A man impossible to classify

by Laurie Seagal

I decided to try to find out what were man’s basic needs. I would live without most things I was accustomed to and see what it would be like. I decided to give up words; I would only say “yes,” “yes” to every question, nothing more, a nod of the head would usually suffice. I would give up things; sandals, a thin shirt and a thin pair of pants would be enough. I knew I could adjust to temperatures in San Francisco through bodily relaxation. The fewer clothes the better; I would worry about changing when the need arose. Nothing in my pockets, nothing, no money, no identification, nothing. And no place. I would break the habit of thinking “where” and “where to?” All places would be equal. I would try to learn to be comfortable anywhere.

I hid a sleeping bag in the bushes, though I ended up sleeping in it only once. The rest of my belongings I hauled over to the family home in Oakland.

Usually, I wore a hat pulled down low. I sat, relaxed my body, and watched, or listened—looked and listened. I sat in Cassandra’s, in the Coffee Gallery, the Bagel Shop, The Place—these were the main gathering spots for people I knew. There was also the Cellar Jazz Club, evenings. Still later some nights after the Cellar closed, we sojourned across town to the Black Fillmore district where jazz was played until early morning at Jimbo’s Bop City. Or I’d go off by myself, as most of the others went home.

The small hours of the morning, three to five, I’d spend in a variety of regular ways. Lying among the empty bins in the Italian bakery on Grant just above Green, I watched the bakers working, kneading, arranging, shoving the long rows of loaves into the great oven—rhythm, movement, fire and quiet Italian talk. I enjoyed the warmth and the smell, enjoyed watching them work, like a dance it was—and they always welcomed me. I was a spectator whose enjoyment in watching them heightened their own enjoyment in the work. Invariably one of them would thrust a fresh loaf of bread upon me when I rose to leave.

Another activity for three to five in the morning was walking through the bustling, bright and raucous produce market located then at easy walking distance from North Beach. My eyes delighted in the colors of the fruits and vegetables, and I felt energy from the surging of the men and their machines, the helter-skelter of it all. Here too, people got used to seeing me among them. I was always silent and happy, smiling from the delight my eyes were beholding. I was joyous watching the beauty of existence. Here in the produce market people called me “wolf-man,” I suppose because my hair was long and shaggy, but they always acted toward me with friendliness and offered me fruit, which I ate.

When I was especially tired, during these pre-dawn hours and at other times also, I went into rhythmical walking, sometimes for long distances around San Francisco, long rhythmical strides, arms swinging. The action sort of turned me on, got me high, rested me.

Every day, before the sun rose, I climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill somewhere alongside of Coit Tower, to sit and meditate. From my spot, all the sounds of the bay down below me in an arc left, right and center rose up directly, undisturbed by any edifice. I sat, relaxed deeply, deeply, and listened, watched. The sounds of the ships, of the city, of the birds were pleasant to me. I enjoyed them every day, day after day, for hours at a time. When I began hearing the coarser hum of human voices—tourists appeared about nine in the morning to look out on the bay—I lay down where I was and slept for a few hours. I liked sleeping in the sun.

When I awoke, I usually went to Washington Square Park, or down through Fisherman’s Wharf to Aquatic Park. On the grass of Washington Square, or the sand of Aquatic Park, I’d catch some more sleep in the sun, sometimes swim in the bay at Aquatic Park, eat raw fish at the wharf, or I would sit and watch, listen…

Looking and listening were for me ways of quieting my mind, teaching it to not think, breaking habits of thought like: What to do? Where to go? But after awhile, looking and listening became something much more: I came to see and to hear the world, existence, more and more acutely. The more I watched and listened, the more I saw and heard, more keenly, more distinctly.

Every day I gained more and more pleasure from this listening and looking, always seeing and hearing more clearly. As time went on, I appreciated how glorious and beautiful existence is, living. I saw how busy, preoccupied were most people with doing, making. Existence was already so much to enjoy, so grand and lovely, so exquisite. Just to see, to hear the sights and sounds that were there made me happy and delighted. I was truly happy and at peace. Everywhere. All the time.

