I have several e-mail addresses, one of which dates back to about 1993 and another to about 2004. As you can imagine, I get a lot of subscribed, solicited, and unsolicited mail in my inbox for both of these e-mails. Lately, I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails about things our illustrious Congress is doing or considering or trying to get passed—like closing post offices and stopping Saturday mail delivery, or a bill to replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen and overseen by Congress, which the sponsoring congressman wants to use as a model for every federal science agency we have.
In the past two weeks, I’ve also seen one from three different sources that purports to be from Warren Buffet with a proposed Constitutional amendment that would essentially force all members of Congress to live by the same rules the rest of us do, to obtain their health care from the same sources and in the same manner the rest of us do, and forego lifetime retirement after serving as little as one two-year term in the House. Is it from Warren Buffet? I don’t know and don’t really care. It’s provisions make so much solid sense that I wholeheartedly support it.
This do-nothing Congress appears to be on the verge of becoming the least productive since 1944, with a grand total of 21 bills passed and sent to the President. The House is now in recess for the next five weeks.
But in reflecting on all these, plus the kinds of things that are in the media today (I no longer watch the nightly news), I started to wonder (again!) where the real sanity is in the world. This reminded me of the movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” starring Jack Nicholson.
This movie was made in 1975 from the book of the same name written in 1962 by Ken Kesey. I highly recommend watching the movie (or reading the book) to find the answer to that question of where’s the real sanity. Hint: It’s not in the voices of authority, proper behavior, and maintenance of social behavior and norms. It’s in those with passion and life, and who are willing to live outside the box; those who question the insanity of what goes on around them and refuse to accept it.
Of course, the outcome in the movie is to be expected: the voice of dissent and reason is silenced. We see that today where, for example, “free speech” zones to protest public meetings are fenced in and situated 100’s of yards away from the event that is being protested. What ever happened to freedom of assembly?
Recently, records requested under the Freedom of Information Act showed that the current President of Purdue University, former Republican Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels, attempted to purge so-called liberal propaganda such as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” from K-12 and college curricula while he was governor.
I happen to be considered to be mostly “progressive” in my political outlook, but I could have easily written the above from the opposite perspective, citing similar abuses to the rights of those who consider themselves conservative.
So, why this rant? When the shift in the world is toward higher vibration, higher consciousness, flowering of the heart, and awakening, what we teach our young people is being dumbed down further and further. Where are the critical thinking skills that create questioning, doubt, insistence upon factual evidence, refusal to accept opinion for fact, etc.? I’m worried about a public educational system that seems to deteriorate further and further on an almost daily basis—witness what is going on in both the Chicago and Detroit public school systems—and the tremendous downsizing of public school educational budgets… especially when we continue to invest billions of dollars each year in the longest “war” this nation has ever been in and when we spend more on our military budget than all other developed nations combined!
There are two quotes attributed to Albert Einstein that come to mind: “One definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result” and “You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
From all this, I’ve concluded that the ills we face as a nation and as a world will begin to resolve when national and international leaders—in business, in NGOs, and in governments—begin to awaken. Movements like Conscious Capitalism, Conscious Business Network, the Wisdom 2.0 Summits, for example, and Oneness University‘s Awakened Leaders Program (with which I’m involved) give me hope that that this shift is indeed underway and accelerating rapidly.
It also gives me hope that people like you are asking, “Is this all there is?” and begin to look for answers to that question. This is ultimately a spiritual quest that can only result in raising your level of consciousness, which will, in turn, cause you to question more and more the sanity of what you see around you. Don’t stop your quest, and don’t allow anyone to deter you from that quest!
With best wishes for you to awaken to your highest consciousness!
