image by logan.fulcher

This is Part 1 of Uli’s piece on the Economy of Consciousness. Read Part 2.

What would you do? TNK, or as you might call her, Tinka, X9, your housekeeper robot just cooked the eggs and made the coffee for you. Until you have to start work—at home, at 5pm, for three hours, maybe four today—this day is yours.

Not just this day. Every day. It has been like this since the big crisis of 2009 rattled the world and humanity had no option but to rethink its ways: a financial system in ruin, a planet on the verge of becoming uninhabitable, and wars sparked by the grotesque disparities between the have-it-alls and the have-nothings. On its way to material prosperity for all, the world had grown out of unlimited growth. So what would your day look like?

Jump back through the looking glass and you are here, in 2009, on this side of the choices that brought about the above scenario. Every day you watch the news, the confusion grows more profound. What are you supposed to do? The mountain of problems seems so overwhelming that a part of you just wants to turn away—there are the grandchildren to hug, the dogs to walk, the next vacation. But you hook up with your local environmental group or food bank because you feel, think and know you just have to do something. Still, in your heart of hearts you wonder: “Can I really make a difference?” The wheels of the world turn so slowly and at this particular moment in our history, where the urgency seems greatest, they appear to be stuck in the mud of our past choices. Not much seems possible.

Since as early as the 1970s the lonely voices of some environmental scientists have been trying to rise over the roar and rush of a growing world economy to tell us that our current model of ever-increasing growth is not sustainable. At the time they were mostly decried as panicked doomsayers, evangelists of negativity.

Now, with the rise of economies like China, India and Brazil and the growing awareness of climate change, everyone can calculate online how many planets Earth it would take if we all were to enjoy the life-style we do in the First World—too many! And didn’t many of us have the niggling sense that an economy increasingly based on simply making money rather than making things would one day have to come crashing down? Trading ever more complicated financial products and shifting sums around that many knew existed only on paper couldn’t go on forever, could it? 

So what do we do? The range of possible solutions is as diverse as the people who propose them. Even if we disregard the most disturbing and outlandish scenarios, in which the poor world is left to vanish and rich folks find a way to make it through, the suggestions span widely different sets of visions and of values.

Maybe we will find ourselves in a world as envisioned by futurist Ray Kurzweil, in which we, part human, part machines enjoy an easy life spanning several centuries, while bio-engineered bacteria will have made our worries about the earth’s climate obsolete within 20 years. 

Or in one that science fiction writers like Howard Kunstler in his novel Made by Hand, consider the only possible option: a return to rough and simple, more dangerous times, a collapse of civilization, a humanity racked by infectious diseases and collapsed infrastructures. Many environmentally minded people tend to think in this direction: a life that, though a lot less comfortable and luxurious, will be manageable and known. We will ride horses, grow our own food again and talk with neighbors rather than twitter with people half a planet away.

And some might boldly—or naively—envision a future in which the best of all possibilities merge: new technologies will take care of much of the damage to the planet and will do the labor that is now keeping people too poor and too busy to enjoy a fulfilling life. We will have evolved into a species that puts the good of the whole before the satisfaction of the few. We could experiment with new ways of fostering in ourselves the highest level of creativity and zest for life to heal the planet and society.

So when you lie in bed, sipping that perfect cup of coffee and contemplating your day, what are your priorities? How do you decide what is important?

You might be thinking about calling up your friends for a game of basketball and then visiting the sauna in all that free time you have.

Or you may lie in bed worrying about your mortgage—yes, they still exist—and about how you could find a better paying job.

Or, you might feel a bit guilty, having such an easy life and decide to take on an extra job in order to support a family you heard about that just lost everything in an earthquake in Peru.

Or, once you feel the caffeine getting enough traction to mobilize your heavy eyelids, you might get up to go and meditate for 3 hours, as you do every day. And as you sit in the soft shade of your balcony’s fauna, its fragrant green cleaning and moistening the air, you may be sure that the only real answer can come from a place deep inside of you.

No matter what you do, your decision will be made on the basis of values, a certain understanding of the world and yourself, a specific consciousness. Usually, this is so close to us, or in fact, right under our skin that we do not even notice, let alone question it. We cannot imagine another way to see the world than how we do and if we do see it in others, we usually lack understanding:

• “I have my own problems to take care of before I can start worrying about everyone else.”
• “How can you be so selfish to stay in bed until noon and then just while your time away, when large parts of the world still need so much support?”
• “Why are you trying to change the endless problems of the world, when really the problem is in our minds, in our own way of thinking. We need to change that first.”

Does any of that sound familiar? We see the world in a particular way and rarely become conscious of that particular perspective’s limitations.

Nevertheless, through the millennia, human consciousness has evolved. Not that long ago, women all over the planet were regarded as property rather than individuals in their own right, just as children were not understood to be more than cattle to be used for labor. Once, we believed that nature spirits were in charge of our destiny then we discovered our mastery over nature and even learned to make rain. Human beings were sacrificed to the Gods to ensure favors for the people. Many years later a declaration of human rights was signed by the member countries of the global community.

We are ever more connected with each other as we are learning about and including more of the world we live in. With this learning, our understanding and interpretation of who we are and why we are here have changed and keep changing. Even the notion so popular today, that there is no reason for our being here, that we and everything else that exists are products of endless coincidences or physical processes, is a philosophical framework in which we look at ourselves at this very point in time. We cannot help but be self-aware.