today is world humanitarian day

Nearly every day of the year is marked by being a special occasion. Some days are made a lot of and others slip by hardly noticed. It seems there are always events tugging at us to respond. The latest atrocity, the most recent gross unkindness, the most horrific explosion. One day we are upset by this event and a couple of days something else demands our attention.

What are we to do? We cannot fix everything, we cannot change the hearts and minds of other people carrying out these acts of human destruction. Are we lost, always left with the role of victim, as these continuous streams of endless events attack our senses.

How have we as human beings come to this? What is it that drives us to such devastating activities; such murder and total destruction?

Is one person, group, nation, sect, class, religion more violent, more hostile, than the rest? What are the corrupting influences that turns people into having no regard for other human life. What is it in most of us that demands we have the best of everything and somebody else can have what is left?

What does it mean to be human? Does it mean that each one of us should be all powerful and the person that is not 'me' have less? Do we see that our upbringing, our education and our society teaches us this; whether as a selfish individual in order to be competitive, successful, or as a society and nation to protect one's way of life and interests. You see we have ended up thinking that being the most important individual in the group is good and so we strive for this individual excellence as if it must be attained at nearly all costs. We ignore the fact of the aggression and competition required to push other people out of our way as we strive to become important. Why do we strive so hard for this recognition? This sense of power without which we think we are unimportant.

What is it to be unimportant? Is it despair, to be cast forever as the victim, without hope, meaningless and in order to avoid these feelings we pursue their opposites so we think we can escape these feelings without understanding them. Perhaps being unimportant can open up self awareness, open one's eyes to seeing the world as it really is; to see the conditioning we have all been subjected to. For the first time perhaps one can see the fear and insecurities driving us all into this world of comparison, ambition envy and hate. Surely these are our attributes that lead us into the problems of the atrocities in the world. It isn't the 'bad' people 'out there' but the blind assertiveness we all have that states that I am more important than you, I am right and I am going to stop you by being more powerful, and by controlling what you can and cannot have I stay safe, because I fear you. I don't understand you therefore I don't trust you because deep down inside I fear you maybe the same as me and I do know that I want to be the most powerful so it does it follow that if I do not suppress you, you will do the same. Is this not the real reason we are locked together, all of us, in aggression towards one another?

Perhaps this will get us no where and we may then realise that true understanding of our enemies' desires, as well as our own, will lead to complete co-operation. Until there is a revolution in each one of us, which is not about condemning the other, there will be the same headlines flooding the media demanding our reaction and keeping us blaming an enemy we can do nothing about as individuals.

Emptiness

That low level, often suppressed feeling of emptiness is especially intense if one compares oneself with others and their seemingly fulfilled lives. One observes their activity, their exclamation of how great everything is for them.  Beyond their words, however true, one starts to compare and one becomes envious and bitter.

Watch for yourself, see what happens.

Perhaps behind their affirmative rhetoric of how great life is for them there is still the nagging emptiness that they are trying to drown out will all manner of mental tricks and tactics. They may no more understand that sense of isolation, of emptiness, than anyone else feels whatever they may say.

Emptiness is not to be confused with negativity or depression.

The envy, bitterness, isolation and the sense that everyone is having a better life than you, is instilled early in all of us and whilst we are telling everyone what a great time we are having we all still have this nagging feeling that gives us a sorrow we are at the moment calling emptiness.

The bitterness that emanates from envy when one compares ones life with others so called more successful lives devours compassion, drains energy and fills ones life with conflict as you try to become more like the people to envy by copying their ways. There is no solution in this action and the conflict within one grows, festers, leaving one with little energy for life as it actually happens, moment to moment.

So far, in summary, most of us feel empty. We look at other peoples lives and they say they are fulfilled and we usually say or lives are great when people ask us. Feeling empty, as if something is missing, we become envious of other peoples seemingly successful lives and from this envy arises bitterness from the sense that we are somehow 'missing out' on the 'good life' that, if others, are able to achieve, why not ourselves despite our outward attempts to make everything look at if it is going well.

So we deny or run from this vague feeling of emptiness. We never stop to look at it, to understand it because we have labeled it as unwanted, bad, to be got rid of somehow. We fill our lives with all manner of activity to kill off the unwanted feeling, the uncomfortable that we do not want to experience. So instead of spending energy to understand with scurry away in the opposite direction always making sure we are too busy to give this feeling of loneliness or emptiness as we have called it here any attention.

If we stopped to look at this feeling of emptiness instead of being in fear of it, what would we find? Is it so terrible that we need to deny and run away from it or is there a quality about emptiness that we have never taken the time to understand? Why have we given the feeling, the word “empty“ with its the fearful label and its negative connotations?

