En mass we are like deer in the headlights about to be run over by events that we have no control over. It is really not a fair situation with consequences raining down pretty much on everyone without much sensitivity to guilt or innocence. Finally we will begin to see that we are all one in reality and that whatever we have allowed to be done to one is going to be done to all. Perhaps we will be driven down to the level where we will finally understand the depth of the Russian soul, which knows quite a bit about human suffering.
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature and to found that edifice on its un-avenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When we separate from the pain of one person we separate from the pain of all people, and we separate from our hearts that feels the pain. The political thrust to divide and conquer has worked its way down to the common folk of the world whose communal tribal roots have been ripped asunder. Instead of working together in community, individualism and separatism rule the day with a massive result of producing a race of people who are unable to feel much of anything for the plight of others. Television has been an extraordinary instrument in this regard and the elite have used it ruthlessly as a weapon against the soul of humanity.
There are many places we can look to see beings suffering at the hands of others. One place close to home is the war on drugs. Clive Crook writes, “How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes and in practice is a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.”
One need look no further than this war to see the need for civilization collapse to bring down the high and mighty who have felt the need to destroy millions of lives. Another place Americans can look is how they treat their own military personal. “We’re brutally and cold-bloodedly sacrificing the psychological well-being of these men and women,” writes Bob Herbert for the New York Times as he describes the conditions of fighting the stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that is being fought for what reason?
War conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. – Major General Smedley Butler
“War is a racket. It always has been. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes,” wrote General Butler who clearly laid out the costs, “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”
There is no true humanity in a corporate identity, only a machine for takeover and expansion as most of the controllers that operate the machine guarantee themselves ever expanding revenue to enrich themselves. Most governments today are operating under a systematic corporate philosophy of doing harm to others for the sake of profit. In the next chapter Psychopathic Tendencies we take a close look at how bad, how cold, how brutally mean spirited the people running corporations and thus governments can be.
Dostoyevsky’s prose directs us to an alien place, which has a lot to do with our ability and capacity to feel empathy for the suffering of others. This is the essence of what Dostoyevsky is trying to communicate. We cannot separate from our brothers and ignore their suffering and be really happy or at peace with our selves. We cannot build a civilization that depends on the suffering of people even if those people are on the other side of the world. But that is exactly what we have done with the principle people being the English and Americans with their empires. Sure before there were the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese and certainly the Germans have never been considered saints and throughout history leaders have universally planned and plotted, plundered and pillaged and wrought ruin on humanity. The war on drugs brings this terror right into our neighborhoods.
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What Dostoyevsky is hinting at here is a world shattering, world transforming all consuming love of the whole. Try introducing such an idea to a person in love with power over others and the financial return that it brings. In the end all actions which are not for the good of the whole will bring pain. For the rich and powerful perhaps consequence returns unexpectedly in the suicide of a son or daughter who just cannot stand the lonely or superficial life of the rich. Living with body guards certainly is not fun but those long stretch armor plated limousines seem to console the elite as do the high walls and electrified fences and attack dogs.
Dostoyevsky, whose soul seems to have known no bounds described the nature of change in man needed to bring about a just sustainable civilization when he said, “All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.” And how do we become angels? Well certainly the first things angels know something about is listening.
To listen is to suffer because we do not want to listen to anything that might require a change. To listen is to change.We cannot change without listening. Listening implies a change.We need to change just to listen.
This prose from my HeartHealth book implies a great deal. It ties listening, suffering and change into a tight mathematical dictum. Looking deeply we can see that people escape suffering by not listening. We need to suffer though for the ultimate suffering is not being able to suffer on behalf of the tiny creatures that Dostoyevsky writes about. We really don’t get it though and it is hard to see that our inability, resistance and refusal to suffer (have empathy and compassion) on behalf of others cuts like a knife into our own heart and its ability to feel even for oneself and our own loved ones.
When we lose our capacity to listen we lose our capacity to love for listening is love in action.
There is a chapter in this book called Listening Psychology and it holds the key to developing a race of compassionate empathetic beings that will not let psychopathic men and woman run the world. There is no political or economic system that will bring justice and correct decision making to humanity unless we can learn how to create angels and saints on a regular basis. What we are doing with our educational system is obviously not doing the job.
If there is one positive about a civilization collapse it would be the destruction of all the terrible wrongs being done. Something positive might possibly happen if the wrong way falls completely on its ass allowing us finally to see that the only sane way to go is the right way to go. Since we cannot even begin to see or understand this we have a long way to fall and there is no insurance that we will ever get it right.
Ego Bubbles and Structure
The ego bubble is our self sense and is most painfully experienced as self obsession and self consciousness. It is also experienced as our sense of separation for it defines the difference between what we consider us and not us. The mind, which is the seat of the ego, runs around like a dog chasing its own tail, with one thought leading to another on and on in a sequence or river of thought that does not stop. Basically the mind listens to itself drowning out all else. When we listen to another the loud radio of our own mind distorts just about everything so we can’t really listen.
