The cult of change

Move fast and break things

Motto of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

While, with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony ...

William Wordsworth

There’s a spot on a bow-shaped wooden bridge above the Merri Creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to which I find myself lured on my walks.

There I gaze, for a minute or two, into the water below. After rain in winter the creek is a surging torrent of turgid brown. In summer it is clear and shallow, allowing you to see to the bottom. Depending on the day, the sun’s rays can dazzle as they gleam and glint off the water. Depending on the creek’s depth and strength of current, the water ripples and glides in a multitude of ways leaving behind endless more delightful ripples and swirls.

For a brief time once every few days I am mesmerised on that bridge. And I notice others stopping there too, gazing below as if looking for something intangible; like the way people involuntarily stand and stare at the ocean. It’s the simple beauty and the sight of ceaseless movement, nature endlessly rising and falling. The inner eye is gently opened to the deeper realms of being. Paradoxically, all the shifting and movement brings stillness and calm, an experience of the eternal that lies beyond transient form.

I contrast this with the human world in which I am enveloped for most of the day. Our culture places a high value on change, but doesn’t have the vision to see the changeless. We are caught up in the hurly burly of material existence, without experiencing the eternal which underpins it. Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God, notes how past civilisations were essentially conservative and resistant to change – they were anchored by laws that were regarded as immutable and divine. But, she says, “The modern technical society introduced by the West was based on the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalised and taken for granted.”

Without religion to point to the eternal reality, I think the West has developed a kind of cult of change in recent times. Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” sums it up. Innovation is everything, to be stationary for any length of time tantamount to failure. Boundaries or limits are suspect and will inevitably be broken by the human drive for improvement. The ideal person participates in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of experience generated by their interaction with technology and consumer products. What Zuckerberg and others like him describe is a capitalist managerial ethic overlayed with insights from the world of marketing geared towards consumerism. Once the preserve of corporate executives, the managerial change fixation has now penetrated deeply into the psyche of society as a whole.

The great failure of the cult of change is its inability to answer “To what end?” or to speak to deep human needs. I think it generates anxiety and feelings of inadequacy in many people. Change is a constant of all created reality, but human-generated change needs to be directed and purposeful to the broader needs of humanity and the planet. The idea of constant improvement has merit, but there are times when we don’t need to strive, when simply “good enough” is fine. Indeed most of the time “good enough” is appropriate: it would be silly to attach some notion of excellence to washing dishes, or to walking the dog, or sleeping. Even at work, we should be secure in knowing we are good enough while being open to improve where we can.

There is a steady-state ethic that is starting to emerge as a counterpoint to the mainstream attachment to change and growth. Informed by the environmental movement and the wisdom of indigenous cultures, it values simplicity. It tries to place the individual in context within a web of human and non-human relationships that makes up the totality of life. It reinforces the importance of ecological and other limits. And its measure is quality, as opposed to the generation of movement and money for its own sake.       

About 700 metres south of the wooden bridge of my walks there is another bridge across the Merri Creek. It is a road that for large parts of the day is clogged with traffic, noise and car fumes. I instinctively find it hostile to any sense of peace or lasting value. Yet, on a larger level, this scene is no different to the ceaseless tumult of flowing water – behind both lies the face of eternity. A well-developed eye is required to see this, and feeling to understand that change and the changeless are essentially one.

Dreams and the unconscious

“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”

C.G Jung, Man and His Symbols

I’m amazed, but mostly baffled, about the way the unconscious operates. Carl Jung emphasised how little we know about it and how important it is to learn more and to engage constructively with it.

Only a few days ago I had a powerful experience that caused me to reflect about dreams and the unconscious. My partner and I were on holiday in far-north Australia and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef, so we joined a half-day boat tour for snorkelling and whale watching. I’d never been snorkelling and I’m not a confident swimmer – I learnt the very basics in a few days on my own in a hotel swimming pool when I was nine and still need to feel the bottom with my feet or hold on to something after a few strokes. Our guide said that would not be a problem because he had devices to keep me afloat.   

After we made it to the reef and the other tourists jumped into the water with their snorkelling gear, I plunged in – and panicked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the deep water and the idea of somehow floating while breathing through a strange plastic mask suddenly brought on fear. I gulped sea water and managed to grab the steps of the boat. My partner and the guide were good. They coaxed me into holding on to a life ring, which the guide then pulled through the water as I learnt how to breathe through the snorkel. And within a few minutes I was actually seeing the reef, gradually relaxing in the water.    