In emptiness, or rather the feeling we have labeled with the word, there is beauty, freedom, silence and peace. This feeling allows action that is not conditioned because the mind does not and cannot work with emptiness. It flows naturally with life; it facilitates awareness because there is no chattering mind to distract it. In emptiness there is nothing to stop truth arriving.

When we are feeling non-empty, when we are being busy, noisy, becoming, achieving, endlessly thinking and all the rest of our current lives are we completely unable to perceive the truth.

Because we have not stopped to observe our unease about this empty feeling we experience, we are still anxious, lonely, neurotic even depressed though we have worked hard at trying to stop the nagging feeling by having such busy lives. Our sorrow and conflict is increased as we try harder to escape the feeling we have labeled as unpleasant.

In emptiness there is no bitterness because there is no envy. Where there is no comparison there cannot be any envy and there is no comparison in emptiness. Only in denial, the running away from emptiness is there the angst of feeling hollow and let down by a meaningless life.

Emptiness is life and in that truth can freely flow because there is no motive, no effort. Action is pure and is love.

Should I want to impress you?

Many of our motivations in life come from deep seated desires that are drivers in our lives. What are these desires and where do they come from? Can one see and watch these desires acting in our lives or is one much more concerned with pretending we are only driven by so called high-minded and social ethics and morality that are acceptable to ourselves, and what we think others will like to see emanating from us?

Is not the problem here that one's ideals are not what is actually going on inside of us so we are in conflict. 'I should not be this, I should be this'. 'What I should be is not actually what I am, so hence I am in conflict'.

We are making judgements; the ideal we want to achieve and become, is good and what we actually are with our greed, ambition, resentment, jealousy selfishness and all the rest of it, is bad.

This is what we are doing in our lives. We have decided what is good and what is bad rather than just looking at ourselves and seeing it all without judgement and comparison. These notions of good and bad, right and wrong are passed round the society or group we are in and conformity is expected. One conforms for whatever reason and conflict follows. The ensuing battle within ones self  goes something like 'I want to feel part of this group or society and be accepted'. 'I do not want to feel outside of the group so I had better conform despite my reservations and inner conflict; it is better to be accepted than it is to worry about my particular reservations, after all we need to belong don't we?' This seems to be true whether we are talking about  nationalism, a particular religion or some smaller grouping.

So for many of us we not dealing with the reality of what we are, but we are trying to fit in to someone else's idea of what we should, be whether we have read things that tell us how to be, or whether we are conforming to what we think others expect of us.

Have you looked at your motivation driven by your personal desires and seen that many come from the fear of isolation, of being rejected and of death? Have you noticed that you want and desire something, whether it is a relationship or money and from that moment when the desire is recognised you start to think of ways to get what it is you desire? Where does desire come from? Does one think one's life needs more, some improvement. If that is the case then one is surely thinking that ones current life has something missing and by acquiring more, the missing things in ones life will disappear and ones life will be a success with endless fulfilment. So we end up trying to escape from what we truly are without understanding ourselves, and without this understanding how can we possibly take the right action to end conflict?

Do we then not have to understand what are our deep desires without judgement by observing them as they arise and move, however we have labelled them in the past either personally or by society?

Watch how you are driven to impress your boss at work but are much less respectful to someone doing what is considered by society a more menial task. Watch how you are much more engaged in the conversation  with someone you desire sexually than you are with someone you want nothing from. Watch all the things we do and say to gain favour and acceptance from those we want to impress and gain from. This is self awareness and it moves from moment to moment.

There is nothing to change until one knows what one is motivated to do at the deepest level because all change without real understanding is merely endlessly trying to think oneself out of the conflict one is in and how to escape from it rather than look to at the reality of it.

An election in a small Country in the northern hemisphere

Most of us have been conditioned to make money for someone else in order that we can survive. This state of affairs is continued through our fear of insecurity and the propaganda that plays on our fears. This, it seams, is the role of the corporate media and the political mainstream. Of course there are worthwhile things to do and we can work at these but the mantra that everything has to be reduced to financial economics is part of the conditioning.

A man met

A man said to the group of people gathered to watch a nature film "flow like a river and blow like the wind". He also mentioned that in walking one can be still whilst in movement.

This man's achievements, though considerable to some, are not important and his words could be empty of meaning but still clever. Putting all that aside one listened and one knew he came from a place where intelligence flowers rather than a place where rhetoric is manufactured for effect.

outside and Inside awareness

How can we force our will, however rational and moral, on others and the world when we ourselves are in conflict and contradiction, pain and sorrow within? Perhaps then it follows that the greatest challenge is to understand the nature of our own  difficulties before we can have an impact in the world outside of ourselves.

