Steve Rigell

We do not understand value at all

We do not understand value at all. We conflate value with price. Perhaps it is because value is harder to measure, and we’re lazy creatures.

Maybe it is our penchant for wanting to gain advantage, for seeing how far we can push things and what we can get away with that gives us permission to ignore value and focus on price.

Or, it could be our extraction/exploitation mentality. We see ourselves as separate from nature and see it as a field of conquest where everything is for sale and feel we must define value as a transaction.

Or… maybe we are just bullies and want to have things our way. Value is what we say it is.

As usual, we take things to ridiculous extremes.

But the ultimate test of value is whether more value is created than extracted.

Think about the value created by nurses, mothers, service workers, firefighters and educators. Compare that the the value created by entertainers, CEOs, and billionaires. The difference is qualitative and not reflected the transactions that accompany whatever value they create for their context. The former create value within their context. The later extract more value from their context and hoard it to themselves.

Nature’s processes are based on value as it relates to Life. In Nature, everything must create more value within its context than it extracts or it becomes very rare. Maybe even non-existent. The things that create the most value, that is, they are valued more within their context, become more stable.

But everything is temporary, and value is continually being redefined within every context. It is an eternal process. It is a way of defining relationships, not a way of setting oneself apart from everything else. That’s what price does.

Sooner or later we’ll have to admit price is not a sustainable way to measure value. Sooner or later, we will realize we must take a closer look at how we define value and measure it. To do that, we will have to change our thinking about what value is. We will have to change our minds about value.

As long as our economic system permits the extraction of value without creating any value whatsoever, humanity will continue to destroy itself. As long as we continue to refuse to recognize value cannot be measured financially, we will continue to undermine Life itself. We simply must change the way we do things.

The problems we see out there are just reflections of our own imperfections. We much change the way we do things. We need more heart and less mind.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Your Self

It is a good thing that poetry is so unpopular

We need more of that, but it is unpopular.

That’s the way we roll, irony all the way
Slipping by on either side of the long highway
The road that takes us from here to there
Treating the mystery like a casual affair
While we believe most of all the crap we hear
And we shed our warm self-pitying tears
As we consume our way to our graves
Our spirits broken like eternal slaves
With no place in our chests for a proper heart
We think it’s a game and we are playing our part
And keep moving, no time to contemplate
Gotta keep moving we don’t want to be late
Gotta keep moving we don’t want to be late
If you ain’t busy with a new beginning
You’re just stretching out the same old ending

We have to change the way we do things before it is too late.

What we are doing is not sustainable.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Your Self

Our default perspective is either-or

Everybody wants to be somebody.

Superficial and vain. Greedy and selfish. Destructive and partisan. These traits have been with us for millennia. We don’t seem to be maturing much as a species.

We live in the midst of the miracle of life itself and take it all for granted. The parts of it we acknowledge, we see as separate from us—something to be exploited.

We seem to be regressing, becoming less civil as we become more civilized. It is almost like civilization is the problem.

But what is wrong with civilization is what is wrong with us. We are clearly not as perfect as we imagine ourselves to be. The Dunning-Krueger effect, like Murphy’s Law, is alive and well, wherever humans go.

What we see wrong with our civilization is what is wrong with us, we just refuse to see it. We openly deny our flaws and justify our shortcomings.

The flaws in our character and the limitations of our awareness as individuals who are part of all that is are being exposed by the growing critical mass of civilization done in the human style.

Clearly human civilization is not working for any species, especially the human species. We will not make an exit from this predicament if we don’t admit what we are doing is not working, and change the way we do thing. The way we think.

What we are doing is not sustainable.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Your Self

As George Bernard Shaw may have quipped

Will we blame it on our parents?

Will we say they failed to prepare us, to educate us, to give us what we needed?

Will we say they failed to give us the right values or they failed to teach us to think clearly and make better decisions?

Will we blame it on our DNA or our irrational, emotional, fearful, selfish, greedy human nature?

