I've taken a break from writing for a few weeks and this article is a non-sequitur, something my goofy mind threw up to me from below. I made the mistake of catching it and chewing on it, so now I have to spit it out. So, here goes.
I believe I've read somewhere that the first corporations in western history were formed around exploration and commerce, viz., the East India Company and its Dutch equivalent. I believe these, like Sir Walter Raleigh, were given a royal charter or permission to trade in the name of and with the protection of their respective governments (in return for wealth and favor, of course!).
In any case, I know enough about state-chartered corporations to know that corporations exist as creatures of law by the various state legislatures. Corporations are deemed "persons" who can be sued and can sue in turn and do various other "corporeal" acts otherwise reserved for human beings.
Our capitalist culture has some of its philosophical roots in Adam Smith's hypothesis that individual self-interest operates for the good of all. From this comes the idea that competition is a good and efficient mechanism for the allocation of goods, services and scarce resources. An entire genre of behavioral philosophy, culture and psychology was given birth from this premise which was given a mighty push by precepts derived from evolutionary biology, aka, "survival of the fittest." Class warfare and, in general, materialism as the greatest good for the greatest number all owe their social legitimacy to the basic idea that struggle and competition bestow benefits of economic efficiency and prosperity upon society.
Not long ago (2010) there was a United State Supreme Court ruling that more or less lifted the limits previously imposed upon corporations in respect to their contributions to political campaigns. I think it was a free speech question but I assume it is predicated on the legal premise that corporations, are "persons" (and thus entitled to free speech).
Many sincere people around the world are concerned that corporations, especially those that operate in the global sphere, are in a position to outwit the various governments in whose jurisdictions such corporations conduct business. Some larger than many governments and are far more sophisticated, as they can hide resources by moving them around the globe. Many people and groups with whom I have a natural philosophical affinity accuse global corporations of all manner of deceptive practices and environmental neglect. I am not prepared to comment on any specifics and even if I did I would be quoting other people for I have no personal experience or expertise in these matters. In any case, for my point here today, it's not necessary.
What occurs to me is to reflect that the very existence of the corporate form stems from the social contract: which is to to say, from government "fiat." Without the laws that permit these creatures to even exist, they, well, wouldn't exist and wouldn't "enjoy" the benefits of various legal protections, as you and I do.
If therefore we in society are concerned that corporations have gotten too large and too powerful relative to their historical overseer -- the various levels of government -- then we should modify their privileges. We don't need to argue whether corporations are a person or have rights of free speech. We can perhaps reform their capitalist heart in the following manner:
Their power lies in their ability to raise capital on the stock exchanges around the world. Adam Smith's idea of "self-interest" was, I believe, never intended to encourage or praise rapacious or exploitative behavior. No intelligent person of goodwill would have espoused greed an an instrument of social goodwill!
As a man of the Age of Reason (and Enlightenment), I assume he meant (or should have!) "enlightened" self-interest! I think many corporations, at least in America and Europe, try to hold their corporate employees to a decent standard of integrity and enlightened self-interest; some, presumably, only pay lip service to such ideals. (I'm not in a position to know or say more or less than this.)
Local, state, and federal government agencies don't seem to have enough "police" and economic power to balance the global muscle of some of these corporations. Besides, I, for one, would hesitate to give government more power both in principle and for the fact that "buying" of politicians is one of the key forms of abuse of corporate power. I think that in exchange for having access to the capital markets, these self-same corporations can be made to expand their own, internal decision making to include their natural constituencies. Let me explain:
An economic enterprise utilizes capital, natural resources, and labor. (I added resources to the traditional explanation.) Such an enterprise makes an impact upon society and upon the environment as a result of its commercial activities. To pass an ever increasing number and complexity of laws to regulate a corporation's social and environmental behavior seems, to me at least, to operate under the law of diminishing returns.
But what if the very management of that corporation included persons who represented the interests of employees, vendors, the environment, and the consumer? They need not be given shares of stock because they can, by virtue of the regulatory requirements of the capital markets, be given a voting place on the Board of Directors of each corporation. There's no requirement that a member of a board of directors has to own stock in the company.