We live in fear and from that fear we are trying to run away. In running away we cannot face or understand fear. If we stop running away can we observe fear, what it is and where it comes from.

Making changes politically or socially will have no meaning if we don't understand the fear, the violence and the jealousies that we harbour within ourselves. If you feel insecure in your life because you want permanency and you cannot find it, your view of what needs to change in the world will be according  to these fears and insecurities. Your escape from 'what is' is motivated on an idealised 'you' or the world where these fears and insecurities no longer appear to exist. This has no meaning for anybody else; it becomes just the exercising of your will over another. The quest to satisfy our own desires is about becoming and having something we want; an idealised future you.

Until we understand truth, love and compassion and whether they may or may not exist external to our own desires, which are driven by our fears of loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness, rejection, hurt, death or whatever, we surely cannot approach the real problem of changing the violent and unequal world we live in and see around us every day.

There is nothing to do until one is living with awareness and an understanding which is not a conclusion, an answer, but is a moment to moment movement where yesterday is not relevant and future destinations meaningless. Doing nothing in this sense is in fact doing a great deal and this action, for it is action, is vital if we are live without the violence and destruction surrounding us and is born within us.

There is also no 'when I have sorted myself out will I know what I will do in the world'. There is only awareness, choiceless understanding and observation. Then there can be pure action. Until one can live now, without constant rationalising, comparison and analysis no action one takes will make the world a better place. As long as our conditioning and prejudices drive our actions human beings will be the same as they have been for thousands of years. To look clearly into oneself constantly without bias may reveal real change.

Just because you are prepared to die for a belief does it follow that you are more right than the next person with a belief? It perhaps just means that you are prepared to die for a belief and nothing more. Rarely does a belief coincide with the truth; it is after all a belief, which is personal. Truth on the other hand is not personal and therefore has no place with just an individual. Why do we confuse the two?

Terrorism and religious fundamentalism

There is so much talk of terrorism and religious fundamentalism as if there is nothing else going on in the world.

Is the human race truly a species of violence with no escape or is all this talk and activity just a way of ensuring we remain a violent species until the last person on earth dies? At least the last may die peacefully. We talk of religious fundamentalism, of whatever religion, as if we are a free people but they are not with their religious rules. I ask whether any of us are free or are we just as conditioned as those terrorists that we condemn? Are we too blind to the hate in our own minds?

The western nations have done terrible acts in the name of national interest and all organized religions have carried out appalling campaigns at some time. We excuse our own and condemn the other on a regular basis.

Are we reduced to shouting and killing across national and religious divides until there is no one left or are we going to look at ourselves and understand the root of our aggression, hate, violence, envy and fear?

The religious, national and political warring is only the outward result of our inward chaos, conflict, insecurity and sorrow. Surely we need to start with ourselves not following the dictates of others; how can they know what is the truth for another.

If one is so insecure, afraid and have such a burning desire to belong to something external to help you through life, then should you not question whether you are actually alive and working it out as you go along or whether you are just pretending to be alive and only following what others have told you what to think. Are you just acting on conclusions that the mind, with all its contradictions and conditioning, has made up from the words that others have fed you for their own needs?

The beauty of life and the world we call earth cannot be measured by external political and religious dogma however appealing it may appear to those of us desperate for any solutions to ease our fears and insecurities concerning life and its meaning. Are we not in danger of destroying the whole of human life if we continue in this self centered way of my belief is right and yours is wrong.

Is it not time to be serious about our hate of one another and get to the bottom of it before it is too late. We can start with seeing what is in our daily life rather than just believing in someone else's ideology.

Can your planet sustain you?

Winter rain lashes the windows and in this part of the world the sun is low and the light poor. Nature has been sheltering with greens rotting to brown and most soils and trees are bare. This dormant and cool period lasts a short time until our endless planetary journey moves us into warmth and longer, stronger daylight once again and green returns to the landscape.

Without humans this story continues and the purity of it is unobstructed. The human species with its successful breading and colonisation seems not to know reflection and understanding of the wider issues and just thinks it can forever grow, reproduce, spread and somehow magically the planet will cope with our selfish and petty desires.

No nation or major organisation appears to want to deal with the possibility of ever increasing growth leading to the destruction of nature and therefore the human species. Perhaps some think the powerful and wealthy few, those who control the nations and large organisations, can survive whatever lies ahead.

One doesn't know what may happen as we continue to blindly develop, but to rely on technological fixes at the 11th hour is surely lacking in foresight.

One has to question our so-called intelligence and wonder why we cannot understand and deal with our own selfish desires and fears, that even if they do not turn the planet into a wasteland, still cause us so much grief and conflict in our daily lives.