Throughout those eight months, or a year—I’m not sure exactly how many months went by—I had not the slightest inkling of trouble of any kind. The two policemen on the beat, when they passed me they said, “Hi Laurie,” and that was that. I did what I wanted, when I wanted to, sometimes with others, but most often alone.  I roamed freely, drank lots of water, ate enough somehow and was always serene in enjoyment of the beauty of all I saw unfolding before me, day into night, night again into day: the warmth of the sun, the cool breezes, the fog, the wind, the sea, sky and stars, trees, flowers, children playing, old people, young mothers with their children, the Chinese, the Italians, the French, the Basque.

My attention became so keen I saw in crowded coffee shops and meeting places, how people’s bodies reacted to each other’s without their consciously knowing it.

When I sat at a live jazz session, my hearing was so sharp, it was like what poets call “a sensitive ear in the audience.” I would hear each particular instrument, separately. The musicians told me that when I listened, they began to hear themselves more distinctly, then each heard the other, and the music grew in intensity and those jam sessions were really something else… at the Cellar, and on weekends, at the Coffee Gallery.

It was all a part of that community spirit which existed, the spirit that both allowed me to be on “this trip” and to live freely in the midst of it.

What are the basic needs of man? What did I learn during this time? I lived very contentedly on almost nothing. I required little sleep and little food. I drank water copiously, had abundant sunshine, walked and ran tremendous amounts, meditated, rested much, did not feel the need for sex, though I enjoyed frequent human companionship, or at least proximity.

I came to regard my needs as so scant that you could say that what you need is what you want. Air, water, rest, exercise, a little food, this is all I seemed to need. I did have an acute sense of something like regret or sorrow that other people were not enjoying existence as much as I was then. If only they could sit more quietly and look, listen, feel. I felt that people could live better that way and that society would be better, life would be better that way. But I didn’t talk. I didn’t think I could start talking and somehow teach people to be that way, change the world.

When I finally did decide to end this period, I just hoped that somehow, some way, I could express what I had experienced and learned and somehow bring some of it back into existence, at least into my own existence, and perhaps for others as well.

Laurie had been a gifted philosophy student at Stanford University. He was a man impossible to classify. Later sometime he went to Israel, married a beautiful Israeli, Talilah and became a social worker. A few years later, Laurie died from liver failure. In Israel, he worked with addicts and others, and was much loved. People thought he had mysterious powers. There was a woman who wanted to have children. She had tried everything. No luck. But one day Laurie met with her and held her hand. “You are going to have children,” he told her. “Don’t worry.” Shortly thereafter, Talilah says, the woman conceived. She did have a child.

Like a river, I flow

If Water stays stationary, it will become stagnant; if it is allowed to flow, it will stay pure.

We all have our beliefs, our own truths and yet how many of us are aware that the truth we so dearly cling to is nothing but our own interpretation of reality and not reality itself, not the Truth itself. Yet we cling to it and are ready to discard, burn everything else.

A belief is like a hook in a river. It stops us from flowing, from remaining pure. Once caught by it, we stop and start to stagnate. No, I will not cling to a belief, for then I would miss knowing what lies beyond it. No, I will also not resist it and run away from it for if I do that I will end up hurting myself, damaging my being.

I shall rather try to understand the belief, for then alone would it dissolve into the flow and let me go… For then alone will I be free to flow and move on, to be caught by yet another hook, yet another belief. Relentlessly I will have to work and keep dissolving these hooks, these relative truths that bind me, that make me blind to others and their truths, that pull me into the quagmire of right and wrong.

The world would not understand and will resent my flow. Every time I dissolve and discard a belief, a untruth, it will discard me or peg me as a trouble-maker. Those who cling would pull me back and try to bind me. Every time I move on, the world will laugh at me, condemn me, put me in jail, and even try to kill me.

