There’s a lot of talk about goals and aspirations but few people really sit down and work out exactly what world there’d like to live in if everything was right in the world. What would the ideal life look like?
Most people would probably unthinkingly answer “I want to be rich” but rarely does that come with really thinking about what that looks like. People with money are generally constantly on the edge about their money. Worried that some day they won’t have it.
To quote the Tao Te Ching, The house that is full of Jade and jewels cannot be guarded.
Even worse, if you become rich in isolation of those around you, you might suddenly find yourself alone with nobody to share your new world with, just like what happened to the creator of Minecraft.
Some people take this a step further and realize they would be happier with everyone in their community becoming rich together so they start having dreams of communism but once again they don’t really think this all the way through. Communism is based on a paradigm of working. You may have equal wealth but that comes with equal endless work because that’s the structure of society as it is. We already don’t need to work except to keep the system happy. Most jobs in first world countries are unnecessary. They exist to keep people employed because the system is designed to keep people working and struggling merely to keep the current power structure in place.
But what if there was a better way? Permaculture is the science of using the way nature already works to grow a literal forest of food in your own backyard. Imagine walking out your back door and having all the food you’d ever need.
But again there’s problems if this is alone your solution. Sure, now you don’t have to work just to avoid starvation but now you have a lot of people with nothing to do and no idea how to be without the power structures in place because they’ve spent their entire lives focused on survival in those power structures. So now they’re just going to start fights over stupid things like religion.
Of course there’s a solution to this as well but it requires a major paradigm shift. People need to embrace, on their own without coercion, a belief system that changes how they see themselves and the world around them in a fundamental way. Most of the world’s religions were created in response to the existing power structures so they don’t offer any real solutions on that front and in the case of monotheism actually make the problem worse. One only has to consider the period of violent forced conversations that every monotheistic religion has gone through at its birth to realize this.
And no, materialism doesn’t work either because it was created solely to serve the empire and isn’t actually reflective of how reality works. Go read fringe physics or the current major problem faced by the “placebo effect” in biology for examples of this. The Victorian era created materialist model most scientists are working in simply by convention and threat of losing their funding if they rock the boat simply does not actually reflect reality.
There is a solution though. One that works perfectly in tandem with the new garden of Eden we would build with permaculture. But for that we have to go back to what humans believed before these power structures were put in place. It’s animism. The idea that spirits are real and everything is a spirit. That’s not everything has a spirit, the concept of ownership as we think of it came with structures of power. No, everything is a spirit.
When you start looking at the world in this way, then everyone’s favorite gods can exist at once because why can’t there be three different gods represented by the sun who can work through solar energy? The pagan religions are generally pretty ok with this idea already. Most modern pagans are already working from an animiat model at least partially without even realizing it. Most pagan religions can easily be happily adapted to fit an animist model, after all they pretty much all ultimately descended from one anyway. Everyone’s gods are real! Why not?
Of course you have to throw away broken old ideas that can’t get along with others. That means the monotheistic religions, including materialsm (which is really just a monotheism that replaced god with some strange inexplicable law of nature that everything supposedly obeys except when it doesn’t) have to go, because they can’t play nice with others the way most pagan religions can, because unlike most pagan religions, they demand exclusivity over reality. They have to be the only truth or they can’t work. In this respect they are ultimately ideas which are infected with Wetiko, that is the mind-virus of endless consumption without consideration, and they therefore fly in the face of the cyclical universe we live in and don’t get along with anyone.