We are in a time of extreme imbalance. Imbalance is the result of accumulation in excess. Accumulating in excess is the precursor of change. When a river swells to excess with accumulated rains, it must, of necessity, overwhelm its banks and flood the lands—a time of great change indeed!
The accumulation of angst through decades of stagnant repression has broken through to revolution in the Middle East Arab Spring. The accumulation of excessive wealth in the hands of the few has sprung another spring of protest upon the “wall” of Wall street.
The excessive stranglehold upon the economy—from whatever tainted, purist, or natural source—presses now upon the spirit to relinquish its attachment to materialism in excess as a source of meaning in life. The flood of deprivation drowning the planet is pressing human life into a new, sustainable balance.
There is no restraining the floods of change currently unleashed upon us. No corrective action can shore us up or return us to an old world balance.
We are in a different world now. The environment is rapidly shifting, the masses are wiser, more interconnected than ever, and the ruling platitude of unlimited growth and expansion has proven unsustainable.
We find ourselves truly at a major evolutionary juncture: Accumulation in excess as a way of life, as a planetary economy, is unsustainable. What will come next?
What is called for is a new paradigm that separates true needs from want, hunger from appetite. Accumulation in excess derives not from true need and hunger but from want and appetite. Want and appetite are abstractions, projections of value attached to things. From this projection derives the equation: more things = greater value. This is the equation of addiction. Addiction is accumulation in excess. Addiction is the human condition at this current evolutionary juncture.
The ethereal impulse behind addiction is spirit. Spirit seeks greater life, greater possibility. Spirit projected onto matter always seeks more for completion: more love, more alcohol, more numbness, more freedom, more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more money, more food, more, more, more.
If we are to find safe passage through this time of great change we must satisfy spirit in spirit terms. We must lift our spirit’s longings off our material world and allow our beleaguered planet to restore its balance.
We are energetic beings. Energy is the home of spirit and spirit longing. The ultimate adventure that awaits us is our energy body, the body that lives on beyond the material world, the body that journeys in infinity. We all have access to it in this life, but only if we shift. The more we cycle in excessive accumulation of material things, the longer we remain in avidya—ignorance—yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.
Fulfillment in this life requires us to explore and meet our deepest needs: material and spiritual. But if we refuse to recapitulate—where we free our spirit from our material experiences—we remain frozen, unable to find fulfillment in spirit or body. One cannot substitute for the other. A spirit being who shuns the body—a spirit in excess—results in a being in need of reincarnation. Likewise, a physical being who shuns the spirit will find itself steeped in addiction, bound to the spirit, projected onto matter.
Such is the condition of now. Accumulation in excess—unsustainable and uncontainable. The walls are coming down in floods of revolution. May we find safe passage as spirits soaring in material balance.
In dedication to the soaring spirit of Steve Jobs,
Chuck