Rural Values

Common Assumption

Current Economic Climate

Strange Taboo

Top Soil

Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis

     It is a common assumption among members of dominant cultures that their victims or victims' descendants should be temperate in their expressions of grief, so as not to arouse feelings of guilt, hostility or anger in the dominant society. Must the rape victim remain silent and deferent to protect the rapist's psychological comfort? Should Jewish people forget the holocaust so as to no longer embarrass Germany?

      When the dominant culture insists on stating that God gave this land to Americans, it makes a blatantly racist statement, which was, by the way, also expressed by Afrikaners in South Africa in their defense of Apartheid, and which is shared by all aggressors and their descendants who attempt to not only rewrite history, but to elevate such brutal invasions to the status of religious myths involving perverted concepts of God or of glorious divine inspiration, as in the case of the idea of Manifest Destiny.

      When a person, a group or a nation are unwilling to admit the reality of their past behaviors, it is because the ideologies, the basic assumptions, world views and perceptions which inspired those behaviors are still part of their characters, and to question the behaviors would be to threaten core beliefs.  No God gave this land, from Northern Canada to the tip of South America, to Indo-Europeans.  They took it by deception, lying to indigenous people when it was more expedient and cheaper to sign mock treaties, treaties that were all meant to be broken, than to fight, and they took it by force, by brutality and treachery when indigenous people refused to believe those lies.

      The obscene arrogance of the race that called itself superior to the world's colored peoples was the driving force of aggression, besides greed, or a pathological hunger for power and wealth, which caused European kingdoms and empires to wage endless and brutal wars against each other for centuries. Contrary to a popular historical myth, people did not come to North America to worship, anymore than the Spanish went to Mexico to "save" souls or the French and British went to Canada to sample maple syrup.

     They all came, uninvited, because the land was free of charge, rich and seemingly endless. They came because their continuous and absurd wars had depleted their nations' coffers, and they were scouting the world for new sources of wealth. European powers competed to grab this continent, and they did so not to make it into a church, but to access its wealth and exploit its resources. 

      They came as others went to Australia, Africa, India, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and attempted to overtake China and Japan. If anything was an object of worship in these endeavors of unwarranted aggression, it was what is still worshipped to this day among most members of dominant cultures and their leaders: power and wealth, which explains why such cultures still have great difficulty coming to term with historical truths of past transgressions, because to question such actions is also to question the very idea of dominant power, which obviously still forms the foundation of a dominant civilization.

      Of all the events which tarnish American history with shame and dishonor regarding its dealings with indigenous people, none are so revolting and criminal than those which took place in California and Southern Oregon during the gold rush. The fact that these events are still suppressed by the dominant culture, labeled "old cans of worms" which should not be disturbed, clearly demonstrates that no healing and no significant transformation have taken place in the psyche of the majority of the members of the dominant society, who still come up with endless arguments and rationalizations as to why, in their view, the real history of Native people is without importance or significance, and should remain buried in denial and forever ignored.

      To opt not to stand in the face of the truth but to run under the cover of lies and denials is, under any circumstance, a cowardly choice which perpetuates all possible ills and breeds spiritual imbalance. To do so while professing to be religious and a believer is to be a hypocrite, it is to compound dishonesty upon cowardice and more dishonesty.

      Victims can heal themselves by forgiving their aggressors, they have this eternal spiritual freedom. Victimizers, however, cannot heal without acknowledging the nature of their actions. To do so is crucial for them, it is a fundamental spiritual law, which by the way is also taught in Christianity in the form of the acknowledgement of personal "sins", the meaning of the word being, in the original language, "mistakes".

     Will the descendants of those who came to this continent as thieves and invaders, taking what did not belong to them, keep on insisting that they had nothing to do with it, while nevertheless enjoying the spoils of a so called conquest, walking on a land whose original inhabitants were routed by lies, epidemics, mass murder and by decades of governmental persecution, and partaking of the wealth of this land as the great-grandson of a wealthy gangster would benefit from his ancestor's criminal activities while protected by some immoral laws?

