From Flemming Funch. The following article was written in France in about 1953.  It is the story of ElzÈard Bouffier, a very special human who lived his life as if it mattered, and ended up making the world a little better every day.

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Making a Difference

Jean Giono

About forty years ago (1913) I went on a long hike, through hills absolutely unknown to tourists, in that very old region where the Alps penetrate into Provence.
     This region is bounded to the south-east and south by the middle course of the Durance, between Sisteron and Mirabeau; to the north by the upper course of the DrÙme, from its source down to Die; to the west by the plains of Comtat Venaissin and the outskirts of Mont Ventoux. It includes all the northern part of the DÈpartement of Basses-Alpes, the south of DrÙme and a little enclave of Vaucluse.
     At the time I undertook my long walk through this deserted region, it consisted of barren and monotonous lands, at about 1200 to 1300 meters above sea level. Nothing grew there except wild lavender.
     I was crossing this country at its widest part, and after walking for three days, I found myself in the most complete desolation. I was camped next to the skeleton of an abandoned village. I had used the last of my water the day before and I needed to find more. Even though they were in ruins, these houses all huddled together and looking like an old wasps’ nest made me think that there must at one time have been a spring or a well there. There was indeed a spring, but it was dry. The five or six roofless houses, ravaged by sun and wind, and the small chapel with its tumble-down belfry, were arrayed like the houses and chapels of living villages, but all life had disappeared.

     It was a beautiful June day with plenty of sun, but on these shelterless lands, high up in the sky, the wind whistled with an unendurable brutality. Its growling in the carcasses of the houses was like that of a wild beast disturbed during its meal.
     I had to move my camp. After five hours of walking, I still hadn’t found water, and nothing gave me hope of finding any. Everywhere there was the same dryness, the same stiff, woody plants. I thought I saw in the distance a small black silhouette. On a chance I headed towards it. It was a shepherd. Thirty lambs or so were resting near him on the scorching ground.
     He gave me a drink from his gourd and a little later he led me to his shepherd’s cottage, tucked down in an undulation of the plateau. He drew his water – excellent – from a natural hole, very deep, above which he had installed a rudimentary windlass.

     This man spoke little. This is common among those who live alone, but he seemed sure of himself, and confident in this assurance, which seemed remarkable in this land shorn of everything. He lived not in a cabin but in a real house of stone, from the looks of which it was clear that his own labor had restored the ruins he had found on his arrival. His roof was solid and water-tight. The wind struck against the roof tiles with the sound of the sea crashing on the beach.
     His household was in order, his dishes washed, his floor swept, his rifle greased; his soup boiled over the fire; I noticed then that he was also freshly shaven, that all his buttons were solidly sewn, and that his clothes were mended with such care as to make the patches invisible.
     He shared his soup with me, and when afterwards I offered him my tobacco pouch, he told me that he didn’t smoke. His dog, as silent as he, was friendly without being fawning.

     It had been agreed immediately that I would pass the night there, the closest village being still more than a day and a half farther on. Furthermore, I understood perfectly well the character of the rare villages of that region. There are four or five of them dispersed far from one another on the flanks of the hills, in groves of white oaks at the very ends of roads passable by carriage. They are inhabited by woodcutters who make charcoal. They are places where the living is poor. The families, pressed together in close quarters by a climate that is exceedingly harsh, in summer as well as in winter, struggle ever more selfishly against each other. Irrational contention grows beyond all bounds, fueled by a continuous struggle to escape from that place. The men carry their charcoal to the cities in their trucks, and then return. The most solid qualities crack under this perpetual Scottish shower. The women stir up bitterness. There is competition over everything, from the sale of charcoal to the benches at church. The virtues fight amongst themselves, the vices fight amongst themselves, and there is a ceaseless general combat between the vices and the virtues. On top of all that, the equally ceaseless wind irritates the nerves. There are epidemics of suicides and numerous cases of insanity, almost always murderous.

     The shepherd, who did not smoke, took out a bag and poured a pile of acorns out onto the table. He began to examine them one after another with a great deal of attention, separating the good ones from the bad. I smoked my pipe. I offered to help him, but he told me it was his own business. Indeed, seeing the care that he devoted to this job, I did not insist. This was our whole conversation. When he had in the good pile a fair number of acorns, he counted them out into packets of ten. In doing this he eliminated some more of the acorns, discarding the smaller ones and those that that showed even the slightest crack, for he examined them very closely. When he had before him one hundred perfect acorns he stopped, and we went to bed.
     The company of this man brought me a feeling of peace. I asked him the next morning if I might stay and rest the whole day with him. He found that perfectly natural. Or more exactly, he gave me the impression that nothing could disturb him. This rest was not absolutely necessary to me, but I was intrigued and I wanted to find out more about this man. He let out his flock and took them to the pasture. Before leaving, he soaked in a bucket of water the little sack containing the acorns that he had so carefully chosen and counted.

     I noted that he carried as a sort of walking stick an iron rod as thick as his thumb and about one and a half meters long. I set off like someone out for a stroll, following a route parallel to his. His sheep pasture lay at the bottom of a small valley. He left his flock in the charge of his dog and climbed up towards the spot where I was standing. I was afraid that he was coming to reproach me for my indiscretion, but not at all : It was his own route and he invited me to come along with him if I had nothing better to do. He continued on another two hundred meters up the hill.
     Having arrived at the place he had been heading for, he begin to pound his iron rod into the ground. This made a hole in which he placed an acorn, whereupon he covered over the hole again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land belonged to him. He answered no. Did he know whose land it was? He did not know. He supposed that it was communal land, or perhaps it belonged to someone who did not care about it. He himself did not care to know who the owners were. In this way he planted his one hundred acorns with great care.

     After the noon meal, he began once more to pick over his acorns. I must have put enough insistence into my questions, because he answered them. For three years now he had been planting trees in this solitary way. He had planted one hundred thousand. Of these one hundred thousand, twenty thousand had come up. He counted on losing another half of them to rodents and to everything else that is unpredictable in the designs of Providence. That left ten thousand oaks that would grow in this place where before there was nothing.
     It was at this moment that I began to wonder about his age. He was clearly more than fifty. Fifty-five, he told me. His name was ElzÈard Bouffier. He had owned a farm in the plains, where he lived most of his life. He had lost his only son, and then his wife. He had retired into this solitude, where he took pleasure in living slowly, with his flock of sheep and his dog. He had concluded that this country was dying for lack of trees. He added that, having nothing more important to do, he had resolved to remedy the situation.
     Leading as I did at the time a solitary life, despite my youth, I knew how to treat the souls of solitary people with delicacy. Still, I made a mistake. It was precisely my youth that forced me to imagine the future in my own terms, including a certain search for happiness. I told him that in thirty years these ten thousand trees would be magnificent. He replied very simply that, if God gave him life, in thirty years he would have planted so many other trees that these ten thousand would be like a drop of water in the ocean.
     He had also begun to study the propagation of beeches. and he had near his house a nursery filled with seedlings grown from beechnuts. His little wards, which he had protected from his sheep by a screen fence, were growing beautifully. He was also considering birches for the valley bottoms where, he told me, moisture lay slumbering just a few meters beneath the surface of the soil.
     We parted the next day.

     The next year the war of 14 came, in which I was engaged for five years. An infantryman could hardly think about trees. To tell the truth, the whole business hadn’t made a very deep impression on me; I took it to be a hobby, like a stamp collection, and forgot about it.
     With the war behind me, I found myself with a small demobilization bonus and a great desire to breathe a little pure air. Without any preconceived notion beyond that, I struck out again along the trail through that deserted country.
     The land had not changed. Nonetheless, beyond that dead village I perceived in the distance a sort of gray fog that covered the hills like a carpet. Ever since the day before I had been thinking about the shepherd who planted trees. ´ Ten thousand oaks, I had said to myself, must really take up a lot of space. º
     I had seen too many people die during those five years not to be able to imagine easily the death of ElzÈard Bouffier, especially since when a man is twenty he thinks of a man of fifty as an old codger for whom nothing remains but to die. He was not dead. In fact, he was very spry. He had changed his job. He only had four sheep now, but to make up for this he had about a hundred beehives. He had gotten rid of the sheep because they threatened his crop of trees. He told me (as indeed I could see for myself) that the war had not disturbed him at all. He had continued imperturbably with his planting.
     The oaks of 1910 were now ten years old and were taller than me and than him. The spectacle was impressive. I was literally speechless and, as he didn’t speak himself, we passed the whole day in silence, walking through his forest. It was in three sections, eleven kilometers long overall and, at its widest point, three kilometers wide. When I considered that this had all sprung from the hands and from the soul of this one man – without technical aids – , it struck me that men could be as effective as God in domains other than destruction.
     He had followed his idea, and the beeches that reached up to my shoulders and extending as far as the eye could see bore witness to it. The oaks were now good and thick, and had passed the age where they were at the mercy of rodents; as for the designs of Providence, to destroy the work that had been created would henceforth require a cyclone. He showed me admirable stands of birches that dated from five years ago, that is to say from 1915, when I had been fighting at Verdun. He had planted them in the valley bottoms where he had suspected, correctly, that there was water close to the surface. They were as tender as young girls, and very determined.
     This creation had the air, moreover, of working by a chain reaction. He had not troubled about it; he went on obstinately with his simple task. But, in going back down to the village, I saw water running in streams that, within living memory, had always been dry. It was the most striking revival that he had shown me. These streams had borne water before, in ancient days. Certain of the sad villages that I spoke of at the beginning of my account had been built on the sites of ancient Gallo-Roman villages, of which there still remained traces; archeologists digging there had found fishhooks in places where in more recent times cisterns were required in order to have a little water.
     The wind had also been at work, dispersing certain seeds. As the water reappeared, so too did willows, osiers, meadows, gardens, flowers, and a certain reason to live.
     But the transformation had taken place so slowly that it had been taken for granted, without provoking surprise. The hunters who climbed the hills in search of hares or wild boars had noticed the spreading of the little trees, but they set it down to the natural spitefulness of the earth. That is why no one had touched the work of this man. If they had suspected him, they would have tried to thwart him. But he never came under suspicion : Who among the villagers or the administrators would ever have suspected that anyone could show such obstinacy in carrying out this magnificent act of generosity?

     Beginning in 1920 I never let more than a year go by without paying a visit to ElzÈard Bouffier. I never saw him waver or doubt, though God alone can tell when God’s own hand is in a thing! I have said nothing of his disappointments, but you can easily imagine that, for such an accomplishment, it was necessary to conquer adversity; that, to assure the victory of such a passion, it was necessary to fight against despair. One year he had planted ten thousand maples. They all died. The next year,he gave up on maples and went back to beeches, which did even better than the oaks.
     To get a true idea of this exceptional character, one must not forget that he worked in total solitude; so total that, toward the end of his life, he lost the habit of talking. Or maybe he just didn’t see the need for it.

