Lama Surya Das: Craving, Desire and Lust in a Consumer Society

Lama Surya Das
www.surya.org

"Craving, or lust, as it is sometimes called, is one of the primary five hindrances, or challenges, that Buddha warned seekers they would meet on the path to awakening," observes Lama Surya Das. "When Buddha Dharma speaks about craving, it implies psychological hunger and thirst, unhealthy desire, longing, attachment, and psychological fixation."

"Who among us," he asks, "is so completely filled that he or she is above "wanting" of any kind? Is there nothing wanting in your life right now? As we try to purify and refine our actions, we need to be aware of the myriad ways by which our desires create pitfalls on the spiritual path."

"Purifying oneself of craving and desire," Das notes, " is a complex and subtle process. The analogy of a misguided moth being consumed by the candle flame to which it is fatally attracted is a good one. Sometime," he observes, "we want something so badly that we think we can't possibly let go of our goal."

"Judge the moth by the quality of its candle," Rumi advises. For even our spiritual thirsts can prove a fatal distraction from true attainment. Wisdom traditions in all ages are rife with stories of great achievers who have been distracted by the sensual, the occult or other powers they have achieved, only to allow their final liberation to slip by the wayside.

"Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight," Rumi points out. "Be a connoisseur and taste with delight. Any wine will get you high," he cautions. "Judge like a king and choose the purest."

"On the spiritual path," warns Surya Das, "be prepared to confront compulsive desires again and again. Watch what you desire," he advises, "observe what attracts or repels you most. Notice what buttons are pushed in you by external stimuli, and how you respond to each of them. We have all invested emotional intensity and energy in wanting, achieving, accumulating and grasping," he points out.

"How does it happen? What is it for?" he asks. "Just round up the usual suspects and look them over - love, ego gratification, sex, sensual pleasures, money possessions, fame, security, power."

Looking at the proliferation of all these desire objects in our modern consumer society, Surya Das rightly asks: "Are we making Faustian deals with the devil?"

"It is said," Das points out, "that a thief's vision is so distorted that even when he meets a saint, all he can see is the saint's pocketbook. Ask yourself: Is there anything or anyone you crave so much that it clouds your judgment and vision? What do you hunger for? Is there anything that engenders feelings so intense that your pursuit of it becomes a substitute for furthering your inner development?"

"It has often been said," Das notes, "that everyone has a price. What is yours? Don't sell yourself short," he advises, "or you'll pay for it."

[Lama Surya Das, "Awakening the Buddha Within," pp. 219-220.]

Eckhart Tolle: On Ownership and Consumption

"The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, life objects to be used, then discarded."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

A New, Kosmocentric Paradigm

In a New-Age Emersonian rant, the narrator of "Cosmopolitical Thoughts on Leaving for Black Rock City, Nevada" (attached) raises recurrent questions about the survivability of humankind as a species (along with the survival of all other species) under our current socio-political paradigms. An advocate of a new "kosmocentric" understanding of life, the narrator of this great video clip offers a glimpse of an alternative to the industrial-productive, money-centered way we live now.

Of course, Black Rock City is the home of the Burning Man Festival, an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance, and leaving for such a destination is bound to focus one's mind on what can be done to advance through change our increasingly sclerotic and seemingly moribund post-modern society. This is accomplished in spades in the attached clip.

"Isn't apocalypse," our narrator asks, "the best-selling plot in today's mass media market?  Everybody knows the old world is coming to an end," he notes, "but because the horror of this reality is too much to take responsibility for the majority of us sit on the couch and pretend it is all just another form of entertainment. Fantasy has replaced forthrightness," he observes, "and imagination has withered to make way for shallow ideological affiliation with merely symbolic causes."

"Of course, symbolism is no mere trifle, and our sense of meaning is precisely what is at stake," he notes. And, thus, he asks:

"How are we to conceive of the human presence on the planet? Are we a cancerous growth or the incarnation of God on Earth? Are we to become once again a spiritual instead of a consumptive and pleasure-driven species? Are we to replace industrial with initiatory cosmology? Is our goal to worship, celebrate, and create, or to use, abuse, and destroy?"

"These are questions of the ultimate meaning of the universe," according to this New-Age Emerson, "and their answers," he points out, "determine how we inhabit the Earth."

A new study released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC") shows that approximately 25 per cent of Americans suffered from some form of mental illness last year, at a cost in terms of treatment and lost productivity in excess of $300 billion. Moreover, the CDC predicts that fully half of all Americans will suffer from some form of mental illness - ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression to suicide - at some point in their lifetimes. Indeed, 8.4 million Americans reported having suicidal thoughts in 2010, 2.2 million made plans to kill themselves, and 1 million attempted suicide.

