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.

Which way is wholeness?

Why do we have such faith in our senses?

Our senses evolved to guide us to wholeness in nature; why trust that they can still serve that purpose in our completely altered civilized condition?

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

Is civilization taking us to wholeness?

We have no good reason to take that for granted.

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 just reached by civilization—which brought about the division we are talking about. 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 change to civilized lifestyle was a step away from corporeal wholeness!

Price diagnosed 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?

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 the "human nature" is just the way we've been socialized by it.

Imagine a culture, living on a faraway island in a completely natural way. What would that culture be like?

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

There is no need to imagine: This did indeed 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, the half-white children were then taken away from their families, to attend special boarding schools and receive the benefits of Western education.

Bob Randall was one of them, who lived to tell the story. One of the first things he observed was that the white people preached Christianity, his people practiced it!

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

Randall, most importantly, 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".

Paticcasamuppada

We have now come to the interesting part. We gave it a name, "Happiness between One and Plus Infinity", and then another, "The Best Kept Secret of Human Culture"; and we made it a theme of one of our ten conversations. The point here is that human wholeness has no limits.

Unlike machines, we humans can always be more whole!