Demand More

The buying and selling of goods and services is the basis of today’s consumer societies.  It is the measure of a country’s gross domestic product; it is the reason we accumulate money and why we go to the store to purchase our food and other needs, instead of making things ourselves or relying on a tribe or family.

People have been buying and selling things for a long time, but this is the first time in history when people buy and sell exclusively, as their only daily activity.  For the last 200,000 years of human history, people grew their own food, caught their own meat, and foraged in commons as their basic economic activity.  Trading, buying and selling — all of this was a very minor activity.

Today, the reverse is true.  No one grows their own food anymore or forages in a commons.  Buying and selling is what we do; it is what we are.  We sell our labor to our employer, and then we get a paycheck.  With that paycheck, we pay the rent and purchase food.  We repeat.

Life is governed by this strange word:  commodity.   We buy commodities, and we sell our labor as a commodity.  The word comes from the Latin word commoditas, which means “timeliness” or “convenience.”  The American Heritage Dictionary describes a commodity as, “Something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage.”

In other words, “Will this make me money?”

People used to insist on self reliance with their economic activities — growing their food, making their furniture, utilizing the commons — because they wanted to be responsible for their own fates.  Self reliance brought independence, and independence brought freedom.  It didn’t matter if the kingdom changed hands or if the South Sea bubble popped:  there would be food on the table and a roof over your head.  Life would go on.

And when they had to buy and sell commodities and engage in the types of economic transactions we take for granted today, they would insist on real money, like gold or silver, because you could hold it, you could store it, you could look at it and see with your eyes that it was there, that it would not go away.  Paper money was seen as dangerous because it was issued by a government and was a step removed from the natural foundation of wealth.  Now, we don’t even shrug when paper money is replaced by electronic money on bank websites, when the Federal Reserve can push a button on a keyboard and issue money to banks over the internet.  This would have been unthinkable even fifty years ago.

With the triumph of the commodity, life experience, too, has been commoditized.  We all know you can purchase your perfect home, your perfect wedding, your perfect school for your child; but that’s just for beginners.   Today, you can fly into outer space without the normally-required decades of training ($20 million) or climb Mount Everest without any prior mountaineering background ($65,000).

What used to be special or unique can now be purchased off the shelf, so that it makes a good cocktail story with your fellow commodity-warriors.

Tit-for-tat is all we understand anymore, even with friendship, even with love.  We treat love like a commodity, something to be exchanged instead of a genuine feeling of selfless union.  He will give me this if I give him that.  This is what too many of us call love, but it is not really love.  It is just an exchange, an agreement between the two parties.  Men are so angry at women, and women are angry at men, but they are both at fault, both of them are rascals seeking to selfishly exchange instead of selflessly give.

This is why prostitution exists, because sex is a commodity.  Today, prostitution is so advanced that your dollar can purchase a few hours of a perfect “girlfriend experience,” ($2000 per hour) so you can even buy the appearance of affection, of what love might feel like.  This is the sorry state of love in our society.

This is what every minister at every wedding always says to the couple:  your love will run out, but you are swearing an oath to God that you will never leave each other, so you’d better stay together!  Or else God will know.  This is what love means in today’s world, a promise before God not to leave once the love goes away.  The ritual we call the alleged pinnacle of love is a sham, but instead we are happy to go through the motions, say pretty lies when asked to so, and see people chain themselves to a partnership that may foreclose them from love for a long time.

Everything is bought and exchanged, everything must have some value, some use.  Even who we talk to, who we love — all of it must have some selfish root.

There is a real insanity behind this, a real deviance that makes people truly insane.  There are too many people in therapy, on pills, or engaging in addictive behaviors to certify this world we have created as healthy, as sane, as fostering to human decency and actualization of the human spirit.  We accept the commodification of our natural resources, of our personal relationships, and of our deepest human emotions without any thought as to whether there is any alternative, or even whether it’s a good idea.  We just accept it, and we suffer for it, and then we go and die a slow and painful death alone in a nursing home, drugged on morphine and wondering why little Timmy doesn’t call anymore.

Self reliance, independence, sharing, love, and freedom:  do we know what these words even mean anymore?  Because they have nothing to do with our daily activities, nothing to do with the selling of our labor and the possession of wealth.  Indeed, these words are hardly even spoken anymore in casual conversation.  No one does anything “for their independence,” or for “love” or because they wanted to “share.”

Where are the rebels of the human spirit?  Where are the partisans who fight for sanity?  Who, today, can reject the commodification of life, the commodification of culture, and call for a return to simpler principles that have nothing to do with buying and selling, with some selfish exchange?

The exchange is everywhere, once you look.  You will see the exchange in your interpersonal relationships, in your business relationships, and in the halls of government.  You will see friends who aren’t so friendly, lovers who aren’t so loving, businesses that profess kindness when they are anything but, and politicians who talk of the common good when they are agents of privatization.  When Congress meets, it chops up more of the shared commons and hands it over to the wealthy, to the corporations, to the monied interests who possess power for ten Earths and not just one.

Even today your thoughts and dreams, your creative works, your desire for music and literature — all those things will one day be bought and sold on a market of “intellectual” property, commoditized so that every single moment of your life, every single thought in your brain can be assigned value, made useful, and potentially turned into a profit.  This is the dream of many people in power today, and they are hard to work to enclose the commons of your mind so that they can buy and sell it like a bad subprime mortgage.

We commodify so that we can possess, so that we can control.  This is why we have commodified all of Nature and destroyed commons, enclosed plains, chopped up forests, denied people the right to forage:  we want to control Nature and make money from it.  This is why we want to commodify creative content, why the RIAA sues single mothers, why movie studios fear the internet and digital cameras:  they want to control the content and make money from it.

The rules of Nature are very different.  In Nature, it is not the commodity that governs, but the cycle.  There is the water cycle, the Krebs cycle, the seasonal cycle as the Earth revolves around the sun, the countless cycles of countless forms of life.  There is a pattern and a harmony that is not dependent on whether there might be an interested buyer.  Rather, the harmony exists from mere fulfillment of the cycle itself.

The Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use on a daily basis, is a measure of one such cycle:  the cycle of the Earth as it revolves around the sun.  Older, perhaps wiser peoples possessed many calendars, not just one.  They were fascinated by the different cycles in Nature and wanted to catalogue them all as a way of understanding a reality, to discover some deeper purpose.  Calendars were created to measure the cycle of the moon, the appearance of the star Sirius, and even the 25,000 year cycle of the Earth as it wobbles on its axis. The Mayans used a number of calendars, including ones with a 260-day cycle, a 365-day cycle, and a 584-day cycle based on Venus.  The intersections created by their calendars created auspicious dates and festivals.  The ancient Hindus calculated their calendars based on trillions of human years.  Just one day in the life of Brahma, the Prime Creator, is 4.32 billion years (the approximate age of our sun, incidentally), a figure which certainly puts things in a very different perspective.

In our modern world, we shun this cyclical view of life and have replaced it with a perspective that is defined by a strict and narrow linearity.  A linear world view can measure a world based on commodities.  A cyclical view cannot do this.

Under this linear model, age is something to be feared because it leads only to death.  As you get older, you can’t buy and sell as much as when you are young.  Age is a hindrance, something to be rejected, avoided, Botoxed out.  We see youth as a precious resource that is slowly stripped away like a coy mistress until we die slow and painfully in a nursing home.

Under this linear model, wealth must be constantly accumulated and hoarded.  Happiness is measured by a climbing Dow Jones index, because more buying and selling is better, richer is wiser, and the expansion of debt the goal of the state and of society.

Under this linear model, marriage and children are a necessity, not a choice.  Without marriage, without children, buying and selling becomes a useless activity because you can’t take your wealth with you once you die.  There must be some purpose.  No matter if your wife hates you or your children piss away the estate:  the property must be given a chance to survive.  The buying and selling must continue, even post mortem.

