Modern industrialised civilisation is largely obsessed with productivity and consumption; this is a natural consequence of living in an era characterised by deep, rigid, materialism as the underlying collective belief or assumption around the meaning of life. Even as the limits of what Earth can sustain, in terms of all the different markers of health of the biosphere, are blown past, the majority of humanity, at least living in industrialised society, is kept trapped on a hamster-wheel of economic slavery. The most greedy, most ruthless and most psychopathic are showered with all possible material rewards, as a result of helping to increase the bottom line margins of multinational corporations who have no sense of duty or responsibility to the nations they extract their profits from. 

 

This civilisation is obsessed with material quantity – the more we produce, the more we make, the more ‘worthy’ we are. This leads to a kind of mass-hypnotic programming, where the vibrant spiritual essence that is the real ground of our existence, is suppressed or repressed constantly, both individually and collectively. People who grow up in this system, with no exposure to any alternative, particularly if their parents have also ‘performed well’ in this system, are naturally going to be identified with how busy and productive they are. During the course of their life, a long-term adaptation to what’s demanded of them, by their parents and by wider society, can result in what would be called a ‘Survival Personality’ in Psychosynthesis theory. For a deeper understanding of the topic of subpersonalities, please read my ‘Planets, archetypes and subpersonalities’ article.

 

The survival personality is a nuanced idea, and it can be formed in different contexts, for different reasons; most generally it’s used in the context of describing someone who has learnt that they need to ‘perform’ on some level to feel loved and accepted by their parents/caregivers. To survive psychologically and emotionally, the person, usually when they were very young, learnt through necessity (and sometimes unconsciously), to shape themselves, their personality, their needs, their interests and passions, and their somatic experience, to the conditions placed on them - that had to be fulfilled for them to receive attention, care and love (even if it’s conditional) from their parents. 

 

If we expand the idea of the survival personality beyond the scope of the family of origin, and consider how much pressure people are under to work, perform, excel and produce when they find themselves in the workplace, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where huge numbers of people have essentially lost contact with their inner world, their feelings and the sense of spiritual meaning in life. That is the scenario we find ourselves in, in our civilisation. Life becomes a two-dimensional factory-line style process, where the weekend or holidays become the only respite in an otherwise depressing and numbing situation. When people are convinced, or brainwashed, en-masse, through societal conditioning, to believe they are just meaningless lumps of matter, the way individuals perceive themselves and their internal worlds is also hugely affected. 

 

By adulthood, people who have adapted themselves to the demands of the world, have often become deeply identified with a state of busyness, or ‘doing’, where even slowing down for brief periods of time can bring intense anxiety. On some level, I would argue, this is because the person is aware they have a backlog of a huge amount of unprocessed feeling and experience, waiting to be brought into the light of awareness. There will be layers of their inner worlds that are crying out for attention and exploration.

 

A question: Which perspective is more likely to be conducive to happiness; one where we understand ourselves to be eternal, infinite consciousness inhering within a supremely loving and benevolent reality, or; one where there is no ultimate meaning to existence, physical matter is all there is, death is the complete termination of consciousness, and while we are alive, the best we can hope for is material abundance, security and perhaps if we’re lucky, human love and affection? I would think the answer is obvious – the latter option induces a type of ‘ontological scarcity’ - a poverty of meaning, an obsession with productivity and acquiring ‘things’, and necessitates what Roberto Assagioli termed the ‘repression of the sublime’. He used this idea on an individual level, where people can deny or repress their own spiritual potential, for different reasons, but we can also apply it collectively, where large swathes of humanity are induced to constantly numb and shut down to the possibility of a transcendent reality. 

 

The consequence of living as if one’s worth and value is entirely determined by how much a person is doing, or how much material affluence one produces and consumes, is a type of constant background unease, that is only partly staved off by being busy (even if what they are busy doing has relatively little depth or meaning), as well as an estrangement from one’s inner world. This can mean long-term suppression of feelings, doubts and fears, hopes and dreams, and the chronic, nagging sense that ‘there must be more to life than this’, that some people can tolerate in the periphery of their awareness for decades, or even a whole lifetime, without acting on it. 