The agency overseeing the exchange where the corporation seeks to be listed would have to oversee the selection and behavior of the non-shareholder members of the board, but that seems far less onerous and feasible than passing more laws and giving more police power over such corporations, especially when they conduct activities in other countries beyond the reach of our laws.
What if the board of directors of such a corporation were required to have one-third of their number elected by shareholders in the traditional way; one-third elected by a combination of employees (including so-called contract employees otherwise barred from employee status) and vendors (excluding vendors effectively controlled by the corporation); and, one-third representing social interests such as the environment and consumers? (Government is by necessity a regulator. It is not appropriate to have board representation.)
The employee group of directors together with the shareholder-elected board members would appoint the social group. The stock exchange could set standards for the qualifications and relative make-up for the social group and for the process through which employees and vendors are represented. In some corporations environmental concerns are few while others such concerns are great. For some corporations (exporters or financial entities) there may be few real "consumers." A degree of finesse would be required.
Non-shareholder board members would be required to submit annual reports (publicly available) to the stock exchange that discloses their voting record, their investigative and oversight efforts, and their summary of the corporation's success in its relations and impact upon the groups and interests represented. The corporation would be required by the exchange to make some reasonable allowance for the costs of the oversight by these board members (including suitable staff and access to data), just as allowance is provided for the cost of outside financial auditors. (But more than just auditors are needed for, decade after decade, financial auditors have proven themselves ineffective.)
But what about a director's fiduciary responsibility to look after the interests of the corporation? Well, good question! Remember our definition of "self-interest" (the enlightened version, that is)? The "best interests" of the corporation are achieved when the interests of all stakeholders are taken into account and balanced appropriately. Indeed, the support, approval, and goodwill of employees, vendors, and consumers and the health and well-being of neighbors and the environment help ensure the long-term survival and success of the venture. Naturally, compliance with all just laws is a given, though only a baseline, insufficient in itself, for success.
Up until now I believe outside interest groups (like environmentalists) either make a lot of noise with boycotts and media to crash the party of shareholder meetings or they have to acquire blocks of stock (or both). It takes a lot of "noise" to make anything happen in such an adversarial environment. But with this approach as I propose it, each major corporation will be empowered to consider the greater impact of its actions. Bottom line, short-term profits are no profits at all if they amount to thievery of a sophisticated kind. Rewarding a long-term view stabilizes the economy and society as well.
You might object that such otherwise competing interests might paralyze decision making. Yes, that possibility exists but there are some of us who believe that such corporations are already too large and cumbersome. Enlarging the scope of their interests might exacerbate the slowness of decision making and response, but such is the price for due consideration of legitimate interests in a large and publicly held institution of any kind. Let the race go to the swift. It does now, anyway, doesn't it? Innovation seems to come primarily from the lone wolves and small operators. The one has immense resources (and commensurate responsibilities), the other, flexibility, creativity, and swiftness! (Economically, they need each other.)
What about our concept of "private property." Would such a proposal rob shareholders of their financial interests? Why? It is common for corporations to enlist the counsel of all manner of public figures or esteemed business associates to guide them. There's no requirement that board members or officers be shareholders. Such boards in reflecting a wider scope of interests would be in a better position to resist the pressure to reward officers with obscenely high salaries. (While a separate proposal and subject, I don't see why the privilege of access to capital markets doesn't also justify some basic limits on the ratio of officer salaries to rank and file.)
I would imagine that financial exchanges in Europe would be even more inclined in this direction (if they've not done so already). Perhaps also, Japan. China remains a feral nation (why do we pretend, otherwise?), so I doubt they would do anything more than superficial. Nonetheless, the American financial markets alone are substantial enough still to weather this en-lightening-up.
What I am essentially saying is proposing a broader standard of what constitutes success and what constitutes self-interest. The time is nigh. A corporation that takes a balanced and fair approach to considering the well-being of all of those segments of society (employees, vendors, consumers) and the environment it affects is far more likely to survive, flourish and grow. Substituting long-term success for mere short-term profits, profits, as it were, everyone, including the corporate shareholders who stick with it. The line between speculation and investment lies, in no small measure, on the timeline of one's holding period.
Well, that's as much time and effort as I am willing to put into this subject. Perhaps you'll agree or think it's interesting, or goofy, or even a good idea.
