BLOG: A turn of perspective

As a global citizen, I find it delightful that cultures from all around the world are advancing in terms of knowledge and technology. People have access to medicines and technologies to alleviate sufferings, and the span of all this progress has been a sparse few centuries.

Bygone Arabian traders would gaze up at the skies to find their way to markets, no doubt speculating on the nature of the Cosmos over a warm fire at night. Today, we are in space and speculating on the fundamental units of matter underpinning our conscious experience of what we call reality.

In a sense, time is speeding up.

Needless to say, even with this prodigious forward movement there is still a gamut of social and environmental issues. One might contend we have really gone nowhere and, in one way, it would seem we have not moved forward at all, but rather continued the same pattern, albeit expanded like a pearl necklace.

If we look around us with a lucid eye and sincerely leave out our presuppositions, we will notice vast inequalities, oppressions of all kinds, and environmental destruction. The latter is the most pertinent, since its eventuality affects all of our lives regardless of whether you’re rich or poor.

We are all born into a world with established codes, laws, and values. To survive (to a certain extent) we submit and accept the mores of our fathers and mothers. Because we wish to satiate our desires for material goods and to appear good in the eyes of our peers we continue believing what is right before us. Doubt is far from our minds and those who would call us out on our games are either ignored or actively demonized. There are reasons why authorities kill a Socrates or a Jesus – they uproot social customs and refuse to give force to established norms.

By destroying a part of the world we kill a part of ourselves. Through another’s oppression we too are oppressed. This is a wholly different way of conceiving of our self. Nonetheless, it is the proper course in this now globalized world. Our identity is vested in all people — action ripples outwards to all.

Due to fact we look narrowly at our individual pursuits and don’t look outwards to the greater problems of life, so much is left out of our consciousness. Why not bring into our identity the whole of the biological diversity existing right now? If you think about it, you are the result of all life; life combines elements and draws itself to greater complexities. The human being is the finest product of Nature.

I don’t see how man will persist into the future without changing how we view ourselves. Delusional frameworks from religions and states are causing serious trouble. In place of these it is best to align our perception with actual reality. What no longer serves us can be dispose of. The rules of game, i.e. how we encounter what we call a world, can be altered so as to bring about the greatest returns.

At some point there come a time to cast serious doubt on our values, our way of life. For much of the past, institutions have kept man from turning inwards so as to reevaluate what the present was. Many civilizations have perished because they did not overcome old values and ways of thinking. Presently, our entire civilization is under major threat from the very values that founded it.

Thankfully our cultural assumptions have no basis and are not eternal; they have no force other than what we give them. Only consciousness is forever. Once our minds no longer give these values force they dissolve on their own accord. In this way we too may shift the entire culture by not consuming its product, by not “playing out” the programming of our society.

Indeed we can change, and by changing our self we simultaneously change the entire whole. This is the name of the game — the part reflects the whole.