My partner and I found it difficult to talk about the experience afterwards. I was embarrassed and needed time to digest and integrate. That night we had broken sleep with disturbing dreams: mine were a mishmash of images, a collage of strange visions and fragmented energies. Though none of them were clear to me, I connected them to my hapless time in the water. A small trauma, a little wound had been created, and the psyche was responding. As Jung pointed out, the unconscious, through dreams, acts as a kind of balancing pole to keep the total mind in equilibrium. Our ego, the personality we present to the world, is in fact quite fragile; beyond it is the vast and largely mysterious unconscious. The ego is subject to myriad stimulations and phenomena every day, all of them registering in some way in the personal unconscious. If we are generally stable in ourselves and in our lives the ego can be solid and firm, but it is always subject to upset or imbalance. New experience is one of the main ways to tip us over.

Unless the ego is mature and flexible, open enough to embrace or relate playfully with new experience, it can be knocked off balance. In that case the unconscious arrives to fill the breach, with its assorted bag of fears, irrationalities and dreams. It is the instinctive and primal counterforce to the developed rationality of the ego. Some experiences of course are just too strong to be absorbed gracefully by the individual ego – on the extreme end I think of wars and natural disasters, which can fracture the psyche and lead to long-lasting imbalances where the unconscious has too much power over a personality. 

Developing a constructive relationship with the unconscious is an important function of psychology. Often we consign the most truthful and telling parts of ourselves to the far reaches of our mind, yet the unconscious continues to speak to us in dreams and other ways, providing balance to the total psyche. Its language is that of images and symbols, which is difficult for the ego, particularly one conditioned in a rationalist, scientific culture. I try to write down my dreams and make a stab of interpreting them, my method a simple one of image association. It’s not easy, the insights coming slowly over many years, but fascinating and rewarding nonetheless. An attitude of holding and accepting mystery is, I think, crucial. Jung was often at pains to point out that the unconscious needed to be taken seriously – we can’t afford to write off dreams, visions or the non-rational as unreal and unimportant – because it reveals so much about our inner selves. At the very least it demands to be noticed and given credence in our lives.  

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The importance of place

There’s nothing like a sense of place. I’ve never had a stable place of residence for more than a few years in my life, but for almost two decades my surrogate emotional home has been the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.

I’ve been going to the Vic Market most Saturdays since 1994, sitting with friends at one of the metal tables in the lane beside the delicatessen section. Fruit and vegetable shopping is the stated aim of a visit to the market but the real interest is in meeting old friends, conversation, coffee and immersion in the vibe.

There are lots of families with children, tourists passing through, couples sitting quietly together, buskers with guitars and solo singers, dogs of every size and kind, and fat overweened pigeons. I love the way you can watch people change over the years – children who grow into fine adults, stallholders taking their breaks sitting on milk crates and smoking in the lane; the friendships that come and go, and those that last. The market’s not just a backdrop to life – I imagine it having a transformative effect, a catalyst for the best in all of us. At the very least, it’s an affirmation and celebration that we are, after all, social beings.

And then there are the Vic Market legends: the time a certain reviled politician and his wife out for a casual stroll were sent fleeing after word of their presence got out in the lane; The Band Who Knew Too Much, whose joyful swinging sound attracted impossibly large crowds; and Jim, the craggy-faced seller of the Big Issue and his familiar cry, “Getcher copy of the Big Issue ‘ere, only five dollars.”

I think place is very important to human happiness. These days there’s an emphasis and tendency towards mobility – rootlessness is seen as OK because technology allows us to hook into communication networks from anywhere. But being a “person of the world” can be harmful if there are no places that are meaningful to us and with which we have a deep relationship. Places hold memory and so are part of our development, make us who we are. They are part of the weave of our lives, resonating psychologically and spiritually. Places evoke particular responses and moods that can be positive or negative – some are uplifting, others make us uneasy, dull or stupefied. At the Vic Market, I’m always reflective and deeply appreciative. For me, it’s a place to just be. I’m thankful for its presence in my life.

For thousands of years people have gone on pilgrimage to holy places. The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi, Muslims are asked to go to Mecca at least once in their life, Jews and Christians have Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Catholics the shrines and cathedrals of various saints, and Buddhists and Hindus significant geographical places and temples. Salvation is in the journey to the holy place and in the prayer or ritual conducted there; the journey is a pilgrim’s preparation for meeting with the divine, arrival the point of connection with God. Ritual renews and strengthens the bond a pilgrim has with their particular deity or expression of the divine, as well as providing a sense of union, meaning and depth in life. Power is created when the ritual happens in a group, the individual merging both with the religious community and the divine mystery/presence.

