The Solution to Everything

"Life is like a maze of doors and they all open from the side you're on. Just keep on pushing hard, boy, and try as you may, you're going to wind up where you started from"  - Cat Stevens

Wayne Dyer has a book titled "There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem". I thought about this title for a long time. First I thought it a bullshit New Age thing, like "Well, say your affirmations, chant at your crystals, and everything will be okay."

But in my life's journey, I've noticed over and over again that it is the hypocrisies or schisms that seem to cause all my problems: those conflicts between what I believe on one level and what I believe on another level, or the differences between what I choose to believe is real and what I know, underneath it all, is real.

For example, I worked for many years trying to implement various programs and policies to reduce the amount of garbage we produce in our society. I looked at this issue from a hundred different angles and came up with all kinds of promotional ideas, incentives, disciplinary procedures, bylaws, you name it. When I went home at night, I sorted every gram of my waste materials into the appropriate recycling containers. This way I would not be a hypocrite.

One day, we did an interesting survey at the city where I worked. We were proud that we had gotten the residents of the city to reduce their amount of garbage. But a simple calculation showed that the commercial, industrial and institutional sectors in our city - including City Hall itself - were producing four times more garbage than the residential sector. In other words, we were making progress in waste reduction at home... and simultaneously producing even more waste at work. Waste reduction education efforts couldn't even claim credit, because, frankly, people just spend more time at work than they do at home, so of course there's less waste produced at home.

I looked around. I saw that all environmental programs that I'd ever led, been part of, or contributed to, work like this; they put lots of attention and resources into accomplishing something really tiny in one part of life, and then they ignore the natural and inevitable consequences of that accomplishment in other parts of life, because it's too complicated to think about everything. So the problems simply shift to someplace else.

Talk about hypocrisy.

The realization hit me like a tonne of bricks. I saw that although I'm the same person whether I'm at work or at home, I was acting as if I was living two different lives and things that mattered in one life were irrelevant in the other. This developed into a great existential angst.

I'd been consoling myself for spending so much time on my "career" instead of doing what I really felt was important in the world, which is educating people about the way the world works. I felt terribly ashamed that I was wasting the best years of my life (and a lot of taxpayer money) on pretending to do something good for the environment while actually doing the opposite.
Not long after that, my son was born and when I had to go back to work a year later, the whole situation was that much worse because not only was I wasting my life doing irrelevant stuff, I knew it. I knew where I needed to be - which was with my son - but instead I was spending day after day doing nothing useful, and knowing it. I was isolated in this experience, because everyone around me praised me for having a good job "helping the environment."

I got out. Sadly, the vast majority of us never really face the contradiction of the North American lifestyle and do not get out.
What happened to me to shift my awareness was that I happened to see that, as a society, we break life into many different parts, or sectors. Then we focus only within one particular sector at any given time. This is justified as "problem-solving." We are taught to break problems (and all of life) into sections and stages and milestones and objectives. Then we are supposed to put everything we have into only one piece of reality, and nothing else.

This is condoned schizophrenia. Those who can't quite accomplish this enormous feat of self-delusion are labeled in various, usually derogatory, ways.
Raising our "level of consciousness" is really just about bringing together the different categories of our lives and psyches. It's a simple, though difficult, task. It requires honesty.
In the book Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, there’s an introduction to a hierarchy of levels of human consciousness. From low to high, the levels of consciousness are: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace, enlightenment (and then several levels of enlightenment concluding with total dissolution of the physical self).  It's fairly easy to figure out where you fall on this hierarchy based on your current life situation.

Integrity is what you have when you are not living hypocritically, when you are genuinely choosing to relate all the different parts of your life together as one thing. Integrity does not begin until you have your consciousness at the level of courage. If your life is generally lived at a level of consciousness below the courage level - as is the case for about 85% of civilized humanity right now - you are not living your life with integrity and therefore are not living your life consciously. The consequence of living an unconscious life is that the opportunities for unanticipated experiences for which you have no means to adapt are much, much greater. It's also much harder to resolve these conflicts, and it's much more likely that these difficult experiences will spin off into body-mind disease patterns.

This is the real basis for the extremely high levels of mental and physical illness of civilized societies compared to those of tribal (aboriginal) societies. Because tribal peoples have a much higher level of consciousness than civilized ones, tribal people will die to hold onto their way of life, rather than give in and become cubicle-rats like the rest of us.

The good news is that a higher consciousness level, once attained, is easy to hold on to. It's hard, when you've seen the bigger picture, to forget about it and go back to living a life that doesn't work very well. As I said, tribal people would rather die.

Wayne Dyer was right; there is a spiritual solution to every problem. The "spiritual solution" is to raise your level of consciousness and to keep on raising it for the rest of your life.