Under this linear model, the state is needed to create rules related to property, to prevent people from fighting over the fruits of their commodification, the profits of their buying and selling.  Government must be robust, with powerful courts and many police officers, because in a world based on the selfish exchange of goods and services, people will never act in the common good but only in their narrow self interest.

This is why, in the West especially, people are no longer individuals.  They have traded their individuality for pre-arranged archetypes based on buying and selling, on commodification.  Everything is an exchange, everything must be a bargain, tit-for-tat.  Everything must be useful, or have value.

Like a preconfigured computer shipped with a sub-standard operating system, people who are alive today do nothing but execute some mindless program of social conformity, behaving in ways that reflect this selfish exercise of commodification.  Everyone buys the same iPod, likes the same mindless movies, reads the same pandering journalists, votes for the same spineless political party.  The generation gap has been closed, and the rebellion crushed.

Wouldn’t it be nice to do things because it would make you a freer person?  Or because you wanted to share something with someone?  Or because you felt love and wanted to give a bit of that love to someone else?  How interesting those motivations would be!  They would be very different than the motives we typically see.

Ironically, these are the motives that governed the human tribes and community groups that learned to live with one another for hundreds of thousands of years.  Groups that shared survived and prospered; selfish groups disbanded or were destroyed by a whimsical and sometimes chaotic Nature.  Teamwork meant you could catch more food, plant more crops, do a bit more foraging.  You could share what you possessed, and it would benefit everyone.

It was here, in these groups that shared, where dancing was born, and festivals, and holidays, and yearly feasts.  This is where calendars were developed — not one, but tens or even hundreds — which catalogued the cycles of life and death, the joys and sorrows of human existence, the soothing breeze of real love, the cultivation of real friendship.  This was a world where government wasn’t so invasive, wasn’t so big, wasn’t so intrusive, because it just wasn’t needed.  People didn’t fight so much because there wasn’t so much to fight about.  This was a world very different from our own, one where the commodity was not so important.

Indeed:  maybe the commodity, the buying and selling of things, just isn’t that important.  Maybe it’s not so crucial for the Dow to keep rising, for wrinkles and gray hairs to make their mark, for love to come and go as it tends to do.  Maybe it’s better to sit outside on a nice spring day and enjoy the sunshine and remember that the spring turns to summer, summer turns to fall, and the winter gets cold and lonely before the spring returns again.  Maybe if more people did this, if more people could think cyclically, and not so much in a straight line, we could see the return of dancing, and festivals, and holidays, and yearly feasts where people could share their bounties and celebrate in times of plenty, and depend on each other in times of famine.  For that, too, is a cycle.

That would make life a bit more livable, a bit more civilized, a bit more humane.  It would make this world a place of real joy.

In a world of freedom, the real heroes are those who are free.  In a world of self reliance, the real heroes are the trail-blazers of self reliance.  In a world of love, the real heroes are the kind, loving souls who meditate under the Bodhi tree or spend 40 days in the desert or drink the Hemlock so that you and I don’t have to, but can just follow their example and cultivate a bit more peace and quiet on this rough and tumble Earth.  Freedom is not bought or sold, love cannot be bargained.  By definition, sharing is never a selfish activity.  These things cannot be commoditized.  They are needed more than ever.

The real division in this world is not based on skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or even nationality.  These divisions exist, they are real — but they are secondary consequences of a much deeper, much more intractable division that has existed for centuries and millennia.

This division is the division between rich and poor — between the haves, and the haves-not.

Between those with credit, and those with debt.

Between those who are the masters, and those who are the servants.

Between those with power, and those who are impotent.

As the currency is watered down, as people are left unemployed, as those already with money and power are sustained with the entire weight of the global economy, this eternal division is exposed with a naked glory unrivaled since the last great depression.

What is exposed, exactly?

What is exposed is the fact that the secondary divisions mentioned earlier — those alleged divisions based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality — are intentionally designed to distract and divide the mass of people who are in debt, who are servants of the system, who are impotent.

You see, the people must be kept divided so that they will never sit down with someone with whom they have a great deal in common — perhaps everything in common — but for the fact that one is white and the other is black, one is a Christian and the other a Muslim, one is a man and the other a woman, one sexually relates with women and the other with men, or that one is American and the other a Mexican.

What is exposed is the very wide gulf that exists between a small elite and the rest of the world.  Perhaps a group as small as 100,000 people worldwide (or even smaller) out of a global population of close to 7 billion reaps the benefits of global wealth:  the million dollar bonuses, the large tracts of land, the private jets, the expensive yachts, and so on.   Please, this is not a conspiracy theory, these people are not in any sort of fraternity.  They do not have any collective sense of who they are.  Each of them, however, is a winning recipient of the structure of the global order.

What is exposed is the failure of government to rule for the benefit of all.  Instead, governments all over the world appear to be making choices that will benefit this tiny group of people, to prop them up on the backs of billions of global tax-payers.  Increasingly, we will see a dying global economy throw more on the street, deprive the famished of food and the sick of affordable treatment.

Maybe twenty years ago, people used to speak of the great differences between the “First World” and the “Third World.”  The First World consisted of the United States and Europe.  The “Second World” were the communist countries.  The Third World were the countries that were endemically poor — countries in Africa, in Asia, in South America.

Now, and on account of globalization, wealth has spread around the world.  Even a poor country like India now sports billionaires.

But poverty, too, has spread with wealth.  Wealth was not created; it was simply transferred.

Indeed, the future we witness is a future where there is no division at all between the First and the Third Worlds.  Instead, the future we witness is a future where the entire world is the Third World.

This is a world where capital and corporations reach effortlessly across national boundaries, but where labor is confined to the stagnant and increasingly dehumanizing conditions wherever it is located.  It is a world where the global elite, from all countries, will share in the bounty of the entire world, while their servants toil and are taxed endlessly and without purpose. It is a world where government is unresponsive to the concerns of the common good and corrupted by the influence of monied interests.

This world will not be confined to Africa, to South America, or to Asia.  The Third World is this world.  It is our world.  And if we refuse to acknowledge this — and refuse to do something about this — then we give our tacit consent to the breakdown of all that is humane and decent in our society in exchange for some consumerist drivel, for some pharmaceutical-induced quiescence, for the false peace-of-mind that comes with being quiet and avoiding the trouble of speaking out.

Today, the illusions that inhere in our society are breaking down.  We believe, falsely, that anyone can become rich with perseverance, when the reality is that wealth is created and sustained with government intervention.  We believe, falsely, that the Democratic Party is different than the Republican Party, when the reality is that they are merely two heads of a larger corporate party, which favor the interests of different sets of elites against the common good.  We believe, falsely, that America is materially wealthy, when the reality is that decades of transferred wealth have left only wealth on paper.  America is decrepit; it is dying; and few are those who call attention to this truth or who genuinely seek to rejuvenate a once great nation.

The journey of our economies and our political institutions is at a cross roads, and no one can predict what comes next.  But this much is certain:  save your money; ignore the stock market; and turn off the corporate news because you know all that you need to know.  Trust your intuition, and prepare for the ride ahead.  Make time for your friends and family, for they are the only true wealth, in times of depression or in times of plenty.

The houses we build in our lifetime are built on a foundation of sand, such that a strong wind can knock them over through no fault of our own.  But we start to become responsible when we recognize the problems, but do nothing to change our behavior. And here is the biggest problem of them all:  our refusal to acknowledge that our societies and civilizations tolerate and even celebrate the rich at the expense of the poor, the haves at the expense of the have-nots.  So, stop hating the black man or the gay man or the Mexican or whoever it is that the corporate media wants you to hate.  It is time to recognize that, regardless of the superficialities that divide us, we are all slaves in Pharaoh’s field; and we will be kept there unless we decide we are better than that.

For a person who lives without any awareness, who wakes up every morning and executes the same behaviors and attitudes, day in and day out, the past and the future are one.  The past becomes the future, and the future the past.

