Mastering the Systemic Illusion
I’m not here to argue about political viewpoints and talking points. I don’t care what your politics are.
I’m not here to argue about the morality of anything. Morality is a useless, circular discussion that simply tries to convince other people they are wrong or evil. It has no bearing on anything and affects nothing. It just distracts you from the underlying issues when it gets used as a weapon and a reason to continue to defend the problem.
Both of those things are distractions. They are symptoms of bigger systemic issues that don’t ever get talked about.
I’m here to have a deeper discussion with you about the root of every single problem we have on this planet today. But there’s a catch. This isn’t a discussion of blame, shame, guilt, victimization, morality, political beliefs, or self-preservation and self-defense. None of those stories are true.
I want to talk about the underlying pain that is fueling the symptoms or issues we have in the world today. I want to talk about the pain that is the foundation of every system we have in the world today.
What is that underlying pain?
Fear, greed, hate, and anger, laced with a lot of blame, shame, guilt, victimization, and a need for a lot of self-defense and self-preservation.
Those things fuel the lack you perceive.
Those things fuel the wars and violence you watch happen.
Those things fuel the political arguments you engage in.
Those things fuel the 24/7 news cycle you can’t stop watching.
Those things fuel conspiracy theories.
Those things fuel the need to use morality as either a weapon or a self-defense mechanism.
Those things fuel most laws, systems, policies, and ways of being in the world today.
If we continue to ignore the hate, fear, greed, and anger we will continue the painful cycles we have been in for many years. I believe that we will ultimately destroy ourselves because we’re too distracted to pay attention to what really matters – the emotional pain of every single person and system on this planet.
Let’s talk about hate. Hate is an emotion. Just like love, hate can be acted out and it can also be felt. The morality of the actions and words hate brings out are not what we’re discussing because that simply defends the problem. It continues the cycle. It repeats the pattern.
We cannot blame, shame, guilt, or banish any emotion. Even if you manage to banish certain experiences, actions, or words, you cannot remove the emotion from the human emotional spectrum. For as long as that emotion is on the spectrum or is possible, hate will continue to exist in the world and it will continue to be expressed, whether we legislate against it or not.
I want to see a world where those feelings are honored, respected, and offered the same compassion you would offer somebody who felt depressed, worthless, or hopeless. I want to see a world where hate is honored as a valid emotion that needs healing. I want to see a world where we stop judging the actions and words of other people and simply acknowledge the emotion that is fueling those actions and words.
Fear, greed, and anger need to be honored the same way as any other emotion. The difference is that we can do this in certain circumstances. We’re far from consistent with it, but sometimes we can find compassion. Whether we do it or not depends on how bothered we are by how the emotion showed up.
Triggers are a self-defense mechanism. It’s self-preservation. We are protecting ourselves from pain through an over-reaction we call a trigger. When somebody does or says something that triggers you, your first instinct is self-defense. That’s why healing the triggers matters.
When we heal the trigger and we no longer need to jump to self-defense we can find compassion a little easier in more situations. But this conversation around morality kicks in because when we deem what the other person does or says as having crossed this invisible, made up moral line, we no longer consider compassion as an option.
We can’t heal hate with hate. You know this, but you try to do it anyway because your need for self-defense is strong.
These aren’t new concepts. I talk about them all the time. If you follow me these lines should sound familiar.
Drop your judgment of it as right or wrong, good or bad.
Master yourself within the experience without needing to change or control the experience.
Stop being offended by the pain of other people.
Drop the need to defend yourself.
Drop the fight.
Compassion does not require you to take anything on. You can be compassionate from the side of the mud puddle.
Those aren’t just applied to little things. They apply to all things, all experience no matter how extreme it may be.
I have in the past blocked that argument by intentionally limiting the scope of what I was talking about. I only applied it to situations and circumstances that most people could manage reasonably easily.
But that wasn’t completely authentic on my part. As I’ve done the work to heal myself, released the need to defend myself, and drop my judgment of the actions and words of others, my interpretation has expanded to include all situations and circumstances.
I used to be quite far left politically. Now I see the political conversations as a mostly pointless distraction because they don’t deal with the emotional pain behind these symptoms that have been human created.
