Virtually every major world religion and spiritual discipline, as well as many secular philosophies, posit the purpose of human existence as a journey towards unification, whether with the divine or all of one's fellow men and women (Depending upon one's perspective, of course, both could be considered one and the same.)
What's missing, however, is a clear road map to this spiritual utopian ideal.
What we usually receive from artists, thinkers, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and dreamers are generalities and platitudes. All You Need Is Love. Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself. Be The Change You Want To See In The World.
These feel good platitudes seem a million miles away from the challenges of daily life, whether those of an individual, family, community, nation, or all humankind. They rarely suggest how we can, individually and collectively, implement those lofty ideals and get us closer to that spiritual utopia.
There's a way for all human consciousness and all consciousness in creation to take bold steps forward to the ideal we seek.
There's a formula which we can apply in our daily lives and in our society which moves us forward on our journey to unification with the divine. A formula which can be applied to any aspect of individual and collective life, something which can help us get there from here:
"In all matters, seek the solution, state of balance, or paradigm which fulfills all. The only acceptable solution to any problem is one in which every want and need is met and fulfilled."
It's that simple.
The greatest obstacle which humanity has faced in its spiritual evolution is the lie of duality, and the accompanying binary thinking which reduces all things to two mutually exclusive diametric opposites. We are taught to reduce all situations to two polar opposites and pick a side. One side will win, the other will lose. It's our business vs. our industry competitors, believer vs. non-believer, Ohio State vs. Michigan, two romantic rivals competing for the love of a particular person, right to life vs. a woman's right to choose....and the beat goes on.
We learn to shoehorn every aspect of life into this duality and force opposition and conflict into situations where none need exist.
Binary thinking, and how it impacts our decision-making processes, is a tenacious beast. We've thought this way for so long that changing our thought processes is akin to changing who we are on a fundamental level. But it's a change which we need to make.
Instead, we need to ask ourselves in every area of life whether there is a course of action which not only fulfills our own wants, needs, and desires, but also those of every other conceivable party. Whenever a suitable course of action which fulfills all needs can be identified, it should be taken instead of any other paths which involve lack, loss, or the diminishing of one to the advantage of another.
While few people possess the wisdom of Solomon, the simple intention to seek out the solution which benefits all is the first step.
For example, I live in a neighborhood where around half a dozen Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and pan-Asian restaurants compete for business within a two block radius. There's quite a bit of overlap between their respective menus and, invariably, one or two of these restaurants goes out of business every few years, only to be replaced by another Asian restaurant.
The business proprietors lose out because they're dividing up the neighborhood market for Asian cuisine, while people who live and work in the neighborhood lose out due to a lack of diversity among dining spots in the neighborhood.
What if the next person who thinks about opening yet another Asian restaurant in the neighborhood decides, instead, to look for a storefront in an area where his culinary offerings aren't already available. He wins because his menu is more unique elsewhere, the restaurants which otherwise would have been his competitors win because they've got less competition, and neighborhood folks win because a cuisine not already well-represented in the neighborhood is served in that storefront instead.
The interests and needs of all who are impacted by the business decision are taken into account, resulting in a solution which benefits all.
It's not a matter of any sort of central planning or governmental edict. It's the simple willingness to alter our own thought processes on an individual level which will begin to change every aspect of life as we know it.
Why seek this paradigm shift?
The belief that someone has to win and someone else has to lose -- in business, in affairs of the heart, in governance, and in all other matters -- is at the root of most unhappiness and discontent. Even if you're entirely satisfied with your life and you want for nothing, the unfulfilled wants and needs of others potentially threaten to tip over your own apple cart, whether a stalker takes an uncomfortable interest in you or someone you love, or someone desperate for cash robs your home.
Beyond the surface cause and effect playing out in the lives of the unfulfilled, unhappy, and unloved among us, the dissatisfaction of those around us can and does effect the very fabric of reality, through the energies which create and comprise that reality.
It's not simply a matter of Anakin Skywalker choosing the Dark Side or Carrie showstopping the prom, so to speak.
Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and energy needs to flow. Even without conscious ill intent, energy which is not provided with an appropriate conduit will move in random and consciously unintended directions, creating unintended effects.
As I wrote in my essay How art works (or my rejection of the high school English teachers' objectivist theory of art):
If thought, will, emotion, and conscious intention can influence others for the purpose of creating art, the same dynamic may very well apply to the creation of physical reality as we know it. For example, author Masaru Emoto has written a series of published books detailing experiments involving the impact which words, music, and images can have upon water crystals. Experiments conducted by Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), conducted under traditional empirical methodology, have demonstrated the effect of thought and consciousness upon mechanical, electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to a degree which their website labels "highly significant statistical deviations from chance expectations."
Former PEAR Coordinator of Research, Roger Nelson, Ph.D., has also directed Princeton's Global Consciousness Project since 1997. Their work provides empirical evidence of the ability of thought and emotion to have an effect upon someone or something other than the thinker. Random number generators placed in 65 locations worldwide have displayed results deviating from expected norms immediately before, during, and after significant world events, such as the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/papers/pdf/GCP.Events.Mar08.prepress.pdf
I've seen examples of the impact of non-physical energy upon the physical environment and electronic systems in my own life. I began meditating and working with crystals in the mid-1980's. I purchased a few crystals and stones, as well as a book about crystal energies which noted that you should cleanse stones in sea salt for a day before working with them. Well, after doing exactly that, I sat down on my couch, crystal in hand, closed my eyes and began to meditate. Very soon, I felt an uncomfortable fever-like heat and then...the smoke alarm in my apartment went off. The same thing happened again a day or two later.
