Printable July - August 2004 New Group of World Servers in Action Page One

The New Group Of World Servers In Action july 2004 - august 2004 - PAGE 1

From the beginning of time humans have been involved in a battle between the “Forces of Light” and the “Forces of Darkness”. It is the primary human struggle. Our common awareness of the battle is seen in the popularity of film series’ like the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Star Wars.

In real life the “Dark Forces” are not always so easy to identify – as in many a children’s fairy tale where the wolf (or wicked witch) wears a disguise to trick the hero or heroine. The disguises are often very effective and many an intelligent, well-meaning but unwary soul is drawn into a relationship with the “dark forces”. It comes disguised as the pathway to happiness and fulfillment; if you could just dress in this way or drive this kind of car or live in this kind of house or make this much money, you would be happy, right? If you belong to this ethnic group or are this gender or go to this church God will favor you. If you honor this set of beliefs and worship God in this special way you will find peace and gain a special place in Heaven. These kinds of ideas feed a subtle belief that we and our needs come first - before the needs of immigrants or animals or trees or the poor or the “general public” or other countries or other – well – anything… And so we fear the “other” and work to protect ourselves from “them” – with guns and war and legislation. We need to get “them” before they get us.

It’s not that the nice clothes or the great new car or the latest electronic wonder is evil in disguise. It’s what we believe about these things – deep in our hearts. It’s what we give up to get them. Did you take a job instead of staying home with your kids because all your friends had great cars and went on great vacations and sent their kids to prestigious schools, and without the second income you couldn’t afford those things? Do you work a high-pressure job you hate because it pays so much better than the work you would really love to do – because it would mean giving up the new SUV and the big house in the great neighborhood? Are your kid’s lives so filled with tennis lessons and dance lessons and soccer practice that they never have time to just hang out with you? That is the subtlety of “evil” - that gentle nudge toward prestige and power and more material wealth. In order to fulfill this “urge” there are things we must do and things we must give up and our view of the world becomes ever so slightly skewed in the direction of those things that will support and fulfill this need for more. And so it goes.

There are many on this planet who are enamored of the “American Dream”. Thousands strive to come to America that they might live this dream themselves. But where is it the American Dream is taking us? Citizens of the United States consume six times more of the world’s resources than the rest of the citizens of our planet. Our consumer demands negatively impact the water, air, plants, animals and humans in every part of the globe. It’s a challenge to think that the American Dream has become a tool for the “Forces of Evil”. But look what the wonderful vision of all our citizens having enough food and a good home and a secure job has become over time. When did we go from striving to have “enough” to becoming obsessed over having the biggest and the most? When did we forget what the pursuit of happiness is all about?

"The lines of cleavage have grown steadily until now they can be expressed in terms of a humanity which is oriented towards the higher spiritual and altruistic values and whose keynotes are sacrifice, group good and world understanding, and those whose focus is predominantly material and whose aims are selfish, animated by ambition and the spirit of acquisition." A.A.Bailey

Watch television, and you’ll learn that the good life is in a new car, a cold beer, or a new drug. Look at surveys, and Americans say they want more money. But look inside at what actually gives you joy, and the good life may be closer than you thought

What is the good life? The old American Dream offers an answer: It’s individually achieved affluence. It’s the indulgences promised by magazine sweepstakes: a 40-foot yacht, a deluxe motor home, a personal housekeeper. (“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right,” proclaims a Lexus ad.) In a phrase, it’s life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness.

Does money indeed buy happiness? Few YES! readers would answer yes. But ask another question—“Would a little more money make you a little happier?—and many readers will sheepishly nod. There is, we assume, a connection between fiscal fitness and feeling fine, an assumption that feeds what Juliet Schor has called the “cycle of work and spend”—working more to buy more. According to one 1990s Gallup Poll, one in two women, two in three men, and four in five people earning more than $75,000 a year say they would like to be richer.

But we delude ourselves. The good life springs less from earning one’s first million than from loving and being loved, from developing the traits that mark happy lives, from finding connection and meaningful hope in faith communities, and from experiencing “flow” in work and recreation.