Mircea Eliade says in his brilliant book, The Sacred and the Profane, that sacred places channel a human need for connection, transcendence and meaning. They act as spiritual centre points from which meaning emanates and to which people need to return to reinvigorate their lives. Eliade points out that there are still echoes of symbol and ritual in the contemporary secular West, and people have a continuing need for transcendence. My experience at the Vic Market has something of this quality for me. It is a psychological centre point to which I return, a place of reflection and comfort. And I don’t believe that it’s solely a projection of my needs and desires onto a particular place, though an element of that is certainly there. There is a relationship between me and the Vic Market, which is re-established and remade every time I visit. This fine, unseen level of reality exits despite our materialist age and is not diminished; whether we acknowledge it is another matter.

Maybe somebody someday will set up a little shrine at the Market as an expression of thanks. It would be a concrete spiritual gesture and something perhaps for which we are not yet ready. The truth is that people show gratitude in myriad ways there anyway – buying food, chatting with the stallholders, appreciating the colour and variety of the wares, eating with friends, enjoying the ambience. Our actions have deep and lasting reverberations.

Discernment

It’s a small scene that captures the absurdity of life in the modern world: Chinese tourists pile out of a bus near Melbourne’s Parliament House and take photos of each other, faces beaming, in front of a statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

I see this on many mornings walking to work. It’s safe to say the tourists have no idea who Gordon was, because most Melburnians don’t know. He was a kind of tragic hero of 19^th century colonial Australia – a famed horse rider and poet who, having suffered a bad fall in a race and burdened by self-doubt and financial problems, shot himself at the age of 37.

Gordon was one of the early writers of Australian bush ballads, most notably The Sick Stockrider, a melancholy but folksy tribute to the European pioneering spirit. The Chinese tourists with their happy holiday snaps in front of his statue may not care, even if they knew. 

It’s a bizarre scene, but one that’s repeated countless times in different ways around the world and quite instructive. Disconnection is fundamental to the modern condition. Ironically at a time when people are more connected than ever across the world thanks to technology, when information is readily available on anything, deep levels of ignorance abound. 

I think in future our time will be seen as the high water mark of material consumption. Unparalleled wealth is being created with a seemingly endless variety of material goods and choices. If you have the money you can get virtually anything you want, do anything you want, be anything you want. Money has few barriers across the globe.  

Yet as passionately as we have sailed in recent times into the adventure of the material world, the inner world of Spirit has been left far behind. We lack connection with ourselves and our environment, living as tourists in our own lives. Though contemporary technology, including IT and the internet, is helpful in many ways, ingenious and creative, it has negative personal and social effects. Distraction and hyperactivity are two of the most notable. In the absence of a spiritually infused culture with healthy values, addiction to gadgets and the products of the internet is widespread as people fill the inner void. 

Despite this, I can see change. At some point perhaps not so far in the future, as a result of immense human population, scarce resources and climate change, our society will become radically different. There will no longer be endless material abundance and sheer survival will become more important as we are forced to live within environmental limits. By then as a society we may also have moved towards the inner world of meaning, connection and community.

The move towards the Spirit starts with discernment. It’s about engaging quality. Discernment lifts an individual out of the common denominator of the mass and presents him/her with deeper choices about life. What is life about? What really makes me happy? Endless and addictive “conversation” on Facebook, Twitter or other social media does not address these questions; neither does endless consumption of goods, ideas, travel or anything else. When we engage with quality in our lives, we are on the road to creating meaningful connections. Then we can begin to relate to technology or any other aspect of our world with open interest but not with the slavery of the mass. 

The constant barrage of new technology affects social interaction and creates problems that take years to understand, let alone address. There is, for instance, the anxiety and social exclusion of people who don’t participate in or can’t keep up with technology – because of poverty, age, disability or other reasons. There are also the effects that new technology has on the body, either directly through stimulation of the nervous system – contributing to lack of sleep, distraction and anxiety – or indirectly through lack of exercise and obesity. 

Discernment needs to be a central pillar of our culture. Many individuals are already walking its path in various ways, connecting with their deeper selves and their community, but discernment has to become a template for society as a whole. For the tourists who congregate in central Melbourne by the likeness of Adam Lindsay Gordon, it might be something as simple as taking a minute to read the words on the statue; or a moment in the early morning sunshine to imagine who this person might have been, before taking a photo.  

The death of print

We live in a time of endings, but also in a time of beginnings. Recently a friend told me she felt a great loss at the “death of print”, the decline and likely disappearance of many newspapers. It felt to her momentous and the times were uncertain.

I agree. There is enormous transition going on. To me it seems like the entire Western project, the civilisation whose political, economic and social ways have come to dominate the planet, is undergoing fundamental change. Institutions that emerged during the Age of Reason like the press and parliamentary democracy seem particularly moribund at the present time.  

