Friday, December 14, 2012

Ending the endless cycle

Today another 20 children and 7 adults were added to the list of the dead after another school shooting. 

Add to that the seemingly endless list of the murdered around the world due to war and hatred and poverty and ignorance and nationalism.

And then we have our week of mourning and anger and soul searching and flag lowering and maybe, perhaps, but not likely, a new law is passed, which will only address the symptom and never the problem. 

Because we don't want to know the problem, even though every spiritual master of every spiritual practice for thousands of years has described the problem. 

We always place the problem outside of ourselves. It's that person or person's fault, the ones who actually fired the gun. It that nation's fault. It's that culture's fault, that religion's, that race's. And on and on until we finally lay the responsibility squarely on "evil" and then go home and go to bed. And we get to go about our lives as usual, feeling righteous and justified. Until the next 'senseless' slaughter.

And what is the problem that none of us wants to hear? that we are, each one of us, as responsible as the perpetrators. 

This truth cannot be expressed to those who are still unconscious to the spiritual truth of 'I am my brother's and sister's keeper.' but to those of us to like to think of ourselves as spiritual beings, conscious and awakened, it is time, as spiritual adults, to accept our full responsibility for all the actions that happen on this planet.

And this is not simply referring to whether or not we waste gasoline, therefor holding some economic responsibility for wars over oil or the destruction of the environment. This is about coming to terms with the absolute truth of the quantum and holographic nature of the universe and everything within it.

And that truth is that there is only one of us. That we are, each one, the center of the universe, that our reality is created by our consciousness every instant of every second of every minute of every day.

And that the nature of pure energy -- pure thought -- makes no distinction between a physical attack in the material world and thoughts of attack in our minds and hearts. They are absolutely and without doubt one and the same. Period.

Every time we accept violence as entertainment, we contribute to the floating 'cloud' of attack that engulfs this planet. Every time we applaud and reward brutal competition that leaves one person injured and another holding a trophy, we are adding an energetic 'bullet' to a gun somewhere in the world. Every time we hate in our hearts, someone will eventually die.

The true translation from the Bible isn't " I am my brother's (and sister's) keeper." The true translation is "I Am my brother ( and sister)".

This is the truth we must come to accept in this transition from the old world to the new. We must accept full and absolute responsibility for not only our actions, but ours thoughts. 

Or we will continue to repeat and repeat an endlessly brutal story of tragedy until we all suffer the consequences.

As the Mayans say in a greeting: "I am another you."

This is the truth.

3 comments:

Barb said...

Thanks Bradley. This is really a hard concept to grasp and you word it so succinctly.

Anonymous said...

This brought to mind how essential it is for something to happen that jars us out of the mindset that is so pervasive that it never will be overcome without a huge attention getter that does not let us continue with business as usual. Speculation about that magnitude of change is that it would have to be the result of some disaster so large that the world could not recover. Alternatively, something we could do is seriously look at the possibility of visitation. If crop circles and UFOs are coming from elsewhere, it’s a big enough sea change in the nature of the cosmos to get our attention on who we are as humanity. And, once we engage in a worldwide conversation, where we no longer are smugly the big cheese in the universe, that would be an opening to reconsider the worldview in which we are so violent with one another and so destructive to the planet. It’s one thing to identify the problem, as you eloquently do, but there’s a paucity of conversation about what we might do to try bring about s change of worldview. It’s what I talk about in a blog post of mine as my Vital Mission – to get that conversation happening very publicly: http://theconversation.org/blog/vital-mission-will-you-join-me.org

B. R. Smith said...

Thank you for your heartfelt comments.