Within a human being, there is a natural need for change

I reflect on the direction of today’s society, where in one way or another all people operate for personal gain. But what is this personal gain that we today consider normal? Personal gain = my activity today that simplifies or enables my activity tomorrow. It sounds quite reasonable. Since a person’s physical eyes look at the physical world outside of themselves, it is natural that everyday action takes place in the context of the physical world — meaning that a person changes the external world around them every day.

For gain to function within society, the concept of ownership is also necessary. The right to possess, use, or dispose of a result. Otherwise, a situation arises where the fruit of your work today is taken into use by someone else tomorrow. You plow a patch of land, and the next day you see that the neighbor has planted potatoes there or perhaps dug a hole in the same place for a pond.

Thus, the natural desire for personal gain and the concept of ownership, together with a worldview directed outward from oneself, combine into materialism. Materialism is the dominant philosophy of life today. The purpose of human life becomes materialization — the realization of one’s ideas and desires for the sake of personal gain and self-expression.

It is only natural that, when scaled, this gives rise to economic systems and forms of governance where a small group dominates a larger group. There is no essential difference whether the economic system in use is capitalism, a market economy, socialism, communism, and so on. Whether governance takes place through democracy, autocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, or something else is of no real importance, because as long as materialization dominates, there will always be the maximization of personal gain, resulting in the power of the few over the many. In materialism, the entire game is reduced to money, and whoever wins the money game dominates the rest. The root cause is the fixation of human attention on the external world.

What is the alternative? Within a human being there is a natural need for development, which means for making changes. At present, we make changes mainly in the external world. But if this same natural need is turned inward and one begins to explore the inner world, then such exploration automatically leads to a change of the person, to transformation. It is impossible to endlessly examine oneself and gain knowledge and experience about oneself without changing in the process. At first, such change seems very small, and therefore, this process goes unnoticed. The natural result of turning one’s attention from the material world to the psychological world is transformation.

Planet Earth cannot sustain billions of people whose entire life energy is spent on rearranging atoms, in other words, on materialism. Such a system is not in balance, and the result is periodic destruction. But now, if half of life energy is directed towards inner development and half remained for the external world, then there is hope that humanity may enter a new phase of development. At first, even a shift of 10% or 5% would be enough, and that alone could perhaps be achievable within the next thousand years.

With warmth, Rein