-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.
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