But like a river, I will continue to flow…

The Truth will flower within me as I sit on the fast for years and wait for justice. It will help me come out on street, take long arduous journeys, and fight for the change. And I will continue to flow and unfold with every step for I know that the Truth awaits me somewhere beyond…

Some screwed up ratios!

One day I was sitting and thinking -

“A young engineer turned banker who does some financial work gets paid nearly 1 Lac per month. A maid servant who cleans utensils, mops the floors and washes clothes in 5 houses a day gets paid less than 4000 pm.

I have tried my hands at both. I worked for a bank for a year and then also did a lot of cleaning and washing for another one year. Working with hands was such a fulfillment and so much more difficult. The work unlike that in bank involved both mind and body. It took me quite some time to master the skill of washing the utensils clean (with and without soap and/or ash), almost the same time I took to learn the nuances of valuation. I still have not learnt how to wash the clothes well with minimal usage of water.And still after a year of doing both for myself and others, I cannot imagine doing it for 5 households in a day.

And yet the lady who does it day in and day out gets paid 25 times less than the banker! And a construction worker who works all day – with his wife helping him – with his little daughter playing in the mud which would be in due time used for construction gets even lesser! A farmer who understands much more about plants, his land, water than any of us and who gives his sweat to mother earth does not even get that!” 

When suddenly a divine voice interrupted the train of thoughts and spoke directly to me -

“Offo! who is making all this hullaboo about skewed ratios? Is this the time?

You need not get all emotional about the farmers, maids, workers etc. Please tell them how difficult it is to sit in an AC office and make presentations all day. Do they even know what is it takes to be a consultant? Do they know that you need to walk, talk, eat and sleep only in English to do all that! In English and not in their local crap. And you need to know how to work on Microsoft Power point, how to use clip board, insert animations and how to wear tie! Baat karte hain! Don’t they understand that the ‘Economics’ (God’s gift to mankind alone) would love to have things like this only. The ratios need to be more skewed for better GDP growth rate and development. And don’t they see news? Everyone knows that India is in 2nd position in the race. Is this the time to discuss such nonsense?

Ambani ne wahan Mumbai mein Atilla bana liya aur tum yahan “25 times” par atke hue ho? Please concentrate. You need to diligently devise more strategies to fool the innocent and the not so cunning. Only then can you continue to fill your bags with more, more and much more. And please for God’s sake, don’t meddle with economics. It has a lot of math in it that even the mathematicians do not understand. Just have faith in it”

There you go!

Let them find out their own meaning!

In the face of every new born I see untainted innocence and pure honesty. In the eyes, I see an inner self that is ready to burst forth and absorb the world; an enthusiasm that has no parallel, enthusiasm to understand this world, enthusiasm of a level that a small child manages to learn his mother tongue on his own. In every new born I see a miracle of life, a miracle that tells us that every child has a potential to contribute something marvelous to the understanding of the world, of life, a potential to be nothing less than Vinci, Mozart, Tagore and Picasso himself. This potential which is very fragile, needs utmost care, fertile hands to materialize.

Instead for quite long now we have got ourselves into a task of killing this potential, into this tortuous task of turning every new born into us! In the name of education (which today is nothing but schooling) we have nearly perfected the art of imposing our understanding of the world (which by the way is nothing but inherited knowledge, accumulated information and is nothing more than close to nothing) on to the brain of every new born. And we present our understanding of the world with utmost confidence, stopping the curious ones where ever they are and closing all other doors. This way for every child the unknown world is turned into a known thing, the curiosity to understand life afresh is subdued, the excitement to do so is killed. The possibility to look at life from another angle is squandered there itself. And it is squandered pretty ruthlessly.

And lately with advent of mass education programs we have started doing it more efficiently and effectively. We have also managed to create factories (schools with mission to impose our limited understanding of the world on young children) where children are being shaped into beings (products) we adults want. Confucius had once said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” Dangerously this trend has become so rigid in our minds that any person who escapes the systems, jumps the boundaries and tries to look at this world differently, tries his own method of living and understanding it is at first not only called pessimist but also treated like an outcast. Some who dare to be outspoken of their own different understanding (Gandhi, Lincoln and Luther King) are assassinated.

