oh THAT article! this is it!

TRANS-cendence

Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them.”

Why is it then that we wake up day after and think the same thoughts and feel the same feelings and do the same things that we did the day before, yet somehow expect the results to be different?

It has become very clear that the models that we have been working with, as individuals and as a society – hell, as a planet – are not working particularly well. But we seem to be so busy blaming each other – the oil companies, Dubya, our parents, whoever – that we expend all of our energies pointing out what’s wrong, rather than opening to new models, new levels of addressing our problems.

It’s not like we don’t know what we’re doing. Sure, there is a significant percentage of the population that, due to lack of education and opportunity, or just plain old fear, remains stranded in the mire of the status quo, but we cannot fall back on that default position any longer. It’s an excuse, plain and simple, and nothing more.

Too many people on this planet are now conscious to claim ignorance any longer.

We are in a period of cultural awareness unparalleled in modern times. Even science, via theoretical quantum physics, is now telling us that what we choose, how we think and what we look for determines what we experience in life.

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them.

The challenge to this point has been lack of models for implementing a different level of thinking. Religion has tried, and some have actually presented viable tools with which to begin. But religion has accumulated so much baggage along the way – or more accurately, our perception of religion has accumulated the baggage – that many have closed to the door to that area of exploration. Worshiping instead The God of Materialism, we have opted to confine our experience of life to what we can see and touch and accumulate. We have become a nation of Stuff Worshipers. But hey, that’s the model we had to work with, the American Dream; the house, the cars, 2.2 kids, the dog and the picket fence.

Let me ask you this; How well is that working for you?

Here’s what happened; the American dream picked up it’s own baggage along the way, and has now become so cumbersome as to be archaic. The model doesn’t work anymore.

Madison Avenue has convinced us that we must have stuff to be happy. It doesn’t even matter what kind of stuff any more. Almost any stuff will do. But in the process we have become so focused on materialism that we have seriously depleted the resources of the planet. Indeed, in our own shortsightedness we have sickened our own environment to the point where there are ecosystems on this planet that cannot even sustain life.

We have confused success with acquisition, joy with how much we spend in the pursuit of it, awe with dominance and oppression, even love we have confused with over-dependence, power, control, ownership. We have become isolated from each other. We have picked up quite a load of our own baggage along the way.

So how then do we begin to change it? I mean really change it, how do we jump the tracks and re-define our models, how do we let go of what is no longer working and begin to nourish and nurture better models to create a world that works for everyone?

Perhaps an even better question is not how, but rather, do we have the courage to do it. Are we really, honestly willing to begin to step out of our own self-serving little worlds into a place of bigger awareness?

Honestly I’m not convinced we’re ready to do that yet. Even those of us who profess to be conscious and progressive and open at the top still hang on to our separation from the whole of humanity. Why? Because it still serves us. Why, really?

Erica Jong hit the nail n the head some years ago when she said, “Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

The problem is, we still need someone to blame. That is the root of the problem here, individually, societally, and globally. We need someone to blame, because if we let go of that, we would have to truly step into a place of responsibility for our own actions, our own thoughts, our own experience of life, our own planet. And for all of our talk and bluster, I don’t know that we have yet reached a point of maturity where we are truly ready and willing to take responsibility for ourselves.

We could though, if we really, really wanted to. We have “new” models emerging, and ancient ones re-emerging that we could apply right now, today, that would radically change our world in a very short period of time. And there is something within us, individually and collectively, that is starting to re-awaken to this truth.

Movies like What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret are bringing into the mainstream a new level of thinking with which we can transcend our problems. Every single one of them.

Science is now reinforcing what may of us have known since our species first stood upright; that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being. This means, simply put, that what we think and feel and believe, what we focus our attention on, what we expect, all factors in to what our world looks like, and our experience of it.

It means that we can change our minds, and in so doing, change our life, and our planet.

There are countless places to look, where a new level of thinking is taking hold, where change is starting to happen. 12-step recovery has a wonderfully simple model with which a personal inventory can be taken. Do you even know what you think, really? Maybe it’s time to find out. Take an inventory. Look at how you think about every single thing in your world. You may be surprised. You may even be shocked at what you find. But before we can begin to operate on a new level of thinking we must be familiar, intimately familiar, with the old level. We cannot set out on a journey to a new place if we have no idea where we are to begin with.

Psychologists tell us that every one of us thinks an average of between 65,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day and 90 to 95% of those thoughts are repetitive. We have become numb to our own thought, yet we wonder why the same thing keeps happening. I’ll tell you why; it’s because we don’t know what we’re thinking. Literally.

There are the teachers of our day that are spreading the word of modern day transcendence. People like Deepak Chopra, M.D., and Marianne Williamson, Eckhart Tolle and Mary Manin Morrissey, Dr. Wayne Dyer and Iyanla Vanzant, Amit Goswami, Ph.D., and Dr. Albert Einstein and Dr. Ernest Holmes and the Reverend Dr. Michael Beckwith are putting together the pieces and presenting them again for our consideration. They are articulating a different level of thinking that they will be the first to admit is nothing new, but rather has been known since the earliest of times.

The Buddah is quoted as saying, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become."

These are smart people, yet they recognize that we share something essential; we share our humanity, and all that that entails.

We are beginning to experience a resonance again that we recognize is perhaps even the sound of creation itself. It is something we have in common. It is, perhaps, life, perhaps that drive for survival that is calling us together as never before.

There is a place within each person that transcends the status quo and our current models and judgments and labels and fear and beliefs, that cuts through baggage and dogma and greed and fear. It is the place that is recognizing and admitting that the way we have been doing things for the past few hundred years isn’t working so well anymore. Something has to change. And we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them.

This article copywrite 2007, SpiritPathCounseling.com. Article may be reprinted with this notice included.