Introducing the following article by
Steve Bhaerman
On
6/10/2010 Fred wrote:
To my friends
I rarely forward email "blasts," even when I agree with the writer's
point of view, that take political or religious or even sociological
stances...except, perhaps, very selectively. In this instance, this
writer has a profoundly revelatory insight on "oil spills and blood
spills" that I'm passing along to everyone in my address book
(please pardon any duplications), with the encouragement to read it
through. It's not that long, it's easy reading and it's worth
it...no matter who you are, what "side" you're on or what you're
dealing with individually at the moment. If we all read this and
give it just a measure of unbiased, open consideration, we might
just begin to change our perspectives and start the process of
"reinventing" ourselves...and our world.
This is sent to you with care and respect.
Fred
NOTE from CR:
It helps to keep a sense of humor amidst despair
for level-headed flying of your ship of state
while others are losing their heads.
From:
The Oil Spill and the Blood Spill: Same Problem, Same Solution
By Steve Bhaerman
Sometimes it's just not funny.
There is nothing funny about oil hemorrhaging in the Gulf of Mexico,
or blood flowing in the Mediterranean - just the sad joke that we
humans are largely the cause of our own suffering. And we are
largely clueless as to how and why.
For millennia, we have been under the spell of the lowest common
dominator, the notion that it's a you-or-me world, that to survive
we must dominate or be dominated. Never mind that at the root of
every religion and ethical system is some version of the Golden
Rule. We have as a species chosen to apply this law selectively to
those in our own family, tribe or nation. When we feel threatened -
not necessarily ARE threatened, but feel threatened - we very easily
adopt a conveniently modified version of the rule: "Doo-doo unto
others before they can doo-doo unto you."
So, for tribes or nations to be manipulated by a sociopathic few,
all these misleaders need to do is convince their people of an
external threat, and this protective mechanism is activated. While
fight-or-flight is a necessary response to an immediate danger, the
blood flow to the hindbrain has to come from somewhere. It comes
from the forebrain, the place of creative thinking and discernment.
In other words, when we are in fear we are less intelligent.
In places like the Middle East, the us-vs.-them story is well
established, and each atrocity by the other builds the story one
more story high. The one thing the Palestinian terrorists set to
blow themselves up and the Israeli soldiers firing on civilians have
in common is the belief, "We are the good guys."
It's this belief alone that turns good guys into bad guys. It's how
America justified using atomic weapons on Japan, napalm on
Vietnamese, and bombs on Iraqi and Afghan citizens. It's the cost of
war, paid by the other guy - the bad guy.
From the Mideast ... to the Midwest
In order to bring this notion home, literally and figuratively, we
need to take what is happening in the Mideast, and apply it in the
Midwest. Just as surely as the Israelis and Palestinians are at war,
we the people of America have been divided into two warring tribes,
the Red Tribe Republicans and the Blue Tribe Democrats. The main
difference between these two tribes is that the right wing
understands there is a war going on; the left wing merely feels
assaulted.
Here's why.
Whether you believe it's an actual conspiracy, or merely the
out-picturing of our divided collective consciousness, the body
politic has been split into left-brain and right-brain, masculine
and feminine. The political left represents the values of novelty
and nurturance; the right stands for structure and protection. Each
of these tendencies - progressive and conservative - represents a
healthy biological impulse. However, separately they are incapable
of wise rule. Why? Well, imagine living your life using only half
your intelligence, or worse yet with two parts of your psyche
constantly in mortal combat.
Consequently, each political party represents a toxic distortion of
a valuable asset. Put bluntly, the Republicans represent the abusive
male, the Democrats the enabler female. All of the muscle is on one
side; all of the compassion is on the other. Instead of working
together, these two opposing impulses have inflicted a deadly
autoimmune dysfunction on the body politic. Who benefits? Those who
have the most to lose by these two divided forces uniting as an
integrated, whole "we the people."
In a healthy, integrated, whole system the forces of protection
protect life. Consider the eggshell. It is absolutely necessary to
protect the egg during development. However, for a chicken to be
born, the shell must break. Structure must yield to life.
In our distorted, divided system the structures designed for
protection all too often protect the predator. That's why back in
the 1930s, Gen. Smedley Butler, at the time America's most decorated
Marine, wrote a booklet called War is a Racket, where he confessed
that most of the defending he did during the early part of this
century was for United Fruit and U.S. Rubber. In the nearly 80 years
since Butler's pamphlet, we have seen the simple desire for defense
and protection rigidify into a Military Industrial Complex, a
structure largely in service of itself, in partnership with the
American empire.
