Change the Way People Think . . .
“Change the Way People Think, and Things Will Never be the Same” -- Steven Biko
In early August I traveled to California on business. I took a recent issue of a magazine with me that featured the war in Congo. I didn’t want to read it, but I thought it was important to read. The war there had killed 4 million people in the last 8 years and currently has the distinction of being the deadliest war on the planet.
Truth be told, I have yet to get around to reading the article. It just seems too depressing. I can only hope that included in that number of 4 million dead are the multitudes of Hutus and Tutsis that were killed during the ethnic cleansing that occurred in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, but sadly, I do not think that is the case. At its peak, the hatred between those two tribes killed over 80,000 people a day. PER DAY! That is 55 people per minute. Roughly 1 per second. For 10 days straight! 24 hours a day!
Imagine killing every man, woman and child in San Francisco. Or Pittsburgh. Atlanta. Or Denver. Boston. Or Seattle. Every single person. Imagine that and you will begin to understand the scope of this killing. And, for many of those cities you would have to do it almost 2 or 3 times over.
Horrific!
And yet, this is just another example in the long line of examples of how we humans interact with each other. I am not sure whether to be ashamed . . . or amazed.
On the plane ride home, with war heating up again in the Middle East, I stared at the magazine yet again, still refusing to open it. Instead, I found myself getting angry over the lack of love and understanding that exists within our species. I am sick and tired of the immature, un-evolved way in which we handle our disagreements, disputes and differences. It is as crude as the medieval forms of medicine would appear to us now. Why has our thinking in this area not evolved past when that first stone or spear was thrown at a neighboring tribe?
Worse than the current state of humanity however, or the lack thereof, are the hordes of people who tell me that my thinking and expectations for how the human species should interact are not realistic or based in this reality. They tell me my beliefs are naïve.
Thankfully, that never stopped Ghandi.
Still, don’t expect me to choose or accept your “reality” when it comes to how I believe our species should interact. When I consider human interaction I am not coming from a reality, but rather a possibility. My thinking and actions come from a vision and commitment to how things could be. And that is most likely why I see a path to change, while most everyone else only sees and accepts a path to more of the same.
And that is what disturbs me most about the future of the human species; the unwavering belief and acceptance that the current reality is how the world works, and thus, we constantly recreate it as such.
It is not until we fundamentally shift that belief and the way we think – and believe that we can come from love, trust and understanding – that change will occur. So long as people keep choosing the current “reality” rather than the possibility, we will always have what exists now. Always.
So the big question here is whether or not everyone knows that. Are we as a species even aware of this choice between reality and possibility? Because if we are not even aware of it, then clearly we cannot make a choice about it. All we can do is continue to act out the present reality.
And that is why I continue to hammer home these points about who we currently are being as a species and what else is possible, for in order to make a choice, we must first become aware that we even have a choice available to us. Once we are aware of that, then we truly have an opportunity to demonstrate our self-declared superior intelligence as a species.
In early August I traveled to California on business. I took a recent issue of a magazine with me that featured the war in Congo. I didn’t want to read it, but I thought it was important to read. The war there had killed 4 million people in the last 8 years and currently has the distinction of being the deadliest war on the planet.
Truth be told, I have yet to get around to reading the article. It just seems too depressing. I can only hope that included in that number of 4 million dead are the multitudes of Hutus and Tutsis that were killed during the ethnic cleansing that occurred in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, but sadly, I do not think that is the case. At its peak, the hatred between those two tribes killed over 80,000 people a day. PER DAY! That is 55 people per minute. Roughly 1 per second. For 10 days straight! 24 hours a day!
Imagine killing every man, woman and child in San Francisco. Or Pittsburgh. Atlanta. Or Denver. Boston. Or Seattle. Every single person. Imagine that and you will begin to understand the scope of this killing. And, for many of those cities you would have to do it almost 2 or 3 times over.
Horrific!
And yet, this is just another example in the long line of examples of how we humans interact with each other. I am not sure whether to be ashamed . . . or amazed.
On the plane ride home, with war heating up again in the Middle East, I stared at the magazine yet again, still refusing to open it. Instead, I found myself getting angry over the lack of love and understanding that exists within our species. I am sick and tired of the immature, un-evolved way in which we handle our disagreements, disputes and differences. It is as crude as the medieval forms of medicine would appear to us now. Why has our thinking in this area not evolved past when that first stone or spear was thrown at a neighboring tribe?
Worse than the current state of humanity however, or the lack thereof, are the hordes of people who tell me that my thinking and expectations for how the human species should interact are not realistic or based in this reality. They tell me my beliefs are naïve.
Thankfully, that never stopped Ghandi.
Still, don’t expect me to choose or accept your “reality” when it comes to how I believe our species should interact. When I consider human interaction I am not coming from a reality, but rather a possibility. My thinking and actions come from a vision and commitment to how things could be. And that is most likely why I see a path to change, while most everyone else only sees and accepts a path to more of the same.
And that is what disturbs me most about the future of the human species; the unwavering belief and acceptance that the current reality is how the world works, and thus, we constantly recreate it as such.
It is not until we fundamentally shift that belief and the way we think – and believe that we can come from love, trust and understanding – that change will occur. So long as people keep choosing the current “reality” rather than the possibility, we will always have what exists now. Always.
So the big question here is whether or not everyone knows that. Are we as a species even aware of this choice between reality and possibility? Because if we are not even aware of it, then clearly we cannot make a choice about it. All we can do is continue to act out the present reality.
And that is why I continue to hammer home these points about who we currently are being as a species and what else is possible, for in order to make a choice, we must first become aware that we even have a choice available to us. Once we are aware of that, then we truly have an opportunity to demonstrate our self-declared superior intelligence as a species.
Copyright 2006, RL, All rights reserved
posted by EvolutionUS | 6:33 AM
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