INTRODUCTION
As of June 2021, America’s four richest individuals, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, technology entrepreneurs all, held a combined net worth of approximately 587 billion dollars. Forbes Magazine reported this number in an online tracker they termed “The Real-Time Billionaires List.” Underneath the headline “Today’s Winners and Losers,” the tracker displays 10 headshots of 10 billionaires. Each photo has overlaid on it, at bottom, a green up arrow or red down arrow, plus a number: $3.6 B, $2.6 B, $1.2 B. These indicate the daily increase or decrease, in billions, of each outlandish fortune.
As perspective, to understand more fully this elite competition, a million minutes covers just under two years, while a billion minutes represents nearly two thousand years. A million minutes ago, Donald Trump was the American President. A billion minutes ago, Jesus Christ walked the Earth. Which is to say, certainly to the average American, but even to the average millionaire, the 587 billion dollars accumulated by Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg represents a nearly unimaginable, unprecedented amount of money.
Yet these are only four men.
In June of 2021, Forbes reported that the 400 richest Americans own nearly 3.2 trillion dollars. As perspective again, one trillion seconds equals approximately 31,688 years. Where Jesus Christ lived approximately one billion minutes ago, one trillion seconds ago Neanderthals thrived. In 2019, as reported by The Washington Post, America’s 400 wealthiest individuals, or .00025 percent of the country’s population, owned more than 150 million Americans combined (a full 60% of the population).
In May of 2020, Musk offered this to the podcaster Joe Rogan: “How does this wealth arise? It’s if you organize people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than what existed before and you have some ownership in that company then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital.”
The simple statement from this complex man reveals within it four forces that enable the existence of billionaires and shape mainstream American society: applied science, or technology; capitalism, the economic system within which technology is deployed; the primacy of the individual (or individual entity), which makes the choice as to how “to allocate more capital;” and private property, the target or telos of such allocation.
These forces of technology, capitalism, individualism, and private property have developed relatively recently, are new not only in the span of humanity, but also in the history of Western civilization. They have led to extraordinary advance for America, conferring upon it, over the years since WWII’s end, the status of global superpower. During this time period, the quality of life in America grew to become the envy of the world.
The power and privilege of at-scale technology and free-market capitalism, combined with the preference for individual freedom plus property rights (over communal obligation), feel to many Americans like natural laws—the way things are, have always been, forever should be. For others, they have been coming of late into dispute as questionable. Some seek to double down, while others seek reform, and still others demand revolution. Whatever one’s stance, it is clear that, as the still nascent third decade of the third millennium progresses, even as, or perhaps because these forces remain in force, America is in decline.
An exceedingly small number of the “super-rich,” the Bezos and Musks and Gates and Zuckerbergs of the world, own substantially more than most other Americans together. America has about 800 billionaires. A still small but larger number of the very rich, people like Duane Johnson (“The Rock”), America’s highest paid actor, with a net worth of 320 million dollars, or Beyonce (500 million dollars), own far, far less than the super rich, but still far, far more than everyone else. America has about 90,000 people with a net worth of 50 million or more (.00036 percent of the population).
In present-day America, a small, likely very gifted, probably exceptionally hardworking and undoubtedly uncommonly shrewd minority excels. Through various endeavors in fields ranging from technology to finance to entertainment, unprecedented wealth is being created. Yet, as this infinitesimal slice of the American populace accumulates and hoards wealth, leading lives of God-like freedom and agency, an ever-growing number of Americans fall into economic despair and all manner of consequent suffering—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual.
American society, by nearly every measure, the details of which will be covered later in this book, deteriorates. The quality of our political, education, transportation, justice, health care, and infrastructure systems all are in financial and or moral crisis. These public goods that once enabled the economic and social upward mobility that defined 20th century America are collapsing. The nation, as it moves deeper into the 21st century, increasingly is becoming one of rich and poor, a “winner-take-all” society. At the same time, the very same forces that have led to America’s economic and social ills have created our planetary climate emergency.
How has this happened?
Business has been the main driver of American culture and society for well over 100 years now. During certain eras of our short history, government, on the one hand, through taxation and regulation, acted as counter-balance to unrestrained profit-seeking, and on the other, through public spending, redistributed wealth for the benefit of the many over the few. This has not been the case, however, for some forty years, a time period during which big business, as it became increasingly supra-national in scope, became divorced from any obligation to American or global society. At the same time, the American government became ever more devoted to furthering business interests.
