The two previous posts explained the issues of debt based finance and energy resources, the twin fuels of economic growth in the last decades.
Crucial as they are, these issues are only additional.
The core problem of the world economy lies in what it produces, why, how, with what consequences, and, most crucially, according to what vision of life.
In conventional thinking, the economy produces goods and services demanded by consumers and state institutions to meet their various needs.
But what are their needs?
You might think that food, clothes, a roof over one’s head and a few other things to make life reasonably comfortable are, in that order, what individuals need.
However, in developed countries food nowadays tends to be the “adjustment variable”, i.e. the last item paid with whatever money is left after covering all other expenses: car, television, mobile phone, holidays, …etc.
Up until a century ago local communities were pretty self reliant regarding their food. But this has been completely altered by intensive agriculture and the concentration of retail in the hands of large companies.
Today most people are cut off from the land and rely entirely on the global economic system for their supply of food, and for everything else.
As a result, what people eat and drink (and what they put on their skin or hair) is for the most part unnatural, manipulated, of low nutritional value, and contaminated by additives and pollutants. Food is now a major contributor to ill health, rather than the basis of sound sustenance.
At the same time, the most rapidly rising category of individual and collective expenditure is medical care. This is often seen positively as a consequence of longevity, itself credited to better health.
But people in their seventies or older were born at a time when most food was still natural (perhaps not always abundant and varied, but natural), and when pollution was virtually non existent compared to now.
There are already clear signs that younger generations will not enjoy the same health in their old age.
So, cheap junk food on the one hand, expensive medical care on the other; what else do people and institutions spend their money on?
A major item, of course, is housing.
Just as in the case of food, local communities used to be largely autarkic with respect to housing. Materials and building methods fitting local climate and circumstances were used in construction.
This too has changed with industrialisation and concentration of materials and technology in the hands of multinationals and their satellites.
Similar observations can be made regarding virtually all categories of expenses in the modern economy.
The end result of these evolutions is Western middle class life (the model everybody is encouraged to emulate) : house in suburbia, cut off from nature, dependent on the car, filling neurotic emptiness with gadgets and activities driven by the obsession of social positioning.
An uninspiring existence, without much harmony and beauty, pestered by the constant stress of competition.
As to the environmental consequences of producing, packaging and transporting the millions of tonnes of stuff required by this model, they are fairly well known – though underestimated in their scope and interactions. We can skip their tedious description.
To top it all, world population is still growing (over seven billion, three times more than in the late 40’s when people now retiring were born), and the concentration of big business ensures the gradual disappearance of more and more jobs.
From whatever angle one looks at the situation, it is clear that the dominant system is nearing the end of the road, with no escape way in sight, though nobody is able to predict exactly how things will turn out.
To reach this conclusion, we have followed the normal materialist mode of thinking.
As we face the greatest challenge in human history, the time has come to consider a radically different mode of thinking.
In fact a new paradigm is emerging in the minds of a growing number of people: a calm certainty that there is a lot more to existence than our five senses tell us; a realisation that the material world is not the whole of reality.
According to the emerging paradigm (which draws much from ancient traditions) the material world is only a mental motion picture based on observation at a certain scale.
This might sound a bit abstract; to make it more concrete, just look at your own hand for a minute.
You see fingers and skin. Now look closer, and imagine that your observation point becomes so tiny that you can see the cells of one portion of skin on one of your fingers.
Observe a particular cell, and now observe a particular atom, then its nucleus, and now a particular elementary particle within it.
At such miniature scale, matter no longer exists as such. There is just a vacuum filled with pulsating energy fields, with changing patterns and various frequencies.
Physicians have amazing theories on what happens to particles and energy fields. Such theories bear no resemblance whatever with what we can conceive at our ordinary scale of observation.
Always bear in mind that underneath all we can see and touch there is a completely different reality of subatomic physics. And millions of miles above our heads there is the other formidable reality of astronomy, with its own equally amazing theories.
Yet reality is but one. What happens at our scale of observation is in fact constantly interacting with occurrences lower down and higher up.
Wondering where all this leads to?
Wait a minute, but now let us throw in “synchronicities”.
These are events that have such low probability of occurrence that they shouldn’t happen in our lifetime, but which do happen all the time.
You think of somebody you haven’t seen for months, and suddenly he or she is there before your eyes: on the same bus, in the same restaurant where none of you ever goes, except today. Probability quasi nil, shouldn’t happen, yet it does.
Or the book that you open “just by chance”, and immediately you come across a sentence that really resonates in you, given your present preoccupations.
If you are attentive and observant, you will notice that many events, big or small, seem to carry meaning, bring subtle messages to your attention.
Many people will confirm this. In fact, it is a law of existence. Materialist thinking cannot account rationally for it. Yet it is undeniable.
Which only confirms that materialist thinking only offers a very truncated view of reality.
But let us go a bit further and now throw in “consciousness”
This is the capacity to be aware of one’s own existence and of the existence of other things around. A fundamental subject for us, sentient human beings; yet one that is hardly ever considered in science.
Now, let us try and relate things: where could consciousness reside in the infinite vacuum filled by elementary particles and pulsating energy fields that, according to advanced physics, constitute the universe?
Don’t give yourself a headache: nobody knows.
And the fact that nobody can even begin to know is a very strong indication that there must be a hell of a lot more out there than materialists give the universe credit for.
To cut a long story short, the emerging paradigm stretches science into spirituality, and accepts that existence is run by the invisible, not by mechanistic laws. The latter follow the lead of invisible intention; matter follows the lead of consciousness.
With this paradigm in mind, one looks at the world economy, politics and many other aspects of life through new eyes. One begins to think freely, to get rid of encrusted layers of indoctrination by family, school, university, and society at large.
If you look carefully around, you will notice that some people discreetly move outside the beaten tracks.
They eat differently, don’t panic about their state of health, behave with less fear and aggression, engage in different work, in different relations with others. They are rarely rich, but also rarely very poor.
They know the system will disappear, and they are not scared. They are already, to some extent, in the new order of things.
In the invisible domain of reality, vibrations around our planet are changing. People in the new paradigm sense this. You may sense it too, if you tune down the noise and agitation of your mind.
Fear not, eat and drink with taste and moderation.
Love,
Leo
Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012
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Leo Foresta 