Why Compassionate Understanding is the Only Sensible Approach

A human mind is like a seed, from the time of conception. If you plant that seed of consciousness in harsh soil, the seed will either shrivel up and expire, manage to sprout but remain meager and wounded from constant attack from predators, or will manage to grow quite strongly but be riddled with thorns to repel and injure anything that tries to touch it. With a soil ripe with the conditions for fear, such is the outcome for a human mind. But suppose that seed is settled into fertile soil, it will surely grow and blossom despite the occasional deluge of a rain storm. With a soil ripe with the conditions of love, the human mind is invigorated with enough purpose and meaning to grow into something that will benefit other life, like bloomed flowers that benefit bees and other creatures (despite an occasional deluge of pain and difficulty).

What one should recognize is that this is not just a simple analogy. The same fundamental essence (some call "life-force," some call "Mu," some call "spirit," etc.) is behind the growth of a human mind as is behind the growth of a plant. This basic and singular essence of existence is consciousness-waveform-energy. The more coherent that energy-matrix is, the more influence it exercises over how energy flows within its surrounding environment.

So, a human being has significant influence to apply to their environment and, given the intention (choice) to, can provide a flower in their yard with just the right conditions for energy flow (in the forms of sunlight, water, nutrients) that result in it achieving its maximum blossoming potential. Likewise, if a human mind is provided the light of love, the water of freedom, and the nutrients of knowledge and wisdom, they will become the next Einstein, the next Buddha, the next Martin Luther King Jr., the next Gandhi, the next Steve Jobs, or the next Mother Teresa.

This is why it is senseless and unproductive to punish a person's future self for the behavior of the past. Their behavior was overwhelmingly influenced by the conditions that were prevailing at the time of the behavior – proximate causes such as poverty, isolation, neglect, abuse, addiction, mental illness, and miseducation. However, given the necessary social and environmental conditions are then provided that person, they will surely thrive and blossom as the best human being they can be.

Stigma Free

Today, let us face the epidemic of mental illness together, with some clarity.  In countless ways, some subtle, some not so, our society actively engages in the dehumanization of people who do not operate within a “normal” (i.e. socially convenient) range of behavior.  While we’ve increasingly buried our heads in our phones and TV screens over the past couple decades, our country has slowly gone to hell around us — primarily because we have neglected to attend to one another’s suffering and isolation.  Worse than that, we’ve managed to allow the development of a for-profit trade in the mass-incarceration of human beings, a majority of whom have an untreated medical condition (addictions, mental illnesses, and neurological impairments), at the hands of a morally-bankrupt “justice” system that denies all but a few “due process” and “equal protection of the law,” much less genuine avenues for tangible rehabilitative support.

We’ve allowed the justice system to ensnare hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people, whom have not had a genuine capacity to advocate for themselves or press their incompetent public defenders to do a better job.  In an era of the “rocket docket” assembly line of defendants being processed like cattle and public defenders literally only having a few minutes to review each case, we cannot afford to ignore the festering problem of inadequate "behavioral health” care for the tens of millions of people who are one “bad day” away from being trapped within the blackhole of the prison-industrial complex.  Put bluntly, we cannot ignore, any longer, the fact that our jails and prisons have become convenient (money-making) garbage piles for “unproductive citizens.”  Yet, every one of us knows someone actively suffering from a mental malady, someone we care about — whether suffering on the surface, or in silence, they are all around us.  So how do we begin to solve the problem?

We begin by facing reality as a culture, admitting to ourselves that when a person suffers from a serious mental illness or impairment, the impact that that has on their behavior is inherently beyond their ability to self-regulate.  We begin by recognizing people’s behavior is constrained and distorted by environmental conditions (such as poverty, abuse, and neglect) and brain neurobiology (also beyond their control).  We begin by appreciating the fact that we are, as a society, directly responsible for all the social conditions currently prevailing to permit the psychological abuse and neglect of millions of children and vulnerable adults, and directly responsible all the more for the furtherance of those injuries through a cultural stigmatization of the people who suffer the effects of that abuse and neglect.  The onus for change rests with the society, not those abused and abandoned by it.  The lens through which we’ve been perceiving the problem has been the fundamental condition providing for the problem's perpetuation and growth.  Thus, we most readily begin, truly, by dissolving the chains of stigma imposed on ourselves and our bruised and broken brothers and sisters.

In order to effect this, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) started the #StigmaFree campaign to foster greater understanding and compassion in our approach to the largely ignored problem of mental illness and addiction in this country.  I encourage you to take the pledge.  I also strongly encourage you to consider helping support NAMI [www.nami.org], especially since they are actively engaged in such work as the Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) [http://www.nami.org/cit] for law enforcement (emphasizing de-escalation of situations involving a person suffering from a mental health problem).  Direct participation of community members in their local NAMI and CIT programs is sorely needed, but please at least spread the word.

It’s never too late to make a difference, to save future lives through the noble teachings and compassion of today.

How Do Beliefs Close Our Minds?

