The Wisdom to Know the Difference

I have been working a great deal on the way in which the affairs of global world are interacting with our own personal quality of life. Patriarchy itself has contributed enormously to the neuronets our brains carry, that inform the bias of the decisions we make unconsciously. As a result, the fear we all live with is accelerated by the ensuing crises that have come out of a linear world view. There are many layers to what is affecting our psyche, many of which are not directly of our choosing.  As I wrote in a previous article, it’s becoming more and more important to be able to differentiate between what is ours to be responsible for and what is not.

 Initially, I had not put together the reality that all we are experiencing today has its genesis in the history of the political movement towards power consolidation. Why is this important to self-growth? It’s essential that we are able to see the layers that are affecting us, in order to get to those that we can actually change now. That can change with time and experience; however, we must be able to know our current limitations as well as what is possible. There is a wise saying that I think came out of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement I have heard call the AA Prayer. I’m not good at quoting it but it goes something like this.

God give me the Courage to change the things I can.

The Serenity to Accept the things I can’t.

And the Wisdom to know the difference.

 As a methodology of life its practicality is unrivaled. We all need this set of tools to negotiate our way through the choosing/acting process which underpins everything in our life. My job is to help people decipher the responsibility they have to themselves, as opposed to the duty our culture imposes on them to their detriment. It is this fact that has led me into the explorations I have been doing into this multiple strata of affects we have operating on us all the time.

Most of us have grown up in some overarching semblance of democracy. Its tenets are so interwoven with our psyche that it’s hard to realise how much our thinking unconsciously reflects it. Winston Churchill once iterated that whilst Democracy is not perfect, its better than the alternative. As a result, we have fought and spent, and propagandized, and trusted that what we have been told is the truth. We have seen other forms of political systems as draconian compared with our holy grail. And in so many ways its true. What we have never had adequately explained to us, is that Democracy depends on all the other systems in the world to keep it viable. In a great article by Bayo Akomolafe I read recently, he reiterates that the people of the democratic world have relied heavily on resources from the whole world to make its existence viable. We have become accustomed to believing that we can have it all, however, to get it all, we have had to take it all. Because Democracy is not the rule of the People by the People for the People that we have been led to believe. Underpinning it is a system called capitalism, which is another name for trade, with the extension of resource stealing.

In order to make profit, capitalism has developed a strategy of seeking out those that have not been associated with its rules, encouraging those countries to sell cheaply, so that the trader can sell on to the Democratic population at a much higher price. Business as usual. But over time, the resources that have fed capitalism have been exhausted. Is it China that’s exhausted it? Or Russia? India Perhaps? No, it’s the democratic capitalist countries. But wait. Not all of us in the West have been doing that. Most of us over the centuries have also been relatively poor. Theres a reason for that too. All the resources from third world countries (an American invention thought up after the war), still had to be processed by cheap labour so that the bulk of the profit went to the traders.

But the neuronets that we were all infected with assured us that we were the best and brightest, and even though we were poor, we still had it better than the rest. As long as we could enjoy tea from China or India occasionally, we were living the life of freedom. The Empires, that our forefathers were so proud of, fought like hell to make sure we didn’t get too much, unless it to was going into their coffers. But we were blissfully ignorant of where it all came from. The truth never came out. We had no idea why the countries like India revolted and threw us out.

But it’s out now. We were living on stolen goods. No wonder the rest of the world sees us as Imperialist robbers. The reality is that all the resources we have been stealing are fast running out. Search as we might for oil and gas among other things, it’s down to the dregs, and while there will always be people with their head in the sand, its plain for all to see that the dream is about to end. There is no more that we can buy for beads and sell to those back home. No wonder we are scared, even though we may not realise it. But our feelings that are geared to our survival, personally as well as globally, are picking up on the collective energy field, and telling us its not looking good. Indeed, telling us that even though we had little idea for all these centuries that we were being sold down the river, we need to make some different choices now.