It is not a stretch to go further, to say that business has become divorced from morality, from legitimate concern for people and planet, eschewing these in favor of an ethos of profit. And as goes business, so goes America, which has devolved into a deeply amoral society.
Our nation has become one filled with far too many disconnected individuals, wealthy and not: disconnected from communal values, and, following, lonely amongst the crowd; disconnected from meaningful work that sustains body and soul alike; disconnected from their own selves, overcome with ill-health and dis-ease, both physical and psychological; disconnected from source, Spirit, the divine.
Source, Spirit, the divine? We don’t learn much of these in school, or hear of them in the news. A secular mainstream American culture denies them any meaningful existence. Yet, there is a thread connecting us all to All. Long-standing spiritual tradition and the most modern science alike recognize this thread, but America has lost it.
If, as you’re perusing this book, deciding, perhaps, whether to commit to it, you very likely sit reading from a place of relative advantage, more well-off than the average American: better educated, better-nourished, more free. So, why should you care about these others, the less-fortunate? You need not. It’s a choice.
However, even given your advantages, perhaps you feel something is off, not right, persistently unpleasant, questionably sustainable. Many benefiting from good fortune struggle emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. The alienation of disconnection so endemic to American society affects rich and poor alike.
Which is to say, you are not alone.
America as an individualist, market-oriented society breeds persistent, low-level anxiety for most, and extreme anxiety and dis-ease for many. We’re taught to succeed in the marketplace, to make our own way, to support ourselves and our family, or else. Fail, and homelessness is a very possible outcome. A drive past any of the many tent-encampments emerging in America’s cities, large and small, enforces this point. Even friends generally refrain from helping friends financially in any significant way. The nuclear family has become a nuclear silo, each to his and her own.
But the damage goes deeper, as self-worth has become equated with financial worth, perhaps especially so for those more financially well off. Accomplishment breeds the need for further accomplishment. Yet, while individual success takes priority, it fails all too often to alleviate a gnawing sense of unsatisfactoriness. The billionaire, as example, quests for more and more and more. Most all of us participate in this kind of externally oriented ambition, when what is needed is internal Love. We stretch out in all directions, avoiding, not recognizing answers that lie within.
Spiritual tradition teaches this, you are not alone.
So too, it teaches that compassion and Love for self and others brings true happiness. Compassion and Love: American society has come to lack precisely these. In the realm of politics, as example, we are divided, deeply, one side against the other, each side too often convicted of its own righteousness and of the other’s heinousness. Institutional compassion is lacking altogether in key realms of social life, which have come to be characterized by inequality, in economics, justice, education, and health care, as examples.
The multiple crises confronting America have their roots in a common psycho-spiritual crisis. Economic and political change is needed for the prospering of our nation, our lives, our humanity. However, this change will not, cannot happen until we find a way to open ourselves. At this moment in our history, we would do well to take a step back, to reintegrate, with ourselves, with others, with nature, with Spirit.
As a society and as individuals, we operate under deeply unhealthy, misguided forces and patterns, which combine to create a worldview that has become ingrained through education, entertainment, economics, politics. We need to expand our consciousness beyond the confines of this fatally limiting understanding, expressed as a scientific and cultural materialism, which currently defines American culture and society.
While the roots of our mainstream worldview go back centuries, its branches shape our thoughts, emotions, reactions, our very lives in every present moment. This view has at its core a misunderstanding of reality as it is, the misperception of separation, a confusion, the lack of both a theoretical underpinning and a felt-sense of fundamental unity. Spiritual tradition and the most modern of science both express this unity. American culture does not. Instead, it dis-integrates.
As result, Americans and America are in the throes of suffering a form of individual and collective trauma, which the Hungarian-Canadian psychiatrist, author Dr. Gabor Mate describes as “an overwhelming threat you don’t know how to deal with.” This trauma, which “fundamentally is disconnection from ourselves,” can be seen in rapidly rising rates of addiction, suicide, and all manner of psychological affliction. In his 2021 film, “The Wisdom of Trauma,” Mate explains: “We have… a social structure that induces trauma… therefore it induces escapist, addictive behavior in a lot of people. And those inner trends line up with what society looks like on the outside. So, therefore, all of this looks perfectly normal and perfectly natural.” What has been happening in American society, while having become normalized, is not healthy. Disconnection from others and community, from meaningful work and financial security, from self and Spirit, these are the roots from which our trauma grows.
