World events and personal calamities over the past few years have buffeted us all in many ways. Some of them good ways and all of them strongly. As a result, the angle from which we are perceiving the world is gradually reorienting itself. After decades of peering under the dusty, blood-soaked rugs of human history and years crowing my findings to the digital wind, my own mental pathways, which are very positive by nature, were becoming negatively polarized by nurture.
Now, in agreement with C. Wright Mills and his 1956 book, The Power Elite, I can endorse that learned sociologist’s conclusion that one can always find conspiracies in history, indeed, they are its building blocks. But history itself, taken as a whole, is not a conspiracy.
The events we applaud and the tragedies we lament, have all been authored by men and women. Thus, to dwell exclusively upon the spider-silk strands that lace all stories is to miss much that could be gleaned from each individual story.The Möbius view never to comes to a conclusion, allows no healing and abides in the infinite. That is as it should be and is the realm of what we call our gods. On earth, here and now, we are our own enemies and our own saviours.
Training one’s mind onto a more balanced track that doesn't deny the dark, but acknowledges an equal measure of light without creating a dichotomy is possibly the mental mechanism that buys one the time to examine all the many things that one cannot control in a truer fashion; thus making it infinitely easier to choose well, to have grace, to maintain one's dignity and to uphold one’s creed, whatever that personally wrought guide might be.
We are living in an exciting time of widespread focus on mental and emotional health and we have the internet to facilitate and leverage the process. Don't regret or cease historical research but internalized those lessons. The new frontier at hand is inside ourselves individually and the maps that we draw and assemble collectively will help us to evolve our humanity and be worthy of the responsibilities and the rewards that this miracle entails.
With a mutation rate that holds steady at one every three thousand years, there have been at least a hundred mutations that are carried in our current human DNA. Very likely, much of what we see when we look backwards into the past is the ongoing grand test driving of these randomized adaptations. It remains to be seen if our new mass communication abilities can effect the speed at which we unfold as life forms on this ineffable canvas.
A human being is a whole thing, like a tree, consisting of roots, stem, flowers and fruits. By bringing our known human predicament into silhouette against the background of our spiritual beliefs and religions, we are seen to have a definite proclivity for perceiving black and white and a penchant for dichotomy. This is an easily understandable model but one that is ripe for abuse.
I now believe that our old placeholders such as yin and yang, good and bad, hot and cold, etc., must be seen and treated as dynamic wholes at all times to avoid our getting lost. To cultivate one and deny the existence of the other sets up a perpetual motion machine that has driven the violent past of our species. This is because a pressing down is a loading of potential. Most of us have never been used to seeing whole things. There are now definite signs of a shift in that way of perceiving that is as encouraging as the wind’s first good tug on a kite string.
What will the world look like if I am correct? Possibly a place in which everyone cognized the meaning of the Portuguese word, "saudade." One might see some people crying when a baby is born and others expressing happiness for the deceased. In both cases, not in a histrionic way, rather in a subtle way that intimates that for us humans, tears and laughter are congenital twins, even when only one of them is talking.
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