     Is there a spiritual law, anywhere, which states that a person should freely benefit from the outcomes of murder and thievery, as long as he does not commit these acts himself?

     If there is such a law, it can only come from a false religion, a religion ideologically interpreted to be used as a tool to numb the conscience of a dominant civilization, a civilization which has not yet healed or changed to the point of understanding that dominant power is spiritually abhorrent and practically obsolete, because never leading to peace and respect, but to inequity and coercion.

      It has been forcefully stated by some members of the dominant culture that native people should, and must, feel honored by sport mascots, having really no choice in the matter. Most of them do not feel this way, but they will all be honored by the truth, when the truth comes, at last, from America itself, and native people are finally acknowledged by the dominant society to matter, not as cultural curiosities, not as basket makers, pow wow dancers or totem poles carvers who produce collectibles, but as human beings whose ancestors suffered unspeakable crimes and who still bear the burden of trans-generational post traumatic stress disorders, as do the descendants of survivors of the holocaust.    

      In the final analysis, the acknowledgment of historical truths is a question of humanity, for real history is not an intellectual or ideological exercise, it is written in blood and tears by living, breathing, feeling people. All truths are a matter of opening and freeing the heart, and those who already have an open heart understand and are not offended or frightened by any truth. Those who refuse to open their heart, who lack this fundamental courage, will instead continue to feel threatened by guilt, and will attempt to keep on running and hiding from it, as Cain is said to have done after killing his brother Abel.

     How long they do this depends solely on how comfortable they remain in partaking of the general spiritual sickness of their own dominant culture, and on actively or passively perpetuating such sickness.

     Given the current economic climate, or economic storm, money and its availability in the form of wages, credit or profit, or lack thereof, is once again foremost on everyone's mind, even the very rich few who without a doubt are currently developing new schemes to profit from the misery of the many (this is usually called "seizing opportunities", the way the sick or exhausted African zebra is the seized opportunity of the hyena).

      Let's not be exceedingly fooled by talks of compassion at any societal levels: ours remains mostly a dog eat dog world, and many of the top winners of such a senseless survival contest appear determined to make it ever more unforgiving for the losers.

      To the iron-willed conqueror, the weak are a burden.  To those who espouse social Darwinism (and they are the majority at the very top), the poor are meant to be exploited, abused, and sacrificed whenever deemed necessary and with nature's blessing, since according to Darwin's fantasies, the elimination of the so-called weak is nature's plan.  It is incidentally extremely ironic that a culture would be so seemingly eager to model its behavior according to an imaginary natural law when in every other respect displaying contempt for nature, and being so antagonistic and hostile to nature as to strive to overcome it in every possible way.

      Who is weak, and who is the fittest?  In business as in life, generosity, trust, innocence, vulnerability, sensitivity, openness, compassion, respect, a spirit of cooperation and sharing and even having a conscience can be somewhat detrimental to wealth accumulation and preservation.

      The successful top business model is predatory, more often than not ruthless, exploitative of the ignorance, misfortune, or weaknesses of others.  At the highest levels the aim is no longer to compete but to eliminate the competition, as in an all out war.

      Big business is indeed war, just as war has always been big business, the collateral damage being the majority of the world population, which is mostly the poor. The fittest is then the successful predator, and the poor, the working class and today  increasingly the middle class, are its prey.

      While most small businesses offer real, valuable, honest services and products, many large businesses and multinational corporations simply feed on the public the way a wood tick feeds on a mammal, or government feeds on the taxpayer.  The problem with the law of the jungle, however, is not so much that so few get to exploit so many, this sickness has always been part of the civilized world ever since the Roman Empire, but that the acquisition of wealth and power for their own sake leads to the development of philistine cultures, where the focuses in living are no longer meaning and quality but survival and quantity.

