Awakening From Your Anger

Tag: power

  • What Limits Me (Part 1 of 3)

    Lots to digest! One bite at a time.
    Lots to digest! One bite at a time.

    Hi to all.

    A question to you, the reader. What limits you in your ability to make changes in your life, or your world?

    I want to take the next few postings to explore what I am attempting to do here, with these postings. I strongly believe that we need a more mature culture (an ongoing shifting matrix of living what we value), and that the key to this is the maturing of individual human beings. I intend to invest the rest of my life in helping this evolve. But there are limitations for me, possibly just limitations at my own personal level, but I suspect these limitations are more general. So I am going to explore these limitations in the next few postings, and I welcome commentary as to whether you resonate with them or not.

    The first limitation for me is that I have access to too much information. The web has transformed our civilization, and one of the major ways that this has happened is that, for any give topic, I can gather a huge amount of information in milliseconds. However, seldom can I say that I have gathered a huge amount of valuable knowledge thereby (in this context, I consider knowledge as being the meaning I give to information), and I certainly cannot say that I have gained wisdom thereby (wisdom here being the ability to make effective judgments).

    Most people, including myself, use a TIC process to handle new information: they translate new information into a language they understand (T), interpret this into their own meaning of the information (I), and corroborate this meaning with a group they trust (C). Generally, it is a useful strategy, but it frequently fails when the corroborating group has their own agenda (witness the issues of the Republican Party in the United States, both in how they respond to Climate Change, and what they are doing in response to Donald Trump).

    My specific difficulty here is that I do not know who to trust. Certainly, I cannot trust the media (although I find movies often give me a good sense of the zeitgeist, currently that of violations [often inaccurately called violence], duplicity of power dynamics [The Hunger Games and Divergent series], and catastrophe [end of the world scenarios). I also have difficulty with people what are too one-sided in how they present themselves: too negative, too positive, or too focused on just one aspect of what seems to me to be a complex issue (all of which are my own personal biases).

    What I am attempting to do at present in response to this difficulty is re-build my network of trusted sources. I have a few, but if I am to influence on a broader scale, I need to find more resources and find a way to contribute. As a off-the-scale introvert, I find this difficult. Up to this point in my life, I have called myself a poustinik, a Russian term for a hermit who is available when asked (and I have needed to be asked). But this stance no longer serves me. I want to be able tell my grand-children that I wanted to make a difference in their lives; I want to leave them a world that is healthier.

    More later.

    This was originally posted to my Facebook on 20160605.

  • Physicians Respond To Gun Control

    Shotguns are shown for sale

    Finally, the American Medical Association has chosen to lobby on behalf of gun research and gun control. As a physician myself (albeit Canadian), I am almost ashamed that they have not done so prior to this.

    I know from personal experience that most physicians are intelligent, compassionate and interested in research; and they are often very conservative. From my perspective, this combination generally makes for good research — intelligent enough for depth, slow enough to assess the evidence.

    But I do not understand why it has taken so long, approximately twenty years of escalating mass killings, to begin to challenge these issues (underline begin, as there will still be major resistance). I can only assign it the incredible power of the negative forces that prevent our maturing as a species, especially our hubris and our greed.

    Sad. I have long maintained that, as individuals, human beings are capable of immense greatness, yet as a species we are psychotic.

  • Welcome

    We are running out of time.
    We are running out of time.

    In the past two days, I have received two key emails. Both seem vitally important to me in the resolution of global warming. If you are not able to access them, I’ll be happy to forward my copies.

      1. Al Gore’s The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate(Rolling Stones, 2014 June 14), and
      2. Charles Eisenstein’s Climate Change: The Bigger Picture (Resurgence & Ecologist magazine Issue 284 May/June 2014)

    (Although the intended meanings of climate change and global warming are similar, I have read recently that global warming has more emotional impact, and therefore more likely to influence people — it is the term I will use in future.)

    In particular, Al Gore noted:

    There will be many times in the decades ahead when we will have to take care to guard against despair, lest it become another form of denial, paralyzing action.

    Eisenstein, in his article, discussed the complexity of the inter-relatedness of our world, and the need for a grand vision. These are exactly the messages of my dissertation: Acedia and its Transformation, and my book Acedia: The Darkness Within, and the darkness of Climate Change (AuthorHouse, 2012, available on Amazon).

    As illustration of the difficulties, I was listening to a podcast interview of David Suzuki, one of the world’s leading environmentalists (CBC Ideas, The Global Eco-crisis, 2014 Jun 20), where he indicated that he believes that the environmental movement of the past 50 years has failed — any advances have been temporary — and the destructive forces just keep on coming.

    As a species, we are hugely subject to denial, seeking short term resolutions when long-term vision is essential. I believe it is time to create and act towards the kind of planetary civilization that we will require if we wish to survive as a species.

    In my dissertation/book, I proposed that acedia is the basic underlying human characteristic that has both led to the problem of global warming (amongst other problems), and also stops us from effective action in its resolution (and possible maturation as a species). I also discussed some of the needed characteristics of a mature civilization.

    The intention of this blog is to initiate a discussion of what is needed for our survival and maturation as a species. Throughout, I will be reflecting on my own issues as well as my own learnings over the thirty years that I have been studying human dynamics.

    The starting point, from my perspective, is a two-pronged approach:

      1. develop a culture-wide vision of the civilization we want, and
      2. study and transform our acedia.

    A tall order; in fact a super-wicked problem, and a major factor in acedia. It is possible that such approaches as mine will also fail, but “in basketball, you miss 100% of shots that you do not attempt.”

    Those who wish can contact me, either within this blog itself, via email directly ([email protected]), or via Facebook.

    Dave MacQuarrie