This is not a riddle, but an observation based on the fact that human beings are too often creatures of habit.  Too often, a person handles the challenges of life in only a limited number of ways and will use these same old solutions time after time.

Thus, the future becomes the past because behavior is always the same.  And when behavior is the same, then the outcomes remain the same as well.  The pain and suffering of past wounds reoccur with an exactness that speaks not towards any cruel God or destiny, but rather to the reality of cause and effect:  do something a certain way, and a certain outcome is bound to happen.

In Eastern thought, the link between the past and the future is known as karma.  This word is not really translatable into English, but it has come to be associated in the West with an outside force which punishes bad actions and rewards good ones.

But this is not really what karma means.  Rather, karma is an idea that the outcome to any endeavor in life is determined by the initial seed of action.  The way a person approaches a challenge, the perspective that is brought, the intention that one carries:  these are the seeds that, once planted, will produce either good or bad fruit.  The input determines the output; the battle will be won or lost before the first shot is ever fired.

Thus, the best predictor of someone’s future is their past.  A person who wakes up every morning without thought, without knowledge of his life, without an awareness into the motivations and intentions which guide his behavior — this person is condemned to a life of constant repetition.  He will have the same problems, the same frustrations, the same agonies over and over because his approach to life is always the same.  He will be continually planting the same seeds day in and day out, and reap nothing more but the same failed harvest.

Such a life is a life of real Hell.  Heaven and Hell are not physical destinations.  Heaven and Hell are states of mind.  A life without awareness is Hell because it is a life of frustration.  The same problems come up over and over, and the same tired old solutions are used to tackle the problem once more.

When you look around at the people in your life, both friends and acquaintances, you may start to see how people repeat their problems in ways that may seem silly to you.  Perhaps they are chasing after the same rotten type of people or worried about their same rotten job, or engaging in addictive behaviors in a variety of contexts.  When it comes to other people, it is easy to observe these patterns because we are their observer.  We are their witnesses.  And as witnesses, we can see things clearly and without any blinders.

Sometimes we become so good at witnessing others that we begin to issue harsh judgments.  The others we witness seem like idiots.  It seems so clear to us.  But therein lies a basic problem of life — we are remarkably good at witnessing other people, but we are no good at all at witnessing our own lives.

A wise man once said, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you don’t see the beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you’ll see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”  There is real wisdom in this.  Unless we begin to witness our own lives, we will never escape the Hells which we create and which doom us to a life of constant repetition.  Only by witnessing can we break the cycle which equates the past and the future, the cycle of karma, and discover real freedom.

The Hell of the mind comes about because of our relationship with our memory.  Too often, we treat memory as a compass.  We think of the pleasures and pains we experienced in the past, and we want to distill out the pains and recreate the pleasures.  We engage in the same behaviors but think that if we are just a bit smarter, we can avoid the pains and recoup the pleasure.  Do you see this fallacy?  We plant the same old seed but think this time we can get a different type of tree.  This is how the past becomes the future, and why the future remains the past.

When we witness, when we are aware, we experience something much more beautiful.  With witnessing, we have a different attitude about memory.  We no longer use it as a compass towards some future gain, but rather as a way of analyzing and learning about cause and effect.  We think back to an old love, with whom we had pleasure and pain, both sunshine and poison.  The person without awareness, the person in Hell, who does not act as his own witness — this person wants to recreate that same love without the pain.  But this is not possible.  Pain and pleasure are brother and sister; pleasure is a result of pain, and vice versa.  This person condemns himself to this type of love over and over, perhaps recapturing that pleasure for just a moment but also that same pain once more.  Can you see why this is Hell?

The person with awareness, who is now acting as his own witness — this person thinks differently.  He says, “no, this love cannot be repeated; the pleasure I experienced came along with the pain, and they are inseparable; I cannot chase this pleasure without also accepting the pain as well.”  And instead of planting the same seed, this individual plants a new seed for something different, having learned the lessons of the past.  In such a manner, karma is avoided, the cycle is broken, and a new future is created.

So many times in life we are tortured by the same anxieties.  A certain trigger puts the mind in a downward spiral of worry that is neither justified nor rational but seems inevitable and necessary.  Over and over, the same triggers make us feel so helpless.  The person who is witnessing, however, comes to see these triggers and can prevent the spiral of anxiety from ever taking place.  This is the power of witnessing.  Nothing in life is inevitable, nothing in life is set in stone.

Through witnessing, we come to access power — a real creative power which is the hallmark of freedom.  It is freedom because a person who witnesses has the power of infinity at her disposal.  For the person without awareness, who does not want to witness her life, who repeats the past over and over, the future is nothing more than a mirror or a carbon copy of the past; the details may change, but the underlying patterns, the archetypes of behavior, all of these things remain the same.  On the other hand, for the person who is witnessing life, the future is no longer a prison but becomes a blank slate.  And on this slate, the person who is witnessing can utilize intention to make anything, absolutely anything, manifest into reality. The future becomes a state of infinite possibility and not merely the stage for further misery.

In this existence, the most holy act each one of us can do on this Earth is to celebrate the witnessing of our lives, and to celebrate the sensations which we feel and the mind which acts as host to them.  We are all part of this Creation, and when we witness, it is Creation itself that is also witnessing.  Do you see how holy this is, the idea that the Universe, through us, comes to learn about itself?  The evolution and flowering of our individual minds does not take place in a vacuum — it takes place amidst the backdrop of universal sentience which both acts as teacher and as pupil, as both destiny and outcome.  When we learn, when we grow, when we witness, we do it not only for ourselves, but for all of Creation as well, for the entire fabric of sentience.  This is the responsibility of life and the joy and glory of existence itself.  This is what it means to find Heaven, and Nirvana, and Moksha and to break the cycle of karma.  These are the flowers and the fragrance which come from the seeds of witnessing.

For over eight years, George W. Bush and a handful of his close associates engaged in a variety of behavior that is defined as criminal under international and domestic law.

These included violations of the laws of war as set down in the Geneva Conventions and international legal precedent (including War Crimes tribunals such as those that took place in Nuremburg, Germany), violations of domestic law, and violations of the articles and amendments contained in the Constitution of the United States of America.

It is known, for example, that Mr. Bush, his cabinet members, and his officers in the Executive Branch ordered the preemptive use of force against Iraq in 2003 which they had been planning for nearly two years, and had been contemplated by their intellectual supporters since the late 1990s (otherwise known as the “Project for the New American Century“).  This type of pre-meditated, aggressive warfare is defined by international law as the “supreme international crime” and an “evil thing”.  Yet Mr. Bush and his administration engaged in this crime.

It is known that Mr. Bush, his cabinet members, and his officers in the Executive Branch authorized the wiretapping of electronic communications in the United States with collaboration from nearly every major telecommunications company, in contravention of federal law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1789.

It is known that Mr. Bush, his cabinet members, and his officers in the Executive Branch authorized the use of torture in interrogating alleged enemy combatants — a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, and the domestic laws of the United States.  In fact, American law, as codified in the War Crimes Statute, requires a sentence of capital punishment in cases where any such torture leads to death.

It is known that Mr. Bush, his cabinet members, and his officers in the Executive Branch failed to take responsibility in their response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and thus failed in their most basic duty to faithfully execute the laws of the United States to protect its citizens.

Today, there is talk that these crimes, and any other crimes committed during the presidency of George W. Bush, should be ignored and forgotten.  Dahlia Lithwick points out in the New York Times that the near-universal consensus from anyone with even just a little bit of power — in government or in the flattering media — is that it would be better to pretend as if these crimes never happened.  Even Deepak Chopra, who normally confines himself to new-age spiritual advice, has issued a statement that President Obama should forego prosecuting administration officials because ignorance of the criminal past would be “better than the stark truth.”

