16 Overflowing world

The outside world overflows our senses: we continuously see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Our mind overflows with thoughts and memories: there is constant chatter in our heads. The world is full of possibility. We continuously filter this overflow, by shifting our gaze, by picking up sounds, by noticing things, and by making choices. As we are shifting from survival to living, the meaning of our lives also changes. How do we find meaning in a world which is not empty, but overflowing? 

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we investigate the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and today I want to talk about an overflowing world.

I am walking in a different forest today, in this nature area to the east of the Netherlands. The sun is shining through the trees, there's quite a bit of wind, so you can hear the rustling as the trees full of leaves catch the wind - and being in nature like this is a good place to talk about the overflowing world.

An overflowing world to me is a world that overflows our senses is a world that is full, that is replete, that is full of meaning, full of possibility, full of opportunities, full of chances, full of journeys, full of discoveries. And yet that very fullness, this sense of overflow can also be experienced as overwhelming. And so on this walk, I want to explore how we deal with this natural overflow, the overflow of senses, the overflow of possibilities, the overflow of the world, and how we can turn that experience from one of being overwhelmed to one of joy.

This is a more philosophical approach, because it asks how we are thrown into the world, how the world appears to us, how we deal with this world that we discover. It asks us a more existential question about what our life is, what possible meanings our lives can have, and where we can find that meaning.

And so, after discussions about the ecological structure of the world, and global economics, and forms of abundance that have to do more with our practical lives, today let's delve a little bit deeper into this metaphysical aense of abundance. And by metaphysica, I mean the structure of reality, and not so much physical reality, but reality as we experience it; so the structure of our experience of our life, experiencing life as an overflow, experiencing life as abundance.

Aand the first aspect I think is this overwhelming sensory input. I'm walking in the forest now looking at these different shades of green, the foliage of these trees, with the blue sky behind it. There's the sound of all kinds of birds and in the distance rumbling, the sound of civilization. It's a very comfortable temperature, so I can feel this gentle breeze on my skin. I can feel my feet being in touch with the earth as I walk.

But all these sensory inputs, at the same time, are filtered. When I look at the leaves, my hearing is muted. When I try to listen to a certain bird call, I hardly notice what I'm looking at. Human beings filter this veritable onslaught of sensory input. Just in terms of everything that hits our eyes, we must make decisions about what we're going to focus on, what we're going to pay attention to.

We could be looking everywhere, at everything, and yet we don't: we look at a specific thing. I look at this tree, close to me, or I look at something in the distance, or I try and have a wide-angle view of this path that I'm on. When I listen, I might listen to a specific sound, or I might just let the noise of the world, the sound of the world, envelop me. Most of the time we're not very aware of the other senses, because we're so focused on sight and sound, but I can direct my attention to feeling. I can imagine tastes, the tastes that I have in my mouth. If I breathe in deeply, I can smell the late spring. I can smell the earth here around me amongst the trees and the leaves. I can smell the forest.

And walking on an empty path in the woods on a spring day is a very quiet environment. If I were in the middle of the hustle and bustle of a city,  with the riot of colors and sound and people around me, I would be paying attention to different things. The point is that we are always filtering what we're experiencing. And we are filtering things to an enormous degree. The world is really overwhelming. It is overflowing with input, or at least we are the input of a constant overflow. 

We perceive this constant overflow in terms of colors, which are certain frequencies. We perceive the frequencies of the sounds that we can hear. We perceive the things that we can feel with our specific biological bodies. Imagine us being surrounded by this vast overflow of colors, of sounds, of tastes, of feeling. Almost all of it is filtered out by us because we can only pay attention to a few aspects of this reality, which is enveloping us at all time.

And this overwhelming though it is, is only a small part of our experience because even to feel our lives at this very moment, the smell, the sights, the sound, we must filter out a lot of what's happening in our heads, in our brains: the thoughts, the emotions, the memories, the expectations, the constant dialogue that may be happening in our heads. The talking chattering voice that makes us relive certain experiences we've had today. Certain things we think we're going to do after this walk. I think that many of us can experience how restless our brain is, our chattering mind as we call it in meditation, that there's constantly something going on in our heads.

And there again, we're filtering most of what we could be thinking about. We could really be considering or fantasizing about all kinds of possibilities. We could be remembering any aspect of our lives, and yet, even when we are full on in a memory, we're only focusing on one specific thing that happened to us. Of all the possible things we can think about or rememberm we tend to do one at a time. We tend to experience only a tiniest fraction.

