Why is there resistance to working to reduce the imbalances in earth’s systems? What is this resistance? What are these imbalances? What is earth? What are systems? What is a life that reduces imbalances?
Today the world cloud, the electronic communications sector, uses much more energy than the global aviation sector. It is not possible to have a conversation about this unless we set aside time to discuss. And as soon as we set aside time to discuss we find we have set aside time not only to discuss but to be free.
It only appears to be the case that taking time to think is a great luxury. In reality if we take time for ourselves without any conditioning, without any external or internal pressure or preconception, then we are already free. Taking time away from the internet is a great step towards freedom.
What is freedom? It is freedom from preconditioning; freedom from pain; freedom from selfishness, freedom from the longing for fulfilment. If we take time to think, and more so to act, freely, we can begin to see how to live to reduce imbalances is to be free from all preconditions, free from conditioning, free from one’s own preconceptions or those of others. Free from judgement. We can begin to see that electricity and petroleum and plastics and wealth are all preconditions set by capitalism to make us unfree.
It is pure ideology to say we need electricity in order to spend fifty years studying the ideas of others on the internet, only to find when we are old that we wasted our life reading things other people said instead of living our own life of freedom.
As more and more of us are unemployed we have time to think. By necessity we have time. And as we have time we can look inward and enjoy our freedom, and look outward and enjoy our freedom. We have the time and freedom to reduce suffering. We have the time and freedom to do wholesome actions and help others.
If we accept the judgement of society that tells us we are unemployed and therefore useless, and we are not contributing to society, and we do not have access to the internet to participate in society, we will go mad. But if we understand that we are already free, in fact much more free than those with jobs, then the whole debate about who I should be, as opposed to who I am, becomes irrelevant. And I will not need to learn anything from anyone, not from experts and teachers and not from the internet. I can become free to do my own experiments and make a contribution to the lives of others by understanding things for what they are, having taken the time to study them personally and understand them through my experience.
We only need to love ourselves enough to want to transcend our own ego and become selfless and without desires. Once we are free we will see very clearly how to reduce the pressure of each individual person on earth’s non renewable resources, and how to contribute to maintaining earth’s renewable resources, and support the life of all living and non living beings.
Thanks to capitalist jobless growth, those of us who are unemployed are free. This capitalist system is destroying itself. But it may not destroy the individual human being who is far wiser, far more intelligent, and far freer than what the left right and centre political ideologies presume.
Therefore the answer to the questions raised today may be the following: value immensely the lives of those of us who are unemployed, or underemployed, because we are free and have opportunity to become wise. And ask those who are employed, and therefore conditioned, preconditioned by their own knowledge, caught in their fears and their selfishness, to look inward, and look outward, and come out of their conditioning.
Anandi Sharan was born in Switzerland, lives in Bangalore, India, and worked in Araria District, Bihar, India. She attended King’s College at the University of Cambridge where she graduated in History and Law. She mainly writes about India and how we need a better money policy to help agricultural labourers and women especially to adapt to man-made climate change.