     In 1933 he received the visit of an astonished forest ranger. This functionary ordered him to cease building fires outdoors, for fear of endangering this natural forest. It was the first time, this naive man told him, that a forest had been observed to grow up entirely on its own. At the time of this incident, he was thinking of planting beeches at a spot twelve kilometers from his house. To avoid the coming and going – because at the time he was seventy-five years old – he planned to build a cabin of stone out where he was doing his planting. This he did the next year.

     In 1935, a veritable administrative delegation went to examine this ´ natural forest º. There was an important personage from Waters and Forests, a deputy, and some technicians. Many useless words were spoken. It was decided to do something, but luckily nothing was done, except for one truly useful thing : placing the forest under the protection of the State and forbidding anyone from coming there to make charcoal. For it was impossible not to be taken with the beauty of these young trees in full health. And the forest exercised its seductive powers even on the deputy himself.
     I had a friend among the chief foresters who were with the delegation. I explained the mystery to him. One day the next week, we went off together to look for ElzÈard Bouffier, We found him hard at work, twenty kilometers away from the place where the inspection had taken place.
     This chief forester was not my friend for nothing. He understood the value of things. He knew how to remain silent. I offered up some eggs I had brought with me as a gift. We split our snack three ways, and then passed several hours in mute contemplation of the landscape.
     The hillside whence we had come was covered with trees six or seven meters high. I remembered the look of the place in 1913 : a desert… The peaceful and steady labor, the vibrant highland air, his frugality, and above all, the serenity of his soul had given the old man a kind of solemn good health. He was an athlete of God. I asked myself how many hectares he had yet to cover with trees.
     Before leaving, my friend made a simple suggestion concerning certain species of trees to which the terrain seemed to be particularly well suited. He was not insistent. ´ For the very good reason, º he told me afterwards, ´ that this fellow knows a lot more about this sort of thing than I do. º After another hour of walking, this thought having travelled along with him, he added : ´ He knows a lot more about this sort of thing than anybody – and he has found a jolly good way of being happy ! º
     It was thanks to the efforts of this chief forester that the forest was protected, and with it, the happiness of this man. He designated three forest rangers for their protection, and terrorized them to such an extent that they remained indifferent to any jugs of wine that the woodcutters might offer as bribes.

     The forest did not run any grave risks except during the war of 1939. Then automobiles were being run on wood alcohol, and there was never enough wood. They began to cut some of the stands of the oaks of 1910, but the trees stood so far from any useful road that the enterprise turned out to be bad from a financial point of view, and was soon abandoned. The shepherd never knew anything about it. He was thirty kilometers away, peacefully continuing his task, as untroubled by the war of 39 as he had been of the war of 14.

     I saw ElzÈard Bouffier for the last time in June of 1945. He was then eighty-seven years old. I had once more set off along my trail through the wilderness, only to find that now, in spite of the shambles in which the war had left the whole country, there was a motor coach running between the valley of the Durance and the mountain. I set down to this relatively rapid means of transportation the fact that I no longer recognized the landmarks I knew from my earlier visits. It also seemed that the route was taking me through entirely new places. I had to ask the name of a village to be sure that I was indeed passing through that same region, once so ruined and desolate. The coach set me down at Vergons. In 1913, this hamlet of ten or twelve houses had had three inhabitants. They were savages, hating each other, and earning their living by trapping : Physically and morally, they resembled prehistoric men . The nettles devoured the abandoned houses that surrounded them. Their lives were without hope, it was only a matter of waiting for death to come : a situation that hardly predisposes one to virtue.
     All that had changed, even to the air itself. In place of the dry, brutal gusts that had greeted me long ago, a gentle breeze whispered to me, bearing sweet odors. A sound like that of running water came from the heights above : It was the sound of the wind in the trees. And most astonishing of all, I heard the sound of real water running into a pool. I saw that they had built a fountain, that it was full of water, and what touched me most, that next to it they had planted a lime-tree that must be at least four years old, already grown thick, an incontestable symbol of resurrection.

     Furthermore, Vergons showed the signs of labors for which hope is a requirement : Hope must therefore have returned. They had cleared out the ruins, knocked down the broken walls, and rebuilt five houses. The hamlet now counted twenty-eight inhabitants, including four young families. The new houses, freshly plastered, were surrounded by gardens that bore, mixed in with each other but still carefully laid out, vegetables and flowers, cabbages and rosebushes, leeks and gueules-de-loup, celery and anemones. It was now a place where anyone would be glad to live.
     From there I continued on foot. The war from which we had just barely emerged had not permitted life to vanish completely, and now Lazarus was out of his tomb. On the lower flanks of the mountain, I saw small fields of barley and rye; in the bottoms of the narrow valleys, meadowlands were just turning green.
     It has taken only the eight years that now separate us from that time for the whole country around there to blossom with splendor and ease. On the site of the ruins I had seen in 1913 there are now well-kept farms, the sign of a happy and comfortable life. The old springs, fed by rain and snow now that are now retained by the forests, have once again begun to flow. The brooks have been channelled. Beside each farm, amid groves of maples, the pools of fountains are bordered by carpets of fresh mint. Little by little, the villages have been rebuilt. Yuppies have come from the plains, where land is expensive, bringing with them youth, movement, and a spirit of adventure. Walking along the roads you will meet men and women in full health, and boys and girls who know how to laugh, and who have regained the taste for the traditional rustic festivals. Counting both the previous inhabitants of the area, now unrecognizable from living in plenty, and the new arrivals, more than ten thousand persons owe their happiness to ElzÈard Bouffier.

     When I consider that a single man, relying only on his own simple physical and moral resources, was able to transform a desert into this land of Canaan, I am convinced that despite everything, the human condition is truly admirable. But when I take into account the constancy, the greatness of soul, and the selfless dedication that was needed to bring about this transformation, I am filled with an immense respect for this old, uncultured peasant who knew how to bring about a work worthy of God.

     ElzÈard Bouffier died peacefully in 1947 at the hospice in Banon.

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Translated from the original french by Peter Doyle.

Synergy means working together, operating together as in Co-Operation, laboring together as in Co-Laboration, acting together as in Co-Action. The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task than can be accomplished by individuals working separately. We are committed to a world where I win, you win, others win and the Earth wins. Win-Win-Win-Win.

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The Synergism Hypothesis

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that as the tools of scientific research have grown ever more powerful — from positron emission tomography to electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance and massively parallel computers — the phenomena we are able to investigate (and their causal dynamics) seem to grow ever more complex. The relentless reductionism of particle physics, polymer chemistry, molecular biology and neurobiology, among other disciplines, has not (so far) revealed the decisive “mechanisms” or underlying “laws” of the phenomenal world. Instead, the “microcosmos” (to borrow Lynn Margulis’s term) displays profound complexity, interactionism, interrelatedness and, not least, historical specificity.

It has been suggested that our era should be called “the age of complexity.” While this sobriquet (or epithet, depending on your values) may be appropriate, complexity is certainly not a newly discovered aspect of the natural world.1 The debate over “wholes” and “parts” (or holism and reductionism) can be traced at least to Periclean Athens and to the writings, especially, of Aristotle. Although scholars these days have a propensity for forgetting their forebears, over the course of this century there have been successive waves of holistic and reductionist theorizing — a sort of transgenerational dialectic — in which many of our most distinguished scientists have played a part. After reaching an apogee of sorts with the imposing theoretical edifice of the 19th century polymath Herbert Spencer (1892/1852, 1874-82), holistic theorizing was all but banished by the supporters of Darwin’s theory, and (later) of “Weismannism” and “mutation theory,” at the turn of this century. However, in the 1920s holism (especially the concept of “emergent evolution”) reappeared, thanks to the writings of C. Lloyd Morgan (1923), Jan Smuts (1926), and William Morton Wheeler (1927), and others. Following another haitus in the 1940s, holism recast as “systems theory” was revived again in the 1950s with the emergence of the systems sciences (see especially Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1950, 1956, 1968; Kenneth Boulding 1956, 1977; H. Ross Ashby 1958; Anatol Rapoport 1968; Arthur Koestler and John R. Smythies 1969; Ervin Laszlo 1972; and James Grier Miller 1995[1978].) Nowadays, systems theory — which is partial to cybernetics and feedback models — seems to have been temporarily eclipsed by “complexity theory” — which is partial to chaos models and hypotheses of “self-organization.” (Stuart Kauffman, 1995, calls it “order for free.”) However, the two disciplines are really close kin.

What sets the present era apart is the fact that the scientific enterprise seems to be in the process of bridging the theoretical chasm between holism and reductionism; there seems to be a growing appreciation of the inextricable relationships between (and within) wholes and parts, and between various “levels” of organization, relationships which necessitate multi-leveled, multi-disciplinary, “interactional” analyses. (See Corning 1983; Kline 1995; also Polanyi 1968; Anderson 1972; Ghiselin 1981, 1997; Eldredge 1985; Buss 1987; Grene 1987; Maynard Smith and Szathm·ry 1995; Miller 1995/1978.) Witness Francis Crick (1994), a Nobel Laureate (for the double helix) and a reformed arch-reductionist, who now embraces the phenomenon of emergence in his recent book on the nature of “consciousness” (see below). Indeed, the very terms “mechanism” and “laws” seem increasingly to be naive formulations in light of the enormously complex, dynamic processes that we can observe (and model) in ever more sophisticated ways. Consider just a few examples: quantum non-locality and quantum entanglement in physics; the highly conserved homeobox domain, consisting of some 60 amino acids, which plays a key role in morphogenesis; the awesome functional organization of the human immune system, which includes at least nine different subsystems; the elaborate cortical substrate of human vision, which involves many millions of neurons and at least 20 distinct visual areas; the intricate relationships and multi-leveled feedback processes associated with even a relatively simple ecosystem; the daunting interconnections between world population growth, technology, economic activity and vested political interests and rivalries, on the one hand, and the problems of environmental pollution, habitat destruction and resource depletion.

There have been many efforts in recent years to gain greater theoretical control over this overwhelming complexity. Best known, perhaps, are the non-linear dynamical systems models that are capable of exploiting the computing power of super-computers. (See Yates et al.,1987; Kauffman 1993, 1995; Holland 1992, 1995; TK and TK.) This has proven to be a fertile and productive enterprise, and we can at present barely glimpse its ultimate potential. For instance, computer scientist John H. Holland is involved in an ambitious attempt to model the evolution, aggregate behavior (emergence) and anticipation (purposiveness and cybernetic feedback processes) of what he characterizes as “complex adaptive systems.” (See also Chauvet, 1993.)

On the Concept of Synergy

Here we will describe a complementary approach. It involves, in effect, a conceptual revisioning of the phenomenal world — a paradigm shift — which directs our attention to an underlying causal principle that is concerned with structural and functional relationships of various kinds and with the concrete consequences, or effects that they produce. Albert Einstein many years ago observed that “we should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Theoretical simplifications, or generalizations, may serve to identify key features, common properties, or important relationships among various phenomena. Equally important, a concept which encompasses a broad range of phenomena may also serve as the anchor for a theoretical framework which, in turn, may catalyze specific hypotheses, predictions or tests.

