Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Grow… or become unviable

 

Change requires us to make the adjustments that become necessary as a result of the reality that “all things are becoming new”. We change our clothes because physical and physiological dynamics dictate that we do. If we don’t, our place in the socio-communal order becomes compromised. No one wants to be around tattered, stinking individuals. We shower to get rid of the dirt, the dead cells, and stench that results from our being in a demanding world. It is a re-freshing experience. We should all embrace it; but for many resisting change, the tatteredness of their general disposition is only superseded by the foulness of their bad behavior.

We change our minds because we should always be learning/discovering new things. At some point we should accept the reality that the earth is not flat. At some point we discover that the place we occupy in this infinite universe is but a spec, all be it a most beautiful one, but a spec nevertheless in the grand scheme of things. Eventually we realize that each of us are but minuscule pieces in an unimaginably large puzzle. Minuscule, but essential pieces.

The role each of us can play in the functionality of this great puzzle which is life is not to be underestimated. Ask Gandhi. Ask Martin Luther King Jr. Ask Malcolm X. Ask Yeshua. Ask Moses. Ask Mandela. Ask a tired lady who refuses to give her seat up to a white man and move to the back of the bus to satisfy the demands of a racist society. Ask my grandmother…and yours.

In the light of new discoveries, the assumptions we made in ignorance about life, and the operations of day and night, the comings and goings of the seasons, and the oceans, and the stars, and each other,… must change. The historical assumptions that led some to deny others their rightful place in society based on pseudo-science, economic bias, and just straight up evil behavior, must eventually end up where they belong…on the garbage heap of history.

So we discover new things, and those discoveries require us to make needed adjustments in how we think, and believe, and in how we behave toward one another and the earth - and the broader universe. To maintain old dogmas in light of ever emerging realities, is to create for ourselves unsustainable spheres of being. It is no surprise then that some individuals end up being what I would call charlatans of unreality; others call them “prophets of doom”. The demise of things that they “predict”, has to do only with the very real unsustainability of their own world-views. Nothing else. Their world will end…must end, and we will all be witnesses to it.

At some point what I would call our old technologies of thought and behavior, become defunct. Our continued survival as dynamic presences in universal reality, will be… and is, a function of our willingness to be constantly growing, amenable to change. In order to grow we must cultivate in and around ourselves an ability to shed old ways of being and behaving, so that we are constantly emerging into and ready for the challenges of an infinite universe.

The processes of growth allow us to emerge from the dysfunctions of a superstitious mindset, its protestations, and its proliferations; into being the cultivators of more viable lives, and a more sustainable society. 

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