The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek happiness here and now. The lifestyle changed, and the culture blossomed. How could the next such change begin?

Without suitable information to show us the way, we pursue convenience—what brings immediate gratification.

But convenience is a deceptive value, which surprisingly often leads to a less convenient condition.

In its shadow, there are a wealth of insights and opportunities that we can use to vastly improve our condition; through "human development", and "cultural revival".

In the shadow of our cherished value—of instant gratification or convenience—reside a wealth of ignored opportunities for improving our condition through human development. When they've become known, the "great cultural revival" will most naturally follow.

The way and the paradox

Lao-Tzu

According to tradition, Lao-Tzu or "Old Master", an ancient wise man of China, was on his way out of China to end his life in solitary contemplation. But the border guard would not let him leave, until he wrote down the essence of his wisdom for posterity.

We let the Old Master convey to us two insights:

• Instead of reaching out for the objects of our desire, must focus on our way of life—and harmonize it with the overarching Way of the universe
• The Way (called Tao) to the highest good is hidden from us by a paradox

We let the following excerpt from Tao-Te Ching, the book of wisdom that the Old Master's allegedly left to the border guard, summarize his message for us.

That the weak can defeat the strong—

There is no one in the whole world who doesn't know it,
And yet there is no one who can put it into practice.

The paradox of physical effort

Moshe Feldenkrais

The heaviest thing we ever lift up and carry is the one we can never get rid of—our body.

We let Moshe Feldenkrais too appear here ideographically, to point to the physical side of the convenience paradox:

We build the technology to make life easy; but the lion's share of our effort is in the way in which we use ourselves—which can only be improved through human development.

The way to happiness

The way of the Buddha

A prince in India rides through the village neighboring his palace, and remains shocked by seeing people suffer. He decides to leave the shelter of his palace and family, and withdraw into the forest to seek a solution.

Having tried several approaches to human development and nearly died trying, Prince Siddartha sat for five years in meditation under the Bo Tree, achieved complete enlightenment, and found the answer to his quest. Returning to the world, his first sermon was about "the Four Noble Truths", of which the first one was the truth of "suffering".

This, of course, is the familiar legend; but is it plausible?

When we looked at it, we found that it wasn't.

It was difficult for us to imagine that even a prince could be so sheltered as to be surprised to see suffering; and that an enlightened being would talk about the truth of suffering as his great realization, and his gift to the world.

All of this changes, however, when we replace the word "suffering" by the original Pali keyword "dukkha".

But what is "dukkha"?

Well, that's exactly what the First Noble Truth of Buddhism is about!

To a future conversation, where we'll explore this theme, we offer the following two points:

• Our everyday emotional life is by and large just dukkha—just that particular kind of "suffering" that the Buddha undertook to eliminate
• The Way he found and taught was not only different—it was opposite from the way in which we tend to "pursue happiness"

The way of the Christ

The following excerpt from Christ's teaching will serve to illustrate The Buddha's Way, and at the same time suggest that it is not in essence different from what other great humanity's teachers taught.

Matthew 6:26 in the New Testament reads:

See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they?

The point is, of course, not to avoid work—but to work as an act of service, and without "reaching out" for the fruit. Just as the Buddha, and so many other teachers of the Way—not excluding Moshe Feldenkrais—taught.

The result is well beyond the cessation of suffering. Here is how C. F. Andrews described it in "The Sermon on the Mount".

(The disciples of Christ) found in this new new 'Way of Life' such a superabundance of joy, even in the midst of suffering, that they could hardly contain it. Their radiance was unmistakable. When the Jewish rulers saw their boldness, they "marvelled and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus" (Acts 4. 13).

The way to health

Werner Kollath

As a medical researcher, Werner Kollath observed that the diseases that plague us modern people tend to be to a significant degree a product of our lifestyle. And that to counteract them. we wold need a completely new and different approach to health and healthcare.

