The Financial Crisis and Survival of the Species

On Wednesday, I went with my friend Tom to Dharma Field to hear one of the teachers speak on what was called Physics, Philosophy and Prajna and ended up being a reasonable exposition of the idea that the Buddhist concept of Mind renders some of the more paradoxical and confounding findings of physics unsurprising if not entirely expected. I will not pretend to begin to be able to relate, let alone explain, what was discussed. Suffice it to say that the physics topics covered were things like Schroedinger's cat, the Double Slit Experiment and the horror of the Pythagorean theorem (i.e., this side is 1 meter, this slide is 1 meter and this side is... Oh, my God, how did that become an inexpressible number?). 

I'm also reading The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder (I assume no relation to the cat guy, but possible, I guess), in which I was reminded again that, given the amount of nothing within and between atoms, we really should be able to walk through walls. The universe is a painfully obscure place when looked at through the lens of science. I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's contention in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that if the nature of the universe is discovered, the entire thing will be destroyed and replaced by something more incomprehensible and the competing theory is that this has already happened several times. 

Perhaps this all has me in the place of "there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy", but it's heightened my awareness of our interconnectedness as a species. We have collective joy and collective anxiety. Just look at the current economy and the nature of bubbles within markets. Irrational exuberance and irrational gloom. I believe there is more at work here, however.

One of the consequences of the current economic situation is the reduction in consumption of fossil fuel and consumption in general. A quite unintended impact, then, of the current financial and economic situation is a reduction in our impact on global warming. It's given us a breathing space. We are immersed in the projected horror that justified our refusal to join the industrialized world in the Kyoto protocol. It works in reverse as well: reducing greenhouse gas emissions impacts your economy; tanking your economy reduces your greenhouse gas emissions.

Which brings me to my point. Are we, on a collective subconscious level, going through an exercise of self preservation? Our conscious, intellectual mind abdicated it's responsibility for the long term survival of the species by pursuing, without consideration for the consequences, short term gain. Has our collective subconscious orchestrated the excesses that lead inevitably to a fall, forcing us into a situation where considering actions that benefit our long term survival also produce long term gain?