Sayonara dear friends and on to more meditative subjects.....
Nayaswami Hriman, CPA
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Friday, May 23, 2014
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Does Satan Exist? (Or, more depressing news?)
Last Sunday at the Ananda Meditation Temple, in Bothell, WA our subject was a peek at the dark side and one of humanity’s core ethical and existential issues: Does evil exist? What is the cause of suffering? Is there a cure for suffering? If there is evil, did God create evil? Is God evil therefore? Does Satan exist?
I’ve always had an interest in such musings. My mother used to tell me that as I child I pestered her with “the big questions of life.” But my response to that was that it was she who prodded me day in and day out, constantly urging me by shouting: KNOW KNOW KNOW. (Maybe I misunderstood the NO for KNOW - :)).
As you have perhaps heard it said here, the Indian scriptures proclaim that GOD CANNOT BE PROVED. Ishwar Ashiddha
I suppose therefore it must also be admitted that neither can evil be “proved,” only experienced and judged as such. Paramhansa Yogananda defined evil as that which obscures truth, or prevents us from knowing the divinity behind all forms of creation.
Relative to the bliss state of cosmic consciousness (out of which the creation has been manifested) we could say that any lesser state or any desire for a lesser state of consciousness or object of creation would take us away from our bliss nature.
There cannot be the great drama of creation, the great symphony of life if all life were harmonized with bliss alone. It takes the multifarious forms of creation each seeking their own existence and separate welfare to enact this drama. It is the duty and opportunity of awakened beings to pierce the veil of maya to see through the drama to the dramatist Himself behind it all but, as we are not its creator, it is not our duty, task, or ability to change the nature of creation itself. To exist it must perforce carry on the drama of dark and light.
We are all in a matrix, a spider web of false appearances. The game goes on only if we play it on its relative terms of survival, competition, conquest, pleasure, pain, health, disease, life and death. Once we begin to view it transcendently and to view these opposites as only a ceaseless flux can we begin the journey towards the goal of pure consciousness which is untainted by opposites and where we find our original state, our home in God, in Bliss.
Does this mean however that evil, being opposite of good, is, well, just as good? Well, of course not! On the scale of “distance” from bliss, evil (selfishness, e.g.) blinds us far more completely to the divine within than good. But good alone is not enough though it is better. Good remains only an opposite destined to reverse itself until we see it and use it as a stepping stone off the wheel of samsara, rebirth, and the opposites of life and death.
Though we exhibit self-awareness we cannot claim to have created it, no more than we can claim to have given birth to ourselves, or to the world around us. We come from and are part of something much greater. This, then, is as true for good and evil as it is for consciousness and life.
“Thoughts are universally, not individually, rooted” Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his famous autobiography. What this means to us is two-fold: the power which darkens our life towards error, ignorance and suffering is greater than us, but the power which brings light is also greater than we. In each case, as we are not the origin of dark or light, we can consciously call upon the power of Light to uplift us from the darkness. Not passively, of course, for the Light vibrates on a higher level of energy, intelligence and bliss than we do on a merely conscious egoic level. We must attune ourselves to its level by thought, word, and deed.
The vast nature of that Light is such that we, confined as it were to the prison of ego and body, cannot comprehend that Light without a medium. It is its own language and we need an interpreter, a teacher, to instruct us in its syntax (that's a pun, actually). Just as a radio or cell phone is needed to capture the spoken words of one far away but attempting to speak to us, so too it is the guru who acts as a light-house that refracts, aims, and concentrates the universal but subtle and difficult-to-perceive beam of cosmic Light into human form that we can see, feel, and be transformed by it back into it!
Is God responsible for ignorance, suffering and evil? He created this world, didn’t He? God becomes this world as the playwright writes a play but in so writing becomes not villainous for making the villain evil. Without the villain the play would not play and no one would pay to see it.
Therefore His actors, who are manifestations of His intelligence and desire to create that His joy might be experienced in the play, are similarly endowed but by necessity separated by their forms. Our created separateness is a necessity for the drama but imposes upon us the urge to survive, to compete, to win, and to seek the natural objects of sensory fulfillments and ego affirmation. By degrees, therefore the actors of the play begin changing the script. We begin to be typecast as second rate actors who have forgetten that it's just a play. We have forgotten our lines in the script.