How adaptable are we really, when operating without the daily support and insight of others to serve as a mirror reflecting back the imperfections that exist in our own way of seeing the world -- without brethren helping us to see the stale frailty of our ingrained biases? The capacity for genuine, lasting behavioral change for a person can only occur within a nurturing social environment. Devoid of a regularity of positive feedback from the environment (that is in excess to the negative), there can be no lasting change or growth of character, for it will sink and drown from exhaustion otherwise.

 

Our own beliefs can cut us off from being able to recognize the fundamental cracks in our accepted worldview. Beliefs are a self-fulfilling prophecy, for better or worse. Beliefs inform our intentions inform our actions. Beliefs create blind spots within the light of our own consciousness, like shadows cast in broad daylight. Our judgment is limited by our degree of mindful awareness, which is limited by the beliefs thus far attached to. It is only through personal abandonment of fixed attachments and static conceptions about the world, while abiding within a loving web of family and community, that we can restore an inner-equilibrium and equanimity of mind -- a state of consciousness that is the source of all inspiration, wisdom, hope, joy, and righteous agency in the world.

Inter-Dependence Day

What does “independence” mean in 2016 America?  What does it mean to sing, “for the land of the free, and the home of the brave,” from within a modern surveillance police-state and ‘teenage wasteland’?  Ever satisfied with half-measures and half-truths, gimmicks and hot air, we collectively handed over our futures to narcissists in every area of socioeconomic life and category of human endeavour.  Even in many academic circles, it has been long forgotten that it is a logical fallacy to weight the validity of information based on the credentials of its source.  Successive American generations sold their souls and their childrens’ futures for short-lived and hollow gains.  We abdicated our personal responsibility and freedom, for the illusion of greater security and convenience of “authorities” and “experts” controlling every aspect of our lives for us, including how to think.  But most of all, we have failed to raise our children with love, compassion, understanding, and encouragement, and through our own example to become strong-willed, free-thinking, responsible, self-sacrificing, and honorable people.  If you believe at all in the idea that, “it takes a whole village to raise a child,” then it’s not hard to comprehend why our “civilized” society has disintegrated from within.

 

Over the course of the 20th century especially (in correlation with the rise of consumerism, federalism, and corporatism), successive generations of parents have increasingly abandoned their children’s futures out of their own selfishness and willful ignorance.  (Note also: neglect works just as well as abuse.)  The evidence literally stares us in the face, in the form of all the countless eyes of children staring back at us — the tens of millions of children trapped in “adult” bodies — their minds never having been nurtured and guided into genuine pscyhological maturity.  Rather, in truth, all these young and middle-aged “adults” going about their American lives are deeply wounded, neglected, and abandoned adolescents who merely cover their frail psyches behind the masks they create for themselves and each other.  They are ultimately fear-rooted (-driven) personalities because their growth was stunted or blunted by the negligence and neglect of others.  Fear was the language in which they were raised, and rejection.  Their natural, innate innocence and loving natures were routinely ignored, or even attacked, by the many adults they looked up to.  What surprise can it honestly be for people to see that hostility, bigotry, and greed are an exponentiating result?

 

What the hell happened, you often ask yourself…  Deep down, you already know why: we are all deeply interconnected with one another but have been acting like we are not.  Look in the mirror, my fellow Americans — yes, all of us are to blame.  "You reap what you sow" is somehow an unclear concept to many people still, even as they stand in their very own pile of shit, day in and day out.  People have become increasingly lazy, distracted, arrogant, spoiled hypocrites.  People have increasingly turned a blind eye to problems festering in their own homes and communities.  People have become overwhelmingly disinclined to put in the degree of effort required to reap the rewards they rationalize themselves to be worthy of anyway.  People have allowed parasitic ideas and corrupt thinking patterns to take root in and unravel our families and communities from within, by virtue of the costly indulgences of apathy and arrogant presumption.  People have chosen to be lemmings, guided by the hands of egomaniacs.  People have shirked their moral duty to their communities, as citizens receiving communal benefits, by failing to think for themselves and stand up for what they know in their hearts to be right and noble.

 

People want greater democracy, but are satisfied with handing over the country to an aristocratic oligarchy of narcissists.  People want sanity restored, but are satisfied with being handed a binary choice of a criminal elitest and a fascist bigot to choose for the presidency.  People rail against how corrupt the system is, but are satisfied with staking their childrens’ futures on nothing but the delusional optimism that the system will somehow “right itself” without actual effort on their part.  The American Dream will never be more than a fantasy until we wake up from our drunken slumber to see reality as it truly is.  The first step to addressing a problem is to recognize the true, root nature of the problem.  Guess what, the real problem is how most people have been made to perceive the problem.

 

You have likely been misled into thinking the fundamental problem with this country has something to do with groups of “other” people or which political party is in power, when it is you who are responsible for creating the world you wish to inhabit.  Nothing will be fixed so long as the majority of people believe “someone else will fix it.”  See this attitude for what it is: cowardice.  Also, consider taking the log out of your own eye before helping another with the speck in theirs.  The moment we finally choose to take personal ownership for how we live our own lives and each treat one another, we will truly deserve to celebrate Independence Day.  We must be brave enough to be free.