As individuals suffering trauma must heal psychological, energetic and spiritual wounds, so too must our society, in healing our collective trauma. Else it will continue, will not be overcome. In this, the institutions devoted to healing such wounds, mainstream psychiatry and psychology, have failed. Psychiatric drugs suppress symptoms, relying upon synthesized molecules to activate or deactivate very specific biological targets. They may make an individual feel better, alleviating symptoms for a while, but underlying causes remained unaddressed. This is acknowledged. Likewise, talk-therapy goes only so far, and most often fails to root out deep trauma. Neither makes any attempt to address the energetic and spiritual components of suffering, as these concepts lie outside their ken. More is needed.
Recently, a renaissance in “psychedelic medicine” has been emerging in the West. In America and Europe, academic institutions and private organizations (for-profit and non-profit) have been researching the use of mind-expanding substances, such a psilocybin and MDMA, to treat trauma, addiction, and depression. An important learning has come into view, relevant to both the individual and the culture: deep healing comes through, and perhaps only through, mystical experience, connection to source, Spirit, the divine.
This makes all the sense in the world, as mystical experience reconnects and reintegrates body, mind, soul, and Spirit. The reality we know day-to-day in America focuses, of course, on body and mind only. We pay attention, primarily, to mind-oriented activities in the pursuit of material goals, some healthy, many not, that provide in some fashion or another for our bodies, our physical selves. Generally, we are encouraged to seek physical security and pleasure. The human being, however, does not stop with body and mind. We have a soul, which can be described as individuated, yet non-material. We are Spirit, which can be known as non-material and undifferentiated—unity with All.
Mate observes: “Large segments of the economy survive because people buy things that give them temporary pleasure, but do them no good whatsoever in the long term, and... are even harmful. In fact, we’re going so far as to destroy the Earth because of our addiction.” Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, puts this another way: “When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
For the vast majority of our history, human beings lived in a fashion that prioritized connection to soul and Spirit. This connection, in turn, manifested interaction with others and nature alike, as part of the very fabric of living. Today, we would benefit from reconsidering a worldview that cuts us off from our selves, others, soul and Spirit,and Earth. For American individuals and society to thrive, a healthier way of being is needed, which re-integrates us as individuals and as a community. At minimum, such an exploration and transition will help us each lead a more enchanted, responsible, connected, meaning-full life.
This will not happen from the top down. Many of America’s cultural heroes, those who triumph and accumulate unfathomable wealth and power, embody and propagate the very forces driving so many in our society to despair. Men like Bezos and Gates provide particularly good example. Bezos, through Amazon, seeks singular control over and profit from ever more of world commerce. Gates, through various aligned foundations and organizations, gains increasing influence over global health policy and food production, each driven by, reliant upon a singular vision of technological control. Mate has this to say: “Fundamentally, the message is that our minds create the world. So, if I have a worldview that the world is a horrible place, then I’m going to live in a world where I have to be aggressive, suspicious, competitive… I have to be grandiose, and cunning, because that’s the world I’m living in. And these are the people that our society rewards with power.”
Some Buddhists like to reflect on the improbability of being born a human being, out of all creatures populating the Earth. It is an honor, a blessing, they counsel, not to be wasted. As human beings, how do we want to treat the gift of our existence? What kind of role models do we wish to emulate? What kind of role models do we wish to become? Is it that of the billionaire, or something else?
This book is intended to provide some perspective on these questions. Its genesis came after I decided to take some time off, after spending 15 years working as a digital media entrepreneur. During that time of intense, frenzied work and creation, I founded or co-founded six organizations in fields including film and the Internet (IFILM—acquired by Viacom), mobile communication (Veeker), software development (Tekadence), large-scale video display (Obscura—acquired by The Madison Square Garden Company), toys and video games (Nukotoys) and healthcare (miraclefeet). A wild ride, filled with successes and failures, my career gave me the opportunity to raise and “allocate capital” to visions I’d dream up in head and heart. So too, I had the chance to explore varied established industries from the perspective of the innovator. An outsider always, I came to interact with some of the most successful people in Hollywood and Silicon Valley alike. Quite regularly, I’d look forward to seeing myself featured in some magazine or newspaper or another. Proud for a moment, I'd fall quickly into feeling agitated and dissatisfied, wanting and needing more, always more.
