‘We seem to be seeing a strong impulse for freedom springing up in the world today - especially in the Middle East, with all the manifestations of ‘people power’ that we have been witnessing, especially with what has just been going on in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain and now Libya . Do you have hope that a better world is in the offing? If so, what do you think of those prophecies that foretell the end of the world in 2012? Doesn’t that sound rather scary?’
Here is my reply:
Yes, I do have hope – a huge amount of hope - that a better world is in the offing and I think that the impulse to be free of totalitarian leaderships that is now springing up in the Middle East, is very important and may be compared with what took place at the end of the last Millenium with the whole breaking down of the Iron Curtain. However, before I get into that, I will first comment briefly on your last question about the prophecies.
PROPHECIES
There have always been prophecies forecasting the end of the world and ones suggesting that we are about to enter into a whole new ‘golden age’ and I think this is appropriate, as it asks us to ‘dance’ between these two possibilities. If we only believed in doom and destruction, we’d give up now and do nothing, and if we only thought that a wonderful new era lay ahead, we’d probably do none of the hard graft that is required of all of us if a new and better civilisation is to come into being. Here, we need to remind ourselves that no one ‘up there’ is going to usher in a better world – it is not up to our world leaders; it is up to you and I. I.e., you and I are the midwives of tomorrow! So I think it is good that we are always being presented with both scenarios, as it somehow preserves a necessary balance. Also, I don’t interpret the phrase ‘end of the world’ literal ly. Rather, I prefer to think that we don’t all live just in one world or one reality, but in many worlds or many dimensions of being and that this statement simply refers to the fact that one particular ‘world’ that has been over-prominent for much too long in human affairs, will be phasing out.
THE END OF ONE WORLD
And this is exactly what is happening. We are living at a time when a particular world that has for overlong been dominating the world stage, is at last coming to an end.
And what this phasing out means is that space for a new world or new reality to emerge is able to open up. And I very much celebrate this fact as I think that the world that is coming to an end, is a very limited and unconscious one, many aspects of which, have a very evil face, and that it is responsible for most of the ills which we face today.
Basically, it is a domain of being where we believe that who we are is our separate ego self and that this constitutes the full extent of ourselves and that what we cannot see or conceive of, therefore cannot exist. Needless to say, this is a very blinkered, black and white reality and it has a very dark face. It is characterised by a lot of selfishness, fear, greed, violence, materialism and manipulation; it is one where we unthinkingly burglarise our planet’s limited resources, over consume and treat our fellow human beings terribly, as well as live in denial of anything sacred or mystical. Its darkest face may be seen reflected in the many totalitarian regimes in the world, whose leaders govern by terror and grow rich at the expense of their subjects’ impoverishment.
So yes, I would like to believe that this ‘old world’ which is so full of suppression and denial, and causes so much suffering to so many people -is coming to an end, and that it is doing so because millions of people all over the planet, not only want a new and better world - one where there is justice and where people’s human rights are respected and where there is no longer the vast gulf between Have’s and Have Not’s – but are also prepared to do something to have this better world come about. Here, we remember that old realities die and new worlds are born because our thoughts and our actions make it that way. And right now, as I write, one of the more tangible ways that this ‘brave new world’ is coming into expression, is via the arising of People Power. And I celebrate this.
THE ASCENSION OF PEOPLE POWER
What we are learning from recent events in the Middle East is that People Power is a) a very, very potent force for change, and b) is primarily a young person’s movement. No matter what nationality they are or what race or religion they belong to, first and foremost, the youth of today want to be free, want to have the opportunities to be their own person. In the Middle East in particular, young Arabs and Iranians are fed up with being hoodwinked and exploited by their senile leaders more interested in their own power-bases, grandiosity and bank balances than in the well being of their subjects, and, at this moment, they are making their feelings felt forcibly, and for the most part, peacefully. Half the Middle Eastern population is under twenty five and never in history has there been a wider gap between the tweeting youth and the mummified pharaohs.
As I write, people are gathering in their hundreds of thousands in the streets of every Arab nation and are saying ‘We want freedom - the freedom to be who we are, the freedom to have work - freedom from the many constraints imposed upon us. And we also demand respect – that our leaders stop treating us as cattle fodder and offer us opportunities to develop ourselves.’ And I think they are saying something which, deep down, we all desire, even if we are not young or live under some murderous totalitarian regime (the two worst for me being the totally corrupt and murderous theocracy in Iran and the ghastly regime under the madman Gadaffi.) Whether the chains we wish to break free from, exist more at an inner level or are specifically the result of external constraints, doesn’t matter. It is the same thing.
EMERGENCE OF A NEW ZEITGEIST
Another way to frame what is happening is to say that a new zeitgeist or new ‘spirit of the age’ is arising powerfully in the heart of mankind and that it is unequivocally demanding that the many different kinds of forces which enchain our bodies and minds and hearts and souls, be unlocked. In my own particular journey at this moment, this zeitgeist is compelling me to work at releasing the particular kinds of shackles that still subtly wrap themselves around my heart. They comprise the sum total of all those beliefs and patterns that I still carry inside me , keeping me locked into the illusion of my separateness, trapped in the myth that tells me that I am less than who I truly am.
My aim is to ascend into my true self, not least because I know that the freer I become, the more potent a role I can play in the liberation of my planet. And I realise that is why I have been put here on this planet, indeed why we all exist, namely to assist in the process of its evolution. ‘We are all born Stradivariuses’, a wise lady once said to me, ‘Yet we grow up believing we are mere plastic fiddles.’ This is so true. This is what the old world or the old culture has done to us. It has kept us down – some of us externally, others internally, many of us in both areas - and what our planet needs today is the arising of a new Stradivarius consciousness in all its many faces. Thus, the more that each of us can work at our own ascension – pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps - the more we can say a huge ‘Yes’ to a new vision for Man and Planet, the easier it becomes to say a resounding ‘No’ to everything that pertains to the ‘old world’ and so holds the domain of ‘plastic fiddlery’ in place!