      Mostly gone are, for example, reasonable interests in art, poetry, literature, philosophy, unless the popular trash that passes for such leads to marketable formulas and significant corporate profits. The barbarians are no longer at the gate, they are in the temple, and are in a position to dictate, with an implacable logic that is exclusively grounded in the harsh principles of money making, the terms of the world enduring slavery, which is that of barely existing under the burden of society's ever more oppressive commercialism.

      The habit of an obsessive pursuit of money for its own sake appeals to people whose uneducated motivations cause them to be oblivious and impermeable to any kind of refinement, sophistication or higher aspirations, to display a hatred of even the slightest traces of intellectualism, to distrust imaginative, independent, creative, free-thinking individuals, to favor conformity, uniformity, blind group loyalty as in nationalism, and to delight and perhaps even take pride in idiocy, as long as it is group idiocy, as can be seen in the media and mass trends.

      Let's compare objects created in previous centuries, to today's mass-produced junk: most old objects, antiques, bear the mark of their human makers, a rare and beautiful quality of heart and soul involvement and individuality. Today's objects only bear the mark of speedy profitability, they are vacant of all humanity or quality, as are becoming our lives: plastic, rushed, impersonal increasingly insensitive and hollow, barely holding up, and ruled by the crass corporate model of profit at all cost, by the ideas that what is not profitable is irrelevant and what impedes profits is the enemy of  progress.

      In this regard, the authentic artist, the true poet, whose main motivations are anything but money, are suspiciously regarded as being almost seditious, adversarial to the norm, while the norm, first defined by the productivity of the assembly line, now causes workers and professionals to compete with an increasingly faster electronic standard of productivity, natural time being perceived to be an obstacle to monetary gain, which is to say that our very own imperfect humanity could currently be defined to be an obstruction to profit.

      What kind of world is this, then? A world that, for those who reject the social conditioning that encourages relentless competition, the manic pursuit of material rewards and a drive to achieve recognition within the boundaries of limited social frameworks, makes no more sense than a treadmill would make sense to someone who would rather run free in the wild open prairie.

      To make sense of a world that keeps people down, immobilized, functioning like robots and barely living, and whose only practical freedom is financial freedom, without which life remains, under any form of government, slavery, one has to become a willing and obedient hostage of conditioning indeed, and follow this vastly unintelligent social script as closely as a prisoner follows incarceration rules.  

      The prison, the evil here, is not money itself, but the utter fantasy that high artificial living standards create happiness and fulfillment while more modest natural living standards cause misery and humiliation.  Why then are the richest people on earth are plagued by so many mental illnesses such as depression, bi-polar disorder, etc? Not to romanticize poverty and demonize wealth, but a simpler, calmer, more natural, authentic and cooperative way of life is in my opinion far superior to the mania of pillaging the earth to manufacture ever more toxic products and substances that are ever faster consumed and discarded while third world populations are exploited in every possible manner or even killed to keep this madness going. 

      What is today called material poverty becomes psychologically unbearable only within an environment that is culturally bare, alienating, and devoid of authentic human fulfillment, a cultural, spiritual and psychological wasteland. Where and when populations have very close family units, meaningful social roles and connections, essential values and a propensity to fulfill real, natural human needs rather than artificial desires and fancy cravings, a humbler lifestyle is not perceived to be anymore humiliating or unfulfilling than not having a 3000 square foot house would have been perceived to be damaging to the self-worth or well-being of a 19^th century Inuit, or than not growing up in Beverly Hills and not going to summer vacation in the Hampton is damaging to the average American child's psyche.

      It is time to initiate new social and cultural standards to restore a sense of independent self-worth to the individual, to understand that frantic productivity and consumerism are not conditions fundamental to fulfillment, and a quasi imperial standard of living is not essential to human happiness,  so that the earth is no longer trashed and the future generations sacrificed to elevate the low self-esteem and fill the inner void of the neurotic and the spiritually vacant. 