Will we blame it on our cognitive biases and our parents prejudices?

Will we maintain we had no choice, that we didn’t know any better, that we were mislead.

Will we maintain we did not have the science until it was too late?

Will we fail to act even now? Even though we know what we are doing is not sustainable? Even though we know there is no way to stop the impending collapse? Even though we know we should be doing whatever we can to soften the landing for those who will have to live through it?

What will you do? How will you decide?

Change Your Mind

Let’s do something together

Express Your Self

Who benefits?

Mostly is seems like it is overweight, white guys, but that’s probably just what I’m seeing. If I lived in India, China or Africa, I would probably be seeing the local version of overweight, white guys—overweight men with different colored skin.

We call them CEOs these days, but they are the equivalent of plantation owners.

Polarization, segregation, and superficial superiority do not serve the people who are pitted against each other. It only serves the wealthy who want to keep people ignorant and at odds with each other.

Keeping people so oppressed they have no energy for empathy for those outside their trusted circle serves no one but the wealthy.

Isolation, oppression and exploitation are the tools of the wealthy. Make sure they don’t have the energy or health to organize. Make an example of the ring leaders.

We are the only species to treat other members of our species this way.

Not the distinguishing characteristic we like to use when comparing ourselves to other species, but it certainly fits.

We’ve given this structure plenty of time to prove its merit.

It isn’t working. It is not sustainable. We have to change the way we do things. We must work together. All of us. Together.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Looking for a purpose for life

We spend our childhoods being indoctrinated by our families, schools, churches, friends, communities, municipalities, cultures, societies, tribes, and other institutions. Everyone has an agenda. We are eager to find a place to fit in to it all.

We spend the rest of our lives in the process of transcending that indoctrination on way or another. Either we become masters of fitting in, or we reject it—at least some of it—and with it, the assumptions we had to make.

The Red Pill or the Blue Pill. Which will it be?

Then there is the whole direction thing.

It is a beginning. It is always a beginning.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Somewhere along the way

We are all busy making money. Gobs of money. You don’t even have to make anything but money. You don’t have to add any value to anyone’s life. All you have to do is make money. More money. Even more money.

There is no limit. Infinity is the goal.

MORE

MORE!!!

And when you have more money than anyone else, you buy things like rocket ships, islands, super yachts, and social media platforms. You take rides into space and jet around the place.

You don’t try to make life any better for anyone but yourself.

We learn to be greedy and stop caring about what we perceive to be outside our reality. We learn not to care about anything else because we see everything as separate instead of seeing it as a whole.

The thing is, everything that is is what is outside our reality. Our reality is imagined and believed. The reality in which we make money and spend it is only a small slice of reality. The reality where we experience greed and seek to exploit only exists as a collective belief to which we have all been indoctrinated.

This reality is finally proving it is unsustainable, so now we have to do some unlearning. We have to change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Until we square-away some things about our values

It is up to us. You and me. We are going to have to fix this.

This is too important to allow politicians or corporation to be in charge. If they are in charge, nothing will happen unless it will make a profit or be rife with corruption and an extraction mentality.

We are not going to be able to think our way out of this one. Thinking is what got us into it. I recommend tempering our thinking with a little more heart. Open our thinking up to the possibility of compassion and dignity and slowing down.

Either way, what really matters is what happens ‘in here.’ With my self. The part of me where I make decisions about my reality. Where I engage with my meta senses and operate as part of something bigger than who I think I am.

This is where the action is for all of us.

All that crap going on out there is just reflecting the confusion and distortions going on ‘in here.’

We need a little more clarity ‘in here.’ Collectively. That means a lot of us choosing not to operate as individuals but start doing things together. Things that are more sustainable. Things that improve the situation for everyone, for the entire planet, instead of conferring advantage to individuals.

It is a simple shift, but it is also a powerful one. That’s why it is so hard. It is not hard, it just looks hard. It is flipping a switch in your head. You may have to flip the switch a few times intentionally before it stays flipped, but that’s really all it takes.

