When it comes to consciousness, it is Divinely intelligent and beyond our understanding.
As a general rule, anything that happens which supports what we believe will be seen by us, and anything that doesn’t will waft away from us. Even our brain plays a role in this, sorting stimulus from our day into conscious and subconscious piles so we are not overwhelmed with the vastness of it all.
This is then further added to in our clever modern era by news feeds that are set up based on algorithms of what we might be most interested in reading. The rest we never even see. Shiva and I often have a laugh about the vastly different news feeds we receive, living as partners in the one house! We generally see evidence around us that supports our belief systems, which then creates roots from the pure world of energy to the grounded reality of felt sensed experience, via our filters. Those filters at times get more powerful than our seeming capacity to shift them.
The shape of our individual and collective reality reference points is also affected by the average collective level of vibration. If the average of the collective vibration is very high, say set at love and kindness, we would be living in a golden age, which we are definitely not doing.
We are instead living in an age where the set point in consciousness is full of blame and shame, and where a particularly nasty condition called “motive attribution asymmetry” affects humanity. This infectious mental state happens when we assume that the people we identify with have good motives for the things they do and the reasons they are called to think, speak and act. The people who we don’t agree with are unconsciously demonised and marginalised by assigning to them bad motives. They are not good people. They are people with nastiness inherent. So inherent is their nastiness that there is no point even trying to talk to them because they will never understand. They are sub-humans, not worthy of our effort. If you think this is not true, just consider for a moment the dialogue or lack of it between Democrats and Republicans, pro and anti abortionists, gay and fundamentalist Christians, transgender and traditional gender adherents, and their aligned media reporting machines. Or the Russia-Ukraine war. Or the Jewish-Palestine conflagration. Or any kind of racism, or sexism, or religious hatred. The disease is “motive attribution asymmetry,” upon which various studies have been done. What is the cure? Where do we start?
Here is an idea. What if we start by talking to one another, understanding that there is a whole lot of life out there that is going on beyond the narrow confines of our own understanding of how things are? That some people, in good heart and in good faith, doing the best they can, have put down their rational parameters in a place that is not the same as ours. They have ranked different value scales to us. A simple example is the ranking of personal freedom as number one, as opposed to group solidarity and harmony. Or modesty as opposed to sexiness in dress. Are people who cover themselves from head to toe inherently better than people who wear see-through dresses at public events? Are people who wear see-through dresses at public events inherently better than those who cover themselves from head to toe? It depends who you ask. Motive attribution asymmetry will mean that there will not be a level playing field when we try to talk to each other about it.
Hence the value of starting things off with conversational relating. Let’s find things we can agree on. Let’s talk about the way the weather is unfolding, or whether we have had our lunch, as Amma often inquires. Let’s build bridges to each other connecting heart, mind and energy, to provide a container into which more can pour later. Let’s have open dialogue after some time has passed, into which we can say it how it is for us, and how we arrived at the kinds of places in consciousness that we have. How have you arrived at your places in consciousness? We barely know. We are too busy telling others how it is. We are not ready to listen to how it may be for others. Perhaps because at times the ‘other side’ has tried to speak in a really loud voice to be heard, we feel attacked and want them to go away?
We could start a revolution in communication by actively listening to what others are really saying. Not just preparing our defensive response, or our ‘why I am right and you are wrong.’ Perhaps we could ask some open questions that might elicit more of what is going on behind the bold statements made by people we may have written off as misguided, nutty or republican/democrat/capitalist/communist.
There is more than one way to spice a casserole, and actually thousands of ways just to cook a potato. Maybe we can replace moral superiority with open heartedness and learn a way to bring peace to our world.