One example is the concept of natural selection. Evolutionists often speak metaphorically about natural selection (as did Darwin himself) as if it were an active selecting agency, or a mechanism. But in fact natural selection is an “umbrella” category that refers to whatever functionally-significant factors (as distinct from, say, stochastic or teleological influences) are responsible in a given context for causing the differential survival and reproduction of genes, genic “interaction systems” (in Sewall Wright’s term), genomes, groups, populations and species. Genes are the units that are selected, but it is the functional consequences of the genes that (by and large) determine their ultimate fate. (The “classical” population genetics definition of natural selection as a change in gene frequencies in a population is — as Wimsatt, 1980, has pointed out — inadequate because it focusses on the informational and “bookkeeping” aspect of a larger, iterative functional process.)

Accordingly, as a theory of evolutionary change natural selection makes no global predictions about the overall course of evolution or the future of any given species, in contrast with various “orthogenetic” or law-like theories of evolution. Nevertheless, the concept leads to many situation-specific explanations, predictions and postdictions about the properties of various organisms, about the relationships among species (and between any species and its environment) and about the causes of various directional changes through time.

Another example of an “umbrella” term is the concept of hierarchies. The basic principle was well understood by Aristotle, and by the 19th century taxonomists and evolutionists, but the term itself apparently traces to the turn of this century (reviewed in Grene, 1987). Today the term is used in a variety of ways, with each usage having its own theoretical connotations. (See the discussions in Weiss 1971; Pattee 1973; and the references for multi-levelled organization cited above.) Thus, the postulate of a taxonomic hierarchy, which entails a classification of various species into more inclusive groupings (genera, families, orders, etc.), also implies that a given species has certain characteristics and evolutionary relationships in common with (or different from) other species, both extant and extinct. The physiologists, in contrast, associate the term hierarchy with organelles, cells, tissues, organs, etc., a scheme which implies a nested set of functional parts-wholes relationships. Likewise, to political scientists a hierarchy refers to structured relationships of power, rule or authority — to different “levels” of cybernetic (political) control. And when biologists Niles Eldredge and Stanley Salthe (1984) drew a distinction between “genealogical” and “ecological” hierarchies in nature, they were also implicitly making certain claims about the causal dynamics of the evolutionary process (see also Ghiselin 1981, 1997; Eldredge 1985; and Salthe 1985).

“Synergy” (from the Greek word synergos) is another such umbrella term. Although it is often overlooked, underrated, or misunderstood (or called by a different name), synergy is a ubiquitous and fundamentally important aspect of the natural world. (For an in-depth discussion, see Corning 1983; also 1995, 1996, 1997.) Synergy, broadly defined, refers to combined or “co-operative” effects — literally, the effects produced by things that “operate together” (parts, elements or individuals). The term is frequently associated with the slogan “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (which traces back to Aristotle in The Metaphysics) or “2+2=5″, but, as we shall see, this is actually a caricature, a narrow and perhaps even misleading definition of a multi-faceted concept. We prefer to say that the effects produced by wholes are different from what the parts can produce alone.

Read the full paper.

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A graduate of Harvard Medical School and Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Dr. N. Arthur Coulter is a synergic science pioneer. He began searching for a better way for humanity over 50 years ago. The following was originally published in 1976. The readers of this site are quite familiar with the term synergy. Synergy means working together. The opposite of synergy is adversity. Adversity is working against. The scientific term for this is “dysergy“.

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The Machine

N. Arthur Coulter, MD

Every human being is enmeshed in the vast and intricate world-wide system that I call the Machine. The Machine is a network consisting of a large number of social, political, military, economic and cultural components. I call it the Machine because its mode of operation is so very much like the smaller machines man has produced in such abundance. The essential characteristic of machine is repetition—it repeats a sequence of movements over and over again, always the same, though differing perhaps in speed or force produced. The pistons of an automobile engine move up and down, up and down, endlessly. The wheels of a locomotive turn around and around. A printing press goes through the same complex sequence of movements, over and over again. To mechanize a process is to organize it to repeat itself as exactly as possible.

So it is with the World Machine. It imposes on each human being a variety of patterns that he or she is expected to follow repeatedly. Get up, make breakfast, wash the dishes, make the beds, go shopping, come home, fix dinner, wash the dishes, watch TV, go to bed, etc. etc. etc. —patterns we repeat again and again, patterns we follow exactly lest we be punished. The Machine rules us all. We are only cogs spinning around and around.

Each of us was drawn into the Machine the minute he or she was born. None has any choice in the matter. True, there are moments in our lives when we do have a choice between alternatives; but the alternatives that are available are almost always those defined by the Machine, they are seldom our own. Even here, more often than not, the Machine exerts subtle pressures upon us, manipulating us with carrot and stick to choose the alternative preferred by the Machine. Having the illusion of choice, we then feel more committed to the path we have
“chosen.”

How did this Frankenstein’s monster arise? And why do human beings so meekly submit to it?

What follows is admittedly an oversimplification and involves some speculations that are difficult to prove or disprove. A far better analysis is provided in the works of Lewis Mumford and other writers. But it does provide a simple, clear picture that is, I believe, not in contradiction to what is known; a picture that clearly shows how we are chained to the Machine. Some might call it a fable, the Fable of the Machine. But it is a fable that rings true.

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 It began a long time ago. Some say about 8000 B.C.

Some unknown genius, probably a woman, discovered or invented agriculture and, at about the same time, animal husbandry.

The ways of human kind were revolutionized, never again to be the same. For the first time, humans had a reasonably assured food supply. No longer were they forced to live a nomadic existence, hunting, fishing, and picking and eating wild fruits and vegetables. No longer did they have to move from place to place, always going to where the food was. No longer were they entirely dependent on the vicissitudes of weather, climate and animal competitors for the available food supply.

Humans could grow their own food in abundance. And “civilization” became possible.

Many humans became farmers. But at this point another element entered the picture. Farmers were able to produce more than they themselves actually needed. In other words, a surplus was possible. This meant that not all humans had to be farmers.

Moreover, a farmer was necessarily tied to the land. He could move about, of course; but he always had to return to the farm where his crops and animals were, and he had to spend most of his time there. This left him vulnerable.

And since not all humans had to become farmers, some did not. Those who did not were those who naturally preferred to hunt and to fish and those who were good at it. Those were the ones with the weapons.

And so the hunter became the warrior. He killed the farmer and stole his food or forced the farmer to give him food under threat of death.

And in due course, some warriors were better users of weapons than others, and, true to their kind, they forced the lesser warriors to do their bidding. And they organized the warriors into armed groups. Such groups were far superior to individual warriors.

And so the warrior-kings emerged. And they took control of the land. They let the farmers continue to farm, provided they obeyed the warrior-kings and gave each king and his generals and his warriors food.

And the food the warrior-king took was called “taxes.” And the orders of the warrior-king were called “laws.” And the farmers and other subjects obeyed the laws “or else.” And they paid the taxes “or else.”

And as time went on, the warrior-king became more clever, not only in using weapons and in organizing armies, but in persuading people to obey him. He learned the warriors could be conditioned to obey (this is now called military training). After a period of this conditioning, the warrior learned to obey orders instantly, that to question them was to die. And he was given a false image to live up to—the image of the Hero, the Fearless and Brave. And, of course, the warrior-king was the Great One, the Champion of His People, the Superhero. Sometimes he claimed to have Supernatural Powers—to be a god.

And the same methods of conditioning were applied to farmers. The warrior-king, who had actually seized power by force, claimed that he had it by Right. And he gave the farmer another image to live up to—that of the Loyal Subject, the Obedient Citizen who faithfully obeyed the Law and paid the Taxes. And he was taught to revere the warrior-king (this is now called patriotism), who was his Protector (against other warrior-kings), and who settled his disputes with other farmers Fairly and with Justice.

And since women were physically weaker than men, but necessary for the pleasure of men and the production of new warriors, it was only fitting that women become the property of men. And so it was decreed that women belonged to their fathers or their brothers or their husbands. And the men agreed that this was Fair and Just.

Now the warrior-king was the Greatest One among his people. And this made him very happy. And since happiness equals Greatness, he naturally reasoned that he would be even happier if he were still Greater. But to do this he had to overcome another warrior-king to prove he was Number One.

Thus war was invented.

To prove his Greatness, the warrior-king invented The Enemy—another warrior-king and his soldiers and subjects.

The Enemy is always less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes. Moreover, he is out to get you—the Good Guy, the Hero. So you have to kill him first, before he kills you.

(Of course, the other warrior-king is doing the same thing with his young Heroes. To them, you are The Enemy—less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes.)

And so Warrior-King A—the Good, the Wise, the Just, the Protector of His People—orders his young Heroes to a place where they must kill the Enemy—the young Heroes of Warrior-King B. And lo! It is true! The Enemy is trying to kill the young Heroes and therefore he must be Evil, less than human, and everything the Warrior-King has said.

And so the young Heroes come to hate The Enemy. And the parents and sisters and younger brothers and grandparents of the young Heroes learn to hate The Enemy even more. And the Warrior-King is satisfied, because hasn’t it been proved that what he said was Right and True? And doesn’t this prove that he is Wise and indeed the Protector of his people? And doesn’t this prove that The Enemy must be murdered or tortured if he is captured? And doesn’t this prove that The Enemy’s women, who are less than human—deserve to be raped by the young Heroes,  etc. etc. etc.?

And so the young Heroes become what they hate.

But there is one thing worse than The Enemy without and that is The Enemy within, the Traitor.

For it happens that, ever so often, a person sees through all this nonsense and refuses to take part in it. But this means that he has Disobeyed the King—the Wise, the Good, the Great. He who is not With Us, the Good Guys, is Against Us. He is one of Them and therefore less than human. Worse, he has deceived us into trusting him, pretending falsely to be one of us Good Folk.

Punish the Traitor! Kill him! Kill! Kill! Kill!

And so it went. The Warrior-King was able to expand his territory and kill so many of the other Warrior-King’s soldiers that The Enemy was subdued. Thus, the Warrior-King brought Peace to his people.

And since all the people wanted peace, and never really wanted to hate and kill in the first place, they were grateful to the Warrior-King. For didn’t he Protect them from The Enemy? And hadn’t he ended the War and brought Peace?

Thus it began 10,000 years ago. This is the way kings and laws and taxes and governments were formed. And the people were conditioned to believe that all these things were Good and Right. And so they taught their children, who in turn taught their children, and so on down the generations until it was our turn. And we accepted it, too.

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Let us pause, for a moment, and analyze the Fable of the Machine, as told thus far.

