In this week’s article, we contemplate the state of the world and our role within it.
Release ♓︎
The world is an insane place, but you shouldn’t let it get to you.
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)
It’s obvious that the world is changing. The old systems we depended on are deteriorating and will continue to do so.
It’s the end for some things, yes. But for every end, there is a new beginning.
Do you have the courage to keep searching for a better life—not just for yourself but also for those around you? This world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? […] Why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living, Series III (1960)
Before you judge others, consider yourself—your actions, your intentions.
Are you living just for yourself?
Have you offered a helping hand to that friend you see struggling?
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)
The world of what “could be,” “would be,” or “should be” does not exist. There is only the world as it is. Are you aligned with the world as it is?
Consider your mind, body, and soul. Do they need healing?
You’re not alone. There are people who want to help you.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Are you living your authentic life?
There is still time.
Anticipation ♒︎
There is a place for you in the future, but it will require sacrifice.
What happens to one of us happens to all of us.
Do you have the courage to cast out the meanness in your heart?
Do you have the courage to connect to the love inside you?