Choices for our Future Means Learning To Embrace The “Whole” - Dick Rauscher

The universe gave humanity its greatest gift. The ability to choose.The power to determine our future. The power to choose what we choose to do with our life. But of course, making good choices for our future begins with awakening our consciousness to the simple reality that we have the power to choose the future we would like to create for ourselves.

Here is a simple test on how well we are doing choosing our future. How we answer the following questions could predict what is coming in our future. I’ll give you a hint. If we want to experience a successful future, our answers to the test questions will need to be: A, yes, yes, yes, and no.

The Questions

First, are we a) pro-future, or b) anti-future? Second, are we currently embracing a sustainable lifestyle? Third, have we learned to embrace the awe and sacred “thou-ness of nature and the amazing planet we live on? Fourth, are we living in a right relationship with nature and her natural laws? Lastly, do we treat nature as an “IT” to be exploited and used to satisfy your own personal ego needs?

Unfortunately, many of us are unconsciously anti-future, trapped in ego-based, short-term thinking. We have a hard time embracing a lifestyle that reflects true compassion for the “whole”; the millions of non-human life forms, and the billions of other human beings that share this tiny planet with us. When we begin to think realistically about what it would mean to actually embrace compassion for the “whole”, our egos tend to focus on “self”. This tendency to focus on “me” creates the feeling that we would somehow have to give up the life of privilege we feel entitled to live.

Most of us are grateful to live in a country that is technologically and economically advanced and feel we have worked hard to get what we have. But true compassion brings to consciousness the simple reality that we are not entitled to horde what we have worked for at the expense of the rest of the world. If we fail to awaken to the needs and dreams of the “whole”, we are choosing a future that is not realistic. It’s essentially anti-future. The rest of the world wants what we already enjoy. The people trapped in poverty in emerging third-world cultures are getting resentful and angry. They feel powerless. It’s only a matter of time before they will demand their right to live the same kind of life we are living. Much of the unrest in the world today is a reflection of that anger.

The Wisdom of History

History is an excellent teacher, and history is clear. We are a great nation. Some would even say a great human empire. But history is filled with examples of once-great nations and empires that crumbled into dust. Why? Because the wealthy and privileged felt entitled to their riches and wealth, so they choose to ignore the needs and dreams of the “whole or “commons”. Trapped in their own egos, they were not interested in sharing their privilege and wealth with the “whole”. They were anti-future in that they chose to ignore the teachings and growing wisdom of history. A few examples include the Byzantine, Assyrian, Roman, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Russian, British, Spanish, and Greek empires. All of them thought they would exist forever.

Wealth inequality historically eventually leads to conflict and violence when those in the bottom 10% begin to fight for their share of the limited resources owned and controlled by the wealthy. The top 10%.

History is clear. When the “common people” of a human empire lose hope and feel they have nothing to lose, even the greatest empires eventually slid from order and structure into violence and anarchy. If we ignore the need to live in right relationship with nature and use the limited resources of our planet sustainably and fail to embrace a sense of equality that compassionately offers those limited resources to the “whole”, it’s only a matter of time before our great nation joins those in the dustbin of history.

Unless we can successfully evolve our human consciousness and learn to embrace the needs and dreams of the “whole”, and end the cultural instability created by wealth inequality, history will record us as just one more anti-future Empire that embraced greed, hoarded its wealth, and disappeared into the mists of time.

The Wisdom Of Nature

We are currently living as if our planet is an “IT”, a “thing” to be exploited and used however we deem to use it. We need a shift in our consciousness; a new worldview that sees our planet, and the universe, as one “whole”, unified, living, evolving organism. We need to learn to live in a right relationship with nature and her laws. Nature is not a machine that can be controlled. And in the end, nature “is” going to win. We need to transform our short-term, anti-future, “me” focused ego needs into a long-term, pro-future, sustainable “we” focus on the “whole”.

