The light of life

When we look at the world, we can see that so much seems to be broken. Our institutions are dysfunctional, and our lives are under seige.

In a hundred or so years we have brought the earth to the point that it is close to killing us. Billions are living in poverty, and even in so-called affluent societies, people are living on the streets. 1% of the world's population hold half of the world's wealth, and the inequality is getting worse. The technology that held so much promise is swamping our minds with delusions. We appear to be so advanced, yet we seem helpless in our willing march towards our self-imposed annihilation.

We have glimpsed the utopia of what the world could be, yet we seem to have lost that vision to the delusions of the greedy who we have cheered us on in our adoration and veneration, hailing them as heroes, even when we see how empty they are. The institutions we thought would take us to enlightenment seem to be hollow shells with thin stone veneers, now crumbling before our eyes as their occupants are frantically stuffing their pockets with money, hoping it will save them from Armageddon.

It would be easy to fall into the melancholy of despair when our view is filled with such reminders of the fragile delusions we have thought would protect our future. Yet while we look down and ponder our seeming destruction, we still don't see that future as inevitable. We are not all falling in a heap day after day, feeling overburdened with the weight of our failures, though many are. Something in our collective psyche is not ready to give up just yet, but we don't seem to know how to change what seems inevitable.

It is the fractious way we view the world that can get us down. The way out is to see the earth more as one process in which all are participating, and that changes the outcomes that we can see.

Over the millennia, we have built grandiose monuments to our delusions, only to become the skeletons that outlived our capacity to maintain the will to maintain the follies. Yet we have tried to build bigger towers in the hope that we will persevere, only for them to remain half-built. Somewhere it is sinking in that such monuments are vain frivolities that are not worth building in the end. The endpoint to that process is to not get caught up in it in the first place.

Much of what we have built had structural flaws resulting from the faulty reasoning that we had been caught up in. There is only so much that can be done to patch up what was never really designed to endure. Sometimes we have to see what we have built break to really see why it is weak. We have been in a long experiment, and humanity is learning to understand where the weakness is, and it is not in what we have built, but in our desire to dominate the indomitable. We have been a victim to our own aggrandisement, and in the process have weakened ourselves.

Humanity is in a healing crisis, where we are going through the reverse of all the local disease crises that we have subjected ourselves to for millennia, but now we are healing ourselves as we begin to see that we need to all work together to heal the planet. We are rebuilding our societies from the inside out, dispensing with the useless and the distractory, and gathering together what is really going to make us a better humanity, worthy of being custodians of the physical world.

We have now been through enough to know what it is we have to do. Of course, we still resist, but we really know the direction in which we need to head, and it is not more of the follies of the past, but the pursuit of the real and the worthy, and letting all the rest slip through our fingers as we let it go. We do have hope for the future because we know it is in our grasp. The last few years have been the final reflections of the past trying to draw us back, but we now know there can be no home for them in our hearts any more.

The better future is in our grasp and we know we can make it happen. It is now the time for the legwork that will make it manifest. It is not a painless path, but it is easier, just because we are not fighting an inner battle against ourselves. That battle has been won, and it is now time to turn the battlefield into a meadow.