Sun Tsu said that knowing your enemy is key to winning every battle. It’s funny what happens when you change this to understand that your enemy IS you.
To know ourselves, we must look within. However, when we do this we discover that we are made up of the same energy as those outside us.
We persist in being at odds and fighting the outside world. If it is the same inside, if there is no fundamental difference between me, my environment, then it becomes clear that we are actually struggling against ourselves. We are the enemy.
We are the enemy, which we must learn.
Knowing yourself is the process of understanding everything. You and I are not independent from the whole. We are just one example of how it can all be arranged, how it could be woven into subjective experiences.
The concept of Wu Wei, or simply going with it, could be described as learning how to not get in our way. To stop creating obstacles outside of our own creative process and instead realize that the person who is me exists in the environment, but that we also create that environment. Our environment and ourselves are inextricably linked to each other.
Physically speaking, as we perceive the world, if we do harm to the environment, we also harm ourselves. We poison ourselves if we poison the land.
It is a great job of the ego keep us fighting our external selves, to maintain the illusion there is an independent me that is unique in the universe.
To maintain my isolation from the rest, my ego creates the illusion of separation. This is to make me feel special and ensure my survival.
The last thing that ego wants us all to realize is that there are only one thing, that there is only one thing, and that we all swim in it. Each of us is a ripple, an eddy, in a river. We are all part of the river, but we are still an individual.
When I learn to accept, I discover that you, me, and everything are one. If I do something to enhance your life, I add value to mine and enrich the environment where we both live.
Because I care about the environment, I also care about you.
If I view the world and my role in it subjectively as a physical person living on a large, round rock covered with water, I can see my fellow humans as one, but not as other people.
Each person on earth is me. All of humanity is one, with all parts of the body and mind we call humanity. We all live in an environment that allows us to survive. Only if we live in harmony with one another and our environment can we survive.
Darwin was correct when Darwin spoke of how only the fittest survive. However, Darwinism is more than a theory. It’s a warning. Survival of the fittest is survival of those who are the most adaptable.
Our evolution as a species is being slowed in the physical sense. We have become disconnected from our environment and see it as something we must adapt to, and so we are at odds both with nature and ourselves.
This is why we are trying to kill her and how we are speeding up the end of our own lives.
97% of all species that have ever existed went extinct. We are not immune or special. Climate change is a temporary condition and will kill us, but not the planet.
350 million years from our extinction, the planet will have completely healed itself and forgotten that we ever existed. There will be no trace left of us.
Anywhere. We aren’t involved in saving the planet. We are committed to saving ourselves, but we won’t do that if we are divided and if accumulation is the driving force behind our societies.
You will see the truth.
You will be shocked at the inextricable relationship between us and our environment. It is part of us, and we are part of it. It is easier to die if we poison it longer.
Continued desire for more, more and more is suicide over generations. You will see that evolutionary terms require more than just a jump-start for our physical selves.
We have to adapt and grow beyond our egos, beyond our individual sense of self, and into the belief that we all are part of the creative process of self-discovery by the universe and her own evolution.
If we don’t change our perception and remain stuck by our ego in isolation then eventually we will discover that we are still alone.
We won’t be able play in the harmony of the frequency that is us with the rest.
We become the bum notes in the universe. The music is at odds with us because we haven’t learned to be at peace with ourselves.
Until we can tune ourselves to the universes harmonics we will remain outside, alone.
As we felt in our lives, we felt isolated and insular, looking out for number one. We never realized that there is only one and that we are just fractions.
Aramaic, the Hebrew language, conveys the concepts of good or evil in agricultural terms. Either something was ready to eat and was therefore good, or it wasn’t yet ready to eat.
This could be applied to us by saying that we either are ready to learn, or we aren’t yet ready.
This is what I love about it. It gives hope that something, or someone, bad, can ripen.