     There is a strange taboo regarding anger in many cultures. This may not seem to be an important topic, yet a healthy expression of feelings is at the root of individual psychological health as well as perhaps relevant to the restoration of balance within societies that are plagued by violence, child abuse, substance abuse and other disorders.

      Depression is becoming widespread. Today it could be triggered, in some individuals, by the global economic downturn, as well as the constant barrage of bad news spewed by the corporate media that seems to derive a perverse satisfaction in spreading hopelessness and fear. However it is generally believed that the original causes of depression are not well understood, so scientists choose the narrowly materialistic and seemingly practical approach of focusing on brain chemistry.

      The fact that they do not appear to make the connection between suicide, which is a form of murder, of violence against the self to which depression can lead, and suppressed anger or rage, is significant, as it is a sign of how much anger has become a taboo subject and how little it is understood in our societies, of how much it is regarded as undesirable and irrelevant.

      There is a profound difference between sadness and depression.  Some people confuse them, yet sadness is an actual feeling, depression is an absence of feeling, a general numbness and sense of emotional paralysis and hopelessness that come from the suppression of the feeling process. It forms a self-destructive pattern whereby thoughts and emotions are turned against the self, preventing the vital flow of healthy self-expression as well as growth and reaching out, and leading to stagnation and deep despair.

      At the root of many depressions is suppressed and often unconscious anger, the more intense the anger the more profound the depression, suppressed rage occasionally leading to suicide, or to murder and suicide. Such anger, such rage can linger just below consciousness, as parents and other adult authorities often quickly correct children whenever they express appropriate, healthy angry feelings, training them to control such emotions.

      Anger is also culturally suppressed. Anger is the elephant in the room no one sees, because most have been conditioned to suppress it as soon as it emerges, associating it with negativity. Anger is not "nice", it is not pretty, sweet or cute. It can be hurtful and appears destructive, like a storm.

     What makes anger destructive? The steam that escapes from a functioning pressure cooker does not cause any damage; block any means of escape, and the pressure cooker explodes. Adults who have been trained to suppress legitimate feelings of anger since early childhood accumulate such anger to the point of self-implosion as in the case of depression, of explosion in abusive, violent behaviors, or of self-destruction through the weakening of their own immune system, as the suppression of such feelings takes a very heavy toll on the body. It is indeed a lot more exhausting and stressful to suppress rather than to express feelings, which explains the exhaustion that accompanies depression.

      What is not understood in this process of the suppression of anger, or of any other feeling, is that such feelings do not vanish just because an individual or society wishes they would. All feelings seek and require expression, and will find a way out regardless of how carefully people attempt to seal them in. This requirement can lead to depression in the sense that depression is the ultimate expression of the negation of feelings: in this paradoxical process the person can only express forms of self-denial and self-destruction, as all other expressions are blocked. The other unintended outcome of the suppression of anger is an unconscious expression of anger: offensive, provocative behaviors that are grounded in suppressed rage but that an individual is not aware of displaying, which can provoke normal angry reactions from people who are victimized by these behaviors; ironically, the said individual then often reacts with explosive rage to such angry reactions, having been given, from his/her own perspective, a legitimate cause to "let it out" and have intense and apparently irrational temper tantrums.

      What is the difference between appropriate and inappropriate anger, between healthy, normal, natural anger and irrational anger? Society does not know or willfully ignores the difference. Parents, most of whom have acquired neurotic traits, do not make the difference in their children. Schools do not make the difference in their students. Some religious and some superficially thinking pseudo-spiritual people do not make the difference within themselves or anyone else, so paranoid are they about "evil", "negativity", "darkness" or "toxicity". And many therapists and counselors busy themselves suppressing both in their patients, focusing on behavior and control rather than feelings and their full expression and integration. In this sense they become a kind of psychological police, unwittingly doing their part in the perpetuation of a repressive and neurotic culture, frequently prescribing or recommending mental straight jackets (medications) to their patients.