Despite the doings of mankind, nature continues to hope to break this trend. With every child born, it throws at us a new possibility, a new ray of hope, a hope to break ourselves out of all prejudices. This new born might find his or her way out and discover a new meaning of life. This one might discover it through art, through impressions. The other might discover the meaning through his inner music. For the meaning is yet unknown and many are the ways, many as there can be drawn radii from one center. If only we could understand it and leave our children to discover a future for themselves and shape their own path into the unknown, can we hope to have humans who live.

My bounden duty

I had written about her two years ago. Now two years later I again want to write about her valor, go meet her if possible and just see her once. Because that is all I can do. When a journalist from Tehelka went to her in 2006, she simply said, “I am normal. I am normal. How should I explain? It is not a punishment. No, I am not inflicting myself with pain. It is just my bounden duty. I don’t know what lies in my future; that is God’s will. I have only learnt from my experience that punctuality, discipline and great enthusiasm can make you achieve a lot.”

Yesterday Irom Sharmila or “Menghaobi”, the fair one as the people of Manipur call her, completed 11 years of fasting, not having eaten or drunk anything since 2000. To mark the completion of her 11-year old crusade and also in solidarity with her struggle, day-long fasts, sit-in protest demonstrations, rallies and public meetings were held in different parts of the country.

For eleven years now, she has been forcibly kept alive by a drip thrust down her nose by the Indian State. For eleven years, nothing solid has entered her body; not a drop of water has touched her lips. She has stopped combing her hair. She cleans her teeth with dry cotton and her lips with dry spirit so she would not sully her fast. Her body is wasted inside. Her menstrual cycles have stopped. Yet she is resolute. Whenever she can, she removes the tube from her nose. It is her bounden duty, she says, to make her voice heard in “the most reasonable and peaceful way”.

Youngest daughter of a grade four worker in a veterinary hospital in Imphal, Sharmila was always a solitary child, the listener. Eight siblings had come before her. By the time she was born, her mother Irom Shakhi, 44, was dry. When dusk fell, and Manipur lay in darkness, Sharmila used to start to cry. The mother Shakhi had to tend to their tiny provision store, so Singhajit, her elder brother, would cradle his baby sister in his arms and take her to any mother he could find to suckle her. “She has always had extraordinary will. Maybe that is what made her different,” Singhajit says. “Maybe this is her service to all her mothers.” “We have to face trouble; we have to fight to the end even if it means my sister’s death. But if she had told me before she began, I would never have let her start on this fast. I would never have let her do this to her body. We had to learn so much first. How to talk? How to negotiate? We knew nothing. We were just poor people.”

Her Satyagraha was not an intellectual construct. It was a deep response, an inner call to the violence she saw around her. On November 2, 2000 the enraged battalion gunned down 10 innocent civilians at a bus-stand in Malom. The local papers published brutal pictures of the bodies the next day, including one of a 62-year old woman, Leisangbam Ibetomi, and 18-year old Sinam Chandramani, a 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. “I was shocked by the dead bodies of Malom on the front page,” Sharmila had said in her clear, halting voice. “I was on my way to a peace rally but I realised there was no means to stop further violations by the armed forces, AFSPA*. So I decided to fast.”

Her demand is to repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 from the regions of India’s north east where AFSPA has been imposed. On July 23 this year, Sanjit, a young former insurgent was shot dead by the police in a crowded market, in broad daylight, in one of Imphal’s busiest markets. An innocent by-stander Rabina Devi, five months pregnant, caught a bullet in her head and fell down dead as well. Her two-year old son, Russell was with her. Several others were wounded. But for an anonymous photographer who captured the sequence of Sanjit’s murder, both these deaths would have become just another statistic: two of the 265 killed this year. It is true Manipur is a fractured and violent society today. But the solution to that can only lie in another inspired, unilateral act of leadership: this time on the part of the State.

