Are you influenced by mass hysteria?
image: erik kolstad
Our lives are cathedrals of manifestation. Palettes wherein the colours of our experience are blended and what we do is daubed upon the canvas of our attempts to define ourselves.
We exist within a combination of fixed parameters with a fluid possibility. We have agency within our own lives and can be and do whatever we choose. Our early life is mostly spent in a churning maelstrom of confusion, chasing the prize - usually something indefinite and specific to each of us according to our own hopes and expectations.
With the onset of maturity we become more resolved to who and what we are and the thrusting urgency is replaced by a sense of tranquility. The true purposes of life may be contemplated without the external pressures of a world that is going slightly mad and demands that you go slightly mad with it.
Thank God that humans do not rule the Universe, or even the planet for that matter. There is currently some fantasy verging on mass hysteria doing the rounds at the moment about climate change and the influence that humans have upon this planet. The only thing you can change is yourself. You can surrender to the Universe and what made it but you cannot become a usurper and place yourself upon the celestial throne. Yet this seems to be one of the malaise of our time. An over inflated sense of the importance that we humans have in the scheme of things.
People\are told by an increasingly hysterical eco-lobby that everything they do has a consequence for the planet. True, everything does, a la James Gleick, have a consequence. The strain becomes more difficult to bear when one conclusion psychosis takes root in the collective mind of the human race. When the only conclusion for human activity is bad, when everything we do is a bad thing with dire consequences to follow.
At the end of the last ice age some eight to ten thousand years ago the sea level, as the ice sheet melted, rose by three hundred feet around the world. There were no cars, no industry, no bad humans to blame. Our lifestyle choices were not complicit within a sleepwalk into disaster, we did not author planetary change. If you study history you get a snapshot of comparatively recent events, always written, incidentally, from the perspective of the victors - study history and you will see quite quickly how the human story is one of conflict.
Study history in a broader context, that’s what we call prehistory, and you will soon discover that the planet we find ourselves to be upon has spent billions of years in a state of constant flux. Change here is the name of the game, the order of the day. Climate change, variation in the flora and fauna life here is an ongoing process. Latterly we have discovered this and like some child enthralled by a magician’s act we have concluded that we did it, we said ’abracadabra’ and set the whole thing up.
Responsibility has always been a marker of development. We have to be responsible for ourselves and the consequences of what we do. Hysteria has always been a marker of no development. We live in interesting times. Mass hysteria seems to be the hallmark of our age. Mass communication puts ideas into the arena that without foundation or context become like free radicals rushing around the bloodstream of the human race.
If you are to grow as an individual, if you are to escape the road to nowhere of arbitrary or random thought processes then understand the mechanics of the Universe. Study its laws, its cycles, therein lies the only true freedom. When you realise that you are powerless in matters pertaining to the planet’s own development or evolutionary journey then you can be free of the anxiety that the madness of misplaced culpability summons.
The human race will not be here for ever. It is not its destiny to be here for ever. We appear in a circumstance that we did not create and are sustained by a set of maintaining principles that we only fleetingly glimpse and have little comprehension of. We are here to grow and evolve individually and collectively. Having care for and respecting the setting we find ourselves in is a basic requirement, but understanding that we are visitors and guests here is a basic requirement too.