 

The invasion of smartphones, screens, apps and now AI, into daily life has only intensified this process. The more focused we become collectively on ‘data’ and ‘information’ and yes/no, good/bad, friend/enemy, binary style thinking (i.e. ‘splitting), the more we lose the experience of, and appreciation for depth and nuance in our experience. As the techno-sphere invades the boundary between man and machine in ever more pervasive and nefarious ways the more distracted and less present we become. The goals and aims of the ‘Tech Industry’ and the deeper, shadowy forces driving it, particularly when it comes to ‘Transhumanism’ and the long-term goals and objectives of this movement, are well worth paying attention to and familiarising oneself with, if the reader has not done so already.

 

At this point, any act of deep conscious presence during the work day (or any other time of day), however much discipline it may require, is an act of courage and profound meaning, in the face of the onslaught of external forces that want to deprive humanity of its sovereign connection to its divine identity. Short breaks of silent meditation, mantra practice or slow mindful movement during the day, help to anchor ourselves in our own awareness and psyche, and help to repair the fraying/dissociating quality that can be hard to avoid in the midst of a busy day in the city or any other frenetic environment. 

 

Book-ending the day, with at least one hour after waking and one hour before sleeping, entirely free of screen use, and focused either on one’s spiritual practice, reading, or something else that is low-simulation and restful for the nervous system, is often recommended by coaches and self-help Gurus, and I would have to concur its immensely important to treat the time after rising and before sleeping as sacred. 

 

Retraining or de-conditioning oneself out of the habit of being identified with doing and phobic of being, or framed another way, the uncovering of one’s truer, deeper self beneath the survival personality, takes time, but is entirely possible. The need to find deeper meaning in one’s life, and the desire to contact something that is unconditional and entirely outside the demands, impositions and restrictions of the external world can provide the motivation to make such a change. Some people, even today, are the fortunate recipients of sudden, unbidden transformative spiritual epiphanies, that change their life trajectory forever. Some people’s perspective is changed through the use of plant medicines or psycho-active compounds, some have an experience that brings them into direct contact with the fact of their own mortality, but for many, the stubborn and persistent feeling that they should not have to feel that their worth and value is entirely defined by their external achievements is the catalyst. 

 

People who are high achievers, whose time is highly structured, who may have received conditional acceptance from important figures in their early life, who are used to the results of their time and energy being measured, quantified and compared, may see what I’m advocating for as regression into an unfocused, unproductive or lazy way of being. I would say in response that this is a misunderstanding of what really happens in the ’being’ state – which is not a passive, inert, inactive state; like sitting on the sofa for hours and consuming mindless content. The spiritual practices I mentioned earlier require willpower, discipline, mindfully bringing the mind back to the task at hand repeatedly, and result in a generally alert, vibrant state of presence. 

 

The drive to be doing and achieving is of course entirely healthy and necessary within certain contexts but as an underlying adaptation to life that drives the person through most of their waking hours, it can become tyrannical and deeply restrictive and limiting. Asking oneself ‘what am I trying to avoid’, or ‘what am I going to avoid by being busy right now?’ when inner restlessness compels us to start ‘doing’, in a way that feels compulsive, can be an interesting question to ask. From the perspective of Psychotherapy, the answer, if honest, will often be that some kind of affective state, i.e. a feeling, mood, emotion, memory or anxiety, is being avoided. 

 

Therapy can help a person learn the contours of their inner world, to befriend it and learn to sit comfortably in it, at deeper and deeper levels, with the guidance and assistance of a compassionate witness. Astrology can also help in this endeavour, as it shows us again and again that our life has sacred meaning, that the events of our lives are mirrored by the configurations of the cosmos, and this in itself points strongly to the universe being a type of learning environment for the soul. You may find my article ‘The therapeutic power of Astrology’ particularly relevant to this issue.