Stress, Overpopulation & Quantophrenia

One cannot fail to notice the worldwide preoccupation with figures, arithmetic, statistics, percentages: quantophrenia. Its adherents apparently love to compile lists and tables, illustrating specific problems of humanity in numerical form and they are keen to keep sending these lists out to others in an attempt to convince everyone that action must be taken. The recipients, however, are not nearly so interested in such lists; they are constantly being bombarded with details from almost every direction, and are mostly occupied just coping with their own problems.

There surely exists already a certain global awareness of that ever-growing, stifling pressure of people upon each other and the land, which we call overpopulation; what seems to be lacking is the kind of mutual acknowledgement that could create a respite, an easing up of the pressure, a psychic breathing space, an opportunity for a totally different way of being. However, it is a most difficult realisation that acknowledgement begins at home, that is, with awareness itself. Our creaturely pattern is always to reach out and expand, trying vainly to make more and more of the objective world acceptable to our own sensibility. Each of us must ourself be the much-needed transformation centre, because any attempt to transform externally simply compounds the pressure.