As we exit a very tumultuous 2015 and the world teeters on the breaking point of our various economic, societal, and natural eco-systems, I thought it interesting to try and understand what are some of the root causes and significant milestones that have lead us to this point in time .
The Power Trio of Smith, Newton, and Darwin
When one embarks on this journey, you are naturally taken back to the 18th century when Adam Smith proposed that market based economic activity and the aggressive pursuit of self-interest should be used to improve the material well being of all citizens. Smith published his Wealth of Nations in 1776 and Issac Newton’s book on classical mechanics, Principia, was published in 1687. So the concept of the world as a mechanistic, matter (material) based world-view had close to 90 years of percolation before Smith came onto the world stage. And it is those two major fields of thought (along with Darwin) that have driven our economic, scientific, and societal development for the last three hundred years –
Man as maximizing his self-interest within a materialist scientific world view that sees no inherent connection between humans or their world – just objects that can be manipulated against each other to achieve a desired outcome.
These new fields of thought arose in the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment period which was ripe for a new world view. The middle ages had left the world without enough economic development and the private and public lives of citizens were too dominated by the stranglehold of religious dogma.
What Enlightenment’s modernity brought to the scene was a move beyond the previous mythic-literal, religious, traditional era of development – where the Bible was the one source of literal, uncontested truth; humanity had one, and only one savior; and ‘no one comes to salvation save by through the ‘Mother Church’, whose dogmas delivered truth on all subjects, artistic to normative to scientific to religious. With the Enlightenment, representative democracy replaced monarchy; freedom replaced slavery, and the experimental modern sciences replaced the revelatory mythic religions (as source of serious truth)...So successful were the modern sciences that the other major domains of human existence and knowledge – from artistic to moral – began to be invaded and colonized by scientism (the belief that science, and science alone, can deliver any valuable truth). | The ‘dignity of modernity’ (the differentiation of the value spheres) soon collapsed into the ‘disaster of modernity’ (the dissociation of the value spheres), resulting in what Weber famously called the ‘the disenchanted universe’. Such was the state of affairs for some 300 years – a mixture of great advance and stunning discoveries in the scientific arena, accompanied with a reductionism and scientific materialism that rendered all other fields and areas as defunct, outmoded, childish, archaic. | Social Darwinism – the notion of the survival of the fittest applied to all aspects of human existence as well – began to insidiously invade all the humanities, ethics, and politics of humans, including the two major new economic systems, capitalism and socialism. |Scientific materialism – the ideal that all phenomena in the universe (including consciousness, culture, and creativity) could be reduced to material atoms and their interactions, which could be known only by the scientific method – and the generally liberal politics that accompanied such beliefs, set the stage for the next three centuries. – Ken Wilber writing in the foreword to Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.
So in essence, by pursuing the Smith/Newton/Darwin path, we certainly have benefitted greatly in terms of our material existence and the movement beyond religious dogma and superstition was a welcome relief to many. But along the way, we also ended up losing something very important – deep human values, morals, and spiritual connection. We threw true spirituality out with the bath water.
Quantum Reality
Quantum Physics (QP), however, came along close to 100 years ago and gave us the scientific rationale to reunite spirituality with science. QP revealed that what spiritualists (not religious dogma) had said for thousands of years was actually grounded in scientific reality. Mystical truth of a universal interconnectedness between all people and all things was in fact the true nature of reality. Author Trevor Blakes explains the impact of two of the core aspects of QP in more detail:
- Quantum Entanglement – Two particles can become entangled if they are close enough together and their properties get linked. They can stay linked even after they are separated. When you measure or affect one particle, you end up affecting the entangled particle no matter how far apart they are. Once connected always connected. If we change the way we pay attention to the past we can change how it affects us now, if we focus on a future we want we can connect it to us now.
- Observer Effect – Also known as Wave-Particle Duality. Reality is unset jello. Everything is possibility until you observe it. Once an observer puts its focus on the wave/particle, the wave collapses into particle matter. Everything in our life only exists when we put our attention to it. An atom only appears in a certain place, until you measure it or observe it.
