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Hello Everyone,
‘This is going to be a very unusual ezine’ was the greeting I read recently in someone’s newsletter. I nearly fell out of my chair, because I had already begun this ezine the same way. I love those synchronous moments, especially when each ezine is respectively authored by friends who didn’t know the other was thinking the same thing. Fascinating!
This ezine is really unusual, because it’s a teaser for topics so grandly embedded in the USA psyché that for me to imagine writing about them is too much for me to chew. Gratefully, others have already done gargantuan homework, and written books and lectured about all things religious and psychological in corporate workplaces, a changing complex I find deeply fascinating. Add to those ideas reports from worlds of astronomy and cosmology, and I’m into wonderment!
“Surprise!” Moment
This article was drafted right after watching the first two hours of National Geographic’s documentary Strange Days on Planet Earth, televised April, 2005. The intuited “Surprise!” was felt when I turned on the television one minute before that program came on. Well, I almost dropped the remote. I was not even aware of the documentary, and the tube had not been on for days.Are you bahleeeeving that? My intent to gobble up as much information about Earthlings’ partnerships with nature is one of my primary fascinations. That intention has everything to do with turning on the television at just the right moment.
Colossal, cosmic, exquisite processes have been going on behind our backs, under our feet, and over our heads as you will see in a moment. We Earthlings are not only a single collective in processes discovered in nature, we are extraordinarily observant of ourselves embedded in those processes.
Once we awaken to our links with nature, and gawk at how nature affects our enterprises, we can no longer snooze. The joke we’ve played on ourselves is ended once we become watchful of Mother Earth’s business in climate cycles, and calmly stay awake for any “Surprise!” moment that guides our sensibilities this decade.
Earthly Business
What has our curiosity about Earth’s natural happenings got to do with business? A better question might be, ‘What has business not got to do with Earth’s natural cycles?’
The National Geographic documentary shows, with very little scripted sensationalism, how an interloper, for example, a certain type of termite has purportedly traveled unticketed continent to continent on board humans’ ships and airplanes.
Those interlopers have been attending their business for decades by munching in woods underneath and inside homes and buildings in the southern United States. Some of those structures are falling; landslides are likely to occur after sponge-like underground structures collapse from the gnawing appetites of innocent wee critters.
Most termite colonies are family oriented, helpful, groom each other, and sophisticated in their communications with one another—even termites can be endearing.
Would you believe plants spar with each other for resources and space? Plants are conscious. I have believed that for years, but little did I know as a kiddo that ivy mom kept on the coffee table had actually schemed to take over the house.
Plants, living on one continent but delivered into labs of research scientists a continent away, are able to nose around, forage, and interlope out of labs into common water ways. Those overly healthy, undaunted green leafies now interrupt the flow of water through channels native residents had engineered for irrigating crops.
Dust travels intercontinentally. Vast, circular weather systems rotating above Earth gather dusts containing elements reported to compromise the health of the destinations’ residents. We could be breathing last year’s air born skin cells from who knows where.
It is possible to understand that Mother Earth has been continually using humans’ attributes, just as we are, distracted by tethers to delusions and technology, as a collective alliance for a nearly conceivable, magnificent evolutionary process. Natural cycles have happened over eons, and we now acknowledge necessary attention to such a cosmic detail by observing what appears as nature cycles increase by natural occurrence. Likely, Earthlings have not had such a dazzling opportunity to observe these elegant processes on a grand scale with as many peoples and economies in the balance. ¹
Given choices made available to us, staying awake to the idea that we are doing the best we can to make the best choices possible can be enlivening, and a reason for joy for being present on Planet Earth! Why not focus some learning, and our businesses and behaviors, on being in concert with exquisitely altering climates, which would include real worlds of other earthly businesses performed by interloping species of insects and plants?
The Real World
Earthlings’ real world is a world of gawking at the nature that created us, and, for too many people, that awed nature has been negated. Gawking at the mere presence of Earthlings is part of human’s real world, too. Confusing as it may seem, the only world, if that is to be acknowledged.
Surveys begun twenty years ago in studies of mental health, Rabbi Michael Lerner summarizes a spiritual turning point, a crisis in The United States, in his lecture for Cambridge Forum, February 9, 2006, as heard on National Public Radio (NPR), San Francisco, California USA. ²
During Lerner’s lecture, he reminds listeners that he is making sweeping statements comprehensively clarified in his writings.