Why, one asks, in a country devoted to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are Americans so evidently and profoundly unhappy?

The answer may be that the United States, more than nearly any other developed country, suffers from a common post-modern malaise, from a crisis of meaninglessness that only accentuates deeply flawed human thought structures. Alienated from their inner life and faced with the unraveling of a fictitious "American" dream, one wonders if Americans in the early 21st century are not suffering from the same sense of anomie that Emile Durckheim, the father of modern sociology, associated with increased suicide rates amongst nineteenth century Europeans citizens disaffected from their societies following epidemics and dislocations resulting from war.

"The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable," notes Eckhart Tolle in his best-seller, "A New Earth," observing that the human mind has proven itself to be "highly intelligent" particularly in the arts, technology, and science. "Yet," he notes, "its very intelligence is tainted by madness."

Moreover, he notes, "(s)cience and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other lifeforms, and upon humans themselves. That is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized. A further factor," he points out, "is that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating."

"The collective manifestation of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition," writes Tolle, "constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness."

"If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being," Tolle points out, "the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies" - his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals."

Such a collective diagnosis is far from exaggerated. If you do not recognize it, Tolle suggests that you watch the evening news, with its daily tales of war, terrorism, violence and mayhem, our collective madness is all too apparent.

With societies the world over hitting new lows in terms of their compassion for the individual, each other and the planet as a whole, is it any wonder that Americans mired in two apparently unresolvable wars, massive dislocations caused by financial hardship and unemployment, and with no end apparently in sight, are feeling blue? And yet, little or nothing is being done about it. If one in four Americans were suffering from an incurable and life threatening virus, one can assume that all the stops would be pulled out to find a cure. But is it possible, one wonders, to solve the problems of societal disintegration and looming crises portended by these skyrocketing rates of mental illness within the currently existing societal paradigms? Is time running out?

It was Einstein who famously said one cannot solve one's problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Tolle, too, clearly acknowledge that our current thinking is the problem, and that we cannot get to the solution utilizing that same mode of thinking that got us here.

(For more on Tolle's views on our "collective insanity" and the problems created by a strictly "consumer society", please listen to the audiobook readings from "A New Earth," below.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Self and Selfishness: A Sufi Perspective

"Sufism is concerned with the ways of following a spiritual path and with what gets us off track," write Fadiman and Frager in 'Essential Sufism.' "There is in an element in us," they note, "the nafs, that tends to lead us astray. This Arabic term is sometimes translated as 'ego' or 'self.' Other meanings of nafs include 'essence' and 'breath.'"

"In Sufism," they point out, "the term nafs is generally used in the sense of 'that which incites to wrongdoing.' This includes our egotism and selfishness, our greed and unending desire for more things, our conceit and arrogance. Perhaps the best translation for this part of us is the 'lower self.'

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

There was a poor fisherman who was a Sufi teacher.  Every day he would go fishing, and each evening he would distribute his catch amongst the poor of his village, trading a fish or two for vegetables and some basic essentials, and keeping a fish head or two with which he would make a fish-head soup for himself. Each evening, after finishing his soup he would sit in front of his hut, mending his fishing nets and sharing discourses with his students.

One evening, one of his students, a merchant, told the old fisherman that he would soon be traveling to Cordoba on business. The old man was delighted, and he charged his student with seeking an audience with his own teacher, the great Sufi metaphysician Ibn 'Arabi. "Tell him that my own spiritual growth is slow," the sheikh instructed his student, "and ask him what, if there is anything, I can do to improve my practice."

Arriving in Cordoba, the merchant sought an audience with Ibn 'Arabi, as instructed. He was overwhelmed by the grandeur of the great sheik's palace, the majestic marble columns and the fine silk draperies. When summoned to speak with the great sheikh, the merchant humbled himself and relayed his teacher's concerns. Ibn 'Arabi considered the merchant's request for a moment, and then said simply: "Tell him that he is still far too worldly."

Weeks later, the merchant returned to his village, still incensed at the temerity of Ibn 'Arabi, who amidst all his luxuries could say that his own humble teacher was too worldly. When he relayed Ibn 'Arabi's instructions to the fisherman, he expressed how upset he was by the hypocrisy of the renowned teacher. The fisherman told his student: "Do not be confused by material wealth and seeming abundance. We each may have as much wealth as our soul can handle. Ibn 'Arabi's great wealth was not merely material wealth, but great spiritual wealth as well."

