I Saved the World

How Humanity Saves Itself

No matter who we are. We all want to feel better. We want to express ourselves to our emotions. We often externalise these impulses rather than changing ourselves first. This emotional or spiritual need is experienced by most, even by those who don't make a formal religious commitment. Yes, 'we' is the collective experience of all of us. Yet there is no escaping our individual egos and the experience of the "I".

This is also the underlying truth behind the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhists and their primary philosophical guide, the Dalai Lama, who says:

"Happiness is not something readymade, it comes from your own actions.”

Any thinking person can understand this message. We all want to feel pleasure from what we get. Not just material things but also our inner emotions. We all want to feel good. And it is pretty common to consider this emotion a fundamental human right. But if we are not aware, this is simply a refused request. Instead, we are made to believe that our emotional needs are irrelevant, worthless, and that our emotions are wrong or broken, that they are due to a lifetime of suppressed feelings.

This attitude towards our own emotions is the heart of the oppression of the Self. This view of ourselves oppresses us as autonomous beings who lack any control over our impulses and needs. We are mentally abused by making us believe that we are the helpless objects of the seduction of the mischievous inner devil that festers inside of us.

Hearing these tales of spirits or ghosts or demons is, in effect, telling us that we are not the masters of our own minds. We are programmed to repeat these stories, and this psychological abuse has been held over our heads for generations. We never acknowledge that we were programmed to behave in the way we do. For example, we believe that we are the controllers of our own will and the final arbiters of our own lives. But in fact, we were manipulated into behaving this way.

The history of religion is the history of domination and hierarchy. It is the history of conquering and oppressing the self. This is how God is presented in the religion of Islam. This is how the almighty Master of our thoughts is presented in Christianity. Religion exploits the power of the imagination. It divides us, distances us from our own humanity.

And this is the main reason why religious thinking cannot save us. We have to look somewhere else: Our Inner Spirit.

The Inner Spirit

You will find the source of your emotions in the Inner Spirit. That same Inner Spirit that our ancestors and indigenous peoples have known for millennia, that wisdom which humanity has lost as we have abandoned it, that self-awareness that is the root of all psychological and spiritual questions. You will find that power in the moments when you are most aware of the Self within yourself and can respond in the way you need to.

But until we reconnect to this, the illusion of being a sentient being will continue to be presented to us, the delusion that our emotions can be controlled and defined by outside forces. In the final analysis, all we have is ourselves. We have to become aware of our true Self, to rise above the evolutionary assumptions and cultural conditioning that dehumanises us and makes us believe that our true Self is separate from ourselves, somehow in charge of our instincts and unconscious impulses, somehow outside of our own emotional and intellectual freedom.

We have to remind ourselves that we are autonomous beings with the right to our feelings and our choices. That we have free will. That we have a responsibility towards ourselves and to our fellow human beings.

We have to become aware of our own Inner Spirit, feelings, motives, and our own needs and desires. We have to be mindful of the power that we have within ourselves.

This is the only way we can truly change the negative stories that are pervasive in this world. By transforming our individual shadows into the light, we can contribute fully and positively.

It is also the only way we can restore our empathy for others. By dealing with our emotions, we must truly see another person’s motives and feelings and act from a place of understanding and love.

And by learning to rise above the forces of suppression and indoctrination, we can learn to overcome the conflict inherent to our shared humanity and the most obvious source of human conflict: the war of egos.

Breaking the Mental Cogitation Trap

We have put ourselves in prison in our mental pursuit of power and control. And it is not our imaginations that are the prison doors. It is the matrix of assumptions, concepts and generalisations we use to understand reality; the matrix of shared assumptions and power dynamics that is the prison of thinking.

"A man has a free choice to the extent that he is rational"

Thomas Aquinus

Once we begin to understand that there is no such thing as an objective reality, that everything is a combination of things and thoughts, we must break out of the mental prison of thinking, of creating stories in our heads, judging others, and judging ourselves. We must break free of the prison of the mental cogitation trap.

"Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves"

Thich Nhat Hanh

We have the most powerful imaginations and skills of all creatures on the planet. And we have access to the largest repository of all human knowledge ever assembled. It is our choice: to use our imaginations and skills, or not.

If we are stuck in the prison of thinking, the prison of mental cogitation, we will not be able to create a free and just world. If we are not compassionate, we will not be able to care for others and make the world a better place. If we are not curious, we will not understand or care about others or our environment.

It is all about our choice, our responsibility to ourselves and the world, to use our imagination and skills, and to care about others and the world. It is all about changing our inner story and making a new story, a true story, of our dreams, needs, and choices.

In that true story, we don’t need the stories of hatred, conflict, and confusion. We have compassion and empathy for others, common humanity, a shared experience, a human collective. We are not by any means there yet, but we can become there with enough awareness and intention.

As children of the world, we have a responsibility to transform the stories, the unconscious assumptions, the false power dynamics and the concept of possession, ownership, and alienation. We can set the stage for a new paradigm of conscious freedom.

"I" truly can save the world. Perhaps you can too.