Deep down, at the foundation of cultures, along with some of the ideologies lurking behind the myriad of gestures and artefacts they contain, you can find the principles that drive life.
Arguably, the strongest of them all is the instinct to survive and reproduce.
We all know that there is more to life than our basic instincts, but how we make sense of them, in the context of the societies we inhabit, plays a huge part in both our survival and our prosperity.
Knowing when to stand in line and when to jump the queue in the supermarket might make the difference between getting a car parking ticket or not. Ok, so it’s not a life or death situation – unless you are so broke that it will make the difference as to whether you eat or not that week.
Generally speaking though we recognise our instincts as they arise in the moment. To what degree we suppress them in order to fall in line with the conventions of society, and, to what degree we allow social convention to overrule our instinctual nature, will depend on a number of factors. While we do not need to act on every single urge that might arise from within us, the better we know when to bare our claws and fight, when to run, and when it is fair to jump the queue, can make a difference.
In some instances it can even make the difference between life and death.
Adapt and Persist
An awareness of how we might choose to operate on the surface of this fragile planet can enable us to travel paths that lead to different potential futures. Some of these futures will likely be better than others.
For example, we know we need to cover certain bases in order to survive. We need water, food, shelter, and warmth for a start. As we get beyond these basics though, the complexities, especially of contemporary life, begin to spiral off in multiple directions. Survival was never necessarily a simple matter but as the nuances of modern living get ever more complex, with ever shifting social and technological changes, the paths through it – the choices available to us – also increase in complexity.
Consequently, the range of potential futures available to us can get confusing.
This is why it is as true today as it ever has been, that the key to our survival is our ability to adapt.
Those who can adapt quickly and well increase their probability of survival drastically.
Those with a tendency to adapt and persist seem to prosper.
The short answer then, as to ‘How do I survive and prosper in the 21st Century’ is this: Adapt, and persist.
Meeting Needs
Learning how to meet your physical and material needs is one thing. Learning how to meet your emotional needs is another.
This is true for the needs of the mind and of the spirit as well.
I will add here that by spirit I am refering to an individuals willingness to follow the truth as it presents itself in their life. Why is this a need? Perhaps it isn’t for some, but for many there appears to be a question of conscience. Contradicting ones conscience appears to present challenges for many people. Loosing our sense of integrity can have an impact on how we feel and what we think about ourselves. When, however, we act in alignment with what we know, or believe to be right, especially in the face of personal hardship, our conscience is appeased and, also, our sense of resolve grows in strength. This is effectively what I mean by spirit.
Meeting our needs and cultivating a sense of prosperity is multi dimensional and how we accomplish it will be specific to each of us.
Commodity vs Life
Our perspective on life is shaped by the language that we use to navigate our experience of it. We cannot escape this language but we can become aware of its limitations.
Our awareness of the limits of language can go a long way to informing and influencing choices that we might make for our futures. In this way we can shape our relationship to life by the language we use to define and to describe it.
For example, it is not wrong to consider a forest as a commodity. Language by itself is a frame, nothing more. That said, language never exists in isolation; it points to something. The question is, in the thing that is being pointed to, what are the bits of language that are missing, or purposefully being left out?
If we were only to think of a forest as a commodity, then the act of cutting it down could be framed as the harvesting of a resource.
It is through the act of relating that we can increase our comprehension of things – or people, and of ourselves. The frames that we draw around things can broaden the more intimate we become with them. It is through the act of intimacy that our comprehension of life grows. We are opened to different ways of knowing things, or knowing something in a deeper way.
If we spend a week living in the forest, or a month, or a year. If we are present with it and all that it contains, then what language will we fill it with. Or what will the forest infuse us with and inform the language we can use to describe it. Even if we are left with no words for the experience.
“My experience of living in that forest for 6 weeks was beyond words. Perhaps the only way to really know it that deeply is to experience it.”
Even when language cannot accurately describe the experience of something, it can still convey the context in which it is ineffable.
Instead of the harvesting of a resource might we see the desecration of an ecosystem with homes and habitats destroyed?
To consider the forest as a material resource that can be replaced by planting more trees is not to see what the forest is in its totality. There are of course many ways to know a forest. We can know it at a biological level by understanding the complexity of the colonies of living things it contains. We might seek to know it in an historical way, or even at a mythological level – or as an archetypal process. We might also know it at the level of being. At a level before or beyond words.