YES TO A NEW VISION
And today, millions of people around the planet are saying Yes, each of them in their different ways. Politicians with vision are aspiring to do politics in a new way, Scientists are expanding our parameters of our possibilities and many of our Writers and Poets and Artists and Visionaries and Shamans and Healers and Philosophers are pointing us towards a more expanded view of the universe. More and more people today are starting to leave their old three dimensional space/time worlds behind and are beginning to embrace a new culture that is multi-dimensional in its nature.
So, yes, like you, I am full of hope and know that in the heart of all this turmoil currently going on all around us, that something much better – a whole ‘brave’ new world - is emerging, and is doing so all over our planet and in many, many different ways. Nothing can stop it now, but the new spirit underlying its emergence, needs all our support to help speed it along, and so the more that each us commit (in whatever way or ways we feel appropriate) to this ‘new spirit of freedom’, the better.
THE ‘OLD REGIME’ RESISTING CHANGE
Thus, we must allow ourselves to be especially inspired by what the brave young people in the Arab nations are currently doing, as they take to the streets, and understand that it requires enormous courage to stand up and say ‘No’ to the backward looking forces of evil, especially in countries such as Iran, where the wise and brave and visionary young people are governed by a clique of corrupt and paranoid, religious Terrorists prepared to torture or kill anyone who dares disagree with them. The whole point is that the ‘old order’ doesn’t want to change its spots; it doesn’t want to evolve or turn over and die. It is too scared. Look at that repellent, narcissistic and psychotic Gadaffi, for example, prepared to wage war on his own peoples rather than lose the control he has enjoyed for forty years. Yes, the old system is coming to an end; it is dying, but it is putting up a strong fight in the process, and it is all these enclaves of resistance everywhere that make for much of the precariousness that we experience around us today.
LIVING IN PRECARIOUS TIMES OF CRISIS
So if these are exciting times, they are also precarious times. For we do not know how things will turn out. Yet, despite what many historians think, I believe that the Arab nations will embrace Democracy (their own brand) but that it will take time, and that every nation will need to work out their own unique agendas. I think this will be speeded up by the fact that the West too, is learning its lessons, namely that to continue to focus on what is economically in its interest at the expenses of abandoning its democratic values – i.e., supporting tyrannical regimes because of the money to be got through oil - is actually to shoot both parties in the foot. Put simply, the fact that many of these barbaric regimes have lasted so long, is because Western powers have supported them. And oil, just like a hugely beautiful woman, is terribly seductive and both East and West have fallen pray to its lures! And also weapons. Will we still consent to hold our world eco nomy together on the back of the arms trader? Or will deeper questions as regards the morality of such an occupation begin to be asked? I suspect that the answer will be yes and that eventually people power will forbid it.
So yes, crises abound everywhere and the Chinese were wise in defining them as dangerous opportunities. For that is just what they are. The gift which they offer us is that they help keep us on our toes. They stop us from falling asleep. This is why, in these ‘Millenium times’, we all need to choose to be brave and strong and flexible and open hearted, and see what we can do to play our part in disassociating ourselves with old world thinking and putting our time and our energy behind assisting the new freedom forces – doing what we can to help them grow and flourish.
THE TRUTH MUCH MORE IN THE OPEN
So I, like you, am very hopeful. What particularly excites me is that now, with the advent of Twitter and Facebook, People Power has acquired a new dimension of communicative weaponry, and so can be much more effective. One thing I feel for sure is that from now on, most of the important changes will first come about on our planet, from the bottom up. Only then will those at the top realise that they too need to shift. What is also interesting is that through such things as Wickileaks, all information is so much more in the open and it is increasingly harder to cover things up. Indeed, today, information which in the past, used only to be obtainable via an ‘underground press’, (if at all), is now available ‘above ground’ or to anyone able to use the Internet. And this is so important as it means that less and less will the powers that be, be able to get away with their old deceptions and misinformation, and no longer will our planet’s ambassadors resort to being adept at ‘lying for their countries.’
HUMANITY BECOMING INCREASINGLY INTER-CONNECTED
When, in the 1940’s, the great visionary thinker Teilhard de Chardin, talked of the whole planet being linked up by light, I initially thought he was just referring to the growth of spiritual centres and communities all over the world. He might have been, but what I think he may also have been intuitively hinting at, is the fact that we are all becoming increasingly interconnected, not just at metaphysical or mystical levels, but also physically and electronically. The Global Brain is now accessible to anyone armed with a simple mobile phone. And because the new generation are so highly computer literate (my eleven year old daughter teaches me how all these things work), we are seeing the emergence of a whole new breed of techno Spiritual Warrior. And this again, is very exciting.
I also believe that this new People Power impetus for freedom, will gradually spread from the Middle East to all those nations where repression still reigns and will have the effect of strengthening the ‘new world’ elements in those nations as well as challenging the ‘old world’ forces. Even now, China is starting to pay more attention to the issue of human rights as announced by the Chinese president during his recent visit to the U.S. Indeed, I predict that China will gradually become less Protectionist as her leaders realise that economic policies which militate against the currencies of other nations, will, if continued, eventually have a kick back effect on her own emerging prosperity and stability.
All nations will realise that what truly is in their own best social, political and economic interest, is never to never waver from honouring and respecting what is also in the best interest of all members of the larger community of nations, of which they are a part.
Most significantly, I predict that this new ‘freedom zeitgeist’ is going to have an effect on Terrorism and that over the next decade the Terroristic impulse is going to go into a decline. Why do I say this? Because Terrorism thrives primarily in repressive environments. It is most ‘attractive’ to those who live in fear and uncertainty, that is, who have closed and scared hearts. And what feeling freer does is that it opens our heart. The freer we feel, the happier we feel, the more we have access to experiences of joy and excitement, the more we feel inspired, and consequently, the less disposed we are to be drawn towards philosophies centred around violence, homophobia, barbaric Sharia law, the repression of women and the glorification of death. As people’s hearts open, there is a desire to celebrate life not glorify martyrdom!
When I say that the cat is gradually coming out of the bag, I mean that the young people in the Arab countries are no longer believing the lies which, for so long, have been fed to them by their rulers, as, for example, that those responsible for their ‘sad plight’ are the ‘evil Israelis and the Americans’. Increasingly, they are coming to realise that the real reason why they are impoverished and uneducated is due to the intentional policies of their leaders. People who are emotionally, intellectually and physically malnourished, can much more easily be controlled.