We come now to our red, horned, cloven-hoofed friend, Satan. As we are beings clothed in human form, endowed with intelligence and intention, and the power to act, so too does the divine creating Light manifest higher (astral and causal) beings with roles to act in the grand drama of creation. As we fall into ignorance by the hypnosis of the creation's seeming reality, so too some of these Beings fall into ignorance drunk with their own power and embolden by their duties to create and oversee.
As this world is itself a manifestation of consciousness, so too the forces that emerge to create and diversify and to sustain the creation are conscious. Whether seen as Beings or as Forces it matters not. There is a satanic force that impels and invites us into ego affirmation, into the delusion of sense satisfaction, security through material weath, and pride, just as there is an angelic force that invites us into the inner silence to commune with Her as Peace, Joy, and who invites us, as prodigal sons, to return to our Father's kingdom as Sons of God.
An example of such forces of darkness and suffering can be seen in a drama that is unfolding right now on our planet. Today our western world is on the brink of the greatest depression and economic collapse in recorded history. Will it happen? How can it not happen except by pretending it isn’t happening? Paramhansa Yogananda certainly is among the many who have predicted it. In his case, he did so over sixty years ago. But of course so have other seers of various persuasions seen through the fragile success of capitalism. Whether spiritually seeing the delusion of materialism fanned by capitalism or socially seeing the potential for the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many, or economically seeing the endless expansion of capital and wealth and consumption as the false foundation for its success, the end result is the same: collapse.
Not that the basic tenets of capitalism are somehow evil, at least not so far as giving individuals the freedom to earn a living. Rather the pursuit of wealth for its own sake and money (a non-productive, imaginary object) as the measure of that wealth: these are the false gods before us who are soon to betray our trust in them.
Life must be productive, harmonious and sustainable of life, health, and harmony. The western form of consumption and lifestyle is simply based on the untruth of himsa, injury to life. It cannot therefore last. Here we see evil pretending to be good: the good life (for some at the expense of others, and other life forms). Generation after generation this good life has lulled us, its beneficiaries, into increasing dis-ease with ourselves, one another, and the planet on which we live.
I doubt anyone can even explain or understand what this item called a “dollar” actually is, or represents, or is based on. It’s a fiction, a lie agreed upon. We must consume faster than we save in order to increase our wealth and pleasure. The interest on the debt we incur to do this rises exponentially like a tsunami which races across the trackless ocean and then suddenly rises to crash to shore leaving death and destruction in its wake.
The solution is to reject fear and despair and inaction and to embrace the Light of God's love within and with our fellow men and planet. We are invited to change our lifestyle to one of harmony and sustainability with our own souls, our bodies, and with the divine life which is this creation.
Blessings,
Hriman
I’ve always had an interest in such musings. My mother used to tell me that as I child I pestered her with “the big questions of life.” But my response to that was that it was she who prodded me day in and day out, constantly urging me by shouting: KNOW KNOW KNOW. (Maybe I misunderstood the NO for KNOW - :)).
As you have perhaps heard it said here, the Indian scriptures proclaim that GOD CANNOT BE PROVED. Ishwar Ashiddha
I suppose therefore it must also be admitted that neither can evil be “proved,” only experienced and judged as such. Paramhansa Yogananda defined evil as that which obscures truth, or prevents us from knowing the divinity behind all forms of creation.
Relative to the bliss state of cosmic consciousness (out of which the creation has been manifested) we could say that any lesser state or any desire for a lesser state of consciousness or object of creation would take us away from our bliss nature.
There cannot be the great drama of creation, the great symphony of life if all life were harmonized with bliss alone. It takes the multifarious forms of creation each seeking their own existence and separate welfare to enact this drama. It is the duty and opportunity of awakened beings to pierce the veil of maya to see through the drama to the dramatist Himself behind it all but, as we are not its creator, it is not our duty, task, or ability to change the nature of creation itself. To exist it must perforce carry on the drama of dark and light.