As Sharmila enters the twelfth year of her fast, she still lies incarcerated like some petty criminal in a filthy room in an Imphal hospital. The State allows her no casual visitors, except occasionally, her brother, even though there is no legal rationale for this. She craves company and books – the biographies of Gandhi and Mandela; the illusion of a brotherhood. Yet, her great – almost inhuman – hope and optimism continues undiminished.

It took Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi to raise proportionate heat on Irom Sharmila, on a trip to India in 2006. “If Sharmila dies, Parliament is directly responsible,” she thundered at a gathering of journalists. “If she dies, courts and judiciary are responsible, the military is responsible… If she dies, the executive the PM and President is responsible for doing nothing… If she dies, each one of you journalists is responsible because you did not do your duty…”

As Shoma Chaudhary, Tehelka had put it –

“Unfortunately, even as the entire country laces up to mark the first anniversary of Mumbai 26/11 – a horrific act of extreme violence and retaliation, we continue to be oblivious of the young woman who responded to extreme violence with extreme peace. It is a parable for our times. If the story of Irom Sharmila does not make us pause, nothing will. It is a story of extraordinariness. Extraordinary will. Extraordinary simplicity. Extraordinary hope. It is impossible to get yourself heard in our busy age of information overload. But if the story of Irom Sharmila will not make us pause, nothing will.”

Letter to Mr. Mallya and to Formula 1 fans

Mr. Mallya,

The first and the only time I had seen you, was in my first year of engineering. It was at that time when I was invited to World Youth Peace Forum in Bangalore. That was the time when like others system had purposefully kept me also ignorant of the other side of ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘growth in GDP’. I was being trained to run the big road roller of development, to be a part and parcel of this lifestyle where in you are considered God. I was both naive and excited then. You were one of the speakers in this one week long conference. I was excited to hear about your journey. And then you arrived on the stage. In parts I and many others could not understand what you were speaking. Some said that you had come there drunk. It did look like that by the way you were walking. I was too baffled to say anything.

And then I forgot all about you, until now when I read your statement in the Washington post. When some in India were celebrating the F1 race, when the bollywood and cricket stars were clamouring for attention and when some people were out there celebrating ‘God knows what’ with cell phones in their hands clicking photographs to be added on Fb, someone in Washington post was writing to remind us about those who were sacrificed to create this place for this gala event –

Not too long ago, the hosting suburb of Greater Noida was the site of weeks of massive farmer unrest over forced acquisition of land by the government for construction projects — including India’s first race track. Many villagers complained that the track, snaking past their villages, had also cut off their connections to the main road.

To which you Mr. Mallya, Force India team co-owner replied this –

In every country, there are the privileged and the underprivileged. We have underprivileged people in our country, but that does not mean the country must be bogged down or weighed down. India is a progressive country; we have a strongly growing economy, a large economy. The government is doing all it can to address the need of the poor or the underprivileged people, but India must move on.

Move on? As a part of moving on do you want us to celebrate the naked dance of development which to me looks something like this -

Millions of people are being crushed under the big vehicle that people like you are driving. Millions are being displaced and sacrificed for the likes of you want to become bigger and more powerful. Many like us are being successfully educated (coerced) to join the roller, the roller that is showed to us as the picture of growing GDP, progress and development. Many are being seduced to go get degrees, peg themselves into the roller and increase the size of its wheels that crushes the rest.