We have to change our minds. What we are doing is not sustainable.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

The little things taken for granted

It is the little things. The things we don’t even notice and understand the least that shape our lives the most. We like to think we’re in charge of our lives.

Decisions we made thoughtlessly in passing bubble up into our awareness long after they were made when they’ve been terraformed into formidable incidents—the kind of thing that changes lives and reshapes the course of history.

A smile or a sneer cause the world to spin in different directions. Whether they are reflexive and reactive or deliberate and intentional is a choice. It is an outcome and an initiation. A beginning and an ending.

We only have a few knobs to turn as we attempt to control our reality.

We have less control than we like to admit.

Putting ourselves into a big picture perspective is not our strong suit. We have trouble seeing past what we want next.

We should all be able to acknowledge what we are doing is not sustainable, that we need to change our behavior. Change our thinking. Change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Population frailty

We continue to permit greedy growth-oriented corporations run by wealthy people to exploit the planet and oppress every species including our own.

Evidence continues to pile up confirming this approach is not sustainable.

Yet we continue to hope things will change.

You would think governments would think it desirable to have healthy populations, but since corporations don’t care, and corporations run things now, governments don’t care.

It’s all about profits. Everything is for sale. Populations are just another resource to be exploited.

Besides, most people are too busy trying to survive to have any energy left at the end of the day to raise their voices against the status quo.

That’s the way the CEOs like it.

As a result, we’ve turned the corner on population growth for humans and most other species on earth.

In fact, it seems like we are deliberately targeting growth of any kind except for opportunistic species like viruses which will eventually run out of opportunities, too.

Things look bleak on the evolutionary front, especially for humans. Well… for every other species, too.

But species come and go, doncha know… We’re not exempt from that one.

These days, everyone has varying degrees of low-level stress continually tugging at their consciousness.

This kind of stress is particularly stressful. It is like a bad bearing or brakes that are continually partially engaged. It resists any forward progress.

The upshot of civilization is that we make it harder and harder to just live comfortably.

The things we call comforts and conveniences actually produce more stress than their absence would if they were never invented.

Another of the ironies of human existence.

Meanwhile species of flora and fauna are dying off right and left because of human interference in the natural rhythms to which they are attuned.

The world will be a different place without birds and insects. We literally have no idea what to expect. Their absence will not be without consequence.

It’s too late to stop it, it’s already started.

But we have to do something… Right?

We can’t just give up without a fight…

Can we?

Hell, we haven’t even tried at all.

We keep thinking we can keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them for the last ten thousand years or so.

It’s insane!

We have to figure out a way to do things differently.

We need new mindsets. We have to change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Humanity has no future whatsoever without accountability

Which means humanity has no future whatsoever unless we change our minds and accept some form of surveillance.

Nobody likes having someone looking over their shoulder all the time. Not even a little of the time.

Yet, we seem to be okay with credit card companies monitoring how we spend. We even let them make money doing it.

Accountability isn’t that far out of the question.

The hard part is deciding how to enforce accountability.

That’s always the hard part for any society.

There is simply no way to pull off accountability without making it personal.

The fact of any social construct or context is that there is always a certain amount of compromise that must occur if the context is to be considered successful by everyone. This compromise must take place on a personal level.

People who want the power to enforce accountability should never have it.

Maybe technology is the answer. We know it can be consistent enough.

But accountability is impossible if we don’t first agree to it, agree to the compromises we are willing to make in order to have a stable future. Compromises everyone must agree to. It can’t be top-down with exclusions and exemptions of privilege.

This will be a major mindset shift, a fundamental realignment of priorities, for humanity, but certainly not something with which we have no experience.

Still, it will require us to change our thinking, to put the collective ahead of the individual. On a mass scale.

We have to change the way we do things. We don’t really have the luxury of continuing to bumble around like immature idiots.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Your Self

Improvement is easy

Humans will always look for the easy way, even if we know it requires more effort and time.

Welcome to the human race.

