Occupy Life
These are curious times, to say the least. I doubt the handful of fed up citizens who decided to occupy Zuccotti Park in the NYC Financial District on September 17th, 2011 knew going in that within a month they’d have millions of supporters and thousands of occupations popping up across the Earth. They just knew the system was utterly broken, and felt compelled to take action. And here we are.
Indeed, Life Is This Moment. This idea of the totality of Now is the central tenant of World 5.0, the notion that civilization is emerging into a new cultural operating system, and one that contrasts sharply with our previous operating systems.
Consider: For nearly 200,000 years we were Neolithic, simple hunter-gatherers using simple blades to sustain themselves. Then maybe 10,000 years ago we became agrarian, developing new implements like the plow, seed funnel and and irrigation systems. A thousand years ago brought World3, The Medieval Age, where we learned to make machines like the gun and printing press. And then, with the development of the engine, we enabled the Industrial Age, World4. It is this industrial culture of globalism, based on the power of money, failing around us as we speak. We require a new operating system.
The enabling technology for World 5.0? Yes, the Internet, or InterWeb as I prefer.
But let’s get back to ‘Life Is This Moment.’ World4 has been utterly confused about the nature of reality. We have a vague sense that life/reality is ⅓ past, ⅓ present and ⅓ future. But such thinking is only ⅓ correct. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow never comes. While events continue their never-ending dance, our consciousness, being of Eternal Awareness, stays Here. There is a sense of eternity to this moment, if we’re here to experience it.
One reason this obvious fact of life is so obscured is because the World4 culture places so little value on life. Understanding life, or health for that matter, has never been a serious goal for a system designed for profit.
Another reason? The steady stream of propaganda we’ve all grown up subjected to. Propaganda about the elite 1% being ‘job creators’ instead of the truth, that they control our government for their benefit. Propaganda that we must destroy our ecologies, our Earth, to create jobs, even while studies always show green jobs offering a better return than fossil fuel energy jobs.Propaganda about all these people who are different from us and hence must be feared, Muslims being the current favorite to attack. The elites who control World4 do this to keep us in fear, and to justify spending 75% of l2010’s total global expenditures on war and the war machine.
Finally, we’ve been so caught up in our thoughts and feelings that we rarely allow ourselves the simple experience of being alive, just like any other animal on this planet. We create a bubble of our thoughts and feelings and fears, losing touch with Life. Yet we are alive, we live and breathe here, and only here. We become far more integrated and whole as we use our intent to find ourselves connected to Life in this Moment.
We are literally creating our new cultural operating system right now, each occupation finding its own particular way to organize and each in solidarity with all. What all these occupations share is attention to Life, and a commitment to Peace. One can easily see how the old world, built on war, greed and fear, feels threatened. Which is why we see so much negative press about this movement. But this occupation is here to stay. Too many of us are awakening and impassioned about this effort. Too many of us have been hurt, ruined or killed by the plutocracy of corporations and government. Too many now know it doesn’t have to be that way.
And now, Bernie Sanders is bringing this radical change to our political system. As of March, 2016, we don’t yet know what the outcome will be of the upcomoing presidential election. But what we already know is that the old system cannot hold. The revolution is upon us.