Let's assume for a moment that the idea of a finite ecosystem has finally sunk all the way in. Right now the majority of humanity acknowledges the idea that all of life is an interconnected web, but we put that on a shelf with the rest of our ideas that we don't fully process, that we don't envision how it would apply to us.
Interconnection means that we're not really separate from "others" as our eyes would have us believe. In fact, there are no "others" in any independent sense. Separateness is an illusion, a fiction that we've adopted because it's useful at a stage in the evolution of self-awareness. Knowledge of our interconnectedness points beyond "Us versus Them" to a place where we realize that there is no "Them". There is only "Us". You can find plenty of evidence for that if you approach the facts with an open mind.
1. Your body is a colony of cells, billions of specialized little entities acting in concert in the common enterprise you call "you."
2. Likewise, this thing called our self (small "s") is a colony of ideas (mostly non-original), emotions and behaviors (mostly learned along our life-story's timeline). It appears in the space of pure awareness that we think (because of the evidence of our very limited senses) is a "person" living inside this bag of flesh and bone. The word "person', by the way, comes from the Greek word (transliterated) "personna" which literally means a "mask". It originally meant a theatrical mask with sort of built-in megaphone that the sound ("sonna") came through ("per"). We are not this "personna", this thing that sound (and a lot of other stuff) comes through. We are the pure awareness that's watching this whole performance of the "self". More properly, we are this pure awareness that everything arises in.
3. Again, our history of sensory experiences convinces us that this awareness is inside our heads. The Ghost in the Machine. Very Existential. But how do we know when somebody is staring at us from behind our backs? How do we finish each others sentences when we are in intimate relationships? The world is full of little clues pointing to boundlessness if we are simply willing to suspend our previous notions and really look at what's actually going on.
Now, if we're really not as separate as we appear, how does it make any sense to act as though we were? It takes a lot of energy to hang on to separateness. Here's another clue: we'd much rather relax with our "friends" than defend ourselves against our fears, which we externalize as "other people" who are "strangers." We don't want anything bad to happen to our "friends", the people we have stuff "in common" with. We're not so sure about those "strangers", though! And the "stranger" they are, the more defended we feel, that is until we find out that the "strangers" are really no different from "us" in any fundamental way. We all want to be happy. We all want to feel safe. We all want our kids to be happy and safe. That's just for starters.
Fear and anger (which usually seems to be a defense against fears that we don't want to acknowledge) are the primary causes of feeling separate. When we don't feel so separate, we relax. Hmmm. What could that mean?
So what if we all "got it"? What if we all started treating everybody else as though they were, if not ourselves, at least our family? Probably in the course of this evolutionary change, everybody is not going to wake up one morning with this realization firmly lodged in awareness. I'm guessing it will take some time, but that a tipping point will be reached where consciousness of interconnectedness will outweigh the illusion of separateness. What do you suppose will happen then? My guess is that we'll start taking care of each other as though we were all family members, then as though we were all each other's children. Not that hard to imagine, is it? It's just the logical conclusion of ecology, of the obvious interconnectedness of all life. In fact, it has to extend to what we perceive now as "non-living matter", which supports the seemingly fragile web of life. Mistreat the non-living matter until it stops supporting life, and life disappears. Be grateful for the rocks holding up your house. If they weren't there, you wouldn't be either.
Another thing that the illusion of separateness and the subsequent fear produces is the idea that there Isn't Enough. That idea was formalized by the pioneering economist, Adam Smith (1723? - 1790). Better information convinced another pioneer, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), that the problem wasn't scarcity, it was distribution. A really good introduction to his ideas and the facts that he backs them up with is a little book called "Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth". Ought to be required reading for everybody.
So if there really is enough, and we start to understand that we need to take care of our world (every body and every thing), wouldn't our first impulse be to try to solve the distribution problems and make sure that everybody gets taken care of? Does that seem so illogical? Right now we're so conditioned by our belief in scarcity that we fear that by helping others, there won't be enough for "ourselves". If there's enough for everybody, wouldn't that fear atrophy away?
Let's take another look at money in this context. We know that it's a convenient way to trade goods and services, but in previous posts, we've made the case that with a scarcity mindset, it's also a convenient way to hoard. Hoarding is a response to perceived scarcity. But if everybody has enough and everybody is taking care of each other, hoarding doesn't make sense. Neither does piling up lots of money. If you translate vast wealth into vast amounts of stuff, you may not have a scarcity problem, but you definitely have a storage problem. Now suppose what you're hoarding is perishable. You either have to defend your wealth, maybe by refrigerating it (which chips away at your wealth), or you watch it perish. The better part of wisdom in a post-financial world would be to acquire only what you actually need and can take care of. We said before that ownership may come to mean not what you've paid for but what you can accept responsibility for.
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