But with endings, there are always beginnings. This is something we often fail to see. When a person dies, for instance, the family and friends grieve for a time and then go on with their lives. The death is felt as a loss, which it is. But it also opens the door to new relationships. Those who are left behind have a new experience of life, a difference in the makeup of things, a re-ordering of reality. Often that which has been neglected or unseen comes to the surface and opportunities for growth and enlightenment inevitably arise.

Every death heralds a birth. This is not something easily grasped by the rational mind. Most of the time we see material existence as a moving jumble of discrete and isolated phenomena. But the connections are everywhere, on all levels, and interdependence is the overriding reality. A deep and fundamental understanding of relationship is, I think, something that humans are evolving towards, but it requires a shift in the psychic dominance of rationality and a greater opening to mystical experience.

The ecology movement is one of the primary catalysts in turning our minds towards relationship. Scientists are increasingly aware of the biological interdependence of life on Earth, and how life-supporting ecosystems exist in delicate balance. Take one part out of an ecosystem and the whole, dynamic web is changed. When we revere nature, when we are awestruck by a mountain or moved by the lushness of a forest or the grandeur of the sea, we turn inwards to a profound place of oneness, which is mystical experience. 

What birth arrives with the death of print? I don’t find this easy to answer, and it’s probably still too early to tell. The breakdown of the traditional press as mass opinion-forming agents creates an opening for multiplicity and diversity of views – we have seen this in the internet – but those views are not necessarily mature or enlightened. The shift towards the internet is also a means by which culture is fragmented as people seek out their own niche interests and news, abandoning the broad-based and generalist news services. The fragmentation, in my opinion, furthers the decline of the political-economic-social system we live under. It makes society more unpredictable and volatile.

Before new forms are created there is a period of gestation, usually involving conflict and crisis. We don’t know how long the present period of transition will last, but it’s safe to say that the seeds of the new order are already in existence. The seeds of love and unity are daily watered by the actions of millions of people across the world.    

Seeds of Change

Herein is the subtle wisdom of life:

The soft and weak overcomes the hard and strong.

                                                - Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu

There has been a wonderful program on Sunday nights on ABC Television in Australia called How to Grow a Planet, by BBC Scotland. Superficially it’s about plants and their evolution over millions of years, but embedded in it is a subversive theme about the relationship of humans to the rest of the world.

It goes something like this: “Plants deserve just recognition for their enormous impact on life on Earth. They have been at the centre of great evolutionary changes, including the evolution of mammals and our own species.”

One of the program’s amazing insights is that plants developed a way to tell animals when their fruit was ready to be consumed – fruit turned red when the seeds inside it were mature for dispersal. Scientists believe that primates evolved an ability to see colour as a result, giving them an advantage as ripe fruit also had more sugar and so more energy.

The insight is that humans have co-evolved with plants, and where we seem to control them the reality is more complex. People have spread certain plants across the globe – cereals like wheat and rye, fruit like bananas and tomatoes, flowers like roses – and this can be seen as an evolutionary triumph of those species. They have particular qualities we like and so we propagate and develop them.

It’s quite humbling to think that not only are we reliant on plants for the oxygen they breathe into the atmosphere and the nutrition and energy we get from eating them, but our bodies and minds and indeed whole civilisations have been shaped by them. The development of agriculture, namely the cultivation of wheat in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, was the crucial developmental step towards Western civilisation and what we have now.

Plants are intelligent. How to Grow a Planet has shown that they sense and communicate among themselves. I think this has radical implications. The 18^th century Enlightenment enthroned Man as the centre and pinnacle of value, but recently there has been a growing realisation of the interconnectedness of all life. This entails a shift towards a moral system that does not privilege humans, but honours all species as part of a great web of life. Such an ecological approach has been embedded for thousands of years in the culture and spirituality of Indigenous people.

I believe that this shift can only come to full fruition experientially in people’s lives, not purely at an intellectual level. In Melbourne in the past decade there has been a flourishing of farmers’ markets, community gardens and organic food box schemes. People want a greater connection to their food and how and where it is grown, as well as to those who grow it. This is a reconnection, a re-establishment of meaning that was taken away by supermarkets and suburbia. In more mature phases, perhaps decades away, conscious ritual and a symbolic life emerge to express a new way of being.

In a way, cultural changes are another triumph for plants. Compared to the prevailing human spirit, with its emphasis on power and control, theirs is a soft and quiet energy. Some writers, aware of changes in the human psyche, have noted a movement towards a more nuanced, “feminine” view of life.  David Tacey, in Edge of the Sacred (Daimon Verlag, 2009), describes the emerging paradigm as being “closer to nature and the elemental world, closer to the soul and the feminine, to intuition and feeling, to the values of the earth and the body”. 