Materialism surged during the 1970s and 1980s, as evident in the annual UCLA/American Council on Education (ACE) survey of nearly a quarter million entering collegians. The proportion considering it “very important or essential” that they become “very well-off financially” skyrocketed from 40 to 74 percent, flip-flopping with the shrinking numbers who considered it very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” Materialism was up, spirituality down.

What a change in values. In the recent UCLA/ACE surveys, “very well-off financially” has been the top ranked of 19 rated goals, outranking “becoming an authority in my own field,” “helping others in difficulty,” and “raising a family.” And it’s not just collegians. Asked by Roper pollsters to identify what makes “the good life,” 38 percent of Americans in 1975 and 63 percent in 1996 chose “a lot of money.”

In Luxury Fever, economist Robert Frank reports that, with more people having more money to spend, late-1990s spending on luxury goods was growing four times as fast as overall spending. Thousand-dollar-a-night suites at the Palm Beach Four Seasons Hotel were booked months ahead for weddings, as were $5000-a-night suites at Aspen. The number of America’s 100-foot yachts doubled to 5,000 compared to a decade ago, and each may cost more than $10,000 per hour of use. Cars costing more than $30,000 (in 1996 dollars) increased during the 1990s from 7 to 12 percent of vehicles sold.

Does such unsustainable consumption enable the good life? Does being well-off make for well-being? Would people—would you—be happier if you could exchange a modest lifestyle for one with a world-class home entertainment system, winter skiing from your condo along the Aspen slopes, and being wined and dined on executive class travel? Social psychology theory and research offer some clear answers.

To a modest extent, yes, rich people are happier. Especially in poor countries, such as India, being relatively well-off does make for greater well-being. We need food, rest, shelter, and some sense of control over our lives.

But in affluent countries, the link between wealth and self-reported well-being is “surprisingly weak,” notes researcher Ronald Inglehart. Once able to afford life’s necessities, more and more money provides diminishing additional returns.

“People who go to work in their overalls and on the bus are just as happy, on the average, as those in suits who drive to work in their own Mercedes,” observes David Lykken, summarizing his own studies of happiness. Even the very rich—for example, the Forbes 100 wealthiest Americans in a 1980s survey by psychologist Ed Diener and his colleagues—are only slightly happier than average.

Over time, does our happiness rise with our affluence? A recent windfall from an inheritance, a surging economy, or a lottery win does provide a temporary jolt of joy. But as soon as one adapts to the new wealth, the euphoria subsides.

If personal happiness does not enduringly rise with our rising personal affluence, does a rising economic tide lift our collective happiness? Are we happier than in 1957, when economist John Galbraith was describing the United States as The Affluent Society?

Hope College social psychologist David Myers is author of The Pursuit of Happiness (Avon) and The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (Yale).

All of you want to do well.
But if you do not do good, too,
then doing well will never be enough.

It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great-Uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce. I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature.

Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first. Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office." Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. People don't talk about the soul very much anymore.

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume. I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

Simplicity of living is not a new idea. It has deep roots in history and finds expression in all of the world’s wisdom traditions. More than two thousand years ago, in the same historical period that Christians were saying “Give me neither poverty nor wealth,” (Proverbs 30:8), the Taoists were asserting “He who knows he has enough is rich” (Lao Tzu), Plato and Aristotle were proclaiming the importance of the “golden mean” of a path through life with neither excess nor deficit, and the Buddhists were encouraging a “middle way” between poverty and mindless accumulation. Clearly, the simple life is not a new social invention. What is new are the radically changing ecological, social, and psycho-spiritual circumstances of the modern world.

The push toward simpler ways of living was clearly described in 1992 when over 1,600 of the world’s senior scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences, signed an unprecedented “Warning to Humanity.” In this historic statement, they declared that, “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course . . . that may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” They concluded that: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

Roughly a decade later came a related warning from 100 Nobel Prize winners who said that “The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed.” As these two warnings by the world’s elder scientists indicate, powerful adversity trends (such as global climate change, the depletion of key resources such as water and cheap oil, a burgeoning population, and a growing gap between the rich and poor) are converging into a whole-systems crisis, creating the possibility of an evolutionary crash within this generation. If we are to create instead an evolutionary bounce or leap forward, it will surely include a shift toward simpler, more sustainable and satisfying ways of living.

