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The third part to this series on the importance on communication ended on the assumption that a major breakdown in communication could in effect lead to nature itself "pulling the plug" on our civilisation. I don't want to rain on humanity's parade, but the chances of our civilisation surviving for even another thousand years is remote with the way things stand. Some believe another Dark Age is much more likely.Meanwhile those believing that we can outgrow our internal squabbling to journey deeper into space and colonise it, cannot ignore the science of the terrible hostility of space and the immense distances between stars, as if they were intended to be incubated from exposure to one another.
And what if we did meet life "alien" to us, how would we treat it, would we try and dominate them or assimilate them to impose on them our humanity? Because for some reason we feel the need to change things to be more like us, rather than accepting them in their own true nature. But journeying outside of our planet is more than a need to colonise or cement the survival of our species, it's a need to reconnect with our past, and the origin of our species.
Possibly for this reason, ideas describing the universe before the big bang have gained popularity, but the truth seems to be that such things cannot be known: no information can reach us from outside the universe or before it - as immensely separate from our knowledge as the stars seem to be - so all we can do is speculate. The Hindus believe the universe merely exists in Brahma's dreams, and why not, when you can't know otherwise?
And with such large gaps in the "patterns" in life that we try to link up as though they were a communications link to a better understanding, it only serves to illustrate as an incredibly strong demonstration of how powerful our perceptual effects are. We will see patterns where none exist, like seeing a face on the Moon or a paranormal voice speaking to us from recorded white noise. Experts say we really want to see things like faces, we really want to hear things like voices, and our perceptual system will set out to do that. It provides an important reminder that the importance of communication includes how a person perceives the communication, just as much as the person communicating it.
Like most people these days, I feel I need to be careful about what I say because there is such a breakdown in communication in society, but eternal optimist that I am, I continue to hope that when I communicate my opinion, I will not encounter someone who is determined to accuse me of putting my foot in it. Crushing someone's opinion is in a very real way communicating to the individual that they are seen as crushable - good women were deemed to be subservient and silent throughout the ages, good children perceived as being "seen and not heard".
Today it has swung much more the other way, where it is suggested that we allow children to express their thoughts with complete abandon - even if that is in the form of high octane arguments that we are used to seeing teenagers express these days. Anita Abrams, clinical psychologist and associate of the British Psychological Society, agrees we should allow teenagers to cause a ruckus. After all, we've all been teenagers driven by a need to be anti-establishment and anti-parents. Adolescents are hard-wired to ignore their parents until their brains are fully developed. That's not going to change.
Arguments with parents, Abrams believes, give teenagers the chance to test a relationship - to find out how much they are really is loved - as well as to establish that they are a separate entity, with ideas of their own, and not just an extension of their parents. What's more - so the theory goes - shouting, "I hate you" and slamming doors isn't the sign of a family that's cracking up, it's the sign of a family that's resilient and comfortable about voicing (or shrieking) emotion.
But is shouting really the way to learn to communicate with others? If our parents allow us to communicate with them in this way, won't this set up a given rule that we can talk to others in this way, too? It rather promotes a detritus of communication, because often when a person shouts we don't listen - and effective communication requires both. Moreover, we need to learn that shouting - like violence - won't get us anywhere in the long run.
It does show however that although communication is an innate need, we learn the rules from the environment we grown up in. Like riding a bike or tying your shoelaces, you learn through word-of-mouth in childhood. And if taught wrong, then it can affect how we communicate with people in our adult lives.
A news story about how we play the game of Monopoly is an interesting illustration of this - where it seems we have been playing the game wrong all our lives. The board game of Monopoly was created after the Great Depression in the United States and has been tearing families and friends apart ever since. Complainants that the game takes too long to complete (the longest game in history lasted 70 straight days) will be surprised to learn that it is not down to the nature of the game, but due to so many people playing by the wrong rules.
Johnny Nexus, the editor of the Critical Miss blog, which launched The Campaign For Real Monopoly, puts it down to people skipping the rules and simply being taught how to play by their parents.
