Agenda For A New Economy by David Korten - The Face Before I Was Born By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

More than half of Agenda For A New Economy is devoted to a review of Wall street economics and its definition of wealth, which Korten calls phantom wealth Not to put too fine a gloss on it, you eventually find it impossible to fault his thesis that Wall Street is a giant casino that runs on an amoral, bottom-line, devil-take-the-hindmost system that is cannibalizing the planet.

As he traces the branches down to the roots of this giant organism, developing a theme of an irredeemably corrupt system run amuck, I began to think that whatever remedies he might propose can"t possibly be adequate to the task of turning around this giant Titanic we"re all riding on.

Not that that"s any reason not to make every effort, and to that end he gives resources to numerous grass roots organizations across America that are not waiting for The Government to do the right thing. Korten is an economist and systems analyst, so of course he proposes revamping everything from banks and the function of money to land use and how cities are laid out and lived in.

He describes a future world in which crime is practically nonexistent, where local communities are vibrant and sustainable, and where Wall Street is out of business. I, along with millions of others would like to see this world, but unfortunately you can"t just buy a ticket; you have to create it where you are.

For me at least, this line of thought brings up a nagging question. Isn"t this dystopia that we all decry one we ourselves have created out of human psycho-spiritual structures that are virtually invisible to us? Obviously so. We didn"t set out to create an entropic world.

We went merrily forward to this sorry pass in great optimism, confident of a vision that somehow blissfully omitted any web of life issues. Which leads me to wonder if some inner work isn"t in order, especially since what we see manifest in our contemporary world took centuries of preparation in the psyche.

Or, I could pose the question this way: will inner forces we don"t have any control over subvert our efforts to create a better world in the same way they have done till now, and for the same reasons?

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi/Jungian mystic who approaches this problem from the opposite pole, using dream work and active imagination to connect with archetypal energies that he says are both in the psyche and in the world.

He discusses how we in the West have polluted and degraded our inner world, and the fact that we don"t even notice points to the crux of the issue. How will we fashion a life of meaning, how will we savor the magic and wonder of creation, if we see the world as only a collection of exterior entities needing nothing more than rational organization?

We no longer talk to the Gods, nor they to us. That God is dead meme really means our intuitive right-brained mind is dead, leaving us with a left-brained rationality that is wholly inadequate to the task of creating a meaningful life.

Reading these two authors back-to-back throws a light on two sharply contrasting understandings of the problems facing us and what to do about them. David Korten lays out a very cogent and well constructed argument detailing how we got here and how we can find the exit to a better, more sustainable world. His descriptions definitely ring a bell. There"s no question that the economic systems ruling our lives are crazy and have to be changed, but therein lies the rub---how? How do we get a grip on the forces at work here? I don"t think he speaks to the shadow forces in the collective that will not be in the least amenable to re-organization along more sensible lines.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, on the other hand, starts at the real foundation of this catastrophe, the human mind and its relationship to archetypal energies. He insists that only when real dialogue is re-established with these forces will we be able to truly heal the world, and since that healing is from the inside out, it will be sustainable in the true sense of the word.

Vaughan-Lee is proposing, not just an introvert"s theory of the value of an inner life, but a mystic"s insights into the human heart and soul. He offers news from forgotten strata of the mind and their part to play in this dance of life, and points to rich and abundant springs of the unconscious that have dried up, leaving us with a desperate materialism.

How much traction he can get in such a left-brained, rationalist, masculine oriented culture is something I wonder about, but I do agree that since America is the biggest locomotive of global destruction, working here is most urgent.