The World is Only as Mad as How You See it

Perhaps you read this title and thought, what’s this guy on about? Is he just trying to be provocative and controversial? Really I’m not, but let me explain a bit about what I mean here and hopefully earn your trust on this one!

There’s a lot of chatter around these days that the “world has gone mad”, or that things are getting worse not better all the time. It’s easy to get drawn into this way of thinking for a number of reasons, including the fact that we are given this message through social media and our news outlets all the time.

But determining if its actually true is much more difficult and not really the point of this discussion anyway.

It’s more about our individual viewpoint on the issue and how we affect the world around us.

I’m obviously not saying that you as an individual control how all the things happen in the world just by looking at them. No one person has that kind of power (luckily!). But as a collective we do influence each other, through our thoughts and actions. Every time you look lovingly at another person, or think highly of someone, or do something positive in the world, that affects your energy and that of the people around you.

It spreads from one person to the next, so in that way your way of seeing the world does have an effect that is greater than what you might think at first.

The other meaning in this title comes down to how you feel about your own life and your place in the world. Most of what actually makes up our lives: the day to day activities we take part in, our time at home with our families, even our jobs, are generally fairly insulated from “the madness” that we keep being told about. In fact it’s mostly just the chatter about the fact that it exists that has any direct influence on our lives. If you disconnect from that chatter, you may find that life seems better all of a sudden.

Our news media is full of sensational stories that are meant to titillate and provoke, and keep your attention as long as possible. Most of social media is designed the same way. Everyone is fighting for your attention.

Now you may argue that its important to be connected into what’s happening in the world. And that is true, but I would argue that the method of connection is key. Connecting into the sensational, the negative, is not helpful. Fostering connection through real social relationships and community, building strength through becoming more conscious of our connections to each other at a deeper level, connections that are often ignored. This is where we will truly discover what is happening in the world. This is where we will each stop playing a part in perpetuating the “madness”.

This madness we keep hearing about isn’t a permanent fixture of humanity. It isn’t inevitable and it isn’t our true nature. It can be reduced and then eliminated over time. That process starts with each one of us.

And its really quite simple. Think, act and be in a place of integrity. Be authentic and honourable in everything you do, say and think.

Your life will improve and then the lives of those around you will improve. And on it will go.

Do We Have the Capacity to Really Know Truth?

I was recently going through one of my notebooks and came across something I wrote in September of 2021. I’m intrigued by my motivations for writing it at that time and the place I was in. I agree with much of it still but I’m not sure I would write it in this way today. I’d like to share it with you here:

Humans have a tendency to believe that what we create is what is real, what is truth. But this is arbitrary. Is is only what we have decided should happen, not ultimately truth or ultimately valid necessarily.

We also tend to overestimate our worth in our pursuit of correcting past wrongs. We often believe that any issue that we encounter can be solved by creating or engineering something new, applying it to the problematic situation and improving it. Generally this approach involves adding a new layer to the issue – the corrective layer. Unfortunately these approaches often only provide a partial or temporary solution, and even more often end up having unintended consequences or side effects that can’t be seen initially. Our limited perspective on long-term trends allows us to overlook these issues and assume that our fix is more beneficial than any future problems it might cause. But this is human folly – arrogance and ego at its worst.

As for truth, one should wonder if humans even have the capacity to grasp ultimate truth, given our propensity to invent, promote, instill and believe whatever we think is best for society, or so we would be lead to believe. But there are many layers to this, built up over centuries. All of them “discovered” or invented by humans. There is no way to know for sure which of those layers contain “truth”, given that each is successively added and “discovered” assuming that the prior knowledge that informed it is based on truth. To unravel this you would have to go right back to the beginning of time, assuming there is a beginning to go to. Its an impossibility wrapped in unknowns. So all we have is what we have. We have to continue on in our arbitrary framework. But there is great value in recognizing that none of it is fully true in the purest sense. Our minds should be open to ideas that don’t fit today’s version of reality yet. We should listen to our bodies and let them receive our birth rite – the ability to access a higher level of consciousness that could help us fill in the pieces that may be missing from what we perceive as “reality”. Pieces that, when gathered, could provide a fuller picture, a more complete vision of humanity and earth working as a unified force, instead of at odds with each other. That consciousness will help us make changes that are at the root of issues plaguing the world – war, climate, medical, hunger, etc. Not adding more stop-gap “solutions” but restructuring everything in a way that promotes harmonious living at its root.

This will be a sea change, societally, economically, even physically within our bodies. Nothing less will be enough to continue human life on earth for the longer term.

