Today, our basic assumptions about life and the human condition are being questioned.This is natural in a time of rapid change and upheaval.I will look at some current attitudes to human needs and consider what are our true human needs.In current society satisfaction of needs is a problem due to very limited views on human life.
Human needs are the physical,emotional,thinking,imaginative and spiritual realms of existence.To widen the picture, the first four relate to the four elements: earth,water,air and fire.Since ancient times the five pointed star (pentagram) has been used to represent the human being.There is also the soul, which links body, mind and spirit.(Various esoteric teachings mention other realms of human life,which lie well down the track.First things first.)
Physical needs
This involves food, clothing, shelter;the things to keep us simply alive.These things today are a problem, even though we live in an age of plenty.Their supply is left to "market forces", and it's tough if you lack the dough.False needs are promoted to keep the system going and lock people into the materialistic realm for control and profit.Today at the supermarket I saw sixty kinds of savoury dip.Galaxies were not formed nor have millions of years of evolution occurred to produce such paltry purposes.
There are ample resources to ensure that everyone has sufficient.Economists talk about scarcity, but this is a man made condition to allow a few to exploit others.Most people realize deep down that material things do not bring lasting happiness, but are trapped on a crazy treadmill.Our real material needs can be met quite easily, leaving time to pursue higher aims in life.
Emotional needs
Again, these needs are severely distorted.The nuclear family, itself a stultifying and unnatural unit, is breaking down.A virtual army of helpers (psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counsellors,etc.) are employed to tend to the casualities of modern life.Child abuse is at almost epidemic levels.The mass media promotes anti-social behaviour, including sexism.The consumer culture promotes self indulgence and selfishness.Relationships are unstable and material things seem more reliable, thus setting up a vicious circle of unfulfilled needs.Modern life is screwing up the capacity to achieve good relationships that humans need.
For thousands of years people have lived in real communities, such as clans or kinship groups.This allows for everyone to relate to people of all ages.It offers stability and great variety of human experience.Under such conditions people are not left to make it on their own, but have a whole network of people for emotional support and expression.Because we have lost real community there is ample scope for the mass media to exploit people through the propagation of fantasies, such as romantic love being the magic answer to life.Just one person can't satisfy all the needs of another.Meeting our emotional needs is a question of social organization, not a purely individual activity.We need communities that consciously promote emotional well-being through their value systems and social organisation.
Thinking
Today most education is development of left brain (i.e. abstract) thinking.Schooling means learning bits of data.Its frightening to see computers promoted in schools.Staring at a screen for hours on end is not education.Real education means interacting with other people and developing the whole person.George Leonard has pointed out that what is called education is mostly the training of our screening devices.Civilization requires that peoples' consciousness should have a very narrow focus, so we are taught to screen out perception of our own biofields and the biofields of others.(1)
Higher "education" simply means more abstract and specialized thinking.Many fields of "knowledge" have come to a dead end, where jargon and sterility of mind rule the day.To achieve the stamp of approval you play the game, don't upset the applecart with original thinking.
Young children are naturally open to experience ( but under severe threat
from the modern world).They should be allowed plenty of time to explore
nature.Abstract thinking can wait, and should never become the dominant
function.The very young are always asking question, but soon the system
grinds them down, requiring them to give set answers.The last thing we
need is for minds to be put in a mental straitjacket.Children should be
taught how to think clearly, but not brainwashed, as happens today.Minds
should always be free to roam, ever questing.
Imagination
The human brain is the most complex and mysterious thing in the universe.An extremely important human attribute is the imagination.This is the mind's ability to create images and even access and create other worlds.(Looking at pictures is not using the imagination. I stress that true imagination is a creative act.)The imagination gives us inner space where we can be our true self.
The mass media, in particular television, kills off the imagination.Today the natural creative power of the mind is taken away and replaced with anti-social and nightmare images.Advertisements create false desires and false pictures of the world. Pornography and violent images have never been so widely available, nor so degrading.Some would have it that the plethora of images we have today are like wallpaper, simply a background to existence.But all the images are done with a purpose: to influence people and control minds.An old saying has it that you become what you behold.The owners and operators of the media know its power, that is why they bombard us relentlessly.
Today, in our so-called "civilization", the young are criminally exploited psychologically, to an extent never recorded in history.Television is now aiming at mere infants, wiring their brains into the consumer culture, and preventing proper brain development.The "teletubby generation" will be spending most of their waking hours gaping at a screen and consuming mostly pointless products.
The natural abilities and qualities of the mind should be protected and nurtured with vigilance.Young children need to exercise their imagination, not be brainwashed and exploited by the media.Modern mass media is simply a tool for mind control, and we don't need it.We must re-gain the mythic-poetic dimension of existence, which is accessed through the uncorrupted creative imagination.