Your mother, who never read the rules but was instead taught them by her father, taught you, and one day you will teach your children, again without reading the rules first. She passed on broken rules to you and you'll pass them on to your kids.
It indeed makes a perfect allegory of how we communicate with each other becomes so influential in our lives. But the need to communicate is a powerful human drive, and sometimes we communicate through silence, or by things unsaid, just as much as we do with sight and sound. Some of us communicate by using technical terminology, or well-known euphemisms, or are purposely obtuse to give ourselves an air of mystery. Sometimes the less said, the better, or "less can be more".
We shouldn't, however, confuse this with a lack of communication. Often this is communication working at its best - where it has become so finely tuned between individuals that no words are needed. Like great sex, it is communication taken to another level.
This form of communication has been corrupted by generations learning the rules of engagement, as it were, via freely accessible porn sites that have no educational value, but rather nurture violent fantasies that are rarely enjoyed when played out in real life. Our children are at harm from abusers raised on such porn, and at risk at harming others as a result of viewing these misleading and explicit portrayals, because they don't have the defence of understanding to protect their minds from what they see, but so are adults. Some even suggest that watching the wrong porn films are making us bad at sex.
Mary Elizabeth Williams in her article titled "How not to make love like a porn star" for Salon questions whether the more violent sexual fantasies on our screens are affecting the way we communicate with our partner in bed. Williams opines that it communicates that we have become all about performance - like other aspects of life in general.
We tweet what we’re eating for dinner. We upload a photo of the party we’re celebrating right now on Facebook. And some of us are screwing like we’re trying to go viral, long on ego and short on originality.Much has been written on how porn’s transformation into the modern sexual lingua franca affects women — the pressure to be bush-shaved and adept at pole dancing didn’t come from Oprah or Martha Stewart. But porn has changed men too — what we expect of them, what they demand of themselves. And the problem is that thinking you can learn to make love to a woman from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching “The Fast and the Furious.”
More frightening than equating dirty movies with good sex, is the belief that it can teach us how to have good sex, because it is, after all, about communication. Porn is about getting off, whereas sex should communicate a desire to give pleasure and a genuine attraction and respect for the person you're with. And unless she or he really likes violent sex, then you're not having sex with a person - you're having sex on a person.
The short stories of American author and public speaker Tucker Max offer some prime examples of bad sex, and how not to treat women - or any person for that matter. He chronicles his drinking and sexual encounters in the form of porn parables, where he outs himself as an "arsehole". He informs us:
I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.
As a public speaker he urges people in his speech "What you need to know about life, but haven't been taught" to take risks (e.g. get drunk and fuck) because it's the only way to learn, according to the porn star of the word. He is a role model for the young American man, communicating that, "No one is going to hold your dick for you while you piss."
His stories are just as eloquent. In his book "Sloppy Seconds" Max doesn't shy away from reciting a story where he persuades a girl to have "butt-sex" simply because he's never done it before, and then gets a friend to hide in the room to secretly film the event, his victim unaware that she is going to star in home-made porn. The evening doesn't go as planned, however, and Max comes to a very sticky end.
It serves as a reminder that we shouldn't treat intimacy like a camera-ready event. When performed well, we see sex as an indicator to one of the most comfortable and intimate parts of personal relationships, where communicative harmony has been synced between people so that words or visible communication are unnecessary. There is a lot of truth to that statement; we can corrupt words and their meanings by the intention with which we use them, that sometimes even a common language can divide us.
This doesn't mean that silence provides a better impact than words, just a different one. Words can cut deep without us realising it because it gets under our skin without leaving a visible mark, wounds secretly bleed and seep into the soul long after they have been rashly spoken. Depending on the situation, it might be best to keep things temporarily zipped, "least said, soonest mended" as is often said, until the other person has calmed down enough to be able to "hear you" - because effective communication requires we listen, too.
