When one compares the bazaars in India and the Middle East with their bustling life, myriad of smells, and networks of relationships to the modern mall - brick and mortar or click and mortar - one cannot help but be depressed. Anyone who has ever been to one of these places, where customers are treated with hospitality and care, or even where bargaining is a ritual part of the exchange, cannot easily return to the faceless world of "your credit card number and your mother's maiden name."But under the continuous pressure to produce and consume, too many individuals dare not consider that the more they purchase, the more they are in need, because there is little satisfaction left in the act of buying or selling itself. Imagine buying a brand new remarkable something or other with all kinds of features and attachments, and not being able to tell anyone about it! Is it not the contact, the human energetic exchange that we actually want, crave, and cannot live without? And in the absence of this, how many of us have become walking junkyards, carrying our "stuff" around, not because we want to, but because we do not know what else to do?
The Bazaar versus the Mall
Why is it that the traditional bazaars were and remain so energizing while the mall and most web-shopping creates exhaustion? On a very visceral level, we can look to the quality of energy being exchanged. Thoreau remarked in Walden "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." What do we actually seek from exchange, and what happens when we do not receive it? In traditional hierarchically based societies, exchange took place within very specific boundaries. You would only communicate with, or buy something from, someone of a different class through a rigidly formal process. Exchange dynamics served to foster social structures, which offered a sense of security to its participants. And certainly, security is very basic to any system of exchange. You need to know that you can rely on the terms of an agreement, that contracts are respected, and that each other's credit is good. Once security is established, however, further aspirations emerge; for the energetic of exchange, itself, arises from a deeper longing. We can imagine that the world of business operates so impersonally and lawfully that various personal and psychological factors can be done away with, but who buys what from whom, where, and why become the defining factors of our lives. And whenever we exchange, and in whatever way we exchange, we are sharing "manna", the gifted life force that sustains all. The less sensitivity there is to this, the less communion/communication takes place on shared subtle and imaginative levels, the more needs to be said and done, evolving into a ludicrous piling up of information, goods, services that cannot stop itself because it has no idea of what else to do: Maine to Texas a thousand fold. The resultant excess of activity (our endless lists of things that must be done) and the materials that weigh us down, instead of fostering creativity, become a disease run rampant.
Toxic landfills that will not dissolve for a millennium, mountains of used rubber tires, ever-increasing landscapes of asphalt and smoke, mercury-filled fish floating up on their belly; these reflect our ailing modes of interpersonal exchange. Refusing to acknowledge the pervasive sense of unfulfillment that will not fade with the introduction of new products, the economy, as toxic transaction, continues to lead mainstream culture down the road of not just excess, but of desperate frenzy.
Underneath the exchange of goods and services lie values. Where do values come from? Are they inherited? Are they conscious? Can they be transformed? And if so, how? These are the elemental questions of our time. In the last hundred years, we have seen entire societies try to reinvent themselves in the name of "the people" or the "individual," while human nature continues to rebel, craving a different sort of order. At least twice in the modern era, for example, governments have tried to change the structure of the work-week. During the French revolution, a "decimal system" of ten days a week and ten months a year was instituted, and during the reign of Stalin, the work week was pared back to five days with no week-ends, then moved to six with a "floating day off" that would keep the factories humming full time. In both instances, intentioned design was going to do away with antiquated mythologies and boost productivity. Both attempts failed, however, because people living in the countryside were inherently attuned to contrary rhythms and would not comply.
Whereas our forbearers, Confucius or Moses, could point the way to harmonious living based on the template of an exalted past or the laws of a great transcendent being, the post-modern world cannot reclaim absolutism from its terrible history. No executive God, heaven sent savior, over-arching system, or plan of action can compete with the forces of the free market. To go this route is to revert to the childish mentality, be it through a belief in planned economies or personal saviors, that helped lay the foundation for this current situation in the first place.
The free-market, moreover, cannot be curbed without paying the awful price of losing the word "free." But freedom offers the possibility for exploring alternatives and for offering the fruits of our explorations to others. In this vein, those who have waded through the muddy waters of "red" and "blue" - oppressive planned economies and exploitative capitalist ones - may begin to work toward "green" by opening to the sensibilities that are exhibited in nature, by holding mindful living and quality of life as a priority over productivity, and by cultivating mutuality over isolation or conformity. Integral values, themselves, will emerge from the deep, regenerative powers of being. The transpersonal community, as far as I can see, is being asked to be the midwife: to intuit their arrival, to assist their coming into consciousness, and to flesh them out in open and fearless dialogue.
Continued in Part 3...