This perspective is ironic in light of the fact that America is the world’s leader in jailing its citizens — more than Russia, more than China, more than Iran, more than Saudi Arabia.  Every day, thousands of people are jailed in this country for minor, non-violent offenses, often for little more than possession of an illegal drug, at a cost of more than $55 billion a year.

But when it comes time to talk about the crimes of the utmost severity, crimes that affect the very freedoms in society that we are taught to cherish — there is nothing heard other than a thundering and shameful silence.  Instead, what is advocated is a perverse form of mercy which would be ridiculed by any judge at any sentencing hearing for any lesser crime.

One of Barack Obama’s first act as President was overturning the Bush-era rules on torture.  He did so with a simple stroke of a pen.  This, no doubt, was a victory for human rights.  But it was also a chilling reminder that because of the actions taken by George W. Bush and his administration, America’s most cherished liberties and freedoms now depend on the person occupying the office of President.  A single signature on a single piece of paper can overturn decades or even centuries of hard-won freedoms.  That is a power that no single person should ever have.  Yet this is a consequence of the Bush-era abuses.

For almost 800 years, since the signing of the Magna Carta, Anglo-American jurisprudence has taken the position that there is no person, not even a king, who can stand above the law.  And as the Founding Fathers made clear when they rebelled from that very king, the President of the United States can never act outside the confines of the law and the four corners of the Constitution of the United States.  Indeed, it is respect for law and respect for the Constitution which compels an inquiry into the behavior of the powerful.  Otherwise, accountability becomes a word without meaning, and the “rule of law” a phrase without life.

One of the most difficult lessons in life is the lesson of humility.  No one is perfect, and sometimes people make mistakes.  But the mistake is never a sin.  Mistakes are human.  Rather, the sin is the refusal to admit that a mistake was made at all.  That is the greatest sin, because the mistake is never corrected.  It becomes a perpetual stain on the fabric of one’s existence.

Before the moment is lost, before history is forgotten, before history is repeated:  the crimes of President Bush must be investigated.  They must be brought to light.  A record must be created, and if there is evidence of crimes, indictments must issue.  The mistake must be admitted, and rectified.  The Constitution requires it, and justice demands it.  Liberty is won over many centuries, but it can be lost in a nighttime.  If America is truly interested in change, then it must require accountability from those who have wronged the nation and its laws.

I have always been skeptical of those who call for crusades, for the simple reason that crusades have killed many more people than they have ever saved.

There is something attractive about taking up the banner of the knight-errant and fighting the demon-of-the-day allegedly holding civilization in its grip.  Moral clarity is attractive, and the demand for action inspired by any crusade provides meaning in a world where both human and heavenly action appears dictated by the rule of whim, and not by any other logic.

Thus, the seed of every crusade is the seed of fundamentalism — an unshaken belief that the cause worth fighting and dying for is noble and just.  And fundamentalism, as we are all too aware, is a tool of immense destruction.  Whatever their intentions, no one can deny that fundamentalists — of any stripe — will not hesitate to commit great acts of mischief in the name of their conviction.

The crusade is still at work today.  Every religion, every belief, every ideology has its crusaders.  They hoist their flags and build their intellectual forts, ready and eager to combat any deviation from dogma.   They leave their home countries to convince some far away people that their God or their government is the right way to do things — the only way to do things — incapable of leaving their narrow perspectives for a deeper appreciation of the diversity of human existence.  Diversity, in fact, is the enemy of the crusader; and if there are only a handful of languages spoken on this Earth today, a handful of governments, a handful of religions, a handful of people who run the banks and issue the currency — well, we can thank every crusader who has ever lived for that.

Please don’t think that I am rejecting the struggle for justice, or the quest for progress that has defined human civilization.  There are things that are wrong on this Earth that must be righted.  There is injustice, and suffering; there are people who live in physical and spiritual destitution on account of outside oppression.

And there have been many people over the millenia, genuine agents in the cause of justice, who have righted many wrongs and broadened the frontiers of human dignity.

But these stunning individuals who have furthered those frontiers were never crusaders, or fundamentalists, or moralists; these bright lights never called for the deaths of those who stood in their way, never insisted that there is only one right way to do things, never for one moment thought that it was appropriate to kill in the name of an idea.

If you look at human history, and if you trace back this history over thousands of years, you will see little more than one crusade after another — one group of people killing other people in the name of some idea.  That idea might involve God, or government, or some perceived injustice, or may even be as simple as greed for more land and resources.  But before a person can pick up a spear or a gun against another person and commit murder — legal murder, but murder nonetheless — she needs to have a reason.  A human being cannot kill for no reason alone.  The ones who do so we call sociopaths; the ones who give us those reasons we call our leaders.

The crusade cannot further justice.   Even today, in the Middle East, we reap the effects of crusades started 1000 years ago.  This is how long the effects of a crusade will last!  The crusades we have initiated today — and there have been many — will have similarly long effects.

And it is also the case that the most fervent crusaders are those who are least at peace with themselves.  This is why they feel the need to go on exotic missions with weapon (or religious book) in hand and advance their idea — they have no inner serenity unless there is some violence in their lives.  This is why Frederick Nietzsche wrote long ago, “When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”  A crusader is the enemy of peace because in times of peace the crusade is over and the crusader becomes useless.

Let us examine all the crusades that exist today, crusades which we know are plowing the seeds of future conflict many years from now, maybe even a thousand years from now.  There are the countless religious crusades, too numerous to list.  There are the political crusades — democracy versus communism or socialism.  There are the crusades of the strong against the weak — the Israelis against the Palestinians, the Americans against the Afghanis.   There are the crusades against other people even in the same society — white versus black, man versus woman, the fundamentalist versus the gay couple wanting to get married.  These are not so violent, but the kernel is the same, the desire for sameness is there, the need to destroy all diversity and insist on a bland conformity that has been the dream of tyrants for thousands of years.

We have developed so much technology over the last hundred years that we forget how little our minds and hearts have changed over that same period.  To go from horse-and-buggy and sail ship to electric cars and space ship is a phenomenal feat of ingenuity.  We are so advanced when it comes to our tools.  Why then are we such infants when it comes to human decency?  Why this desire for the crusade, this desire to force our own beliefs on others even if it means blood?

The answer to that question lies inside our heads.  And so, instead of looking for answers outside, we must look inside, to our inner worlds.  The crusade must be turned inward.  Instead of fighting the outside world, instead of proselytizing and pointing a gun at someone else in the name of an idea, we must use that same urgency of purpose to confront our inner psyches.  This is the real battleground for the courageous, because it is a terrifying thing to examine our own minds.  Our minds are filled with fears and anxieties and old habits which we insist on performing day after day unthinkingly.  So many of us today drown our heads to avoid this very self-examination.   Not even one minute of silence can exist in our day or else the mind starts to shake and tremble at its own character.

But it is only here, in this inner crusade, where real peace is found, which is the kernel for world peace as well.  For so many thousands of years people have been killing each other and at each others’ throats.  And not just on the battlefield, but in marriage, in friendships, in the marketplace — please, look wherever there is any human interaction and you will see the specter of violence and tyranny at every moment.  This is how we define ourselves as a species, with behavior that would make even the most base animal ashamed because we do it in the name of an idea.  At least when a dog bites another dog, it does it out of some instinct; it does not need to come up with a reason why it had to attack.  It is only humans who are so devious with each other that they have to justify the killing of another in the name of God or country.  Even a dog has better sense than that.

And the mind itself, a thing of such beauty, never reaches its full potential.  How can it?  It is tied to an idea, like a boat moored to the dock, floating here and there but never straying far from its provincial port.  The mind is the real treasure, but it is never explored.  It is like having a treasure chest of gold in the closet in your home, but you never look inside your own house because you’re too busy outside looking for the treasure everywhere else.  The treasure is right there, the gold is right there, but it’s in the one place you never look, the one place you refuse to look because who wants to examine the mind?  So the treasure is never found.