If I were to create a world, everybody would have their basic needs fully met all the time. They would also be completely free to live their lives and express themselves in any way they chose – regardless of the morality or individual judgment of what they were doing or saying.
I would tear down all government systems worldwide.
I would tear down all education systems worldwide.
I would tear down all health-care systems worldwide.
I would tear down all military worldwide.
I would remove all borders and countries to enable free movement, accessibility, and equal distribution of goods.
I would tear down all organized religious systems.
The things that I would rebuild, and I would not rebuild all of them, I would do so without the fear, hate, greed, and anger that all of our current systems are built on. I would remove the pain from the foundation of the system.
You see the pain is the problem in the system. The pain is the foundation of the system. A foundation based on pain is a crumbling, broken foundation. Currently, we spend a lot of time arguing over where to put the furniture and what color to paint the walls. Those are things like politics, morals, religion, and judgment. What we don’t seem to understand is that none of that matters if the foundation is left to crumble because it’s more fun to pick out paint colors and worry about whether or not the Prime Minister or President can lower gas prices.
The idea of starting again the way I’ve just suggested is terrifying to most people. Your need to protect yourself just kicked into high gear because you worry about the chaos that gets created when we take out all the guard rails. We have this idea that we’re the only thing standing between where we are now and complete chaos. I would argue we’re already in complete chaos. Removing the guard rails isn’t going to make anything much worse than it already is.
Fear and self-defense are what prevent real change. These are the emotions that stop us from actually taking action towards systemic change. But it’s not the fear of the politicians or the rich CEO’s. It’s the fear of the average person reading this. It’s the fear of most of the population.
The irony in the need to defend yourself from the perception of chaos is that it makes you willing to go down with the ship or better yet, it puts you in complete denial that the ship is taking on water at all.
You’re so completely unwilling to drop the fight that you don’t even see what you’re creating. You don’t see the cycles that continue to repeat because you keep fighting over the same things and wondering why nothing changes.
You think voting will fix it. Well it might if you vote in some people that don’t offer any fear, greed, judgment, or pain, and are willing to admit that we need to tear the system down and start again. That doesn’t match the current political environment at all though. it’s not a mandate on the left. It’s not a mandate on the right. I don’t believe the centrists out there have that mandate either. So, I’m thinking it’s unlikely you’re going to find that at the ballot box. All that means is that participating in the current political system is a distraction and a dead end.
My fundamental belief is that the world and the people on the planet will all balance naturally when left to their own devices.
When people no longer feel attacked for what they think and believe.
When people no longer have to struggle to meet basic needs.
When people no longer feel the need to defend themselves from anything.
When people can begin to heal the pain they carry with them.
When people are truly free to be who they are, pain and all.
Then the world will balance.
I think of the world like one of those old school scales with the arm and the two pans, one on either side. Currently humans spend a lot of time trying to add and remove things from each of those pans, but they can never successfully balance the scale because they refuse to include everything around them on the scale. They want to banish things like hate and violence. Trying to leave those things off the scale creates an imbalance.
The scale naturally wants to balance. When left to its own devices it will balance successfully by itself. We just have to be willing to put everything on the scale and not mess with it anymore. Then it will balance.
But we’re not willing to do that, so we have a mangled scale to work with instead. Why is it mangled? Too much human interference. Too much pain.
By starting over we reset the scale. We set it back to its neutral point and then we create systems that balance naturally.
It’s not as terrifying as it seems. But that need for self-protection is strong. It’s a wound though and it can be healed. It starts with doing that internal work to manage yourself within the experience. If you can mange the imbalance we find ourselves in now without needing to change anything around you, then you can handle what would happen if we performed a much needed system reset on the world at large.
Being able to manage ourselves in the experience doesn’t omit us from wanting change. We can be okay where we are and still work toward change at the same time. What we’re not doing is arguing with it. I’m not mad at it. I’ve dropped the fight with the current system. I’m not using it as a weapon to beat myself up with or keep myself stuck. I simply allow it to be there, while I begin to advocate for the change that we need to make in our world.
It’s all still self-mastery too. That is the foundation that I created for myself and those who choose to take it on. That foundation of self-mastery is what I’m now using as my platform to begin to advocate for a massive shift in our world.
Love to all.
Della