was an almost bovine mentality of resignation to the troubles of life.

I had internalised this in my short six years on the earth; that’s why everything from the train seemed a wonder, remarkably alive and different.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Jews were practically the only people to permanently leave the Soviet Union. As a result of pressure from the US and Jewish welfare organisations during a thaw in the Cold War, Jews were allowed to migrate to Israel. Yet many chose not to go there, ending up in America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.

Our journey began at a tiny place called Chop on the Soviet border with Czechoslovakia. The train station was probably bigger than the town itself and, like in so many scenes of refugees across the world, was filled to bursting with a nervous and expectant throng, suitcases everywhere and the cries of children. The place was patrolled by soldiers with rifles, and each family was allowed to take out of the country no more than $US100 in currency. Bags were stuffed with coral necklaces, cheap cameras and other trinkets that could be sold somewhere en route. In the middle of the night our train arrived. There was an almighty rush to board. Despite having tickets, the platform attendant told us the train was full, and with chaos around us my father pulled out a bottle of vodka from somewhere and shoved it into the attendant’s hands. On the train we were crammed into a compartment with another family, my mother and I on one berth and my dad sleeping on the suitcases.  

We were only a few days in Vienna, but the impression was tremendous. There was a dazzling variety of food in the supermarkets, a seemingly endless supply of goods in the shops. It was a cornucopia of plenty for people who had known only queues and the meagre basics. 

From Austria the next stop was Italy. We were among thousands who waited for months to receive permission and visas for the final leg of the journey, awaiting eagerly the chance to start life anew, to prove we could be worthy citizens of the “liberated” West.

What is freedom? To this day my parents say they decided to leave because they hated the communist political system. There was no freedom of speech and no quarter given to the individual. Migrating to Australia was the fresh start: happiness found in well-paid work, family life and home ownership.

Grateful as we were to find refuge, the liberation was only partial. For my parents, the end of the journey was a life in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. In their minds, redemption was about living the typical life everybody was supposed to have. By the time I could think critically, I rebelled. I hated the lifelessness of suburbia and its vapid routines of work and consumption. At the age of 19 my struggle was to find meaning – and I knew there were other quiet lives of desperation being lived behind the illusory curtain of stability, the white noise of weekend lawn mowers and ever-flickering TV sets.

In my late teens I wanted to make sense of my family’s journey to freedom. I wondered if freedom was more than the ability to openly speak your mind and live a comfortable material existence. Was it more than simply a release from harsh social constraints? Could it be something to do with an inner experience of fulfilment not reliant on external social conditions?

The 20^th century psychologist and social theorist, Erich Fromm, in his book The Fear of Freedom (Routledge, 2001), made a distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” in his attempt to understand why so many people supported authoritarian regimes like those of Nazi Germany.  Fromm argued that submission to such regimes was a retreat into a false security as a result of social upheaval and uncertainty; it represented a psychological escape from personal responsibility – a delegation of authority to the state that rightfully belonged to the individual. For him, true freedom was about making choices from a whole and integrated personality – “freedom to” being an active orientation of a person to live a meaningful life with creative social interaction.

There is a correlation to Fromm’s work in Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006). The essence of what it is to be human, according to Frankl, ultimately lies within the heart of every person and cannot be dictated by society. It is up to the individual to live from a centre of authenticity within. A former inmate at Auschwitz, Frankl had seen and experienced horrific brutality yet maintained a core of dignity: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”   

When I discovered the works of Fromm, Frankl and other writers who blended social critique with psychological insight, it was as if a key had clicked in a lock. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were extreme examples with which to make a point about the nature of freedom, yet it was clear to me that submission to external social norms was still primary everywhere. In the contemporary West “the economy” is god, material wealth the primary goal to which people’s energy is harnessed. Individuals are conditioned to be materialistic and ego-centred to feed the all-important engine of economic growth. The constant psychological bombardment of advertising, which creates an endless stream of artificial wants and desires, ensures most people are in step with the program of consumption.

If freedom is an orientation from the inner self, then trying to find meaning in external objects is not simply illusory but potentially highly damaging. In Australia, high rates of depression, alcoholism and other addictions, youth alienation and suicide are signs of a tattered social fabric. There is an existential chasm at the root of our society which no amount of material wealth or consumption will fill. With the decline of organised religion, Western culture is blind to the inner world of spirit and meaning, so individuals take the inner journey without its support, often haphazardly and with a degree of suffering.       

From the time I left home at the age of 21, my path was one of self-discovery. At university I found a passion for left-wing politics and through my 20s was a committed activist in grassroots movements for peace, protection of the environment and the rights of trade unions. I wanted to make a difference – to reach out from the atomised and lonely self that I felt was my endowment from society and embrace the world. I meditated, trained in martial arts and discussed politics and spirituality with friends and fellow travellers.