First, just as it was useful to make a distinction between individual and group consciousness, so it is helpful to distinguish a third form of consciousness, the consciousness of a person when he thinks of, himself as a member of a large social unit such as a nation. I call this social consciousness. When an individual’s social consciousness turns on, he or she may become aware of, and subject to, contents that go back many years in history. These social contents are not part of his individual consciousness and may be a source of dysergy for him.

Second, an important feature of the individual’s social consciousness is his perception of the social consensus. This perception may be mistaken, but as long as he holds it, his actions and communications and interactions are influenced by it. These actions, communications, and interactions with others in turn help to determine the (actual) social consensus. A cyclical process is thus established, which may continue indefinitely.

Third, the Mode Ladder may be applied to social consciousness. This means, among other things, that certain processes of social consciousness may be Identic or Reactive in mode. I call such processes, and the patterns that govern them, sociodynes.

A protodyne is a strong unconscious belief that a human individual holds. This belief is programmed deep into the mind by one’s life experience. For any individual a protodyne is
“real”. We humans will act as if these beliefs are true whether they are or not. An acrophobic believes that being in the open is very dangerous. They will not leave their homes. They cannot be convinced that it is safe to go out into the open. The root word “-dyne” is from physics it means force. Strong unconscious beliefs held by individuals that force them to behave in specific ways are called protodynes.

When a strong unconscious belief is held by a group of people or a nation of people, it affects the whole group or the nation. Sociodynes force groups of people or nations of people to behave in specific ways. Coulter coined these terms in the late 60s and early 70s. Independently of Coulter, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Meme is today a much better known term than protodyne although it has a similar meaning. —TKW

Sociodynes, clearly, are a major source of dysergy. This dysergy is of two main kinds: social dysergy and individual dysergy. Social dysergy takes the form of wars, crime, political and economic strife, racism, poverty, etc. The individual dysergy produced by sociodynes results from the Patterns-of-expected-behavior they impose on the individual.

A sociodyne is much more complex than a protodyne or a chronic reaction, so much so that it requires a major study to characterize one in detail. For our purposes, it is sufficient to identify a sociodyne and perhaps to indicate a few salient features.

In the Fable of the Machine, we can identify at least three: the war sociodyne, the state sociodyne, and the male chauvinist sociodyne.

From the standpoint of social synergetics, clearly a long-term objective is to eliminate all sociodynes from the social matrix. Desirable though this may be, it is equally clear that this is a formidable task; one that would probably require many decades to accomplish. For sociodynes have been accumulating since the dawn of history and probably long before then.

From the standpoint of the individual, the patterns-of-expected-behavior associated with sociodynes are of interest. Two responses to these patterns are worth noting: the individual may accept the pattern or he may react to it.

When he accepts the pattern, his response is primarily Identic in mode; when he reacts to the pattern, his response is primarily Reactive. In either case, the response is dysergic. And in both cases, he can clear the dysergy by eliminating his own identifications and reactions.

This process is called neutralizing the sociodyne. Please note that neutralization does not clear the sociodyne from the social matrix. Also, it does not eliminate the problems and difficulties the individual may encounter in dealing with the sociodyne in its social and group aspects. But the individual does have the power to neutralize sociodynes, and when he does so, he feels better and can achieve more.

Let us now return to the Fable of the Machine.

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As we have seen, the Machine was born when agriculture was invented. And since farmers were able to produce a surplus, not all people had to be farmers. Some became warriors, as we have seen; and the warrior-kings emerged and established the State. Others became carpenters, weavers, smiths, masons, etc. producing goods and services that people needed or wanted. At first, these were traded by simple barter. Later, money was invented as a medium of exchange and a measure of value.

By and by another group of people began to emerge. Workers and farmers were very busy working and farming. They had little time to take their goods to people who needed them or to find where these people were. So some people saw in this an opportunity. They bought the goods cheaply from the farmers and workers who produced them, and they stored them or took them to people who needed the goods and sold them for high prices. These were the traders.

Now some traders realized they were performing a service and charged for that service only what they needed to buy their fair share of the goods and services that society as a whole produced. But others didn’t worry about this. They had no qualms about cheating or deceiving the people they bought from or sold to. Buying cheap and selling dear enabled them to keep the difference, which they called “profit.” And some traders became very rich this way.

One day, a rich trader got the idea of bringing all the workers, together in one place called a manufactory. This made it easier for the trader, who could organize the workers so they produced more. And since the trader was very rich, he could pay the workers for the goods they produced, only now he called this payment wages. And since the. workers now had to get wages in order to buy food and other things they needed, they pretty much had to do what the trader wanted. In this way, the trader became a boss.

Some workers remained free, of course, at least for awhile, producing things themselves and selling them. But free workers could not compete in the long run. Because things were organized in the manufactory, goods could be produced a lot more efficiently and sold at a lower price than the goods of the free worker, even though the trader-boss still made a large profit.

Meanwhile, science was invented. A scientist is a funny person who is smart in some ways and dumb in others. Scientists began to find out more and more about nature; and one day they discovered how to make machines run by natural energy.

The trader-bosses were delighted about this. Being very rich, they paid the scientists to design machines for their manufactories; and they paid workers to build the machines. With machines, workers could produce a lot more than they could before. And so the manufactories became factories. And the trader-bosses became even richer.

Some of the trader-bosses were generous and kind and tried to help the workers to make things easier for them. But to do this cost money and reduced their profits. So the trader-bosses who were most ruthless, buying the workers’ labor cheap and selling their products dear, made the most profits and soon drove the generous traderbosses out of business.

Sometimes a factory became so efficient that it produced more than people wanted or could afford to buy. When this happened, the trader-boss would lay off workers in order to keep his profits.

The trader-boss didn’t mind this, because it made sure that the workers he kept on would work harder and not get any radical ideas.

And the trader-bosses saw the value of machines and the scientists who were smart enough to design them. So they hired scientists (who were then called engineers) to design more and better machines. And most of the scientist-engineers didn’t mind this, because they loved to do research and design machines, and the trader-bosses paid them well. They became workers, bought and paid for like any other thing by the trader-bosses. But most of them didn’t realize this.

Trader-bosses were constantly trying to figure out new ways to buy cheap and sell dear. Some of them noticed that money could also be treated as a commodity to be bought cheap and sold dear. They also saw that farmers and workers needed a place to keep their money, temporarily, until they spent it.

So these trader-bosses became money-bosses. They stored the money of the workers and farmers in a safe place called a bank. But they realized that on any given day farmers and workers would draw out only a small fraction of their money; the rest of the time the money-bosses could use it as they pleased. So, they loaned it out, mostly to other trader-bosses, and charged interest for it. And in this way they became very rich.

Now the trader-bosses and the money-bosses and the modem-day warrior-kings (who are called politicians) are not evil men. They are just doing what their roles tell them to do. If they don’t perform according to their roles, the Machine causes them to lose, and they become workers or farmers or unemployed.

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The Fable of the Machine could be continued indefinitely; but enough has been told to provide a basis for understanding how this Frankenstein’s monster arose. Let us now consider the second question posed at the start of this chapter: Why do human beings so meekly submit to it?

A simple answer would be: Because we have no choice. But this may immediately be modified to: Because we believe—we have no choice. And this leads to another question: Why do we accept this belief?

Whenever the Machine permits us the illusion of choice, it always defines the alternatives in terms favorable to it. Catch 22. In the case of submission to the Machine, the choice offered is submit or perish. You need food, which only the Machine can provide. And, for almost everyone, this is true. But there are other alternatives, which become clear once we refuse to limit ourselves only to those stated by the Machine.

But there is more to the problem than this. Let us probe more deeply.

The human mind is so organized that when a pattern occurs that
“works,” the mind tends to use that pattern again in a similar situation. This is the Identic mode in operation. There is no discrimination or awareness.

The warrior-king established the original pattern of the state with laws and taxes. This same pattern prevails today, despite the fact that, to many thinking persons, the nation-state has become an anachronism, and despite the fact that the original warrior-kings used brute force to seize power and to keep that power. Whatever was, is right and it will be repeated, over and over again, till the end of time.

The endless repetition of the Machine is nothing more than the projection, upon the screen of social consciousness, of the Identic mode of function.

This insight provides the basis for understanding why the Machine has such power over us. It is because we unconsciously give it that power. It is as if the Machine were under the control of a pseudomind, operating entirely in the Identic and Reactive modes. Like the Freudian Id, which imposes its protodynes to control the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the individual consciousness, this pseudo-mind imposes its sociodynes upon our social consciousness.

It will be useful to give this pseudo-mind a name. I call it Dysergy Prime because it is a primary source of dysergy upon the planet earth.

To understand how Dysergy Prime. controls us, let us once again consider the distinction between individual and social consciousness. When you are alone, doing something you enjoy and do well, your consciousness is your own; it isn’t shared with anyone else. The contents of your consciousness are your sights, sounds, ideas, etc. Your will, too, is your own—you do as you choose, selecting from alternatives you yourself formulate, not those of the Machine.

But when you become a member of a group, your consciousness subtly changes. The contents of your consciousness are no longer purely your own, but are selectively focused upon those contents that you perceive to be occupying the consensus-attention of the group. Moreover, you tend to perceive those contents the way the group consensus perceives them, which may differ from the way you would view them through individual consciousness.

The same thing applies to your will. You are limited to alternatives that you perceive to be acceptable to the group, indeed, that are expected by the group. You may, on occasion, choose; but you do so as a member of the group, not as an individual.

Now, in addition to membership in a group, an individual also has one or more roles in the group and a certain status in the group. If your role happens to be one of leadership, you may imagine that you have power to shape things as you choose and, to a limited extent, you do. But power attracts power seekers like garbage attracts flies. You soon find yourself surrounded by flies clamoring for attention or cleverly massaging your ego so they can wield some of the power in your name. And in your role, you are expected to manage every crisis that comes along. Your consciousness again is not your own, but is governed by your perception of the contents occupying group attention, modified by your perception of what-you-are-expected-to-do.

If your status is low in the group hierarchy, your image of yourself is profoundly affected. Instead of seeing yourself as you actually are a unique individual with unique potentials and unique needs—you view yourself in terms of your status, your perception of how-you-are-regarded-in-the-group, You feel inferior, inadequate; and because this is unpleasant, you may try to compensate by covering it up, by taking it out on someone else whose status is even lower than yours or by finding something outside yourself to glorify. As for your will, your lowly status insures that you end up doing the scut work that nobody else wants to do.

Generalize this to include all the groups to which we belong, and to society as a whole, and we see that we become absorbed in a social consciousness that to a considerable degree governs what we perceive, the way we think, the way we regard ourselves, and the actions we take. Each of us assumes a False Identity that is a kind of average of his various memberships, roles, and statuses, while the real
“I” is submerged, confused, and impotent.

But this is not the whole story. From social consciousness that occupies our minds there emerges a new entity whose existence and reality are determined by collective agreements. This entity is Dysergy Prime.

