About 150 years ago Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” If Thoreau were alive today he would undoubtedly recognize that our desperation is no longer quiet—it has become very loud indeed!
Every one of the many problems facing humanity today have one fundamental cause: we—human beings--do not know who we really are; we are disconnected from our true nature. Disconnected from our true nature, we feel an inner hunger which we seek to assuage with possessions and experiences in and from the external world. This includes material wealth as well as mental and emotional possessions, such as relationships, social recognition, roles, power and status. (None of these are inherently bad; the problem arises when we use them to feed our inner emptiness).
Humankind has lost sight of its true nature and is trying to fill this existential vacuum with things in and of this world. We have become totally addicted to this quest for satisfaction, yet true satisfaction has forever eluded us.
We have engaged a very powerful tool in our search: the rational mind. The mind has evolved to sustain our survival, but we have used it to seek satisfaction and happiness. While it has served us well (so far) in maintaining our physical survival, it has failed to produce the essential satisfaction that we seek. It has kept us alive, but it has not brought us happiness.
We are now discovering that the same rational mind that has helped us survive so far may not serve as well today; we are seeing that while the rational mind may be excellent at solving acute and immediate problems, it does not do so well on problems that require a global or long term solution. The result of this myopia is that our solution to one problem eventually becomes the next problem. Today’s cure becomes tomorrow’s illness.
From DDT to hairspray, from fossil fuel to penicillin, we see that today’s dream fulfilled becomes tomorrow’s nightmare. The rational mind has myopia: it sees fairly well that which is right in front of it-- but fails to see much further. When this issue is coupled with our attempt to feed our inner emptiness with the things of this world we create problems that appear intractable and overwhelming. Identified with the rational mind we cannot perceive a future that is much different from the past. The intellect knows only that which it perceives (or has perceived) thru the senses.
Changing life conditions forced the evolution of humankind from the level of instinct to the level of the intellect. Now we are being called to evolve into another dimension of mind---that of intuition.
Thru intuition we are able to connect with our true nature and also receive information from the world around us. This means that we can function from a very different level of being: we are no longer limited by the past, we can become creative; we can truly create rather than simply replicate the past.
We cultivate access to our true nature when we give our inner world as much attention and validity as we do our outer world. We must listen to the voice of intuition as much as to the voice of the intellect. Listening to the silence of the inner world as fervently as we listen to the noise of the external world will cultivate evolution to this next level.
Just as learning to reason and understand the outer world takes time and diligence, so too does cultivating intuition and developing an understanding of our inner world. By practicing meditation and internal listening we cultivate our inner world and can bring ourselves into balance and wholeness. Until we can bring ourselves into a state of wholeness we will be unable to develop long term solutions to the many crises in our world today. Let us pray that we do.