Interestingly, the more libertarian right represented by Ron Paul
know about Smedley Butler and his assessment of war, whereas he is
an unfamiliar figure to most on the left. That's because each
political polarity has it's own information pipeline telling them
the "truth." The left is told that the Ron Paul variety of populist
- as represented currently by the Tea Parties - are backward racists
and isolationists. Meanwhile, the right wing impropaganda machine
bangs away at the notion that "liberals hate America," making them
as much of an enemy as Al Qaeda is.
Progressives are outraged by the assaults of Limbaugh, Beck and the
like, but cannot respond effectively or courageously. Why? Because
all the martial energy has been marshaled over on the other side.
The right, meanwhile, doesn't dare empathize with the downtrodden,
lest we empower welfare cheats. In having their attention focused on
the lowly criminal, they are conveniently distracted from the highly
criminal.
We are a political house divided, a body politic afflicted with
bi-polar insanity. Somewhere in the netherworld, Machiavelli is
smiling, for his lesson of divide-and-conquer has been well learned
by our misleaders. We the people have learned to identify so much
with what divides us that we completely ignore the common virtues
and values we share as non-sociopathic humans.
It's Either an Awakening ... Or a Wake
Which brings us to the oil spill.
The major missing piece in this web-of-life threatening tragedy is
our ability to act in unison in a moment of crisis. The bi-polar
political dysfunction has bred so much mutual distrust, that we've
wasted valuable time and energy in obfuscation and blame. But the
problem goes deeper than that, as deep as the subconscious
programming of "survival of the fittest." We are so programmed with
fear of not enough - Swami calls this "scare city" - that we spend
our attention, intention, time and resource on protection and
acquisition, at the expense of other healthy human "cellular souls."
The cost of this agreed-upon greed, goes beyond the trillions of
dollars spent and the millions of lives lost. We now have a rupture
in the web-of-life itself, as the fluid we value more than life
gushes uselessly and harmfully into the ocean, unstoppable by the
magic of technology. Like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice, in our
ignorance and innocence, we unleashed a power far too powerful for
our Mickey Mouse consciousness.
And the good news is?
If we choose to use it as such, the oil spill may be the significant
emotional event that bumps us out of the illusion of separation and
into a healthier relationship with one another and the planet. What
is called for is no less than a spontaneous spiritual evolution from
children of God to adults of God, from victims and villains to
aware, responsible co-creators. It's never happened before. But
never before have we faced such a blatant and immediate human-caused
disaster, one that calls into question our fitness as a species.
As many of us have seen in the "try this" or "try that" emails that
have been circulating, there is no dearth of potential remedies or
even solutions. We already have the worldwide network of
communication to create an open-source approach to a situation that
threatens every one of us. Necessity is indeed the mother of
invention ... and intent is the father. What an opportunity for the
people of this world to "gather under one big intent" to take the
initiative to create a worldwide "we the people" authority to, for
the first time, confront a species-wide threat as a species.
This would not be some top-down New World Order, but a bottom up,
grassroots "new world ordering," where we access the heart-and-soul
essence of who we are, an essence that has been lost through
millennia of domination and programmed fear. It would mean gathering
in intentionally diverse groups, and using existing polarities to
stretch ourselves beyond the limited choices we currently perceive.
It would mean calling forth the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred
Feminine, to act in accord as dynamic duo dance partners. It would
mean taking the obsolete political polarities of progressive and
conservative, and turning them into healthy intentions by asking,
"How do we wish to progress?" and "What do we choose to conserve?"
I know, I know. I am proposing a sane world. I must be crazy.
But the question to ask ourselves and one another is, how sane is
the institutionalized, homicidal, suicidal insanity we have now? As
the saying goes, if we keep on the same path, we will arrive at
where we are going. Even if we are able to stanch the current oil
flow, and we contain the damage to "just" one ocean, what will the
next blow be? Will we be able to recover, or will it just be a
matter of time before a human-made disaster kills us?
In our book
Spontaneous
Evolution,
Bruce Lipton and I point out the phenomenon of "spontaneous
remission," where an individual is told their condition is
untreatable and terminal, and yet something mysterious and
miraculous happens. They recover, and show no sign of the disease
whatsoever. While we might imagine this some super-human miracle,
when we look deeper we find that
the recovery is preceded by a profound
change of belief, and change of behavior.
(emphasis added. CR)
In other words, a spontaneous remission is often the result of a
"spontaneous remissioning." And so the choice is before us to
collectively change our mission from "dominate or be dominated" to
re-growing the Garden together.
This has been the wake up call we have been waiting for. And the
snooze button is no longer working.
Steve Bhaerman is a writer and uncommontator who has written and
performed comedy as Swami Beyondananda. He is also the co-author
with Bruce Lipton of Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and
a Way to Get There From Here (Hay House: 2009). He can be found
online at
http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/ |