The rest of this ezine follows with those sweeping, general statements, easily partnering Lerner’s keystone of societal consciousness with personal cosmology. This author hopes these words might be as educational for you as they have been for me.
Some of the knowledge gleaned from Lerner’s ten thousand surveys is most waking hours of people in the USA are spent in offices as well as in travel to and from. Many workers have tendencies to perceive themselves and the world from trainings borne in places of work. Psychodynamics within that perception have a monumental impact of shaping what is called the bottom line, which has been substituted for forms of spirituality—being awed by creation.
The bottom line has become the real world for rationally maximizing money and power for someone else, usually owners of corporations, or owners of retail stores in which workers work; or, if workers are entrepreneurial, they maximize bottom lines for clients and customers. Ego needs of people at the tops of nonprofits may be maximized by office workers.
As office workers are learning how the bottom line maximizes self interests, they are simultaneously learning that every other person is viewed either as a potential client, or, if in the workplace, as a potential ally and assistor. The ultimate question for too many office workers is how could someone else assist the influence of their own importance and bottom line within a corporate system?
Rabbi Lerner and other people saw what was becoming for many the real world. As people internalize the function of the bottom line hour after hour, day after day, month after month, home and family and friends are perceived with similar attributes. For some people, friendships have been thick with compassion, kindness, polite neighborliness; remember the days when a cup of sugar was borrowed by handing it over the backyard fence. Now, many friendships are bottom line, thin with regard only for what families or neighbors can give without communal esprit de corps. ³
The cyclic, continually evolving natural real world, in which humans can experience nature with awe, has for many workers been turned upside down, and redefined as supplying money and resources for a good life (mortgage, food, auto) and siblings’ education. Hence, office workers sense the real world as rational; necessarily fixed without natural cycles of transformation; unchangeable as being caught in a cage; and, darkly competitive. †
At the same time, many workers feel conflicted, and sense they are being slimed by the training for and subsequent perceptions of their bottom line world. Then, they go home, and attempt to teach their children traditional values, many of which are not substantiated in hours of watching physical and psychical violence on television or on Internet.
Good Wishes
In many offices of corporations in the USA are workers and directors, surprisingly, some are males, who acknowledge what’s happening. They would love to have a new bottom line of love and generosity; they would love their good wishes for ethics and ecological sensitivities to become apparent; they would love their display of awe for being born human not disregarded as fanciful and unreal spirituality. Despite the corporatocracy they’re caught in, those many courageous people remain on with good wishes and ethical sensibilities while threatened with dismissal if they don’t maximize bottom lines.
Rabbi Lerner finds in his research that millions of middle income families beg for a deeper spiritual consciousness, and feel frustrated because they think they can’t find it, what with manipulations and utilitarian calculations looming in the larger society. Consequently, many presume their contributions in the competitive marketplace transcend no further than making money for pleasures of heads of corporations.Masculine dominated institutions are seen undermining reasonable, specific measurable results, to an extent that rationally maximizing bottom lines thwart what workers consider of value—their spirituality.
Enter the patriarchal, religious political right, which says there’s a spiritual crisis in this society; and, they’re correct. And, the crisis is based on materialism and selfishness; and, they’re correct. Unfortunately, they turn and ask ‘you know where that comes from, don’t you?’
They relentlessly claim that special interest groups are introducing materialism and selfishness into society. Groups picked for religious scorn depends on which nation being considered, and at which historical periods it was to their political advantage to demean a group’s beliefs. Any group will be labeled special interest, i.e., African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, gays, lesbians, feminists, Jews, and so on, if a group begins moving for accountability, responsibility, and equality to help repair a nation’s social structure.
The ironic complexity is exposed. When movements demand that corporates correct such things as worker income; improve working conditions; end environmental pollution; stop gender discrimination; offer health care, the resolute religious patriarchs have systematically opposed any introduction of accountability and responsibility for corrections.
Indeed, this is duality at its finest: Religionists speak to workers who need a name for the source of frustration (a spiritual crisis), while simultaneously being the primary force in society championing materialism and self interest in the workplace. Workers must then take that confusion and frustration and pain into their personal lives at home. ‡
Progressive forces have allowed the right to become the only assumptor and articulator of the spiritual crisis to taxpaying hirelings, who silently scream wishes for relief and good will, and solid community for their futures.
What would many institutions’ new bottom lines look like? Love: Attentiveness to one’s feelings, and the well being of one’s self and others; a state of staying awake to perceive one’s self and another person not for what can be maximized in the workplace, but only that they both exist being human in gawking-awe of the nature that created them.
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