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. What will the next "great cultural revival" be like?

From scraps of 19th century science, our ancestors concocted a narrow frame—a "rigid and narrow" way to look at the world, which made us misunderstand and damage culture. Convenience—which identifies happiness with acquiring and experiencing what feels attractive—is a case in point.

When we look at the world through convenience, we shun knowledge and wisdom as irrelevant, because we already know what we want. The "pursuit of happiness" then becomes a practical matter—of acquiring it.

The key insight, which we are calling convenience paradox, is that convenience is a deceptive and paradoxical value.

That with striking consistency, the more convenient direction tends to lead to a less convenient condition.

When the convenience paradox is understood, we readily see that we in fact have no clue about the life's important question: What is really good for us?

What is really worth aiming for?

It is at that point that we begin to seek the information that illuminates basic questions.

We have introduced the holoscope as an academically founded method for creating and using that information.

When illuminated by the holoscope, our contemporary condition is seen in a completely new light—and a wealth of ways to improve it come to the foreground.

We here illustrate that by a few examples.

Are we nearing happiness?

Why do we have such faith in our senses?

Our senses evolved to guide us to right choices in nature; why trust that they can still serve that purpose in the completely altered condition we are in?

Why do we have faith in the civilization that is guided by convenience?

Wholeness is so precarious: We may have everything else in abundance—and a single nutrient missing in your diet will make it all futile.

Has civilization made us happier?

The truth of this matter is that we simply don't know! It is impossible to "step into someone's shoes" and feel how he feels; especially if that someone lived centuries ago, and didn't even have shoes.

So imagine an experiment, where a sufficiently large human population is divided into two groups. One group continues to live the civilized way, and the other in the way this population lived before it got civilized. What sort of differences would develop?

Such an experiment is of course practically impossible. But it did happen—not in a laboratory, but in real life. In early 20th century a number of world populations were on the borderline of civilization, and undergoing a division. Weston Price traveled around the globe visiting those populations, and recording the data. The results were published in a book titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Its message was that the switched to civilized lifestyle was a step away from corporeal wholeness!

Price found that the people who lived in pre-civilized ways manifested higher degrees of wellbeing.

Kanyini

There is a popular myth, that the "human nature" is acquisitive and self-serving; and that therefore the societal order of things we are living in is the best and most natural one.

But what do we really know about this theme?

For all we know, it may well be the case that the order of things we are living in is just the one that emerged through societal "survival of the fittest"; and that what we know as our "human nature" is just the way we've been socialized, in order to suit that order of things.

Imagine a culture, living on some faraway island, which evolved in a way opposite from ours—without strife and war, and science and technology. What would that culture be like?

Imagine that our civilization discovered and colonized their island. What would this meeting of cultures be like?

There is no need to imagine: This indeed did happen.

We tend to use the nature to satisfy our needs. The "civilized" people who colonized Australia extended this principle to Aboriginal women. As the number of children conceived in that way grew, they became a political issue: Being half-white, their souls too needed to be saved. By a political decision, they were then taken from their families, to attend special boarding schools, and receive the benefits of Western culture and education.

Bob Randall was one of them, who lived to tell the story. One of the first things he observed in that boarding school was that while the white people preached Christianity, his people were living it!

Randall later returned to the area that used to be his home, but he never found his family. Now in reservations, his people were destitute. Inhaling gasoline (to once experience that "high" that the nature once gave them?) was so common among them, that Australia had to infuse it with additives to prevent that.

Randall, most importantly, also extensively reported about the original Aboriginal culture. Melanie Hogan gave him a voice, by creating a documentary titled "Kanyini". Kanyini is "the principle of caring and responsibility that underpins the Aboriginal life".