Material vs. Cosmic Perspective

Christina Sarich, Contributing Writer
Waking Times

Almost all of the world’s problems, let alone our personal snickers and complaints, can be boiled down to a difference in either a material or cosmic perspective of the world. Many of us do-do-do instead of be-be-be because we have been conditioned to accept the world on nihilistic, materialistic terms. You can‘t fight corrupt government or corporations because you are just too weary from trying to put food on your table or recover from a mean argument you had with (___________) insert name of your friend, lover, mother, brother, etc. When you see things from a purely physical/material perspective, it causes you to self-limit expectation and self-limit possibility. The truth is that we are unlimited – not in a new-age parlance kind of way, but in deep, profound ways. Here are just a few examples to rock your thinking out of its material doldrums:

• As early as 1962, Thomas Kuhn talked about the scientific basis of paradigm shifts in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The basis of this book was that all change comes essentially from a change in consciousness – even among the scientific community. Put simply, one cannot put asunder the germ theory of disease once it has been ‘proven’ by a consensus of ‘experts’ in a field, and so it becomes ‘science.’ While quantum physics has done a lot to change our accepted theories about what we are and what the Universe is, they are simply reflecting a consensus of thought. Once we collectively agree upon something, so it is. You can see paradigm shifts in history over and over again, politically, socially, through technological developments and through scientific experiment. Even the things scientists choose to study are telling. From the abolition of slavery to the Wright Brother’s plane taking off, people simply changed their minds once given the possibility that something could be different than their current level of understanding or conception of reality.

• Zeitgeist is the term which comes from the German ‘Zeit’ meaning time and ‘geist’ meaning spirit. We form the spirit of the times by our collective cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and social or political slant. We create reality, not the other way around. From rationalism to romanticism, socialism to corporatism – we choose.

• By limiting our perspective to one of materiality, we collectively agree that events, circumstances and people as we now see them are reality. Materialism gives no room for creation, creativity, novelty. . .a shift in who and what we think we are and can become. Materialism results in greed (in a hoarding of things that we erroneously believe we cannot have more of, since this material reality is limited.) Federico Garcia Lorca, poet and playwright, once said, “The terrible cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. Then, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running. . .” If you can’t get past the number three, then how will you ever conceive of the over 100,000 billion possibilities in just our tiny neck of the universe (as evidenced by the approximate number of stars in our solar system), let alone INFINITE possibility.

Letting go of a short-sighted vision makes a quantum leap possible. We can’t frog-leap our way out of the mess we’ve made. It’s time to open our minds to the incredible, vast possibilities that are out there. We have done this before. We have made great leaps in consciousness, and the one at our doorsteps now, beckons us to leave the material world to its small and insignificant ways. Change your mind first – the rest will follow. If you call it the butterfly effect or the 100th monkey effect, it starts with one person thinking up something radically different than the consensus, and then a few more people agreeing, and so on. It begins NOW with YOU. What radical shift in your thinking can you make today?

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny,  Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her blog is Yoga for the New World.

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