The Crisis of the Human Mind
Many would argue that in order to change the world and bring about peace we need to fight harder against our perceived enemies. Fighting for peace is like shouting for silence! it just creates more of what you don't want.
These days there is a war against everything, a war against terror, a war against disease, a war against hunger. Every war is actually a war against ourselves.
The fight is part of a collective delusion. We say that we want peace, but we continue to elect leaders who engage in wars. We lie to our selves saying that we are for human rights, but continue to buy products made in sweatshops. We say we want clean air, but we continue to pollute. We want science to cure us of cancer but won't change the self-destructive habitual behaviors that make us more likely to be sick. We delude ourselves that we are promoting a better life.
We don't want to see our hidden parts that are condoning suffering, the belief that we can win a war against cancer, hunger, terror or any enemy that was created by our own thinking and behavior, lets us continue to delude ourselves that we don't have to change the way that we operate on this planet.
The inner world is where the change must first take place. Only when we feel the spiral of life within will the outer world come into alignment with the absolute principle underlying the universe. Until then anything we do will add to the chaos created by the mind.
War and peace arise together in an endless dance, they are a continuum. One half cannot exist without the other, just as light cannot exist without dark, up cannot exist without down. The world seems to want light without darkness, fullness without emptiness, happiness without sadness.
The more the mind gets involved the more fragmented the world becomes. Every solution that comes from the egoic mind is driven by the idea that there is a problem, and the solution becomes an even greater problem than what was trying to solve. What you resist persists!
Human ingenuity creates new antibiotics only to find nature getting more cunning as bacteria gets stronger. Despite our best effort in the ongoing fight, the prevalence of cancer is actually increasing, the number of hungry people in the world steadily grows, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide continues to rise.
What's wrong with our approach?!
Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice from Gothe's poem, we have taken hold of a great power, but we don't have the wisdom to wield it.
The problem is that we do not understand the tool that we are using, we do not understand the human mind and its proper role and purpose.
The crisis is born of the limited conditioned way in which we think, the way we feel and experience life. Our rationalism has robbed us of our ability to recognize and experience the wisdom of many ancient cultures.
Our egoic thinking has robbed us of the ability to feel the depth and profound sacredness of life, the numinosity of life, and to realize entirely different levels of consciousness, which are now lost to humanity.
Things may look bleak, but the future is open and up for invention.
We mistakenly treat the future as something to prepare for. Companies and governments hire scenario planners to lay out the future landscape as if it were a static phenomenon. The best they can hope for is to be ready for what is going to happen.
The future is not something we arrive at so much as something we create through our actions in the present. Even the weather, at this point, is subject to the choices we make today about energy, consumption, and waste.
The future is less a noun than a verb, a thing we do. We can futurize manipulatively, keeping ourselves distracted from the power in the present and the connection to the past. This alienates us from our history and our core values.
Or we can use the idea of the future more constructively, as an exercise in the creation and transmission of values over time. This is the role of storytelling, aesthetics, song, and poetry.
Art and culture give us a way to retrieve our lost ideals, actively connect to others, travel in time, communicate beyond words, and practice the hard work of participatory reality creation.
There is only one thing going on here. As much as we think we're separate individuals, we're wired from birth to share, bond, learn from, and even heal one another. We, humans, are all part of the same collective nervous system. This is not a philosophical conviction but rather an increasingly accepted biological fact.
We can not go it alone, even if we wanted to. The only way to heal is by connecting to someone else. This also means that when one of us is disturbed, confused, violent, or oppressed, the rest of us are, too. We can not leave anyone behind or none of us really makes it to wherever we think we are going. And we can not stay confused and depressed ourselves without confusing and depressing everyone who is connected to us.
This is a team sport...