Well what it invokes is an ever greater distance
between those at the top
and those at the bottom of the social pyramid,
and an ever fiercer,
and an emergence of ever more brutal behaviour patterns.
Which is what we see happening.
Our world is getting uglier,
and meaner,
and more mean spirited by the moment
because those who have
are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
I mean, what we've gone in the last 12 years in this country
is a tremendous transfer of wealth
to the upper 2 percent of society,
and, concomitantly,
a tremendous spread of anxiety,
alienation,
and a dehumanizing of the entire social enterprise.
If we don't get hold of ourselves,
the next century,
most of the world is going to be a toxic desert,
and then here and there there will be
very well defended pleasure domes,
in which a very small number of incredibly wealthy people
will live out lives of utterly self-indulgent hedonistic fantasy,
in denial of the moral catastrophe that they participated in
in order to achieve that hedonic state of isolation.
That's clearly happening.
Metaphorically, that's what we have already.
Not to freak you out, but that's where we're sitting right now,
compared to Bosnia, and Haiti, and Somalia.
Well, neither create defensiveness
except in the presence of the ego.
In other words, what we have to do is teach people
to care for each other as a primary value.
Not something you do after you pay for your Mercedes, and all that.
But as a primary value.
We have to have community.
It's very simple.
We don't have community.
We have a free-for-all where the devil takes the hindmost,
the most brutal and ruthless among us rise to the top,
and everybody else has a foot on their neck.
We are now in a hell of a fix,
because we've waited so long to address these problems.
There is not now 
enough gold, aluminum, iron, so forth, in the planet
to raise everyone to a middle class standard
as it's enjoyed in southern California
and yet we have unleashed these expectations in everyone
by flagellating people with images of material wealth and comfort.
We must re-empower the individual
and the quality of individual experience.
In other words, you have to convince somebody
that you are a richer person on five grams of Psilocybin
than you are if you live in a five million dollar house
and are spending fifty thousand dollars a year on psychotherapy
cause you're miserable, you see.
We have allowed ourselves to be tremendously disempowered
by allowing our values to shift toward the material domain.
You can't take it with you, folks.
But the soul is the vehicle that you do take with you
into whatever dimensions of continuity exist beyond this mortal coil.
So, instead of balancing and replacing the tyres on your Porsche,
you should be balancing and replacing the tyres on your after-death vehicle.
After all, that's the one that's going to have to serve you well in the clinches, you see.
