| 25/Aug/2010
THE ECONOMICS OF IMMORTALITY
THE ECONOMICS OF IMMORTALITY
Mankind is on the threshold of the epochal passage from a disaster-based capitalism, a short-sighted economic system dealing with survival, to a limitless, abundant economics of immortality.
I have a question for you. Try to answer it as sincerely as you can before starting to read this article: when was it the last time that you have come across an extraordinary idea or an unusual concept? I do not mean an idea just interesting, but something amazing, baffling, disconcerting, shocking… something contrary to common sense, adverse to reason, opposite to anything you had believed so far. If your answer is that you have never met something so powerful to turn your mind upside down, you are coming close to discover that, very early in life, we have already built a complete system of deep convictions and beliefs. Hence, we can spend our entire existence never meeting one idea which clashes with our mental schemes. Quite soon in our life we become impenetrable to any evidence or even to minor affirmations that could vaguely contrast with our old set of beliefs and consolidated ideas. Ordinary humanity seems to be condemned to think alike and to use the same set of thoughts forever - from cradle to grave.
Uniformity is mediocrity
Schools and universities have forgotten their real mission and have come down to be factories of uniformity, worshippers of bookish knowledge, imposed from the outside, equal for all. Institutions geared to transfer a ready-made set of convictions and beliefs to youth, suffocating their essence, clipping their higher senses: intuition and dreaming. The traditional instruction that they offer does not provide any sense of distinction between what is external and what is internal, nor does it prepare individuals capable to manage one’s thoughts or be aware of one’s emotions.
A student coming out of these institutions, ‘educated’ by them, is like somebody who goes out in the world convinced to have a nice suit, brand new and made to measure for him. Quite soon though he realizes that it is not a brand new suit, but a second-hand one. Looking around he also finds out that it is not a suit but a uniform, equal to millions of others. And when he finally finds a job, and finds himself confined for most of his life to a small desk, restricted in few square meters, if he has a heart to go further, he will discover that he didn’t just received a uniform but the uniform of a prisoner, trained to fight anything which is out of his mental schemes, forget about conceiving new ideas.
A planetary belief
Nevertheless, paradoxically, any progress is the product of subversive concepts, of revolutionary visions. Original, innovative, unconventional ideas are the most strategic resource for the future of the species but for ordinary humanity they would be impossible to bear, if one ever had a chance to bump into one of them.
There is a belief, a planetary ritual which is common to all universities and business schools, world-wide. “Economics is the fine art of coping with limited resources”. The idea of scarcity in economics is one and the same thing with the justification of criminality and human exploitation. If resources are limited, individuals and countries must devote themselves to plunder and robbery if they want to survive. We have to overturn this common belief and start thinking that “It is not resources that are limited, but man.”. The projection of his limitations onto the external world causes man’s unconscious propensity toward scarcity to take on a concrete form.
If we enter in this frame of mind we will devote our best effort and energy not to grab and exploit but to educate youth to be independent thinkers, to get rid of every form of hypnotism, dependence, superstition, to abandon one’s inner conflicts. Only a School of Being, a School for visionary leaders, can dare to offer to its students such a subversive vision: The planet is bountiful in the extreme, a cornucopia overflowing with all a man’s heart desires. In such a universe it is impossible to fear scarcity.
One Idea can Change the World
Deep inside any powerful, innovative vision, behind any vast idea and courageous solution there is a sense of greatness, a fragment of eternity. Mass education, traditional schools and universities, devoted as they are to limits and dependency, fostering divisions, prejudices and conflictual thinking, cannot produce such ideas nor the visionary individuals who can nurture them. The biggest limit that we bring hidden in our being, engraved in our psychology, in each cell of our body, is the idea that death is ineluctable - that we are prisoners sentenced to death and hopelessly waiting on death row. This idea is at the root of our every constriction - shackling our creativity.