The conditions needed for a human existence are disappearing
Of all the problems we face today, one of the most serious is that knowledge of a truly human life is fast disappearing.The modern age is one of fragmentation.Real community is gone, families are breaking up, the integrity of the individual is under severe attack.It's impossible for most people to live a truly human life, because the conditions for such a life are being taken away by the modern world, especially by the technology.The rising generations just don't have the experience or knowledge of complete human beings, living as true humans should.As Robert Bly has shown in "The Sibling Society", half adults are now in charge of the mass culture.We are on a downward spiral, as this regressive effect is cumulative.The young only know a junk culture of alienation, where any awareness of true human living is preventeded from even taking shape.
Spirituality
People cannot live a full human life without a spiritual foundation.People need ideals to live up to and guide them.Deep meaning to life can be found through relating to the sacred cosmic order.Every life passes through cycles of cosmic significance.This has to be understood, and acknowledged with appropriate rituals.Both the feminine and masculine aspects of life have to be revisioned as energies working in partnership, with neither trying to dominate life or the other.Patriarchal religions are in a state of decay, their time is over.Out of the current chaos a new consciousness can be born.
For over two thousand years we have had religion and philosophies that deny true human needs.It's a major task to see through the teachings that distort the human being, both male and female.This is the crux of the matter, to see with new eyes.
In essence, the Age of Aquarius means the realization of the complete human being.Aquarius cannot abide restrictions on the human spirit.Conditions must be established to allow for the full expression of our truly human qualities.
The soul
Over the last 2,000 years there has been a progressive de-souling of the world and humans.Primal people saw soul everywhere: in animals, plants,and even stones.To them everything in the world was alive (we call it animism, from anima, Latin for soul or breath.Greek for soul is psyche).Some ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and writers were aware of the importance of the soul.Epicurus wrote:"It is never too early or too late to care for the well-being of the soul".The later Roman Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, which is about the mysteries of Isis, wrote: "Everyone should know that you can't live in any other way than by cultivating the soul".
The Renaissance saw much interest in the soul, in particular the writings of Marsilio Ficino.Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century such as John Keats placed a high value on "soul making".Today, Thomas Moore and James Hillman, among others, have written perceptively about the soul.
Soul is to be understood with the right side of the brain rather than the left side.In Care of the Soul (1992) Thomas Moore explains soul for people of today:
"Soul is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance."(p.5)
"Soul is nothing like ego.Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego...Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control.We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can.t outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego."(p.xviii)
"Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life."(p.xix)
David N. Elkins has written:
"Spirit is Icarus flying toward the sun; soul is Icarus as he plummets from the sky, falling back to Earth.Soul is always about falling back to Earth, about coming down, about descending into our depths."(2)
Soul is a coy mistress, to be wooed with delicate manoeuvres.She shuns the hi-tech, hurry-scurry world, far from the madding crowd.She favours the by-ways rather than the highways.She is the extraordinary that is found in the ordinary, by those who care to look.She blesses the deep and enduring things of life, she has no time for fleeting fads.She dwells in natural things and places, far away from the artificial. She delights in the play of sun and shadow, spurning bright lights.Expressive melodies capture her heart, she flees from clatter and din.She gambols beside ponds and streams,raging torrents are not her style.Soul is all those subtle things that have been trampled underfoot by the unfeeling, mechanical modern world.
We need to embrace soul in order to live a truly human life.This is
an important way to redress the imbalance of the modern world, where techne
dominates psyche.Techne is the innate ability to achieve and put into practice,
literally it means skill or art.
Techne is associated with the masculine.Jose Arguelles has observed:
"Most people live arbitrary, mechanical existences in which error and aberration succeed each other unendingly, while the mind is plagued with sundry neuroses and the body with various diseases....Psyche is totally unconscious and techne totally mechanical, for there is no recognized relation between the two.But this is the life of the waking dead, and it is no real life at all.An integration of the two modes of being, psyche and techne, gives rise to and defines a mythic or cosmic state of consciousness, a harmonization of opposites in which war and strife have become transformed into a conscious interplay of energies, and the human organism itself is in a dynamic balance with the primal forces of the earth and the radiant forces of the heavens."(3)
Footnotes
(1)Leonard, George B. The Transformation: a guide to the inevitable
changes in humankind (New York:Delacorte Press,1972)p.166
(2)Elkins, David N. "Psychotherapy and spirituality: towards a theory
of the soul", Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1995 V.35 n.2:78-98
(3)Arguelles, Jose The Transformative Vision (Fort Yates:Muse,1992.Reprint
of 1972 Shambhala edition),pp.6-7