In the process of co-evolution, survival is at stake: that of plants and humans. As human population grows and we take ever more for our needs, as we pave over the soil for our ever-expanding cities, we are threatening the survival of other species as well as undermining our own long-term future. I believe that plants, and the earth in general, recognise this. If we can accept there is an intelligence at work in nature that is fundamentally kin to our own, then we need to listen to it and learn from it. If we share a common soul, then an injury to one is an injury to all.

I think people who garden are in a privileged position. Gardening is a ritual with profound meaning, whether a person recognises it or not. On one level a garden is there for beauty, for neatness and tidiness, for the vegetables or fruit trees we grow, for the relaxation it gives us. At a deeper level we are reproducing cycles of life in a dance with the plant world; plants and the earth are making us as much as we are making them.    

   

Leave it in the ground

An almighty rush to dig up the ground is sweeping through Australia and other parts of the world.

Fed by the global hunger for energy, the rapid development of countries like China and India and steadily growing world population, we are in the grip of a frantic mining boom.

Mining is a daily discussion topic in Australia, which is rich in many of the world’s most needed minerals. New iron ore mines are being opened in remote parts of the country, while prospecting for coal, coals seam gas, gold and other minerals seems to be happening everywhere, often with concern and opposition from local communities.

Once, decades ago, Australia was said to be “riding on the sheep’s back” for our economic dependence on wool and other farming products. Now the talk is about the enormous wealth created by the minerals boom and the rise of mega-rich mining tycoons like Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer.

With this focus has come discussion about the distribution of this wealth, with the government introducing a resource rent tax to recoup some of the royalties for the benefit of the general population. The reality is that much of the wealth goes overseas and the states furthest from the most lucrative mines, where most of the population lives, struggle economically regardless of the boom. What is often left out of the discussion on mining is its most immediate cost – to the environment.

In advertisements run by the industry to shore up public support, you don’t see the scale of the gigantic holes gouged out of the earth by open-cut mines. You are not told that the earth is never the same after a mining operation, that there is no true “rehabilitation”. You are not informed about the millions of litres taken out of groundwater aquifers, or the toxic slurries that are pumped back into the ground from some mines. The digging is generally well away from population centres and so most people have no direct experience of what is going on. Driving through the coal-rich Latrobe Valley east of Melbourne you would not know that just a few kilometres from the road are massive open-cut mining holes.

Mining is underpinned by the idea that humans are separate from nature. The earth and its minerals are inert, dead, have no living connection to us, and so we take what we please. The aim is to provide raw materials to feed the engine of modern society and, if possible, make lots of money along the way. Indigenous people hold a different notion, that the land is alive and sacred and that we belong to the earth, not it to us. Nevertheless some Indigenous communities are co-opted by large corporations into accepting mining on their land with promises of jobs, schools and better roads.

If we accept that humans are separate from nature, then essentially there is no cost to our actions. But what happens when we dig out radioactive uranium? Or take iron ore from deposits left by living organisms in ancient seas? Or drill deep holes and remove the coal formed by ancient forests? I suspect it upsets balance in ways we know nothing about.

Our planet has created immense treasures in its 3 billion years in existence – treasures formed in the relationship between the atmosphere, wind, water, rocks, volcanic eruptions, shifting tectonic plates and myriad life forms. The planet’s unfolding transformations can be seen below and above the surface. In a way, we are stealing its history (which is our own history) by mining it; and we do this with no better reason in places like Australia than to support unsustainable lifestyles.

I don’t say there should be no mining, but it needs to be limited and strictly controlled. Above all, it should be informed by reality, not illusions of human dominance and separation from nature. The reality is that we are made of the very same elements we are digging out of the ground; we are formed by the earth and out of the earth, so we have to act with the utmost respect and in concert with life. In essence what we do to the planet, we do to ourselves.      

What is required is a radical shift of values, which I think is slowly occurring across the globe. Commentators like American theologian Matthew Fox talk about a creation-centred approach rather than a human-centred one. This is where we don’t negate human needs, but they are seen in the context of the needs of all beings and the planet as a whole. The old biblical maxim, “Do unto your neighbour as you would have done unto you” becomes “Do unto all life as you would have done unto you.”

The spread of environmental thinking and action across the world is a sign of this shift, but there is a very long way to go. I think the current mining mania shows a system in steady decline; often the worst aspects of a civilisation rise to the surface before there is great change. And there is hope – Gaia has undergone incredible upheavals over the aeons and its creative life essence, which is also our life essence, will go on regardless.