Dysergy Prime may be defined as the set of sociodynes that have accumulated since the beginning of humankind, controlling us through patterns-of-expected-conduct associated with our memberships, roles, and statuses in various groups and other social entities. The Machine serves Dysergy Prime, not individual human beings. The Machine itself is only a machine, and could be made to serve us if Dysergy Prime were destroyed.

How can Dysergy Prime be destroyed?

In principle, the solution is easy. Dysergy Prime exists because we unconsciously believe in it. If all of us, collectively, became fully and knowledgeably conscious of Dysergy Prime and of the ways it controls us, and collectively decided not to believe in it any more, Dysergy Prime would disappear.

(All we have to do is change our minds. —TKW) 

Unfortunately, this has to be a collective decision. One person, discovering the truth, can stop believing in Dysergy Prime; but his social consciousness discloses that everyone else still believes; and their collective belief so influences their perceptions, thoughts, and actions that his individual consciousness is overwhelmed. He must continue to deal with the reality of this collective belief.

In the movie “Forbidden Planet,” a human scientist, Dr. Morbius, spent many years studying the remains of an advanced civilization whose citizens had mysteriously disappeared. The resources of the planet had been harnessed by a technology far in advance of that of man, and this technology continued to function automatically. Ultimately, Morbius discovered that the vanished race had been destroyed by an Id creature produced by their collective unconscious, a creature that drew upon the inexhaustible energies of that technology.

Let us hope that a similar fate does not await humankind.

Love Your Enemy

The prescription to love your enemy and to requite evil with good is sometimes thought of as an impractical and perfectionist ethic, able to be practiced only by a few exceptional souls.  But, in fact, this doctrine is widely taught in all religions as a fundamental principle for pursuing relationships with others.  The person who insists upon vengeance or retribution is not necessarily committing a crime, but neither will his act of revenge be helpful to spiritual advancement.  Revenge, which requites evil with evil, only multiplies evil in the world, while love, by in which one strives to overcome evil with good, spreads goodness in the world.

True love is unconditional and impartial–thus the metaphor of the sun that shines down on all life.  It is tested and proven by encounters with those who are difficult to love.  Where true love prevails, there no enemies are found.

The concluding passages dispute the prescription to love your enemy when it apparently contravenes the principles of justice and right.  Sometimes the best way to love an evil person is to make him face justice, or to hinder him from doing wrong.  Nevertheless, these corrective actions should be done with a loving heart and with the other person’s welfare uppermost in mind.

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“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me!”  In those who harbor such thoughts hatred is not appeased.

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me!”  In those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred is appeased.

Hatreds never cease through hatred in this world; through love alone they cease.  This is an eternal law.

Buddhism.  Dhammapada 3-5

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?  Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others?  Do not even the Gentiles do the same?  You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Christianity.  Matthew 5.43-48 

My Lord!  Others have fallen back in showing compassion to their benefactors as you have shown compassion even to your malefactors.  All this is unparalleled.

Jainism.  Vitaragastava 14.5 

Of the adage, Only a good man knows how to like people, knows how to dislike them, Confucius said, “He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon Goodness will dislike no one.”

Confucianism.  Analects 4.3-4

I should be like the sun, shining universally on all without seeking thanks or reward, able to take care of all sentient beings even if they are bad, never giving up on my vows on this account, not abandoning all sentient beings because one sentient being is evil.

Buddhism.  Garland Sutra 23

What kind of love is this that to another can shift? Says Nanak, True lovers are those who are forever absorbed in the Beloved. Whoever discriminates between treatment held good or bad, Is not a true lover–he rather is caught in calculations.

Sikhism.  Adi Granth, Asa-ki-Var, M.2, p. 474

The sage has no fixed [personal] ideas. He regards the people’s ideas as his own. I treat those who are good with goodness, And I also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained.

I am honest with those who are honest, And I am also honest with those who are dishonest. Thus honesty is attained.

Taoism.  Tao Te Ching 49

It may be that God will ordain love between you and those whom you hold as enemies.  For God has power over all things; and God is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.

Islam.  Qur’an 60.7

Aid an enemy before you aid a friend, to subdue hatred.

Judaism.  Tosefta, Baba Metzia 2.26

Do good to him who has done you an injury.

Taoism.  Tao Te Ching 63

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Christianity.  Romans 12.21

God said, “Resemble Me; just as I repay good for evil so do you also repay good for evil.”

Judaism.  Exodus Rabbah 26.2

Conquer anger by love.  Conquer evil by good.  Conquer the stingy by giving.  Conquer the liar by truth.

Buddhism.  Dhammapada 223

Man should subvert anger by forgiveness, subdue pride by modesty, overcome hypocrisy with simplicity, and greed by contentment.

Jainism.  Samanasuttam 136

May generosity triumph over niggardliness, May love triumph over contempt, May the true-spoken word triumph over the false-spoken word, May truth triumph over falsehood.

Zoroastrianism.  Yasna 60.5

The good deed and the evil deed are not alike.  Repel the evil deed with one which is better, then lo!, he between whom and you there was enmity shall become as though he were a bosom friend.

But none is granted it save those who are steadfast, and none is granted it save a person of great good fortune.

Islam.  Qur’an 41.34-35

A superior being does not render evil for evil; this is a maxim one should observe; the ornament of virtuous persons is their conduct.  One should never harm the wicked or the good or even criminals meriting death.  A noble soul will ever exercise compassion even towards those who enjoy injuring others or those of cruel deeds when they are actually committing them–for who is without fault?

Hinduism.  Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda 115

The reason why God does not punish even though He may see an enemy and have the urge to kill him and get revenge, is that He is thinking of the enemy’s parents, wife and children who all love.  Knowing all too well their unparalleled love toward that person, God cannot strike him with His iron rod.  When you really understand such a heart of God, could you take revenge on your enemy?  When you know all these things, you would even go and help that person.  In this manner one comes closer to the Great Way of heavenly Principle, that Great Way which tries to embrace everything centering on love.  When this happens earth will shake and induce even God to shed tears.  “You truly resemble me.  How happy I am!”  He will ex- claim.  God always looks at things in that perspective.  This is how we should understand the teaching to love one’s enemy.  The source of such a power to love your enemy is neither knowledge, nor money, nor earthly power.  It is only true love.

Unification Church.  Sun Myung Moon, 3-30-90

Someone said, “What do you say concerning the principle that injury should be recompensed with kindness?”  The Master said, “With what will you then recompense kindness?  Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.”

Confucianism.  Analects 14.36

According to Anas ibn Malik, the Prophet said, “Help your brother whether he is oppressor or oppressed.”

According to Anas, after the Messenger of God said, “Help your brother whether he is oppressor or oppressed,” Anas replied to him, “O Messenger of God, a man who is oppressed I am ready to help, but how does one help an oppressor?”  “By hindering him doing wrong,” he said.

Islam.  Hadith of Bukhari

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Read more from World Scripture: A Comparative Anthrology of Sacred Texts

LOVE

Meher Baba 

Of all the forces that can best overcome all difficulties, the greatest is the force of love, because the greatest Law of God is Love, which holds the key to all problems. This mighty force not only enables one to put the ideal of selfless service into practice, but also transforms one into God. It has been possible through love for man to become God; and when God becomes man, it is also due to His Love for His beings.

Love is dynamic in action and contagious in effect. Pure love is matchless in majesty; it has no parallel in power and there is no darkness it cannot dispel. It is the undying flame that has set life aglow. The lasting emancipation of man depends upon his love for God and upon God’s love for one and all.

Where there is love, there is Oneness and, in complete Oneness, the Infinite is realized completely at all times and in every sphere of life, be it science, art, religion, or beauty. The spirit of true love and sacrifice is beyond all ledgers and needs no measures. A constant wish to love and be loving and a non-calculating will to sacrifice in every walk of life, high and low, big and small, between home and office, streets and cities, countries and continents are the best anti- selfish measures that man can take in order to be really self-ful and joyful.

Love also means suffering and pain for oneself and happiness for others. To the giver, it is suffering without malice or hatred. To the receiver, it is a blessing without obligation. Love alone knows how to give without necessarily bargaining for a return. There is nothing that love cannot achieve and there is nothing that love cannot sacrifice.

Love for God, love for fellow-beings, love for service and love of sacrifices; in short, love in any shape and form is the finest “give and take” in the world. Ultimately, it is love that will bring about the much-desired universal leveling of human beings all over the world, without necessarily disturbing the inherent diversities of details about mankind.

All the same, in order to burst out in a mighty big spirit to serve as a beacon for those who may yet be groping in the darkness of selfishness, love needs to be kindled and rekindled in the abysmal darkness of selfish thoughts, selfish words and selfish deeds.

The light of love is not free from its fire of sacrifice. Like heat and light, love and sacrifice go hand in hand. The true spirit of sacrifice that springs spontaneously does not and cannot reserve itself for particular objects and special occasions. Love and coercion can never go together. Love has to spring spontaneously from within. It is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force and it cannot be forced upon anybody, yet it can be awakened in one through love itself.

Love cannot be born of mere determination; through exercise of will, one can at best be dutiful. One may, through struggle and effort, succeed in securing that his external action is in conformity with his conception of what is right; but such action is spiritually barren because it lacks the inward duty of spontaneous love.

Like every great virtue, love, the mainspring of all life, can also be misapplied. It may lead to the height of God-intoxication or to the depths of despair. No better example can be given of the two polarities of love and their effects than that of Mary Magdalene before and after meeting Jesus.

Between these two extremes are many kinds of love. On the one hand, love does exist in all the phases of human life; but here it is latent or is limited and poisoned by personal ambitions, racial pride, narrow loyalties and rivalries and by attachment to sex, nationality, sect, caste, or religion. On the other hand, pure and real love has also its stages, the highest being the gift of God to love Him. When one truly loves God, one longs for union with Him, and this supreme longing is based on the desire of giving up one’s whole being to the beloved.

True love is very different from an evanescent outburst of indulgent emotionalism or the enervating stupor of a slumbering heart. It can never come to those whose heart is darkened by selfish cravings or weakened by constant reliance upon the lures and stimulations of the passing objects of sense.

Even when one truly loves humanity, one longs to give one’s all for its happiness. When one truly loves one’s country, there is the longing to sacrifice one’s very life without seeking reward and without the least thought of having loved and served. When one truly loves one’s friends, there is the longing to help them without making them feel under the least obligation. When truly loving one’s enemies, one longs to make them friends. True love for one’s parents or family makes one long to give them every comfort at the cost of one’s own. Thought of self is always absent in the different longings connected with the various stages of pure, real love; a single thought of self would be an adulteration.

Divine Love is qualitatively different from human love. Human love is for the many in the one and Divine Love is for the One in the many. Human love leads to innumerable complications and tangles; but Divine Love leads to integration and freedom. Human love in its personal and impersonal aspects is limited; but Divine Love, with its fusion of the personal and the impersonal aspects, is Infinite in being and expression. Divine Love makes us be true to ourselves and to others and makes us live truly and honestly. Thus, it is the solution to all our difficulties and problems; it frees us from every kind of binding; purifies our hearts and glorifies our being.

