Perspectives

Our personal, and All Humanities, Challenge

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

We’re waking up, becoming more aware, but will our “awakening” be enough, and soon enough?

The first and overarching Big Problem is to make the Good Person. We must have better human beings or else it is quite possible that we may all be wiped out, and even if not wiped out, certainly live in tension and anxiety as a species… This Good Person can equally be called the self-evolving person, the responsible-for-himself and his-own-evolution person, the fully illuminated or awakened or perspicuous man, the fully human person, the self-actualizing person, etc.”

Abraham Maslow

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a demonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

Carl Jung

For, as all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue.

Aldous Huxley

Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphorical mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life, we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

Bob Samples

Life in the 21st century demands mindfulness—getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives.

Bill Gates

One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase (consciousness / self-transcendence) amid all the clutter, and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top.

Johathan Haidt

Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

Abraham Maslow

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better… and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.

Vaclav Havel

We traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare and neurosis. If we do not quickly awaken to our predicament? Planetary catastrophe.

Terence Mckenna

Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment…

Nikola Tesla

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Will & Ariel Durant

The problem in the West is people want enlightenment to be fast, to be easy, and, if possible, cheap.

Matthieu Ricard quoting Dalai Lama

There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

Eckhart Tolle

The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don’t wake up, they’re always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people… The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else.

Anthony de Mello

Humanity’s Mind: Wisdom Catching up with Science & Technology

There are more people on the planet today thinking for themselves than ever before.. Now, for the first time, a huge massive number of people are thinking for themselves.

Sadhguru

The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Oscar Wilde

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.

Henry Ford

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. We cannot change it without changing our thinking.

Albert Einstein

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

E. O. Wilson

We are living in space-age times with people who are living with Stone Age minds.

Daryl Davis

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall… until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?–rationally.

E. O. Wilson

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

Will & Ariel Durant

The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions.

George Miller

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

Charlie Munger

When I think about the world today and the challenges facing mankind, I don’t think the problems are technical. I think they’re human.

Nichol Bradford

In order to make peace with technology, we have to make peace with ourselves.

Tristan Harris

Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival–this is humanity’s challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet.

Eckhart Tolle

Abundance and Leisure Post Workism

Thus for the first time since his creation man will face his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

John Maynard Keynes

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature results from ease and security, not from a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto, we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this, we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Bertrand Russell

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

Peter Drucker

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

E. O. Wilson

Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

Bill Gates

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

Naval Ravikant

Creativity is the last frontier… automation over a long enough period will replace every non-creative job… that’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs cared for, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.

Naval Ravikant

The machines came and took away the power of your muscle. Now machines are coming which will take away the power of your memory (referring to intelligence/intellect)… in the future, the only thing that matters is what kind of human being are you?

Sadhguru

Aligning our Human Nature with Universal Nature

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

Priorities must be Planet-Society-Economy as opposed to Economy-Society-Planet… The reality of the world is that the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.

Ron Garan, Astronaut

Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction.

Eckart Tolle

There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview and in identity.

Frank White

Your definition of the word ‘home’ would rapidly expand to encompass the planet in its entirety, and for the first time, you might fully understand what it means to be one human family.

Ron Garan, Astronaut

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are finding out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.

John Muir

I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.

Buckminster Fuller

Earth is not a platform for human life. It’s a living being. We’re not on it, but part of it. Its health is our health.

Thomas Moore

In the 1980s, simplicity was seen primarily as downshifting, or pulling back from the rat race of consumer society. Several decades later, there is a growing recognition of simplicity as up shifting—or moving beyond the rat race to the human race.

Duane Elgin

The solution to a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step.

Yvon Chouinard

Humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years… but this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity… growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.

Matthieu Ricard

Voluntary simplicity does not mean a return to a more primitive past, but a movement ahead to a more sophisticated, compassionate, and collaborative future

Duane Elgin

Individual and Collective Purpose

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.

Joseph Campbell

As the concerns of survival recede, human beings will naturally evolve into perceiving higher things.

Sadhguru

For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Viktor Frankl

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization, etc., even a society like ours, which is relatively one of the most fortunate on the face of the earth. This is our great paradox. We have the impulse toward full development of humanness. Then why is it that it doesn’t happen more often? What blocks it?

Abraham Maslow

Maslow defined self-actualization as discovering what you are meant to do and committing to the ardor of pursuing it with excellence. The purpose of free society, I would suggest, is to systematically increase the percentage of people who do exactly that.

Jim Collins

Despite the severity of our physical problems, our deepest challenge is to overcome an invisible crisis: a lack of collective consensus and cohesion around a compelling sense of purpose

Duane Elgin

The most foundational challenge facing humanity is not devising solutions to the energy crisis or climate crisis; rather, it is bringing visions and narratives of the human journey into our collective awareness that empowers us to look beyond a future of great adversity and to see a future of great opportunity.

Duane Elgin

As tribal cultures developed into ancient civilizations, they allotted certain functions to certain people: ruler, priest or priestess, warrior, farmer, merchant, artisan, craftworker, laborer, and so on. A class system developed. Your function, which in most cases you were born into, determined your identity, determined who you were in the eyes of others, as well as in your own eyes. Your function became a role, but they did not recognize it as a role: it was who you were, or thought you were. Only rare beings such as the Buddah or Jesus, saw the ultimate irrelevance of caste or social class, recognized it as an identification with form, and saw that such identification with the conditioned and the temporal obscured the light of the unconditioned and eternal that shines in each human being. In our contemporary world, the social structures are less rigid, less clearly defined than they used to be. Although most people are, of course, still conditioned by their environment, they are no longer automatically assigned a function and, with it an identity. In face, in the modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit in, what their purpose is, and even who they are.

Eckhart Tolle

Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the surrounding culture. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness had not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.

Eckhart Tolle

Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose: to bring that essence-consciousness-into the world of form and transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or comprehend. And yet, on this planet, that transformation is the task allotted to us. That is the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, the reconciliation of the world and God.

Eckhart Tolle

Start with Yourself

Don’t we all want to change the world? Do our part to make the world a better place, change humanity’s consciousness, mind, work, nature, and meaning?

Paradoxically, the best and only place really, is to start with yourself.

Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.

Andrei Platonov

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Aldous Huxley

It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world… Live the life you want other people to live.

Naval

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

Robert M. Pirsig

If it’s true that “the macrocosm reflects the microcosm,” then you’d see the cumulative and compounding effects of more and more humans taking personal responsibility for their own lives.

Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state. That means now.

Eckhart Tolle

The character of a society is the cumulative result of the countless small actions taken day in and day out by millions of persons. Small changes that may seem unimportant in isolation are of transformative significance when adopted by an entire society.

Duane Elgin

There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations..

Will & Ariel Durant