Transforming the Planet Is a Change of Heart
R.Ayana
It’s hard to realise how utterly different daily life in
modern nations has become compared to the existence of our forebears. Who can
say what’s been lost amidst all that’s been gained? Many promising babes have
been thrown out along with the wasted bathwater of the past.
It can be difficult to discern which aspects of human nature
have been thoroughly transformed and which have been simply disguised beneath
fashionably chameleonic costumes and momentary mores. Many apparently wilful
acts are actually repetitive reiterations of instinctual behaviour. Fundamental
change can easily evade control or prediction.
Commonplace notions and behaviour that seemed utterly normal
in times past are often thoroughly forgotten or completely proscribed. Blood
sports and bloodletting, mercury tooth fillings, poisonous coal gas pumped into
citizens’ homes, workhouses for the poor and the apparently ‘natural order’
which routinely subordinated women and ignored children’s needs are anathema to
advanced societies. We’ve left much behind in the infancy and childhood of our
species but if we’re wise and fortunate we still have a great deal of growth
and evolution ahead of us, doubtless accompanied by the usual requisite growing
pains.
Our race is not yet run. Many things we take for granted
will be completely swept away and replaced in less than a single human
lifespan. Whether we keep the baby or the toxic bathwater of our industrious
leavings is entirely up to us; we can’t have it both ways.
Throughout virtually all of human history slavery was
regarded by almost everyone as a normal state of affairs. Populations reared in
the primate pecking order of feudal societies were indoctrinated to believe in
a ‘natural order’ of sexes, classes and castes and to regularly pay obeisance
to distant faceless overlords and the tin-pot graven gods devised to authorise
their totalitarian rules. Even when enough technical and ethical progression
had occurred to make slavery both an uneconomical and undesirable proposition,
freeing the most benighted enslaved underclass of humankind required centuries
of argument, conflict, bargaining and travail.
Centuries of struggle and public education were necessary to
make the bleeding obvious a recognised fact; that all men and women are born
(not created, friends, but self-created) equal and deserve the same rights,
freedoms and responsibilities as everyone else - unless they prove by
destructive actions that they’re incapable of living in free and just
societies. Centuries of struggle have resulted in the recognition of a few
prime requisites of egalitarian cultures; the recognition of an individual’s
sovereign rights to habeas corpus (to own their bodies and live freely without
fear of unjust imprisonment), robust democratic traditions, freedom of speech
and an unfettered media, an independent judiciary, electoral oversight, fair
and equally apportioned rights and responsibilities and the freedom to pursue
one’s dreams, ’ere they harm none.
It’s always suited ‘great leaders’, captains of industry,
monarchic dynasties and their coterie of privileged servants, relatives and
hangers-on to keep the far greater majority of humankind time-poor, ignorant,
insecure and helpless. Endless work was required to maintain the lifestyles to
which these robber barons were accustomed and to fulfil their dynastic
fantasies, so the poor were informed that they were expected to work until they
died. They were told that ‘idle hands do the devil’s work’ and ‘there’s always
a place for you in the army’.
We applaud the advances of the last two centuries, but still
have a long way to go before true equality and freedom can become the norm. It
isn’t a matter of technology or ability; all the tools and treasures we require
are lying at our feet, hidden in plain sight. It’s a question of perception,
wisdom and will.
In this day and age, working almost all your life away to
secure the basic necessities and a few little luxuries is lauded as a valuable
and necessary ethic. In fact, we’ve already reached the point where everyone on
the planet could easily be provided free housing, food, clean water, health
care, education, refrigeration, transportation, information, communication and
energy – if only we’d give up war and stop paying all our time and imaginary
money to weaponsmiths and their bankers, so they can hold a war-stained sword
of Damocles over all our heads.
It would be relatively easy for everyone on earth to be
provided with a basic payment or guaranteed wage that would provide us all with
the requisite leeway to spend our only true asset – our precious time on planet
Earth – more fruitfully and wisely. Those who seek more can always work harder
than is healthy for them if they so desire. Most taxes, visible and otherwise,
go not toward schools, hospitals and public welfare but into refinancing
imaginary debt. Almost all the rest are wasted on war.
There’s plenty in the pot, but a lazy crazy few hold all the
cards. Universal welfare is not a dirty word or some socialist plot; it’s
easily available now, if we wake up and seize the day. Scarcity is an artefact
of profligate waste, empty-headed ingrained competitiveness and carefully
inculcated moral and technological delusions. If he heal and nurture the planet
that spawned us abundance will be our reward.
Despite all our advances and advantages wage slavery is
still the norm, regarded as a fair and ‘natural’ order by just about everyone.