Sometimes the best way to do something is not doing. Not pushing. Not pulling. Not comparing. Not wanting.

Simply being in, when, where, who and why you are without any embellishment.

We don’t need embellishment.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want it.

Maybe we do need embellishment. Maybe that’s part of being human. An essential human need.

It’s possible.

Other species make do with their genetic endowments. They don’t treat flaws and imperfections the way humans do.

We humans can’t help but recognize flaws, especially in other people. We ostracize, exclude, exploit, and oppress based on what we perceive as flaws.

We cover our flaws. We hide them and lie about them. We feel shame because we think other people see our flaws the way we see them.

Seeking improvement means you don’t accept your self, your flaws. Having to improve and get better at something, even if it is a deception points to a dissatisfaction with the way things are. We feel a need to improve the situation to make our self more comfortable.

But it isn’t our self that is uncomfortable. It is our ego. Egos are never comfortable. The ego is always moving on to the next thing, looking for advantage, ascendance, prestige and status. Whatever the current fad is.

Comparing and daring, but not caring about anything other than itself.

It’s your ego that wants to improve, it isn’t your self that feels and responds to that need.

If you don’t accept your self, you can never know your self. If you don’t accept your ego’s true nature, it will always control you.

The irony, of course, is that to stop improving, we have to change, and the change is supposed to be an improvement. Just what we were choosing to avoid. Right?

That’s what we have to get comfortable with. The fundamental contradictions between the humans we think ourselves to be and the beings we are beyond thinking.

It requires changing your mind. It requires changing my mind.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Your Self

We are like monkeys with our fists stuck in the jar

But we can’t see what we are doing.

We don’t want to see what we’re doing, so we convince ourselves there’s still hope. We convince ourselves we don’t have to do something because we believe something else.

We say we care about our children’s future, but our actions show them we don’t care.

But everything is okay in our minds if we convince ourselves we care about their future. And really believe it. You know, like, really, really believe it.

That’s what makes humans unique you know—the ability to believe anything but the truth.

It’s our super power. We just haven’t figured out how to control it yet.

We’re convinced we can get out of the climate change conundrum without doing anything or having to be uncomfortable. Someone will figure out something and tell us what to do.

Riiiiiiiggghht.

We have to change the way we do stuff. We have to start working together more, and we need to get really good at it.

We have to let go of that false hope in the jar. You know, the one with our fist in it.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Yourself

Or do things the hard way

We’re going to change our minds one way or another.

We can either do it the easy way or do it the hard way. Either way it will happen, it’s just that one way is easier than the other.

There’s only one short cut, and that’s what we refuse to do. We can voluntarily change our minds or let nature do it for us over the next millennium.

It’s entirely up to us.

The thing is we have to work together on this.

Working together is not something we’re very good at.

If we don’t practice we’ll never get good at it.

Eventually we will have to start cooperating, caring.

Unless we wipe ourselves out before then.

This is one of those situations where the hard way means walking off a cliff without knowing how bad the fall is going to be.

Why would any sane person do that?

We have to change our ways. What we’re doing isn’t sane. We’re high on ourselves. We need to sober up.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

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The lesser of two evils

When you live in a system, as we do, where someone else’s misfortune is a legitimate business opportunity, you live in a system where everything is for sale.

This is a system that allows greed to thrive.

We just accept it as inevitable. Corruption is expected. It’s just the way of the world. You can’t do a darn thing about it. Been around since Cain and Able.

This is a system that promotes selfishness and separation. A system that weaponizes isolation. A system that allows humans to dominate and exploit and oppress other humans.

The few are allowed to gain dominance, and they make laws to ensure what they do is legal until they become powerful enough to feel confident ignoring the laws.

And the people just shrug and get on with their lives. No one seems to care about what is happening to all of us.

This isn’t working. We’re caring about the wrong things.

No one seems to understand that what is best for all of us is what is best for each of us. The individual and the whole can’t exist without each other. We are all co-creators of what is.

