Tuesday 22 April 2014

Having enough

Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.

-Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching

My electricity company keeps sending me bills with graphs and colourful pictures. I like the one in which they line up my electricity usage with the average for my type of household. Typically, my consumption is about one-third the norm.

The company’s quoted averages seem awfully large and it would be in its interests to inflate them so people feel comfortable with high levels of consumption, but I’m proud that my glass (or grid) is only one-third full.

Maybe because I’m a conserver and frugal by nature, I don’t struggle to keep electricity use down: I don’t have many appliances, I switch off lights in rooms that aren’t being used, make sure stand-by power is off and use energy-saving light bulbs. It seems fairly simple and no-fuss to have a low-energy, more environmentally sensitive lifestyle, yet it’s not the way that many people choose to live.

Knowing when you have enough is actually quite a radical disposition in our society. Despite inroads made by the environment movement, it is still countercultural to voluntarily limit your material consumption. Ultimately I believe it is a spiritual matter based upon some fundamental questions: Where do you centre your being? What is your understanding and experience of yourself?

Our dominant culture works upon the conception of a fairly small and limited self – an individual who strives to fulfil basic material needs and desires. It manipulates these needs and desires by offering vast and ever-changing selections of material products. In the process, a gap is created between the small self and what each person actually is in the fullness of their being. The gap is in turn bridged with more and ever-changing consumption, but its existence is harmful: it manifests as various kinds of poor physical and mental health such as obesity, neuroses, addictions, anxiety and depression. The ailments that are a result of the restriction of human capacity are then often treated as isolated conditions without understanding the spiritual problem that is at the root.

The small self, the ego grasping solely to satisfy its own wants, more broadly restricts the development of humankind. The global social and environmental challenges we face require an opening outwards towards a much bigger self – one that embraces other people and other species as ourselves. The new “we” that is created can be a dynamic force to heal the planet.

Having enough is based upon a healthy relationship with yourself, upon a recognition of “I am what I am” and not “I am what I have”. It requires a fundamental valuing of self as a growing, organic process that is unbounded, unrestricted. The self, or the soul as it’s also known, has its own needs and requirements that are different, though connected to, the material needs and requirements of the body. In a spiritually developed human being it is the soul that is in charge, directing his or her actions through the personality. Such a person is not enslaved by the chaotic whims of desire and is less prone to be manipulated by outside forces. Far from being restrictive, spontaneity or life force actually increases under the aura of the soul as a person centres deeply in their own being.

There is an invocation that appears in a number of the Upanisads, the Hindu wisdom texts that were written more than 2000 years ago, that goes: That is full, this is full/ Fullness comes forth from fullness/ When fullness is taken from fullness/ Fullness remains. This could be interpreted to mean that fullness is a condition of humanity no matter what state it is in. That is, you are spiritually whole even when you feel empty, even when you have never experienced wholeness. Fullness of being is always available to us and is our true condition, the true fulfilment of what it means to be human – partiality, separation from self, alienation occur as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

The path to having enough is simply experiencing fullness in yourself just as you are.

Thursday 3 April 2014

Globalisation for good or ill

Globalisation used to be a dirty word for me. I took part in the anti-globalisation movement that was a force a decade or so ago, marching against corporate greed and global-scale capitalism, blockading with thousands of others the World Economic Forum when it came to Melbourne in 2000.

The intentions of that movement were good: to fight the rapacious exploitation of the world’s resources and people by increasingly powerful corporations, governments and transnational entities like the IMF. However, the processes underlying the growth and reach of the exploiters have also, for instance, fed the development of global environmental organisations and understanding. The ant-globalisation movement was itself, ironically, global in scale and arose out of a global awareness. It all points to a particular transformation of humanity and the planet in our time.

Our species, Homo sapiens, ventured out from its cradle in the great rift valley of East Africa about 100,000 years ago. For thousands of years thereafter, humanity was in a state of dispersion as we spread to most parts of the globe. Separate cultures, languages and physical features formed in adaptation to particular environments and out of the social dynamics of specific human groups. Communication between groups, trade and cross-fertilization of cultures occurred mainly at local and regional levels.

The reversal of the process of dispersion – of humanity drawing back together – began in the 16th century when Spain, Portugal and Holland, followed by France and England, took to the seas during the so-called “Age of Expansion”. The colonial empires they built were global in breadth: cultures from different sides of the world came to be continuously in contact with each other. European power was entrenched through the control of vast new trade routes in natural resources and slaves, and European hegemony was eventually established everywhere – often at the point of a gun. European explorers finally “discovered” and mapped the entire globe.

In our time the process of global convergence is well advanced. Events that occur at one end of the world can have immediate effects everywhere; communication between people shoots instantaneously around the globe; financial systems tie all countries together; political and economic leaders meet to decide global protocols and directions. The result is an emerging planetary “culture” with particular vision and sets of values. Following the historical dominance of the great European powers, this culture is essentially Western in outlook and underpinned by ideas of continuous economic innovation and expansion. However, as can be seen in the rise of worldwide movements for the environment and Indigenous rights, planetary priorities are up for contest. There is no certainty what the global culture will be, say in 100 years’ time, particularly given the volatility of a rapidly increasing human population, scarce resources and the dire realities of climate change. There are also the tensions that occur between local cultures – with their own histories, views and directions – and the overarching global worldview. We can see this, for instance, in the current political struggles in the Middle East as the more globalised democratic impulses clash with older, tribal and authoritarian local traditions.

We are living in a remarkable phase of the Earth’s history. It seems to me that the template for our time needs to be “unity”, that the challenge in the process of global convergence or globalisation is to create systems that nurture and affirm life. The older, fragmented vision of self-interest, of identifying purely with one’s own needs and that of one’s immediate others, has to give way to a much bigger self, the global self. The difficulty is, of course, that the old ways are deeply entrenched in the systems and societies that we have created, and it may be that they will only be transformed by global-scale catastrophe. The nascent world spirit is developing at the edge of a cliff.

In his book Re-enchantment, Australian thinker David Tacey describes the emerging spirituality in our time as moving from an older “either/or” worldview to one of “both-and”. He says: “At the stage of post-enlightenment, life can be understood by way of paradox and complexity.” To me, this holds something important: “both-and” means we include the needs of the individual, the local and the particular with the needs of the planet overall (as in the slogan, “act local, think global”) and what is created out of that is a new life or new phase for the Earth.

I believe we are ultimately agents for and within something bigger than ourselves, that the period of globalisation is not simply happening by blind chance. Humans are an expression of the magnificence of the planet and our journey of self-discovery is very much that of the Earth. That’s why we carry an enormous responsibility of acting with its highest interests at heart, something that we are only just learning to do.