So why are we concerned with what a particle may be doing or whether it is waving or not waving when we are not looking at it? When we understand that our observations and expectations actually influence the apparent behavior of reality, then we are empowered to actively play with interactive reality-creation. Reality is neither particle nor wave. It is both and neither simultaneously, and as co-creators with universal consciousness, we influence how reality shapes itself. | Likewise, in our continual observations of our reality, and ourselves, we repeatedly collapse the wave function into a state of sameness, or a state of no-change. We perceive through the same lens of awareness, and that collapses the wave function from various possibility states into the ones we have chosen to observe for ourselves. Our limited lens of awareness creates perceptual biases that filter what we are able to notice and experience. How we perceive life is a result of how we collapse wave functions. Our perspectives, our observations, our opinions, our thoughts, and our beliefs are continually collapsing the wave function from unlimited possibilities, to probability states, into what we actually observe and perceive as our experience. |We see what we expect to see, and we are continually and consistently collapsing the wave function.The act of observation creates the entire universe. There are no objects, only relationships. The world is based on consciousness. Practice the skill of observation to change the reality of your life. Pay attention to what you really want, not want you don’t want. Where our attention goes, energy grows. [To learn more about Quantum Physics and the various proofs and experiments that have taken place over the last 50 years, see the very readable book by journalist Lynne Mactaggart – The Field, The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.]
QP is an example of how knowledge evolves over time and so existing systems need to be updated accordingly. This is where we have plateaued in our evolution. Quantum Physics principles radically go beyond the foundations of classical Newtonian Physics but we have not integrated those concepts into all aspects of our society. In QP, everything is in fact connected. Life as we know it as all energy. And, energy is never destroyed (ie., we are spiritual, energetic beings having a material existence – life time after life time).
Quantum Physics helps us reclaim the spiritual truth that we are not isolated material beings – we are in fact highly interconnected to each other and to everything on the planet and the planet itself. What we say and do to others has a great effect not only on them but ourselves as well. We do not operate in insolation. Energy connects everything. We live in a holistic world, not an isolated, separate one.
But this updated understanding of reality has not made it through all our various scientific, economic, and social systems. We still cling to the world view of the past which unfortunately saw diminishing need for meaning and values within materialist reality.
So how do we move past the Smith/Newton/Darwin model into the 21st century Quantum reality? First, let’s review the basis of Adam Smith’s capitalist model. Quantum Physicist Amti Goswami explains in his book, Quantum Economics:
Adam Smith’s capitalism derives from the notion that if producers and consumers alike are left alone to pursue their individual self-interest, the invisible hands of the free market will establish equilibrium between production and consumption, allocate resources between sectors of the economy, and stabilize prices, etc. Over more than a couple of centuries, we find that although capitalism is workable, there are glitches. We have been searching for a right direction for changing capitalism ever since its shortcomings became clear, the boom and bust or business cycle – alternative periods of inflation and recession – for example. There is also the question of social good. Obviously when individual good sometimes comes in opposition to social good, what then? Smith implicitly believed that the invisible hands of the free market also guarantees social good.
Since Adam Smith’s model actually doesn’t work well enough in practice, Capitalist governments have had to intervene in the “free market” to remedy ever present imbalances. But as Goswami writes, ironically, these go directly against the core principle of free markets:
Many of these theories of convenience stand in direct contradiction with Smith’s pivotal notion of the free market…the demand side model creates middle class jobs through middle class tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and government funded public works infrastructure. The supply-side economics creates more capital supply by tax cuts to the rich; the idea that this will stimulate direct business investments, trickling down to the middle class by creating jobs. Currently in America, the two political parties are bogged down in a battle of these two alternatives with various new gimmickries. But when viewed through the lens of pragmatism, all these efforts are simply versions of the same old, same old. But the two parties do agree on one thing – we need to always be in a perpetual growth mode in order to deal with the problems of the capitalist system -‘Economists of all ilks seem to agree that we have to have indefinite economic expansion in order to deal with periodic but inevitable recessions, the bust part of the boom-bust cycle. But how can a finite ecosystem with finite resources provide such indefinite expansion?’
So Where Did It All Go Wrong?
If we go back to the time of Newton’s discovery of modern materialist physics, we see an accepted co-existence between science and religion – with each saying to the other “I recognize your importance and let’s agree that we’ll each take care of our respective spheres and that both are important to the proper functioning of society and evolution of humanity”. Goswami points out that Adam Smith and Newton arose at roughly the same time and Smith implicitly understood the importance of mind and matter harmonizing together for society’s benefits:
Adam Smith understood quite well that capitalism crucially depends first on ethics and morality and second on creativity. Only when the market operates incorporating these features of the mind, does its invisible hands maintain overall social good. To summarize, Adam Smith’s capitalism had the following implicit message:
- Producers and consumers, do pursue your self-interest with gusto, but…
- When dealing with competition, do remember ethics;
- And producers, don’t forget to fan the creative power of your team to forever create renewed interest in the consumer for whatever you produce;
- And then, the invisible hands of the free market will distribute capital to make room for new innovation, will produce the needed economic expansion, will grow capital, and will maintain equilibrium and stability to bring not only your personal good but the good over everyone – social good.