Although the pushes toward simpler ways of living are strong, the pulls toward this way of life seem equally compelling. Most people are not choosing to live more simply from a feeling of sacrifice; rather, they are seeking deeper sources of satisfaction than are being offered by a high stress, consumption-obsessed society. To illustrate, while real incomes doubled in the U.S. in the past generation, the percentage of the population reporting they are very happy has remained unchanged (roughly 1/3) and, at the same time, divorce rates have doubled and teen suicide rates have tripled. A whole generation has tasted the fruits of an affluent society and has discovered that money does not buy happiness. In the search for satisfaction, millions of people are not only “downshifting” or pulling back from the rat race, they are also “upshifting” or moving ahead into a life that is, though materially more modest, rich with family, friends, community, creative work in the world, and a soulful connection with the universe.

IN THE LAST 200 years science and technology have changed the face of the Earth. Armed by the Industrial Revolution, European countries conquered continents, established colonial empires, had access to raw materials and markets and used their power to control much of the world.

Modern technology propelled by the forces of the market and politics has enhanced the power of Western nations beyond anything known or even dreamt of before. It is power over matter, over life on Earth, and power over nations and millions of people. Its unfettered exercise over two centuries has raised living standards of these Western nations to unbelievable levels of consumption. As Hans Jonas points out, "Not even the ravages of two world wars — themselves children of that overbrimming power — could slow the upward surge for long; it even gained from the spin-off of the hectic technological war effort in its aftermath. The decades after World War II may well denote the high water mark of technologic economic ebullience."

Today, faith in technology and progress is unabated. The dark side of technology is ignored and pushed aside, and more technology is generated to deal with the problems of earlier technologies. We live in a world which has obsessive preoccupation with growth and unlimited confidence in new technological developments to add to our lifestyles.

But this growth and lifestyle are by no means shared by all. Forbes magazine has estimated that 225 individuals, the richest in the world, have a combined wealth of more than $1 trillion, a figure that approaches the combined annual income of the poorest one half of humanity. The assets of the three richest individuals exceed the combined annual economic output of forty-eight poor countries!

The Western economic model — the fossil-fuel based, automobile-centred, throw-away economy — is the model that is being promoted and eagerly copied by the "developing" countries. The result is some economic growth, but the divide between the rich and the poor has become larger, with cities where more than half the population live in unbelievable slums. Also our economic and technological progress has been achieved by disappearing forests, disappearing rivers and wetlands, disappearing cropland for more and more cities, disappearing biodiversity, and disappearing fossil and mineral wealth and increasing wastelands.

In India we have increased our gnp by 5% to 6% or maybe 7%, but at the same time we have millions who go hungry and are homeless. Is this progress? No society can truly be called civilized if it has hunger and homelessness within its communities.

IN 1916 MAHATMA GANDHI gave a lecture to students of Allahabad University and asked the question "Is economic progress real progress?" In discussing the subject, Gandhi said, "I take it by economic progress we mean material advancement without limit — and by real progress we mean moral progress." The economists point out that there can be no moral progress, unless there is economic progress, so that the poor can satisfy their daily needs. Gandhi’s reply to this argument was that of course no one has even suggested that grinding pauperism can lead to anything else than moral degradation, that all human beings have a right to live decently and therefore must find the means to feed, clothe and house themselves. But for this simple performance, Gandhi adds, "we need no assistance from economics or their laws."

Gandhi, continuing his lecture, made the point, "I venture to think the religious scriptures of the world are far safer and sounder treatises on the laws of economics, than many of the modern economic text-books." And he added, "I believe that Jesus was the greatest economist of his time."

Are you a Cultural Creative? This list can give you an idea. Choose the statements that you agree with.

“The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” – Edmund Burke

Lately we hear the word “evil” thrown around quite often in some political circles—even entire nations are called “evil”. But what is “evil” from a deeper spiritual perspective?