The fire of my idealism continued to burn through work in community radio, which led to a career in journalism and the eventual realisation, many years later, that I was a writer.

All of my experiences have helped shape a still-evolving inner structure at the core of which is a simple hunger for life – in all its depth, variety and mystery. Along the way I’ve been blessed with teachers and mentors without whom I could not have made the journey. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that people weren’t searching for meaning in life, but rather the “experience of being alive”.

I returned to Kiev, now in the independent Ukraine, for the first time in 2006. The place had undergone an enormous and rapid transition to capitalism, and every street and square that once bore a communist name now had one celebrating Ukrainian independence and nationhood. Yet though the old economic and political order had toppled, the psyche of the people seemed largely unchanged. Everything had changed, yet everything remained the same.

There was more than a trace of the old animal survival mentality in the way people jostled like cattle on packed suburban trains, cursing one another; more than a glimpse of homo sovieticus in the rudeness and slow service of shop attendants. And though the fruits of capitalism were everywhere in the heart of the city – in the smart facades of banks and the sharp suits and expensive clothes of the nouveau riche, the vast majority of people lived on meagre incomes in suburbs of shabby tenement blocks.

I wondered where the spark of life was in the minds of the people. The so-called Orange Revolution had occurred not long before where the result of a rigged general election was overturned by mass protest and political pressure, and a stirring from the deep freeze of communism was palpable. In front of the parliament building, small numbers of people still camped and protested. Yet real change seemed an achingly slow trickle.

In most people I spoke to there was a deep powerlessness and resignation. When one family friend complained about the poor state of housing and the senseless bureaucracy attached with getting anything done, I asked her why she didn’t join with others and push for change. The response was a dull stare. More dull stares came my way from other people. If a robust and socially engaged populace is the product of a healthy civil society, then it was clear that strong institutions independent of the ruling elite were virtually non-existent in Ukraine.      

 In my despair I wrote a poem inspired by Yeats’ The Second Coming, imagining the waves of physical and ideological invasions Kiev had endured in its history, culminating in the present hegemony of Western-inspired capitalism. It was like a foreign body had settled and was feeding on a dull and credulous population. As in Yeats’ poem, I pictured the next Beast, the next invader, moving its thighs and rising from the expanse of the Dnieper River that cuts through Kiev.  

As I sat in the plane about to fly out of the city, images poured forth of that frosty morning at the age of six when colour announced itself to me in the world outside. What had I learnt in the years since? The glow of life, if it is to have any permanence, any depth, must come from within outwards. Perhaps some of the colour that I had seen out the window had now made its way into my own life. Maybe I no longer was simply observing it as an awe-struck passenger, but blending my own individual palate.

Cleaning Up

A black sock, a capped syringe, a hub cap, an old jumper – these are some of the things I made acquaintance with last Sunday. And there was some plastic too – endless shreds of plastic bags and bits of bottles.

I and about half a dozen other keen souls spent two hours picking up rubbish along the Darebin Creek in Melbourne as part of Clean Up Australia Day. The experience gives you insight into our throwaway society and why essentially, despite years of environmental warnings, we still don’t value the planet. It also shows how small groups of people continue to respect and nurture the earth year after year in unassuming ways.   

As I and my partner unwrapped the plastic that had twirled around a sheoak, joggers and power walkers passed by barely looking in our direction. For something as important as cleaning up the detritus of society so that nature can live, there were precious few of us doing it. I wondered why. But for a couple of pamphlets I’d seen by the creek, I wouldn’t have known Clean Up Australia Day was on. I hadn’t seen anything about it in the media. The Clean Up Australia organisers have said there were 591,400 volunteers across the country this year – that’s great, but there need to be a lot more. Why aren’t masses of people involved in looking after our parks and bush? Why is it not made compulsory for everybody, once a year, to clean up their patch? Think global, act local.

As a society we’ve improved immensely since the appalling times of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries when industrial and household waste was routinely dumped into rivers and creeks. Nowadays natural areas are preserved and maintained, with taxpayer dollars, to a certain level of health. But to see the miles of plastic tangled up in tree branches, the cans, bottles and Styrofoam cups washed up in the creek, is to realise we have a long way still to go. The truth is that urbanisation is a barrier for most people caring for the environment. Most of us living in the city are psychologically disconnected from the natural processes of earth, air and water. We are typically not involved in rearing the plants and animals we eat – we don’t know how to look after soil so that it’s productive, how the balance of clean air and water supports all the organisms necessary for life. We live in a bubble, buying from supermarkets as if our sustenance came like manna from heaven. And the waste created by our lifestyle simply piles up in landfill and is washed into waterways to find its way into the ocean.