Breakdowns in communication is a common complaint in failing relationships, for example, and we often measure the depth of our affection by how well we can communicate with our loved ones. Thus, it is not just the method by which we communicate, but how we use communication that matters - because silence or sound, if used as a weapon, will ultimately hit its mark. Experts tell us that if we can't communicate adequately in relationships we will not be able to find resolutions to any struggles that may occur with our loved one.
Read the 4 steps to successful communication.
Effective communication connects us to the present moment, it gives us the sense of oneness Eckhart Tolle describes in his book The Power of Now, and it enables us to enter into deeper relationships with others and ourselves. We gain a new awareness where we understand the impact of different methods of communication, and choose wisely to reconnect when once we were cut off from life.
People who suffer from Cotard's Syndrome know all about being cut off from life. It is also known as Walking Corpse Syndrome because it makes people think they have turned into zombies - they believe they are dead and lose the urge to eat, as well as the desire for talking, because they no longer see the point of either. The brain function of a sufferer resembles that of someone during anaesthesia or sleep, even though they are awake. All their senses become disconnected from the emotional centres of the brain.
The brainpower of communication
“Seeing ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
— William Shakespeare, "Henry VI Pt2" (Act IV, Scene VII)
Life equals communication. Everything that lives will communicate; all life everywhere needs to communicate. Scientists have even discovered that plants are capable of basic communication and have a built-in capacity to do maths, but as much as the need to communicate has shaped all life, more complex brains have also influenced the way we communicate.
Big brains or great thinkers constantly re-evaluate the world, and our relationship with it, helping to influence the way we communicate with life. Albert Einstein with a group of scientists led the technological revolution, and today we communicate with our computers, we communicate via our computers. Along with technology transforming future possibilities, Sigmund Freud gave us his theory of a universal set of emotions, loves, desires and fears amongst humankind, which represents our modern obsession with feelings and desires as the key to understanding and communicating with ourselves, to see into the workings of the inner mind. Thus, while some of us look to explore the planets and stars, others are pushing deeper into the frontiers of the brain.
Read about the future of the brain.
For example, advancements in science have shown that birdsong isn't just beautiful to listen to, it can help relax people physically and stimulate them cognitively. The sound somehow communicates positive benefits to us. Similarly, learning new languages not only helps our brains, but it can cure your stutter if you have one. You will stutter in that one and not in your original tongue. Lascivious Lothario Max may also help in this area, as it is believed daydreaming about your wildest sexual fantasy will stop you stuttering for a while.
Like the value of art is to rise - or lower - the mind to the truth, so, too, science is showing us ever new and innovative ways to communicate and the benefits of that communication. We look to science to help us communicate with our past and the origins of the world we live in, and to help us communicate with our bodies for longevity of life. People are going off to remote areas of the world where the population live healthily into their 90s to discover how their secrets can translate to the human species as a whole.
Shield yourself from the effects of ageing.
Often it is discovered that those of us who live longer do so because we have a strong communicative relationship with life. Nature, society and the individual are inextricably linked as our soul is linked to our wider consciousness and to life. Science can destroy, or strengthen the lines of communication between them. There may come a day when we can control the way oxygen "communicates" with our bodies by injecting tiny, gas-filled microparticles directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate the blood.
Communication is in our blood, and our soul, because its a pathway to connect with the sources that fuel our consciousness. It is said that Freud imagined himself as the archaeologist of the soul, as though the psyche has many levels that one has to dig through to get to the truth. And while some do indeed dig inwards for understanding, others dig in the soil, to discover the artefacts left by ancestors that can speak to us over the passage if time.
It is a method of communication that pushes people to communicate with their past, and indeed the watershed of archaeology in 17th Century England, pushed people to investigate into Britain's deep past. This was scientific thought in action; a world away from the religious dogma of religion which said that everything began and ended with the Bible. The birth of archaeology challenged the Biblical view of the past - the patriarchal manual of domination the West had hitherto used to communicate with the world around us.