As more and more people the world over, are responding to, and ‘seeing the light’ and consequently are feeing emboldened to stand up and say ‘No more’ to the repressive forces and to the politics of abuse, and as more and more tyrant leaders are consequently forced to back down, I also feel that a new spirit of honesty and good will, will also begin to infuse International Relations. I like Cameron’s idea behind the ‘Big Society’ where people are encouraged to take greater responsibility for their lives and not always be looking outside of themselves to be ‘bailed out’! I also feel that America will stop trying to arrange the world according to what She deems to be in her own interest, with little consideration paid to the consequences of such a self-serving world view. In fact, I feel that in the years ahead, the more powerful nations will have to listen more and more to the will of their people and in so doing, will bec ome increasingly inclined to take into consideration the interests of the smaller countries, as they start to understand at a much deeper level, how truly interconnected we all are, and that in effect what benefits the part also benefits the whole (and similarly, what impedes the part, also detracts from the whole). So yes, my heart is full of hope and we need to hold onto this quality even though there may be times when we will confront certain challenges. In my own personal crisis which I shared with you in my last newsletter, I did just this. And I got through.
I believe that, as a species, we are definitely going to get through. It may take a little time. Some of us may be called, en route, to spend a bit of time in dark places. But I also feel a lot of light and joy and celebration surrounding this challenge, and whether we draw these qualities towards us or not, is very dependent upon how much we choose to connect to ‘the Force’. Put simply, to have the force be with us, we cannot hide away. To have the force be with us, we need, in our lives, to be journeying purposefully into the new world, to be doing in our own lives, the equivalent to what our brave brothers and sisters are doing in the Middle East. There is the best way to invoke the protection of the light. And the deeper we manage to go into the new world, the brighter the light will be.
Please feel free to write your responses, which I will publish in my next newsletter, which will go out in the next ten days and which will look at some of the technologies I have been developing to try to accelerate our transformational process.
Over the years, people have asked me many questions about spirituality. Here is a selection of their questions with some of my answers!
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
There is so much financial unrest in the world at this time. What do you think will happen?
Question: Serge, I am scared about what is happening in the world today. Trillions are being thrown into our coffers which will put our nation in debt for years to come; yet nothing seems to be getting better. George Soros, the great financial guru, believes England may need to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund and that if the G 12 summit does not work out, that the world will go into a depression. This is terrible. What the hell is happening? I see nothing good about these times. What do you have to say about all this?
Serge’s Reply.
What I have to say is that everything that we read in the papers today about the need for change, was being said in the late sixties and early seventies. Only not necessarily in the mainstream press. I quote what a certain radical Nobel Lauriat said in 1971. ‘If, as a species, we are to survive, a radical change of consciousness is required. Mankind has to wake up and become more mature. This is not going to happen as a result of our adhering to the ‘business as usual’ approach. We need to shift our thinking away from our selfish consideration with what we want, to consider what is in the best interest of our planet as a whole, and to do this, we need to think wholistically. …’
This might have been said today. Indeed, it is being said today. And by increasing numbers of people, and in mainstream journals. It is sad that it is only being said because times are so tough that we are being forced to look at ourselves. But perhaps we have to agree with Gurdjieff when he suggested that ‘Mankind is so set in its ways, that we seem to need a shock greater than the sum of our own inertia, if we are to wake up.’
The truth is that the symptoms of what is now imploding upon us today, were visible half a century ago. Only because we didn’t need to do anything then ( the crises were containable) we preferred not to see them. Indeed, for as long as I can remember, our world leaders have talked change talk but never questioned the system out of which they operated . Why? A) Because they didn’t have to, and b) because to maintain the status quo worked in their interest. It was comfortable. Those holding the reins of power in the world ( primarily white-skinned) never really listened to the advice of the so-called ‘crazies’, i.e., those on the ‘edge of civilisation’, the ‘radicals’, the visionary cuckoos, the non-suited brigade, the ‘alternativists’ – call them what you may - those who did not subscribe to the old boy network and who were not anaesthetised enough not to feel the pain of Gaia and who, in their hearts, understood the crises that our planet was in and had important solutions to offer.
As a result , most ideas for ‘making a difference’ occurred inside the old boxes which kept the system the way it was. Yes, money would be sent by the rich nations to help the poor nations, but this was easy, because nothing was ever done to change the process which allowed the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. Nobody in those days recognised the evil that they were unconsciously colluding with. Nobody thought that evil, in addition to having an excessive ‘obvious side’, i.e., our Hitlers, Mugabes, Saddam Husseins, also has a banal side and sits next to each of us, unbeknownst , as we have our breakfast each morning!
I say ‘ sits next to each of us’, because we need to know that each of us are responsible for the state of our planet. It is all too easy to scapegoat our unimaginative politicians and greedy bankers as being the cause of all our woes. But the whole thing goes much deeper and is about the system itself which throws up certain kinds of people. We need to know that in a very real way, ‘they’ are also ‘us’! If we have the courage to look at the darkness inside our own hearts, we will see where we, in subtle ways, have also colluded in keeping an unjust system alive, either by taking advantage of it or by not withdrawing our subscriptions to it powerfully enough.
How our world has behaved over the last half century is analogous to how many of us behave when confronted with the first symptoms of crisis. Often, we go into denial. We bury our head in the sand. Take the case of an old university buddy of mine, a real old smoker and drinker and lover of la dolce vita! Many years ago, his body displayed signs of something not being quite right - a terrible cough, night sweats. But the symptoms were not bad enough to warrant examination. He considered himself a tough old bird. So he continued his old lifestyle, which he was very attached to, making one or two minor changes; he’d swallow vitamins every day and have a weekly massage! And he got away with things for a long time, until one day, his symptoms worsened so much, that he could no longer not pay attention to them. It took him becoming so ill for him to wake up and see, as if for the first time, how much he had abused himself and how little he had ever listened to his heart and how deeply damaged he was as a result.