      If you are either drawn to conflicts, to confrontations, to power struggles, to fights, or are conversely afraid of such things and avoid them at all costs, you have most likely suppressed your anger and are either terrified of the lingering, potentially destructive monster you sense you have created within yourself, or are propelled to let it out regularly for a cathartic release of the chronic inner tension your suppression of anger is causing you to experience.

      If on the other hand you have no problem expressing anger whenever it arises in a manner that is not cruel, not underhanded, not mean, not hurtful but direct, real and to the point, and if you feel naturally compelled to walk away from someone who consistently provokes such anger in you rather than being drawn into a fight to the finish or a perpetual struggle as are so many, you are most probably healthy, that is to say free of residual anger. Being free of such pathological anger, you are most likely able to feel all other feelings (joy, pleasure, love) that much more deeply and satisfactorily.

      Indeed the suppression of anger, or of any feeling, eventually causes an inability to feel other feelings adequately, until a person no longer knows who he or she is, what he or she wants, having become driven by unconscious impulses, compulsions and the dictates of society and culture rather than by conscious needs, consequently afraid of him/herself, of what could be festering within and lurking below conscious awareness, and frequently inclined to supporting the implementation of social systems, from governments to religions, whose prevalent ideology is one that is characterized by denial, suppression, repression and control.

     The police state begins in neurosis, and neurosis begins in the suppression of feelings.

      "In an unreal society, the simple truth is revolutionary" Arthur Janov, The Primal Revolution.

"Today, our top soil is being ruined, the earth is heating up, the ozone layer-the earth's protective skin-is being destroyed, and a synthetic toxic chemical film is building up on all biological life. The birth defect rate has doubled in the last twenty-five years, and the leading cause of death from disease for children under ten years old is cancer.  Part of the crisis in the environment is because of our crisis in democracy. Corporate polluters are using large sums of money to literally steal our sacred democracy. Years ago, if you poisoned someone's well or cattle, you were hanged or went to jail. Today, our weak environmental laws  -brought to you by Exxon, Chevron, DuPont, and Union Carbide - say its okay to poison and kill people as long as profits are made and a few jobs are provided."

 John O'Connor

The American Promise, 1991, From the book Heaven Under Our Feet

     Let us look at the environmental legacy of President Bush, summed up rather intensively in his last minute "midnight regulations" silently shoved down the throat of the American public in December 2008, some of which have remained difficult to overturn by the new administration.

      In early December 2008, Bush finalized a rule that would allow the coal industry to dump waste from mountaintop mining into neighboring streams and valleys.  A separate rule would allow Big Coal to build plants next to some of the nation's most spectacular national parks.

      In a rule that became effective three days before Obama took office, Bush opened nearly 2 million acres of mountainous lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for the mining of oil shale, a process that drains precious water resources, is energy intensive, and would transform the entire region, called the Green River Formation, into an industrial park.

      Circumventing the Clean Water Act, the Bush administration approved last minute regulations that would allow animal waste from factory farms to seep, unmonitored, into America's waterways. The regulations would leave it to the farms to decide whether their pollution is dangerous enough to require them to apply for a permit.  A separate rule would exempt factory farms from reporting air pollution from animal waste.

      In October 2008, the White House exempted more than one hundred major polluters from monitoring their emissions of lead, a deadly neurotoxin. The Bush Administration also allowed industry to treat three billion pound of waste as "recycling" each year, and to burn another two hundred million pounds of hazardous waste reclassified as "fuel", increasing cancer-causing air pollution.  Nearly 90% of the factories that are now permitted to burn toxic waste were cited for already violating environmental laws prior to these new legislations.

      As the world appears to be entering a global crisis that is beyond the grasp of most nations to control, and that is almost certain to ultimately bankrupt most governments, the same old mentality prevails: keep raping the earth for short term profits, as in the 19^th century California gold rush, while people expect scientists to come up with magical solutions to clean up this mess.