The growth of your stocks is not India moving on. India or for that matter any country can only move on if every person is taken along, cared for, loved and protected. But you know that don’t you Mr. Mallya? You also know very well about Meera. Meera who was living with her four children in the land acquired for this race. She was displaced and her land was forcibly taken away. You know Mr. Mallya, for a farmer their land is their mother. Meera is illiterate and can only guess her age. Rubbish lay in ponds of stagnant water. With a sick child who has already suffered from malaria twice she asks, “I don’t understand this concept of cars racing for entertainment,People pay money to watch this? Like a movie?” Why don’t you Mr. Mallya go and tell her that the cheapest tickets are about 2,500 rupees (about $50) – about half the monthly wage of a cleaner. The most expensive corporate boxes go for about $200,000 – and nearly all have been sold. Nearby, workers sprayed the manicured lawns around the F1 track with water in last minute preparations. Meera, who has electricity for four hours a day, must walk half an hour to the nearest water pump. But now your eyes have become hazy they have already seen many Meera going down under the weight of your ambition.

I could have written pages here belittling these statements of yours but I would not waste my energy doing that here for two reasons -

Firstly, who would read it? The system has successfully created a dead lot of positive branded people who are dancing in these events, people who see in the image of Sachin with chequered flag the image of growing India, people who look at the video on Facebook which showcases the number of cars you own and like it and share it, people who do not really care about the consequences of their actions and work till people like you keep throwing money at them. Such people would call me a pessimist for having written this alone.

Secondly, I have already done that a number of times in my previous articles that talk about the atrocities being committed by likes of you. And so there was no need. Just like the commonwealth, I would have just ignored this gala event of yours too.

Do what you wish to Mr. Mallya. Its ok displace people, take away their lands and throw them deep into poverty, there would always be people to support you, but at least have the shame to keep your mouth shut. Stop making making such statements in the media and stop stripping yourself naked in front of at least those who can see. It makes some people lose the little left-over hope in humanity.

Name them !

A picture worth a thousand words

Unlike other Prime Ministers…

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” — Henry David Thoreau

For last two years, I have been doing experiments with my life, questioning my beliefs, my thoughts. I have questioned my needs and have successfully found many reasons to lead a simple unassuming life. However there are days, when I have to struggle to keep my sanity alive, when I begin to think of all the luxuries that my “education” and “degree” could buy; when I start to question my new found principles.

July 19, 2011 was one such day. It was 10PM and I was strolling on the platform in old Delhi railway station, waiting for the train to Chakki Bank. I was going to Dharamsala for a few months. The monsoons had not yet come to Delhi and it was hot and humid. The station was dirty and crowded and the train was late. I as usual had booked a sleeper class ticket. The heat and the headache together were making me miserable and fret over my decision.

I was walking on the platform when I saw an old Buddhist monk sitting on a chair, waiting for the train. He was dressed in the traditional saffron robes. I had spent the last 3-4 months near monasteries with many monks and so went closer to him to see if I knew him. And yes I did know him. He was Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche, the then 71 year old Prime Minister of Tibet. When in Deer Park, I had the privilege to listen to his talk on ‘Hind Swaraj’. I had heard a lot about him, how he is regarded as one of the leading Tibetan scholars of Buddhism, an authority on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and how humble he was in each of his actions.

I remember it very clearly. He was sitting on one of the seats and quietly counting the beads in his hands. There were two young men, dressed in suits standing a little away from him with his luggage. I went and sat down in front of him with folded hands. I told him about myself and how I had first met him in Deer Park. I told him about my journey and the work I would be doing with one of the Tibetan school. We talked for sometime and he shared his thoughts on education. Finally he smiled, asked me to keep in touch and went back to his meditation. I thanked him and left. People were looking at us, wondering at who this man was and why was I sitting down in front of him. Of course no one knew that he was the Prime Minister of a country and more over one of the highest authority on Buddhist teachings after Dalai Lama.

To go from Delhi to Dharamsala, you either take a train to Chakki bank (8-10 hours) and then go to Dharamsala by road (4 hours) OR take a flight from Delhi to Dharamsala (1.5 hours). Someone later told me that he hardly takes flights.

The train came and he walked into 3rd AC compartment. I had changed. The incident made me feel stupid and helped wash off my doubts hopefully for ever.