And this is analogous to our situation today. As Ben Okri put it. ‘Our economic crisis is a crisis of our civilisation. Our material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy. The more our society has succeeded, the more its heart has failed.’ And now, we are seeing the consequences of that failure. We thought we’d ‘get away with it’ forever. So long as Climate Change and Terrorism and Economic hardship didn’t affect us Have’s personally, so long as the Footsie continued to go up and our houses increased in value, and Paris and New York remained the centre of fashion, things were fine n’ dandy! Yes, Nine Eleven was a pointer that things were not as they seemed, but instead of our ‘getting’ the deeper message about that attack - with America perhaps asking herself why she was so hated - in the vain belief that you can kill off evil by waging war against it, the sum total of world evil and world insecurity actually increased as a result.
The point is that we , the world’s Have’s, entrenched in our comfort zones, never realised - never fully let in - the fact that for large swathes of our planet, Armageddon had already happened and that the dark riders of the Apocalypse had already ridden - and are still riding - in many areas of the world. We preferred to shut off our hearts to this. Only if one happened to live in Darfur or Zimbabwe or Gaza or Iraq or any other war/terror/famine zone of the planet, as opposed to in Mustique, London or the Bahamas, would one know this.
The truth is that we didn’t want to know. This is why our current economic crisis hit us out of the blue. For eons, we Have’s have projected our shadow side onto other parts of the planet and let ‘them’ deal with all the nastiness and despair and confusion and terror and uncertainty that we didn’t want to have to face ourselves. And what is now happening is that the shock waves are returning to engulf us and whether we like to or not, we are being forced to confront the consequences. For once there is nowhere to hide. Even the Tax Havens where the rich have sequestered their money – even they are now being broken open!
This all said, I do not share your pessimism. I have the utmost belief in the core nobility of man, and in altruism being a core part of our constitutional make up, and hence, in our capacity to use crisis wisely. I believe that in the months and years ahead, the very best will emerge from us. As I have said in many articles, what we are witnessing is the death throes of an old regime, whose time is over, in order to make space for a new one. As David Spangler once put it: ‘Underneath the patterns of instability in the world, a profound spirit of love and good will is at work and using the instability and the individuals that emerge from it as the farmer uses a plough, to turn the soil and prepare it for new seeds and new harvest.’
We must understand the profundity of these words and realise that we are now at a crossroads. We have a choice. Do we ‘get’ this and so choose to align our lives with the forces of innovation ( which Obama is doing his best to do – and it is very tough and he is a remarkable person) . Or do we still battle to shore up a dinosaur needing to die? The choice is ours.
Barbara Mark Hubbard, a most unusual thinker, once equated these times to a long-ago era, when life on our planet was just starting out and when all that existed were very simple life forms: unicellullar organisms. Then along came a common enemy, oxygen, that threatened these life forms. The unicellular organisms, in order to survive, were forced to adapt and what they did was to combine together and morph into a higher-order organism, a multi-cellular organism, which was not only able to resist oxygen, but actually thrived on it and as a result, gave birth to a higher-order organism still, namely man! The so-called enemy to evolution, turned out to be the friend!
Her thesis is that something not dissimilar is occurring on our planet today and that the common crises we face, are also having the effect of accelerating our evolution, and that even the most hard-boiled of us are coming to see that the problem with our world is us, and our ‘unicellular’, greedy, selfish, nationalistic, patriarchal, egotistical viewpoints which breed hatred, despair, alienation, dysfunction, separation and destruction. Increasingly we are coming to see that, as a species, we have remained incarcerated in this limited mindset/dysfunctional system for too long and that what the visionaries have been saying, is actually true and that unless we make a vast shift of awareness, we have not a hope of surviving.
From this viewpoint, then, our current crises are our friend galvanising us to make a vast leap of soul. Will we shift from being primarily ego motivated to becoming increasingly heart centred? Will we start to care for and share with, our fellow human beings and learn to open our hearts wide enough to embrace all of humanity as one big family inside them? I believe we will. It will be tough but we will. Yes, it is important that our world leaders make the right decisions, politically, economically and ecologically and one hopes this happens at this oncoming G12 summit of all the world leaders. But any system is only as good as those who operate it. Much more important is what each of us do at a grass roots level as we recognise our own capacity to make a difference from the bottom up and commit our lives to doing exactly that. My experience of those I know who live out of this commitment, is that they are happy people.
Serge’s Reply.
What I have to say is that everything that we read in the papers today about the need for change, was being said in the late sixties and early seventies. Only not necessarily in the mainstream press. I quote what a certain radical Nobel Lauriat said in 1971. ‘If, as a species, we are to survive, a radical change of consciousness is required. Mankind has to wake up and become more mature. This is not going to happen as a result of our adhering to the ‘business as usual’ approach. We need to shift our thinking away from our selfish consideration with what we want, to consider what is in the best interest of our planet as a whole, and to do this, we need to think wholistically. …’
This might have been said today. Indeed, it is being said today. And by increasing numbers of people, and in mainstream journals. It is sad that it is only being said because times are so tough that we are being forced to look at ourselves. But perhaps we have to agree with Gurdjieff when he suggested that ‘Mankind is so set in its ways, that we seem to need a shock greater than the sum of our own inertia, if we are to wake up.’
The truth is that the symptoms of what is now imploding upon us today, were visible half a century ago. Only because we didn’t need to do anything then ( the crises were containable) we preferred not to see them. Indeed, for as long as I can remember, our world leaders have talked change talk but never questioned the system out of which they operated . Why? A) Because they didn’t have to, and b) because to maintain the status quo worked in their interest. It was comfortable. Those holding the reins of power in the world ( primarily white-skinned) never really listened to the advice of the so-called ‘crazies’, i.e., those on the ‘edge of civilisation’, the ‘radicals’, the visionary cuckoos, the non-suited brigade, the ‘alternativists’ – call them what you may - those who did not subscribe to the old boy network and who were not anaesthetised enough not to feel the pain of Gaia and who, in their hearts, understood the crises that our planet was in and had important solutions to offer.
As a result , most ideas for ‘making a difference’ occurred inside the old boxes which kept the system the way it was. Yes, money would be sent by the rich nations to help the poor nations, but this was easy, because nothing was ever done to change the process which allowed the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. Nobody in those days recognised the evil that they were unconsciously colluding with. Nobody thought that evil, in addition to having an excessive ‘obvious side’, i.e., our Hitlers, Mugabes, Saddam Husseins, also has a banal side and sits next to each of us, unbeknownst , as we have our breakfast each morning!
