The Horror Within

“God invented war, so Americans would learn geography.”

- Mark Twain

This quote is great on so many levels, pointing to the futility of war and to the many illusions that have been created around this tragic concept (freedom! responsibility! democracy!). It reminds me greatly of the times we live in, in which we are further and further deluded into the necessity of taking away self-determination and free will for the sake of….what exactly?

Barely anyone will be able to tell anymore because most of us are running with the symptoms of which more and more appear these days. We’re further fooled into a non-existent public discourse whose essence is changing by the day, and what that means for our personal lives is that we’re further and further fooled away from who we are - our life experiences, emotions, and needs - and what we want.

I personally am horrified by the developments out there and while aggression and desperation are part of my inner make-up these days, I’m trying to stay away from too many facts and figures, analyses and interpretations, to be able to stay connected with my own intuition and internal compass. I wouldn’t be able to otherwise and I’m not willing to give up this deep self-connection in order to win the next “scientific” debate of what we’re faced with these days.

Apart from that, I’m personally more intrigued and attuned with the psycho-social side of things and what we’re seeing here, I don’t think has a lot to do with science (and its truest sense anyways) and everything with psycho-social dynamics of the kind we have witnessed too many times before. Charles Eisenstein wrote an amazing analysis of that just a couple days ago (one of those that are worth diving into, even if you’d otherwise like to stick with yourself :)

I do agree and feel his own conclusion that counter-aggression is not the answer, never had been, while I’m grateful for those who relentlessly keep on witnessing, reporting, and the balance sheet straight so at some point we won’t be able to say anymore, “we didn’t know!”

For whatever reason, as humanity we’ve not learned our lessons yet, which would actually mean to be finally fully human. Our response to human tragedies before might have been diligence, discipline, remorse, compensation, but it also always included further marginalisation, exclusion, blaming, and vowing to keep everyone outside of humanity who is going off track in their beliefs, words, or deeds.

This is not to justify hateful criminal acts but I’m questioning if it has helped us to fully tap into our amazing human potential and capacity to embrace nuances, the whole spectrum of our experiences, perspectives, and decisions - and yes, the horror within.

Fulfilling this human capacity starts - as everything - with myself. Seeing the shades of my own experience, the seeming paradoxes, the conflicts, the pain and the tremendous joy buried underneath. Expanding and holding that capacity within myself, especially in times like this, is key to nourishing a sense of Self that is beyond separation and separating fear, and that can clearly articulate discomfort, anger, and boundaries from its place in time, rather than the leashing out that is always concerned with others.

In this sense, the horror within and without, serves the purpose of what it intends to diminish: full self-connection, self-care, self-determination for the betterment of all our lives.