Categories
Philosophy

One Breath…

Life at its simplest, most basic level can be understood with one breath cycle.

As we inhale, our lungs are filled with the air we need. Oxygen is distributed by our circulatory system to all areas of our body. Our bodies warm and we feel the momentary benefit of our basic need satisfied.

Then the moment passes…and we begin to exhale.

The oxygen we need is getting used and simultaneously converted to carbon dioxide…a substance we need to release.

As the carbon dioxide leaves our body, the feeling of relief is palpable…ultimately culminating in a moment of serene contentment.

This moment is the epiphany revealed most completely by meditation.

Here we get a temporary glimse of the euphoria we will experience when we no longer live.

Then the moment recedes…as we are consumed with the need to inhale once again.

Categories
Personal Growth

We Learn to Live by How We Play

So who are your teams?

Mine were the Yankees, Cowboys, Celtics and the Islanders. Hmmmm, I can feel your judgment.

Even if you hate sports, you still have teams…

Ford or Chevy or Toyota…

Verizon or AT&T or Sprint or T-Mobile…

And now that we are adults, our teams play for keeps.

Democrat or Republican or MAGA…

Conservative or Liberal or Moderate…

Man or Woman…American or not American…

Us versus them.

In our games, winners take all the glory…and the losers are resigned to the scrap heap of history.

In real life, the winners earn more than they can ever use and the losers wind up carrying a sign on the off ramp of life…marginalized and forgotten.

Yet have you ever really thought about what separates the winners from the losers?

Once you think past the ego based answers: talent, intelligence, willingness to work hard…You start to realize how things well beyond your control are more important: the family & country of your birth, who you know, being in the right place at the right time, random luck, etc.

So as we sip our high-quality beverage of choice, consider how easily our good fortune could have been different. And if it was different, how comfortable we were enjoying our good fortune without a thought about the people who weren’t as lucky.

Yes, we were taught to live by the games we play. Yet aren’t we all more than these uniforms we wear? Are any of our successes really by our efforts alone? Do we have no experiences where our personal satisfaction does not come at the expense of someone’s degradation?

Winning is a hollow victory based on a false choice: win or lose.

Life offers a third option…fulfillment, which is only possible when no one loses.

Categories
Personal Growth

And Then She Awakes…

Was it the random streak she happened to notice across the sky?

Or successfully jamming her brakes to avoid the car that suddenly stopped in front of her, and realizing her mechanic just saved her life?

Or reading the label on her favorite coffee and noticing the beans were picked by indigenous people from a distant land?

Any of these reasons or maybe the slow accumulation of experiences finally crystallized into her new epiphany:

She is one participant in her life’s journey fully realized by the choices of many actors.

Now what? Can I proceed to view my life as my own when it actually is not?

Can I look at people I do not know as strangers when their choices are contributing to my well being?

Does it make sense to pray for my nation alone when so many influencers to my life journey live beyond our national borders?

No

I can no longer view my life as I did before.

Us used to be very clear: myself, my family, my friends, my employer, my nation, my religion, and my preferences. And Them were not Us.

Yet how can my mechanic be a “Them” when he saved my life?

As I consider the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the bed I sleep on each night, and the home that provides me shelter, I realize virtually everything I utilize to support my wellness was produced by people and with resources from places around our world.

Can all these people who I rely on daily remain beyond my thoughts and concerns?

No

I must acknowledge my Us has expanded to include almost everyone.

And who remains beyond us?

Anyone who hurts us.

Now, I am finally awake.

Categories
Economics

Why Capitalism is Failing…

Capitalism was made possible by the emergence of democratic societies. These societies shed economic elitism and allowed increasing portions of the population to access wealth.

The core engine of capitalism is one of the most common basic instincts…greed. Hard work, skill acquisition, and innovation can combine to elevate a child born in poverty to great wealth and prosperity. Under these circumstances, everyone had a chance to earn financial independence. And as a result, there was no need for the poor to resent the rich because they too have the opportunity to be rich one day.

What went wrong? Greed

As the descendants of poverty elevated to great wealth, their greed inspired them to use their resources to manipulate the free market to consolidate wealth to themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The propensity of free market capitalism to create severe wealth inequality is not new. Historically, these periods of severe financial imbalance were corrected by economic depressions, which re-leveled the opportunity to access wealth for the broader society.

By the 1970’s, the Powell Manifesto encouraged wealthy people to protect their interests by investing enormous resources to co-opt the government, university system, and mass media. The point of these investments was to prevent the economic correction that restores financial opportunities for the general population.

In the 1990’s, Alan Greenspan accomplished the first “soft” landing in US history by reversing a business cycle slow down without an economic recession. And by 2009, the Congress and the Federal Reserve prevented the new Great Depression by giving the wealthiest holders of capital trillions of dollars in public funds to cover private losses. The net effect is to metastasize severe economic inequality as the new norm of the free market economy.

Free market manipulation, and economic globalism, combined with accelerated automation has effectively subjugated the broad working class to involuntary servitude.