There is injustice in this world, there is oppression, there is violence and there is suffering.   But there is never a need for any one of us to participate in those things.  If all of us were just a little more at peace with ourselves, a little more in tune with our minds and our thoughts and our motivations, we would be just a little more at peace with each other as well.  And, over time, with little improvements over our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our descendants, you would see oppression wither away, violence slowly end, and the scales of justice ever gradually right themselves.  This is the only way justice, peace, and freedom have ever come about.

It sounds like fantasy but the best way to ensure peace on the Earth is to work on peace in our own individual lives.  We make peace with our friends and neighbors, peace with our acquaintances, peace with our enemies, and most importantly, peace with ourselves.  When we have that peace of mind that comes through self-analysis, the injustices of the world take on a different hue.  Suddenly, it is no longer about us and them, which killer is right and which killer is wrong; instead, one sees that in all wars, in all conflict, in all crusades, the injustice is the mental harm and damage done to the next succeeding generation who will continue to blindly kill for no other reason than that is what they were taught.  That is the real injustice.

It makes no difference whether one side is weak and the other is strong.  The weak can triumph through peace.   This was the method of Gandhi, and never before in human history was one man so powerful as to defeat an empire.  Gandhi was but the pioneer of this technique; the method of peace has yet to be truly explored.  And its potency lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the method of the crusade, and everything to do with truth, and justice, and freedom.  These are the real sources of power in human existence; how rarely they are utilized!

With so many problems facing the human race today — problems of war, of sustainability, of oppressive government — many men and women are beginning to feel a need for action.  It is tempting to think that by picking up the banner of an idea and marching off to battle against the enemies of that idea, solutions can be found.  But this will not work.  Please, don’t take my word for it, but simply examine the many thousands of years of history and see the bloodshed that has been produced by every idea to ever cross the mind of every well-intentioned but misguided soul who has insisted on the way of the crusade.  Make your own conclusion.

The better way — the way towards genuine human advancement — is to take that need for action and use it as a tool of self-discovery.  It is enough for every one of us to explore the universe that resides in our own heads and to come to peace with our individualities, our own psyches.  Really, that is enough.  One person does this, and just somewhere on this beautiful Earth, there is one person who has peace, who lives in perfect harmony and perfect freedom.  Than, another person finds his or her peace, and the boundaries of peace and freedom have multiplied and expanded.  Real peace!  Then two more people do this, and so on and so on and maybe there will exist one day even just one neighborhood where there is real peace and real harmony.  And that neighborhood expands into a town, and then into a city, then a state, and then maybe one day there will be one shining nation of individuals in peace with themselves and each other.

This is the way of peace, a way very different than the way of the crusade.  The era of the crusade is over.  No more crusades; it is time for peace.

There is a day coming soon — perhaps a hundred years, perhaps two hundred years, but no more than that — where the evil of religious fundamentalism will no longer exist.

Now, one or two hundred years may seem like a long time, but when compared to the thousands of years that religious fundamentalism has existed, it is really just a blink of the eye.

There will always be close-minded people who insist that they are right and everyone else is wrong.  Human nature is not set to change.  But what will change, what must change, is the grip of fundamentalism over the minds of individuals.

Whenever human consciousness has expanded, fundamentalism has declined.  The Enlightenment heralded the end of the power of organized religion in temporal affairs and the birth of reason; the American Revolution brought forth the First Amendment, which commands a separation of church and state in a manner that every democracy now strives for; and the development of science heralded the dawn of rationed inquiry into the nature of existence.

With each of these developments, fundamentalism was deprived of one of its carefully cultivated monopolies.  With the Enlightenment, fundamentalism lost its monopoly on war, and the reasons for war; with separation of church and state, fundamentalism lost its control in the realm of politics; and with science, fundamentalism was deprived of its monopoly in explaining Nature.

We stand at the doorstep of an age of yet another explosion of consciousness; a final push of thinking that will end once and for all fundamentalism’s last grip, its last claim of relevance — its explanation of God.

More and more, people are discovering that organized religion and religious fundamentalism cannot explain God.  In fact, people are increasingly discovering that these things are in fact great obstacles to true inquiry into God, true connection with God, true contemplation and union with God.

More and more, people are discovering the fact that religious fundamentalism is based in fear.  Look at any religious fundamentalist of any religion, and you will see the same fear.  People are taught to fear Hell,  the Devil,  reincarnation,  karma, or even social ostracism.  Like all forms of control, religious fundamentalism feeds off of fear.  And anything based in fear cannot be God.  It is the opposite of God.

More and more, people are growing sick of this fear.

What will replace religious fundamentalism?  We should be clear that the replacement will not be “science”, as we conceive of that term.  We will not invent devices that will measure God, or machines that will trap angels.  Science dedicates itself to the study of measure, but God is not something that can be measured.  Measure implies observation, which in turn implies a separation between the observer and the observed.  God is a thing of unity; there is no such separation with God.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with personal inquiry.  Instead of pre-packaged answers, we will move to a world where people will be encouraged to inquire into the nature of God for themselves, and to reach their own conclusions.  We will move to a world where a diversity of consclusions is not only encouraged, but expected, and where respect for those conclusions will be honored.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with faith.  Today, faith is a faith of fear.  It is a faith that commands the blind adherence to antiquated sets of rules so as to avoid eternal punishment in an afterlife that has never been proven.  This is not really faith.  True faith is based in love.  This is a faith that rests on the foundation that life is filled with joy, that people can be decent, that kindness is the operative law of the universe, and that the forces of universalism and peace by definition necessarily triumph over the forces of division and war.  This is a faith that can see the order in the chaos, and the blessings that accrue through suffering.  It is a faith that is deeply personal and derived from experience, not from any religious text, however holy.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with truth.  Organized religion today is in the business of selling lies, packaged lies with bows on them that may seem pretty, but which are lies nonetheless.  Please, let us not disparage those who sell the lies — let us not doubt their intentions, which are no doubt benign.  But a well intentioned lie is a lie nonetheless.  And a business, as well, no matter how clothed with ritual and holy ordinance, remains a business.  Churches are not built without labor; and man does not eat on bread alone.  Thousands of years, thousands of religions, millions of preachers and monks and nuns in all religions — yet we live in a world consumed with war, with hatred, with disrespect, with plunder of the environment, where children are still controlled to believe the falsehoods of their parents.  Religion has not ended any of these things.  Dare I say that religion may in fact bear some responsibility?

Truth cannot come from a book.  Truth is not something that can be communicated with words from a preacher to a listener in a pew.  Truth is experience, but it is also beyond experience.  Truth is understanding, but it is also beyond understanding.  Truth comes about when a person’s consciousness resonates at the vibration of the Universal and comes to grips with a deeper reality that exists beyond the realm of our five senses.  This is something that no religion can give.

Fundamentalism will not go without a fight.  It has survived for too long and enslaved the minds of too many to simply go with a whimper.  But like all things that are composed only of shadow, the extent of its power is only as meaningful as the power we choose to give it.  Like all shadows, the flicker of even the smallest of lights will expose how transitory, illusory, and rather silly its power really is.  As individuals of all cultures and religious backgrounds awake to the true nature of reality, across all continents and languages, the nature of this shadow will be exposed once and for all.

We stand like Moses at a promontory overlooking a promised land — a land free of fundamentalism — that we may never have the opportunity to enter.  From this vantage point, it is easy to see the fertility of the land, the extent of its blessings, and its ability to provide a real sense of security born of freedom of thought.   It is a land where people can connect with this universe in their own way, on their own terms, so as to obtain genuine understanding of their purpose and the nature of existence.  It is a land where the seedlings of our consciousness will find ready soil to grow and flower in their own unique and magnificent ways.