We can do better than this.

Change Your Mind!

Let’s do something together!

Express yourself!

We are not in charge of the universe

We can either go with the flow or fight against it. We can either acknowledge we are part of all that is, or we can consider ourselves separate and unique and individual.

And, of course, in this reality, we are all those things. We can not avoid being, doing, becoming, creating all those things.

We can not avoid being part of all that is We can not avoid being individual.

We all must find a way to balance this circumstance while we are alive, within the context in which we find ourselves.

The degree to which we achieve and sustain this balance is the measure of our life here. The degree to which we achieve this balance is the vibration that arises with our brief sojourn here and the vibration we leave in our wake as we merge back through the quantum stuff that makes physical experience possible.

We can do better.

Change Your Mind!

http://talkin-tees.comLet’s do something together!

Express Your Self!

We have to be objective

The more sentient life becomes, the more it exhibits feelings. Feelings are a measure of our consciousness of being connected with all that is. Feelings are that connection with all that is. To deny our feelings is to deny our connection with all that is. To deny our feelings is to deny our brief experience of individuality.

Isolating yourself is impossible, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

We shut down our hearts. We force our hearts to conform to mental patterns. We force ourselves not to care, not to see our connectedness.

We have lost our way as a species. We lose it more as we structure our society away from nature. When we continue to see nature as something to be exploited—something apart from us.

Denying our feelings, and the feelings of all manifestations of life from the quantum to the universal, is the source of suffering. Shutting down our hearts is the source of suffering. Thinking we can think our way into the future is the source of suffering.

Thinking what we’re doing is sustainable is not sustainable.

We have to change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Your Self

The real reason we have inflation

We have inflation because employers are permitted to extract labor without valuing it by paying a reasonable wage.

We have inflation because we are greedy.

Inflation is simply a measure of greed.

Inflation is a measure of the greed we are willing to tolerate. Inflation is a measure of the greed that society will permit.

Inflation is not sustainable.

Life is not sustainable unless every entity adds more value to its context than it extracts during its life.

Life is not sustainable unless everything is always reused, reconfigured, adapted to meet emerging growth opportunities.

Life is about growth, but we don’t really understand growth. We measure growth by what we extract, not by what we contribute.

This is a fundamental flaw in the way humans think. We have to stop thinking this way. We must change our minds.

Change your mind

Let’s do something together

Express Yourself!

How much longer will it be

Even medicare is now being run by insurance companies.

Corporations only care about profits. They don’t care about people, or even other corporations.

Corporations will pollute all the water on the planet and then profit by selling purified water for people to drink and cook with.

How much longer do you think it will be before corporations pollute the air enough that purified air will be necessary for human life?

How much longer before the rain condensing and falling in a poisoned atmosphere will be too toxic for food to be exposed to, and all farming must take place indoors?

How much longer before corporations offer assisted suicides and convert the bodies into something more useful than people?

We have to change our minds.

We have to realize at some point what we’re doing is not sustainable.

We have to be able to work together.

We have to be able to work within nature, contributing more than we extract.

We can’t change someone else, we can only change ourselves.

Live the story you want to tell!

Change Your Mind

Let’s Do Something Together

Express Yourself

To live like the gods

In modern societies, where status is accorded to the financially wealthy, or more precisely, purchased by the amount of one’s debt to our planet, the wealthy set themselves up as gods, and the rest of us let them do it.

Wealth is not a measure of productivity. In fact, the biggest wealth building machines ever invented have all been purely about extraction.

The wealthy don’t care about other people. In fact, the mass of humanity is just a necessary nuisance to them, like an uncomfortable natural disaster or an inconvenient interruption of business as usual.

Humans are to be exploited as much as possible.

With advancement robotics, humans will be cast aside. In effect humans will find themselves liberated from servitude and slavery, and released into full-blown poverty, unable to afford food or housing because the wealthy are no longer paying even token wages. They’ve switched to compliant and solicitous robots.