But Newton’s materialist world-view overtook the spiritual / ethics counterpart and over time as we entered the industrial revolution, we saw a world which looked very much like individual machines that could be controlled and manipulated through scientific and mathematical principles. That view steam rolled into our current situation which began in earnest after WWII with the desire to fully utilize all the spare manufacturing capacity that we now had. We needed to find buyers for the output of those factories and the age of consumerism was born. For the economy to grow, and for lifestyles to increase, people had to increase their consumption. And to feed that consumption machine, they needed to find ever new ways of making money. I wrote earlier this year in Dear America: Have We Gone Too Far?:
It’s Always About the Money…
This “making money off of money” started in the 1950’s as a way to increase economic growth through consumption. With America’s post-war manufacturing capacity fully charged up, someone needed to buy all the things it could produce. Advertising and Consumer Marketing tactics were accelerated and financial instruments were created to give consumers and businesses the capital they would need to make purchases and investments.
Consumerism was on the rise in America, but still in its infancy, when Thorstein Veblen coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the late nineteenth century. Wars and the Great Depression kept it in check, but it sprang into its adolescence in the 1950’s. That’s when the economist and marketer Victor Lebow wrote his article “Price Competition in 1955” in the Journal of Retailing. With stunning frankness, Lebow laid out this vision for the shopper society: ‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today [is] expressed in consumptive patterns.’” – from Enough is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill
In many ways, this system has provided many advantages. Many of us have benefited from this increased availability of capital and the ensuing economic growth that it produced. The downside is that the need for growth is perpetual and there are no real mechanisms to limit it within safe operating levels – this is why we have boom and bust cycles. The system exceeds its safe operating limits, breaks, and then we have a bust again. We inject more capital (mostly money that doesn’t exist) through tax breaks or government expenditures (public debt) in order to get the system going again. In fact, since 2008 world debt levels have increased by close to 25% or $35 Trillion Dollars.
In order to pay all of this back, the prescription by government leaders and corporate and finance executives is – more growth. That’s right, we need to grow the economy larger and faster in order to have some chance of managing this debt. But with interest rates at or near zero in most of the developed world, and governments straddled with too much debt and not enough revenues, its hard to see how this will be done so easily.
And so here we are. We have arrived 250 years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into an era that has lost the critical understanding of our inherent interconnectedness and spiritual oneness. Without that, money was allowed to become god and the source of all happiness.
Money became the new God of economics. However, this God is very different from the old God of religions. The old God favored spiritual values – ethics and love, meaning, creativity, and the like. The new God favors only material values or ego values, if you will, centered around pleasure. Helped by the media, younger generations around the world are lapping up these pleasure-centered ego-values. – Goswami, Quantum Economics
The Next Step in Human Evolution
If we end up equating consumption with happiness, then a perpetual economic growth strategy that seeks to maximize material pleasure and profits with no care to social costs or degradation of the planet is a logical conclusion. The problem of course is that we’ve pushed our planetary boundaries to the breaking point (if not already past them) which is pushing humanity over the cliff to extinction. We therefore have no choice but to seek a new path.
The new path must follow a Quantum mindset – a science which allows us to see the true nature of our reality. A reality that reunites heart and mind and provides us with the insight to control and integrate our internal and external lives through the power of our consciousness:
Quantum economics is the extension of Adam Smith’s capitalism in the right direction because it is based on a scientific worldview that incorporates the matter-mind, religion-science compromise that prevailed in Smith’s time and clearly influenced him. The new economics makes room once more for both mind and matter in the economic arena, only this time in an integrated scientific way. Consequently, the new economics makes capitalism every more appropriate for conscious human beings. It puts not only our gross material side into the economic equation, as Adam Smith had, but also our subtle side – consciousness, feeling, meaning, and intuition – which Smith failed to include explicitly; it was premature in his time. – Goswami, Quantum Economics
But the time is certainly right now. So, how would a new Quantum focused world look like? If we allow ourselves to think freely, I have a feeling it may have the following elements of Unity Consciousness:
- Winning and losing would be anachronistic ideas. Competition would seem counter-productive. Those ideas breed separation between individuals and not unity. Working for collective good would be a goal of all participation in human systems.
- People would enter the field of Governance and Stewardship, not Politics. Politics implies arguing for your particular “special interest” whereas Governance and Stewardship implies working towards the good of the whole and not just some of the parts.