We may never enter this land; but we can see it, and we know it is there.  And we should rest assured that our children and their children will reach ever closer to this place that is all around us, that is so close but still so far, that is always just one day away, until that moment when human beings from every corner of this fantastic planet shed their fear once and for all and enter an undiscovered country where truth, love, and beauty find ready resonance in the minds and hearts of all seekers.  This is what God is; and while some may think it ironic, it is only fitting that it is God — God — who will vanquish religious fundamentalism forever and ever.

In just a few short weeks, Californians will head to the polls to decide, among other things, the fate of their months-old experiment with same-sex marriage.  A voter-initiated proposition (”Proposition 8“) aims to re-write the state’s Constitution to take away the right of any individual of any sexual orientation to get married. Opinion polls show Proposition 8 winning amongst likely voters, although not yet having a clear majority.

Earlier this year,  the California Supreme Court struck down all laws restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, finding that such laws violated California’s Constitution.  Chief Justice Ronald George (appointed by conservative Governor Pete Wilson), wrote for the Court that such laws violated California’s guarantee of liberty and privacy enshrined by the state’s supreme law.

Marriage, according to the Chief Justice, represents “the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one’s choice,” and is fundamental to a person’s “personal autonomy” and their “liberty”, both of which are protected by California’s Constitution.  Withholding marriage from same-sex couples deprived them of these constitutional freedoms.

The Court relied on its 1948 court decision Perez v. Sharp in reaching its decision.  In Perez, the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited two people of different skin color from marrying.  California was the first state in the United States to strike down such laws; the federal Supreme Court would strike down all such laws only some twenty years later in Loving v. Virginia.

In striking down similar restrictions against same-sex couples, Chief Justice George noted, “It is instructive to recall that the traditional, well-established legal rules and practices of our not-so-distant past (1) barred interracial marriage, (2) upheld the routine exclusion of women from many occupations and official duties, and (3) considered the relegation of racial minorities to separate and assertedly equivalent public facilities and institutions as constitutionally equal treatment.”

It is strange and a bit sad that a thing like liberty needs defending; but these are strange times.  Why the private decisions of two consenting adults should be the business of anyone else — or the business of any government, be it local, state or federal — is a question that few politicians are willing to answer.  Yet more and more, Americans seem content to interfere in the lives of others.  Spying telephone companies and a failed war on drugs are just two of the more obvious examples of intrusive and inappropriate social policies designed to police the private lives of otherwise law abiding citizens.

Much of this interference is done in the name of terrorism (or more accurately, irrational fear of terrorism) but initiatives like Proposition 8 are a reminder that restrictions on liberty come in a variety of forms.  Today, it is fashionable to argue that liberty should be restricted — a sad testament to the decline of freedom in America.

And thanks to the explosion of money in politics over the last few decades, California’s direct democracy initiatives and voter referenda have become battlegrounds for this call to arms against liberty.  It is interesting to wonder whether in 1948, after the Perez decision, people would have flocked to the polls to keep Mexicans from marrying people with black skin (the couple in Perez) in order to preserve the institution of marriage for proper, decent folk.  Perhaps this is a hypothetical better left unanswered, because it is not unreasonable to think that such an initiative would have soundly passed, and even been enshrined in the state’s Constitution: “Marriage for one’s race, and one’s race only.”

Even today, more than fifty years after Perez, interracial marriage remains uncommon, and many people express preferences for people of their own “race”.  It is of course anyone’s right to be close-minded and prejudiced, and to believe in the fiction of race.  There are people who believe the world if flat, that climate change is a lie, and that you go to a place called Hell if you don’t worship a particular god.  In time, a more enlightened society will see the notion of “race” for what it truly is: a way to artificially divide people and keep them separate and at each others’ throats, without genuine communion, compassion, solidarity or love.  And, thankfully, California had a brave Supreme Court which realized more than fifty years ago that close-mindedness is not an appropriate bedrock for law; and that prejudice, no matter how defined, no matter how clothed, no matter the arguments made in its favor or the religious texts used to support it, cannot be what defines the concept of liberty for any free people.

The best way to preserve one’s own freedom is to support the freedom of others.  That’s how freedom works, in all its aspects.  If you want to have freedom of speech, to say what you want without threat of retribution, then, in addition, you have to support the right for people to say things that you don’t like or may not want to hear.  If you want to have the freedom to associate and join political parties of your choice or to vote for candidates who support the way you think, then, in addition, you have to support the right for people to vote for ideas or candidates whom you may find repulsive or deadening to your values.  If you want freedom of religion, to worship the god or gods of your choice, then, in addition, you have to support the right of others to worship who they want as well.

Freedom is not a thing that can be parceled to favorites — it must exist for everyone, or it exists for no one.

And if you want the freedom to love who you want, and raise a family with whomever you want, then, in addition, you must support the right of others to do the same.  The denial of anyone’s freedom is a denial of your own freedom as well.

There are many opponents of same-sex marriage who argue that same-sex couples should have a different institution to sanctify their relationship — a “separate but equal” relationship, if you will.   Has this country learned nothing from its bloody history with race?  Separate but equal is a principle that was implemented and tried for over fifty years, depriving black-skinned people of basic rights for no other reason than to keep them confined as a permanent underclass.  It was only through brave protest and judicial oversight that such laws and practices were banned.  Today, America still wrestles with these demons.  Yet there are those who would want to bring back such principles, once more!

There is no doubt that the institution of marriage will one day be open to any individual who chooses to make a life-long, civil arrangement with any other individual.  The question before Californians is whether they will recognize this inevitability now, or choose to restrict liberty for some undefined period of time.  This is what it means to live in a democracy — you have to present this choice to the people and appeal to the “better angels of their nature”.  It is this choice, and this responsibility, which represents what it means to be free.  Only now, we will see whether democracy will be used as a tool to protect freedom, or as a means to oppress a targeted few.  We will see the nature of those angels; we will see what they are worth.

Happiness comes from within.  It is a perspective that is carried in the mind at every waking moment.  You will not find any lasting happiness in the outside world that is separate from your own inner perceptions.  This is because the outside world only reflects your internal point of view, your internal perspective.

If you are not happy on the inside, you will never find happiness on the outside.  Yet today, it is common to see people seek happiness on the outside without having done this inner work.  They seek some sort of lasting fix from something out there, somewhere.  They expect the next TV show, consumer gadget, website click or paid-for experience to provide some happiness, even when it never does.

The urge to find happiness on the outside leads to addiction and delusion.  It is possible to be addicted to anything in this world, even pain.  The root of all addiction is simply the urge to find pleasurable stimulation, to cover over the emptiness felt on the inside.  It is not possible to treat addiction without addressing this very emptiness — you have to teach the addict how to create happiness first, then the addiction will go away, naturally.

And it is possible to be deluded about anything.  So many people today are so obsessed with their religion, with their politics, with their ideas about how the world must be.  They cling to some belief system to interpret their emptiness and sense of existential anguish, to give it meaning, to give it some dignity.  This is a very human thing to do, but no matter how much you dress up the empty void inside, it remains an empty void.  The fundamentalists of religion, of politics, even of science — those who refuse to question — have made this world a very difficult place for the rest of us.

I want to point out that our entire economic system today — consumerist corporate capitalism — is itself a product and reflection of this attitude that we can find happiness on the outside without doing the self-inquiry and personal work necessary to make ourselves happy on the inside.

Indeed, the entire premise of our society is that happiness can be purchased.  It doesn’t matter what it is you purchase, as long as you are purchasing something.  You could be buying a flat-screen TV, or a pet, or a year supply of Prozac.   In each instance, we make the assumption that the purchase itself leads to happiness.  That moment when cash exchanges hands, when units of money are swapped for some consumer experience or consumer item: this is the sacred moment of our society, worshipped as the sum total of human civilization.

