Infants come into this world whole, in the hands of God. But it doesn’t take long for life to become fragmented and complex. Western society encourages us to become as separate, unique, and specialized as possible. We call this “becoming an individual.”
We spend our lives working hard to achieve a strong personal self, that sense of “I” that is the center for our doing and having. That “I” demands that we make choices. What is right and what is wrong? Should I choose this or that? This differentiation is necessary, but our civilization pushes the complexity of life to great extremes.
You can make a forceful argument that children should not be subjected to the formal education process too soon or they will be robbed of their childhood. We truncate the childhood of our young ones when we overload them with the too-muchness of modern life. Often there is too little time for fantasy and imagination—the lifeblood of early development.
We might well ask: Is our culture’s great emphasis on individuality really progress? Does it lead to more contented lives or just more production and material goods?
Looking Back for Utopia
Do you have a nostalgic longing for a simpler time? That yearning can be called “utopian thinking.” The word utopia means a place or situation of moral and social contentment, an ideal condition.
Sir Thomas More stirred the ideals of English citizens when he wrote in 1516 of an imaginary island where people lived in simple contentment. Two centuries later the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called for a return to the “noble savage,” declaring that civilization was destroying humankind’s natural capacity for a rich and happy life.
In nineteenth-century America, Henry David Thoreau left the complexities of his civilization behind to live in a small cabin at Walden Pond. He grew his own food and lived closely and quietly with nature. Thoreau’s experiment still touches people and reminds them of their constant hunger for a simpler life.
Eden. Camelot. Atlantis. Shangri-la. We fantasize about magical places where life was pure and simple. We yearn to return to such experience.
Rediscovering Lost Ideals
One of the most thoughtful voices to question the cost of Western civilization was India’s great political and spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi grew up as a member of the middle class in India, and his early admiration for British civilization was matched only by his outright rejection of India’s native culture. In his autobiography Gandhi recounts the shock and embarrassment he experienced during his studies in law school in London when a friend arrived to visit him wearing the Indian dhoti or native loincloth.
As Gandhi learned firsthand about British culture, however, his praise of Western ways turned to criticism, and he wrote that India was “being ground down under the heel of modern civilization.” When Gandhi returned to his native land to lead India’s independence movement, he began wearing the simple dhoti, and he even spun his own cloth. He was convinced that India should not rush to emulate Western culture.
Gandhi was afraid of losing the virtues of traditional India, and the spinning wheel became his symbol of this. He suggested that everyone in India should spend some time spinning thread to help them remain earthbound. Unfortunately, since his assassination in 1948, Gandhi has been conveniently parked off in the pantheon of saints. Sadly, no Indian today is expected to live up to his ideals of nonviolence, community, and simplicity. Now educated people in India’s large cities dance in the streets to celebrate the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons.
You don’t have to spin thread or weave your own cloth to experience Gandhi’s vision of contentment. Utopian thinkers such as he simply call on each of us to rekindle love and honor for the simplest acts of daily life.
You Can Simplify …
One path to contentment is to follow the approach advocated by Thoreau and Gandhi: you can simplify. Reducing the sheer number of your daily choices effectively limits what the “I” has to process and cuts out some of the anxiety of modern life.
Do you really need 101 channels on satellite television? Does flipping from channel to channel bring more contentment or less contentment? What are the trade-offs? Apply this yardstick to many things in your life.
We equate freedom with the greatest degree of individuality and the maximum number of choices. Just as an experiment, see what it is like to live with fewer choices. This weekend, rather than going off to consume something, choose to soothe yourself by being quiet, taking a walk in nature, or arranging a simple dinner with friends.
Take an inventory of your life, and look for ways to simplify. Will a new car really bring you more contentment, or will it stretch your budget so you have to work much harder? How long will it be before its “newness” wears off? How about moving to a different house—will the opportunities for enjoyment be offset by worries and innumerable projects? Our doing, just for the sake of doing, is a major factor in modern discontent.
… But Simplicity Isn’t Contentment
As part of our hunger for natural contentment, we romanticize pioneers, cowboys, and the “good old days.” You can pass a shopping mall or restaurant and see a covered wagon, a plow, or a windmill displayed as decoration. Western movies or stories set amid quaint covered bridges in Iowa or located in the Alaskan wilderness resonate with modern people. This reflects our nostalgia for a golden age.