We are all in a matrix, a spider web of false appearances. The game goes on only if we play it on its relative terms of survival, competition, conquest, pleasure, pain, health, disease, life and death. Once we begin to view it transcendently and to view these opposites as only a ceaseless flux can we begin the journey towards the goal of pure consciousness which is untainted by opposites and where we find our original state, our home in God, in Bliss.
Does this mean however that evil, being opposite of good, is, well, just as good? Well, of course not! On the scale of “distance” from bliss, evil (selfishness, e.g.) blinds us far more completely to the divine within than good. But good alone is not enough though it is better. Good remains only an opposite destined to reverse itself until we see it and use it as a stepping stone off the wheel of samsara, rebirth, and the opposites of life and death.
Though we exhibit self-awareness we cannot claim to have created it, no more than we can claim to have given birth to ourselves, or to the world around us. We come from and are part of something much greater. This, then, is as true for good and evil as it is for consciousness and life.
“Thoughts are universally, not individually, rooted” Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his famous autobiography. What this means to us is two-fold: the power which darkens our life towards error, ignorance and suffering is greater than us, but the power which brings light is also greater than we. In each case, as we are not the origin of dark or light, we can consciously call upon the power of Light to uplift us from the darkness. Not passively, of course, for the Light vibrates on a higher level of energy, intelligence and bliss than we do on a merely conscious egoic level. We must attune ourselves to its level by thought, word, and deed.
The vast nature of that Light is such that we, confined as it were to the prison of ego and body, cannot comprehend that Light without a medium. It is its own language and we need an interpreter, a teacher, to instruct us in its syntax (that's a pun, actually). Just as a radio or cell phone is needed to capture the spoken words of one far away but attempting to speak to us, so too it is the guru who acts as a light-house that refracts, aims, and concentrates the universal but subtle and difficult-to-perceive beam of cosmic Light into human form that we can see, feel, and be transformed by it back into it!
Is God responsible for ignorance, suffering and evil? He created this world, didn’t He? God becomes this world as the playwright writes a play but in so writing becomes not villainous for making the villain evil. Without the villain the play would not play and no one would pay to see it.
Therefore His actors, who are manifestations of His intelligence and desire to create that His joy might be experienced in the play, are similarly endowed but by necessity separated by their forms. Our created separateness is a necessity for the drama but imposes upon us the urge to survive, to compete, to win, and to seek the natural objects of sensory fulfillments and ego affirmation. By degrees, therefore the actors of the play begin changing the script. We begin to be typecast as second rate actors who have forgetten that it's just a play. We have forgotten our lines in the script.
We come now to our red, horned, cloven-hoofed friend, Satan. As we are beings clothed in human form, endowed with intelligence and intention, and the power to act, so too does the divine creating Light manifest higher (astral and causal) beings with roles to act in the grand drama of creation. As we fall into ignorance by the hypnosis of the creation's seeming reality, so too some of these Beings fall into ignorance drunk with their own power and embolden by their duties to create and oversee.
As this world is itself a manifestation of consciousness, so too the forces that emerge to create and diversify and to sustain the creation are conscious. Whether seen as Beings or as Forces it matters not. There is a satanic force that impels and invites us into ego affirmation, into the delusion of sense satisfaction, security through material weath, and pride, just as there is an angelic force that invites us into the inner silence to commune with Her as Peace, Joy, and who invites us, as prodigal sons, to return to our Father's kingdom as Sons of God.
An example of such forces of darkness and suffering can be seen in a drama that is unfolding right now on our planet. Today our western world is on the brink of the greatest depression and economic collapse in recorded history. Will it happen? How can it not happen except by pretending it isn’t happening? Paramhansa Yogananda certainly is among the many who have predicted it. In his case, he did so over sixty years ago. But of course so have other seers of various persuasions seen through the fragile success of capitalism. Whether spiritually seeing the delusion of materialism fanned by capitalism or socially seeing the potential for the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many, or economically seeing the endless expansion of capital and wealth and consumption as the false foundation for its success, the end result is the same: collapse.
Not that the basic tenets of capitalism are somehow evil, at least not so far as giving individuals the freedom to earn a living. Rather the pursuit of wealth for its own sake and money (a non-productive, imaginary object) as the measure of that wealth: these are the false gods before us who are soon to betray our trust in them.