Throughout that period of life, a largely unexamined, if not unconscious, need to prove myself spurred me on. I wasn’t in it for the money. I wanted the glory, which I thought would quell an inner sense of dissatisfaction. As CEO of my company Nukotoys, I found myself at the heights of work and love. We’d managed to get our products, collectible trading cards that interacted with App-based games, into Apple Stores, Targets, Best Buys, Barnes & Nobles and Wal-Marts nationwide. So too, I’d reconnected with the woman I’d always considered the love of my life, the separation from whom, earlier in life, had stoked my ambition to succeed. Still, even at these heights, even as I noted what a nice time of life it was, I felt anxiety. As if it all could go away. And it did. The company imploded, and the relationship failed.
At that point, I took pause to consider, to question meaning in life. For years, I’d been striving after success in work and romance. With both having failed, for the moment anyhow, I wondered, “If not work, and not (romantic) love, then what?” The answer came to me, very clearly: Being. I would focus on Being.
What does this mean?
The quest to figure this out took me back to an earlier version of myself, as a graduate student in Berkeley, CA, studying Systematic and Philosophical Theology. That is, it took me back to an interest in various aspects of spirituality, which I’d lost to the throes of striving and ambition. Ambition now sated, I moved to a small town north of San Francisco, rented a turn-of-the-(20th) century cottage at the base of a coastal mountain range rolling down to the Pacific ocean, and determined the following: “I want to feel God.”
From my years in graduate school, deeply studying spiritual tradition and lightly surveying quantum physics, I could understand intellectually that all is unified, connected, and divine. I believed this to be true, in my head, but I had no felt-sense of its truth. It all feels separate, divided, distinct, I thought. What was I missing? Why did I not feel an overarching sense of unity in my life?
And so I set the intention: I want to learn to feel God—“God” being “unity.” With this, I felt, I would get to the source and root of Being. And then I added, “that I might do Good:” “I want to feel God so that I might do Good.” Enough, I thought, of trying to prove myself through endeavor—I had, at least, overcome the need for this. For well over a decade, while I and my generation busied ourselves with all things digital, the real world seemed to have deteriorated into a state of crisis. Enough, I thought, of selfish pursuit. I wanted to do what I could to help out.
Over the years that followed, I set out to explore what it means to heal body and mind, to reintegrate soul and Spirit. In this exploration, I came to develop a perspective on the evolution of our current worldview, the forces and patterns that have caused us, as a society, to become so deeply cut off, alienated from ourselves, one another, soul and Spirit, and nature.
This book is about that perspective gained.
In approaching the book, it is helpful to understand a core premise. We do not begin and cannot lead our lives as if on a blank canvas. Instead, the canvas we inherit, work upon is highly cultured and contoured. It has been shaped by an intellectual lineage that, carried forward from the near and distant past, heavily influences the way we perceive, think, live today.
The thoughts and insights, transmissions and expressions of many, many generations past live on in us, for better and for worse. Some persist as unconscious yet potent memes: “I am not good enough,” inherited from Christianity; or “I need to prove my worth through success,” evolved with capitalism. Others carry on as more explicit maxims: “Because this cannot be validated by the scientific method, it cannot be determined as real,” an expression of science.
Which is to say, these thoughts and insights, transmissions and expressions matter. They have a persistent energy, propagated by culture, which demarcates the boundaries of our co-created reality. To move beyond the totality of this often too limiting energy, we must come to understand it, as the individual working through trauma will come to comprehend the forces and patterns that have caused, and continue to cause the wound.
In this sense, the book presents a story about the history and evolution of Western thought, of the ideas that have come to shape our modern-day perception of reality. And, following, the choices we make to navigate this reality—the (life) paths we choose to walk.
Intellectual comprehension, however, is not sufficient. Our minds, thoughts will take us only so far. We need to reintegrate soul and Spirit, reconnect to these essential components of our Being. When connected to soul and Spirit, confusion lessens. And so, also, the book contains practical wisdom, insights gained from spiritual traditions the world over, which might help us discover what we might do, as individuals and as a society, to reestablish these essential, life-giving connections.
The organization I now lead, Psykia Institute, works in these two areas: of theory, helping people understand who they are, what it means to be a human being; and practice, offering modalities and experiences that help us connect to source, Spirit, the divine.
