Hi,
I wrote a LinkedIn post and I know that I'll never be able to put it to words better than I wrote it because it was,
You know,
All organized by my left brain.
So I want to just read it if I can.
It's about how all of our cultures have errors in them.
We can see this in the caste system in India,
But you know the Westerners might be blinded by our emphasis on progress and on getting more and more and more.
You know,
Endless prosperity never works because our world is one of duality.
So there's never going to be endless good or endless progress or endless daytime.
If you push too hard in one direction,
You set in motion a return to the opposite.
This happens inside individual lives and in larger societies.
If you push yourself to the point of exhaustion,
You have to walk around exhausted and your productivity goes way down.
So you might as well not do that and just be stably productive.
Maybe this is why crash diets don't work.
They end up with weight gain because of this duality.
If we push too hard one way,
We will get the opposite.
So you know there will be a weight gain.
Or why a teacher,
A client of mine says the best student nowadays is equipped at the same level as the worst student 10 years ago.
This is the opposite of real progress.
Actually,
This is a return to the opposite,
Sort of a downgrading,
The reverse of progress.
You know,
Plants need sunshine and darkness to grow.
Crop fields need times of lying fallow to recover from production.
And our food quality is downgraded if they don't get it.
Medicine continues its fight against illness and death,
But it's a battle we can never win.
The great white hope of antibiotics is slowly getting sidelined by resistant germs and superbugs.
And if our food supply is getting nutritionless due to exhausted soil and poisoned by pesticides,
All medicine can do is a kind of damage control.
You know,
We're spending more and more money on healthcare,
But actually chronic illnesses are going up.
This is what I mean.
There is duality.
You can't always have the good.
I feel we Westerners need to understand better that life is an experience of duality.
There's no fixing this and no perfection possible,
Except in a kind of acceptance of what is and taking action from that peaceful,
Wise spot.
You know,
When I was younger,
There was a big emphasis on the 80-20 ratio.
And basically it says that if you do 20% of the effort,
You will get 80% of the benefit.
Another way of looking at it is 20% of the people will do 80% of the work.
And if you push to do 80% of effort,
There's just an extra 20% gained from that.
You see sort of some few simple actions have the biggest payoff.
And the more we fuss about things,
The smaller the benefit.
Yeah,
I hope that's understandable.
Anyway,
So if we did this,
Became more content accepting of duality and the rhythms of nature and ourselves,
We would find that our solutions carried a wisdom that really does solve problems.
Actually,
If we made the shift inside ourselves to acceptance of this duality,
Answers to the problems like the need for less toxic solutions to crop pests would become as obvious as daylight because we would be able to see the answers,
Which would probably be simpler than we imagine.
You know,
Any parent knows that if you stay close to your heart,
You will have fewer problems managing the kids than if you bring in a very complicated situation with a whole bunch of rules and too high expectations,
You have trouble.
But if you just keep a constructive,
Loving,
Positive environment,
The kids flow along.
And,
You know,
Here's an example.
When I was raising my kids on my own,
I had two boys and they were tourist boys.
And so they were very sort of stubborn and opinionated.
I mean,
Like their mom,
But when they're even as very little.
So what I used to do was I would pick them up.
I would just use touch.
And they did not argue with me when I was holding them.
So I would actually spend a lot of time walking around with one boy on each hip and I became very strong.
But it was how I solved it.
I just solved it through touch.
Now,
I know,
You know,
Maybe this isn't practical for everything and I wasn't working full time,
But it's just the principle that I'm trying to communicate.
The simplicity of the solutions that come when we come back to our hearts,
When we just accept that life is one of duality and it's going to be imperfect.
But we can steer towards,
You know,
Happiness and a constructive life.
OK,
Well,
Anyway,
I'll continue this.
So what's really hard,
The challenge of this is letting go of our point of view so that we can see more deeply into truth.
It can be scary to come,
You know,
In closer to our hearts and their understanding of the duality.
But it's just our egos fussing.
I mean,
People actually can get scared.
I mean,
They can experience fear just in the process of getting closer to the truth of them.
But it does pass and then you become much happier.
OK,
So and the thing is that our hearts and our essences know the answers to the problems individually and in our culture.
We just need to listen more.
So,
I mean,
What is sad is we often don't turn inside until we're caught inside a perfect storm of duality.
Still,
Any time we decide to open up and to compassionately embrace and accept the truth of ourselves and our culture is a good time to do it.
And then I go on your mark,
Get set,
Go.
And of course,
That's a joke,
A bit of irony,
You know,
Like the opposite of a race.
OK,
I hope this is understandable and that it helped.
OK,
Bless your hearts.