"Besides," the fisherman added, "my teacher was right. I still love my fish heads too much!"

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"The lower self is not so much a thing as a process created by the interaction of the soul and the body." note Fadiman and Frager. "Body and soul are pure and blameless in themselves. However, when our soul becomes embodied, we tend to forget our soul-nature; we become attached to this world and develop such qualities as greed, lust, and pride."

"On the spiritual path and in life in general," they note, "we all struggle to do those things we clearly know are best for ourselves and others. We often struggle even harder to avoid those actions we know are wrong or harmful."

"Why the struggle?" they ask. "If we were of a single mind, there would be no struggle. But our minds are split. Even when we are convinced of what is right, our lower self tries to get us to do the opposite. Even when we see clearly, our lower self leads us to forget."

[Fadiman and Frager, "Essential Sufism," pp. 65-66.]

Gaia and the Evolution of Consciousness

"The psychology of any epoch must be at the same stage of advance as its economics and physics. Our perennial challenge has been that our working psychology is always a whole epoch behind our physico-economic state."

-- Gerald Heard --
("Pain, Sex and Time")

In the attached five-part video lecture, pioneering and iconic climate scientist James Lovelock - who first proposed the theory that the Earth is itself a self-regulating bio-organism (and dubbed it "Gaia Theory") - delivers a sobering lecture on the impact of global warming, a lecture that amply demonstrates that the physico-economic model that is sustaining our civilization is, in fact, unsustainable.

In his book, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning," Lovelock observes:

"Our contemporary industrial civilization is hopelessly unfitted to survive on an overpopulated and under-resourced planet, deluded by the thought that clever inventions and progress will provide the shoehorn that fits us into our imaginary niche. I think it is better if we accept and understand how poor is the chance of our personal survival, but take hope from the fact that our species is unusually tough, has survived seven major climate catastrophes in the last million years, and is unlikely to go extinct in the coming climate catastrophe. Geneticists, interested in the evolution of humans, have observed that at one time in the last million years we passed through a genetic bottleneck in which our ancestors might have been as few as 2,000. Gaia, fortunately, is much tougher and as a living planet has survived for over a quarter of the age of the cosmos."

Lovelock has, in past lectures, noted that it is now far too late to halt or reverse global warming - a possibility if we had recognized and understood the damage we were doing to the environment 150 years ago - and that our collective task is now to forge a consensus to ameliorate the damage we have done while adapting to the much hotter and drier world to come.

"Perhaps the saddest thing," says Lovelock in concluding his lecture (below), "is that if we fail altogether and humans go extinct, Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. For not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems vanish along with us, but in human civilization the planet has a precious resource. We are not just a disease on the planet, we have through our intelligence and communication become the planetary equivalent of a nervous system."

"It has taken Gaia at least three-and-a-half billion years to evolve an intelligent, partly social animal species. . . . We have to be patient while we slowly evolve to become an integral part of what could be an intelligent planet."

What Gerald Heard (above) and many other contemporary spiritual teachers and philosophers have pointed out, however, is that if our continuing evolution is to be sustained there will not be a next physiological evolutionary leap, but rather there will have to be a psychical evolution in our individual and collective consciousness. If we are to evolve as the nervous system of Gaia that Lovelock contends we are, then we ourselves will need to deliberately and consciously evolve to a new state of consciousness and being.

The Pursuit of Happiness Re-Examined

"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice."

-- Adam Smith --
("The Theory of Moral Sentiments")

Would you really be happy if you won the lottery? What if, instead, you had an horrific accident and were rendered parapalegic? Faced with these two "permanent situations" is it possible that we could really over-rate the difference between these two seemingly diametrically opposed outcomes?

It turns out that we do, according to research by psychiatrist, Dan Gilbert. Surprisingly, one year after an inarguably life-changing event, both lottery winners and parapalegics report the exact same level of happiness with their lives. By virtue of our anatomy alone, Gilbert explains in the attached video, humans have an unbelievable capacity to synthesize happiness. The trouble is, few of us (a) know it, or (b) know how to tap into it.

This is perhaps not so surprising, given that in our consumer society we are taught (incorrectly) that attaining happiness lies in the acquisition of exterior things, and that permanent happiness can be found through such acquisition. Gilbert looks at the the thought processes that goes into acquiring goods and the phenomenon of buyer's remorse in order to demonstrate the innate potential we all have for being either happy - or profoundly unhappy.