I went back to my friendly local New Age bookstore, where I bought the crystals and the book. The proprietor mentioned that newly-acquired stones should be cleansed in sea salt for a week, with a day-long cleansing appropriate to refresh a stone long since in your possession. Once I cleansed my recently purchased stones in sea salt for a full week, I stopped setting off the smoke alarm while meditating with a crystal.
Around the same time, I would also meditate by lying down on my hardwood living room floor, while focusing upon a mantra or playing a guided meditation tape. I usually ran a box fan, also on the living room floor, while I meditated to drown out ambient noise from the apartment building hallway.
When I began each meditation session, the box fan was four to six feet away from my head as I lay on the floor. Imagine my surprise when I opened my eyes at the end of the meditation session and saw the box fan touching the edge of the pillow I placed beneath my head before meditating.
This happened around half a dozen times to me. I wanted to ascertain whether these events were telekinetic in origin or simply an effect of my body weight creating a slight tilt on the hardwood floor, sufficient to cause a running box fan to move a few feet. I took a suitcase and trunk, and loaded them with sufficient items to approximate my own weight at that time. I set them on the floor and in the same spot where I'd lay down to meditate, started the fan running in it's usual location, and then left my apartment for a while. When I returned, the fan had not moved an inch, compared to the four to six feet it moved during my floor meditations.
Telekinesis is portrayed in movies like Carrie and Chronicle as something consciously willed or intended. Maybe some have mastered the ability to consciously direct this energy to cause an intended effect, but that's never been the case with me. Things just happen. (Often, while working in my home office, nearing my lunch hour and absolutely ready for a break, I'll lose connectivity with my employer's remote network. The irony being that I end up delaying my lunch break because I need to finish whatever I'm working on before breaking for lunch, as I wait to reconnect.)
I believe that the art of living well consists of creating suitable conduits for the many different forms of energy which comprise our selves and our reality: physical, emotional, intellectual, sexual, aspirational, psychic, ethereal, etc. When people feel unfulfilled in one or more areas of their lives, and a suitable conduit (such as a fulfilling career and a loving, romantic relationship, to name two) is not created, conduits will form of their own accord, much like ice crystals on a winter's day windowpane. Conduits which form without conscious design will channel and direct various forms of energy in consciously unintended directions, and the results can be...well, anything.
If thought and emotion, individually and collectively, can impact the physical and non-physical environment, it's ultimately in the best interest of all for the energy projected into every level of reality to be as positive, nurturing, and enhancing as possible. The hate, fear, loneliness, anguish, and despair felt by any one person effects the whole. Ultimately, your happiness should be my concern and my happiness should be your concern because we're all swimming in the same energetic streams. Seeking solutions to problems and paradigms which satisfy the needs and wants of all helps to replace negative and destructive energy with something far better.
While it may take humanity hundreds or thousands of years to fully adopt this new way of thinking and living, taking that first baby step of being willing to think about solutions to problems which meet the needs of all concerned when we encounter potential conflict or dispute is a great place to start.
And it might be possible to bring about the paradigm shift from binary, conflict-based thinking to meeting everyone's needs faster than you'd think.
I may have been too young to have been a flower child, but I was a child in the 60's, and the conventional wisdom about dating and relationships back then and for a few decades to follow was that women like older men. Girls in junior high liked high school boys, high school girls liked college guys, and so forth. Growing up in the 60's and 70's, it wasn't unusual to see couples around town where the man was 10 or 20 years older than his wife or girlfriend. You'd even hear about the occasional teenage girl who received the legally-required consent from her parents to marry a slightly or significantly older man. Conversely, it was extremely rare to see an adult woman dating a man noticeably younger than herself.
Social dating and relationship conventions stayed much this way through the late 1990's in the U.S., when long-simmering social change began to intersect with an underrated social force. The result was powerful enough to change dating and relationship paradigms which had existed for centuries.
The welcome result of the women's equality and rights movement which picked up steam in the 1960's was the empowerment of women to stake their claim to the same career achievement and resulting financial reward which men had always enjoyed. As women made great strides in the workplace through the 70's, 80's, and 90's, the social conventions and unwritten rules surround love and romance stayed the same, however, in regard to which gender played which role in a May-December romance.
In the late 90's and early 00's, a social tipping point was reached and middle-aged women began dating slightly and significantly younger men. In 2013, check out any personal ad site upon which advertisers are required to list a preferred age range and it seems like the number of women in their 40's and 50's who prefer younger men outnumber women of that generation who prefer to meet men who are their own age or older.
While the economic self-sufficiency gained by women enabled them to no longer rely upon a men for sustenance, something else must have created a tipping point which caused this widespread change in dating behavior which began in the late 90's. That tipping point was created by a confluence of one premium cable sitcom, a raunchy series of comedy movies, and a single tabloid romance. That's all it took. Combine the Samantha/Smith romance on HBO's Sex and the City, the portrayal of middle-aged women as attractive to young men in the American Pie movies, and the Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher relationship, and the lightbulb collectively went off over the heads of both middle aged women and younger men that this could work.
If that much social change could be triggered by a relatively modest entertainment and media footprint, imagine what could happen if artists and entertainers work the concepts of non-binary thinking and "meeting the needs of all" into their work. Presentation of this concept in literature, film, television, music, and other artistic media plants the seeds which enable this new approach to grow and gets people putting the formula into practice. Every person who walks into a business meeting, singles bar, family dining room, holding fast to the idea that the only acceptable solution to a problem is one which meets all needs brings us that much closer to that spiritual ideal we seek.
Of course, the internet (and, specifically, social media) provide us with a wonderful means through which to broadly communicate with people throughout the world, without a gatekeeper, such as a publishing company or television network, needing to anoint a particular message or messenger as being worthy of broad dissemination. If what I've written has struck a resonant chord within you, I encourage you to share this writing with others through social media and otherwise.
Thank you for reading this essay and considering the ideas presented here.
