Changing the collective mind, changing the world

The world is a mirror, a reflection if you will, of the collective mind. If you want to change the world you need to change that mind. We are all cells of that interconnected mind. Change our own thoughts and they have the potential to spread through the network of the mind like contagion.

Coming to terms with the gap between our wished for view of reality and what is

There is a simple formula for frustration.  First take the reality of a situation thing or person then try to impose on it/them what you think they could be if they reached their full potential, responded to your efforts to control or in other ways complied with what you think could be.  The resulting gap is the cause of frustration. A variety of carrot and stick approaches have been used throughout time to try and bring about change at the individual and societal level: fear, ostracism, monetary gain, social position, prestige, propaganda, conditioning. Sometimes temporary change can be brought about by these measures but remove the incentive or disincentive and what we tried to control usually reverts to its original state or else something unintended.  Its basic physics really, remove the heat from the boiling water and the steam will revert back from its gaseous state back into water.  Sometimes things don't revert exactly back to what they were but are still not what we intended.

There is a temptation to think that things, people and events are the way they are due to simple causes such as a bad upbringing, politicians succumbing to the gravy train, pollution causing global climate change.  Reality is often more complex than that. Bob Frissell in his book "Nothing in this book is true but that's exactly how things are" puts his finger on it when he says that we don't look far enough back in the causes of things. We tend to blame the latest obvious causes in a long string of causes and effects. If a child is bullied we are tempted to look to the bullies as the cause but not what made them bullies.  If we do follow the chain of causes as far back as we can go then we probably get all the way back to the first humans or maybe the ancestors of us and the chimps. So who is to blame for the deficiencies in our world? No-one or everyone?

Our power rests not in attempting to change others but in finding how we ourselves exhibit or influence the very thing we criticize,  taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions, accepting what we are and changing what we can. We can be the very break in the chain of cause and effect that we are seeking. Like it or not what we will choose to change is what will give us the biggest pay back for effort. When we see ourselves as part of a greater connected whole then the usual benefit to self gets broadened out to our extended self, the pleasure and happiness of another is our pleasure and happiness.

Oneness: is it union, merger, loss of boundary - does it really matter?

In an attempt to deepen my understanding of my own experiences of oneness I've been reading what some of the religious paths to it have to say about it. The immediate frustration I faced with attempting this was all the contradictions and of course everyone thinks they've got it right an everyone else has it wrong.

I've listened to Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle on Youtube.  I've tried to get my head around the different Shiva Hindu sects as well as Advaita (non-dualist Hindu traditions), the gnosticism of Tau Malachi and of course Kaballah.  Conspiracy writers like David Icke and Bob Frissell also have much of worth on the topic. I've tried to compare what they say back to my own experiences derived through meditation, moment in time insights and one experiment with a legal plant substance.

For me, my own experience was a loss of the conditioned self and a loss of boundary between the rest of creation.  It was a realization that I am the limiting factor, the blockage so to speak, creating my experience of existence as a singular entity when the other reality is - vast! It was a realization that I normally experience a world limited by my five senses, my conditioned ego self and co-created by the other parts of myself (other people, animals, plants and the planet) who are just as constrained by their own senses and conditioning, by fear, anger and self doubt.

The different religious views seem to describe oneness in one of three ways:

• Loss of boundary/ Loss of distinction between subject and object.
• Merger with the all pervading consciousness (dissolving back into the source consciousness) - the idea is that our individuality was only every an illusion necessary for the divine to experience the world of matter.
• Union (as in intimate closeness) with the all pervading consciousness (this is the path followed by those who want to evolve to be like the source or cling to it like a devoted lover

Frankly, faced with this confusion of paths where I'm at for the moment is trusting that love is the key to growing and increasing the frequency of the times I experience oneness and that on a practical level I need to look at what I am doing or believing that gets in the way. Accepting some responsibility for the state of the world I experience and trying to observe it without criticizing it.  The most profound idea I've come across in the last few days is that everything and everyone in the world is the way they are because I needed them to be that way and I helped to co-create them that way. I know that before know I wouldn't have been able to accept that level of responsibility or would have even railed against it.  Once I would have said that if I hadn't directly acted upon something then "its not my fault", "I didn't do it" because I saw them as outside of my experience of reality, separate from my own thoughts and beliefs.  Now I'm not so sure - everything is so connected and I believe we are just one consciousness that for some reason has compartmentalized itself.