To those whose hearts are pure and simple, true love comes as a gift through the activating grace of a Perfect Master, and this Divine Love will perform the supreme miracle of bringing God into the hearts of men. All the same, human love should not be despised, even when it is fraught with limitations. It is bound to break through all these limitations and initiate an aspirant in the eternal life in the Truth.

God does not listen to the language of the tongue which constitutes Japs (mental repetitions), Mantras (verbal repetitions), Zikra (either kind of repetition), and devotional songs. He does not listen to the language of the mind which constitutes meditation, concentration and thoughts about God. He listens only to the language of the heart, which constitutes love. The most practical way for the common man to express this language of the heart, whilst attending to daily-life duties, is to speak lovingly, think lovingly, and act lovingly towards all mankind, irrespective of caste, creed and position, taking God to be present in each and every one.

To realize God, we must love Him, losing ourselves in His Infinite Self. We can love God by surrendering to the Perfect Master who is God’s personal Manifestation. We can also love God by loving our fellow-beings, by giving them happiness at the cost of our own happiness, by rendering them service at sacrifice of our interests and by dedicating our lives at the altar of selfless work. When we love God intensely through any of these channels, we finally know Him to be our own Self.

The beginning of real love is obedience, and the highest aspect of this love which surpasses that of love itself is the aspect which culminates into the perfect obedience or supreme resignation to the Will and Wish of the Beloved. In this love are embodied all Yogas known to saints and seekers.

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To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings. If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.

If, instead of seeing faults in others, we look within ourselves, we are loving God.

If, instead of robbing others to help ourselves, we rob ourselves to help others, we are loving God.

If we suffer in the sufferings of others and feel happy in the happiness of others, we are loving God.

If, instead of worrying over our own misfortunes, we think ourselves more fortunate than many many others, we are loving God.

If we endure our lot with patience and contentment, accepting it as His Will, we are loving God.

If we understand and feel that the greatest act of devotion and worship to God is not to hurt or harm any of His beings, we are loving God.

To love God as He ought to be loved, we must live for God and die for God, knowing that the goal of life is to Love God, and find Him as our own self.

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Love is a gift from God to man.
Obedience is a gift from Master to man.
Surrender is a gift from man to Master.

One who loves desires the will of the Beloved.
One who obeys does the will of the Beloved.
One who surrenders knows nothing but the will of the Beloved.

Love seeks union with the Beloved.
Obedience seeks the pleasure of the Beloved.
Surrender seeks nothing.

One who loves is the lover of the Beloved.
One who obeys is the beloved of the Beloved.
One who surrenders has no existence other than the Beloved.

Greater than love is obedience.
Greater than obedience is surrender.
All three arise out of, and remain contained in, the Ocean of divine Love.

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The gift of understanding is more precious than any other attribute of Love — be it expressed in service or sacrifice.

Love can be blind, selfish, greedy, ignorant, but love with understanding can be none of these things. It is the Divine fruit of Pure Love, the rare fruit or flower of the Universe. It has been called “The Sweetest Flower in all the world!” Age cannot wither it.

It grows more lovely as it casts off its outer garment, disclosing its unseen beauty within.

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Read more by Meher Baba.  Google Meher Baba.

Within you lies a great and wonderous future.

I have within me a great and wonderful future.

In my mind’s eye I imagine that the life I have experienced so far is stretched out behind me. As I look at this line of people, events, and feelings I give thanks for all of them and all they have brought to my life. I now turn my attention to the space before me and imagine I see my future as a long line stretching into eternity. I see only positive images of people, events, and feelings in my future. I notice my future is limitless in richness and happiness. I affirm that I am worthy of a great and wonderful future and I accept it now. I combine these images with joy and let them go, knowing that they will create the good things I am visualizing and thinking.

–Becca

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The Highest of the High

Meher Baba 

Consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, each and every creature, each and every human being — in one form or the other — strives to assert individuality. But when eventually man consciously experiences that he is Infinite, Eternal and Indivisible, then he is fully conscious of his individuality as God, and as such experiences Infinite Knowledge, Infinite Power and Infinite Bliss. Thus Man becomes God, and is recognized as a Perfect Master, Sadguru, or Qutub. To worship this Man is to worship God.

When God manifests on earth in the form of man and reveals His Divinity to mankind, He is recognized as the Avatar — the Messiah — the Prophet. Thus God becomes Man.

And so Infinite God, age after age, throughout all cycles, wills through His Infinite Mercy to effect His presence amidst mankind by stooping down to human level in the human form, but His physical presence amidst mankind not being apprehended, He is looked upon as an ordinary man of the world. When He asserts, however, His Divinity on earth by proclaiming Himself the Avatar of the Age, He is worshipped by some who accept Him as God; and glorified by a few who know him as God on Earth. But it invariably falls to the lot of the rest of humanity to condemn Him, while He is physically in their midst.

Thus it is that God as man, proclaiming Himself as the Avatar, suffers Himself to be persecuted and tortured, to be humiliated and condemned by humanity for whose sake His Infinite Love has made him stoop so low, in order that humanity, by its very act of condemning God’s manifestation in the form of Avatar should, however, indirectly, assert the existence of God in His Infinite Eternal state.

The Avatar is always one and the same, because God is always One and the Same, the Eternal, Indivisible, Infinite One, who manifests Himself in the form of man as the Avatar, as the Messiah, as the Prophet, as the Ancient One — the Highest of the High. This Eternally One and the Same Avatar repeats His manifestation from time to time, in different cycles, adopting different human forms and different names, in different places, to reveal Truth in different garbs and different languages, in order to raise humanity from the pit of ignorance and help free it from the bondage of delusions.

Of the most recognized and much worshipped manifestations of God as Avatar, that of Zoroaster is the earliest — having been before Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Thousands of years ago, he gave the world the essence of Truth in the form of three fundamental precepts — Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds. These precepts were and are constantly unfolded to humanity in one form or another, directly or indirectly in every cycle, by the Avatar of the Age, as he leads humanity imperceptibly towards the Truth. To put these precepts of Good Thoughts, Good Words and Good Deeds into practice is not as easily done as it would appear, though it is not impossible. But to live up to these precepts honestly and literally is as apparently impossible as it is to practice a living death in the midst of life.

In the world there are countless sadhus, mahatmas, mahapurushas, saints, yogis and walis, though the number of genuine ones is very, very limited. The few genuine ones are, according to their spiritual status, in a category of their own, which is neither on a level with the ordinary human being nor on a level with the state of the Highest of the High.

I am neither a mahatma nor a mahapurush, neither a sadhu nor a saint, neither a yogi nor a wali. Those who approach me with the desire to gain wealth or to retain their possessions, those who seek through me relief from distress and suffering, those who ask my help to fulfill and satisfy mundane desires, to them I once again declare that, as I am not a sadhu, a saint or a mahatma, mahapurush or yogi, to seek these things through me is but to court utter disappointment, though only apparently; for eventually this disappointment is itself invariably instrumental in bringing about the complete transformation of mundane wants and desires.

The Sadhus, saints, yogis, walis and such others who are on the via media, can and do perform miracles and satisfy the transient material needs of individuals who approach them for help and relief.

The question therefore arises that if I am not a sadhu, not a saint, not a yogi, not a mahapurush, nor a wali, then what am I? The natural assumption would be that I am either just an ordinary human being, or I am the Highest of the High. But one thing I say definitely, and that is that I can never be included amongst those having the intermediary status of the real sadhus, saints, yogis and such others.

Now, if I am just an ordinary man, my capabilities and powers are limited — I am no better or different from an ordinary human being. If people take me as such then they should not expect any supernatural help from me in the form of miracles or spiritual guidance; and to approach me to fulfill their desires would also be absolutely futile.

On the other hand, if I am beyond the level of an ordinary human being, and much beyond the level of saints and yogis, then I must be the Highest of the High. In which case, to judge me with your human intellect and limited mind and to approach me with mundane desires would not only be the height of folly but sheer ignorance as well; because no amount of intellectual gymnastics could ever understand my ways or judge my Infinite State.

If I am the Highest of the High, my Will is Law, my Wish governs the Law, and my Love sustains the Universe. Whatever your apparent calamities and transient sufferings, they are but the outcome of my Love for the ultimate good. Therefore, to approach me for deliverance from your predicaments, to expect me to satisfy your worldly desires, would be asking me to do the impossible — to undo what I have already ordained.

If you truly and in all faith accept your Baba as the Highest of the High, it behooves you to lay down your life at His feet, rather than to crave the fulfillment of your desires. Not your one life but your millions of lives would be but a small sacrifice to place at the feet of One such as Baba, who is the Highest of the High; for Baba’s unbounded love is the only sure and unfailing guide to lead you safely through the innumerable blind alleys of your transient life.

They cannot obligate me, who, surrendering their all — body, mind, possessions — which perforce they must discard one day, surrender with a motive; surrender because they understand that to gain the everlasting treasure of Bliss they must relinquish ephemeral possessions. This desire for greater gain is still clinging behind their surrender — and as such the surrender cannot be complete.

Know you all that if I am the Highest of the High, my role demands that I strip you of your possessions and wants, consume all your desires and make you desireless rather than satisfy your desires. Sadhus, saints, yogis and walis can give you what you want; but I take away your wants and free you from attachments and liberate you from the bondage of ignorance. I am the One to take, not the One to give, what you want as you want.

Mere intellectuals can never understand me through their intellect. If I am the Highest of the High, it becomes impossible for the intellect to gauge me, nor is it possible for my ways to be fathomed by the limited human mind.

I am not to be attained by those who, loving me, stand reverently by in rapt admiration. I am not for those who ridicule me and point at me with contempt. To have a crowd of tens of millions flocking around me is not what I am for. I am for the selected few, who scattered amongst the crowd, silently and unostentatiously surrender their all — body, mind and possessions — to me.

I am still more for those who, after surrendering their all, never give another thought to their surrender. They are all mine who are prepared to renounce even the very thought of their renunciation and who, keeping constant vigil in the midst of intense activity, await their turn to lay down their lives for the cause of Truth at a glance or sign from me. Those who have indomitable courage to face willingly and cheerfully the worst calamities, who have unshakable faith in me, eager to fulfill my slightest wish at the cost of their happiness and comfort, they indeed, truly love me.

From my point of view, far more blessed is the atheist who confidently discharges his worldly responsibilities, accepting them as his honorable duty, than the man who presumes he is a devout believer in God, yet shirks the responsibilities apportioned to him through Divine Law and runs after sadhus, saints and yogis, seeking relief from the suffering which ultimately would have pronounced his eternal liberation.

To have one eye glue on the enchanting pleasures of the flesh and with the other expect to see a spark of Eternal Bliss is not only impossible but the height of hypocrisy.

