Life is simple. Isn't it?

Dear Reader,

The greatest truths have been forgotten because of their very simplicity.

Great truths are simple because they are of universal application.

Truth itself is always simple. Complexity is due to man's ignorance.

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902).

We are living in a time of fear and, inevitably in such times, the fingers start pointing toward others - it's they that must surely have caused the problem (we think)! Yet virtually all of us - unconsciously perhaps - have responsibility for how society is regulated.

Going to one extreme, when a man is brought to trial on some criminal charge, rarely do the causes of his crime get examined unless there is something that stands out to warrant examination. The law assumes that a person of adult age is responsible for their own actions unless they have a recognised health condition that could be contributory and needs treatment. 

However, beliefs and attitudes are fundamentally shaped by familial ties and personal events. Underlying every person's anti-social behaviour lies some influence or treatment of them by others in their earlier years that triggered or amplified such behaviour. Alternatively, or as well as, something from a previous life may have been an influence in creating such a predisposition. Neither such causes for anti-social behaviour are tolerated by the legal system - and, indeed, society at large finds difficulty in accepting the notion of the second cause. 

In the Christian world, how many realise that reincarnation was a widely accepted concept in pre-Roman Christianity? It was not until a Roman emperor's wife decided she didn't like the notion so had her husband expunge it from the Roman Catholic creed in 353AD. Thus it became expunged from every Christian's faith. Hence why our legal system pays no heed to it. Today we (outwardly at least) deny its place in our world. Thereby we lose sight of the fact that our essential selves live on to do better next time.

Swami Vivekananda (an admired spiritual man of India who, when visiting America in 1893, announced that he was bringing Christianity to that country) placed a great deal of importance on psychology; even then, before Jung. He wrote:

The idea of psychology in the West is very much degraded. Psychology is the science of sciences, but in the West it is placed upon the same plane as all other sciences; that is, it is judged by the same criterion—[its] utility. How much practical benefit will it do to humanity? How much will it add to our rapidly growing happiness? How much will it detract from our rapidly increasing pain? Such is the criterion by which everything is judged in the West.

In other words, a thing tends not to be evaluated for what it is and its place in our understanding of the universe and our relationship to it, but for how it can be applied to what we think is practically useful in our mastery of the material world, not the spiritual. Not to include the spiritual world in the manner of our thinking largely explains where we are in today's apparent crises.

Vivekananda observed (speaking of the typical man):

But even taking the Western idea of utility as a criterion by which to judge, psychology, by such a standard even, is the science of sciences. Why? We are all slaves to our senses, slaves to our own minds, conscious and subconscious. The reason why a criminal is a criminal is not because he desires to be one, but because he has not his mind under control and is therefore a slave to his own conscious and subconscious mind, and to the mind of everybody else. He must follow the dominant trend of his own mind; he cannot help it; he is forced onward in spite of himself, in spite of his own better promptings, his own better nature; he is forced to obey the dominant mandate of his own mind. 

Poor man, he cannot help himself. We see this in our own lives constantly. We are constantly doing things against the better side of our nature, and afterwards, we upbraid ourselves for so doing and wonder what we could have been thinking of, how we could do such a thing! Yet, again and again, we do it, and again and again, we suffer for it and upbraid ourselves. At the time, perhaps, we think we desire to do it, but we only desire it because we are forced to desire it. We are forced onward, we are helpless! We are all slaves to our own and to everybody else's minds; whether we are good or bad, that makes no difference. We are led here and there because we cannot help ourselves. We say we think, we do, etc. It is not so. ...

Therefore, he says:

It is the science of psychology that teaches us to hold in check the wild gyrations of the mind, place it under the control of the will, and thus free ourselves from its tyrannous mandates. Psychology is therefore the science of sciences, without which all sciences and all other knowledge are worthless.

And it is said...

Sow a thought, reap an action;
sow an action, reap a tendency;
sow a tendency, reap a habit;
sow a habit, reap a character;
sow a character, reap a destiny.

As the result of the mechanistic development of our society, particularly over the last 400 years but also based on earlier foundations, of course, our political leaders - and nearly all those in the major economies of the world - think alike in their reaction to events by applying reactionary policies. The commonality of the education content in the western world makes all in the West think in the same way. The Eastern (south Asian) world is somewhat different.

It doesn't matter which political party holds the reins of a Western government; they all have the same tendency. They mostly utilise reductionist techniques to 'spin' the truth as they want it to be conveyed, particularly as we now increasingly live in the world of professional politicians. Our natural tendency to want a simple life causes us mostly to accept it all. The exception is when a matter directly affects us deeply in some way.

Hence Putin is to blame for what is happening in Ukraine, they say. Is he? Yes, the act of war and violence that he perpetrated can be put on his shoulders, but way back in the 1990s, where was the aid to Russia to re-examine its real aspirations in the hurry of the US (and McDonald's) to try to convert Russia into another consumptionist partner? 

The old Communist structure and underlying traits did not die easily with its ingrained machinery of suspicion. Putin served in the KGB and also wanted Russia to be seen as a great power, creating traits in him that could clearly be seen developing. The West - with its own suspicious state machinery - just let it all happen. So, is Putin really all to blame?

Thus the finger-pointing goes on, overlooking our own deficiencies. Perhaps we could have made a difference if we were truly a spiritually healthy country, not materialist or simply religious. Perfection is a very difficult thing to attain, but more the reason we should have more humility and be disinclined to point fingers.

So, to come to today's political situation in the UK, we again have a new prime minister who comes full of promises about how all will be well but is in danger of creating a more divided country than it was before - if that were possible.

What is frightening to anyone, who has studied enough, is that the One Country attitude of the post-war Conservative party is in danger of being thrown aside yet again. Not only that but the experience that tells us that those old methods of capitalism and fossil fuel technology are outdated is potentially being walked over as non-existent. 

Growth and wealth are again the expedient factors in decision-making in order to get out of the mire, we are told, with the true beneficiaries being business shareholders while the ordinary taxpayer will have to make the contributions to reduce the national debt.

This is in a world that is burning and under floods, and with migrations accumulating. And in a world where the major powers have decided that all we need to do is cut back on CO2. They can't even sufficiently do that.

The governments of the developed world are blinkered to the reality of life elsewhere, and even in their own backyard. Their idea of reality is based on Henry Ford business concepts of a hundred years ago and more. 

Well, perhaps it's time that those who think non-materialistically should retire to the hills and watch for the outcome. On the other hand, perhaps there are local feelings and initiatives that are strong enough to drive a huge change in attitude as pandemics and climate change reap their punishment. The problem then will be how to arrive at a UK government capable of administering such a sea-change in thinking.

Before embarking on that sea-change, let us keep in mind that to attain success, a sacrifice will be called for based on the philosophy that All Is One. We are not separate or essentially different from one another and we all depend on our planet. That is a greater part of the philosophy contained in Vivekananda's "greatest truths". 

It's based on moral but simple thinking. Therefore, we should love all, serve all.

Thank you for reading this.