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Love is the only sane answer to the problem of human existence

These are the words used by Erich Fromm in his six decades bestseller, The Art of Loving.

But what is 'love'?

As both Fromm and many spiritual scriptures point out, it is not merely an emotion. It is the essence of being both human and divine.

When Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and Newton, among others, first 'discovered' the physical laws of the universe, they inadvertently created a worldview of the world as a machine created and controlled by God. This conveniently put God out of everyday life and fostered the belief that we could control nature. When Darwin made his appearance, God became completely obsolete.

On the one hand, this was not such a bad thing, because the wrathful, unreliable, capricious and immature patriarchal god of the Middle East is indeed obsolete. In fact, that's what Jesus came to say. That was why he was crucified. Religious people don't like others telling them that their god is obsolete. As happens with religions, however, a new religion was created. Instead of hearing what Jesus tried to say, it made of Jesus the sacrifice that Jesus came to say God doesn't need!

Yet the damage was done. A god that needed to murder his own son was equated with love. Such is the nature of patriarchies. For two millennia, we have had to live with this double message.

And so we can understand the atheistic anger at this deception. Yet anger is not love, and does not solve the problem. It is, in fact, a cry for love.

“Remembering the gentleness of the Art of Thought over the relentless stridency of the thinking mind is helpful,” says A Course of Love by Mari Perron. “Obsessive thinking is always ruthless, judgmental, and wearing on you.” For me these words capture the essence of the dilemma. In its deification of rationalism, atheism has often excluded love to the same extent as religion. There is nothing wrong with rationalism, of course, but the problem with the deification of rationalism is that there is a ruthless, judgmental aggression in obsessive thinking that so often become rationalization of underlying, often unconscious beliefs that tolerates no different perspectives.

Although usually relying on science and its deification as scientism, this thought pattern is actually not scientific at all. The very essence of science is change in perspective. It is through changes in perspective that science has made the incredible progress it has, even though as the quantum physicist Max Planck put it, “A new scienti?c theory does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

In other words, in practice there is as much resistance to change, and therefore progress, in science as there is in religion. It has nothing to do with either science or religion, but with human nature: that part of human nature which is not love, and which is often called the ego.

It is still very much in evidence. When, after nine years of research specifically aimed at finding the causal relationship between cell chemistry and form, Rupert Sheldrake wrote, “After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do.” This statement, which challenges the very foundation or reductionist science, led him to formulate his hypothesis of morphic resonance. This hypothesis, in turn, cost him his previously high credibility as a scientist. Like so many brilliant scientists before him who challenged the status quo, he was rejected, marginalised and villified.

And yet, when I listen to Sheldrake talking, he comes across as calm, confident and not at all aggressive. In Richard Dawkins' interviews aimed at 'debunking myths' (including Sheldrake), however, I hear the “relentless stridency of the thinking mind,” “ruthless judgement” and aggression.

Today more and more biologists, such as Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief), Denis Noble (The Music of Life) and Thomas Kornberg (research on cytonemes) are challenging the very foundations of the reductionist scientific worldview. And, of course, they encounter endless resistance.

Today we have an additional problem. The reductionist view of life (the belief that living organisms are effectively machines that can be taken apart and re-assembled, and we 'lumbering robots' as Richard Dawkins put it) is a critical foundation for the belief that nature can be controlled by mechanical and/or chemical means. This belief, in turn, is critical for large (and small) pharmaceutical and other companies to maintain and increase their profits. It is therefore in their direct commercial interest to maintain this belief and fight anything that might challenge it.

In addition to the normal ego-resistance to anything new or different, therefore, there is a huge commercial vested interest in maintaining the old model. With probably most research in the world now funded by the private sector, this compromises the very integrity of science.

It has recently come to light that Monsanto, for example, has a special department whose sole function is to discredit science and scientists that challenge their GMO products and roundup, their herbicide directly related to GMO seeds. In addition, they have a huge propaganda machine aimed at inculcating the belief that what to them is the source of their profit is actually beneficial and even critical for the welfare of humanity. It never ceases to amaze me how people who vehemently ridicule religious people for their beliefs often gobble up the propaganda of the large corporations as the absolute truth!

Large corporations have truly become machines. They act like bulldozers that simply destroy everything in front of them – forests, soil, human communities and the like without any sense of responsibility. Human beings within the corporations can simply deny responsibility by claiming that they have to follow the dictates of the company.

Yet it is human beings who protest against the massive global agreements that completely ignore the welfare of humanity, the TPP being the latest. More and more human beings can't live with the inhumanity of the corporations they work for and leave.

It is also human beings who protest against statues that symbolize oppression and dictatorship. We may not agree with the way they do so but, instead of judging them, would it not be wise to actually listen to them?

At no time in human history has there been such a desperate search for a deeper meaning in life – a meaning which most of us at some level know is there, even though we may not actually be able to verbalize it. Who of us do not want peace, joy and happiness?

Now here's the paradox. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it,” said the Sufi poet Rumi many years ago, as do many other 'spiritual' writings.

We arelove. The only reason why love seems so rare is that it is hidden by our fearful ego. In the group process that people such as Rogers, Scott-Peck and Yalom have described, and which I have seen manifested time and time again, a group only reaches cohesion and consensus – love – once the suppressed and denied negativity has been exposed. In many groups that I facilitated, when all seemed lost in chaos, I have thought, “It has always worked so far, but this time it's not going to work!” And every time it worked again.

In a recent article, A Rainbow Nation in Pieces, Max du Preez asked the question: “Is it a good or a bad thing to stir the racial pot in South Africa?

The 'rainbow nation' was an idea; not a reality. 'Civilization' was an idea; not a reality. Western civilization was built on pretense and denial: pretense of the 'good' and denial of the 'evil'. Such pretense inhibited authenticity. When individual human beings then do venture to be authentic, it often emerges at first as 'negativity'.

Within us as individuals as much as within groups or nations, we will not find the love that we are without change and disruption of that which is not love – the ego. It will almost inevitably initially emerge as chaos and negativity. What matters is how we deal with the chaos and negativity.

Mental masturbation has no effect, other than further polarization. What we need now, I believe, is not further 'debates' on who is right and who is wrong, but a deep listening to each other – and to ourselves – as human beings. When we allow the 'negativity' while deeply listening to the love that desperately wants to emerge behind that, we could change the world.

I find it significant that the 'poo protests' happened at an institution that has a strong British colonial origin and is deeply entrenched in the very reductionist model that gave rise to such colonialism. Perhaps what is at stake is not a mere 'political' protest, but a desperate call for a more human approach to life?



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