The wealthy are not going to change their ways, voluntarily. Humans just don’t operate that way. They will have to be incentivized to change.

The only thing that will accomplish this is making what they do inconvenient, uncomfortable and devoid of entertainment value.

How do you do that?

I don’t know.

But I do know we’ll have to work together. We’ll have to invest time and effort. And more importantly, we’ll have to change our minds.

We can’t change someone else, we can only change ourselves.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Dream Together

Express Yourself

The thing about needs

Not only is nothing not divisible, it also can not be used to divide or separate.

But does nothing exist? Is nothing a fact? Can it exist inside human consciousness? Can something that can not exist be a fact?

And do we really understand what we understand our understanding to be?

Fact is, fact is just a concept of something that cannot exist because of the nature of human consciousness. Human consciousness requires interpretation, even if it is only the assignment of meaninglessness.

A fact can only be something that is beyond interpretation.

Therefor, facts can only exist outside of human consciousness. Inside human consciousness, there are no facts.

And that’s a fact.

Humans do have free will, but we mostly do not use it.

If you want to exercise free will, you have to go outside human consciousness. Free will doesn’t exist within human consciousness.

The fact that we can conceive of things like facts and free will—things that can not exist within human consciousness—is one of the ironies which human consciousness has in abundance.

You have to change your mind to include mindfulness of consciousness greater than human consciousness. Changing your mind is expanding your awareness. It’s built in. Every time you change your mind, you are expanding your awareness. That’s what changing your mind is, expanding your awareness.

Each time you change your mind, you are beginning again from a new point of view.

People resist changing their minds because they detest beginning over and over when beginning over and over is the process of life. It can not be resisted. It is necessary. It is a real need.

Understanding needs is something we have put off for far too long.

We have no idea about what humans need, especially collectively.

The only way to really understand human needs is get outside human consciousness.

We can’t change someone else, we can only change ourselves.

That means changing your mind.

Change Your Mind

Let’s Dream Together

Express Yourself

This is America

Equality is a sham, an empty meaningless word.
Telling lies is accepted, no matter how absurd.

We elect bullies and sociopaths who don’t hide their greed.
We pretend slavery has ended and the slaves have been freed.

This is America.

Our corporations don’t give a shit about human rights.
We’re a land filled with bullies looking for a fight.

The Republicans are malicious, the Democrats incompetent.
And they’re all owned by donors, their wealth is their confidence.

This is America.

Looking objectively at our society, I have to say.
We lost our way, somewhere, along the way.

We don’t care about the climate, we just want our stuff.
Two days after ordering it is not fast enough.

This is America.

And the thing is, nobody with any power cares at all.
And no one is reading the writing on the wall

This is America, after all.

What we’re doing isn’t working. Our way of life is not sustainable.

We have to change our ways. We have to change our minds.

Change your mind

Lend Your Light

Express Yourself

Humanity is a spreading infection

A festering ulcer oozing pus.

We are destroying the biodiversity that makes our lives possible. We are destroying the life upon which our continued existence depends.

We can’t stop ourselves. We’re addicted to destruction. It’s sort of an unsustainable approach to life pursued by especially destructive diseases like cancer or viruses like Ebola.

We seem dedicated to the extinction of life in all forms, including our own. It’s like we are angry and lashing-out because we are obligated to be alive instead of seeing the opportunity to co-create with nature.

We have the potential to be so much more.

We have to do better than this.

What we’re doing isn’t working.

We have to change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Lend Your Light

Express Yourself

Ignorant savages

Bigotry, prejudice, and racism are long-standing in human traditions. These are attitudes passed from generation to generation. There is no rational basis for assuming inferiority because of differences in skin color or the place of one’s birth.

These attitudes are learned from our families and communities.

They are extremely old ways, and the old ways are reluctant to die.

But die they must if we humans are to survive.

Some of the old ways must be unlearned because they no longer serve us. That’s assuming they were ever more than superstitions.

Regardless, they are well entrenched and people naturally resist changes that threaten their reality and assumed superiority.