Although ancient artefacts showed that, in an attempt to appeal to both genders of pagan converts, the first Christians had feminised idols of Jesus Christ. For instance, followers of Arianism (who saw Jesus as a separate entity from God similar to Jehovah's Witnesses) used these depictions in their churches. In time this representation of femininity was segregated to the iconic image of Mary as Jesus' mother. Having the Virgin Mary emerge as a divine icon did away with the need to feminise or soften Jesus' image, and so it became fully masculine, bearded and Zeus-like.
Alongside this iconic image of Jesus, the touching image of mother and child - Mary caring for the baby Jesus - became one of the most popular of all the Christian images of the Dark Ages, with archaeological evidence suggesting it was adopted from a previous "mother and son" religious duo, Isis and Horus from the Egyptian myth of creation.
Read about the myth of the Dark Ages.
Moreover, as the ground beneath 17th Century feet began to relinquish these new discoveries, the geological evidence was telling the people of the era that many civilisations had existed before them, mapping ever more distant epochs of time, as explorers mapped ever more distant lands. It raised new questions about our beginnings in England; we knew about the ancient Romans from classical history, but what of the mysterious cultures that had come before? Just where did it all start?
But this was not only to persuade people to their flock, it was in response to the growing voices that were questioning the word of the Bible, which was treated back then like the Koran is by its believers today - as the indefatigable and unquestionable word of God.
The questioning voices channelled through the burgeoning sciences did not begin with the discovery of evidence to the contrary of Biblical sources. People taking advantage of the new intellectual opportunities in the years previous to the 17th Century were challenging the patriarchal views of the Bible. One woman who fully embraced this was Aemilia Lanyer (Emilia Lanier). In what was very much a man's world, Lanyer challenged the status quo, inspiring others to set out on the long road to intellectual equality.
One of the standard-bearers in women's literature, she demonstrated that women were capable of original ideas. Witty, educated, and with a lot to say for herself, in one of her most famous poems, published in her single volume "Salve Deus Rex Judacorum" in 1611, she shifts the blame for man's fall from grace from the Garden of Eden from Eve to Adam.
But surely Adam cannot be excusde,
Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offerd,
Strength might have refusde,
Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame
But for generations of Christians in the 17th Century, the Bible was the primary source of all primary sources and its word could be trusted implicitly. However, when Bishop James Ussher, for example, used events in the Bible to trace back the origin of humanity, in adding up the entire chronology of the world, he got it wrong. The date he came up for mankind's creation - 23rd October, 4004 BC - was really quite a long way out. Even a past Pope has said that the Christian calendar is wrong, raising doubts held by many academics and recent authorities over the keystones of Christian tradition.
And what will the archaeologists of the future make of our world today? What will the future make of us, and how much will it get right about us with what they find, and how much will it make up stories to fill in the gaps? In the 20th Century great thinkers were preoccupied with political ideologies, with science and psychology (the thoughts and feelings of everyday people) of the past, and so they looked on previous ancient civilisations from these windows of communication. Thus we can be sure of one thing, however the future interprets our world, it will be shaped by the religion, politics and social moires of their own time. History can get too much hate from revisionists, but it won't stop them looking, because one trait constant across time is our human, driven by curiosity, to communicate with our past.
The first Christians knew all about this power of communication, and because of their initial secret cult-like status, from the beginning Christianity employed a secret religious coded language based on symbols and wordplay. The communications they have left behind for us to read are often a link-up to their time before their religion became the recognised religion of the Roman Empire.
The Greek version of Jesus' name and his title have given rise to many symbols and double meanings that pre-dates the crucifix or the cross. Jesus (or Jeshua/Joshua) was called "Christós" - the "anointed one" from the Greek Χριστός, or ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ in capital letters. An early sign of Christ, the Chi-Rho was formed by superimposing the first two letters chi and rho (ΧΡ) to produce the monogram pictured left. Sometimes etched around the Chi-Rho, when decorated on the first Christian houses, you would find the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha and omega - to signify the beginning and the end. When you put all the four letters of alpha, rho, chi and omega together you get the word "arco", which means "I rule".
