“Humanity treats humanity in the same way that humanity treats nature” Michael Roads.
What makes people conform to the Status Quo? – Peer Pressure and the fear of being rejected, i.e. being unlovable. This is the pressure that so many accept in order to be liked – being a people pleaser. If you, like most, want to be liked, you will follow the herd mentality to do things that make you popular. That is why we accept so much of the environmental destruction and the dogmatic thinking that characterizes the mainstream Consumer mindset. To break out of that mindset, especially in these times of extreme censorship brought on by the Coronavirus crisis, takes courage to be different and not be afraid of speaking your truth. What controls us is our own inner critic instigated by our conditioning. What happens up to the age of seven years of age creates who we are as adults, our personality complete with its beliefs and subconscious behaviors. It takes a concerted effort to recognize the conditioning and become a different person who can step beyond the conditioning – in essence to heal oneself allows one to start healing how they will start to treat the planet “If somebody talked to you the way you talk to yourself, you would have kicked them out of your life long ago” Carla Gordon.
Limiting beliefs that create all our difficulties and recurring behavior patterns of allowing harm can only be changed by looking at them consciously. Fear is currently the default mode of humanity, which is just poor management of the mind. “What you think, you become” Buddha. And what we become conditioned to be is a collection of labels and ideas (beliefs) that we call our own reality. We then associate with people that confirm our reality (confirmation bias) and disapprove of those whose reality is different in any way.
Who do you need validation from? Where does your self-esteem come from? Survival strategy beliefs (driven behaviors) are doing what addresses the needs to attain validation and thus improve our self-esteem. All these focus on fear of rejection. What does everybody want? – Affection, Attention, and Acknowledgement. Your Self-inner critic will find fault with, Competence, Body, Identity, and Relationship (I’ll only be lovable if…). To every event or experience, we give it meaning based on the specific beliefs we hold. Think about a sports match where the opposite team scores – how do either side interpret that? It’s like internal propaganda going on all the time to support your own personal interpretation of reality. Remember, a belief is a statement about reality that YOU come to see as the TRUTH about life – a belief is just a thought you keep thinking! “Don’t believe every thought that you have” Wayne Dyer.
Where does your self-worth come from? Externally through a number of likes on social media (the quantified self), or internally through an understanding of your own true value as a person? Your beliefs from very early childhood with your upbringing tell you a truth you believe about yourself – if denied love and affection – I am not lovable; If ignored or denied attention – I am not important; If criticized – I am unworthy and not good enough. And the crazy thing is, adults only need do this 3-4 times to set a belief in the child’s mind about itself that can last a lifetime, unless they set out as an adult to truly look at and address their beliefs. Sir Ken Robinson (among many others) addresses this often as how we are disconnected from the natural world and each other. We must address this systemic problem of our own human-human disconnection and simultaneously accept that the natural world is also a direct part of us.
We are still in competition, when we must be in cooperation with each other. Janine Benyus talks about growing a business like a redwood forest, which emphasizes how the whole forest is integrated in how it works – it isn’t just a redwood forest, but a unique ecosystem in its own right with each part playing its part in maintaining the whole system. Darwin mentioned a little about competition but throughout his famous book introducing natural selection, he marveled at the way each species in the natural world cooperated with each other. In the book, The secret life of trees, different survival strategies are found in each species but it is an integrated system, not individuals fighting each other. The natural way is about unity of each species and a planet with all the organisms. Only humans think they are not a direct part of the system. One of the problems is the way we have come to study nature. The scientific method we learn in school is mechanistic and can be reduced to a system of parts to be studied. What we now know is that reducing a large system to a group of parts and assuming that the individual parts are isolated gives us a misleading story.
There is a classic story about five blind men asked to feel an animal they have never known – an elephant. One feels the tail and says the animal feels like a rope. Another feels the tusk and says the animal feels like a spear. Another feels the leg and says it feels like a tree, while yet another feels the leg and says the animal feels like a tree. The fifth man feels the ear and says the animal feels like a fan. Modern science seems to do the same thing. We see many of the parts but have barely come to understand how those parts, and many more we have not yet recognized, make up the whole.
Neuroscientist, Dr. Joe Dispenza states: “95% of who we are, as a personality by the time we are 35 years old, is a set of memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions that function like a computer program” that drives our daily lives. This is our unconscious conditioning in which we accept everything that is happening on the planet. You are born with a natural capacity to Love. Hate has to be carefully taught, and we do such a good job at it.
We know that he way we treat each other is appalling, but just shake our heads with sad dismay and accept it, just as we do when we hear about the destruction of say the Amazon forests or the extinction of yet another endangered species. It is so much more than simply protesting the destruction of nature by the corporate machinery – we sanction this destruction because we, as a species, sanction this kind of destruction within ourselves and on each other. We have to first look inward and find a way to heal ourselves so we lose that self-critic, and then heal our relationships with each other such that we Love instead of Hating each other. Once we come to Love ourselves, we can then learn to Love our uniqueness within each other, and then we will be ready to naturally Love the natural world. (You might note that I capitalize the L in Love to indicate it is so much more than the flawed and simple romantic love in novels and movies.)
As the title of this post indicates, we need to heal ourselves so that we can heal the planet. That first requires that we do the inner work to accept ourselves as we are and to understand just how our pervasive conditioning has set the stage for us to subtly self-hate, and not so subtly hate others, and even less subtly (as a species) dismiss the natural world as insignificant to our needs. So, what ways exist to heal ourselves and thereby begin a new world of Love and harmony?
To Be Continued ………………………….
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