There is virtue in simplifying your life. It is worthwhile to look for ways to improve your diet, shorten your commute, lower your stress, reduce your debt, and set aside more time for friends and family. However, please be aware that efforts to simplify will ultimately fall short of making you content. Although it may be your fondest wish, there is no going back to the Garden of Eden. Consciousness can only move forward, never backward.
Even with an organic garden and home-baked bread, modern people find themselves beset by discontent. That is because contentment is never the result of doing or having. Rearranging life on the outside cannot produce contentment—at least not for long. Contentment is an inner experience resulting from your level of consciousness.
Climbing Up to Wholeness
The Hindu religion represents the evolution of humankind with a circle. We start at the top in natural contentment, living instinctively and unselfconsciously. In Jewish and Christian terms, this is the Garden of Eden. Then we fall to the bottom, entering the age of materialism and “I” centeredness. It is from this point we must climb up the other side of the circle to return to whole consciousness.
Our culture specializes in the stage found at the bottom of the circle. It is a partial understanding, a stage of evolution that is no longer rooted in the instinctive world but not yet adequately connected with the heavenly realm.
Remember Arusakumar, the coconut seller who lives in a tiny bamboo shack? Watching this man sing and laugh as he goes about his daily work, you find his natural contentment contagious and you glimpse what is missing in Western society. But this does not mean that to regain contentment we should pack our bags and become street vendors in India. Even if you wanted to leave the Western world behind, trying to take on the simplicity of another culture seldom works (which we can attest to from personal experience).
In traditional societies, such as rural India, the average person does not strive for such intense individuality. There is authority, security, stability, and community. These provide a container that holds and supports people. You are born into a certain profession or caste. You make the most of what you have, and if a troubling question arises you take it to the guru, the holy person, or the head of the village. This was equally true in the West up until about the twelfth century. The priest was the carrier of the splendor of God, and it never occurred to the average peasant that he or she could have our modern sense of individuality. Since then, the West has evolved so that every person wants to be self-directed and given every opportunity, every choice, every freedom.
Living in pre-modern contentment in the West cannot be recovered. We are too much bitten by the bug of individuality. Instead of being caught in the ongoing dilemma of half-consciousness, we must make the journey up the other side of the circle to wholeness.
The Power of Myth and Story
We live in a time when alienation from the unconscious is at its height, but we cannot just throw away our sense of “I.” So how do we get outside our current consciousness in order to see beyond it? The human psyche cannot step outside itself to observe from a totally separate vantage point. This is where the power of myth and story can help.
We can use myth and stories to make human experience clear. When a myth moves beyond mere storytelling and truly comes alive for us, we experience deep understanding. Mythic truth helps us find direction and meaning in the midst of life by showing patterns of human experience. Shakespeare’s greatest play, King Lear, is a rich reference point to help us understand contentment.
It is impossible to say exactly when the modern “I” emerged in Western society. Certainly by Shakespeare’s time (1564-1616), having applied reason for many wonderful practical achievements in science and technology, Western people became obsessed with it, so much so that it seemed that we could attain the power of gods. The great bard himself wrote, “What a peece of worke is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in apprehension, how like a God!”
However, Shakespeare also understood human limitations and frailties. We can read Shakespeare’s greatest work, King Lear, as a story of the partial consciousness of modern people who, by their own misguided actions, lose their capacity for contentment and experience intense suffering. As the story unfolds, human failings are exposed in full light: ambition, treason, lust, greed, jealousy. Nearly all human relations become distorted. Life becomes a struggle, with the players trying to wrench from life whatever prizes they can grasp. This is a story of modern consciousness. Today, each individual wants to be king of his or her domain, having lost track of the reality that there are many more factors beyond the “I” that must be integrated in ordering a human life and human society.
We want to mine the gold in Shakespeare’s great masterpiece, applying its insights to our own time. But before we explore a new psychology of contentment, let’s turn to our story and invite the West’s most powerful dramatist to speak directly to our hearts.