Life must be productive, harmonious and sustainable of life, health, and harmony. The western form of consumption and lifestyle is simply based on the untruth of himsa, injury to life. It cannot therefore last. Here we see evil pretending to be good: the good life (for some at the expense of others, and other life forms). Generation after generation this good life has lulled us, its beneficiaries, into increasing dis-ease with ourselves, one another, and the planet on which we live.
I doubt anyone can even explain or understand what this item called a “dollar” actually is, or represents, or is based on. It’s a fiction, a lie agreed upon. We must consume faster than we save in order to increase our wealth and pleasure. The interest on the debt we incur to do this rises exponentially like a tsunami which races across the trackless ocean and then suddenly rises to crash to shore leaving death and destruction in its wake.
The solution is to reject fear and despair and inaction and to embrace the Light of God's love within and with our fellow men and planet. We are invited to change our lifestyle to one of harmony and sustainability with our own souls, our bodies, and with the divine life which is this creation.
Blessings,
Hriman
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Thank You Darwin!
I read once in National Geographic how researchers were analyzing human love and attraction and attempting to show that this, too, was but an outgrowth of our genetically programmed impulse for survival and continuation of the species.
I've never understood all the fuss about the law of survival. It seems so obvious (to anyone perhaps but a scientist) it should never have received tha attention it has garnered.
I suppose some of these "Darwinists" also interpret great works of art and acts of personal self-sacrifice in terms of the law of survival, as well. But the attempts reek of the sterile laboratory of dry, myopic reasoning.
Consider that long before Darwin, Adam Smith published the (then) shocking assertion that self-interest was the motivation behind all human action. Ah, yes,yet another fact of human nature revealed to us that is otherwise so obvious as to never having merited particular attention by people with common sense and a higher vision of life.
And then there's the "pursuit of happiness" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Who's to argue with these great "revelations?"
Now all told, none of this is either shocking or blasphemous in its own right. The issue I take with it all is twofold: 1) It's simply and truly inadequate to explain anything meaningful to human existence, and 2) Scientists and nonscientists alike have made bold attempts to make a philosophy of life (and in some cases a religion) out of such pedestrian observations. The modern age seems to have gloried in the most banal realities of human existence.
Returning, then, to Darwin and his army of devotees, we can say that competition and survival have been elevated to the heights of the greatest virtue in social theories, pyschology, politics, and the arts. Both communism and capitalism owe their stark, dark, and banal dogmas to the deification of the mundane realities of self-interest and material needs.
Again, who would argue with obvious fact of competitiveness (and its potential benefits when held in check). It's just that the 19th and 20th centuries which promoted this "philosophy" managed to slaughter hundreds of millions of people, wipe out entire species of animals and plants, and bring this earth rapidly towards potential self-destruction!
In other words, philosophy DOES matter. Social values DO MATTER. The Founding Fathers of America created checks and balances to hold at bay the self-interest that they wisely knew was the engine of human motivation. At the same time, they themselves were guided by and extolled for everyone high ideals of the social good, belief in God and recognition of divine love and virtues.
According to the teaching of duality, however, all things have their opposite. I have noticed that since the Sixties, the science of ecology is reawakening a steadily growing and enlightened self-interest that is the necessary counterweight to competition and materialism. Ecology contains an implicit philosophy of interdependence and places a high value upon mutually supportive diversity. At heart, these are, arguably, spiritual values and, in fact, only to some degree, scientific ones.
Of course, religion ought to offer such insights but science and religion have been at odds for centuries, with religion steadily losing ground and science gaining respect and becoming the religion of modern culture. Religious principles founded on a priori beliefs and sectarian dogmas have earned the disdain of intelligent and high-minded people all over the world.
So, if science is the modern religion then it must needs be science that will save us! And that's where the message of ecology seems to have played a role.
Still, science, whether pedestrian or elevated, cannot satisfy the deeper and eternal questions of humankind, nor can it satisfy the heart. For wisdom, too, Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his famous life story, "Autobiography of a Yogi," we have a hunger (not just for food and shelter).
This is where and why the life-affirming and all-encompassing ancient Vedanta philsophy of India has encircled the globe offering hope for a better world. Vedanta is incomplete with the knowledge, science, and art of how to attains its cosmic vision of the creation and the purpose of creation.