      By ignoring the past, the modern world finds itself stuck on a path without direction- apart from the direction to the bank-and cannot visualize a realistic future, reduced, in the face of a potential global environmental disaster, to fantasize about space colonies or the rapture to save itself from its environmental sins.  This disconnected mental process characterizes a civilization that focuses on superficial symptoms rather than root causes, and that will do anything to avoid questioning itself, questioning the validity of its primordial assumptions.

      Yet it is these assumptions that determine the direction of the path the world has now taken and the outcome of the journey. By ignoring the philosophical foundations of western civilization, by dismissing the fact that thoughts and beliefs determine all human actions, we limit ourselves to treating the symptoms exclusively and to never addressing the real causes of the crisis, and consequently set ourselves up to promoting crisis-causing technologies and legislations as "solutions" to environmental crisis, and to do so indefinitely as when medications upon medications are prescribed to patients to counter the negative side effects of each respective medication, until the patient succumbs. 

      What are the philosophical roots of western civilization?

     To simplify greatly, the core of this original foundation is a mental vision of separation from nature. In the western worldview, wild nature was from the beginning of what is called civilization perceived to be a dangerous adversary to be tamed, to be conquered and controlled. The civilizing effort, represented by St George slaying the dragon, the dragon being feminine in most cultural traditions and symbolizing the outer and inner wilderness -  meaning untamed nature and the creative unconscious - has been to overcome and subdue this wilderness, to cut it to pieces and dismember it, to impose a new artificial patriarchal "order", a man-made "moral" ideal of authority over a natural world and a human psyche that are, to this day, still perceived to be chaotic, fundamentally immoral and antagonistic to human progress.    

      Unfortunately, this peculiar philosophical model fails to take into account two obvious and crucial facts many indigenous cultures still remember: nature is life itself, and humanity is not and cannot ever be separate from physical nature, not even for an instant, unless dead; consequently, what we do to nature we do to ourselves, to all life, and to the future generations, which means that when we treat nature as an enemy to be subdued and enslaved, we eventually overcome and enslave ourselves, as we have made, in thoughts and actions, all life the enemy.

      The current global environmental degradation, created by our abysmal alienation from nature and near total denial of natural laws, of a reality of balance, spontaneous order and intelligence within nature, should tell us that there is something extremely and dangerously wrong with our thinking process.

     But it is precisely because we are trained to never question our false assumption of separation from nature that we imagine that it is by seeking to achieve ever more mastery over nature, to ultimately overcome nature completely and make it irrelevant and obsolete, that we will save humanity and civilization from obliteration.

      Rather than choosing solutions that would convey a spirit of cooperation with nature, we still opt for more industrial and technological destruction, for dominant, aggressive and insensitive technologies, because we are still hell bent on asserting our self-proclaimed superiority and dominion over the natural world, we still think we are at war with life, in the laboratory as well as in the industrial park.

     We still think we have been granted the quasi-divine right and abilities to mess with nature, to play with the very fabric of life, to rearrange the DNA of food with bio-engineering as if we were toddlers merely playing with building blocks, to clone living creatures, we salivate at the prospects of the fusion of artificial and human intelligence, and we fantasize re-creating life in the laboratory to match our own standards, which are ironically anti-life.

     Indeed the wet dream of the civilized world is one of absolute mastery; it is one of a madness of command and control over all life, artificial and natural, from conception to oblivion; it is literally a dream of absolute dictatorship over the physical and mental worlds, a fantasy that could be expected from an extremely disturbed mental patient, yet it is assumed to be rational and reasonable originating from our cultures because we say that it is, as a mental patient would, lost in the trance of his delusions. If we were not so enamored of the illusions this global technological civilization uphold to be truths, we could easily understand indeed that the civilized worldview is nothing more than the product of a dangerous trance, which causes us to act as if we were blind and deaf.