Let me ask you: when did you last pronounce the word ¨immortality¨? When did you last utter the word ‘infinity’? Or, ‘timelessness’? Or, ‘eternity’? When was it? Most likely, for most of the people, it was in a perfume shop ordering one of the fashionable brands: Eternity or Love Forever or Immensity. We hardly use these words more than a few times in a lifetime. Why? Because, they are extremely powerful words. They are engaging to the point that just to utter them will produce a change in our Being and in our reality. What does immortality mean? It means something very simple. It means the absence of death. If there is no death, there is immortality. Why do we need to bring in this concept in economics?
The economics of immortality
Until now, all economic systems have dealt with survival - with peoples' basic needs: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction. From this point of view, the economics of Neanderthals and the economics of a modern complex society are essentially the same.
All existing ideologies of left and right are outdated and obsolete. Powerful forces coming from the individual and not from the mass are steadily rewriting the fundamentals of life. You as an individual are called to create, through your dream, a new humanity and redesign within yourself a new economics and a brand new epoch.
It’s possible to change our destiny, to eliminate poverty, misery, and scarcity, but to do that we have to change man’s psychology and the hypnotic world’s story rooted in his system of convictions and beliefs. We must change the dream. Only individuals can do that. That is why a school is needed, a school of Being, potent enough to bring a planetary revolution in education, and to overturn teaching programs and methods, and exalting the vision. A School for Gods. This is the scientific path in which we believe and on which we have to set forth.
Dreaming the Impossible
We had impossible dreams before. Our civilisation was built on impossible dreams... from the project of cutting the Suez channel, to conquering the moon, to creating from scratch a brand new capital in Brazil’s tropical rainforest, in 41 months. The myth of Icarus announced that man one day would fly! It was dreamed in Crete thousands of years ago. How many would have believed in this dream? We had to wait for the Wright Brothers for the first human flight in 1903, but we made it. What is the next impossible dream - impossible even to bear? What is the idea that is so bold and powerful as to produce the kind of shocks, the turning upside-down of our psychology, which have always preceded and created a quantum jump in the economy? The idea that death is not ineluctable, that it can be overcome! Physical immortality is the new frontier of human dreaming - the incredible thought which requires an immense strength just to be conceived. For innumerable years we have accepted death as our destiny. For millennia we have resigned ourselves to the idea that life is limited. By accepting this mental limit, everything else has consequently met a limitation in our existence. Resources, creativity, and wealth have been thought of as limited.
It is like looking at the world with the eyes of a frog and complaining over the view.
A turning point in our civilization is to start to believe that death is not necessary, and not even ethical.
This revolution in our thinking - removing death from our psychology, as the limit of all limits - will produce the greatest revolution in the economy - even in the planetary system of production and distribution of wealth, and in the very concept of how to build and how to measure the real affluence of a nation. The conviction that death can be overcome meant the overthrow of all limits and the start of a psychological revolution capable of sweeping away the old, mental barriers and triggering a new world economy.
The Art of Dreaming
Traditional education, the schools and universities as we know them, cannot teach the young how to free themselves from conflictual thinking, prejudices and obsolete ideas, nor teach how to dare to dream the impossible, to upset any mental limit, any inner stockade, and to cultivate in themselves an indomitable passion for greatness. This is what we call the Art of Dreaming: to prepare the cells of a new mankind, individuals inspired by the dream’s principles and nourish them with the idea of immortality, striking down the preconception that death is invincible.
We cannot rely anymore on a short-sighted economic system, dealing just with survival, where millions of people are on the payroll of death, fed by the belief of its invincibility. It is not true that innovation comes from huge investments and the titanic effort of large corporations, but from the brilliance of an idea and the flawless commitment of a visionary individual. Meucci an Italian immigrant to NY, living in poverty, invented the telephone. Colombo discovered America (the greatest business of all times) with limited means (three ships) and a strong belief in his creazy idea to go west to find east. The airplane industry had its start in 1903 with two brothers and their dream to be the first to fly. And will continue to be so, as it has happened with Microsoft, apple, google, facebook... Gig In... multinational corporations, giants of Business, created by the dream of teenagers.
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