Integral Wisdom Activist

The world as we know it, is mad and getting madder. It seems our collective ego has finally caught up with us. Our endless fascination only with materialism, with its reverence for the individual false self, and all it entails, including the impossible programmes for happiness that the false self engenders, is affecting the very face of planet earth.

And may I suggest that it’s our belief that we are separated from everything and everyone else around us that has led us to this moment of collective desperation.

We are facing horrendously complex political realities that are costing lives in wars and further entrenching or in the case of the young, building hatred and fear of neighbour.

Our polarised and paralysed political ideologies keep us divided, vilifying those on the left or right, instead of working together to find workable solutions of which we are eminently capable.

We are facing what seems like insurmountable problems with more and more climate catastrophes and their fallout both local and global, including despair for future, homelessness and mass migration for both people and animals.

Whether we choose to see it or not, the world is facing its own dark night, its moment of surrender where a collective ‘Help’ seems the smartest and most profound prayer we can utter on a minute by minute basis.

As we navigate the unknown waters, the big question now on our lips surely has to be – are we going to continue acting like idiots telling ourselves the same lies that got us here in the first place?

Do we continue on an endless path of denial and greed, with our addiction to fossil fuel, ravaging what’s left of our precious resources, burying our ideological heads in the sand, as we witness almost monthly superstorms, flooding, droughts, crumbling support systems?

Are we concerned about the implications of failing health care on our children and older population? Do we turn a blind eye to the corporate greed that results in untold wealth concentrated in the top two or three percent of society while fifty percent are in need? Do we REALLY want to keep doing this to ourselves??Are we going to refuse to believe that we can get through this with the wisdom our collective minds can harness? We powerful humans who are capable of moving mountains withe right kind of faith.

I don’t know about you but I intuitively feel that we are now facing a very existential choice of ‘service to self’ or ‘service to others.’

If you are interested in taking the service to self path then I suggest you scroll on. There’s nothing for you here.

I can only aspire to taking the path of the open heart. And knowing myself fairly well, I have no illusions about how much daily work is required to keep the energy flowing to an open heart with so many daily triggers coming my way.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the problems we face today both on a global and personal scale have largely been caused by a collective closed heart. But the bottom line us that in order to keep our hearts open we have to see the people around us as literally, not metaphorically, the same as ourselves. There IS no separate self. The Golden Rule is not only a moral precept . It’s a universal Spiritual law. Most folk might find that a bit of a stretch in our times.,

But the quickest and most effective way to keep an open heart is to love your neighbour as yourself.

How that is done requires an intensely personal daily response from each of us and it’s our life’s work. In my view it’s why we’re here, to learn to love one another. I don’t think we can underestimate its importance.

But perhaps we might begin by getting to know ourselves because until we know our essential nature we can’t hope to understand our neighbour. We are caked equally to contemplation and action. The firmer will help us to know ourselves as the latter will help us to know our neighbour.

More to follow…….