      We consequently do not question these insane pursuits, as they have become associated with what passes for progress, and to question this progress is to invite anathema: it is to invite ridicule and being verbally stoned to death by people who have been conditioned to automatically assume that the only thing that distinguishes them from savagery and ignorance is this absurd effort to conceive nature to be separate from and below humanity, and the only thing that can keep them from sinking back into this presumed ignorance is to keep waging this war of conquest against the natural world. 

      Western civilization, which has now become global and has almost completely obliterated all remaining holistic, traditional cultures, cultures that were sustainable and whose technologies were created in harmony with natural laws, has been allowed to accumulate much of this false and temporary dominant power by acting in accordance with this philosophical model of extreme antagonism and disrespect towards nature, because the natural world has an immense threshold of tolerance to abuse.

     Yet just as an alcoholic will certainly succumb after having abused his/her body for decades, the natural order, the timeless cycles and mechanisms of regeneration of the air, the water and the land will collapse under the assault of our overly aggressive, and chaos-causing technologies and practices, and will teach humanity a very severe lesson, as we insist on pursuing this highly irrational path of the attempted mastery of life by means that are incompatible with life, and that are the direct expression of a complete and tragic alienation from the spirit of life and from our own.  

      Because we refuse to acknowledge that a toxic environment originates from toxic ideas, because we do not understand that the poisons, the hundreds of dangerous chemicals we create that now saturate our bodies, and the destruction we cause in the environment, come from thoughts that are completely disconnected from the ways of nature, we persist in our vain effort to win this perceived conflict with nature, to assert ourselves as the superior species at any cost and by all possible means, damaging all we depend upon to live.

      We will not save ourselves without learning to truly love and appreciate the earth, which requires badly needed humility, and without understanding that nature and humanity are one, that all life is one, physically and spiritually. This means a major shift in a cultural fabric that, through Judeo-Christian traditions, has, for centuries, mostly defined physical life to be a curse tainted by an original sin, meant to be merely endured in a fallen world stalked by an ever present devil, until salvation.  For atheists, it means a major change from the prevalent scientific dogma that dictates that the physical world, outside of humanity, is devoid of any form of consciousness, of any form of meaning, intelligence or order, that it is merely empty matter destined to eventually self-destruct in chaos.   

      Only when we no longer conceptually separate the physical and the spiritual, the natural environment and humanity, and the other and the self, will we begin to understand our true nature and consequently our place in the universe, and perhaps embark on a seemingly new yet very ancient journey of gentle, humble and at last intelligent and realistic cooperation with the natural world and with each other.

      As long as we insist on remaining separate from and above nature in our minds, we remain deluded and dangerous to all life, to ourselves and each other, regardless of which technologies we adopt, because even green technologies and policies can be used to perpetuate lifestyles that are themselves out of balance and unsustainable, as the actual meaning of life still escapes us, because no spiritual or physical truths can be found in mental schemes of separation, conflicts and dominance over nature, but only in the non-dualistic comprehension of  the integrative qualities and complementary harmony of all aspects of natural life (meaning that all life is one and all polarities complement rather than oppose one another).

Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis

     While some blame specific ideologies for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the current recession, the actual source of the problem might not be exclusively political but also cultural.

      America has a unique cultural model, almost an archetype, not found to be so dominant in other parts of the world. The mold or model here is material success, or wealth, with all its trappings. It is metaphorically called the pursuit of happiness, but it remains as the original 19^th century first draft wording intended the pursuit of property, which could, today, also be more accurately called simple greed.

      This American dream, which has lately turned into a nightmare for many, usually mostly comprises a big house, a couple of cars or preferably the biggest SUVs that can be found anywhere on the planet, and the latest high-tech toys besides a television for each person living under a same roof, so family members not only do not have to speak but do not even have to see or spend time with one another, the outcome of which will later feed the need for psychotherapies and the content of popular mainstream television programs such as Dr Phil. 