Such subtleties and word play, although would have communicated volumes to the people of the time, become lost to modern eyes. This loss of communication between the generations or centuries happens as sensibilities and methods of communication change. A kind of generational amnesia - details that deaden with the passage of time, or language that is lost to us now, but communicated meaning to people of their era. For example, the BBC recreated the Netherfield ball from Jane Austen's classic, Pride and Prejudice. The documentary shows that the details Austen's original readers would have taken for granted we have to re-learn, where dance, dress and food all symbolised your social standing.
As science continues to advance, our understanding of the past will continue to increase in leaps and bounds, just as it has over the past 100 years. But there will always be mysteries, debates and stories. In our search of science we always have to balance what we know, what we believe and what we imagine in our human quest to communicate with life. When we grasp at such fragments, we see them as our beginnings, stories of humankind about where we came from, and this drive will continue into the future, where it will try and communicate back to us as the ghosts of their past.
This form of communication shouldn't be about retreating into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past; often we call bygone eras "golden ages" as though they were somehow better than what is to come. Interesting, game-changing possibly, but there is no era that is a golden age, except the one that succeeds it. Those that look back with rose-tinted glasses, do so because they are out of sync with their now.
The lawyer Sir Thomas More, who was councillor to King Henry VIII of England, wrote a speech on the coronation of the Henry, and spoke about the golden age having returned in the 16th Century. In using the phrase "the golden age", More was self-consciously referring to the works of the ancient Roman poet Virgil. More had been schooled in the humanist tradition, an emerging intellectual movement that looked back to ancient Rome and Greece. Humanist thinking became a major influence on the education of that time, but so did the knightly virtues of chivalry, stressing courage and honour - essentially using violence to protect the weak.
The two were not at odds but ideally combined together of the age, characteristics that were attributed to well-rounded individuals rather than suggesting a split-personality. The rationalism of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the medieval romance of the age of chivalry was absorbed by a young Henry, he was a product of a wider orbit that the time called "new learning" - it included all the Roman greats such as Ovid, Cicero and Virgil in Latin, as well as some Greek. It was believed that men should be educated action heroes; a lover and a warrior in parts, a chivalric knight and a Renaissance man who treats learning as above all else.
Henry understood the importance and power of art and education, and his patronage enriched the Tudor age (albeit for his self-glorification), but he was also responsible for the destruction of many of England's priceless religious treasures, changing the face of British culture forever. Although Henry was a cultured king, he is remembered just as much for his many wives and their bloody history, and the establishment of the Church of England with the split from Rome, an institution that had previously given him the subsidiary title of "Fidei defensor" or "Defender of the Faith". This divorce from the papacy also brought about the execution of More in 1535.
But More's fate was one he had argued for many others. Although More himself was a great forward thinker of his time, even promoting the education of women, there was a more controversial side to his life, because he advocated the persecution and execution of people that did not follow the Catholic faith. The glory of the golden age he had envisioned had not lasted long.
Today we commonly call the reign of Henry VIII's second daughter, Queen Elizabeth I as England's Golden Age, a time when England embraced the whole world in an increasingly literate society. In a period bursting with icons - Shakespeare, the Spanish Armada, and the Virgin Queen herself - literacy was the key to social mobility. However, although it was a time of beauty and wisdom, it was also a time of plague, violence and superstition.
Life was undeniably tough if you were poor, racked with fear if you were rich, because it was a time of political uncertainty. For many people, "medieval" is a byword for torture, but in fact the English medieval kings almost never engaged in this form of brutality. It is the Elizabethans who pioneered state-authorised torture. Thus, when we look at our past, it is advisable to look at it within its own context, rather than the feelings we have about our own - even though in actuality our interpretations will be a mix of both.
