Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
We don’t need horror movies. We’re creating our own horrors in places like Gaza.
We don’t need dystopian fiction. We’re living in dystopia right here in our own society.
We don’t need fantasy stories about scary monsters. The scary monsters run our government.
Westerners will create a waking nightmare, psychologically compartmentalize away from its existence, and then go watch a movie about a fictional waking nightmare to give themselves a thrill.
We’ll sit on the edge of our seats watching made-up tales about psychopathic killers while psychopathic killers rule the world.
We’ll turn our backs on horrific acts of human butchery and then go watch fictional acts of human butchery, getting ourselves through any discomfort we might experience by reminding ourselves that what we are watching isn’t happening in real life.
Someone in my Substack comments just asked me if I’d considered the possibility that the world might be better off without humanity, because of all the horrible things that are happening while the vast majority of us do nothing to stop it.
There are certainly many ugly things about human behavior, and there are forces within us which absolutely do not deserve to exist. Our self-centeredness. Our competitiveness. Our hatred and prejudice. Our seemingly limitless tolerance for unfathomable abuses so long as they are being inflicted on people in other countries whose anguished faces we don’t have to look at. The delusions and trauma-based conditioning patterns we’ve been passing on from generation to generation since the dawn of civilization. The world would be better off without these things.
But over the years I have also become acquainted with dynamics inside the human organism which could make this world into a paradise, if we can only get out from underneath our delusion-based conditioning enough to realize them. Within every human being sleeps the potential for selfless action and vast compassion. We all have within us the ability to heal. We all have within us the ability to shed egoic consciousness like a reptile sheds old scales.
Maybe it’s silly, but I like to think of this potentiality as a kind of Chekhov’s gun for our species, sitting there onstage waiting to go off as humanity’s story unfolds. I know for a fact that humans have the potential to awaken from the trance of the ego in profoundly transformative ways, and I choose to believe that the playwright put that potential there for a reason.
Every species eventually hits a point where it must adapt to changing conditions which threaten its existence or go extinct. It just happens that in humanity’s case, the changing conditions which threaten our existence are the creations of our own minds. Ecocide. Nuclear brinkmanship. Weaponized AI. Biological warfare. The further our egos carry us down the path of competition and domination, the more likely it is that we open up some existential peril down the road for ourselves that there is no coming back from.
We’ll either make the necessary adaptations and find a way to collectively unlock our dormant potential for selfless functioning on this planet, or we will go the way of the dinosaur. I keep at this because I have seen far too many strange and miraculous things in my life to believe such an awakening is impossible.
And the good news is we have truth on our side. The human ego is an illusion; the self does not exist. Enlightenment is already here, closer to us than our own breath, just being overlooked amid the flailings of the deluded mind. The propaganda is deceitful, and the truth is getting more and more exposure. Humans are getting better and better at sharing ideas and information about what’s really happening in our world.
We just need to open our eyes. We just need to let truth get a word in edgewise. That’s all that needs to happen.
We need to stop fixating on all these made up stories in our heads and on our screens, and look deeply at what’s really going on.
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