I say ‘ sits next to each of us’, because we need to know that each of us are responsible for the state of our planet. It is all too easy to scapegoat our unimaginative politicians and greedy bankers as being the cause of all our woes. But the whole thing goes much deeper and is about the system itself which throws up certain kinds of people. We need to know that in a very real way, ‘they’ are also ‘us’! If we have the courage to look at the darkness inside our own hearts, we will see where we, in subtle ways, have also colluded in keeping an unjust system alive, either by taking advantage of it or by not withdrawing our subscriptions to it powerfully enough.
How our world has behaved over the last half century is analogous to how many of us behave when confronted with the first symptoms of crisis. Often, we go into denial. We bury our head in the sand. Take the case of an old university buddy of mine, a real old smoker and drinker and lover of la dolce vita! Many years ago, his body displayed signs of something not being quite right - a terrible cough, night sweats. But the symptoms were not bad enough to warrant examination. He considered himself a tough old bird. So he continued his old lifestyle, which he was very attached to, making one or two minor changes; he’d swallow vitamins every day and have a weekly massage! And he got away with things for a long time, until one day, his symptoms worsened so much, that he could no longer not pay attention to them. It took him becoming so ill for him to wake up and see, as if for the first time, how much he had abused himself and how little he had ever listened to his heart and how deeply damaged he was as a result.
And this is analogous to our situation today. As Ben Okri put it. ‘Our economic crisis is a crisis of our civilisation. Our material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy. The more our society has succeeded, the more its heart has failed.’ And now, we are seeing the consequences of that failure. We thought we’d ‘get away with it’ forever. So long as Climate Change and Terrorism and Economic hardship didn’t affect us Have’s personally, so long as the Footsie continued to go up and our houses increased in value, and Paris and New York remained the centre of fashion, things were fine n’ dandy! Yes, Nine Eleven was a pointer that things were not as they seemed, but instead of our ‘getting’ the deeper message about that attack - with America perhaps asking herself why she was so hated - in the vain belief that you can kill off evil by waging war against it, the sum total of world evil and world insecurity actually increased as a result.
The point is that we , the world’s Have’s, entrenched in our comfort zones, never realised - never fully let in - the fact that for large swathes of our planet, Armageddon had already happened and that the dark riders of the Apocalypse had already ridden - and are still riding - in many areas of the world. We preferred to shut off our hearts to this. Only if one happened to live in Darfur or Zimbabwe or Gaza or Iraq or any other war/terror/famine zone of the planet, as opposed to in Mustique, London or the Bahamas, would one know this.
The truth is that we didn’t want to know. This is why our current economic crisis hit us out of the blue. For eons, we Have’s have projected our shadow side onto other parts of the planet and let ‘them’ deal with all the nastiness and despair and confusion and terror and uncertainty that we didn’t want to have to face ourselves. And what is now happening is that the shock waves are returning to engulf us and whether we like to or not, we are being forced to confront the consequences. For once there is nowhere to hide. Even the Tax Havens where the rich have sequestered their money – even they are now being broken open!
This all said, I do not share your pessimism. I have the utmost belief in the core nobility of man, and in altruism being a core part of our constitutional make up, and hence, in our capacity to use crisis wisely. I believe that in the months and years ahead, the very best will emerge from us. As I have said in many articles, what we are witnessing is the death throes of an old regime, whose time is over, in order to make space for a new one. As David Spangler once put it: ‘Underneath the patterns of instability in the world, a profound spirit of love and good will is at work and using the instability and the individuals that emerge from it as the farmer uses a plough, to turn the soil and prepare it for new seeds and new harvest.’
We must understand the profundity of these words and realise that we are now at a crossroads. We have a choice. Do we ‘get’ this and so choose to align our lives with the forces of innovation ( which Obama is doing his best to do – and it is very tough and he is a remarkable person) . Or do we still battle to shore up a dinosaur needing to die? The choice is ours.
Barbara Mark Hubbard, a most unusual thinker, once equated these times to a long-ago era, when life on our planet was just starting out and when all that existed were very simple life forms: unicellullar organisms. Then along came a common enemy, oxygen, that threatened these life forms. The unicellular organisms, in order to survive, were forced to adapt and what they did was to combine together and morph into a higher-order organism, a multi-cellular organism, which was not only able to resist oxygen, but actually thrived on it and as a result, gave birth to a higher-order organism still, namely man! The so-called enemy to evolution, turned out to be the friend!
Her thesis is that something not dissimilar is occurring on our planet today and that the common crises we face, are also having the effect of accelerating our evolution, and that even the most hard-boiled of us are coming to see that the problem with our world is us, and our ‘unicellular’, greedy, selfish, nationalistic, patriarchal, egotistical viewpoints which breed hatred, despair, alienation, dysfunction, separation and destruction. Increasingly we are coming to see that, as a species, we have remained incarcerated in this limited mindset/dysfunctional system for too long and that what the visionaries have been saying, is actually true and that unless we make a vast shift of awareness, we have not a hope of surviving.
From this viewpoint, then, our current crises are our friend galvanising us to make a vast leap of soul. Will we shift from being primarily ego motivated to becoming increasingly heart centred? Will we start to care for and share with, our fellow human beings and learn to open our hearts wide enough to embrace all of humanity as one big family inside them? I believe we will. It will be tough but we will. Yes, it is important that our world leaders make the right decisions, politically, economically and ecologically and one hopes this happens at this oncoming G12 summit of all the world leaders. But any system is only as good as those who operate it. Much more important is what each of us do at a grass roots level as we recognise our own capacity to make a difference from the bottom up and commit our lives to doing exactly that. My experience of those I know who live out of this commitment, is that they are happy people.
Is it spiritually damaging to work for a large corporation whose values I don't subscribe to?