“Practical” is not an option…

Here is an amazing article by Charles Eisenstein (inspired by the protests across the World connected to Occupy Wall street). One of the few articles I have read in which I found nothing unreasonable…

Looking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t want to merely fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. For the American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice, “I wasn’t put here on earth to sell product.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to increase market share.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to make numbers grow.”

We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.

No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street, no one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1% as well. We have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can create.

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars, regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren’t quite what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary. Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a force but a call. Our message is, “Stop pretending. You know what to do. Start doing it.” Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don’t beat him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden.

If politicians are disconnected from the real world of human suffering and ecosystem collapse, all the more disconnected are the financial wizards of Wall Street. Behind their computer screens, they occupy a world of pure symbol, manipulating numbers and computer bits. Occupy Wall Street punctures their bubble of pretense as well, reconnects them with the human consequences of the god they serve, and perhaps with their own consciences and humanity too. Only in a hallucination could someone imagine that the unsustainable can last forever; in puncturing their bubble, we remind them that the money game is nearing its end. It can be perpetuated for a while longer, perhaps, but only at great and growing cost. We, the 99%, are paying that cost right now, and as the environment and the social fabric decay, the 1% will soon feel it too. We want those who operate and serve the financial system to wake up and see before it is too late.

We can also point out to them that they sooner or later they will have no choice. The god they serve, the financial system, is a dying god. Reading various insider financial websites, I perceive that the authorities are flailing, panicking, desperately implementing solutions they themselves know are temporary just to kick the problem down the road a few years or a few months. The strategy of lending even more money to a debtor who cannot pay his debts is doomed, its eventual failure a mathematical certainty. Like all our institutions of exponential growth, it is unsustainable. Once you have stripped the debtor of all assets – home equity, savings, pension – and turned every last dollar of his or her disposable income toward debt service, once you have forced the debtor into austerity and laid claim even to his future income (or in the case of nations, tax revenues), then there is nothing left to take. We are nearing that point, the point of peak debt. The money machine, ever hungry, seeks to liquidate whatever scraps remain of the natural commons and social equity to reignite economic growth. If GDP rises, so does our ability to service debt. But is growth really what we want? Can we really cheer an increase in housing starts, when there are 19 million vacant housing units on the market already? Can we really applaud a new oil field, when the atmosphere is past the limit of how much waste it can absorb? Is more stuff really what the world needs right now? Or can we envision a world instead with more play and less work, more sharing and less buying, more public space and less indoors, more nature and less product?

So far, government policy has been to try somehow to keep the debts on the books, but every debt bubble in history ultimately collapses; ours is no different. The question is, how much misery will we endure, and how much will we inflict, before we succumb to the inevitable? And secondly, how can we make a gentle, non-violent transition to a steady-state or degrowth world? Too many revolutions before us have succeeded only to institute a different but more horrible version of the very thing they overthrew. We look to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes, let me call it a revolution of love.

What else but love would motivate any person to abandon the quest to maximize rational self-interest? Love, the felt experience of connection to other beings, contradicts the laws of economics as we know them. Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally not the enemy of love. We don’t want to forever fight the money power to create good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don’t need to fight it. I will not in this essay describe my vision – one of many – of a money system aligned with the good in all of us. I will only say that such a shift can only happen atop an even deeper shift, a transformation of human consciousness. Happily, just such a transformation is underway today. We see it in anyone who had dedicated their lives to serving, healing, and protecting other beings: people, cultures, whales, children, ecosystems, the waters, the forests, the planet.

In the ecological age, we are beginning to understand that we are connected beings, that the welfare of any species or people is aligned with our own. Our money system is inconsistent with this understanding, which is dawning among all 100 percent of us, each in a different way. I think the ultimate purpose of Occupy Wall Street, or the great archetype it taps into, is the revolution of love. If the 99% defeat the 1%, they will like the Bolsheviks ultimately create a new 1% in their place. So let us not defeat them; let us open them and invite them to join us.