This is so, because we are driven by our need to communicate, and often when we listen to the past talking, we will hear it through our own precepts rather than theirs. We also do this to be able to relate to the past, and to see what lessons it holds for our own future. When we investigate the extraordinary and ordinary humans, the science and the workings of the inner mind of a particular time, we do so not just in terms of our past, but to understand our present and wonder how we will communicate to our future, too.
What is said about us in our lives is not always what history says, and doubtless history will have its say, as it always does. In its conversations with us, we search for warnings of mistakes we should not repeat, and to see what we evolved from. And as we may be amazed at how we came through the dark ages of history, it may be true that future generations will look back at us in amazement and wonder how humanity managed to survive the exerting pressures of change to create a better society than the ones that came before.
Communication is a leading light
I am not suggesting we will ever create a utopia - it may be we never achieve it, but the point is to strive for it. More envisaged a 16th Century form of utopia in a novel of that name - he coined the word itself. Completed and published in 1516, he describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island country of Utopia (Greek pun on ou-topos [no place], eu-topos [good place]). In More's Utopia, with communal ownership of land, private property does not exist, men and women are educated alike, and there is almost complete religious toleration (something which More himself did not adhere to).
But as the word utopia is a pun, the joke could be on us - that there can be no such good place as that, because of the human factor in the equation. However, it feels better to strive for something better, than allow a dystopia to gradually evolve simply because good people buried their heads in the sand exactly at the time when history required them to act.
It may be that pigs will fly - the one seems as likely as the other, but it's human nature to be aspirational. Today, you can make the first right decisions. Start by reducing your material needs and seeing what's good for you and what isn't. You bought Brand X, once; so did others, and others still, until the whole world was buying Brand X, making it the market leader and making one specific family just a bit richer still. And now Brand X has increased its costs, spent still more money on marketing and publicity, dumped more and more waste on the world, in the streets, in fridges, in cupboards - waste which will eventually end in the earth, in the atmosphere or at the bottom of the sea, aggravating pollution.
People just like you are beginning to think, to become intelligent consumers, to be aware of their acts. And, slowly but surely, each of our actions, if they are useful and conscious, will contribute to reduce the deep injustice we have done to the world in the name of progress. And yet, if we had to take radical steps, they would include stopping, or at least limiting, air traffic; putting an end to deforestation and mass high-sea fishing; cutting automotive production and traffic by half; eliminating industrial-meat slaughterhouses; decreasing electricity production by half. But we all need to buy wood, eat proteins, travel, commute to work or drive for pleasure. This is not the time for us to do without everything, but rather to curb our needs. But no one does anything because humans have the unfortunate habit of waiting for tragedy to strike before they move a finger.
We criticise the police for waiting for someone to get killed before they show up; we criticise the justice system for waiting for a corpse to appear before it hands out a conviction; we criticise the government for waiting for a riot to occur before it starts taking notice, but aren't we doing the same thing, down at our lowly level? Everybody worries about the crisis, but perhaps we're all waiting to be on the brink of extinction before we become aware of the gravity of our situation.
Click here to change 6 negative habits.
So if you start changing your own habits, taking some actions, people around you will do the same, and these drops in the sea will end up awakening people's consciousness, one by one, until the whole world changes. A single person sitting alone in a corner can't do anything. Perhaps it's time we united and took the first step, because there are millions of us around the world who think alike, millions who believe that, for the good of the planet, we must live and act with awareness. We must consciously choose the long term rather than living in pointless overconsumption as dictated by our momentary whims.
The time has come to do away with the disinformation foisted upon us daily by the mass media we love so much. The time has come to wake up, because for real communication needs awareness. You can now choose to be one of those who destroy the Earth or one of those who labour to save it, hoping it isn't already too late. But know that, this very day, millions of people are becoming aware, just like you, of the alarm that is sounding around the world.
