“Take away the fear,
only love remains.”
John McKay, Whole Foods CEO
“... as self decreases,
the Divine increases.”
Bernadette Roberts
Our survival instincts - a conglomerate of life lessons (conditioning), reflexes & genetics - is our 'self-centered survivalist' operating system that runs our mostly autopilot existence. Rarely do we stop to consider, 'Wait a minute, I always respond to situations like this - why? What if I consciously decide on the most appropriate tailor-made response to each new situation to optimize results for myself & others affected?'
Now, each situation is new, as it can't ever be exactly the same, and we change from one moment to the next, so each moment is always a brand new ballgame. Intentionally considering how others are affected requires our fear-based survival instinct to abate temporarily, so our wiser, more spacious love-based 'tend & befriend' operating system can come online.
When an individual or group is criticized, especially if the criticism is valid, instead of using the criticism constructively & making necessary corrections, the usual tendency is to automatically double-down in 'self-centered survivalist' mode, and rationalize past behaviors - 'intellectual bypassing' - like lawyers using legal loopholes to keep guilty clients out of prison.
Such self-centered blindness to values is how a small friendly business that starts by selling nutritious whole foods, degenerates into a multinational corporation, pushing addictive salt, fat & sugar-laden snacks, and viciously defending its market share. Anything tends to similarly degenerate, even our great mystics' direct experience of the Divine.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” Rainer Maria Rilke
There are many reasons why the above will sound counter-intuitive, counter-cultural, even nonsensical to our usual way of thinking & being. Of course this "usual way" - the separate self or left-hemisphere-dominant operating system - is narrowly specialized to control the external environment to optimize survival & procreation. Deeper values, wisdom, spirituality & meaning, and ideas like beauty, truth & goodness are foreign, irritatingly irrelevant, abstract, impractical concepts to this pragmatic level of thinking & being, and indeed to many in our current society.
Unlike the troubled characters we see daily in the news, we actually do have some wisdom-keeper elders actually worth listening to. But they're rather modest & quiet, and so we must take time out to search them out, listen deeply to what they say, and read slowly & carefully the things they write.
Among the wisest of these imho is James Hollis PhD, an 84 year-old psychologist & Jungian analyst, who's written 20 wonderful books, all while working full time and doing many excellent interviews:
“In an age of great material excess, we suffer dislocations from energies of our deepest being and, in return, suffer emptiness, anomie, aimlessness – all sicknesses of the soul.
On a collective level, our culture’s treatment plans for the absence of a personal, intimate relationship with the (Divine) are materialism, hedonism, narcissism & nationalism, as well as a coursing nostalgia for a world that never really existed.”
James Hollis. “Living Between Worlds. Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times.” Sounds True, 2020.
The Highwaymen "The Highwayman"
