Breaking our Hearts... Open

And here's what we find.

Thanks for the many positive comments about my article last week, shining light into darkness. I know that many in this audience are more inclined towards “good news,” so I appreciate that it’s probably a challenge for you to venture into the dark with me, even with the intention of shining light.

However, history demonstrates that any citizenry that fails to inform itself about how it’s being governed dooms itself to eventual and incrementally encroaching enslavement. Readers of my 2017 book, Now or Never, may remember my critique of Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Seen from today, this strategy - followed by millions of now baby boomers - sidelined the very people who could have stayed in the system to provide authentic leadership. I’m one of those who dropped out, but I have a second chance. Perhaps this applies to you too.

BTW, our personal spiritual status won’t matter much if we and our loved ones are sickened by environmental toxins, bankrupted by economic insanity, and imprisoned in “15 minute cities,” told where we can and can’t go? It’s vitally important that we stay informed and prepare to take action in any way we can to prevent the creeping spread of control from on high. But, as you know from my writing, I advocate for Love. I believe that it’s futile to try to make other people change, especially to somehow try to force them to act with integrity. Those driven by greed don’t change because we appeal to their better nature with theoretical arguments or force, and they will always find ways to game the system.

Another power is required.

I believe that we have conclusive proof through centuries of struggle against the power hungry that only the power of Love can save us. But what does that mean, what would that actually look like? One thing it doesn’t mean: only focusing our attention on positive things. That’s called “the spiritual bypass.” And it doesn’t mean only focusing our attention on negative things. That’s called doomsday thinking.

I wept a few days ago when I witnessed a political commentator complete his thorough histrionic of the lead up to the Ukraine war by saying, “500,000 Ukrainians have been killed.” That’s horrible enough but what broke my heart was the show hosts response. He pivoted to some irrelevant detail and argued.

What? Did he feel nothing? 500,000 people dead? That’s half a million humans. Clearly, this guy was, simply, numb. As are so many of us are, walking around with broken hearts that we’ve bandaged over, just to make it through these confusing times.

Then there are the psychopaths, shadow manipulators behind the scenes, like those in the US Defense department who dispatched ex-PM Boris Johnson to sabotage the peace deal that had been brokered to prevent the Ukraine War from ever starting in the first place. He succeeded with his dark mission, the deal was shattered, the war began. Counting Russian soldiers, almost a million of our brothers and sisters have died so far. Needlessly. But billions of dollars are being vacuumed up through weapon sales and scam artists are skimming millions in aid money supplied by our tax dollars.

Don’t the perpetrators of this hoax, this nightmare of death and destruction feel any remorse for that?

The US is now over 34 trillion dollars in debt and the government is paying one billion dollars a day in interest. That’s almost $100 every month taken from your pocket and mine. What do we get for that? Efficiency, transparency, intelligent management?

No. We get propaganda proclaiming how great the economy is, demonizing anything contrary to official narratives, celebrating how humanitarian it is to welcome migrants into the country and house them in hotels while veterans sleep on the street. All this ideological nonsense obscures the facts on the ground. Here’s the top end of our mental health crisis, delusional leaders without compassion.

And this disease is trickling down from above. Instead of feeling what’s here to feel, like anger, outrage, and grief, and doing whatever we could to improve things, feeling impotent, we tend to deny and pivot, escaping into the high of the moment. And technology makes it so easy to become addicts. Ted Gioia writes: “The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.” He diagrams this as The Rise of Dopamine Culture.

This migration from substance to sizzle is ruining our minds.

I had a first hand experience of this the other night, my first ever genuine anxiety attack. I awoke to raging paranoid thoughts about some stupid, silly little thing. I watched my mind flailing away, generating crazy thoughts and movie scenes of persecution and suffering. All self-generated, all without substance, all seemingly out of my control. I’d never experienced this before so it was truly disturbing.

Fortunately, I had a remedy. And it wasn’t reaching for a pill.

As part of our work in the OpenMind Fitness Foundation, we’ve been developing and experimenting with a simple “first aid” technique for mental health. I’ve written about this here before and a handful of friends are experimenting with a four part practice, easily done in two minutes, that I call Refreshing The Mind. We compare this brushing our teeth, a healthy everyday habit. Email me at info@openmindfitness.org if you’d like news updates on this

The process will be ready soon and we’ll give it away. In the meantime, let’s seek that balance between light and dark, daring to face the facts in our personal lives and in the world but never losing hope. This is how Admiral Jim Stockdale survived imprisonment during the Vietnam war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. He said, as quoted in Jim Collin’s book, Good to Great: “Face the brutal facts, but never lose hope in the end of the story.”

Finally, we can be inspired and sobered by this comment from Victor Frankl, holocaust survivor and Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist, who clarified what’s in store for the visionary activists we aspire to be:

“What is to give light must endure burning.”