I do my best to see world events as a giant theatrical production somewhat like Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, a 15 hour production modeled after ancient Greek dramas that follows the struggles of gods, heroes, and mythical creatures over the magic ring that “grants domination over the entire world”. (Wikipedia)
It helps me to see the folly of leading our lives based on the belief that our cultural stories are true and unchangeable!
Such a theatrical “ring cycle” is playing itself out in Washington DC right now, but rather than gods and heroes, we have the lowest common denominator in human thinking using numbers on fictitious ledgers representing “a balanced budget” as the golden ring that will return our country to its place of world power while the people be damned.
I have two conflicting points of view sailing around in my rational brain about our current circumstances.
One says that these world events are inevitable and must happen to dissolve a 5000 plus year human enterprise gone amuck.
Mad Cow
The other says: “what will it take for us to realize that “our core beliefs create the world in which we live”? ( A radical thought to many, but a story that can empower enormous change for the better.) What will it take to understand that if we believe we are creatures of struggle, opposition, competition and survival of the fittest then that is exactly what we will be!
What will it take for us to realize that the dominant story of magic rings and fights over good guys and evil guys and prizes of power are stories that can be changed, indeed, must be changed and that we can do it. We can do it by asking different questions.
If we were to accept as a working principle (forget belief, it is too confining) that we are cooperative, collaborative, “all in this together” beings, living in the same global neighborhood, how would we structure everything? How would we handle our resources? Our relationships? How would we restructure our economics so that all “had enough”, not excess, but enough to experience a life of well -being (for those that choose it)?
We might decide that consciousness can be changed for the better by adopting a “function (behavior) follows form” management style creating family constellations, neighborhoods, organizations, corporations and governments structured “for the good of the whole of us”, collaborative, cooperative, and absent oppositional styles that only create stalemates.
This would throw us into a new story, a “fake it til you make it” adventure of creating all our institutions and relationships anew, based on the COMMON good, the COMMON wealth and using COMMON sense.
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For!
What would such an adventure entail? Well, it might start by adopting the concept of “forgiving debt”, a concept used in pre-Christian, Christian, and Jewish traditions in bygone millennia when all incurred debt was forgiven in a Jubilee occurring every 50 years.
The attitude was: “let’s start over!”, let’s clean house, lighten up the energy, just let it all go, cut our losses, and start anew!
Why not? Who says we have to pay it all back? The old story thrives on this ball and chain economic arrangement. It is only radical if we believe we are slaves to the burdensome story we have been living on planet earth for millennia. Sometimes you just have to walk away and let a new phoenix arise from the ashes of what is outworn and unhelpful to LIFE!
We really can chuck it out the door, chuck it out of our consciousness!
Does this terrify you? Of course it does, me too, but staying mired in this muck is a dying way of life anyway—look around you!
I say pull the plug on the respirator and instead of doom and gloom, get busy doing the Alice in Wonderland thing of “believing in six impossible things before breakfast” and then watch our human energy, hope, ingenuity, and initiative soar!
The “too serious gene” has us by the you know whats and for what?” So, that we can continue to believe in wizards (more like boogey men) behind curtains and gods in the sky predetermining our fate!
How sad to plead with decrepit political entities to “save us”, shore up the ship and keep us on this treadmill of fear-based living! Enough already!
You think this is nonsense? You think this is wishful thinking? How will any of us know unless one by one and then joined together we walk away, leave the coliseum, stop supporting the gladiators in our national Washington coliseum? (see blog November 5, 2010)
Leave the Coliseum
We only lose when we “wait and see” and allow politics to remain the feeble and useless tool for managing our collective good.
I say, let’s take to the streets to dance and laugh at the absurdities we have allowed to co-opt our lives! Pull the plug on salaries in Washington and see what happens.
Are we so “spellbound”, so “in trance”, that we really believe we cannot walk away from conflict, competition and greed in favor of choosing to base every individual action we now take on the COMMON GOOD inside ourselves, in our homes, offices, schools, organizations, governments, and planet?
It just takes one foot in front of the other, making decisions based on a NEW and life affirming story, and cutting off the life blood to any and all laborious “ring cycles” that keep us locked into stress and suffering.
Let’s declare a Jubilee, forgive debt, forgive ourselves for thinking we need to be trapped and instead take action based on a new story that demonstrates we have the guts, imagination, and collective will to create a culture of care right here and right now and then let that spread as a global epidemic!
