Due to a virus, the world has turned a very concerning page. It is a time when lockdowns are imposed with total impunity (while other measures of containment, championed by innumerable medical scientists, remain completely ignored), as wealth inequality skyrockers, and small businesses collapse, leaving the middle class in its dying breaths. A time when authoritarian impositions now seem to be more the norm than the exception (China undoubtedly leading the way in this regard) and mental health in decline, as general feelings of fear and dread help unpalatable solutions suddenly seem like the promised land.

In the meantime, the World Economic Forum, championed by Klaus Schwab is now proposing a Great Economic Reset, which is being gladly accepted by some major leaders. Indeed on the surface it may seem like a good idea – to create a world with less inequality and more respect for nature and its resources. But what on the surface may seem very benevolent, in its depth and potentially resulting conditions appears more like a technocracy, where privacy is stripped away, surveillance and control over the population increased, while power is concentrated even more so in the hands of a select few (that surely we can trust with our best interests, can we not?) – with a digitized travel passport to boot, containing health and vaccine related information for screening purposes. A Brand New World that is completely digital, including money and all forms of information, indeed a wet dream for those hungry for power and control.

Perhaps a completely digital society under a one world government would work with an aware population and a benevolent leadership (both of which are mutually interdependent), but we are not living in such a world – at least not yet.

So the question that needs to now be put squarely and above all else is this – what can we do? There is no time now to sit down and lament, remain apathetic, angry or afraid as our society is crashing down all around us. We need to act and we need to do so now.

But if we act, we need to act with awareness. The darkness we are fighting is not as clear-cut as in a classic Hollywood action movie. The bad guys here are not an obvious foe, like villains running towards us with guns blazing, or evil masterminds twirling their mustache.

Perhaps here you may disagree – that it is obvious the enemies are psychopaths in power, how could they not be?

Beneath the Surface – Collective Psychopathy and Separation

“The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.”
– Eckhart Tolle

Indeed it may seem that way at first, but only from a superficial level. What is psychopathy? A complete lack of empathy and with it great desire for power and control. And what is empathy? In superficial terms it is a sense of relating to the other’s inner world. But from a deeper and broader perspective it is a sense of connectedness, even oneness with the other, a sense that we are not as separate from each other and the world as we might believe.

Thus psychopathy is a sense of total separation, a total identification with form and ego, with body and mind. For separation itself is a mere fictitious belief invented by the human mind, completely identified by a separate and distinct identity. Through this identification, making people “others” and seeing them as mere mental concepts, as well as seeing nature as a lifeless mechanical realm separate from humanity, becomes easy. From there, violence, torture, murder and exploitation become effortless. For in your mind you are not committing violence towards a living entity anymore, just a concept in your mind. It is no wonder humans have been able to inflict such pain on each other, as well as so deeply exploit the natural environment that sustains them, yet they feel so separate from.

There are degrees to the madness – and psychopathy is its farthest reach, a complete and total identification with a separate identity with no connection to an almost alien external reality.

If such a dysfunction is present within us all, merely in varying degrees, then what good would it do to remove the most visible and extreme versions of this dysfunction? It would be like cutting off a visible tumor while the body remains riddled with cancer.

No, if the current psychopathic leadership is to be removed, a new batch would quickly take its place. There is no end to the madness as long as the dysfunction is not recognized by each and every one of us – by society at large.

Only when the people become aware of this, only when the insanity is recognized for what it is, can sanity emerge anew. Without this, we are merely running in circles, much like countless revolutions have simply dealt with the surface problems and failed to recognize deeper issues. All leading to mere cosmetic societal changes and (as the term “revolution” itself suggests) a repeat of the old dysfunction, veiled in more modern and technologically advanced forms.

Beyond Ego and Form – the Depths of Who You Are

‘”Love says ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.’ Between the two, my life flows.”
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Thus the first key, before any action can be taken, is awareness. It is especially the awareness of ourselves, of who we are and who we perceive ourselves to be, for that is most intimately tied with the issues we are facing today –  the illusory sense of separation that we so cherish and all the violence and fear that arises from it.

Are we merely the identity that we hold in our minds, a bundle of thought with corresponding emotions in the body? Or are we something deeper and infinitely more profound, something that cannot be captured with words and concepts alone?

There are many spiritual traditions that point to this, the doctrine of Anatta or no-self in Buddhism, Jesus’ teachings on denying the self, Hindu discourses on self-realization, of realizing the inner Divine Spark or Atman (itself ultimately identical with Brahman, the Absolute Reality). These teachings are mere pointers towards something more profound that cannot be encapsulated by words alone.

These teachings do not deny your existence, but through their negation point towards a movement beyond the conceptual identity held in your mind. That identity always changes, but who you are remains. One could describe that which you are as awareness, but even that term is insufficient, for there is no term that can describe you – that very realization being the point of such teachings. Who you are is more of an experience than a thought, the experience of presence, being, aliveness, fullness, peace. A sense of presence and stillness is available throughout your life, always in the present moment, usually faintly sensed in the background of experience, growing as you put your attention on it.

Your body and conceptual identity will not vanish, the key is merely to understand that those are only aspects of yourself, not all that you are. The more this is realized, the more life is seen as a grand game, a play. Through this peace arises, joy, as well as the understanding that every one else is connected and ultimately one with you – that realization being both compassion and love.

Only through the mending of this core dysfunction can we hope to bring about a different world. Only if action is coupled with this deeper awareness can such action become truly positive and actually create change and a benevolent society.

Thus specific action is not what I will prescribe here (of more specific solutions I have written elsewhere), for there are too many possibilities to name. The more such self-realization grows in your life, the more you will know your own talents, qualities and life-path – and through that you will flower on the individual level, as well as have the ability to serve the world at large.