If you want to understand the damage cause by this philosophy, all you need to do is look at the waste caused by consumerism.  Consumerism and waste go hand in hand.  Humanity has generated more waste on this planet in the last 200 years than in the last 200,000 years.  Thanks to consumerism, we have littered the world with our plastics, which scientists say carry a toxic poison.  We have created so-called “dead zones” in the ocean where life can no longer exist.  An entire island of trash, twice the size of Texas, floats between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Our need for cheap energy to fuel non-stop consumer acquisition threatens the habitability of life on this planet.  Fossil fuel emissions, air pollution, spent nuclear energy — all these things are produced because we give short shrift to the consequences of waste.  We prefer to have the luxury of cheap energy and fast cars even if it means poisoning the air quality and melting the ice caps.  There are so many evils associated with these waste products — health evils such as cancer and asthma, as well as environmental evils such as climate change — yet today, these evils are ignored.

Consumerism generates internal waste as well.  In addition to the physical garbage produced by consumerism, we accumulate mental garbage in our minds.  Short attention spans, fix-it-now attitudes about life, seeing people as worthy of respect only if they look like the people we see on TV: these are the types of mental waste we produce when we dedicate our lives to consumerism.

So we live in a world where we are told that buying things on the outside will soothe the inner void on the inside.  But this never happens.  Instead, all we end up doing is creating and living in our own waste.  Can you see how destructive this logic is, how truly brainwashed we must be to buy into the consumerist point of view?  We are so brainwashed that we cannot stop our behaviors even when they are toxic to the planet and to ourselves — even when we recognize the damage we are causing.

But let us look on the bright side.  The bright side is that more and more people are waking up to the reality that consumerism is a poison that prevents us from being happy.  More and more people are taking a holistic approach to the problems of our society — the problems of happiness, the problems of health, the problems of waste and climate change — and seeing that these problems are all linked together, linked to the very basic desire to find contentment.

Today, it is possible to talk of a world based on sustainability, and not consumerism.

What is sustainability?  Sustainability is a way of life that asks us to cultivate happiness from that which we have, instead of expecting happiness to come from that which we can purchase.

A sustainable world will look very different than a world based on consumer acquisition.

A sustainable world begins in our own minds.  Sustainability says, “what I have is enough,” and uses that foundation as a basis to do the inner work necessary to cultivate happiness.  Instead of seeing the world as a vast resource to be exploited, the attitude of sustainability seeks to live in harmony with the world and minimize human impact in order to preserve it for future generations.

A sustainable world will not be focused on the production of new consumer items.  Today, we all work to get rich, so that we can purchase things.  In a sustainable world, we will not work to get rich, but to maintain our essentials so that we can have the free time to cultivate happiness.

A sustainable world will honor mental and physical health.  Today, there are a variety of diseases that accrue due to our unhealthy lifestyle, diseases of the mind as well as diseases of the body.  Because we sit for so many hours of the day, we get heart disease later in life, and we develop cancers due to the poisons we put in the air and the earth.  Because we are constantly looking for happiness in consumer acquisition, we develop addictive and delusional traits that lead to psychosis and greater feelings of unhappiness.  A sustainable world will ask us to confront these ills, and heal them.

A sustainable world will ask us to take individual responsibility for our every day needs.  In a sustainable world, we will have to take a hand in guaranteeing our shelter, our food supply, our modes of transportation.   We will have to work with our friends and neighbors to ensure that those common necessities of life are shared by everyone, so that all can pursue their happiness in the way they see fit.

A sustainable world will have a different attitude towards technology.  We won’t use technology as a stand-in for human happiness, but we will use it as a tool in making our lives easier.

A sustainable world will be a world of peace.  Our current attitudes about acquisition play themselves out on the world stage this very moment.  What are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, if nothing other than America’s desire to acquire stable energy supplies and greater power in this world?  No, we don’t need to acquire any of those things.  We can do with what we have.  Ninety-nine percent of the wars in this world result from a desire to acquire resources from another.  When we adopt an attitude of sustainability, we will come to see war as the disrespect that it really is, both to its victims and to ourselves.

A sustainable world is a world based on the wisdom that we cannot acquire happiness.  Happiness comes about through cultivation of the soul, through self-examination, by looking at our lives and making constant improvements so that we can feel ever closer to the grand consciousness which permeates all of existence.  If we can adopt this attitude internally, then the world will reflect this attitude as well.

The problems of the world today are the problems of unhappiness.  We are all just looking to be happy.  There is nothing wrong with this desire, but we should be critical of the methods we use to obtain happiness.  And we must discard those methods that do not in fact bring us happiness, ways of life like consumerism.

We can fix a lot of the problems of the world today with a new attitude: an attitude of sustainability.  It is a difficult thing to examine this collective way of life called consumerism which we live day-in and day-out, without thought of any alternative.  But it is a way of life that is killing us, and killing the planet, and prevents us from being happy.  It is time to think of another way.

What do you have to lose in this endeavor, other than your own misery?

When you quiet your mind, and start to look at life with fresh eyes, one of the first things you will notice is the amount of struggle on this Earth.  If you have traveled and seen poverty and hopelessness as it exists in so many places on this planet, you will know that the struggle for food and water is a reality for millions.  But even in the rich countries, there is struggle as well.  There is struggle to find good work, to find a good place to live, to find a good lover, to experience good moments in life.

Struggle is ongoing; it is ceaseless.  We wake up, and we begin our struggles.  We struggle to get out of bed.  We struggle to get to work on time.  We struggle to leave work at an early hour.  We struggle to eat a good dinner.  We struggle to have a little joy and relaxation.  Then, when we are done, we struggle to get to sleep, so that we can wake up and start struggling all over again.

We are trained to struggle.  But this was not always so.  If you know children, you will know that children do not struggle.  Children are spontaneous.  It is only adults who are not spontaneous; spontaneity has been beaten out of them.

When you see the war on this planet, and the lust for power and the quest for resources, when you see all these things, you should learn to see the struggle that has sparked them.  I don’t mean the geopolitical strategy or the economic motivations or anything like that.  You should learn to see the struggle of the individual people involved in those events, their inner psychological battles they wage against themselves every day.  It is the workings of those minds, the inner clockwork — that is the source of war and misery.  The president and the prime minister struggle internally, and then they take that struggle out on the entire world.  The person who cannot accept himself is the first person to call for war on the other.

There is a seeming paradox about existence that must be explained.  It is true that there is a universal consciousness, of which we are all individually apart of; and it is also true that there is no larger consciousness than that which is contained in our own individual minds.  Do you see this paradox?  Everything outside our minds is connected, and is one; and at the same time, there is also nothing beyond our perceptions.  Both of these things are true.

Of course, this is not really a paradox — our minds operate at the same wavelength of the universal consciousness; the two are both one and the same.  But because of the struggle, because we have been taught from an early age to dress up our egos and compete and kill each other, we have lost touch with this basic universalism, a universalism that all other nature comprehends.  The mind is the universe, and the universe is the mind; open your mind, and you will explore the universe.

This, too, you must see — the universe does not struggle.  The universe is effortless.  That is its way.  The universe is chaos, and chaos is effortless.  Yet chaos is in fact the only true order.  Again, a seeming paradox, but only because we do not yet understand.

Nature is effortless.  Anything of grandeur that Nature accomplishes results from its lack of effort.  Nature will set the stage, but it will then allow events to transpire as they will.  There is so much energy and effort in a hurricane, in a giant storm.  But it will not destroy a mountain.  On the other hand, the effortless march of a glacier, inching forward decade by decade, propelled only by its own gravity, its own inertia — this will hollow the greatest of mountains.  This is the effortlessness of Nature.

Nothing in Nature struggles against itself.  It is only human beings that struggle against themselves.  You feel shame, you feel anxiety, you feel paranoid, you feel insecure — that is the result of your struggle against yourself, your hatred of yourself, your refusal to love and accept everything about you.  The stars do not struggle or complain about their place in the universe.  It is only the human being who looks up to those same stars and laments and struggles against his or her purpose.