'SERGE. I can see that this is a big dilemma for you and it is one that faces many people today. One might reframe your question and ask: is it moral to receive money for engaging in work that you say doesn’t seem to support the well being of where one senses our planet needs to be headed? Should one’s efforts be directed to shoring up a reality which, if we are, as a species, to survive - or if a fairer and more just world is to come into being - needs to pass away? At another level, it seems to be a conflict of head versus heart or materiality versus spirituality.
What makes this issue more problematic is that you say you don’t just love your work but you love it immensely! I mean if you hated what you do and sat at your desk feeling uneasy or guilty, this dilemma would be easier to resolve and you would pack up working for Goldman Sachs or whoever and you’d try and get a job at Greenpeace or something like that. So it shows that a lot of your psyche is locked into what you do, and you don’t seem quite ready to make a break. No doubt you also get a lot of kudos for your efforts, and you are, you say, well paid, and money is a great temptation, isn’t it? Even so called ‘heavy duty gurus’ can succumb to its seductive lure!
What is positive, however, is that you are starting to ask the right question, which, if you want a direct response, may be yes. Or let me put it like this. Perhaps it is not so much spiritually damaging for you ( unless, of course, you work for a business that sells arms or something like that), so much as spiritually limiting. If we spend many hours of each day seeped in a culture more concerned with profit than people, something of that mind set enters our psyches, and unless we are quite developed, and will have evolved specific antidotes, it can gradually and imperceptibly harden us and close down our capacity to be kind, soft and tender (which are values I think, that are hugely needed in our world today).
Put another way, it is hard to work in an organisation and not be part of its philosophy of life. I have several friends who, when we were all boys together at university , had big hearts and were open to a vision of a better world. And then they became ‘ serious city men’, and worked for big firms and gradually much that was soulful about them, began to close down, and today it is hard to get any conversation out of them other than what they think the equity market is going to do or whether house process will go up or not!
That all said, don’t let me necessarily discourage you from staying at your job. What I define as the real meaning of ‘downsizing’ ( becoming de-soulled!) may not apply to you. Not everyone’s humanity necessarily closes down as a result of working in a large corporation, and if every good person left that world, the only ones that would be left to run the show, would be the sharks, or the ‘Gordon Gekkos’!* And that’s not what is needed. Actually, I think the system needs transforming from within. And many people are doing this. For example, I had lunch last week with a friend who has a very high-up job, who is a real ‘big noise’ in the city. And I know of few men with a bigger heart. ‘ I try to bring my humanity and caring for my staff’ into all I do’, he told me. And I looked at his warm, kind, and open face, and I knew he was telling the truth, and I thought how lucky the people were who worked under him.
So just as a little light in a dark forest can go a long way, so the same is true of a good human being working within the old system. I have another good buddy in California who is a director of the Bank of America. Not only has he persuaded all his fellow Directors to learn to meditate, but single handedly, he has got his Bank to loan millions of dollars to specific poor people in third world countries at a ridiculously low interest rate. My point is that there is nothing wrong with the corporate world or with large organisations per se. They have a soul; they have a compassionate face and often it has become covered up and so it is simply about helping them uncover it. In other words, the problem is not with large organisations but with the cultures that certain people have injected into them. Change the people and the culture changes. So who knows: perhaps, as you love your work, your role is to stay put and focus on bringing higher values into your firm. Yes, it is tough to do this and it requires a lot of discipline, but why not give it a go. Why not try to be your own person and choose not to surrender to the mind set around you, that is, be in the rat race but refuse to be a rat, and then you can serve as a transforming agent or a kind of de-rattifier! People like you – like my big-hearted corporate friends - are badly needed. And if you feel you earn too much money, you can always give 10 or 15 percent of it away to the poor and needy.
What makes this issue more problematic is that you say you don’t just love your work but you love it immensely! I mean if you hated what you do and sat at your desk feeling uneasy or guilty, this dilemma would be easier to resolve and you would pack up working for Goldman Sachs or whoever and you’d try and get a job at Greenpeace or something like that. So it shows that a lot of your psyche is locked into what you do, and you don’t seem quite ready to make a break. No doubt you also get a lot of kudos for your efforts, and you are, you say, well paid, and money is a great temptation, isn’t it? Even so called ‘heavy duty gurus’ can succumb to its seductive lure!
What is positive, however, is that you are starting to ask the right question, which, if you want a direct response, may be yes. Or let me put it like this. Perhaps it is not so much spiritually damaging for you ( unless, of course, you work for a business that sells arms or something like that), so much as spiritually limiting. If we spend many hours of each day seeped in a culture more concerned with profit than people, something of that mind set enters our psyches, and unless we are quite developed, and will have evolved specific antidotes, it can gradually and imperceptibly harden us and close down our capacity to be kind, soft and tender (which are values I think, that are hugely needed in our world today).
Put another way, it is hard to work in an organisation and not be part of its philosophy of life. I have several friends who, when we were all boys together at university , had big hearts and were open to a vision of a better world. And then they became ‘ serious city men’, and worked for big firms and gradually much that was soulful about them, began to close down, and today it is hard to get any conversation out of them other than what they think the equity market is going to do or whether house process will go up or not!
That all said, don’t let me necessarily discourage you from staying at your job. What I define as the real meaning of ‘downsizing’ ( becoming de-soulled!) may not apply to you. Not everyone’s humanity necessarily closes down as a result of working in a large corporation, and if every good person left that world, the only ones that would be left to run the show, would be the sharks, or the ‘Gordon Gekkos’!* And that’s not what is needed. Actually, I think the system needs transforming from within. And many people are doing this. For example, I had lunch last week with a friend who has a very high-up job, who is a real ‘big noise’ in the city. And I know of few men with a bigger heart. ‘ I try to bring my humanity and caring for my staff’ into all I do’, he told me. And I looked at his warm, kind, and open face, and I knew he was telling the truth, and I thought how lucky the people were who worked under him.