Being able to look down on someone else makes your own illusions seem more stable and real.

But, the time has come to shed these beliefs.

It seems like a small thing from the outside.

‘Just switch off the old belief—after all, it’s wrong. Anyone can see that.’

But on the inside, where all the work happens, it’s hard because these beliefs have wormed their way into the core values of reality for the people who hold them.

People will continue to struggle with the old ways.

And hypocrisy continues to be paramount among human traits.

A good place to start is by refusing to believe racists and bigots are ignorant savages who need to be civilized.

At the same time, we can’t let them continue to kill for racist reasons.

They need a good reason to change their minds.

Survival isn’t good enough. I can imagine the last two humans on earth being completely at odds with one another because of race.

It has to be something they care about more than themselves, because they care about their racist beliefs more than themselves.

Unity has no appeal to these people.

We’re going to have to change our minds and liberate our hearts so we can create a collective consciousness that does not succumb to harmful beliefs .

The only way to do that is to manifest that collective consciousness in our own lives. One life at a time.

We should get started.

Lend Your Light

Nature has worked out a set of simple rules

We humans are not very good at playing by the rules.

In fact, we’re very good at not playing by the rules.

It is much too easy for us to justify what we do and create a reality for ourselves in which what we think is true, regardless of what the facts are.

We’ve convinced ourselves this attitude, this ‘the-rules-do-not-apply-to-us’ approach to life, works.

Another deception. We’re in denial.

We’ve done nothing more than create an enormous debt by not accounting for the true cost of things we assumed we could just take, and exploit without paying.

We have an accounting problem.

Another deception.

The evidence has accumulated to the point that we’re beginning to recognize that the way we’ve been operating for the last 10,000 years or so isn’t working. We know we have to stop doing things the way we’ve been doing them, but we don’t know how. It’s something we’ve never done before.

But that’s just the kind of problem at which humanity excels when we put our minds to work in coordination with our hearts.

But to do that, we must change our minds.

It’s worth the effort of not doing, of unlearning, of breathing in the moment.

Change your mind

You never win by disagreeing

Winning is adding light to life, not extracting anything.

Extract light to create more light.

We are light processors. Light multipliers who devote our time in physical reality to inhibiting light. We enable darkness with our selfishness and sense of separation.

We oppose nature and think it is separate from us.

We compete and argue and belittle and condemn. We wage war while we pretend to fight for peace.

We seek gain advantage over others. All our institutions are corrupt.

In our eyes, no other species has any rights. The earth has no rights. Life itself has no rights. Only humans have rights.

Clearly, we take everything to extremes and set ourselves up as the center of the universe.

We are missing the point of life. Our purpose for living is net negative.

We can’t survive in the long-term behaving and thinking the way we currently do. It simply is not sustainable.

The only sustainable approach to life is to consume a little light and use it to create more light than we consumed.

We are optimized for that.

Start by Lending Your Light.

Eventually you will understand you Give Your Light, and that multiplies its value even more.

It’s really just a matter of Changing Your Mind.

Give it a try

I have died many times

Dying starts by learning to let go of the past. Dying is what you must do when you must let go of the past. Letting go of the past is what dying is.

It is leaving the shore and setting off across uncharted waters, it is wandering off the familiar path, it is knowing you will never return to the place you are leaving.

I still feel like me and probably will till my body dies.

Whether I continue as me is not up to me.

Everything about life is temporary. This reality I inhabit now it temporary. I know I must leave it behind at some point.

All this involves my body, which I know is not me, because it involves something more. It involves an awareness through which I watch my body separately.

And yet death goes before me leading the way, and one day I must sail away from my body across uncharted waters. I must leave my body behind. I must leave behind the observer observing the observer.

It will all be the past in time. I must leave time behind.

This is something I can practice before it happens.

I can sail away from stuff. I can say goodby to the place where I want more stuff. I can wander away from desire for stuff.

This doesn’t mean I have to stop enjoying life and being grateful for what I experience in this life.