There are multiple ways to know the forest. The sort of material reductionism that sees it as a collection of trees to be harvested denies the many dimensions it contains, not least the living thing that it is. Death then is not the absence of life, rather, it is just a different state of material existence. A tree is just planks of wood that are unprocessed; furniture yet to be assembled, a building yet to be constructed. Numbers in a digital account. This way of thinking turns the value of all life, including yours and mine, into a metric of production and consumption. When the value of your life is measured in terms of the value of the goods and services you can provide or consume – what has your life become?
Relating
Such attitudes do not just affect the material world but the psychological one as well.
The limitations of our language and our capacity to know a thing influence the shaping of our thoughts, and in turn cast limited frames that we fit around the world and around their lives. When these frames shift, an individuals perspective on life will shift with it. When life and death are considered material states rather than visceral qualities of being, then how might that influence the actions of an individual towards the world, to other people, and even to themselves?
When we choose to commit to more intimacy – to relate to the world and people and ourselves as we are, then these frames are shaped by what truth we can derive from our experiences. Our experiences inform our words, and our relationship to life shifts.
When living things and people’s lives become commodities to be traded then what happens to all of the other ways of being we contain? What happens to all of the potentials in life we might be, or become?
What is the meaning of life?
What is it to be alive?
Not just your experience of life, but all life?
What is it to be alive?
Until we come too these questions from ourselves, then we live life as an estimation of other peoples perspectives.
Certainly, some of those perspectives may well point to truths that we discover for ourselves. Until we discover them for ourselves though, then they remain as an approximation of life, and not as an experience of it.
Is the value of life contained in the direct experience of living then? Is that the value of life? Not existing as a measurable, objective, material commodity, but a subjective experience? As a living psyche? As a living soul?
How We Do One Thing is How We Do Everything.
When our perceptions of the world are reduced to perceiving it as a resource, what happens to any sense of sanctity of life?
The truth is that you do not have to believe in the sanctity of life at all. If you want to you are perfectly entitled to believe in everything as a material commodity should you choose to do so.
When this happens though, the exploitation of all life can then become the order of the day: The world, the creatures we share it with, other people, even ourselves are open to being used as a resource. If the frames we lay over living systems makes them things, if the language we use to describe our experience narrows our view of life so much that we think of living things only in terms of being components in systems to be utilised in service of some larger goal, then who or what have we become?
At least in the eyes of those who hold such views.
How important then is it to know and be ourselves?
Instincts
It is not that we have instinctual drives and needs that is the problem. It is how and where we allow these drives expression. It is how and where and when we allow them to be met.
If we are to live well, to survive and prosper into and beyond the 21st Century, what might be the best way for each of us to live?
What are the frames that you will place yourself inside, or allow yourself to be placed inside?
What are the frames that would serve you to abandon?
What language will you use to define your experience? What language and limitations and interpretations will you accept to be impressed on you? How close is the language you use to the experience you are actually having?
What are the ways in which we might shift our perspectives on life in such a way that we could retain responsibility for the environments we inhabit, and, at the same time, live out our instinctual drives and needs in ways that are creative and productive? In ways that that affirm life rather than dishonouring and destroying it?
The less responsibility we claim as individuals in this process, the more it would appear that forces beyond us may use this as reason to claim responsibility for us. Like over domineering parents they can push more and more of society towards states of dependency.
When we do not take charge of our own instincts then we can end up being treated like children; infants incapable of managing our own physical, emotional, or psychological needs.
It does not take a huge stretch of the imagination to consider a correspondence between maturity at a social level and maturity at an individual level, and that such a correspondence flows both ways.
If we, as individuals, do not attend responsibly to the management and care of our own lives, to our own psyches – to our souls – then do we surrender ourselves to subjugation by any external force or system that will?
In a brief guide to survival and prosperity in the 21st century what are the most important factors for you? What is important and essential for you and the sort of life that you believe, that you need, or that you know, or that you want, to live.
A Solution
Adapt and persist.
In striving to relate to life with greater intimacy, appreciation and understanding, our consciousness grows, away from any necessity for external control and authority and towards innate creative and constructive expression. Not because these changes are responses to some adopted ideology but because they are instinctual forces and drives that sit alongside those already mentioned. This is what we are once we strip away the mask. We are instinctively creative beings. We are organic problem solvers and inventors of innovation. We are creative. That is how we have survived, and that is how we prosper.
We adapt, and we persist.
Conclusion
In conclusion then, in order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, adapt and persist.
Relate: To yourself. To others. To the world. To life. In all cases, intimacy reveals more of what is.
Know that words are never the totality of the things they speak, but that we cannot speak of things without them. Make sure that the words use and the things you are pointing them at line up as best you can.
And keep living.
And keep living well.
Perhaps that is all any of us need to survive and prosper in any century.
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