We are all mentally disturbed
Our behavior is conditioned by the way our mind works. Every instant we receive multiple impulses through our senses. Our mind receives them, interprets them and than makes decisions accordingly. When we think about it consciously we interfere with the automated way of working of our mind, trying to interpret reality for our understanding. But how can we do that? Based on what criteria do we determine what we believe and understand?
We can’t tell real from imaginary
We react to the world that surrounds us through interpretation of our senses comparing them to experiences and assumptions out of our past. Our experiences are ours, the assumptions are past on by our parents, education systems and culture. Some of these assumptions may well be millions of years old. It is called the “evolution of our consciousness”. This awareness building is form of mental disturbance, disputing consciously what we sense and believe to know.
We believe things are real until we find out the contrary, which we then believe is true. Every day we awaken into a new reality by living through new experiences and interpreting them with experiences lived or assumptions tought and commonly accepted. If only the past can be interpreted by our minds and the future is full of novelties to be discovered, how real is then our present and the decisions we make as a consequence?
We create fake realities to overcome our fear for the unknown
We need touchable realities to trust our perception of what we think is true and hence controllable by our insecure minds. We create fake realities that we believe are touchable and hence safe, such as money, houses, cities, cars. The more we are surrounded by these touchables the more secure we feel. “Realism” we call this, even though we deeply inside know that it is all an imaginary sense of security.
Our quest of living life is to “undisturb” ourselves
We find two ways to address this quest. The first is to avoid disturbance by creating “securities”, environments in which we feel safe and happy with what we perceive because it is congruent and common among people, providing what we think we need. We call this society and culture. Whatever disturbs this “culture” generates fear and uncertainty with a large array of actions to try to re-establish the status quo. We avoid the acceptance that we are “mentally disturbed” by accepting and defending a commonly agreed definition of what is supposed to be real.
The other way to avoid disturbance of the mind is to open up to knowledge and new experiences. We accept that we are “mentally disturbed” as a condition of a higher level of self aware life and progress. We undisturb ourselves by acquiring understanding through learning and experimentation. We can even do this together.
Positive and negative disturbance
We can address our mental disturbance in many ways. When we get to understand the musical reality of the interaction of all living substances we can also learn to appreciate our own complex mixture of senses. We can conduct a positive and harmonically disturbed life by seeking positivism in our perceptions. We learn to enjoy colors, tastes, emotions and energy streams. We learn to detect patterns and act accordingly, interacting with our fellow human beings and environment in a positive, constructive and progressively harmonic way. We do not fear the unknown but learn to value it from its universal energetic and harmonic reality. We can even learn to help others who live the same reality in the midst of fears and negativeness.
Global shift or Quantum Leap
We currently seem to live a global human culture of generalized fear that has been built up over the historical past by allowing the summing up of fake realities in a hierarchy of control. People and societies live through crisis now that open up our “artificially undisturbed” minds to new natural realities and awareness. The tendency is to transform the generalized negativeness to generalized positivism as people break through from their own mental blockage and get positively disturbed again, which in essence is our nature. When we connect again in this positivism we are able to create new societies based on new realities and common understandings, eliminating fear in the process.
Some of us believe that we are probably living in both the most mentally disturbed and exciting times ever. Whatever comes out of all this will depend on how we deal with negativism and positivism, new realities, securities and our interpretation of sustainable human progress when we open up to new awareness.
Pollution and school children
With AiREAS we created a measurement network in Eindhoven to see how air pollution affects our health and how we can improve the situation by initiating actions. As we progress we come across all kinds of issues that cause our immediate concern as human beings and parents but receive little to no support from money driven governance.
The following report re-enforces our intention to address the responsibilities in public schools around environmental conditions in class rooms and in the city quarters where our children grow up. The fact that Ultra Fine Particles (UFP) affect their brains (and heart, lungs, blood vessels, bladder, etc) showing problems in behavior and cognitive potential, is causing this concern. It has been confirmed by various other studies at schools.
UFP_en_cognitive_performance_masterproef_2012 (1)
Our children are obliged to go to school due to our educational system. As parents we expect to receive them back in at least the same shape and health as we delivered them. It is reasonable to expect that school and the environmental conditions to and from school show the same type of responsibility than our parenthood at home.
Is this behavior just cultural, educational or also caused by air pollution’s brain damage?
Our education facilities have been built and maintained around economic efficiency, not sustainable human qualities. In order to change this and find support from our social system representatives we decide to do the following:
- Stimulate entrepreneurial citizenship (STIR Academy) to address the school and city quarter issue together.
- Create an effective platform to influence democratic political processes and related public financing priorities.
The duality of addressing key issues directly through active citizenship and system’s influencing creates a transformation that includes the sustainable progress priorities. 2014 will be key again in Holland because of local city official’s elections. The precedents that result will be communicated again here.
Our youth should be healthy, happy and positive
Air hazard at airports
Airports are concentration points of fuel combustion due to the high activity rate of mobility movements. Measurements have shown that air pollution reaches concentration peaks that are up to 6 times higher than along dense traffic arteries. People who are working on the airfields are exposed to hazards that produce cancer, heart, artery and lung problems. People who live and work nearby also take their share of the problem.
Here you find some reports of local and international action groups:
AiREAS is a citizen’s initiative that invites government, business, science, etc to take co-responsibility for creating healthy living and working environments using air quality and public health as measurement points. This is the infrastructure we laid out in the city of Eindhoven as a backbone for proactive health and air improvement initiatives.
AiREAS activity map Eindhoven
Airport Eindhoven
Having a living lab to co-create a healthy city we also would like to include our local airport in the program. Various environmental groups and neighbors of nearby city quarters already address the issue of noise pollution, the flying zones and quit periods without flights at night. The management of the airport shows no sign of interest to address the issues. The main commercial concern seems to go to the growth of traffic and profitability of the airport area.
We all love to have an international airport nearby for our holiday and business flights throughout Europe. But we also share the thoughts of the airport director at Copenhagen who claims “that no one should get sick by coming to work”. We apply this also to the people who live nearby air traffic or travel regularly.
The challenge we all face is to live a life of wellness without damaging ourselves nor our environment beyond repair. This can only be done if we are all willing to address our wellness with care and responsibility developing applying knowledge and technology that diminish these hazards.
We will continue to build up the pressure locally as a high tech region with a high level of awareness and initiatives for sustainable human progress. We invite you all to do the same in your own home areas, considering even to establish a local AiREAS citizen’s initiative and create with me a worldwide network that address health and wellness beyond fragmented political and economical interests.
We state that self aware citizenship is the new entrepreneurship of the 21st century. We are a 7 billion people multinational that can make a difference: health, no debts, sustainable progress, safety, auto-determination and freely applied learning process (sustainocracy is a network of Sustainocrats).
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 