So just as a little light in a dark forest can go a long way, so the same is true of a good human being working within the old system. I have another good buddy in California who is a director of the Bank of America. Not only has he persuaded all his fellow Directors to learn to meditate, but single handedly, he has got his Bank to loan millions of dollars to specific poor people in third world countries at a ridiculously low interest rate. My point is that there is nothing wrong with the corporate world or with large organisations per se. They have a soul; they have a compassionate face and often it has become covered up and so it is simply about helping them uncover it. In other words, the problem is not with large organisations but with the cultures that certain people have injected into them. Change the people and the culture changes. So who knows: perhaps, as you love your work, your role is to stay put and focus on bringing higher values into your firm. Yes, it is tough to do this and it requires a lot of discipline, but why not give it a go. Why not try to be your own person and choose not to surrender to the mind set around you, that is, be in the rat race but refuse to be a rat, and then you can serve as a transforming agent or a kind of de-rattifier! People like you – like my big-hearted corporate friends - are badly needed. And if you feel you earn too much money, you can always give 10 or 15 percent of it away to the poor and needy.
- The main character is a film about corporate greed called Wall Street.
If we are on a spiritual path, how should we relate to our egos?
Question. Please tell me, Serge, the best way to work with our egos and how you see ego. Many Spiritual teachers tell us that ego is bad, is what stands in the way of our ability to be who we are and therefore that we must get rid of it, while other approaches tell us that it is part of us, needs to be honoured and worked with. What is your opinion?
Ecstasy Uncle’s reply. How we deal with ego is all about what teaching we subscribe to and, most importantly, what level we are at or what our spiritual capabilities are. But you are right, from the perspective of most Eastern spirituality, ego is definitely the bad guy! Most ‘great Masters’ have little patience with their student’s ‘personal life’. For many of them, spirituality is about impersonality - living the unconditional life, not mucking about with all our yucky ‘personality’ stuff!
This approach may be fine if one is from a part of the world where one has not inherited all the many hang-ups that we Westerners have, or if one lives a monkish existence in an ashram in the Himalayas and doesn’t need to concern oneself with things like getting relationships right, enjoying sex, paying the mortgage and finding a satisfying career. It may not work so well, however, if one believes, as I do, that our personal life is as important as our impersonal life and that the name of the spiritual game is to try to sacralize and integrate both dimensions of who we are. And this cannot happen if we have an ‘I must get rid of’ approach to the domain of ego. Here is what A.H. Almaas, a spiritual teacher, who recognises the importance of the marriage of psychology and spirituality, says about people who try to do this.
‘My perception of what happens with people who claim to have lost their personality totally and spontaneously is that there often remains a split-off or repressed part which will manifest as a distortion or lack of integration. If the personality is abandoned rather than integrated, the totality of life cannot be lived.
’I would like to add a remark of Jung’s to this, namely that ‘Any part of ourselves we do not own, becomes our enemy.’
You see, the problem about the ‘‘Let us transcend the ‘bad ego’’’ approach, is that it makes ego into an enemy, which is a mighty risky strategy since our egos are exceptionally cunning and we tend not to fare well by having them in such overt opposition to us! As the Tibetan Master Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche once said ‘Ego is capable of infiltrating itself into everything, even into our spirituality’.
But don’t get me wrong. I am not eulogising the ego and I certainly see that our egos or the idea of ourselves as being a ‘separate self’, is behind most of what does not work on our planet, and that if we are to evolve as a species, and create a better world for ourselves, that we need to open up higher dimensional worlds inside ourselves and not be so controlled by our ego selves. However, and this is the key point, this can only come about when we are ready to surrender to the absolute or to die to the idea of any kind of separation whatsoever from the divine. And the truth is that most of us, despite what we like to say, are not ready for this.
So I say that until we are ready, as it were, to plunge ourselves over the abyss and into the Absolute, that we will still need images of ourselves to believe in (and ego gives us such images). Andrew Cohen, who is of the ‘let’s bust the ego quick’ school, would disagree. His take is that we are always ready to drop ego and that telling ourselves we are ‘not yet ready’ is yet another of the many games ego plays with us!
In certain cases, of course, he is right and we can hang on too long to our ‘separate identity’, fearful of who we would really be if we truly surrendered to the unknown and let ourselves become ‘naughted’ (as St Teresa would say). But this is not always so. Often, if we hang on, it is because we are not yet ready to let go, and to try to do so prematurely, may lead not to Enlightenment but to Psychosis!
Basically I see our egos as being analogous to a scaffolding that is necessary that we erect for ourselves in order to give us solidity and structure thus allowing us to build on new stories or new floors or selves (the spiritual part) of ourselves. If we try to erect our spiritual structures too quickly, without our basic (ego) structures being secure and ready, we may well find ourselves being pulverised by the force of a spiritual fire or current that we are unable to process. As a Transpersonal Psychotherapist, I have worked with several such ‘spiritual casualties’ over the years and it is not easy work.
This is why I say that, metaphorically speaking, only when the ground and first floor of our being has become more solid and secure, is it safe for our ego scaffolding to begin being dismantled. And I believe that if we are sincere in our Spiritual practices, and do not try to run before we can walk (generally because of hubris) that this will happen naturally, just like fruit falling from the tree when it is ripe. Interestingly, it is often when our egos are strong and not weak that they are most likely to start relinquishing their hold over us. Often this happens when we reach a stage in our spiritual journey where, with every cell of our being, we long to ‘play a higher game’ and find we simply cannot bear to act out our old ego dramas for a moment longer!
But I do not believe this process should ever be forced, for if the dismantling is done prematurely, it is possible, as I have just said, that damage can be done. Here, we must remember that many of our paedophiles, serial killers, Terrorists and general ‘wierdos’ are often egoless people, that is, people who have never developed a strong enough sense of self in the first place! The cult leader and killer Charles Manson was a case in point. His problem was that he didn’t have a strong enough structure to process the powerful spiritual urges he was receiving and hence all those impulses became horribly contaminated. Thus I believe, with Ram Dass, that ‘‘We must first be a somebody (have evolved a strong sense of ego self)’ Before we are ready to be a nobody.’(allow the egoic domination to diminish). Thus, we need to work with our ego personalities, not by trying to transcend them as ‘bad’, but rather by opening wholeheartedly to them. As we intentionally seek to bring higher awareness into the most deficient and wounded parts of ourselves, this allows for a deep purification to begin to take place and what we discover is that our old ego encrustations slowly begin to melt away, revealing the deeper inner (spiritual) structures lying hidden underneath.