Most of us don’t truly inhabit the place where we live. How many people can name the trees and other plants in their neighbourhood? How many people would know, for instance, what medicinal or other properties they might have? The solution is to metaphorically de-urbanise the city; to reconnect with the processes of nature so that we are conscious of our part in the great web of relationships that is life; to rediscover place and be responsible participants in our environment, not tourists or passive consumers. Some people are engaged in this rediscovery – many local environment groups have been quietly working for years; there are Transition Town groups which try to integrate communities with their local environments; there are people involved in permaculture and community gardens; even the proliferation of farmers’ markets is a sign of a greater respect and desire for locality. The shift is happening, but still at the edges.   

One simple but powerful step forward in mainstream society would be container deposit legislation. The federal Environment Department estimated in 2010 that 10 billion plastic and glass bottles are sold each year in Australia. If 10 cents could be retrieved for every bottle across the country and not just in South Australia and the Northern Territory, it would go some way to reducing the enormous volume of litter. In Victoria while in opposition, the Coalition said it would introduce container deposit laws, but now in government it has backed away. It shows that the quantum leap from the consciousness of local environment groups to society at large has not yet been made, otherwise politicians would have acted decisively on the issue. Cleaning up Australia is a long work in progress and it starts with each of us getting our hands dirty for the land we love.

What is Spirituality?

What do you see when you look at the sunset? When the sky turns to purple and deepening orange and the evening star casts a point of silvery light, what do you feel?

Some people say they see God. Others are arrested by beauty. Some people become wistful, thoughts turning to dreams and longing. And some have no words and just stand and stare.

What everyone experiences, if they stop and observe long enough, is a feeling of transcendence before the majesty of nature. The impact is registered deep, in the heart and soul. It’s something that cannot be erased by the banality of modern human society or its indifference to nature.

Transcendence is the beginning of spirituality, which is the direction of human attention to what is beyond surface material form. I believe we cannot live without some level of transcendent experience and when that experience is not validated, channelled or adequately held by a collective human culture, it will be expressed unconsciously.

Our modern Western society is based upon rationalist materialism. God is dead, but the deeply ingrained impulse to deify, to find transcendent meaning in the world, has simply enthroned Man as the new God. This is something about which Carl Jung wrote eloquently. Man (for despite the successes of feminism society is still patriarchal) is the centre of all our hopes on planet Earth, capable of virtually anything, and is the beginning and the end. The great American novelist and humanist John Steinbeck, in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, said: “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man – and the Word is with Men.”

In common, everyday life there are many examples of misplaced soul energy. Celebrities and sports stars are worshipped as gods. A rampant consumerism replaces the full and grand experience of life with an endless stream of possessions and distractions. The media and popular culture parade a variety of heroes and villains on whom we project the emotional contents of our inner depths. Widespread depression signals a desire but inability among many people to find meaning.

Spirituality starts with a simple acknowledgement that we are more than just flesh and bones. We have rich and deep lives that go beyond our obvious material needs. I was really pleased to hear about philosopher Alain de Botton’s new book, Religion for Atheists, in which he proposes secular temples devoted to qualities like reflection and perspective. de Botton wants the insight, ritual and tradition that religion once carried in the West to reappear in ways more appropriate to the 21^st century so as to animate people’s lives in depth.

Spirituality is fundamentally about connection. The deeper we engage with our own lives, the more we find that ultimately we are expressions of an essence that is the fabric of the universe. This can be called Life or God and has assumed a multitude of names in different cultures over millennia. By linking with this essence, we experience greater connectedness and meaning. We find ourselves at home in the universe and not just isolated individuals. This is not merely an abstract, cerebral exercise – a genuine spiritual orientation leads to concrete changes in a person’s life. An alignment towards soul inevitably means service in the world.

Two of my favourite authors, Jungian David Tacey and the American pagan activist Starhawk, finding inspiration from indigenous cultures, write about a spirituality of earth and place. I think the future collective spiritual awakening will come in the form of an earth-based spirituality. If we are to protect and heal the planet, we can’t be strangers in her midst. We need to learn her cycles, her moods and whims as they are revealed where we live. I am stunned by how little I and most other city dwellers know about the very ground we walk upon. For instance, what are the characteristics and properties of the trees in the neighbourhood? What is their energy? How do they affect us and we them on subtle levels? Building our knowledge and understanding from an intuitive and feeling point of view, as well as rationally, we radically rediscover ourselves as intimately connected to all life. We can’t but help then protect it, celebrate it, nurture it. As if the trees and the purple and orange sunset were us and we them.