image by Shaire Productions

Uli’s pieces last week on the Economy of Consciousness and the potential for unlimited growth in that realm inspired me to write on the same topic. Let us know what you think!

Human beings grow. That is what we do—we experiment, learn from our mistakes and successes, and integrate those learnings into how we go about the rest of our lives.

This growth is reflected in both our external world—the material life we create—and our internal world—the culture and values we share. From communal tribal awareness and authoritarian traditional religious awareness through the Age of Reason and the Age of Aquarius, we have grown in morality, in care, and in the depth and breadth with which we are able to engage in the world.

We usually don’t think in terms of internal development. When we think about growth, we think about economics, expanding markets, new technologies, globalization, more money moving more freely to create more stuff. Whether we like growth or not, we tend to see it in terms of external, physical reality.

But it’s clear that we are bumping up against our limits in terms of material growth on this planet. The atmosphere and the biosphere are suffering from the way we conceive of growth; it’s simply not possible to provide constant upgrades in lifestyle to the entire world by the using Earth’s resources in the way we currently use them. As Uli said in her piece last week, we’d need several planets to get everyone living like Americans. And, so far at least, we have only one.

So, this leaves us in a pickle. If humans grow by definition, and we are up against the limits of how we can grow in terms of physical reality, where can we go from here?

Well, what do we have an abundance of? People. And what do people have access to that no other creature does (as far as we know)? Self-reflective consciousness. So what if we shift our need for growth from the external world to the internal one? What if, instead of gobbling up natural resources, we decide to make full use of our cognitive and moral resources?

Sifting through human history and looking at what we are capable of, we see a very, very wide range of possibilities. We can be Gandhi, Hitler, and billions of gradients in between. It’s both breathtaking and terrifying to contemplate this. Each of us can be a saint or a demon. We can grow and create or we can consume and destroy.

Sometimes, we do all those things, both positive and negative, simultaneously without understanding our actions—witness the economic and environmental crises we now find ourselves in. They are a result of each of us pursuing our goals without full understanding, and they point to the area in which we most desperately need to grow—our consciousness, awareness, and morality.

Sometimes I wonder— how is this schizophrenic way of being possible on such a huge scale? It comes from seeing ourselves as independent and separate from the processes of life as a whole. When we look at ourselves as small agents operating in a possibly unfriendly universe, we are bound to think of our interests separately from the interests of the whole. “I want what I want and can’t be bothered to think about the rest of these guys.” “Leave me alone, I’m busy.”

But as we see the consequences brought about by our small viewpoints, we are learning that this separate view of ourselves is more than inaccurate—it’s harmful to our ability to continue to do that most human of things: grow.

The truth is that we are connected. Each of us a small process in a much grander process, and each of us is responsible for what we create together. Where we end up in that Gandhi to Hitler continuum—both as individuals and as a group—is determined by the choices we make moment to moment, and what we choose to align ourselves with. Do we fall in step with mediocrity, or do we look for opportunities to go deeper, bring more light, create more possibility? Do we engage with new challenges with a sense of excitement at testing our abilities and contributing to human history? Or do we roll our eyes and complain?

When I look from this perspective of connection and responsibility, I feel the breath of life itself within me, switching me off the track of apathy and self-obsession and onto the high-speed bullet train that is this most human desire to grow and develop, to become and create more.

There may be limits to how big and fast we can grow in physical reality, at least operating under the current assumptions, but there’s absolutely no ceiling on how much love, morality, awareness, intelligence, elegance, brilliance, and creativity we can generate.