In the beginning of my sessions, I create sacred space by casting a circle, and setting up the Medecine Wheel, calling in Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Each element symbolic of a way of being. I explain that each speaks to a process everything in the material world, humans included, must go through. First is the potential that comes from the North representing fire as it points towards the equator (in the Northern Hemisphere this is reversed, and fire becomes the South for the same reason). Potential is unlimited, being the raw material that allows for the creation of everything. The South represents the Earth, where the potential is eternally received, as it drips down, providing us with the beginnings of our physical reality. Only, however, does this occur if it is chosen and acted on, grounding it into this time/space reality. This then must be followed by patiently waiting, as the fruits of our choosing and acting process show up over time. This is the road we have been on since the beginning, making this physical world into a reality one step at a time. All choices require the waiting process while the ingredients are mixed together by the fabric of the Universe, dished up to us at a later date. Sometimes quickly, but more often long enough for us to forget that we chose it.

This is where we are currently at. The choices that the collective has made are now being visited by the consequences. We are not victims. More like innocent teenagers with a taste for freedom. But adolescence is the most dangerous time we have to live through, as many of our unsuspected choices come back to bite us. We did not know, but they’re here, nevertheless. On the Wheel of Life, this is the time for the Mind in the East, the air element. Now it’s time not to bemoan, but to learn wisdom from what we have created. Because we did create it, every bit of it. It was not wrong, but all things can go wrong if we do not learn from those past choices. If we repeat them again and again. It’s important that we see what’s happened to the Mind. Rather than being the holder of wisdom for us, as we unpack the life lessons our creativity has created for us to grow, it has been co-opted by our cultures to keep us chained to the wheel of commerce. Our lives have been crafted to believe the rhetoric of the powers that be and not question or think for ourselves. This has turned us, like the cattle that we raise for the system, into units of production on a conveyor belt of working or the system rather than creating for our lives. individually and collectively.

So, whether we realise it or not, we are carrying those choices in the warp and weft of life on Earth right now. We know we have messed up unless we are in total denial. But it’s not time to flail around in regret. We have to accept that which we cannot change. But there is a whole lot that we can, each of us individually. Now we know the consequences there is some time to reflect, and take new paths, collectively and personally. We just have to have the courage. We have to know what we can change and what we cannot, or we are on a fool’s errand. In taking the action we will come to know the wisdom, one way or another. In so doing we can begin to change one thing that is definitely within our power to change: our Mind. We can free it of the programming by questioning where the information it dishes up comes from.

But where do we get the information that really speaks to our survival on all levels? That’s the realm of the West, the symbolic home of all things that flow, unlike the stagnation of the fixed cultural mind. The water of the West represents our Feeling channel: everything from our physical senses, through to our deepest intuitive and instinctual knowing, our inspirations, and possibilities. The feelings are the true deeper self we are born with. Indeed, all animals are born with, and we are indeed animals. It is this that keeps us alive, not the economy. I have often asked clients what they would do if they woke up one morning and their entire world had changed. This is what happened to the people of the Ukraine, the Gazan, the French when the Nazi soldiers marched in during the wars. What would help us when all our existing structures failed? Our instincts. We would have to feel our way with new information coming in all the time. We could not rely on what our programmed mind told us because it would have no experience of what was happening now.

This is where we are globally right now. The old ways are no longer viable. Though they seem to still apply, it is only temporary until the consequences arrive. This is true for us all, all the time. It looks as though life will just keep chugging on as it always has. Until it doesn’t anymore. But underneath the stagnating mind, the feelings are always talking to us from the body, They have known for a long time that things need to change, but in our implanted denial we refuse to listen to them. That means a crisis is on the way. But if we chose to step away from listening to the programming (which actually is in conflict with the feelings producing anxiety) we will see how we need to proceed and the new choices that are ours to make.

Because most of this labyrinthine structure our minds we have come to call Life is indeed, now anyway, out of our hands. Just as we have carried these ways into adulthood, the dysfunctions bequeathed to us from generations before, are held within the species as a whole. It isn’t about fault. It’s about the importance of learning from it. We must do that individually first, to have a hope of understanding what the collective needs truly are. We don’t have to wait though. The consequences are arriving as we speak. What we must do is learn through our feelings, (because trying to pick through the annals of our fixed mind will take too long to find that the solution is not there) as quickly as they are arriving. Then, eventually, a new balance can be restored, another world will be possible. Not because we have all left for mars (although hopefully some might have). No, this bright shiny new way of living will be right here at home on Planet Earth. Bless.