"Some things are better than others," Gilbert observes. "We should have perferences that lead us into one future over another."

"But," he cautions, "when those preferences drive us too hard or too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk."

"When our ambition is bounded," he notes, "it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we are prudent, we are caution, we are thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we are reckless and we are cowardly."

"Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown," Gilbert concludes, "because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity (i.e., happiness) we are constantly chasing when we choose experience."

The Language and Context of a New Pespective

Do we have a choice in the worldview we adopt, or is it culturally determined? If it is the former, what choices should we be making? If it is the latter, what can we do to influence our cultural environment, so that collectively we can deal with the many existential challenges we face?

Looking back at history, philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observed that the motivations and conceptions which humanity has turned its faculties to have been largely a matter of choice - and that choice, in turn, has dictated the language and direction of further inquiry.

"Certain thoughts," he wrote, "are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present."

For millennia on the India sub-continent, on the Himalayan plateaus, and in South-East Asia, China and Japan, the great thinkers turned inward studying the subtle levels of consciousness and charting paths to the attainment of enlightenment. Meanwhile, in Europe (and then in the 'New World') the direction of enquiry turned outward to the 'material' world, and so birthed the study of the natural sciences.

Thus, Huxley pointed out, "(o)ur perceptions and understandings are directed in large measure, by our will. We are aware of and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. When there's a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come ot the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers - that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained."

Huxley made these observations in his classic work, "The Perennial Philosophy," which was first published in 1945, immediately in the wake of the devastations wrought by world war. Since the passage of what now seems to be an almost historic gulf, has mankind substantially changed the language and direction of his enquiry? Certainly, the West has become more acquainted with Eastern modes of thought as our own religious and wisdom traditions have begun falling away. Yet, for all the evident interest in exploring the inner path to consciousness and enlightenment, it seems that the principal impetus in the direction of our language and thinking - East and West - is towards the further development (and many would say exploitation) of our outer world and "reality."

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 17.]

"A hundred years ago," wrote Thomas Merton (one of the great contemplatives in the next generation of spiritual seekers), "America began to discover the Orient and its philosophical tradition. The discovery was valid, it reached toward the inner truth of Oriental thought. " However, he observed, "(t)he intuitions of Emerson and Thoreau were rich in promises that were not afterward fulfilled by successors. America did not have the patience to continue what was so happily begun. The door that had opened for an instant, closed again for a century."

In his 1961 book, "Mystics and Zen Masters," Merton speculated as to whether an impulse to turn once more to the teachings of the East was once again arising.

"Now," he writes, "that the door seems to be opening again (and sometimes one wonders if it is the door of the same house), we have another chance. It is imperative for us to find out what is inside this fabulous edifice. From where we stand," he observes, "we can descry the residents dressed in our kind of clothing and engaged in our kind of frantic gesturing. They are tearing the place apart and rebuilding it in the likeness of our own utilitarian dwellings, department stores, and factories."

"Not that there is anything wrong with industrial production, with its higher standard of living," he points out. "Yet," he cautions, "we know, or should know, by this time, that our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 69-70.]

Merton's warning, written at the beginning of the 1960's when there seemed to be a brief flaring of the potential for a new western culture - albeit, one that quickly gave way to the materialism and consumerism of the last several generations - seem all the more apt today. Cultural awareness of our existential problems - an unchecked population explosion, global warming, mass environmental degradation and species extinction, to name but a few - should prompt our looking for a new cultural paradigm that is inwardly focused, rather than being focused more and more wholly on materialism and consumerism.

But, with a somewhat jaded eye, can we say that an apparently renewed interest in spirituality and Eastern insights that may help us address some of these imposing problems we face will be any less impervious to a flickering out than it was with the great Transcendentalists, or with Huxley, Merton or the radicals and gurus of the 1960s? One can hope that it will not be so, for it seems imperative (as Huxley noted) that we develop a new language and framework that will allow us to address our problems.

With an ever more widespread awareness of the perils that we collectively face, the possibilities of such a new language and framework for seeing both ourselves, our world and our place in the grander scheme of things seems more likely and more important now than it has ever been. "Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way," as Huxley observed.

Ego: The Enemy Within

As ever, the bloggers on The Huffington Post - alongside their usual fare of political and social commentary - continue to bring the reader informed and varied insights into humanity's spiritual struggles. This week, featured blogger Bernard Starr (professor emeritus at the City University of New York) examines the path to self-realization and spiritual awakening, while examining the ego-traps that lie in wait along that path.