The choice as to whether and how to overcome our inherited worldview is up to each individual. It might take the form of outright rejection, or a more tempered evolution. But any overcoming depends upon achieving understanding. The phrase “Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it” reflects this truth.
The book is divided amongst five parts.
“Part I: Dukka and Darshana” introduces the Sanskrit term dukkha, commonly translated as suffering, anxiety, unsatisfactoriness. And darshana, understood to be the view of reality that we hold, which, in turn, shapes the path we choose to take in life. It describes the interaction between dukkha and darshana, as we seek to escape the pain of dukkha by jumping into routes afforded by the worldview of darshana. When we make this jump without much in the way of choice, it can be called the Way of Addiction. When we make a choice without much in the way of freedom, it can be known as the Way of Conformity. Most of us walk both of these Ways most of the time.
“Part II: Obligation to Accumulation” follows the evolution of Western culture’s orientation from a worldview, the Karma of Christianity, which valued connection to Spirit, shared land and obligation to others, to that of the Kismet of Capitalism, which stresses materialism, private property and individualism. In this progression from the power of the Church to the potency of the corporation, we learn of the “death of God,” the “disenchantment of the world,” and the rise of material accumulation as the West’s guiding goal.
“Part III: Science or Spirit” explores how science and Spirit, the mathematical and the mystical, though once inextricably intertwined, evolved, in the West, to describe separate, mutually exclusive realities. We learn of the development of the Providence of Science, and come to understand how a materialistic, mechanistic understanding of the cosmos came to replace a spiritual, holistic knowing of it. We explore a critique of a hubris that has emerged within the Providence of Science, which rejects altogether the validity of the subjective, the non-quantifiable, the non-methodically verifiable. As counterpoint, we learn of spiritual and indigenous traditions, across history and geography, that taken together express a “perennial philosophy.” In this, we discover the Sanctity of Spirit, which articulates a unitive worldview, accessible only subjectively, through mystical experience.
“Part IV: DOW for Dao” examines the Providence of Science’s merging into the Kismet of Capitalism, birthing a materialist culture within a mechanistic universe. Using the framework of the discipline of philosophy, we examine in detail the metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political components of the American darshana. We explore the genesis and rise of Neoliberal economics, Libertarian politics, and cultural corporatism, explaining how the Providence of Science’s constrained understanding of reality translates into diminished policies that harm people and planet alike. Shifting perspectives, we learn of the cutting edge of modern science, the paradigm-breaking Realm of the Quantum, which offers an updated view of reality, as both holistic and unified. While often equated with New Age thinking, we, instead, pay particular attention to the practical reality of quantum physics, as giving rise to the technologies that power the Information Age.
“Part V: Now but How” begins with an exploration of how the Internet has come to reshape and redefine our lives, economically, socially, and psychologically. We explore a dichotomy. The science underlying, supporting the Information Age bases itself in a unitive understanding of reality. Yet the social systems propagated by this very same science's application in technology has come to foster extreme separation, economically, socially, and psychologically. This raises the question, "Do we want this?" In pursuing the answer, we embark on a journey of Self-help (Self with a capital S, encompassing body, mind, soul and Spirt), examining what it means to live in accordance with the Sanctity of Spirit. We learn, in particular, of the importance and difficulty of finding and pursuing what the Buddhists term Right Livelihood, which is to say, work that aligns with the totality of our Self. We explore how aspiring entrepreneurs and awakening changemakers might reshape the way business is done, by addressing this admittedly enormous challenge through an informed recognition and appreciation of, not economics, but aesthetics. That is, of Beauty, properly understood. Finally, the book ends with the consideration that to learn to move beyond the Ways of Addiction and Conformity, instead to walk the Way of Self, is to determine to act with Love. To do so is to move out of living with the deeply enculturated habit of fear. This leads to the increase of our capacity to cherish Self and life in each moment, and, within this darshana (view and path), dukkha (suffering, anxiety, unsatisfactoriness) ceases.
Each of the 68 chapters comprising this book are short. However, many are dense, and cover a lot of information. The words have an intentional rhythm to them. They are meant to be absorbed slowly, with pacing in mind, as a kind of meditation, a focusing of mind. There is no rush. Keep a dictionary nearby, read for cadence and comprehension over speed, and you'll find the result to be both educational and edifying (see dictionary). May it be so.