That art and science is the personal and nonsectarian practice of meditation and Self-realization. Science will never be enough to transform civilization. At every great turn of history, it is the saints and men and women of universal vision who guide humanity away from the rocks of self-destruction towards the shores of true survival.
Blessings, Hriman
P.S. If you'd like to learn more about this subject, please obtain a copy of Swami Kriyananda's (J. Donald Walters) insightful landmark book, "Out of the Labyrinth." It's sequel, equally inspiring and forward looking, is "Hope for a Better World."
I've never understood all the fuss about the law of survival. It seems so obvious (to anyone perhaps but a scientist) it should never have received tha attention it has garnered.
I suppose some of these "Darwinists" also interpret great works of art and acts of personal self-sacrifice in terms of the law of survival, as well. But the attempts reek of the sterile laboratory of dry, myopic reasoning.
Consider that long before Darwin, Adam Smith published the (then) shocking assertion that self-interest was the motivation behind all human action. Ah, yes,yet another fact of human nature revealed to us that is otherwise so obvious as to never having merited particular attention by people with common sense and a higher vision of life.
And then there's the "pursuit of happiness" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Who's to argue with these great "revelations?"
Now all told, none of this is either shocking or blasphemous in its own right. The issue I take with it all is twofold: 1) It's simply and truly inadequate to explain anything meaningful to human existence, and 2) Scientists and nonscientists alike have made bold attempts to make a philosophy of life (and in some cases a religion) out of such pedestrian observations. The modern age seems to have gloried in the most banal realities of human existence.
Returning, then, to Darwin and his army of devotees, we can say that competition and survival have been elevated to the heights of the greatest virtue in social theories, pyschology, politics, and the arts. Both communism and capitalism owe their stark, dark, and banal dogmas to the deification of the mundane realities of self-interest and material needs.
Again, who would argue with obvious fact of competitiveness (and its potential benefits when held in check). It's just that the 19th and 20th centuries which promoted this "philosophy" managed to slaughter hundreds of millions of people, wipe out entire species of animals and plants, and bring this earth rapidly towards potential self-destruction!
In other words, philosophy DOES matter. Social values DO MATTER. The Founding Fathers of America created checks and balances to hold at bay the self-interest that they wisely knew was the engine of human motivation. At the same time, they themselves were guided by and extolled for everyone high ideals of the social good, belief in God and recognition of divine love and virtues.
According to the teaching of duality, however, all things have their opposite. I have noticed that since the Sixties, the science of ecology is reawakening a steadily growing and enlightened self-interest that is the necessary counterweight to competition and materialism. Ecology contains an implicit philosophy of interdependence and places a high value upon mutually supportive diversity. At heart, these are, arguably, spiritual values and, in fact, only to some degree, scientific ones.
Of course, religion ought to offer such insights but science and religion have been at odds for centuries, with religion steadily losing ground and science gaining respect and becoming the religion of modern culture. Religious principles founded on a priori beliefs and sectarian dogmas have earned the disdain of intelligent and high-minded people all over the world.
So, if science is the modern religion then it must needs be science that will save us! And that's where the message of ecology seems to have played a role.
Still, science, whether pedestrian or elevated, cannot satisfy the deeper and eternal questions of humankind, nor can it satisfy the heart. For wisdom, too, Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his famous life story, "Autobiography of a Yogi," we have a hunger (not just for food and shelter).
This is where and why the life-affirming and all-encompassing ancient Vedanta philsophy of India has encircled the globe offering hope for a better world. Vedanta is incomplete with the knowledge, science, and art of how to attains its cosmic vision of the creation and the purpose of creation.
That art and science is the personal and nonsectarian practice of meditation and Self-realization. Science will never be enough to transform civilization. At every great turn of history, it is the saints and men and women of universal vision who guide humanity away from the rocks of self-destruction towards the shores of true survival.
Blessings, Hriman
P.S. If you'd like to learn more about this subject, please obtain a copy of Swami Kriyananda's (J. Donald Walters) insightful landmark book, "Out of the Labyrinth." It's sequel, equally inspiring and forward looking, is "Hope for a Better World."
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