One day many years ago, I was waiting in a line so long I was hoping others would give up so I could get ahead. Then I drew a deep breath and let my mind turn off for a few moments. Instantly, I became a conscious observer instead of a patterned thinker. I watched my thoughts and judgements as they passed through my awareness, I smiled. I was no longer waiting, but nor had I lost my place in line, and before I knew it, I reached the service counter.
As a society, we are addicted to thinking. We are driven to identify problems and find resolution, it’s part of being human. As Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” Thinking is an amazing tool, without which we could not have made last night’s dinner, let alone planned and executed modern civilization. But our thought patterns are all too often hampered by our ego and, as Einstein said, “we will not solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”
To compound the problem, our society has developed to think competitively. Reinforced by social norms, the education system and and mass-media, we are encouraged to see the world in terms of winners and losers. This pattern often leads to games of one-up man-ship and an unwillingness to even recognize errors, let alone correct them. On a planetary scale, one of the most obvious ways the competitive thinking pattern has played out is in military conflict.
The only winners in armed conflict are the players involved in the military industrial complex. Meanwhile, we are all paying for, and being poisoned by, preparation for and acts of war. This toxicity doesn’t spare the employees of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon or Pfizer and it isn’t helping our life support system either. (Yes, Pfizer is also a defense contractor with over 13 billion in Dept. of Defense obligations in 2021 alone.) The warring pattern cannot be broken by more competitive thinking, just as the ripples in a pond cannot be stopped by more splashing.
Instead, we could each take a moment to detach from our thoughts. There, in the still space between breaths, one finds a consciousness that is a powerful and honest witness of the patterns we have wrapped ourselves in. The future is ours to make, so let’s each take a
break from the troubled waters of thought, find stillness, and quell the bellicose waves that wrack the pond we all share. The future starts now.
コメント