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We,The People, are not happy
16 - How to escape our jail
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The problem is where to begin.
Escaping our jail is something completely new in our lives. It is like watering a little seed that has been waiting to be discovered.
There is something special about human thinking. When your bank statement does not match your expectation, you look for a mistake. You question the way you have been thinking. To correct this mistake is thinking about thinking.
We can think about our thinking!
The way we build machines will not work to improve our soul. To make a machine, we build the parts one by one and assemble them. The way Nature builds a human being is by giving a seed the possibility to feed on its environment. This is a different way of thinking. You don’t add something from outside. You search inside what has been waiting for you. The baby trying to walk is looking inside himself for something to develop.
We have two channels at our disposal. Thinking is better adapted to the body channel, and feeling is better adapted to the soul’s channel. We need them both.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking.
Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception.
We shall require a substantial new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.
Albert Einstein
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena;
it will make more progress in one decade
than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
Nikola Tesla.
“The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge
has now to arise from the materialistic grave.”
Rudolf Steiner
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings –
always darker, emptier, and simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare
We are busy, all day, taking care of the short term: What to eat? When? Our work - Our family - Interactions with other people. Most of what is on our list of ‘things to do’ concerns the next days. The long term can wait until it is forgotten.
Let us go back to a more general view of our life on Earth.
We know of the rise and fall of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The people who lived at that time were not conscious that they were participating in the evolution of mankind. They were busy making wars, finding food, pledging allegiance to a king or a flag. They were fighting the waves and were not conscious of the master motivation governing their lives. The general evolution of the Homo sapiens was not on their list of ‘things to do.’
We know that the human body can live 120 to 140 years. So far, we are lucky to have reached eighty. That means that, all through our life, we do things that lower our life expectancy. We focus on the short term and neglect the long term. We focus on the waves and ignore the tide.
Sadomasochism is a tide that has been with us for as long as historians can remember. To satisfy this need, there is always a neighbor with similar state of mind willing to make one more war. What makes us feel alive is our fear of death. When writing another chapter in the history of a country, we are not conscious that it is only a chapter of the history book of human evolution. We can find, in our everyday life, the superposition of two elements: The hidden long term and the obvious short term.
How can we give the long term the concern it deserves?
The first step is to be fully conscious of the long term. Before falling asleep, remember the conversations and the decisions you made that day. It is an opportunity to see yourself from outside. Try to isolate in your behavior what was related to the events of the day and what was related to long term motivation. Try to become conscious of the tides governing your life. It is a way to keep in control. It relieves the stress that produces stomach ulcers.
You will find both the short term and long-term worries intimately intertwined. To escape our jail we have to focus on the long term in our life. It is our way out of Plato’s cave.
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We may have to change the way we look at history. A dictator may be needed to accelerate the evolution of a country. History creates a hole in which somebody will fall. There is a possibility that Hitler was used by History. Some people could be used to help raise their country or precipitate its decline.
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Parents educate their children and children educate their parents. It is something that will stay with them the rest of their life.
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Children raised in orphanages are not used to being touched. It is something they will have to learn later, from their own children.
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Sadomasochism can be found in everybody, all around the world.
How to get out of our misery?
-Money is one of our main problems. Our politicians have not been selected for their expertise in economy. We could use a fourth branch of government, made of Nobel prizes in economy. Every year they would give the politicians their budget for the year, and no more. Economists would make rules about things, and the politicians would go back to making laws about people.
The Nobel prizes in economy would have to invent a system that entrepreneurs can use to start a company. What happens when people with ideas need people with money? That will not be easy. That is why we need Nobel prizes. They could create a company called Mother LLC. The entrepreneur could exchange some shares of his new company for some shares of their new Mother LLC and some money. People could invest in many different Mother LLC around the world. Just get the Nobel prizes together and turn them loose!
The first step is to free ourselves from our attachment to the material world.
We can put our body to good use. Let us start with something simple, such as chocolate. Is it the body or the soul that is addicted to chocolate? We need a transformation in the soul that will counterbalance the body’s attraction for chocolate. We can move to a cavern in the mountains where there is no temptation. There is no guarantee that we will not succumb to chocolate when we return. Freedom comes from the soul. It does not come from the environment. The same principle applies to smoking and drinking. The battle is inside us.
Freedom will come from our soul,
rather than our environment.
Let’s keep going: After easy victories, we will be ready for more serious battles. What is our idea of a successful life? Is it going up the social ladder? Can we be sure that this is nothing more than ego gratification? We may find that, hidden behind excuses, our life’s primary motivation has been to satisfy our ego. The first step towards true freedom is to remove the ego from the driver’s seat and place it in the passenger’s seat where it belongs. The goal is to bring changes to the soul that will balance the temptations of the material world. It is an internal fight for freedom!