While the wealthy have been successful preventing the restoration of economic opportunity for the general population, they have also earned the contempt of people who now understand they will never have financial security.

Categories
Philosophy

I really want to know…

Who are you?

Not the choices you make or the thoughts you have or the concepts and symbols you identify with. None of these items are you.

Why is knowing you important?

Because once you know who you are, you can see who we are. And thereafter, you will see truth unfiltered by the layers of your preferences.

Do you know who you are? Time to find out.

Categories
Philosophy

Eternity within…

At the heart of everything we touch, everything we experience, and even who we are…is energy.

From the first spark of energy received from the merging of a sperm cell with an egg cell, our bodies have been fueled by energy that sustains it until the energy leaves our body at death.

The existence empowered by energy replicates in everything we transfer energy to…

A flower, a novel, a child, a nation.

The more thoughtful energy we invest in the things and people who touch our lives, the more we contribute to creating a world in our image. Here we replicate the gift of divine creation.

Scripture teaches we were created in the Divine’s image. We know all things true about the Divine have always been true because the Divine is eternal and never changes. What about us is Divine, has always been true, and is not subject to change?

Our essential energy.

Now observe your life. That which you invest your energy blooms. And that which you ignore, degrades until it can be energized into a new creation.

Realizing our divinity empowers us to shed our resignation of a world gone wrong and participate in the creation of a world worth living in.

Tap into your eternity within and join the effort to make the world worthy of our progeny.

Categories
Personal Growth

The Price of Winning…

The thing about success today is it is all about winning.

Getting the big promotion; Being hired for the great job; Signing the big client; Having your dream woman or man say “yes I will marry you”; Writing the latest New York Times #1 best seller; Buying the winning Powerball ticket; Supporting the Super Bowl champion team…

Yet the cost of winning is producing far more losers.

Have you given much consideration to what happens to the losers? This is a trick question, because all of us know exactly what happens to the losers since we have all lost many times. When we don’t get the big promotion or get hired for the dream job or our perfect man or woman says “no”, the whole trajectory of our lives is changed. The range of choices we have to provide for ourselves and our families are diminished. And as these losses pile up, we find ourselves acquiescing to lives of faded dreams.

But the cost of losing is not just aspirational.

The quality of the food we eat, the comfort of our shelter, the security of our neighborhood, our access to timely & effective healthcare, and so much more are all tied to our wins and losses.

For those of us who have more wins than losses, we are encouraged to feel we earned the spoils of our victories. And for the rest of us, we are encouraged to accept lives made excessively harder and often shorter as the cost of losing.

It is nothing short of casual cruelty to know we waste more than enough resources to provide nutritious food, safe housing, and quality healthcare for the less fortunately amongst us.

The fact that we don’t reveals the true price of winning…the loss of our basic humanity.

Categories
Economics

Living daily with one foot on a banana peel

Here we are, working harder and hopefully smarter toward the common goal of financial independence. To reach a point where we can choose to spend our limited time as we see fit. Yet, no matter how close we are to achieving our goal, we all live one mishap away from carrying a work for food sign at the side of the road.

How? Reliance on money.

If you have it, your possibilities appear endless. And if you don’t, you may starve to death while living in the wealthiest country in recorded history.

Consider one startling fact: Almost all of us have lost loved ones to curable, preventable diseases because they did not possess enough money to gain the knowledge of healthy nutrition, or to purchase food that supports wellness, or to access timely and adequate medical treatment.

Have you noticed that the highest quality goods and services are reserved only for people who have the money to pay the most? For the rest of us, we are immersed in an ocean of sub-optimal products and services that are designed to rapidly degrade so we will have little choice but to purchase the products again and again. And the worse part is many of us suffer injuries and even death resulting from the less than optimal quality of the goods and services we rely on.

This is the unspoken reality of our lives.

Up until this moment, we have been told price discrimination in the quality of goods and services is necessary because there is simply not enough resource to provide the best for everyone. The accumulation of human knowledge, coupled with relentless technological developments, have rendered scarcity of the highest quality goods and services obsolete. Stated bluntly, we now have the capability to provide the best quality for all of us.

I hear your doubt but consider a few easily verifiable facts…

  • Knowledge once gained can benefit everyone. The only reason knowledge is withheld is to give contributors exclusive rights that are sold to make money.
  • Most of the garbage gorging our global landfills are from affordable (cheap) goods that were produced to fail long before the best quality goods.
  • Most of the drain on global resources is for the production of less than optimal quality goods that are sold at prices that support our consumption-based economy. As every Economist insists, the more we consume, the better the economy. Better for whom?
  • Since the best quality is reserved only for people who can afford to pay the most, the large majority of global millionaires make their fortunes selling sub-optimal products and services to the rest of us.
  • Our current mass production of sub-optimal goods and services threatens to exhaust global resources as billions of new customers join the consumption pool, especially in India and China.

And what are the implications? If we fail to improve the efficiency of global resource utilization, future resource availability will support materially smaller global populations.