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Now, overflow of course, is another word for abundance, quite literally. Ab unda: abundance means an overflow of water. So an overflowing world is an abundant world, so incredibly overflowing that we must filter most of it. Most of it in terms of our senses, most of it in terms of our thoughts. Our experience at any given moment is just a tiny little element of all that is happening around us, of what is surrounding us, of the way we are in the world, the way we exist at this moment.

On our second walk, we talked about the cosmic surplus. We talked about existence being energy expending itself in time. We talked about life being energy expending itself in time. We talked about our lives being energy expending itself in time. Or, if you look at that formula from a different angle, time is the way energy is experienced by us. We experience everything in time.

On some level, there is only the present moment, but at the same time, of course, I carry the memory of what happened a few minutes ago, a few hours ago, a few days, weeks, months, years: I carry all of that in me. And I'm also projected outwards towards the future. I have plans for this evening. I have plans for tomorrow. There is a schedule as to what is going to happen in my life, hopefully, possibly, over the coming weeks, months, years. 

We live on this very narrow bit of present, but we're constantly connected horizontally across a fair bit of time. A fair bit of time, of course, in terms of our lifetime and our experience, but not a fair bit of time compared to the geological structure of our planet, or the unfathomable vastness and age of the universe. 

What can we say about our physical experience, our sensuous experience of being alive, our experience among our hopes and thoughts and memories? The first is amazement at this abundance, at this overflow: recognizing it, being able to face this overwhelming reality. The second, I suppose, is the realization that we are actually filtering all the time. That we are master of filters, because otherwise we couldn't move in the world, act in the world, behave in the world, structure in the world. We filter all the time and we've learned to be quite good at it. And the third one, perhaps, is that we can shift the way that we filter this overflow, that the way that we filter our experience of life is sometimes biological, sometimes physical, but many times also cultural, but many times also learned or cultural. We can make different decisions as to how we filter things in our lives.

But the most important reason to talk about this overflow in our filtering capacities is that it is a template for how we can filter the possibilities in our lives, if we live abundantly. Now, that as a society, that as a civilization, that as individuals, we are undergoing this fundamental shift to abundance, an abundance of objects, an abundance of wealth and health, an abundance of possibilities, for an abundance of people. We have created a world in which we can have access to an abundance of goods, to an abundance of creative content, and that abundance may be overwhelming us. 

So when we feel overwhelmed by this abundance of objects and creative content, perhaps we can learn from the way we already deal with this sensory overflow, with this overflow of thoughts. We have already, always, as the biological life form that we are, lived in this abundance of energy, this abundance of input. We've already filtered most of it, and focused on what matters to us. We are aware of that filter. We are conscious of the fact that we are filtering, and we can direct it to a certain degree, we can play with it.

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And it also touches on another part of our being, namely the question about meaning. Is there meaning in the world? Is there meaning to existence? Is there meaning to my life ?

We are no longer fighting for survival, day by day, against hunger and cold and disease and enemies. Our civilization, and technology, and economy, has given us a life of health, and wealth, and ease. And for the first time in the history of humanity and the history of civilization, we are confronted with the question: when we solve that economic problem, the problem of surviving, the problem of making a living, then the question becomes, how do we live?

And so the question about meaning is a question that was addressed by a group of philosophers around 80 years ago. Existentialist philosophers were concerned with existence, so they asked what meaning our life has, what purpose it has. And what you see happening, is that if we are making a shift towards abundance, if the long history of human beings has been one that was focused primarily on surviving, on having your children survive, of being safe from disease and hunger, and cold, and war, it was reactive. You were reacting to a world which was hostile, which was out to get you, which was insecure. And there was a life force, or a life drive, which was a response to that. 

If you're focused on surviving, that may be a very unpleasant experience, but you have meaning in your life. You have a reason to do the things you do. You have a direction, you have a purpose. You know why you're doing things. You have a goal: I want to survive this. When you're fighting against something, whether it's cold, or hunger, or disease, or an enemy, you have something to focus on. There is something out to get you, and you are defending yourself. You are fighting back. If you are fighting for something, to achieve a certain goal, you also have a direction. And so you can see that in our history, a lot of our energy was focused on survival, was focused on fighting against something, or on fighting for something. 

And that history of survival is still with us. There are still hundreds of millions of people who are fighting for survival, who are fighting against hunger or for good nutrition, who are fighting against cold or heat, or for a comfortable place to live who are fighting against disease or for a healthy body, and the capacity to develop to their full potential. The misery that pretty much all of humanity endured for most of its history, is still present in our day. And that is scandalous, of course, and we could solve it - and we'll talk about this on another walk. 