The next step is to reclaim our time. Who decides how much time we spend watching TV? Is it us or is it the screen? The TV shows movement, color, and sounds. Wood burning in the fireplace also has color, sound, and movement. They are the criteria of life. We are drawn to TV like we are drawn to life. It takes energy to dominate this kind of attraction. It takes a stronger soul.
Here is an idea that could help when we get desperate. Try a TV set with pedals! When it is not worth pedaling, the TV stops! The goal is to use TV without abusing it.
“Use but don’t abuse” is a law of nature that science has yet to discovered. We may enjoy a glass of wine. We cannot rely on wine to have a happy life. It is not easy to refrain from something that both the body and the soul would enjoy. The battle is inside. The body is the battleground where the soul must prevail.
The body is the battleground where the soul must prevail.
To overcome sadomasochism may be different. Chances are that it came with the body and its genes. Should we blame our ancestors? Thinking may not be the right tool to fight genes. That would explain our slow progress in this domain. That does not mean that any resistance is vain. We can find what is influenced by sadomasochism in our everyday life and develop restraint. That takes thinking, consciousness and energy. We have some and we can amplify what we have.
There is hope.
We started with the body and the material domain. The time has come to do for the soul what we have done for the body in the last 200 years. Everywhere we turn, we find a need for a higher level of consciousness. We have some. We can try to amplify the little we have.
Does that ring a bell? This is how we developed agriculture. We watched Nature dropping some seeds and creating more seeds. We amplified the process. Life on earth develops consciousness. It is by seeing, hearing, smelling and touching that we become conscious of our material environment. The main goal of education develops consciousness. This is our way out of Plato’s cave. We want to distance ourselves from the material world and break our glass ceiling.
Consciousness and thinking are helping each other
We become conscious of the stars by looking at them. To this observation, we added thinking and energy and made telescopes. The use of telescopes increases our awareness of the stars. We start by observing nature and think about what we see. Consciousness feeds on thinking. Through his computer, the student has access to all the knowledge accumulated by humanity. He can select want he wants to become conscious of. Consciousness and thinking help each other. Thinking increases our consciousness and a higher level of consciousness triggers more thinking.
One question remains: Why did we wait more than 300 000 years to start walking on those two legs?
Our consciousness must change.
Our life starts with a vision of the world limited to a narrow range between red and violet. Thinking and experimentation made us discover the infra-red and the ultra-violet. They expanded our consciousness of the world. That was only the beginning. We also became conscious of electricity, microbes and particles so tiny that we will never be able to see them. Our conception is limited to their mass, their speed and their electrical charge. Our consciousness expands with our knowledge. Someday, a new experiment could reveal the presence of a different ‘thing’. This ‘thing’ sometimes acts like a particle… or two.
Human history is a story of consciousness. Two thousand years ago, humans were members of a tribe or a small village in the forest. Later, they became aware of belonging to a country or a religion. Today, they identify with civilizations like “The East” or “The West.” They have not yet reached the point where they see themselves as Homo sapiens. They are moving in the right direction. Instead of focusing on their IQ, they could speed up the development of their level of consciousness.
We are living a time when countries are building fortresses to defend themselves. Let us keep in mind that we all come from the same Big Bang. The same atoms keep circulating between the trees, the oceans, and our bodies.
Consciousness is not limited to the material world.
Our consciousness is not limited to the objects in our environment. We are also conscious of feelings. A soul may be able to perceive the feelings of another soul. There is a possibility that, at night, we leave our body and the material world and become directly conscious of each other’s feelings, love, stress and energy. The souls may be able to see one another like we see each other’s bodies during the day. That could explain why our souls do not have sense-organs. They may not need them at night.
Consciousness as a filter:
Have you had an oculist check your eyesight? He makes you read letters on the wall. Let’s compare each test with a different consciousness. You can see some of the letters but there is a limit. The oculist is looking for what is best for you. He could also select glasses that would show you only half of the world. Different glasses would introduce you to different states of consciousness. You are only conscious of one at a time. Each one has its limits. When wearing one, you cannot imagine wearing another. During the day we see the world through one consciousness. At night we may see the same world through another filter.
Every human being could be going through life wearing different glasses. Our view of the world can be limited by different ideologies, different religions, different preconceived ideas. We are looking at the same world, but only conscious of a limited part of the same world. The same consciousness that makes us discover the world could keep us prisoner of its limitations, like our eyesight keeps us limited between red and violet. We are conscious of having a body and conscious of having a soul. That makes consciousness the link between the material and the immaterial worlds.
We know that an estimated 100 trillion neutrinos pass through each of us every second. How many worlds are around us that we completely ignore|?
After associating consciousness and thinking, we could investigate Consciousness and love – Consciousness and freedom – Consciousness and happiness. As they help one another, the result would be a development of the soul. That could be our answer to the eternal question ‘What is the purpose of our life on Earth?