But technical and ethical progress has reached the stage where endless,
pointless drudgery is no longer necessary, and certainly undesirable. In an age
when everyone is expected to work full time to keep up with an endless
mechanised rat race treadmill and children are farmed out to day ‘care’ in
their parents’ absence, it’s easy to see that mindlessly active hands, not idle
ones, are the true agents of mayhem, loneliness, madness and destruction on
planet Earth. Idle hands have time for recreation, regeneration and true
creation – time and space to write, build, paint, maintain, plant, repair,
play, enjoy and make love.
Further progress or evolution can’t be achieved within
today’s politically daft power-oriented pseudo-system of monetarism – a regime
that not only throws out the baby with the bathwater but eats its own children
and spits out intractable toxic waste. Neither capitalists, communists,
monarchists, nor any adherents to other tried and untrue isms hold the keys to
our future. Yet whatever we choose to do with our lives and time, a brave new
world will be built on the foundations of the paranoid old one. Change isn’t
coming; it’s already here, unstoppably unavoidable, and it’s time to open our
hearts and minds and recycle our destructive tools and toys into braver, better
implements. How we proceed is up to all of us all; it isn’t up to the
self-blinding beurocrats and timeservers who currently run the uninspiring show
for the amusement of today’s unseen overlords. It’s a question of what we each
choose to do with our time.
How will caste-ridden control freaks with edifice complexes
continue to suppress and divert that which they fear the most – the wilful
nature of fundamentally uncontrollable yet thoroughly likeable humankind – when
everyone realises that the emperor has no clothes? Abundant sources of power
and techniques to harness endless free energy have been ruthlessly suppressed
for more than a century. How can you sell free energy? How can you meter
freedom? How can the masses be allowed flying vehicles, making all notional
national borders redundant? Abundant free energy makes a totally new paradigm
possible; inevitable!
There will always be those who believe unlimited power also
makes possible an unmatched potential for total control and complete oversight
of every earthly deed, word and even thought. Some insecure people just can’t
let go of limited power and will cling to it ruthlessly, even if they must maim
and blind everyone in the process of hiding the unlimited sources of energy all
around and inside us. If you’re a worker, you’re probably working for one of
these perpetual malefactors - contributing to their stockpile of destructive
power, while receiving only indigestible promissory notes that have no
intrinsic value in return.
Free energy is the lynchpin that makes anything possible.
When most work in today’s world is actually measured in joules, not
women-hours, we can all be free to work or play at whatever we like. No-one
needs to struggle for supremacy in a needlessly competitive dog-eat-dog world
any more. In fact, clinging to the superannuated failing patterns of our
ancestors in a nuclear era is a lethal proposition.
Today’s purblind leaders won’t easily give up their kingdoms
and satrapies on the quarantined prison planet we’ve built for them; they’re
terrified of humans, after all. But even a world emperor can’t hold back the
tide or moderate the output of the Sun. They’re things we can only do for
ourselves and together; believe it or not, such things are not only possible
but well within our grasp as a species. Anything is possible when we’re finally
ready and willing to leave the playpen and take our place as wise collective
governors of Planet Earth.
A great philosopher of the last century* formulated a basic
plan for human advancement and evolution - SMI2LE; Space Migration,
Intelligence Increase and Life Extension. This is what it will take to reach
the next plateau of being for humankind, but we have to let go of our childish
toys and transform our partial notions of who and what we really are. Wise
friends are waiting to help us; not gods who demand prayer or prostration, but
our very selves dwelling in more advanced forms.
One day most of us – even the otherwise praiseworthy Dalai
Llama - will even come to see that the unnecessary slaughter of sentient beings
for the purpose of consuming their corpses is unnecessary, unsustainable,
unhealthy and positively demonic. Death reeks and breeds death and it’s also a
very bad look. The enslavement of other beings takes many, many forms, and in
all slave societies the masters also live in an all-encompassing prison where
freedoms are negligible and compassion is rare. If we can’t recognise sentience
and the intrinsic right to life amongst our fellow travellers on Spaceship
Earth, how can we recognise it elsewhere – or even in ourselves?
The future we face is a revolution of human hearts and
minds; a rekindling of the light within. Unlike information and temporal
loyalty, knowledge or love can’t be bought or sold, nor even given; they’re an
experience. Don’t put it off. Jump off the treadmill. Live your dreams today,
in the gift of the present. We live on a beautiful world and there’s plenty of
real work to do and joys to experience while we’re repairing all the damage we
and our ancestors have done. It’s been a long party, but no-one gets to really
SMI2LE until the mess has been cleaned up.
Turn on. Tune in. Opt out! We can only create paradise for
all if we’re together, man…
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