I cannot expect you to understand all at once what I want you to know. It is for me to awaken you from time to time throughout the ages, sowing the seed in your limited minds, which must in due course, and with proper heed and care on your part, germinate, flourish and bear the fruit of that True Knowledge which is inherently yours to gain.

If on the other hand, led by your ignorance, you persist in going your own way, none can stop you in your choice of progress; for that too is progress which, however slow and painful, eventually and after innumerable incarnations, is bound to make you realize that which i want you to know now. To save yourself from further entanglement in the maze of delusion and self created suffering which owes its magnitude to the extent of your ignorance of the true Goal, awake now. Pay heed and strive for Freedom by experiencing ignorance in its true perspective. Be honest with yourself and God. One may fool the world and one’s neighbors, but one can never escape from the knowledge of the Omniscient — such is the Divine Law.

I declare to all of you who approach me, and to those of you who desire to approach me, accepting me as the Highest of the High, that you must never come with the desire in your heart which craves for wealth and worldly gain, but only with the fervent longing to give your all — body, mind and possessions — with all their attachments. Seek me not in order to extricate yourself from your predicaments, but find me in order to surrender yourself wholeheartedly to my Will. Cling to me not for worldly happiness and short-lived comforts, but adhere to me, through thick and thin, sacrificing your own happiness and comforts at my feet.

Let my happiness be your cheer and my comforts be your rest. Do not ask me to bless you with a good job, but desire to serve me more diligently and honestly without expectation of reward. Never beg of me to save your life or the lives of your dear one, but beg of me to accept you and permit you to lay down your life for me. Never expect me to cure you of your afflictions, but beseech me to cure you of your ignorance. Never stretch out your hands to receive anything from me, but hold them high in praise of me whom you have approached as the Highest of the High.

If I am the Highest of the High, nothing is then impossible to me; and though I do not perform miracles to satisfy individual needs — the satisfaction of which would result in entangling the individual more and more in the net of ephemeral existence — yet time and again at certain periods I manifest Infinite Power in the form of miracles, but only for the spiritual upliftment and benefit of humanity and all creatures.

However, miraculous experiences have often been experienced by individuals who love me and have unswerving faith in me, and these have been attributed to my nazar or Grace. But I want all to know that it does not befit my lovers to attribute such individual miraculous experience to my state of the Highest of the High. If I am the Highest of the High, I am above this illusory play of maya in the course of the Divine Law.

Therefore, whatever miraculous experiences are experienced by my lovers who recognize me as such, or by those who love me unknowingly through others channels, they are but the outcome of their own firm faith in me. Their unshakable faith often superseding the course of the play of maya, gives them those experiences which they call miracles. Such experiences derived through firm Faith eventually do good and do not entangle the individuals who experience them into further and greater bindings of illusion.

If I am the Highest of the High, then a wish of my Universal Will is sufficient to give, in an instant, God-realization to one and all and thus free every creature in creation from the shackles of Ignorance. But blessed is Knowledge that is gained through the experience of Ignorance in accordance with the Divine Law. This Knowledge is made possible for you to attain in the midst of ignorance by the guidance of Perfect Masters and surrenderance to the Highest of the High.
 

Reposted from the Bah·’“ NYC website.

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A Magnificent Future

Over a century ago, Bah·’u'll·h stated:

“…the prevailing order appeareth to be lamentably defective…” “Soon will the present-day order be rolled up and a new one spread out in its stead.” –Bah·’u'll·h, Gleanings, p. 216 and p. 7

Even a cursory glance reveals that the world is in turmoil. The daily newspaper and television news reports bring us terrible stories of crime, extreme poverty amidst plenty, the rising incidence of violence and immorality, the abandonment and neglect of children, and much more — things which indicate a breakdown of moral and ethical responsibilities on the part of individuals as well as society.

Concurrently, the world is also witnessing the emergence of the means and conditions that promise a magnificent future for humanity. Advancements in medicine, food production, communication, transportation and many other fields are paving the way for a global human community to begin a new era. A raised consciousness regarding human rights, the protection of the environment and all aspects of the home-village earth is replacing the old narrow mentality. The means for achieving world unity are also rapidly being put in place.

These two simultaneous processes are, in the Bah·’“ view, the death pangs of the old world order and the birth pangs of the new. Slowly, even while humanity is learning to think of itself as one entity and laying the foundation for permanent peace, it is realizing the deep need for a world-wide spiritual regeneration, a movement toward raising personal moral and ethical standards of conduct that will enable individuals and societies to function the way they should.

In spite of the advances in material well-being, people are beginning to realize that all the technology that science brings us will not achieve this spiritual regeneration.

The Bah·’“s believe that only the spiritual force and power of the life-giving Message of a new Manifestation from God, Who calls us to a higher level of human dignity and moral conduct, can bring this about. When the energy released by a united and spiritually-regenerated humanity is combined with the benefits of science, then will the world witness that which it has never seen before.

The Forthcoming Golden Age

The centerpiece of the Bah·’“ vision of the future society is the unity of the human race. Bah·’u'll·h writes:

“O ye children of men the fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race….The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” –Bah·’u'll·h, Gleanings, p. 286

The achievement of this unity is Bah·’u'll·h’s declared mission and the cherished task of the world-wide Bah·’“ community. The outline and structure of the unity of mankind when it is achieved are indicated in the following passage from the writings of Shoghi Effendi, great-grandson of Bah·’u'll·h and Guardian of the Bah·’“ Faith:

“The unity of the human race, as envisaged by Bah·’u'll·h, implies the establishment of a world commonwealth in which all nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united, and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are definitely and completely safeguarded. This commonwealth must, as far as we can visualize it, consist of:

• A world legislature, whose members will, as the trustees of the whole of mankind, ultimately control the entire resources of all the component nations, and will enact such laws as shall be required to regulate the life, satisfy the needs and adjust the relationships of all races and peoples.

• A world executive, backed by an international Force, will carry out the decisions arrived at, and apply the laws enacted by, this world legislature, and will safeguard the organic unity of the whole commonwealth.
• A world tribunal will adjudicate and deliver its compulsory and final verdict in all and any disputes that may arise between the various elements constituting this universal system.
• A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity.
• A world metropolis will act as the nerve centre of a world civilization, the focus towards which the unifying forces of life will converge and from which its energizing influences will radiate.
• A world language will either be invented or chosen from among the existing languages and will be taught in the schools of all the federated nations as an auxiliary to their mother tongue.
• A world script, a world literature, a uniform and universal system of currency, of weights and measures, will simplify and facilitate intercourse and understanding among the nations and races of mankind.

In the future society:

• Science and religion, the two most potent forces in human life, will be reconciled, will co-operate, and will harmoniously develop.

• The press will, under such a system, while giving full scope to the expression of the diversified views and convictions of mankind, cease to be mischievously manipulated by vested interests, whether private or public, and will be liberated from the influence of contending governments and peoples.
• The economic resources of the world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated.
• National rivalries, hatreds and intrigues will cease.
• Racial animosity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and co-operation.
• The causes of religious strife will be permanently removed.
• Economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abolished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterated. Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership on the other, will disappear.
• The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the extermination of disease, to the extension of scientific research, to the raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and refinement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human life, and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.
• A world federal system, ruling the whole earth and exercising unchallengeable authority over its unimaginably vast resources, blending and embodying the ideals of both the East and the West, liberated from the curse of war and its miseries and bent on the exploitation of all the available sources of energy on the surface of the planet.
• A system in which Force is made the servant of Justice, whose life is sustained by its universal recognition of one God and by its allegiance to one common Revelation–such is the goal towards which humanity, impelled by the unifying forces of life, is moving.”

–Shoghi Effendi, Letter of March, 1936, World Order of Bah·’u'll·h, p. 203-204

© 2002 The Spiritual Assembly of the Bah·’“s of New York City

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Reposted from Prospect Magazine. 

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Afterlife?

Paul Broks

I’ve been browsing the “World Question Centre” at edge.org, the website for thinking folk with time on their hands. The 2005 Edge question is a good one: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

Alexander Vilenkin, a physicist, believes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of similar regions. But “it follows from quantum mechanics” that the number of histories that can be played out in them is finite. The upshot of this crossplay of finitudes and infinities is that every possible history will play out in an infinite number of regions, which means there should be an infinite number of places with histories identical to our own down to the atomic level. “I find this rather depressing,” says Vilenkin, “but it is probably true.” The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, on the other hand, believes that “consciousness and its contents are all that exists,” the physical universe being “among the humbler contents of consciousness.” But he can’t prove that either. Daniel Dennett sees consciousness as a scarcer commodity. His unproven belief is that, lacking language, animals and pre-linguistic children also lack self-awareness. He insists that neither is thereby morally demoted, but, I wonder, does this mean it is more acceptable to eat small children or less acceptable to eat animals?

This brings us to death. The psychologist Jesse Bering believes we will never get our heads around the idea. He calls it “Unamuno’s paradox,” after the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who was troubled not so much by the prospect of his own death as by his inability in life to get any kind of imaginative purchase on what the state of being dead would be “like.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness,” he lamented. And you can’t get out of this by saying that “it is like nothing at all” to be dead, because the point is precisely that we are incapable of imagining absolute nothingness. Our mental apparatus is tuned to states of being in the world. Non-being is simply beyond our ken. All of this is of no concern to those who believe in an afterlife. The conscious personality just floats on elsewhere. That most people hold to this bizarre belief is not simply due to religious indoctrination. The separateness of body and mind is a primordial intuition. It has sprung from our evolution as social beings and coalesced into the hardware of the central nervous system. Human beings are natural born soul makers, adept at extracting unobservable minds from the behaviour of observable bodies, including their own. Taking the next, false step, if mind and body are conceived as separate entities, it is easy to see the possibility of a mental life after physical death.

This leads me to “Broks’s paradox“: we are inclined to believe in mind-body dualism even though we understand it to be wrong. Neuroscientists are not exempt. Consider the following thought experiment, devised by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Some years hence you find yourself taking business trips to Mars. Teleportation is the usual mode of transport. It works like this. A scanner records the states of your body in atomic detail and digitally encodes the information for radio transmission. Your body is destroyed in the process but reconstructed on Mars using locally available materials as soon as the radio signals are decoded. The replication is perfect: identical body and brain, identical memory stores and patterns of mental activity. It is “you.” You are in no doubt. Most neuroscientists say they would readily submit to this process. Why should they worry about destruction and reconstruction of the body? As good materialists, they know that “the self” (secular cousin to the soul) is no more than a pattern of experiences and dispositions bundled together by the operations of the central nervous system. Now imagine this. There is a teleporter malfunction. You have been scanned and the information transmitted, but this time your body was not vaporised in the usual way. Your replica was automatically constructed and is going about its business. Worse still, the faulty scanner has left you with a fatal heart condition. You will be dead within days. Which would you rather be, the Martian replica or the moribund earthbound version? It should make no difference to a true materialist. In scenario two, the vaporisation process has been delayed, that is all. The personal trajectory of the individual arriving on Mars is the same for both scenarios. Psychological continuity has been maintained, as it is via the oblivion of sleep from one ordinary day to the next. But very few rest easy with scenario two. It shatters one’s complacency about unproblematic teleportation (and therefore materialism): “If the replica’s not me nowÖ”

One might dismiss all this as “angels on a pinhead” stuff. But Ian McEwan” makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.