As long as we are destined to live on the limited resources of this one tiny planet called Earth, our human economy and our planet’s ecology cannot be treated as separate objects. We are a species that has evolved from the living systems of this planet. We and nature are aspects of the same evolutionary process. We are not apart from, or superior to nature. Nor is our human economy. As Wendell Berry reminded us in his book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, unlimited economic expansion based on greed and profit is undeniably the most dangerous myth ever created by our human species.

We need to awaken our consciousness and embrace the reality that we are clearly….not living sustainably or renewably….in a right relationship with nature. We know in our hearts that this is true. We know in our hearts that we are not living pro-future. We are not living with a pro-future mentality that requires us to blend our human economy harmoniously into nature’s ecology.

We don’t need scientists to tell us that fact. We can look around and “see” how we are living. We “know” our scientific technologies are not superior to nature’s living systems. We are pretending to ignore the fact that the resources of our tiny planet are unlimited. But we “know” in our bones that when those resources are gone, or altered so-as-to no longer support life, we will no longer exist as a species.

We “know” we are condemning future generations to a life of hardship and suffering if we continue the path we are on. We “know” in our soul these things are true. We can feel the greed and self-focus that struggle to hide within us. We “know” we are in the jaws of a global climate change crisis that is growing. What we don’t know is how to change our thinking and our behaviors before it’s too late. How to make the transformation from our collective childhood “me” focused ego thinking to a more compassionate and awakened adult “we” consciousness that includes the “whole”.

Summary

We need to transform our human consciousness from ”me” to “we”, and embrace nature as a sacred living “THOU”, not a lifeless “IT”. The universe and our planet are living, evolving conscious organisms, not machines that can be controlled. Our planet is not an infinite resource capable of feeding the never-ending greed of our exponentially growing global economy. It is one tiny planet and its life support system is both fragile and dying. Our planet is trying to tell us that we need to grow up. We are not living pro-future.

We are, for better or worse, embedded in, and dependent on, our planet’s life support system and the limited resources that have been offered to us by our planet. We need to understand that nature will win in the end. Not humans! Nature does not need us, but we do indeed need her. If you have any doubt about the power of nature, see Julia Robert’s video at http://www.wimp.com/powerful-videos/. This amazing little video is a powerful meditation that can help us expand our individual and collective human consciousness.

An awakened and evolved consciousness capable of a compassionate “we” focus on the “whole” is the underlying goal of Primitive Ego Psychology and all Stonyhill-Nuggets newsletters. Primitive Ego Psychology can offer us a better understanding of our human nature, and how we might begin to transform the many reality distorting values and beliefs we unconsciously hold from childhood. It can help us live more intelligently, peacefully, sustainably, ethically, and better embrace the concepts of social justice, compassion, mutuality…….all of which are based on our ability to include the “whole” in all of our actions and thinking.

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A Pro-Future Metaphor

A metaphor that describes the importance of the “whole” is captured well in this quote by evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris when she writes…… “

The wisdom and ethics of the human body, all of our bodies….are remarkable in endless ways. Some 50 to 100 trillion cells, each as complex as a large human city, get along amazingly well. All are agreed to send aid to any ailing part of the body immediately. No organ dominates…..not even the brain….or expects other organs to become like itself. While blood is made from raw material cells in bone marrow “mines” all over the body and becomes a “finished product” when purified and oxygenated in the lungs, the heart distributes it equally to those trillions of cells with no hoarding or profit. Studying the human body and nature, including all of the interdependent systems of both, can offer us the wisdom we need to better run our human affairs and our human culture. The perfect storm of crises we now face may well prove to be the challenge that drives us into our greatest evolutionary leap. The economy must be made subservient to ecology if we want to continue our life on Earth as a healthy, embedded global human society. An economy based on principles of a conscious universe’s mature ecosystems, including that of our bodies, becomes our blueprint. We know deep in our hearts and souls that this must be done; all we need is the courage to lead the way for all!”