According to the Ageless Wisdom of East and West, one of the unique features of our Earth is that it is a planet of polarity. Everything on the physical, emotional, and mental level has its opposite. On a physical level, for example, there are males and females; on an emotional level, there is love and hate; on a mental level there are conservative ideas and liberal ideas. On a spiritual level, there is light and darkness.

We’ve found that one of the major learning opportunities in our spiritual growth process is dealing with the polarities of good and evil, light and darkness. We have learned that both light and darkness have an important purpose within the Divine scheme of things, and we must understand both of them to freely choose the light, as we progress to each new level of understanding. From the perspective of the Ageless Wisdom, God can be defined as a Being who knows good without needing evil as a reference point.

Evil can be defined metaphysically as an energy that is out of place, misdirected, or out of timing. For example, an emphasis on individual selfishness can be appropriate at an early stage of personal development. However, it can crystallize into a type of evil when a person should be ready to move on to self-transcendence and transpersonal love, but resists this next step. Evil can thus be interpreted as persisting in something a person should have outgrown.

As humans, we are responsible for growing into maturity and taking responsibility for dealing with the effects of the evil we have created. Yet there is a distinction between the evil generated by human thought, feelings, and actions, and the major evil organized by what’s called “the dark forces”, the anti-evolutionary (or involutionary) forces which seek to enslave humanity through the opening provided by human evil.

The dark forces originate beyond human control, but the "shadow" aspects in each person--such as unacknowledged fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, ambition, and greed--can draw them in, thus providing a human tool for darkness to influence events. These forces represent involutionary energy--movement into matter and enslavement to it--at a time when humanity should be moving in an evolutionary direction, away from over-attachment to material things and toward Spirit. An example of this would be focusing the attention of humanity on endless consumerism, when the evolutionary goal in this cycle is spiritual development through right human relationships.

Excerpted from Spiritual Politics by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson (Foreword by the Dalai Lama). Corinne and Gordon are also co-authors of Builders of the Dawn, and co-founders of The Center for Visionary Leadership, based in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, and co-founders of Sirius, a spiritual community in Massachusetts. Corinne coordinated a national task force for President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and Gordon was formerly the Executive Director of the Social Investment Forum. They can be reached at 415-472-2540; corinnemc@visionarylead.org; www.visionarylead.org. Spiritual Politics can be ordered from this website or by emailing cvldc@visionarylead.org. A free monthly e-newsletter is also available.

Taking a Stand

There are those who stand for separateness and materialism, for totalitarianism or for any imposed regime, and those who stand for the freedom of the human soul, for the rights of the individual, for brotherhood and right human relations, and the notion that there is one humanity and every individual is as valuable as a human being as the next, that the ancient divisions of people into classes who are worthy and those who are unworthy is a broken system that leads ever deeper into uniformity and the elimination of differences, and of the very things that make humanity humanity - freedom of choice and the freedom to be.

Tom Carney

Before emerging as one of America’s most innovative urban designers and, many believe, social pioneers, Lily Yeh spent much of her young adult life struggling uneasily in the interzone between disparate cultural traditions and identities. Born 58 years ago in pre-communist China, Yeh grew up in Taiwan as the daughter of an army general. She was just out of her teens when she was uprooted from the social, aesthetic and spiritual world she’d known, emigrating to the United States in the early 1960s to attend Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts.

At Penn, under the tutelage of a faculty that included such luminaries as professors Jim Van Dyck, Angelo Savelli and fine-arts director Malcolm Campbell, Yeh experienced an intensive initiation into the techniques, history and aesthetics of classical and modernist Western art, a process she found both exhilarating and “profoundly disorienting,” she says.

“I had started painting when I was in junior high school, when my father, who loved classic Chinese landscape painting, first took me to a master’s house. The way we learned in China was by strictly copying our masters and studying nature. Personal expression was not encouraged,” she explains. “When I came to the States, though, it was all free-style, abstract and geared toward expressing personalities. In this urban world, no one knew or cared about landscapes. I’d been catapulted across time. I felt like a woman with bound feet, and I couldn’t walk.”
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