Let's call this sense of survival, then, a basic level of being in the world, being in society, being in history. There is a level above that, when you've solved the question of survival, when you're not threatened directly by hunger, cold, disease, enemies, but in which you're still striving. You might be poor, and you want to become richer. You don't have many objects, and you want to have objects, you want to have a nice place to live. You want to have mobility, ranging from a bicycle, to a car, to being able to go on an airplane. You want access to good quality healthcare and education.

To achieve all this, you probably have to have a job. You have to find a way to make a living. And even though you're not focused on brute survival, you are still struggling to a certain extent. You are still fighting against certain things, against poverty, against unemployment, and you're still fighting for other things. You're fighting for wealth or you're fighting for status, comparing yourself to your neighbors or your peers. 

We've bought into this idea of progress, that we want life to get better. We want life to get better for us, and we want life to get better for our children. And this can be quite a journey: you can have humble beginnings, be born in poverty with nothing, and work your way up through hard work and through hustle and through luck, and achieve great riches, or great fame.

Or, in a more mundane way, you can reach a level where you are quite well off, where you have a place to live, where you have security in terms of health and education, where you have a job, or a way to be meaningfully engaged in the world and make a living. Where there are no worries about food and the future - and that middle class kind of life has also been achieved by billions of people.

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But the thing, of course, is that all these things that you were fighting against and were fighting for, were part of a sense of scarcity. You wanted more than you had. You felt a lack that had to be overcome. There was a direction because there was already a movement, there was a purpose, there was a goal. When you have abundance, when you have more food than you can ever eat in your life, when you have a fantastic place to live and the capacity to live in other places, when you have all the mobility that you desire, when your life is full of entertainment and opportunities, then it's a different situation. Because when you have everything, then the fundamental question is, what are you still striving for? What is going to be the direction that you're heading? 

And this is a trickier problem than we often think it is, because so few of us get to that position. In fact, I think we can argue that it's so difficult to be in that position that we'd rather hang back and still convince ourselves we're living in the world of scarcity, so as not to get to that place of abundance, where we have to come up with the direction for our life, with the meaning for our life. 

We realise, in a certain sense, we're lost, because the meaning of our life in the past was struggle. Struggle to survive, struggle to have more than the neighbours, struggle to achieve a certain position. And when you have all these things, now what? It's a little bit like we all won the lottery, and all the striving and struggle and things we desired can now be achieved. We've all met a genie who will grant us endless wishes. We've created robots and software to do all the work, and so we can just enjoy not the fruits of our labour, but the fruits of their labour.

And the existential philosophers were confronted with a similar problem 80 years ago, although in their case it was couched more in terms of losing our religion, because religion and Christian religion can also give you a struggle. It can also give you a direction. Religion means linking, re-ligere, it links you back to the energy of existence, to the wonder of existence, to the wonder of creation. And it does so with a story which also gives you an owner's manual of existence, of your body. It gives you the rules of the game that you're playing. It gives you rituals to follow. It gives you things that you should be doing and things that you shouldn't be doing, depending on the religion. 

In a strange way, it's a gamification of your existence. It promises you rewards if you follow the rules and prohibitions. It promises you eternal life, or it promises you escape from rebirth in this life. It threatens you with eternal damnation and endless suffering. It offers you a structure, it offers you consolation for all the struggle, and the pain, and the heartache that you have to experience in this life.

But it is always based on faith. It is based on you accepting that story, and making it your own. It is based on belief, on you believing in that story. And the existentialists struggled with the fact that they didn't believe in that specifically Christian story.

If there is no God in the world, if there is no Creator who created this reality for a certain purpose, if the existence of the universe is just a happy occurrence, a Big bang, an overwhelming event in space and time, then there is no meaning. Then there is no story. There is no direction, there is no reward. There is no particular reason to do one thing or another. If you're still involved in survival, then surviving may give you a structure and meaning. But when you've achieved a certain life of ease and possibility, then the question of meaning becomes more important. 

For the existentialists, this was a great shock. They felt that, suddenly, life had been drained of meaning. They felt that they were facing a large empty space, that they were confronted with a Nothingness, a lack of meaning. And the way they described it is quite physical. There is this horror. There is this recoil. You feel sick to your stomach, faced with this emptiness. Life has been drained of meaning. Your existence has been drained of meaning. Nothing matters. There is no longer a story that you are part of, there is no longer a guide as to what to do and not to do. There is no sense of reward.

