Are you, like so many American’s, struggling to create a happy and meaningful life? Are you wondering what’s happened to our great Nation? Is America really falling apart as so many pundits are now predicting? Is happiness a myth? Should we just throw in the towel and call it quits?

I don’t think so.

Compassion and empathy are powerful forces, but like gravity, they function best when we are connected and interdependent with the object of that compassion and empathy. The greater the separation or distance between us and “other”, the weaker or more conditional or compassion and empathy becomes. Stated differently, the unconditional power of our compassion and empathy for “other” drops away as the distance between us and “other” increases.

Every day we get new incontrovertible evidence that our global economic system is broken. Incontrovertible proof that global climate change is indeed caused by human activity. Much of this new evidence is denied by those who are accumulating great wealth from that broken economic system. The journey toward deep sustainability is hampered by the well-funded denials that are designed to create doubt in the minds of the general public.

The most important change we need to make in the way humanity thinks is very simple. It’s simply letting go of our childhood primitive ego’s illusion that we are a unique “self” or being separate from the rest of the planet we live on….or the Universe.

We seem to be a society consumed with fear. We tend to be more fearful of those things that “might happen” than we are of the real threats that are part of our day-to-day lives.

There is a growing recognition that humanity is walking toward a future we really don’t want to create for ourselves, or our children and grandchildren. We are walking toward a future we know in our hearts is not a sustainable world. Every place we look, we see the cracks in the “civilized” world we’ve been creating over the last few hundred years. And that includes the cracks created by our American never-ending war that has lasted almost seven decades. Some would say even longer.w

Our media is inundating us with fear! If you doubt the reality of that simple truth, you are probably someone who does not watch the evening news…..or read the thousands of emails that promote “fear” of just about anything you can name.

It’s time to say “we’ve had enough”! It’s time to take back our power. It’s time to force all ideologically inflexible politicians out of office, including the inflexible, petulant, ego-driven, emotionally adolescent tea party politicians who need to be“right”. They are gridlockingCongressandshutting down our nation’s political process by adamantly rejecting all compromise. They are emotionally and intellectually far too immature to hold public office in a democratic system of government.

The world needs more elders. Our children need more elders. Congress needs more elders. Where are the elders we need going to come from? If not you and me. Then who?

Are you tired of the evening news too? Or am I the only one who is feeling like I’ve listened to the depressing “problems” long enough? How about a focus on what we can do to fix the problems that are bombarding our psyche every day? How about some news on how we can actually re-empower ourselves and begin to work on solutions.

For too long, our understanding of reality has been fragmented, broken down into separate categories of science and religion. And those two understandings of reality have been at war with each other for centuries. Each was claiming that their way of understanding reality was the right way. For the scientists, God was not relevant. The understanding reality was about mathematics. For the religious, God was an ultimate mystery.

Sustainability is a word that is rapidly entering our human consciousness. Sustainability makes sense as a concept, but what does it mean to you and me? Are we embracing sustainability as a way of life? What changes would we need to make to begin living a truly sustainable life?

When we love another, we make room for them in our heart. And what we take into our heart has the power to transform who we are at a deeply personal level. Thus marriage, more than any other choice we make in life, is a commitment to move toward spiritual growth; toward growth in self-awareness.

What are the skills to improve your marriage? How do you fix a marriage that seems to be faltering?

The more I learn about biology and the beginnings of life in our universe, the more I realize that the unconscious childhood primitive ego in each of us needs to awaken. We are on the brink of maturing into a more conscious and awakened human species, but we carry within, many very dangerous unconscious beliefs, and worldviews, that threaten our future as a species.