And if you make the right decision, your action, multiplied by all the people who are just like you, will save the fauna, the flora, and all of humanity. In the third part of this series we looked at how our plastics are suffocating the planet. It's enough if one single plastic bag is picked up and placed in the trash, preventing it from finding its way to the sea and one day killing an innocent turtle.
In the same vein, it's enough if a few drops of water are saved, avoiding our having to draw even more heavily from our natural resources and drying up rivers so fish are left gasping. It's enough if we reduce our consumption of criminal meat, a consumption that callously kills animals under incredible stress. It's possible to reduce the trips we take by car or to limit the use of our air-conditioning units to save the earth's weather and, in the end, our own health.
If you worry about the crisis, that already means you conscience has awoken, it is communicating to you. You are aware. You have started on your quest for truth and wisdom. Trust and believe in your own courage, communicate that to yourself as we all prepare for the great changes that await us tomorrow. We need to communicate out to the world in our thoughts and actions that what you put out comes back all the time - no matter what.
Communicate to your inner being that it is you who defines your own script; don't let others write your script for you. Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present unless you give it power. Whatever you believe has more power than what you dream or wish or hope for. You become what you believe. Trust your instincts. Intuition doesn't lie. If you make a choice that goes against what everyone else thinks, the world will not fall apart. And if you don't achieve your expected outcome, then see the "failure" as a signpost to turn you in another direction. Let passion drive your profession, and treat every day as a chance to start over.
Communicate to others that the happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give. Don't be afraid to love, the true kind doesn't hurt. Act with the intent to be true to yourself and to others. Love yourself and then learn to extend that love to others in every encounter. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time, give everyone a chance and don't allow the actions of others to prejudice you against life. Worrying is wasted time. Use the same energy for doing something about whatever worries you. Communicate to life your prayers, and if the only prayer you ever say is to give thanks, then tell yourself that is enough.
Together, by believing in a better future and acting to build it, we will succeed in changing all selfish, and destructive challenges that attempt to drag us down. Everything is possible, because we have the power that comes from being many who want a very different world from the one we were plunged into, like plankton in a sea of industrial waste. Troubles do not last, unless we refuse to let them go and to start a new page as we write the next chapter in our evolution.
But by continuing to live thoughtlessly, to preserve this perverse system of miscommunication that keeps us enslaved, we choose the side that will drive us right into a wall and eventually be the death of us all. When you face the abyss, you have to choose: will you jump off the edge or grasp the rope that can take you to the other side? We have to realise it isn't so much our technological commodities that make us progress, but rather our spiritual journey. And these obstacles that block our path can help us make the right choices for the future or not.
Every life that overcomes the odds serves to remind us that life is about perseverance. The human spirit is very resilient, for every terrible news headline we read, there are dozens of "feel good" stories to take its place. When we are blessed, it's so to be a blessing to others, not to “hoard” the blessings for ourselves, as one American family discovered when they began adopting children with special needs around the world in need of a loving home. Their story is an inspiration to those that are filled with scepticism about our species.
We humans are the creatures for whom our own existence is too small, and there has been a spontaneous rediscovery of the spiritual dimension. There is something crucial going on in this welter of spiritual experimentation and exploration. Ancient prophecies speak of humankind today as divided into two paths: the indigenous and spiritual people, who live in harmony with nature and the modern city-dwellers who have made amazing technological progress.
According to these prophecies, we live in a critical time - a time where the two paths must unite to ensure the continued survival of the human race. However, our urban societies have also lost themselves in the stress, isolation and soulless environment of our concrete jungles.
Subsequently we need to learn how to listen to our heart to make decisions, how to bring our body, mind, and spirit together when they are separate, understand that whatever we want to do, our energy follows, and that it's effective communication which allows us to tap into that infinite source much faster and deeper.
Moreover, until we begin to communicate more effectively, we will continue to yearn for more - for connection, for meaning. But when we do find it, all the scepticism in the world cannot put it down.
Read more in this series: -1 -2 -3 -5 -6
Yours in love,