I just have to be ready to sail when the tide turns.

Just like I must be ready to sail away from my body in that instant in which I am separated from the shore it represents for me.

This has been a wonderful place to reside for awhile.

Smile today.

Lend Your Light

Ignorant savages

Bigotry, prejudice, and racism are long-standing in human traditions. These are attitudes passed from generation to generation. There is no rational basis for assuming inferiority because of differences in skin color or the place of one’s birth.

These attitudes are learned from our families and communities.

They are extremely old ways, and the old ways are reluctant to die.

But die they must if we humans are to survive.

Some of the old ways must be unlearned because they no longer serve us. That’s assuming they were ever more than superstitions.

Regardless, they are well entrenched and people naturally resist changes that threaten their reality and assumed superiority.

Being able to look down on someone else makes your own illusions seem more stable and real.

But, the time has come to shed these beliefs.

It seems like a small thing from the outside.

‘Just switch off the old belief—after all, it’s wrong. Anyone can see that.’

But on the inside, where all the work happens, it’s hard because these beliefs have wormed their way into the core values of reality for the people who hold them.

People will continue to struggle with the old ways.

And hypocrisy continues to be paramount among human traits.

A good place to start is by refusing to believe racists and bigots are ignorant savages who need to be civilized.

At the same time, we can’t let them continue to kill for racist reasons.

They need a good reason to change their minds.

Survival isn’t good enough. I can imagine the last two humans on earth being completely at odds with one another because of race.

It has to be something they care about more than themselves, because they care about their racist beliefs more than themselves.

Unity has no appeal to these people.

We’re going to have to change our minds and liberate our hearts so we can create a collective consciousness that does not succumb to harmful beliefs .

The only way to do that is to manifest that collective consciousness in our own lives. One life at a time.

We should get started.

Lend Your Light

A protracted series of tragic events

Well… as long as nuclear weapons exist, there is a possibility our world will end with a grand display right before nuclear winter’s darkness descends on our planet.

Even if this isn’t the case, our future will test our adaptability.

Humanity has always been a highly adaptable species. We’ve generally been able to adapt to conditions and contexts that nature naturally produces on our planet.

But now, we facing our biggest evolutionary challenge. Can we adapt to the conditions and contexts we create for ourselves by figuring out how to get out of our own way?

Having to continually adapt is stressful.

Having to continually adapt to invisible influences is especially stressful. Viruses. Inflation. Pollution. Poisonous chemicals. Vaccines. Stress. Depression. Inflation. Wage erosion. Uncertainty. Hatred. Intolerance.

To say nothing of the physical, visible forces requiring adaptation: War. Wildfires. Flooding. Crop failures.

Ultimately we won’t be able to ignore our new reality. Eventually we’ll have to admit that things are not returning to normal.

Normal will be a fond memory. Remember when we could… What about that time we… When I was a child I…

Is there a way to get ready for it? To prepare for the requirement to continually and relentlessly adapt?

We generally like things the way they are. We don’t like being required to change by external influences over which we have no control.

But we won’t have any choice.

It will require a different mindset. We’ll have to change our minds.

Change Your Mind

Our realities are delivered to us

For a lot of people, the smell of diesel is the smell of productivity. Mobility. Getting work done in remote places. Lots of work. Lots of horse power. Machines that get thing done. Robots with human operators. We could magnify our power exponentially.

It is the smell of the power to change your world.

For a lot of people, the smell of gasoline is the smell of freedom. Cars. Trucks. Going places. Meeting people. Expanding your world. Convenience to the max.

Coal and Steel grew up together. They are brothers. They changed the world.

Fossil fuels will be missed, but they are messy and probably not meant to be used on the scale we have used them and continue to use them.

We can’t stop using them.

But we have to stop using them. The way we use them today isn’t sustainable.

We’re addicted. We’re going to experience withdrawal symptoms.

The only way we’ll be able to stop is to change our minds.

Change Your Mind