What I’m saying here I have experienced myself through my own meditation, introspection and self-inquiry. This is not mere knowledge from books, despite the fact that many books and teaching have helped me (and still do!) a great deal. I am by no means enlightened or free from all pain, but I have seen that life can be different, that what we take as serious is only relatively important, that the world is more a game of exploration and creation than anything else – as well as that letting go of and transcending negativity is always just a choice.

More than anything else, I’ve discovered that serving the world is perhaps one of, if not the greatest joys one can have. For serving the world is uniting with it, through action coming to a sense of unity and love. It is the path of Karma Yoga, as they would call it in the East.

 Subtle but Profound – Awakening and Impacting the Collective Consciousness

“Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”
– David Bohm

The truth is that besides the actions you take, your awakening itself, your very inner realizations are already turning the wheels of world change and creating positive impact.

Why do I say this? Not only is the massive connectedness of the modern world obvious through both physical and digital means (the Internet perhaps being the pinnacle of this), but that itself is merely a gross manifestation of a subtle inter-connectedness, of the fact we are all part of one human consciousness (itself a part of the One Absolute Reality). Thus we are all deeply interlinked in ways far beyond what we can perceive and can impact each other not merely by our actions, but by our inner thoughts, beliefs and emotions alone.

This is not merely sourced from mine and others’ spiritual experience, but is now emerging in scientific understanding as well.

The Global Consciousness Project, a collaborative effort by many scientists and engineers throughout the globe, founded in Princeton University, is one piece of the puzzle showing this reality. The project collects data from a massive global network of random number generators, seeking patterns and correlations among what should be completely random data and a variety of major events throughout the globe, which capture people’s hearts and minds.

The correlations between the data and human activity collected through more than 15 years of research is highly statistically significant, amounting to odds against chance of more than a trillion to one.

From David Bohm’s ideas of an active information field and non-local reality, to Jung’s concept of synchronicity as a subtle connecting principle, to Sheldrake’s theories on Morphic Resonance,…. many fields of scientific inquiry are pointing to an existing noosphere, a collective consciousness among us, being a reality. Something many ancient and modern mystics would have taken as an obvious truth based on their own intuitive experience.

Further proof of the subtle bond between us can be sought in the research of ESP and telepathy. The amount of rigorous double-blind studies done here has been enormous, while the majority of results have been highly statistically significant. From the famous Ganzfeld experiments done decades ago, the research led by Dean Radin and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to the flurry of experiments done by Rupert Sheldrake (these are but a few major examples, countless more studies have been done, in my view best described in detail in Chris Carter’s book Science and Psychic Phenomena). The evidence is so overwhelming that even leading skeptics can now no longer deny its veracity and impact.

Telepathy and ESP does not conflict with any science or modern understandings of physics. Quite the contrary, as theoretical physicist Costa de Beauregard explicated: “relativistic quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme where phenomena such as psychokinesis or telepathy, far from being irrational, should, on the contrary, be expected as very rational.”

Consciousness – A Part or the All?

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
– Max Planck

When it comes to the metaphysical understanding of the world, a new page needs to be turned as well. It is now quite clear that materialism, with its fundamental inability to explain the qualia of consciousness or many phenomena we may deem anomalous, is an outdated metaphysics. The ball then moves to different conceptual understanding of reality and consciousness, from panpsychism to pancomputationalism or a dualistic mind/matter perspective of reality. But these are also plagued with numerous issues, from the bottom-up combination problem, to the variety of epistemic costs present when replacing explanatory abstractions with empirical observations. It seems that metaphysical idealism, where consciousness is posited as the sole ontological primitive and thus baseline of reality, is the most coherent explanation for our reality and consciousness itself. One of the best and most in-depth perspectives of idealism can be read in the doctoral dissertation and subsequent book The Idea of The World of philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, where such an ontology is explicated in a rigorous and multi-disciplinary manner – the book is purchasable, while the PhD is free to read online here. For a more summarized read, his articles in the Scientific American are highly recommended.

If true, our spiritual intuitions and that of spiritual seekers and mystics old and new are correct – our very nature is fundamental to the world, implying also that consciousness survives death (which further research seems to confirm). As I have discussed above on the chapter of transcending ego, we are the world, Life itself. The word “consciousness” being merely an epistemic conceptual pointer to something that truly can never be named. That which in the East they would call Satchitananda – Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

The End, or a New Beginning

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
–  Anne Frank

In this way we see that the roots of dysfunction in our society run deep, beyond what mere cosmetic solutions can mend, beyond the surface level political and societal bickering we see on the news. If things are to change, the change needs to be deep and close to our own hearts – a very shifting of consciousness through which a different perception of the world and constructive, positive action can arise.

Though this shift may not be easy, it is not fundamentally complex. As the pantheist poet Walt Whitman said, in one of my favourite quotes of all time: “Truth is simple, if it was complicated everyone would understand it”.

What we need to do is not a superhuman achievement, it is rather a return to our natural state of inner completion, wholeness and felt unity with the rest of Life. In doing so the many teachers both ancient and modern can guide us, but the greatest teacher to us remains Life and our own experiences within it. Thus we need to trust ourselves and our own intuitive knowing, which will lead us, as philosopher Charles Eisenstein put it – to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

Further Resources:

• • My guide for embracing and dissolving inner pain and suffering
  • For further insights on spiritual liberation, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, as well as A New Earth (more specifically discussing the transcendence of ego) are both fantastic modern classic well suited for a Western audience, that have helped me a great deal (both books are purchasable, but here I’m linking the free .pdfs)

Further discussion about this article can be found here:
-Reddit, on the r/C_S_T subreddit