© Copyright 2005 – Prospect Magazine

More from the What is Enlightenment? website.

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Our Emerging Future

Impressions from: Jeremy Rifkin, Elisabet Sahtouris, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Ray Kurzweil

Faster Forward by Melissa Hoffman

Most of us already know that the world is changing fast—we can feel it in our bones and we can smell it in the air, even though we may not always be able to put our finger on just what it is that’s happening. We may notice that the weather is more capricious, or we may shake off a bit of irritation when we find out, for example, that the new computer we purchased just a few months ago has already been superseded by a better-faster-smaller-cheaper-hipper-looking model. What would happen if we sat down to look at what all these small signs of change, taken together and viewed over a longer span of time, might actually be pointing to? It’s not necessarily a comfortable or easy exercise to undertake, as we discovered. Because, as those who spend a lot of time thinking about things like change and time will tell you, the kind of change we’re in the midst of right now is, by its very nature, different from what we’ve known before. How? According to the scientists and futurists featured here, all of these apparently isolated changes are part of a larger wave of systemic change that is now occurring with a magnitude and complexity greater than anything the human race has yet experienced. And that rate, some say, is accelerating exponentially—a concept that alone is overwhelming to comprehend. Indeed, the more we learned about change and the future, the more we found ourselves asking the question: Can our existing spiritual and ethical structures—both traditional and contemporary—equip us to handle the enormity, the speed, the complexity, and the overwhelming nature of the changes we’re undergoing? Changes that may shortly take us, as you will see in the interviews that follow, far beyond our current capacities of imagination.

As a first step toward finding the answers to these questions, we spoke with a number of scientists, evolutionary thinkers, and futurists, who each view the world of change from a slightly different perspective. From biologist Elisabet Sahtouris’s microscopic empires of warring bacteria to inventor Ray Kurzweil’s intravenous brain-enhancing nanobots; from futurist Jeremy Rifkin’s deathblow to the oil age to Barbara Marx Hubbard’s birth of a new consciousness, each contributor opens a unique window into the many dimensions of our changing life conditions. Whether the subject of discussion is as large as our universe or as small as a nanotube, whether it’s as tangible as petroleum or as ephemeral as consciousness—one thing you can count on is that it’s ALL changing. And just how much and how fast is something that all of us, like it or not, are about to find out.

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Jeremy Rifkin is author of sixteen books on the impact of technological changes on the economy, the workforce, and society. He is an advisor to heads of state and government officials worldwide and speaks frequently before business, labor, and civic forums. Currently a fellow at the Wharton School of Business and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, he spoke with What Is Enlightenment? from his office in Washington, DC.

The End of an Era with Jeremy Rifkin

WIE: The human species is experiencing unprecedented change at almost every level of its existence—technological, ecological, social, and political—and this is all happening on a global scale. From your perspective as a futurist and corporate consultant, can you describe what kinds of changes you’re seeing now and expect to see in the future?

JEREMY RIFKIN: During the twenty-first century, we are going to see the end of mass wage labor on this planet. Sophisticated new technologies—software technologies, computer technologies, robotic technologies, intelligent technologies—are already beginning to replace entire job categories. Within less than a decade, we’re going to produce goods and services we can’t even imagine yet, and many new professional skills will emerge, but these will not be mass labor jobs. We will see smaller and smaller elite workforces working side by side with increasingly intelligent technology. By the mid-decades of the twenty-first century, we’re going to be able to produce goods and services for the whole world with a fraction of the workforce we have now.

The key question this raises is, what will happen to millions of human beings when we no longer need them to produce basic goods and services? We’re already seeing that there is nowhere in the world where we are not facing long-term structural unemployment. So how do we redefine what a human being is in the twenty-first century? Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have become so accustomed to defining humans in terms of their productivity at the workplace that we scratch our head when we try to think: Is there something else human beings on earth can do? If you think about it, you start to see how narrowly constructed our consciousness is about ourselves.

The Age of Biology

Physics and chemistry dominated the first two industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and we’re now moving into the age of biology, which will be the foundation and the basic framework for the third industrial revolution of the twenty-first century. The age of biology, which is already under way, is going to raise unprecedented issues because we now have the ability to manipulate life at its component level: genes, proteins, cell lines, organs, tissues—even whole organisms. In addition to provoking serious public debate, the age of biology is going to raise the issue of how we define all of creation in a world where we can begin to reassemble it, manipulate it, redefine it, and organize it as a utility.

We’ll have to decide: Do we take a hard path or a soft path? Which means deciding: Will we use the new science to create a second genesis, to redefine and reconfigure millions of years of evolution, including our own, and, in a sense, play God? Or, will we use the new science to better understand the relationship between genes and environment, so that we can more fully—and more humbly, if you will—integrate ourselves into the first evolution on this planet? The soft path asks how we can better integrate our science and technology into working with, as opposed to against, millions of years of evolution and the ecosystems that support it. It represents a more elegant, more intellectually sophisticated, and much more scientifically advanced approach because it requires a deep understanding of framework, of context, of all the relationships and choreography that exist in nature. So, the age of biology is going to be critical for humanity. It’s going to force us to define, and even possibly redefine, what a human being is. We’ll have to carefully discern what our relationship is to our fellow species. What are our obligations to the planet, and how do we judge the intrinsic value, as opposed to the utility value, of life?

The New Hydrogen Regime

“What’s amazing about hydrogen is that when you use it to produce power, heat, and light, the only byproduct is pure water. You can drink it! Hydrogen produces no carbon dioxide at all. So if we were to move to this
“forever fuel,” it would potentially address all the major oil-related crises we now face: we could radically reduce global warming, the Middle East would become increasingly less important in the geopolitics of the world, and we could narrow the divide between the haves and have-nots—because once it’s harnessed, hydrogen’s available everywhere on the planet.”

Energy Is Power

Right now, we have three great crises facing the human family, and they’re all connected to oil. The first is global warming, the second is the increasing debt in the third world, and the third is the potential for more wars in the Middle East.

Global warming is probably the most impressive challenge faced by humanity. It represents the dark side of the Industrial Age; it’s the bill for two hundred years of burning fossil fuels. I think that if you were to measure human accomplishment on this planet in terms of sheer impact, you would have to say that global warming is the greatest single accomplishment of the human race, although it’s a negative one. Why? Because global warming has affected the entire biochemistry of the earth in less than one century. That’s very impressive—negative but impressive! Even if the temperature change will be in the lower range predicted by the studies (the higher range is a ten degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature; the lower range is three or four degrees), we’re still in trouble. These changes will force, in less than a century, a shift in climate that is equal to the change from the last ice age to today—and that took fifteen thousand years. Remember, half the planet was under ice fifteen thousand years ago. So we’re talking about changes of that magnitude in less than a century, and our ecosystems and human systems cannot accommodate that without some serious losses.

If you look at the situation in terms of economics, there are also indirect financial costs associated with global warming, which we tend not to factor in. When I consult with leaders in the reinsurance industry, they don’t know how to deal with it. The big question that comes up is: How do you insure against agricultural depletion, coastal flooding, wildfires, droughts, and severe weather patterns? The magnitude of these issues and the amounts of money involved become just enormous. Some companies have already begun to analyze the costs of all these problems, and it’s so much money that the total will eventually start to approach the actual value of our gross domestic product. (Gross Domestic Product is the total market value of all the goods and services produced within the borders of a nation during a specific period.)

Third World Debt

The second crisis we’re facing is third world debt. It’s easy for people in the West to forget that there’s a great divide between the haves and have-nots—and it’s getting worse and worse. Never before in history have so few enjoyed access to so much of the world’s resources and so many been denied. We don’t know of any proportional example in history—from the Paleolithic era to early modernity—where we’ve seen a divide of this magnitude in our human race. It’s truly unparalleled. Some of us are aware of this tremendous divide, but most of us don’t connect it with oil. When OPEC imposed the oil embargo back in the seventies, the price of oil shot up from $3 to $12 a barrel. And since then it’s never gone down. So, for thirty years, third world countries have been desperately borrowing money from the IMF, the World Bank, and other lending institutions to try to pay for oil they can’t afford in order to modernize their economies. So now, 83 cents out of every dollar borrowed in the third world is being used to pay off bad debts—and they’re not even getting the oil. These countries are now spending more money to pay back past loans than they are spending on basic human services. So eighty-nine countries out there are worse off than they were ten years ago. Keep in mind that as the price of oil continues to go up and as we reach global peak, the third world is going to be caught in a downward cycle of ever-deepening poverty and despair.

The Middle East

The third crisis we’re facing is connected to the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East. If you take a step back, you can see that the modern age has been driven by the use of fossil fuels. Look at how we’ve been living for the past one hundred years and you’ll understand how critical oil and fossil fuels are to our very existence. Our foods are grown in petrochemical fertilizer, our clothes are made out of chemical synthetics, our plastics, our building materials, our heat, our light, our pharmaceuticals all come from oil. But we’re just beginning to see that we will have used up half of the world’s supply of cheap crude oil (this is called “global peak”) sometime between 2010 and 2035—and whichever date you believe, it’s still an incredibly short time from now. That’s the critical point though; that’s when the era is over. Because from that time forward, prices will never go down.

When we do reach peak, two-thirds of the remaining reserves of cheap oil will happen to be in the Middle East, which is the most troubled and politically volatile area of the world. If we think the Middle East is a trouble spot today, imagine what it will be like seven or fifteen years from now when that’s where all the remaining oil is. And not only that, but other nations, like China and India, are expected to need as much oil as the U.S. and the European nations within ten years from now; so everyone’s going to be fighting for that oil. It’s a dangerous, dangerous geo-political game being played out.

So if you add it all up—global warming, an increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots, more third world debt, and growing geopolitical and military pressures in the Middle East, compounded with the fact that global production of oil is likely to peak sometime within the next ten to thirty-five years—it means we’re at the end of an era. As we move toward this very dangerous endgame for the current energy regime, a new hydrogen energy regime is on the horizon. The key question is: How do we get from here to there in a way that will allow us to cross the divide and not collapse civilization? 

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Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, is an evolution biologist, futurist, author, and consultant on Living Systems Design. Dr. Sahtouris speaks and consults internationally, showing the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in businesses, government, and global trade. Her books include EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, and Biology Revisioned, coauthored with Willis Harman.

The Wisdom of Living Systems with Elisabet Sahtouris

“The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization—its economy—is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.”