If Occupy Wall Street has a demand, it should be this: wake up! The game is nearly over. Jump ship while there is still time. In my work I meet many people of wealth who have done that, exiting the money game and devoting their time to giving away money as beautifully as they can. And I meet many more people who have the skills and good fortune to earn wealth if they wanted to, but who likewise refuse to participate in the money game. So if I sound idealistic, keep in mind that many people have had a change of heart already.

Some might call these ideas impractical (though I think that nothing other than a change of heart is practical), and seek to issue concrete demands. Unfortunately, though no demand is big enough, yet equally any demand we would care to make is also too big. Everything we want is on the very margin of mainstream political discourse, or outside it altogether. For example, it might be within the range of respectable policy options to tighten standards on industrial-scale confinement meat operations; but how about ending the practice completely? Congress wrangles about whether or not to reduce troop levels by a few thousand here and there, but what about ending the garrisoning of the planet? Any demand that we could make that is within the realm of political reality is too small. Any demand we could make that reflects what we truly want is politically unrealistic.

Shall we fight hard for something we don’t even want? It is fine to make demands, but the movement cannot get hung up on them, much less on practicality, because any remotely achievable demand is far less than what our planet needs. “Practical” is not an option. We must seek the extraordinary.

We might come up with a list of demands, something we can all stand behind, albeit each with a secret reservation in his or her heart that says, “I wanted more than that.” I encourage those in the movement to recognize such demands as stepping stones, or landmarks, perhaps, on the road to an economy of love. Let us never mortgage a greater to a lesser. The means of the movement, more than the ends, will be the genesis of what comes after the debt pyramid collapses. Occupy Wall Street is practicing new forms of non-hierarchical collaboration, peer-to-peer organization, and playful action that someday, maybe, we can build a world on.

We must learn the lessons of Egypt, where a people’s movement started with the amorphous demand to end intolerable conditions, and, as it discovered its power, soon turned to demand the ouster of the president. That demand would have been too big at the outset, too impossible; yet at the end it proved to be too small. The dictator left, the protestors went home without creating any lasting structures of people power, and, while some things changed, the basic political and economic infrastructure of Egypt did not.

Occupy Wall Street should not be content with half-measures, even as it encourages and applauds the tiny hundredth-measures that might come first. It should not let such concessions sap the strength of the movement or seduce it into neglecting to foster its organizational network. Occupy Wall Street is the first manifestation in a long time of “people power” in America. For too long, democracy has, for most people, meant meaningless choices in a box. The Wall Street occupation is stepping out of the box.

Our job is to take a stand for a world that is truly beautiful, fair, and just, a planet and a civilization that is healing. For a politician or a financier, even a small step in this direction takes courage, for it goes against the gradient of money and all that is attached to it. I think that the task of Occupy Wall Street is to provide a context for that courage, and a call to that courage. With each step taken, the necessity of far larger steps will become apparent, along with the courage to take them.

To those holding the reins of power, let us say, We will be your witnesses and your truthtellers. We will not allow you to live in a bubble. We will not go away. We will show you who you are hurting and how. We will make it awkward to do business, until your conscience cannot stand it any longer. We know, in the beginning, many of you will try to escape us; perhaps you will leave Wall Street for suburban corporate offices on private land where there is no “street” for us to hit. You might also retreat further into your ideologies of globalism and growth that deny the obvious. But nothing will stop us, because our tactics will constantly shift. In one way or another, we will speak the truth and we will speak it loudly. Where speaking the truth becomes illegal, we will break the law. We will not wait to be invited. We will enter, in some way, every physical and ideological fortress.

The truth is dwindling rain forests, spreading deserts, mass tree die-offs on every continent; looted pensions, groaning burdens of student debt, people working two or three dead end jobs; children eating dirt in Haiti, elders choosing between food and medicine… the list is endless, and we will make it no longer possible to hold it in disconnection from the money system. That is why we converge on Wall Street, and anywhere that finance holds sway. You have lulled us into complacency for long enough with illusions and false hopes.

We the people are awakening and We will not go back to sleep.