Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a
Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception
most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel
demeanor. He said: “They are always seeking something. What are
they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always
uneasy and restless. We don’t know what they want. We think they
are mad.”
The undercurrent of constant unease started long before the rise of
Western industrial civilization, of course, but in Western civilization,
which now covers almost the entire globe, including most of the East,
it manifests in an unprecedentedly acute form. It was already there at
the time of Jesus, and it was there six hundred years before that at
the time of Buddha, and long before that. Why are you always
anxious? Jesus asked his disciples. “Can anxious thought add a single
day to your life?” And the Buddha taught that the root of suffering is
to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically
connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our
dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, by the way, also recognized
the existence of this undercurrent of unease and wrote about it in his
book Civilization and Its Discontents, but he did not recognize the true
root of the unease and failed to realize that freedom from it is
possible. This collective dysfunction has created a very unhappy and
extraordinarily violent civilization that has become a threat not only to
itself but also to all life on the planet.