Image by Peggy Choucair
The more I looked into the subject of life’s capacity to heal and renew after divisive setbacks, the deeper and wider my view had to grow. This discovery took me through regions of knowledge I knew nothing about—yet. I had to explore them. However, now I can point out more easily how the paths and the dots connect, and speed the journey for others.
The depths from which personal healing bubbles up after trauma or setbacks have a vastly different nature from the familiar predictable habits of the environments we settle into for much of our lives. The mind plays tricks on us, like covering up our blind spots; but the beauty from which our familiar world emerges is awesome when it is unveiled.
When people experience these depths of life in a new way, everything looks different. Then, the renewing possibilities of hope colour life from within more realistically, richly, and honestly.
New Science and Creativity
New Science is finding creative ways through life’s present troubles to joy. While not abandoning the benefits of Enlightenment Science dissection (the science of the last 300 years), to integrate the New Science’s repatterning of life can balance the future potential for renewal. I use the term ‘New Science’ to include many colourful areas of exploration, such as chaos theory, adaptive systems, emergent order by feedback learning, quantum technologies, information theory, and process philosophy. They fit together to empower new beginnings.
On the other hand, there are people who see the science of the last 300 years (Enlightenment Science) critically only as a source of ills. For example, some may even go so far as to see a conspiracy in science to undermine ancient wisdoms, and may reject experimental reasoning as if it is of evil intent.
My response is that an Enlightenment Science of dissection was a necessary phase before this New Science of integration into life could make sense. The reintegration of different perspectives on life now allows a respectful understanding of spirituality to be rationally considered alongside scientific thought, when the wider heart-level context of life is considered.
The Truth of ‘Living Movement’
The approach to understanding movement can bridge science, as a quest for truth, and a person’s spiritual quest for truth. Focus and context are equal partners within the truth of ‘living movement’. They dance together.
Enlightenment Science has described the dust- and water-based organisation of life in great detail. But this substance, which we now understand has inner movements, is stardust in which the same energy that warms us from the sun’s radiance is swirling silently and microscopically round. We too are made of that warmth and stardust. All creatures and microbes of the earth are.
But we humans have the greater power to make choices within it all that may not enhance life. And for the moment, we may choose thus mainly for reasons we do not yet understand, but may grow to understand.
Our Human Power of Choice
Our human power of choice can change things. Sometimes, knowing which way to turn when all familiarity has been torn away can be difficult.
Our life experience hovers in a social ecology. It is suspended somewhere between the microscopic and the telescopic views of the cosmos that our scientists explore. We co-create our paths through a wilderness by speaking order into a feared potential for chaos, and we cooperate as far as possible to maintain a safe future.
Order can emerge from inner depths, however, when we contribute to life’s mutual responsiveness. Trust in that process may grow when we are able to see through the veil of rationalised dust in which Enlightenment Science has shrouded human values.
But What of Time, and of Timing?
My wife Marian and I, in our early thirties before climate concerns overtook international life, went rafting down the Zambesi River’s white-water rapids below the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, ‘the smoke that thunders’ as the local population call that amazing wonder. We were carried away by the excitement.
When flying in, I had been fascinated by the deep ravine of the Zambesi. The Batoka Gorge below the Falls is a series of sharp zigzags gradually straightening out. My mind would not settle until I had found out more about its unusual course. I discovered that each zig and zag had been an earlier Victoria Falls. Imagine the timeframes of the erosion needed to cut each rock edge. A new one is being cut now, a sharp angle turning in upstream behind one end of the main Falls.
Here is the point. This reshaping and recession of the waterfall’s face slightly further upstream into the flowing Zambesi River is happening because southern Africa as a whole is being lifted slowly upwards by movements of the earth’s molten core. This pushes the pressure of water back onto a fault line in the rock—a small fault that grows bigger over millennia. Every zig and zag had been a slowly reshaping wonder.
In those lands, the Saan people, the bushmen, have lived as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers for somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 years. It is only in the last 200 years that pressures in the politics of people have forced many Saan to learn an agricultural way of living.
Choosing to Live as Part of the Ecology
New settlers, educated into an Enlightenment Science view that the ecology could be used for economic progress rather than living as part of it, had influenced a change of relatedness. That change has transformed life. The Saan have had to adapt to a change of their prevailing social environment, even as the physical environment also is very slowly adapting to larger-scale forces.
In the present days, our third-millennium ce world (from the year 2000 to 2999) is going through its own major geopolitical transition. The climate is changing as the world wobbles on its spinning axis. Our growing energy consumption and burgeoning population returns carbon to the atmosphere from long-held stores in the earth. Population migrations and conflict put pressure on others to change, which they resist, sometimes violently. Artificial intelligence and robotics redefine what humanity is. Passivity with fingertip power through social media makes or breaks lives remotely and anonymously.
Something Needs to Be Done
Choices need to be made. Action needs to be taken. The timing of action may be important.
This book explores how at every level of our shared ecology a common set of principles of organisation can bring order out of turmoil and chaos. From the pre-microscopic quantum to the cosmological rotation of all that we know, and all that we love, and from the widest sets of social networks that we move among to the inmost depths of our inner hearts where those movements also stir our lives into action or rest, these principles of organisation are at work ceaselessly. The issue is this: do we understand how to cooperate with them, or do we choose to hold on to values that conflict with these principles?
Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher.
Article Source:
BOOK: Clearing a Way
Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks That Hide Reality
by Trevor Griffiths.
Dr Griffiths takes a deep look at how our brains trick us into seeing the surface of things so that we lose sight of the deep relatedness on which our survival as groups will increasingly depend.
Many astonishing insights follow: How to make better life-enhancing choices when environments crumble and population shifts disrupt our ways of living. The human inner heart is restored over mind, to its central place, as personal values reshape the future.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Trevor Griffiths is an author, New Science philosopher and international speaker on healthy adaptability. For the past two decades, Trevor has taught people of all ages how to create inner clarity and become masters of their emotions. His aim: to prevent mental ill health and socially disruptive behaviour, and to promote personal growth after traumatising change.
His framework, Emotional Logic, is taught in schools and social healthcare settings around the globe. The training charity runs independently (ELCentre.org), setting Trevor free to challenge the old science materialist influence that has successfully harnessed energy, but corrupted humanity. Emotional Logic has helped him transform his life, it’s helped others transform theirs… and it can help you transform yours, too.
Visit his website at Relatedness.net/ and visit Emotional Logic at ELCentre.org
