Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred,
And cannot be improved.
It can be difficult to know how to react and how to be when we look out into the world today. Division is the focus, rather than diversity. Danger, rather than safety. Isolation rather than community. And although our leaders undoubtedly mean well, most governments have become so mired in bureaucratic self-interest, that leading with heart-courage is almost impossible.
If we correlate our planet and the state of humanity to our physical bodies, what would we be experiencing? Emotional disturbance, significant loss of normal function, pain – all symptoms of a serious imbalance.
Our bodies have defense systems designed to protect what is most necessary for life and manage our stresses in the least harmful way possible. But when a threat is perceived as too great, these systems can go into a fighting frenzy, rising up with drastic, sometimes even destructive force in an all-out attempt to preserve the status quo.
Fight – along with flight and freeze – is an automatic reaction to something perceived as life-threatening, initiated from the most primitive part of our brain. But once the acute moment of danger has passed, it’s not meant to keep running the show. “He who overcomes by violence will be overcome by violence.” (Whaley, The Tao and the Power) When we stay locked in fight mode, our body’s energy becomes dedicated to combat and our minds attuned to opposition, easily spilling into many other aspects of our lives.
When we get caught up in a negative response to something in the world, our energy darkens. It gets heavier. And unless we realize our knee-jerk reaction and find ways to deliberately shift it, this heaviness will weigh us down not just in this moment, but likely the next.
Because our physiological wiring is sense-oriented, of course we are constantly interacting with and being affected by the external world. As humans, that’s just the way we are. But as humans, we also can become aware of our inner state and consciously clean up our own pollution.
When we are oblivious to being down-shifted, we’re easy prey to whatever the wind blows. Becoming more perceptive of how we are feeling gives us the opportunity to stabilize ourselves – affecting not just this moment, but the next one and the next. Things may appear to be falling apart, but our consciousness will determine how they get put back together.
Now don’t get me wrong – we should be attending to the forces behind our personal pain as well as what’s behind racial prejudice and planetary distress – but let’s be careful of the kind of energy we perpetuate in the process. Rather than continuing to fight what we feel is wrong “out there,” what would happen if we accept our feelings of pain and alienation as a commonality shared by all? If we act from a sense of true communion that leaves no one or thing apart?
Here’s a little experiment you can do either regarding yourself or the outside world: consciously challenge any belief you have that something/someone is wrong or threatening – and instead include it/them as another aspect of yourself. The minute you notice feeling any judgment or alienation towards a person, experience or thing, deliberately extend an attitude of inclusion and thoughtfulness.
What do you notice?
Consider that when we stop resisting certain aspects of our experience as wrong, we open a field of personal and collective receptivity – towards a more sustainable evolutionary future. We become seeders of a truly common ground from which new life and possibilities can evolve.
See the World as Yourself;
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as yourself;
then you can care for all things.
(Tao te Ching Chapter 13
Stephen Mitchell translation)