Comfort & Convenience Failed Us
We grow lazy at our peril, safety is final danger, as Rumi warned
‘If I could have convinced more slaves they were slaves, I could have saved a thousand more.’ Harriet Tubman
Scratch an old painting and you might find a more valuable one underneath — ask any art restorer how old masters are found.
The discovery of the Self is no different. Obscured for a lifetime or many, depending on your philosophy, we are veiled from ourselves even under the severest oppression.
Beaten women cling to their husbands, children run back to abusive parents and men and women everywhere walk straight into the arms of those who plan to see them dead.
The veils separating us from reality are manifold and ubiquitous. It would seem we are indeed our own worst enemies, sickened unto death by our own minds, surrounded by collective insanity.
It is 30 years since I began training in counselling and psychotherapy; 25 years working at this second career after the black and white bubble of the newspaper industry, which serves only to reflect and reinforce a dull group think.
We know that cultures, like families, do not adopt new ideas thus evolving to higher levels without considerable strife, first rejection, only later grudging acceptance.
Finally, what was originally despised together with its messengers, often savagely indicted and put to death, the new is incorporated, the original hateful struggle forgotten.
Observe the wave of the past two years, unprecedented in modern times, aided and abetted by the addition of a corrupt media, bought and paid for scientists and the most criminal redistribution of wealth in history.
Now, the UK launches a public inquiry which, if past inquiries are anything to go by, will be a whitewash, a simple appeasement, truth buried by war in Ukraine and whatever comes next.
We are hard-wired for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. We seek to conserve energy for the goal of procreation. For thousands of years when life was a struggle, our biology served us well.
Yet like addicts the world over, we have grown self-deceived, taken short cuts to our goal, had life made easy, which in turn has derailed our species and neutered our men.
Where are the warriors of old? I would suggest largely snoozing under a blanket of homespun denial, succumbing to the deadly forces of ease and comfort, refusing to dig into what is really going on, anaesthetized almost to a man.
There are exceptions of course — a few modern heroes stand out — but like the slaves in the great Harriet Tubman’s quotation, their potential audience, those who need their message the most, are long gone.
Life became so easy for most westerners, when it came to the great battle of our times, most rolled over and went back to sleep.
They have been so brainwashed by the weight of the forces surrounding them, they have little interest in peering beneath the veils of deception.
Not only do we no longer go to the cinema, we don’t have to. All the instruments of our destruction are laid out before us, tasting as good as sugar, salt and fat, yet equally deadly.
But it seems we may be at the end of this brief era of pleasure and convenience. Food shortages are coming, gas prices going up, struggle returning.
The irony is this may be just what is needed for Sleeping Beauty to wake up. We humans, perverse by nature or training, need a rock bottom.
I have seen it in my own life and — through work — countless others. It is often a case of timing for it seems there comes a moment in every life when transformation finds a window of opportunity. If we are lucky, we get several, perhaps many.
The universe is entirely merciful in this way. We are loved despite ourselves although the evil that I call ‘militant ignorance’ could soon be the end of us.
Everything hangs in the balance and I cannot help recalling those key moments in The Lord of the Rings when life for all teetered on the knife-edge of disaster.
If we could all see what’s really being done in our name that would be something, but currently, just like Tubman’s slaves, most remain bathed in blindness, happily walking straight into the death camps.
The success of evil depends on its banality, ordinary men and women both acting and complying with the unthinkable.
We are confronted with a far greater problem than people know. We are the sleepwalkers of our time to the point where the very soul of man is in jeopardy.
I believe we are in the prophesied End Times, the Kali Yuga, the great shaking of the planet, faith now critical, speaking out essential.
The arc may be short or long, the opportunity to evolve to higher levels of awareness where we are not divided by the mind but unified by the soul.
We are in truth one being, splintered into a billion fractals and more. We seem to operate within bandwidths of consciousness.
If you cannot make yourself understood it is likely your listener exists within another bandwidth to your own and literally cannot understand what you are saying.
Just as we cannot see that film on the screen without enough light, we cannot perceive outside the bandwidth of the light we have assimilated.
Debating and arguing with people has proven to be a waste of time and needed energy. Yet those who are in the upper reaches of their own bandwidth may be ready to make what Jung called an evolutionary leap.
Our efforts may still net a few; they in turn may net others. Far more effective in removing dust from the eyes is the rolling sweep of consciousness itself.
The wave may travel far out to sea but it always comes back in.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