- Our school systems would be radically changed from factories where memorization and test scores are the top priority to institutions teaching creativity and self-mastery. As Robots will do more and more mundane intellectual tasks, humans need to un-leash the combined power of their minds through the harnessing of both their left and right brains and the integration their minds with their hearts (the latest science in fact has shown that we have three brains – in our heads, around our heart, and around our gut. The brain in our heart actually sends more signals to the brain in the head than the other way around…see the Heart Math Institute for more information). And, we would start teaching children as early as 3 the concepts of meditation and mindfulness so they can obtain mental and emotional self-mastery and intuitive capability to allow them to navigate a highly complex world.
- Violence and War would seem to be bizarre concepts and only taken on in extreme need for self-defense. Having understood how Quantum reality shows the underlying connectedness of all reality, we would profoundly understand the concept of “the other is actually us”. Harming others is the same as harming ourselves as all energy is interconnected. Quantum Physics shows that by observing or putting our intention on something, we collapse the wave function into material reality. What we observe, think about, and choose is what we experience. In this way, the reality we experience is a mirror of our thoughts. If we choose to be hostile, hateful, and the like, then that is what we experience back in return. Not necessarily back from the target of our thoughts and actions, but more likely from someplace or someone else. Everything is connected and the energy finds its way back to the source even from different pathways. The science is simple – the more we attack, the more we suffer. The more we love, the more we prosper. [As an example, the solving of our current predicament in the Middle East would require an end to the cycle of attack and counter-attack. We would need to proactively do things that were in the best interest of all parties. Seeking to maximize our security and oil interests to the exclusion of the health of the whole will always be a losing proposition. And, seeing others as “less-than” us, only exacerbates the problem].
- Our monetary systems would be altered to reflect a shared success reality. Investors and businesses would use capital to improve the health and well being of all citizens globally. Producing products and services to maximize profit would be replaced with stakeholder objectives that sought to improve the human condition and the enhancement of human development as a first priority. Taking advantage of someone in a business transaction, charging exorbitant interest rates and fees, or manipulating consumer behavior for monetary gain would be recognized as counter-productive (the quantum-mirror again…), whereas proactively seeking to do the right thing for the right reasons would be seen as the most efficient way to karmic and material success.
- Our media would not be gauged to the lowest-common-denominator. Generating fear would not be a primary selling strategy as Humans, having fully understood their reality as energy beings, would seek to positively manage their energy levels toward love, joy, happiness, and compassion rather than fear, anxiety, and hatred. It would be understood that the latter only leads to degradation in our personal energetic fields and ultimately poor health and early physical death. We would therefore seek only to consume media that helped us, not hurt us.
- Freedom would mean the freedom to be creative. It would move away from “Freedom for Me” to “Freedom to be Creative for We”. We would all learn the techniques to uncover the spiritual divinity that resides in and is beaming through each of us. Co-Creating with the power of the divine force of love for the benefit of all life, would be considered the highest aspiration of humanity. Technology and the Arts would all seek to maximize this freedom of creative expression. And as we are all energetically interconnected, the more we created at the highest levels of divine consciousness, that consciousness would rapidly spread to all beings and thus rapidly raise the level of consciousness on earth.
- Once it is understood that all living things – humans, animals, and the earth itself – are connected and from one underlying source of creative energy, then harming not just other humans, but animals and the earth would be unthinkable. Sustainability would cease to be a buzz word and a business strategy, it would again become a moral imperative as it has existed in ancient cultures in the past. Abusing the earth for personal gain would be recognized as ultimately hurting ourselves as its energy is intrinsically tied to our own. Polluting the earth’s climate and destroying its eco-systems would be foreign concepts. The quantum-mirror would have shown us (as it is doing now), that the earth will mirror back to humanity the abuse and destruction that it has been given.
- Lastly, we would understand that since energy cannot be destroyed, and that everything including us is energy, then reincarnation and coming back for multiple life times is not a strange concept. We would then ask why do we come back over and over again. That answer has been revealed by mystic traditions (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu) for thousands of years. Our birth into material reality is for educational purposes. In our case, earth is our school. We come to it to in fact to learn only one lesson – the concept of unconditional love for all beings and all reality. Our various life times allow us to experience different perspectives of the “other” to first hand experience that the “other” is an illusion. It is all us. All Oneness. And, the quicker we learn our lesson, the quicker we graduate…and move on to the next grade. If we all understood that, I think you would agree, we would all be much better students during our time on earth and our school would be a much happier place.
Yes, in a Quantum Reality, life on earth would be a much more kinder, gentler existence where the best of humanity was allowed to flourish. Is it too difficult to imagine? A dreamer named John Lennon asked us to do just that when he wrote one of his most important songs in Ascot, England in 1971. The lyrics are timeless:
Imagine
by John Lennon
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
*Listen to the song for free on Spotify here.
May we all have the courage to imagine this brave new future in the coming year.
~Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