What can be done?

Educate yourself on the issue of scarcity. If we have the technology and resources to provide the highest quality goods and services to everyone, price discrimination is no longer necessary.

Despite what we have been told about our Us versus Them world, there really is no them…There is only Us.

Categories
Personal Growth

When our true north turns out to be true south…

…We find ourselves in a place we hardly recognize.

Feel familiar? Lets consider where we are.

We were raised to value our freedom above all else. Freedom to choose our faith, our career, whether to get married and have a family. Freedom to do with our time what we choose. Yet almost all of us spend our entire lives working jobs we would never do, but for the need for money. And for the very few of us who have accumulated enough money to reclaim our time for ourselves, what price did we have to pay? Did we sacrifice healthy relationships with our spouses and children? Or maybe just our basic humanity by being willing to make unthinkable choices for huge sums of cash?

What choices? Consider the fortunes made selling food that destroys the lives of their customers…or the money made deploying planned obsolescence that kills people due to intentional system failure…or the junk science paid for by vested interests to convince people prescription drugs cure diseases…or the countless marketing jingles that associate harmful products with our most cherished values or desires.

We were raised to value the pursuit of our own happiness as one of our most cherished fundamental rights. Now we address the most important public policy issues with a simple question: How is the policy going to effect me? Is there any wonder why we are incapable of solving critical problems facing our society?

We were raised to be independent people. To build a life that allows us to be as independent of other people as possible. Today, the Good Samaritan is a snowflake, and people needing help are labeled takers. Yet do any of us actually live independently? Do we produce our own food? Build our own shelter? Pave our own roads? Fight our own wars?

The fact is we grind through our daily lives guided by values that are not leading us to the fulfillment we sorely deserve. We have exhausted ourselves on blaming an endless list of others for our lack of fulfillment. In desperation we turned to a carnival barker to lead us back out of the wilderness, only to realize he is the glitter that is most definitely not gold.

Where do we go from here?

Stop grinding. Stop digging. Stop running. Just stop, breathe deeply, then set aside the noise and expectations of our busy, modern lives. Find a mirror and take a moment to look at yourself. The answer to your fulfillment is staring back at you.

All fulfillment requires is an alignment of our physical, emotional and spiritual lives. When our values inspire choices that serve our highest purpose, we feel the euphoria of fulfillment.

Today, our values have led us to a society we hardly recognize. And our aimless wandering will not end until we realize the compass that guides our journey is broken.

Independence from each other; Freedom of each other; Self interest without consideration for each other…all lead to dystopia, because our individual prosperity is a function of the constructive contributions of all of us.

We are one humanity, interdependently nourished by one natural universe.

This is the undeniable fact of our existence.

When our values are aligned with the physical requirements of our existence, we will make choices that serve our highest purpose.

Then, and only then, will we find the fulfillment we seek.

Categories
Personal Growth

How did we make it this far…

How did we make it this far…

…given all the challenges of our modern lives?

After all the ranting, blaming, and widespread scapegoating, we stand here poised to do something…anything, but what?

Experience has taught us that more venting is definitely not working. And disconnecting leaves us bearing the brunt of a dysfunctional society, with no hope of facilitating change.

Where do we go from here?

Like any good explorer, the way forward is tied the how we arrived here in the first place. Regardless of the path we have taken, all of us are survivors. We survive, and even thrive, because we have utilized the resources necessary to support our well-being. And the only precondition for the resources we relied on is countless people, supported by our natural environment, who successfully produced the needed goods and services we did not produce for ourselves. Let this sink into your consciousness while I dispense with a modern myth.

Money did not make this happen.

We all have spent money for goods and services that were inadequate or even detrimental to our well-being. While money is a necessary precondition for accessing resources, only high quality, effective human innovation and effort, supported by our natural environment, provides the resources that actually support our well-being.

Once we acknowledge our daily well-being is a function of the effective efforts of countless people, we realize both how we survived thus far and how best to proceed.

Now consider how we make choices today. How often do we consider the countless people who contribute daily to our well-being? In fact, social norms encourage us to think only of ourselves and the people we love, and to fear other people. The values that define American society support this outlook by teaching us we have a fundamental right to pursue our own happiness.

Yet despite being empowered to provide only for ourselves and our families, we find we are angry as hell because it is becoming increasingly hard to do. Why?

Because the wealthiest people, empowered by the right to pursue their own happiness, are taking an increasingly higher percentage of global resources for themselves. Ironically, since we believe pursuing our own happiness is a virtue, we would rather blame other resource deprived people for our struggles. The culmination of our collective angst is America has put the world on notice. We will no longer allow the less wealthy countries of the world to take advantage of us anymore. This Orwellian rationalization is the path to dystopia.

Each of us has the power to expand the sphere of our consideration when we make choices. If it is an undeniable truth that we survive based on the effective efforts of countless people, then it is in our best interest to consider the general well-being of all people when we make choices that effect their lives.

Reconnecting to how we survived thus far is the guidepost for the path to sustainable well-being.