How To Eliminate War

Right now war is on the minds of many, as Russia continues attacks on Ukraine. At this point in time it seems the majority wish that war wasn’t happening. That peace could be restored between countries. A desire for safety and the well being of others is a natural human tendency, and a desirable goal that the vast majority of people have.

So then, why do we have war? It’s been around as long as people have been on this earth. Despite our perceived level of sophistication and understanding of ourselves through scientific discovery and spiritual awareness, we still repeat this barbaric act of fighting and killing our fellow humans.

In order to understand it from where we are now, we have to look back at the patterns throughout history. Over and over conflict and war has occurred. Every time there is a war an eventual agreement to stop fighting occurs and there is peace for a while. And then tensions flare up again and the process repeats. The players and countries are often different, but the general process is the same.

Each time conflict arises there are standard elements in place. Perceived threats from an outside party (triggered by the fears found deep inside each of us), desire for power and control (over people, resources, land, etc.), and greed (money and related acquisitions). This pattern repeats over and over. War, temporary peace, escalation of conflicts, and back to war.

So why does it keep repeating if the majority, at least on the surface level, desire peace? There are many factors at play, but I believe that most of them can be traced back to something that seems pretty simple on the surface, but is very difficult to root out: fear. Humans as a species have endured numerous hardships and challenges throughout history, and because of this many fears have been buried deep in our psyches. We’ve dealt with natural disasters, food shortages, attacks from wild animals, violence, intolerance and so much more.

These fears that we have in our subconscious drive many of our behaviours. Everything from the clothing we wear – often chosen so we fit in with others (fear of rejection), to our choice of and loyal devotion to our favourite sports team (fear of being alone). It affects our obsession with feeling physical security as well – through our use of police, military, airport checks, over-protective parenting, even enforced vaccination. We want to feel safe at any cost.

So how do we move past this pattern of war? How do we relieve ourselves of fear and work towards a world that is generally peaceful? We need to stop the cycle of fear. This is easier said than done, given our turbulent history as outlined above, and how that continues to inform our behaviour. But I believe there is a big item that needs to be addressed at this point in time. We need to take attention away from events and activities that glorify and celebrate the fighting of wars. This includes a more balanced look at the history of war and further studying the effects it has had on the collective consciousness of humanity.

Our tendency is to look at each war, each battle, individually and justify the actions based simply on the visible and reported results. In general the stated goal of war is often in making sure someone or some country gets into line and ultimately ensuring we maintain our “freedom”. But if we look at it from a much higher level viewpoint, you start to see the collective trauma that the human race suffers each time there is fighting to that degree. That trauma builds up in every person on earth, adding to our inner fears, and yes, eventually leading to another war at some future time. Ironically we also actually lose freedom due to this build up of internal fear.

Because of this view that most wars successfully achieved their goals and were necessary to maintain world balance, we continue to celebrate the heroes and glorify past wars. We remember those who fought courageously. Don’t get me wrong, those soldiers were courageous individually, putting themselves in danger for what they believed was the higher good. But the countries fighting the wars were not acting in the most courageous of manners. The act of fighting a war itself increases the probability of future conflicts. If the ultimate goal of humanity is indeed to create sustainable peace then the courageous approach would be to not engage in fighting. To cease activities that add to the collective fear within all humans.

Now you may be thinking, but if we don’t fight wars we’ll end up being dominated by evil world leaders who must be stopped somehow. Again we need to step back from looking at an individual time-frame in history and ask ourselves, how did a particular person end up becoming an “evil world leader”? What is it about that person that made or makes them act that way? And it comes back to what we’ve already discussed – fear. A deep seated fear inside the person, motivating them to react in a way that quells their fear. And where did that fear come from? From the collective experience of people who came before them who had fears from experiencing terrible things, such as war. Trauma is passed from generation to generation, in the actions of people and directly through their DNA.

To break the cycle of war and fear, we must remove that trauma and fear from the psyche of the people. Remove it from the collective consciousness of humanity. A start would be a re-framing of the outcomes of past war events, with particular focus on the trauma that they perpetuate within humanity, and their role in continuing the cycle of future violence.

Additionally the growth in numbers of people exploring meditation, energy healing and related modalities will help in this process of rooting out the fear within us and discovering higher level vibrations within ourselves. This is generally known as raising consciousness, and each person that travels this path helps raise the collective consciousness and replaces fear with much more positive and nurturing energy.

Ultimately if we reduce the collective fear of humans, we reduce many other things in each individual as well:
– fear of lack of resources (food and money scarcity leading to greed)
– fear of rejection (aggression, anxiety)
– fear of people who are different than us (racism, homophobia, intolerance)

With these changes we can reduce and eventually eliminate these military conflicts. Well balanced people and societies do not require acts of dominance over others. Its not something they would even think of or consider as an option.