The existentialists then developed their own way of dealing with this. But the thing that struck me in these descriptions is: how strange that they would think that the world is empty, that there is this nothingness, that there is no meaning out there. When our experience of being alive - physically in our bodies - we live in an overflowing world. 

The world is full, overflowing with sensory impressions. The world is full and overflowing with thoughts, and memories, and dreams. The world is full of energy. The world is full of other people, other consciousnesses. The world is full of objects that we've created. The world is full of projects, of things that we're engaged in. The world is full of artistic creations.

It's a very strange experience to think of the world as empty. What emptiness, what nothingness are we talking about? And I would argue that it's the same thing with meaning. The world has not lost its meaning, has not been drained of meaning because we no longer believe in one of the stories. Rather, the world is full of possible meanings, full of possible stories, full of possibilities. In fact, the world is overflowing with possibilities.

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And all the more so when we're making a shift to abundance. Because if you're struggling to survive or you're struggling to make it in society, you have possibilities, but you are focused on specific things to do, things to achieve things to accomplish. Once all that has been taken care of, once you have this life of wealth and ease, then the enormous amount of possibilities becomes clear to you.

It's not just that we have a tsunami of creative content coming our way, that we can write endless books, endless stories, endless pieces of music, and film, and other forms of entertainment. It's not just that we are capable of creating endless amounts of objects, and machines who can create even more objects. It's not just that we can solve the economic problem and the struggle, by coming up with an economy of abundance and an economy of plenty, that releases this overflowing world, this abundant world of possibilities.   You can choose at any given moment what you want to do with your life, where you want to go, how you want to be engaged, who you want to meet, who you want to do things with, what you want to create.

But yes, this overflow, this abundance is also overwhelming. And when it overwhelms us, it can be terrifying. It can be paralyzing. If we can do anything at all, how do we choose? If we no longer have a direction of survival, or of making it in the world, or a story that tells us how to behave, then everything is possible. And everything is also an overflow. It's also overwhelming. It's also terrifying. How do you choose? How do you make the right choice when almost everything is possible?

As an aside, there's also an infinite number of things that are not possible. You can't turn back time. But there is an overwhelming number of possibilities, just as there is an overwhelming number of sensory inputs. And it's that sense of richness, that sense of abundance, that sense of overflow without being overwhelmed, that we can enjoy when we make the shift to abundance. 

If we ask: what is the best decision, what is the best way to live our lives? That is, I think, the wrong question, because suggests that there is a best way. It suggests that there is one way or one kind of way, it suggests that we had a task, and that we have to fulfil that task. But once we fulfilled the task of survival, once we fulfilled the task of building a civilization where people can have health, and wealth, and freedom, then everything opens up.

And the sense of wealth, the sense of being rich, the sense of living abundantly is the sense that there's all these possibilities, and that I can choose amongst them. And then yes, I will choose one thing over something else, but they would both be good choices. There are hundreds, thousands of good choices at any given moment. These are all possible. Life is incredibly rich. 

There are myriad sensory impulses on me at this moment, and I'm choosing, I'm choosing to look at this or to listen to that, or to smell this, or to feel the bark of this tree that I'm touching. I'm making choices all the time. I'm making choices about the things I choose to remember, or the memories that come up, and how I deal with them. I'm lost in thought, and I follow my train of thought. I'm thinking about this problem, or that situation, or this experience, or I project things into the future. But there also, I'm making constant choices out of this overwhelming multiplicity of options.

Once the fundamental problems of my life have been dealt with, and we are creating a society where we can achieve that for more and more people, where we can be a thriving humanity on a thriving planet, then we will fully emerge in that wealth. Then we will fully realize how many options are open to us.

So, this world is overflowing. It's overflowing with sensory input. It's overflowing in our heads, with ideas and memories and projections for the futures and thoughts. It's overflowing in the society that we've created, with an overflowing number of people, with an overflowing number of objects, with an overflowing number of possibilities for our lives. We can say many things about this existence, about this experience of being alive, but I think that one of the things that we can be pretty sure o,  f is that it isn't empty, that it isn't drained of meaning. 

So how do we deal, then, with this overflow of possibilities? We can experience this, not by being overwhelmed by it, but by revelling in it, by being liberated by it, by being freed to choose whatever possibility we want. We have the capacity to make our own stories, to bring our own meaning and significance and purpose into the world. We are creative human beings. We've created a virtual and physical world. We can also create the meaning that is going to fill up our world.

Thank you for joining me on this exploration of what it means to be alive in an overflowing world. And I wish you joy in exploring these overwhelming possibilities. See you on the next episode of Cornucopia.