The story of our interaction with our egos can be seen in terms of Jesus’ interaction with ‘the devil’ (actually his ego) when he was being led by this part of himself to climb to the top of the mountain, with Satan telling Jesus that with his great powers, he could have the whole world bow down to him. Interestingly, Jesus’ response was not to say ‘Bad Ego get lost, go away’. Rather he said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’! He was acknowledging that he owed something to this part of him that had helped him up the mountain, but that now he had got there, it needed to be in its right place, behind him as his servant not in front of him as his master. And this is how I feel, eventually, all of us need to be in relation to our egos.
Ecstasy Uncle’s reply. How we deal with ego is all about what teaching we subscribe to and, most importantly, what level we are at or what our spiritual capabilities are. But you are right, from the perspective of most Eastern spirituality, ego is definitely the bad guy! Most ‘great Masters’ have little patience with their student’s ‘personal life’. For many of them, spirituality is about impersonality - living the unconditional life, not mucking about with all our yucky ‘personality’ stuff!
This approach may be fine if one is from a part of the world where one has not inherited all the many hang-ups that we Westerners have, or if one lives a monkish existence in an ashram in the Himalayas and doesn’t need to concern oneself with things like getting relationships right, enjoying sex, paying the mortgage and finding a satisfying career. It may not work so well, however, if one believes, as I do, that our personal life is as important as our impersonal life and that the name of the spiritual game is to try to sacralize and integrate both dimensions of who we are. And this cannot happen if we have an ‘I must get rid of’ approach to the domain of ego. Here is what A.H. Almaas, a spiritual teacher, who recognises the importance of the marriage of psychology and spirituality, says about people who try to do this.
‘My perception of what happens with people who claim to have lost their personality totally and spontaneously is that there often remains a split-off or repressed part which will manifest as a distortion or lack of integration. If the personality is abandoned rather than integrated, the totality of life cannot be lived.
’I would like to add a remark of Jung’s to this, namely that ‘Any part of ourselves we do not own, becomes our enemy.’
You see, the problem about the ‘‘Let us transcend the ‘bad ego’’’ approach, is that it makes ego into an enemy, which is a mighty risky strategy since our egos are exceptionally cunning and we tend not to fare well by having them in such overt opposition to us! As the Tibetan Master Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche once said ‘Ego is capable of infiltrating itself into everything, even into our spirituality’.
But don’t get me wrong. I am not eulogising the ego and I certainly see that our egos or the idea of ourselves as being a ‘separate self’, is behind most of what does not work on our planet, and that if we are to evolve as a species, and create a better world for ourselves, that we need to open up higher dimensional worlds inside ourselves and not be so controlled by our ego selves. However, and this is the key point, this can only come about when we are ready to surrender to the absolute or to die to the idea of any kind of separation whatsoever from the divine. And the truth is that most of us, despite what we like to say, are not ready for this.
So I say that until we are ready, as it were, to plunge ourselves over the abyss and into the Absolute, that we will still need images of ourselves to believe in (and ego gives us such images). Andrew Cohen, who is of the ‘let’s bust the ego quick’ school, would disagree. His take is that we are always ready to drop ego and that telling ourselves we are ‘not yet ready’ is yet another of the many games ego plays with us!
In certain cases, of course, he is right and we can hang on too long to our ‘separate identity’, fearful of who we would really be if we truly surrendered to the unknown and let ourselves become ‘naughted’ (as St Teresa would say). But this is not always so. Often, if we hang on, it is because we are not yet ready to let go, and to try to do so prematurely, may lead not to Enlightenment but to Psychosis!
Basically I see our egos as being analogous to a scaffolding that is necessary that we erect for ourselves in order to give us solidity and structure thus allowing us to build on new stories or new floors or selves (the spiritual part) of ourselves. If we try to erect our spiritual structures too quickly, without our basic (ego) structures being secure and ready, we may well find ourselves being pulverised by the force of a spiritual fire or current that we are unable to process. As a Transpersonal Psychotherapist, I have worked with several such ‘spiritual casualties’ over the years and it is not easy work.
This is why I say that, metaphorically speaking, only when the ground and first floor of our being has become more solid and secure, is it safe for our ego scaffolding to begin being dismantled. And I believe that if we are sincere in our Spiritual practices, and do not try to run before we can walk (generally because of hubris) that this will happen naturally, just like fruit falling from the tree when it is ripe. Interestingly, it is often when our egos are strong and not weak that they are most likely to start relinquishing their hold over us. Often this happens when we reach a stage in our spiritual journey where, with every cell of our being, we long to ‘play a higher game’ and find we simply cannot bear to act out our old ego dramas for a moment longer!
But I do not believe this process should ever be forced, for if the dismantling is done prematurely, it is possible, as I have just said, that damage can be done. Here, we must remember that many of our paedophiles, serial killers, Terrorists and general ‘wierdos’ are often egoless people, that is, people who have never developed a strong enough sense of self in the first place! The cult leader and killer Charles Manson was a case in point. His problem was that he didn’t have a strong enough structure to process the powerful spiritual urges he was receiving and hence all those impulses became horribly contaminated. Thus I believe, with Ram Dass, that ‘‘We must first be a somebody (have evolved a strong sense of ego self)’ Before we are ready to be a nobody.’(allow the egoic domination to diminish). Thus, we need to work with our ego personalities, not by trying to transcend them as ‘bad’, but rather by opening wholeheartedly to them. As we intentionally seek to bring higher awareness into the most deficient and wounded parts of ourselves, this allows for a deep purification to begin to take place and what we discover is that our old ego encrustations slowly begin to melt away, revealing the deeper inner (spiritual) structures lying hidden underneath.
The story of our interaction with our egos can be seen in terms of Jesus’ interaction with ‘the devil’ (actually his ego) when he was being led by this part of himself to climb to the top of the mountain, with Satan telling Jesus that with his great powers, he could have the whole world bow down to him. Interestingly, Jesus’ response was not to say ‘Bad Ego get lost, go away’. Rather he said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’! He was acknowledging that he owed something to this part of him that had helped him up the mountain, but that now he had got there, it needed to be in its right place, behind him as his servant not in front of him as his master. And this is how I feel, eventually, all of us need to be in relation to our egos.
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