And when people are not struggling, they feel so worthless.  They have to constantly be busy or be amusing themselves.  They cannot face a moment when there is nothing happening, a moment in which they simply exist in that beautiful potential which accompanies all genuine periods of silence.  This is a moment of real peace, of real serenity — people cannot stand that moment.  Look at people when they are by themselves, they cannot stand themselves.  They need other people, a friend or a boyfriend or a pet or anything that will take away the utter solitude of existence.  Yet solitude is the only truth of this existence.  You are alone, just like this universe is alone.

When you put down the struggle, you can really start to listen.  You can listen to what this reality is trying to tell you.  At every moment, this unified fabric of consciousness that we call reality is constantly showing you new things about the world and about yourself.  When you start to listen, you will start to be happy, because you will come to understand more and more the paradox that you have both total control and no control over the direction of your life.  This is similar to the paradox of the universe — that it is everything, and that it is nothing as well, just a perception of your own mind.  In the same way, the universe controls everything, and you also control the universe.

This is the final mystery that must be unraveled, if you wish to be totally free.

In Daoism, it is written that when you cease to struggle, you become one with the Dao.   Lao Tzu wrote centuries ago:

If any one should wish to get the kingdom for himself, and to
effect this by what he does, I see that he will not succeed. The
kingdom is a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing. He
who would so win it destroys it; he who would hold it in his grasp
loses it.

The course and nature of things is such that
What was in front is now behind;
What warmed anon we freezing find.
Strength is of weakness oft the spoil;
The store in ruins mocks our toil.

Hence the sage puts away excessive effort, extravagance, and easy
indulgence.

God is effortless.  God does nothing with effort.  God is the rolling waterfall that falls effortless and tumbles below, roaring with the power of certainty, of collision, of both creation and destruction.  God is the ocean dancing to the beck and call of the gravity of the Moon, ever approaching and ever distancing, like two lovers who both hunger and fear the reunion of their essences.  God is the Sun, continually pulsing through countless cycles of nuclear fusion not for any other purpose than because that is its purpose, and in so doing, bathes this planet with its energies and allows life to flourish.

Something we have lost in the West is the ability to let things go, and in a fashion, to tumble with the waterfall.  Destruction is part of life.  It is pointless to struggle against those things that have already been lost.  We suffer so much because we insist on clinging to the dead, to the decrepit, to things that have outlived their usefulness.

In India, Hindus believe that the god of destruction, Shiva, lives in the Himalayas.  Shiva is a destroyer god, but destruction is not feared in Hinduism; this is why millions of people worship Shiva.  Destruction sweeps aside all the old habits, all the destructive patterns we accrue so thoughtlessly in our lives.  The force of Destruction sees the filth that we put ourselves through and washes it off of us.  It is good to wipe all that stuff away, every now and then.

When there is no struggle, there is total freedom.  You respond to events in a new way.  You create the future, and direct it to your will.  You unite once more with the universe, and the universe unites with you.  This is the Kingdom of Lao Tzu, and the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is right there, right in front of you.  But you won’t ever find it, if you struggle for it.

It is easy to forget the basic truth that the winner of the American presidential election in November will not be the person who is most qualified.  It will not even be the person who gets the most votes (as Al Gore found to his detriment in 2000).  Rather, it will be the person who wins the most states.

And in order to win the most states, you need to appeal to a majority of voters.  Not an overwhelming majority; the winner-take-all system of presidential politics only requires you to secure 51 percent of each state in order to carry it.

Those are the rules of the game.  And if the campaign of Barack Obama does not change its tactics, and soon, it may find itself losing as a result of the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President.

At heart, Americans are populists, and they love candidates with populist streaks.  They flock to candidates who they can relate to and who speak their language, even if those candidates do not end up winning.  This is the double-edged sword of traditional populist candidates: outside of the elite class, they may have been able to garner popular support, but could never actually win high office.

The history of American politics is littered with the corpses of populist candidates who were indeed a force to be reckoned with, yet who could never master the fact that you had to carry states in order to become president, and not just be popular with the people.   Ross Perot secured 18 percent of the popular vote in 1992 — a stunning figure — but failed to carry a single state; as a result, he was never a real threat to the status quo.

Yet enter John McCain, a seasoned politician, and his choice for Vice President, Sarah Palin.  While many have declared this move a sign of desperation by the McCain campaign, it reflects McCain’s reputation as a “maverick”, and is politically deft.  Like his populist hero, Theodore Roosevelt, McCain is gambling that Palin’s charm and ready ability to connect with average Americans will produce victory.  She is truly an outsider to Washington, which makes her selection a gamble, but also provides that populist appeal that simply cannot be manufactured.

Given the tone and spirit of Ms. Palin’s speech as she accepted her party’s nomination for Vice President, it is clear that she will be a formidable force in this race.  Many American voters, who yearn for a politician who will “feel their pain,” will be attracted her to plain-speaking candor.  She has presented herself as the average mother next door, the hockey-mom who joined the PTA and then suddenly found herself governor of the biggest state in the Union.  This type of caricature will appeal to many people.

In addition, she toes the Republican Party’s line on militarism quite effectively, making it seem patriotic, even maternal, to call for continued war against all enemies.  Obama tried to out-maneuver McCain’s foreign policy expertise by selecting Joe Biden as his vice president, but Biden’s in-your-face mannerisms may be too uncouth to an American electorate that approves of torture so long as it’s in the dark.  Who do you want comforting your children that what we do to terrorists, while abhorrent, is necessary? Americans may prefer the softer features of Palin as such a spokesperson for this attitude.

It does not matter that Ms. Palin is potentially ignorant of foreign affairs or economic theory.  She is not trained in a profession, such as Obama and Biden (both are lawyers).  But this will only help her.  Her lack of credentials will appeal to American voters in the same way that George W. Bush’s lack of finesse appeared to help him against the then stiff and avuncular Al Gore.

In America’s recent electoral history, the importance of capturing the populist sentiment is well known.  Bush won in 2000 due to this appeal. In 2004, the war made this easy — Bush cautioned that as a “war president,” the nation had no choice but to select him once more in order to secure victory in the War on Terror, and the nation complied.

Before the summertime, it looked as if Obama was the candidate who had tapped into the populist spirit.  He ran on his anti-war stance and his outsider status in the Senate.  His internet fundraising is legendary, as well as his ability to bring out young voters.

Now, his populist appeal is in considerable danger.  Obama’s move to the center of the political spectrum following the primaries has not won favors amongst his base who were initially energized by his campaign.  His selection of Joe Biden as Vice President was not the spirited choice many had hoped for.

In politics, experience and intelligence, even charisma, mean little if they do not translate into victory.  And in America, the people vote for those politicians who give off that populist appeal.  Americans are guided by an innocent, almost naive sense that the politicians who connect with them are the ones who will help them.  Sarah Palin gives this impression.

I am not suggesting that Ms. Palin is qualified to hold high political office.  She certainly does not have the academic experience of Obama, nor the political experience of Biden. And like all bona fide populists, she is terribly unpredicable.  There is no way to know how she will fall on a certain issue ahead of time.  This is why populists typically run third party campaigns, and why populists can oftentimes be dangerous — too popular for their own good.  The same charisma that has propelled her to the spotlight may become a threat to the republic itself.  With the people at your side, the power of a politician becomes truly unstoppable.

Nonetheless, there is no test to become President, and no need for qualifications other than to be 35 years of age and born on American soil.  The only test is given out by the people themselves.  In 2000, the people chose George W. Bush, albeit with the help of the Supreme Court.  In 2004, the people once more chose Bush.  Ms. Palin’s appeal to the electorate is a reflection not so much of her own experiences, but the desires of those who will vote for her.  Americans do not want someone they view as an elitist to occupy the highest position in the country, for whatever reason.  If Obama does not realize this now, then his chances of winning will dwindle.  He must seek to recapture the populist mantle back from McCain and Palin in some way, or else he will face defeat in November.