      What is uniquely American is that, through the miracle of relatively easy credit, the trappings of success are acquired before success occurs.  In most other nations, ordinary people seem to understand they have to make money before deciding how to spend it.  You could call this simple logic and fundamental practicality, like planting a tree by the roots.

      In America, success, like most that is directed at the gullible masses, is not portrayed as being (successful) but as having (the trappings of success); it is not about reality but appearances, like politics and advertising, and like the media. Like all of what constitutes the popular culture.

      And it is about having it all right here right now, which could be described as a neurotic impulse, but is most often a symptom of immaturity. So people grab all they can today and worry about paying for it tomorrow, if ever.

      For most the dream is indeed materialistic, but the same frantic drive to have gratification without delays taints and defines everything,  from instant coffee to instant religious salvation and all in between, such as a thirst for instant metaphysical enlightenment, instant mastery in any field, instant weight loss, becoming ripped in four weeks, calling and finding your soul mate in seven weeks and becoming a multi-millionaire in a couple of months.

      One, two, three, by the time you snap your fingers diner is served, you and your toddlers speak three foreign languages fluently, you have lost forty pounds, your net worth has increased one thousand folds, and you look and feel better than when you were nineteen years old, all without effort whatsoever.

      This could be another aspect of the so-called rat race, since once you train or condition people to live frantically, they usually cannot ever slow down, not even to eat a decent meal or read and comprehend a sentence that has more than five words.  

      The cruel irony, which appears to be lost on so many in the mainstream culture, is that real success generally means greater freedom, what is also called financial independence, while acquiring the trappings of success without success translates, in practical terms, as abject, odious bondage, the type that justifiably inspired revolutions in previous centuries.

      Voluntary servitude is however the name of the game in today's society.

      Rather than making an initial effort and then perhaps getting rewarded, people are taught they should seek the reward first, which becomes as a ball and chain that cannot ever be enjoyed, because now comes the struggle to sacrifice for it for many very long years, coupled with the constant fear of loosing it all, the stress of which can produce cancers, ulcers, addictions, rampant divorces and very unhappy children.

      The system obviously generates and preys on such immaturity, and not just con artists with get rich quick schemes but banks, credit card companies, commerce and of course the government which offers all sorts of incentives, such as tax breaks, for so-called consumers to become ever more indebted, and which as a matter of fact long ago erected the financial and legal structures necessary for this endless exploitation of the populace.

      This structure tempts us to have it all now, and while it is presented by commerce as gaining status and reaching for fulfillment in glossy advertising and glorious commercials,  the hidden cost is drudgery and literal serfdom.

      In a consumer-driven economy, no laws will legislate intelligent, independent living, on the contrary. The more people spend money they do not have, the faster the engine runs, as it all is founded on illusions, on smoke and mirrors, like our paper money that is printed faster than monopoly money ever could, while the nation becomes bankrupt and the elite ever wealthier and more powerful. So what is the solution to such pervasive problems?

      The simplest solution might be to jump off the merry-go-round, to no longer consume, or as little as practically possible. If major banks and multinational corporations have indeed embraced a "globalist" agenda meant to level the world into a homogenous mass of paupers and slaves, let them pay the price. Become independent by recycling, growing, building, and bartering for your needs, and turn your back on a predatory system. Buy used whenever possible, and share and exchange information and knowledge to reclaim your power as a people, since the wannabe royalty, the elite, derives its power by dividing us, making us compete for crumbs like overcrowded rats in a laboratory cage. If success comes, enjoy the fruits of your labor, if not, enjoy life, but whatever you do, do it on your own terms rather than because you have been conditioned to fill the bottomless pockets of an elite that manipulates you to the detriment of your health, your sanity, your happiness, your life, and of those of the ones you love.

      The slogan "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" is proving accurate after all.