"In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children."
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
People will say that there has always been change, and this is certainly true. People will say that seers like Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce, or books like the holy scriptures have always predicted turmoil, including earthquakes, floods, locusts, plagues and such. And I'd have to say that throughout time, these predictions have manifested in one form or another.
As a bible student with Jehovah's Witnesses (in the days before I left traditional religion) I learned all too well about the Great Tribulation before the ever encroaching Armageddon. Boy. Christianity did nothing if not keep you in control by drumming an ever present reminder of the threat of destruction by an angry deity if you did this, that, or the other, or if you didn't follow the book attributed to him. Fortunately, for me, I realized that although I could quote scripture and verse, and had an understanding of one religious perspective on the creation and life, I could not go further with traditional explanations. My questions were still not satisfied. And from that place and time I moved on.
I'd been asking those unanswered questions from childhood, and no one had been able to give me satisfactory answers. They had long since encouraged me to look for those answers outside of myself, instead of within where I ultimately returned after many trips down many religious paths. From Christianity to New Thought, to Buddhism to Sufism to Hinduism I journeyed, seeking the answers for questions I had, and those I didn't know I had. I explored a whole bunch of different meditation paths, as well, in seeking for understanding. I tell you these things because I want you to know I bought into the program I was born into - hook, line, and sinker. My parents, my teachers, my religions, my government would never steer me wrong. Right? The paradigm we were all living was the only real reality, after all. Or, was it?
Eventually, I would begin to see more clearly.
"Sometimes I wake up and think... 'I was asleep."
― Rebecca Hurley
Falling away from organized religion and external edicts of morality, ethics, and "truth", I sought my own inner wisdom. After running from door to door, path to path, up hill and dale, I realized that that which I sought was within me. There were no answers out there. Despite platitudes, collective agreements, man-made laws, grown-up fairytales, I realized that I had been a willing (if ignorant) participant in the status quo. I had accepted the primacy of the ego and cast aspersions on the soul. Everything was backward in the world I entered, and no one was going to acknowledge that we were going about life in an inconvenient and unduly harsh way.
Beginning to awaken from the dream life I thought was real, I learned that I wasn't crazy. I wasn't wrong for questioning all the inconsistencies around me and rejecting the hypnotic trance that held us all captive. I had been trained to look out instead of within, to believe the voices outside which harangued me on the regular, instead of prioritize the gentle whisper of my own inner voice. I had been taught to believe only what I could see with my eyes, or prove with scientific data based on someone else's hypotheses and proofs, and to despise the personal wisdom from intuition and truth revealed from the deepest part of my being. I had been dreaming the dream - we all were - and now I was waking up.
At some point, at some particular poignant but unidentifiable moment, I knew that there was something really really wrong with the big picture, the reality that some unknown they kept cramming down our collective throats. My questions deepened, but as they did answers began to flow in. As I privileged the deepest part of my being-the part I accepted as sourced from the Cosmic Divine, the Allness of Everything of which I was a minute but absolutely necessary part, pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place for me.
When you stop doubting yourself and begin to shake off the gobbledy-gook you have had crammed down your throat from every aspect of the world you live in, you begin to realize that this is not at all how things are supposed to be. You realize that it doesn't make sense to be on a planet of plenty, of goodness, of beauty, and for there to be so many problems. No amount of rationalizing the way this 'ism' or that works, (whether capitalism, socialism, communism, etc.), no matter how many time you say it, no particular national government is the king of the world, and the artificial geographical boundary lines drawn by some human beings, don't mean that we are really separate people so different, and so far from understanding one another. Nothing will justify or explain why on this planet there is starvation, disease, greed, suffering, and harm to sentient life when we espouse loudly beliefs in love for our fellow humans. No amount of entrusting the responsibility for Mama Earth's care to the hands of a few chosen ones (politicians), will resolve the great problems in front of us. And yet, we go along with the script, even though we know somewhere deep down, it's a fraud. When your life ceases to get better, when you are running faster, losing steam, and making no real ground, you create an opening for another possibility. When you stop believing the status quo, when you refuse to sync up with the dissonance, some spring within you snaps, and you start seeing in a new way.
"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
― Jim Morrison
You've no doubt heard the phrase, "Be the change you want to see" but I tell you, there are no truer words than these. It is time for us to take the reins and create the kind of world we know is right - one we deserve and want - and stop settling for the poor excuses for the one we have all created. Cosmic signals are being sent, our awareness is being prodded, and more and more people are feeling the incongruities and waking up to discover that there is more to this big picture than meets the eye.
I'm writing to add my voice to the voices of those who urge you to start looking around, start asking better, deeper, more honest questions, those who would encourage you to see that there is more than our five senses allow. I am one bell in the distance ringing because I realize now that it is up to us to create the reality in which we most want to live.
But first, I'm going to need you to open your eyes.