"While wisdom and realization may be fundamental to your being." Starr notes, "they are obfuscated by a lifelong process starting at birth that leads us away from the realized state and inner guru. From the outset, personal experiences and conditioning manifest a personal ego that we firmly believe is our sole identity. That conclusion commits us to a lifelong process of seeking self-realization by strengthening, expanding and defending the little me/self/ego in a desperate struggle for survival. And most of our psychological theories and traditional societal teachings keep us on that dead-end path, since they too cannot see any foundation for existence other than the ego level of consciousness."

And therein lies the first ego-trap. The man or woman who bucks the system and seeks enlightenment is going against the stream of the unawakened vast majority of the population that seeks merely to grab and hold the seeming security and luxuries that society holds out on offer. Doubts as to the validity of the spiritual path and the goal of enlightenment are bound to arise.

More subtle, and much more difficult, however, is the problem of an ego that grasps onto the individual's drive for enlightenment as a means to retain its dominance over the individual. "You are seeking enlightenment?," the ego seems to ask. "Well, just watch how spiritual I can be!"

Starr, identifying this process as the  "near enemy" (a term popularized by Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield), warns that "the ego will not willingly loosen its ferocious grip on existence."

"Since the ego has been your sole co-pilot in life for seeking a secure sense of self," he notes, "you will not abandon it for the smoke and mirrors of another foundation that you sense but are not sure is real."

"The ensuing internal struggle to free yourself from the grip of the ego will submerge you in many self-deceptions in which you will firmly believe you are progressing toward the spiritual mountain top," he cautions. "But many of your practices and behavior(s) on close examination will reveal the ego in disguise and control."

Utilizing the concept of 'love' as an example - a concept which along with 'compassion' is universal to the world's great wisdom traditions - Starr illustrates the process of how the "near enemy" of the ego subverts even these most lofty of emotions and ideals.

"While love is at the core of all religions and spiritual traditions," Starr notes, "its near enemy version abounds. "I love you" are three little words that are easy to say but much more difficult to genuinely mean or live. Hidden behind affirmations of love can be self-serving egoism, attachment and dependency."

"Love that is truly spiritual is unconditional and selfless," he observes. "But in practice, how often does it mean "I will love you only if you return love"? All too frequently we hear about "love" that quickly morphed into hate and even violence when it was not reciprocated."

Traditionally, the role of a spiritual teacher, formal mentor or guru was to help the spiritual aspirant to identify and avoid such ego-traps. Yet such roles may be inimical to the modern seeker, with modern sensibilities. Thus, it is not absolutely critical to find (if one can) and follow an enlightened guru or teacher, one can travel by one's self what is in any event a lonely inner road - for "the kingdom of God is within you" - but, nevertheless, it is helpful.

"(Y)ou can be your own guru," Starr notes, (b)ut beware of the near enemies. Few can avoid entrapment. If you think you can," he warns, "that may be another near enemy."

Consciousness vs. Military-Industrial Complex

In barely 200 years, Western culture morphed from one shaped by religious organizations to one shaped by the state. Then, in a matter of decades, we became a culture shaped by corporations - most notoriously, a culture shaped by the multinational oil companies and the defense and armaments firms that President Dwight D. Eisenhower targeted in his January 17, 1961 Farewell Speech, when he warned us of the the rise of the 'military-industrial complex.'




In a contemporary warning delivered at the Omega Institute, controversial author, John Perkins ("Confessions of an Economic Hitman"), a one-time economist for the strategic-consulting company Chas. T. Main, a firm with alleged ties to the U.S. National Security Agency, warns that "these are deeply revolutionary times," when all of us will have to play a part in reclaiming our lost culture.




"This is a time that requires incredible courage on our part," Perkins notes.  Are we willing, he asks with all the fervor of a convert, to take courage and "stand up to a system that we know we can deeply improve upon?"

"Being fearless, at this point," he observes, "requires tremendous courage and the recognition that there is something much greater than 'my' immediate needs and 'my' immediate life, and that looks at the whole integrated planet and its future."




Perkins' "Dream Change" organization is dedicated to shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community. He has deep roots in Ecuador, having served in the Amazon with the Peace Corps. before entering upon a truncated career as a consultant to U.S.-based multinational corporations.

Below, Perkins talks about the holistic worldview of native Ecuadoran tribal life, and the Amer-Indian "Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor."

