The Not-Enough Culture

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by Joseph Dispenza

What is needed isn't simply more food; it's a serious dialogue on the concept of "enough." - Jean-Michel Cousteau

Two apparently unrelated items floated by on the great river of the national news recently. At closer look, they were not only related, but actually two symptoms of the same alarming problem.

The first headline read, "The Fat War: Hope Amid the Harm," by Gina Kolata, about the growing girth of Americans. "More than half [of Americans] are now overweight and nearly 18 percent are obese -- more than 30 percent above ideal body weight," she says, citing new findings reported in the AMA Journal.

Ms. Kolata continues, "Every time it seems Americans can get no fatter, they gain a bit more weight. Experts foresee an ever-ballooning population gobbling ever greater qualities of food while getting ever less exercise."

The other headline concerned the new hit TV quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and its copycats, one titled, appropriately and unapologetically, "Greed." "If this country is so rich," asks Frank Rich in his New York Times column, "why are so many coveting the prosperity they already have?"*

Maureen Dowd noted in another New York Times commentary, this one about greed engendered by a ceiling-less stock market, "Once upon a time, money was an occasion for guilt. The robber barons who had exploited the poor would cleanse their lucre by buying great art or pouring it into charity; the Guilted Age. But now the only remorse that people feel about money is, why haven't they made more?" **

The answer to these questions about enough money -- and to the previous puzzle about enough food -- may be that we simply do not know when we are satisfied. Like those laboratory mice whose appetite switch was removed from their brains, and kept eating until they passed out, we may be missing a critical part of our cultural brain -- that part that declares, "Enough!"

Dr. Parcells used to say that we are a civilization that is "overfed -- and undernourished." She meant that we are engaged in a feeding frenzy on empty calories...and we overeat because we can't get nourished. Her entire approach to holistic healing was based on getting truly nourished. She did not stop with the nourishment of the physical body, either, but extended the notion of nourishment into the emotional, mental, and spiritual realms.

We appear to be a culture that is overfed on junk -- junk food, junk values, junk entertainment, junk philosophies -- and that is making us fatter and greedier. Fatter because the junk is rich in sugar, but devoid of qualities that will build health -- greedier because in a culture that defines itself in terms of consumption, we are forever craving the next thing.

Our "Not-Enough" culture encourages us to think of ourselves as incomplete in some fundamental way -- and to consider bringing things outside ourselves n so that we can be complete. To do that, we have to buy those things -- thus fulfilling our capitalist destiny. The trouble is, in this scenario, we can't ever be complete and full -- we can never have enough -- because if we do, the whole world we have created will end.

And so, perceiving that we never have enough of anything, we become restless and unhappy: we become professional complainers.

There must be a better way to live.

Simply saying no to the "I ain't got no satisfaction" anthem of our culture is a good way to start living differently...and more sensibly. Asking ourselves if we really need the next toy, the next dollar, or the next mouthful can bring about a dramatic personal healing in this area. And, since consciousness is one, whatever you and I hold in our individual consciousness is also held in collective consciousness. Things will change, if we change.

On the brink of the New Time that is coming upon us, let's consider being satisfied, totally and completely, right now and forever. The alternative is pretty scary. Not to acknowledge the fullness that we already enjoy is to dwell in the inferno of constant hunger and lack where even, to quote the title of a popular film, "The World is Not Enough."



* [http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/rich/112099rich.html] ** [http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/dowd/011200dowd.html]