Who Do We Blame For The World’s Problems? No One, It Turns Out
So, just who do we blame for the state of the world? Who can we blame for global terrorism, pollution, human rights atrocities, destruction of the environment, the mass extinction of species and the ever-increasing health epidemics? It turns out, no one. Can we blame CEO’s of corporations that seem to hide behind closed doors to plot evil and hoard money? They are simply humans who are looking after a family, and were no doubt raised in a way where environmental problems perhaps weren’t even mentioned, whereas striving for success was drummed into their brains. Shareholders don’t want their CEO to be the “nice guy”, they don’t care about his persona, they just want him to make them the most money. Surely they wouldn’t see themselves as doing anything wrong, so where does the authority to judge really land? What about farmers who farm cattle, pumping them full of antibiotics, keeping them in pain, sickness and distress? Can we blame them for animal rights abuse? Surely these men and women too are only doing what they have to in order to keep their job and support a family. It’s probably all they’ve ever known their whole life, and to give up farming, or go against what the suppliers demand, just isn’t an option for them. How about people in the government? Single, separate entities, completely closed off from societal influences, who are just evil in nature and show no empathy for no apparent reason... look deeply into it, and you’ll see no one was ever raised in a vacuum. Every single person is a product of their upbringing, their parents’ ideals, beliefs and inclinations, the culture they were born into, their friends, their neighbours, and so on. “A flower is made up of all the non-flower elements. It is made up of the rain, and the cloud that released the rain. It’s made up of the soil, the sun, insects, wind, gravity, time and the rotation of the planets.
The flower cannot exist alone, it has to inter-be with everything else in the cosmos.
The same is true of people. A human being is made of non-human elements, and if you remove the non-human elements, the human being is no longer there. So a human cannot be by herself alone. She has to inter-be with everything else in the cosmos.” Thich Nhat Hanh So to single out a person or corporation and say “yes, they are the problem,” is to fragment reality in to pieces that cannot be fragmented. So where did all this mess start? How can it possibly be fixed? Well I’d like to put forward an idea: The ego.
The thing that gives us the illusion that here I am, separate to that outside world. So in order to be successful and fulfilled, one wants to increase that ego, which identifies with all sorts of things: money, power, status, talents, knowledge, belief, possessions and so on. But this ego is never satisfied, because it is programmed to want, not to have. And I strongly feel that the state of our planet is due to this wanting more, and more, and more. This destruction is a self-destruction.
The conditions created by the ravenous ego have laid the foundations for many people to see, and to ask themselves certain questions and to look within. It has been the catalyst for awakening on a grand scale. People are now finding out for themselves what and who they really are, and how they already are complete and perfect.
There is a complete dismantling of the false Self they used to believe they were; a transition from little me in a big world, to “I am everything”. From one perspective the world looks like destruction, anarchy and darkness, from another perspective it’s a beautiful birthing.
The ego created the necessary conditions for its own demise, and showed us that we can live in a world where we love everybody (including CEO’s, government, police, farmers, monsanto, george bush) because of who they are, not what they do. I take solace in knowing that there are no mistakes in the universe, no pieces in the wrong place, everything is perfect. How could it be anything else? .
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