Towards a New Cultural Paradigm: 'Developing Sustainability' rather than 'Sustainable Development'

In his now-classic treatise, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Thomas Kuhn points out that new scientific paradigms emerge when there is an anomaly that the existing paradigm cannot account for, when a new theory that can account for the anomaly is put forth, and when a small but growing number of adherents coalesce around that new way of interpreting reality.

Could a new cultural paradigm be emerging in a similar fashion? Instead of mouthing platitudes about "sustainable development," is there a growing number of people "developing sustainability" at an individual level, beginning with a shift in their own consciousness? Could a paradigmatic shift in our collective consciousness emerge as a result of, and to tackle, the existential challenges that we know we face - an energy crisis, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global warming, deforestation and mass species extinction etc.? Perhaps.

In the attached video, spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, points out that a change in our cultural paradigm is rapidly becoming "a biological necessity."

"I think we are actually at a point in time that is very unique," he notes. "Here we are, and it is very possible that in your and my lifespan we will actually experience the fulfillment of literally not being able to sustain certain things. We will run out of energy, we will run out of environment. We have weapons of  destruction that are so extreme that we can wipe ourselves out. It is very possible in the lifetime that we are living in, that we could actually come (to) see a conclusion, that non-sustainability will actually happen and we will have to deal with that. And I think we have been evolving towards that for a very, very, very long time. And, here we are."

"It is no wonder," Adyashanti observes, "that there is fanaticism breaking out in all sorts of religions and fundamentalists in all points-of-view, whether it is religions or philosophical (viewpoints). People are just dividing themselves. There are people that want to save the world, and people that want to destroy each other. They are all there. And it will be very interesting to see what happens. Because there is often at the points-of-no-return - at the point of the most dramatic tensions in life and extremes -  (that) is the very place that dramatic change and transformation can happen."

"I don't think that it's anywhere guaranteed that the change and transformation will happen," he notes. "We don't know. But it is going to go one way or another, and it's not going to be very long from right now before it goes one way or another."

"We are running out of options other than to wake up," he warns. "It is starting to become, possibly, a biological necessity of survival. And when it gets to that point, it really starts to get people's attention."

"We may destroy ourselves if we cannot actually wake up to the fact, to the living experience, that we are really the same," he notes. "It is not good enough to have the philosophy that we are really the same, because that philosophy breaks down when push comes to shove."

Clearly, it seems, we are overdue for a new cultural paradigm that is sustainable in the long-term. And such a shift in paradigms - which may already be occurring - will require the consensus of a great and growing number of individuals who see and experience themselves as being a part of something much greater than their individual selves. The crucial question, for each of us now, thus becomes: "Are we in or are we out?"

Thomas Merton: Intellect, Possessions and Grace

How is it possible to find ultimate happiness and meaning in our Western consumer society? Clearly, it is not for sale, or there would be advertisements for it. In fact, all advertisements and media commercials are intended to create demand - or, in spiritual terms, desire - and without generating this 'needing' to have, the model of our Western consumer society collapses, for we are not really consumers but over-consumers, striving to get and have more in the hopes of being secure and satisfied.

Yet the glow of acquiring -  be it new clothes, a new car, a new house, or even a new relationship - fades all too quickly, and as the old saying goes: "the bloom is off the rose." Intellect, trained largely by the media tells us that the acquisition of material things will bring us happiness, but knowing this happiness fades, we suffer in any event; and implicit in this process is the stark if unfaced reality that possessions alone cannot bring ultimate happiness and, in fact, they may be a complete impediment to its attainment.

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

Writing in his autobiography, "The Seven Story Mountain," the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton touched upon the role that our trained intellect has in generating not happiness, but suffering. He writes:

"I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, acutal practice. It is constantly and blindly being perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda."

"We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own infallibility. The desires of the flesh - and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgment, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire."

"And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is the depths of hell."

[Thomas Merton, "The Seven Story Mountain," pp. 205-206

"The only answer to the problem," says Merton, "is grace, grace, (and) docility to grace."

But why this need for grace, this need to foster and develop a gratitude for who we are and what our life circumstances are, without regard to what we "should" have or "could" be in accordance with the standards of others? Perhaps, it is because we know, at a deep level, that all such standards are fallacies, and the opinion of others will not provide us with ultimate happiness any more than material possessions or wealth will.

"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy," Merton observes, "(on) the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions of other men! A weird life it is, indeed," he notes, "to be living in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real."

["The Seven Story Mountain," p. 303]

In these times, as blessed (or cursed) with material possessions as we may be, the ancient Sufi poet Rumi would undoubtedly agree with Merton: "(We) need more grace than (we) had thought."