There is an old Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times”. Some people might wonder why that’s a curse, and the answer is quite simply that when you live in the midst of tumultuous times, those incidents in the world draw you into them, make you part of them. They pull you away from everything else and become that which is at the forefront of your consciousness.
Right now we live in interesting and tumultuous times. I read an article in the newspaper yesterday that said, “We now live with the highest number of displaced persons in the world since World War II. To give you an idea of the amount of instability, rancor and hostility that’s going on in the world right now.
Now people have choices to make in their lives, and if you watch the news on TV what you see in the news is mainly the actors in the drama of the world that lead to the instability and the hostility that we’re talking about. They don’t cover the non-hostile, and if they do, it’s very limited. They’re covering the areas of conflict and aggression, and right now the areas of conflict and aggression in the world are severe.
Now, for each of us, we are obviously brought into contact with these areas of conflict and aggression, and because of the nature of communications now, the entire world has been shrunk, so that we know of the conflicts and aggressions of the Middle East, in Africa, in the Far East, and anywhere else where anything else is going on. We become privy to it.
So, here we are in times when conflict and aggression is at a really high point in the world and we are constantly being bombarded with the nature of it, and we are constantly being bombarded with its import if we pay any attention to the national media.
Yesterday and the day before there was only one story on all of the news channels, and it was running 24 hours. Well, you would think that that’s very important. Let me put forth a simple question: if the world is at peace and there is conflict and aggression inside of you, if the world is at peace yet you are internally chaotic what’s the state of the world? What’s the state of existence?
If we talk about the state of existence, what are we talking about? Are we talking about you or are we talking about that which we encounter?
There are two states of existences going on here simultaneously and we have to decide the kind of credence that we’re going to give to each one. There’s an internalized state of existence, and then there’s an external state of existence, with all kinds of actors playing all kinds of roles and we have to decide if that means anything to us. Or are we capable of leaving the external chaos outside of ourselves and becoming peaceful inside of ourselves.
The next question is: What is the effect of becoming peaceful inside of yourself? Could it be that if more and more people chose the path of becoming peaceful inside of themselves, then all of a sudden what we would see on the outside would be more and more peace, and of course less and less to report by the international media.
How do we stay within a circle of protection within ourselves while the world is chaotic? Well, that brings another question to bear that runs simultaneously with the question: why the world is chaotic?
Isn’t life chaotic as you even bring it down to our own personal being? Don’t we have to deal with chaotic situations in our own existence on a regular basis? Lack of money can make people chaotic; illness can make people chaotic, interpersonal relationships that explode can make people chaotic.
There’s so much chaos going on within our tiny little sphere that sometimes it makes the larger chaotic sphere that’s going on almost irrelevant. Why? Because of the incredible strength that personal, emotional difficulty attaches to us and the upheaval that it causes within us.
So, if we don‘t have enough internal upheaval to make us nuts, we now have the world to make us nuts…