Kollath was a forerunner of the scientific study of hygiene—by which he understood most generally the lifestyle and environmental factors that influence health and disease. Kollath was careful enough to observe that hygiene was not only a scientific problem, but also a political one—in the sense that it profoundly has to do with (what we call) the power structure.

His own history proved him right—he was in effect eliminated by the power structure, and his project came to naught (see this summary).

Aaron Antonovsky

About two thirds of the women who survived in the WW2 concentration camps later developed psychosomatic consequences; but the remaining one third remained without them. Aaron Antonovsky focused his research on this latter group. Today Antonovsky is recognized as an iconic representative of the scientific study of "salutogenesis" (conditions that lead to health).

Antonovsky managed to reduce the many factors that made one capable of coping to high environmental stress to a single one, which he called "sense of coherence". We mention it here as a link connecting the "psychological" and the "somatic" approaches to health.

The way to coherence

We looked for a word that would include both "creativity" and "comprehension", and chose "coherence".

Friedrich Nietzsche

We let Nietzsche stand for the point of view that we, modern people, are so overpowered by the overabundance of impressions and the tempo of change, that we end up living in a sort of an emotional and cognitive spasm—unable to comprehend and act, and merely reacting to the stimuli from without. At the bottom of Intuitive introduction to systemic thinking you will find Nietzsche's excerpt with some comments; but that entire short essay is relevant to our theme.

Neil Postman

We let Neil Postman represent the point of view, elaborated in "Amusing Ourselves to Death", that the new media have a tendency to substitute amuzement, superficiality and fragmentation—for sustained serious analysis and critical thinkig, which was supported by the printed text as medium.

Nikola Tesla

We let Nikola Tesla serve as a symbol for yet another endangered element of our wholeness; in the Tesla and the Nature of Creativity blog post we called it "direct creativity"; but we may also call it "vision", or "wholistic comprehension", or "creative imagination".

As we explained in that blog post, the phenomenology of that creative process—on which our ability to begin a cultural revival may naturally depend—suggests that it requires a sustained and intense attention on the matter at hand, but without sharp focus. It's like using the peripheral vision...

It is obvious that this ability is even more endangered by the contemporary lifestyle and the immersive media than our capability to think rationally, which Postman championed.

Guy Debord

In "Society of the Spectacle", Debord presents an image of the modern society where all that was authentic has been replaced by its media representation. He uses the technical Marxist keyword "alienation" to point to the political dimension of this issue, his point being that we are now faced with a compendium of problems that neither Marx nor other social critics and political philosophers of the past could predict.

Debord's insights offer a profound extension of the power structure theory we've been elaborating throughout this text.

Convenience Paradox ideogram

See it commented here.

Culture

By defining culture as "cultivation of wholeness", and cultivation by analogy with planting and watering a seed, we undertook to serve several purposes that are at the core of holotopia.

By specifying that purpose in this specific way, we emphasize the human development aspect.

We can now ask: What sort of information does a culture need, to be able to function as a culture? The answer is already in the definition: Scientific, causal thinking won't help. To see that a seed must be planted and watered, we depend on the experience of the past generations.

Information is defined as "recorded experience". This includes also customs, rituals, works of art, architecture etc.

Addiction

While our legislation and our ethical sensibilities are focused on traditional addictions such as gambling and drugs, thousands of new ones may be created with the help of technology. See this article.

NaCuHeal—Information Designi

This is indeed a collection of prototypes, combining basic salutogenesis ideas with interventions into public awareness, through design of suitable communication (see the summary with links here).

Movement and Qi

This prototype shows how human development, and the heritage of the human development traditions, can be seamlessly incorporated in the academic scheme of things.

A salient point has been to turn the Oriental concept "qi" into a keyword, defined phenomenologically. And then use it to show that a variety of Oriental traditions are just different ways to work with a single core issue. See a description here.

Rumi in Oslo

The goal of the Rumi in Oslo prototype is to find ways to make the spirit and the teachings of the 13th century Sufi master and point Jalal ud-Din Rumi accessible to contemporary people, through the medium of contemporary arts. See this invitation flyer.