Eckhart Tolle wrote that, “The structure of the ego is the same in all things; I am right you are wrong (you must/have got to do this/it must be done this way) The need to look superior in the eyes of others (look what I can do better you can’t do that/look at me see what I can do) The need for more (always wanting something more/something else). An example of ego is The British Empire, I am right you are wrong, the need to look superior in the eyes of others, the need for more. Another example is Adolph Hitler the biggest ego the world has known, I am right you are wrong, the need to look superior in the eyes of others, the need for more, of course Hitler never had enough he wanted the world. The ego gets bigger when other people suffer, so the more suffering Hitler caused the bigger the ego got. Pol Pot killed everyone that wore glasses because, I am right, you are wrong.”
Tolle continued saying, “Why do you think there are so many accidents/deaths on our roads? The need look superior in the eyes of others (look what I can do), I am right you are wrong (I can drink and drive), and of course never enough or always wanting more (lets go faster/further). The ego of course gets bigger and bigger and feeds off others suffering, and is therefore always negative. The ego therefore is clearly pathological it is insanity itself. If the history of humanity were to be given a clinical diagnosis, this is how it would read: Chronic paranoid delusions of grandeur with the pathological propensity to commit mass murder with occasional rare lucid intervals. You can sense the truth in this you know you can, recognize the ego in yourself and others. The good news is of course, once insanity is recognized, it ceases to be insanity.”
Popping Ego Bubbles with Creative Conflict
Into the Ashes introduces a process called Creative Conflict, whose main technique is called mirroring (listening). Virtually no one wants to bother with Creative Conflict (profound communication and listening training) so we will have conflict – but it will not be creative – and that is what civilization collapse is on a huge scale, a massive conglomerate of unresolved conflicts coming crashing down on the collective.
I am one of the last custodians of Creative Conflict and through the years I have met virtually no one who has the inclination to work on the level of communication and conflict resolution that Creative Conflict demands. Our most urgent need is a system of conflict resolution and this is needed for harmony not only in family life but in all life. When communication breaks down violent emotions arise and when taken to an extreme physical hurt manifests in very abusive and violent forms. It is the reason families are actually the most dangerous place for women and children to be for it is there where we find the most breakdowns of communication and resultant violence.
Creative Conflict is not like human arbitration and other conflict resolution strategies you will find on the Internet which do not call into question the tendency each and every one of us has to look out for our own interest and to win out over or at the expense of others. Most of our present forms of conflict resolution “do little more than compromise, adjudicate, de-polarize sides, placate egos, or allow people to have a sounding board or pressure-relief valve”, writes Christopher Hills who created the process in the early seventies.
What Hills realized many years ago is that we needed a method that would resolve conflict, not by patching things up at the surface level after conflict had already arisen, but a method that would confront the roots of conflict that we find in the human ego (self sense). Creative Conflict has as its goal a real change in the ego structure in the people who practice it; and that is why it has been shunned so absolutely. We have become that selfish, that egotistical, that disinterested in real movements of being that challenge us in ways that bring us into direct confrontation not only with our own dark side and nature but the dark side of our society and institutions.
If we are going to ever rise out of the ashes like the Phoenix it’s going to be us pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps by living life with ego penetrating conflict resolution in heart and mind. Since we have not found the will to do any of this it’s a civilization collapse that will do the job of sweeping away all the garbage that does not work and that hurts people everywhere. Civilization will continue to collapse up to some unknown point, until people all over the world understand that conflict begins with us, with our philosophy of self, with our self-images and self concepts and with our shear inability to listen and get into the worlds of others at any depth of being.
We will refuse to learn to listen and certainly our leaders and top elitists would rather die and promote massive conflicts, wars and civil repression than learn to listen. So our population will be reduced in the end because of our own stupidity, pigheaded stubbornness and cowardice to learn how to become angels. The necessary changes, including in religion, are so profound it will be a miracle if we ever come out of the ashes.
There are many at the top that have no intention of ever going into the ashes and are planning their lives accordingly. They have the power and money to build castle like compounds or burrow underground and if all the rest of us go to hell so what. We have heard for decades about those who deliberately want to reduce the herd of humanity down to something more manageable and they are going to do their best to do that as we saw in the chapter Assault on Humanity.
This book will be talking about small group consciousness because that is what those who want to survive are going to need to learn. The end result of a small group of people practicing something like Creative Conflict is a tight knit group of people dedicated to the wellbeing of all its members. A group of people with the same purpose working together is a formidable force and offers a power of protection money will never afford.
What few of us are ready for is the pace at which this will all unfold. Between now and the year 2012 (See Mayan Prophecies) we can be assured that the world we know will have metamorphosed into something radically different and that the growing pains will be off the Richter scale.
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