Waking the sleeping giant

Why do I write?

I've been asked that question recently, and I ask it of myself. And I sometimes wonder if some of my recent posts, such as those about the NSA's domestic survelliance and data mining programs, seem too negative and unaligned with Torqopia's mission:

"Copia" is Latin for "abundance," and this blog explores my belief that abundance is all around us. We live in a world of infinite possibilities, and we have choice about what shows up in our lives. I write about a wide range of topics, and common themes are individual freedom and a world that works for everyone.

In 2003 I took Wisdom Unlimited, a ten month course that explores the question, "What if the most important thing about who we are is not what's going on inside of our heads but what is coming out of our mouths?" Through ongoing homework assignments and weekly course events, participants become aware of what they are saying and how closely it is related to what other members of their immediate community--those they are speaking to on a regular basis--are saying. They look at the age of their conversations and begin to see that much of what they say they've been saying for a long time, often since childhood. This awareness gives participants opportunities to upgrade those conversations and bring all of their adult capacities to their interactions with others. As we say in the course, "If you want a new life, say new things."

This year I am assisting with Wisdom; my primary role is to work with my participants to keep the material present for them between course sessions. At the beginning of the course, each of us assisting in this role were asked who we wanted to be known as during the course. While pondering the question, I remembered sitting in a course session back in 2003, feeling totally alive and inspired by the discourse and the people sharing in it. I looked out the window and saw cars backed up into the distance on I-5 in Seattle, and it occurred to me that humanity was a sleeping giant. I was reminded of the opening scenes in The Gods Must be Crazy which shows some of the absurdities of modern civilization: people rushing from place to place, often engaged in repetitive, mind-dulling tasks, disinterested to those around them.

So when asked last month who I wanted to be known as, I answered, "I want to be known as someone waking the sleeping giant."

What does that mean? It means that I think it's important that people lift their heads up from their day to day existence and try to get some sense of the bigger picture, that they attempt to gain some understanding of what happens at a distance from them but is nevertheless intricately connected to their own existence. In America few people any more are involved with, let alone aware of, how their food is produced or where it comes from. Food... what could be more basic to our lives, and yet it has become simply a product, and one which resembles less and less what people a hundred years ago would have recognized as food.

Waking the sleeping giant also means having people seek some deeper knowledge of the world and to engage in asking What? and How? and Why? It means to think and discuss and ponder on life's mysteries, not to simply accept what one is told.

And most importantly, it means that people recognize that they have choice in their lives. And not simply between Coke or Pepsi, but real choice in who they get to be and what they get to do. And to get that in having choice, they also have responsibility for their lives.

None of this is to say that there's anything wrong with all of the day to day activities that people--including me--are engaged in. All of that stuff is our lives. What I'm saying, though, is that all of that stuff isn't enough to be fully alive as a human being.

And that is why I write. To share information. To offer another perspective. To remind people that abundance--and miracles--are all around them. To quote Wayne Dyer, "Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into."

And I also write to warn. I have been fascinated by science and technology since I was a small child. I absolutely love it. But science and technology are neutral entities; we decide how to use them. And I do have real concerns about how we're using technology.

I think it is dangerous for us to think we can outsmart nature and genetically engineer our food crops... I doubt that anyone has a true sense of the potential consequences. Our ecosystem is amazingly complex and interconnected, and we always seem to leave out one critical factor when we make our calculations.

I worry that we've built our civilization's foundation on faulty assumptions about resources and their costs, not to mention our ability to affect the world with our activities. Systems in balance don't always change linearly; they can sometimes reach a tipping point where an equilibrium is disturbed and conditions change rapidly. Even while we may be reaching the end of cheap fossil fuels, we may have already irreversibly altered the climate in ways we will regret.

And most of all I am troubled when technology is used in ways that chip away at our individual freedoms and at the very essense of democracy. Covert surveillance and drone weapons both diminish our humanity, the one taking away our ability to simply be without being observed, the other reducing our inhibitions to kill. It is all well and good to say that extreme measures must be taken to protect the country in the face of new threats, but where does it end? And what are we protecting? Is the objective simply to keep people alive? Or is it to allow people to live?

I see no simply answers to these questions. We have released many genies from many bottles, and there is only one way to go back: a complete and total collapse of civilization. So barring that, how do we move forward, protecting both our own liberties and cultivating true freedom in the world? What happens when the inevitable happens, that the technologies we have developed--nuclear weapons, genetic engineering--are used against us? Does the state clamp down even more tightly, squeezing ever more humanity from the citizenry? Does the pendulum continue to swing from conservative to liberal as we search for answers to the questions of the day? Or does technology give someone the power to arrest the swing of the pendulum at one of its extremes, locking us in to some unending, dreary, authoritarian future?

I don't have the answers, but that is not to say that they don't exist. Abundance is all around us, and so are the solutions. They are embodied in humanity, in the sleeping giant that only has to wake up in order to say something new.

And so I write.