The art of letting go
In my daily activities I find my self in a happy situation of meeting many people who all wish to contribute to a better world. What strikes me is that all are very much attached to particular elements of the old world that they try to change. This is not at all strange because this old world is still very dominantly present in our daily routines. One of the toughest issues that people need to learn to cope with is the art of letting go.
The very process starts with the development of personal awareness that things need to change and that this change comes about by taking personal responsibility. This insight has an origin that nearly always has to do with some kind of personal chaos that arises after some traumatic experiences. The reason that gave rise to this situation of chaos can be very diverse. I have seen people come in chaos after a marriage break up, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, a burn-out situation, etc. etc. The emotional or financial sense of security that may have been present before the chaos has disappeared getting people to find themselves without any stable foothold to stand on.
The pain of insecurity, lack of balance and personal chaos illuminates the mind and sole to find new opportunities, a sense of purpose and renewed drive to progress. In this process one confronts experiences of the past with idealism how things should be. If in the past moral complexities were not taken in consideration these now come intensified into the picture.
The process of letting go is as complex as the one to restructures one’s life an commitment to fullfilment. Memories are still very vivid around those elements that provided securities in the past and which one is temped to revive when one searches new securities. The past is gone for ever and living back what once was is only creating a mental dependence that blocks the potential of the future to present itself in its widest diversity.
Another issue that requires letting go is the pain that is felt in the past when things happened that caused suffering. One is tempted to avoid or condition new actions in fear for pain to happen again. People tend to enter new relationships as if they were the cause of ancient wounds instead of giving them the change to develop. Letting go is fundamental to give the past a position were it belongs and offer the future the opportunity to start from scratch. The future cannot be blamed for the past and the past may not block personal organization after enlightenment. Letting go is a way of getting peace with whatever happened and addressing the future with strength and self confidence.
The last thing that condition people in their evolution to true wealth is the mental attachment to material possessions. When a person gets into a situation of personal chaos this often goes together with the loss of material means. Even when insight and enlightenment comes one still tends to refer to all those things that one once had. When communicating in such way it is tempting for the listener to judge the person for what he or she has lost. It is a serious issue to let go also of possessions that have been lost. They cannot be recovered by longing to them and they lack importance. The real importance resides in the process of enlightenment that one undergoes and that feeds the sole to a richer personal identity. They relativety of possessions becomes clear only when one lets go an concentrates on what one is, not on what one has or used to have.
After the complex process of letting go securities, pains and possessions of the past one feels the exiting freedom of limitless existence. This is important to grow in a new role without the limitation of mental, physical, emotional or spiritual dependence. When one has let go one does not expect anything from anyone anymore, does not wait for anyone anymore and only relies on one’s personal existence, self esteem and confidence. One encounters then true leadership over personal existence that provides the strong sense of human equality that is needed for powerful human interaction in a sustainable way.
The art of letting go is the same as giving yourself room and freedom to expand on all levels of human complexity and organize yourself without expectations, limitations or influences from outside. Letting go you get hold of …yourself.
Osama Bin Laden effect
After spending some time on developing the column of values in a series of my recent blogs now it is maybe of interest to have a look at how this may work since the death of Bin Laden.
I first came across the name Bin Laden when I got back to the Netherlands in 2001. We settled temporarily in the house of an old aunt of mine who had moved to an elderly home. Her house was for sale and we had to bridge 5 years waiting list to get into a rental house. Suddenly a morning in September I was called by my father that I had to switch on the TV as something was going on in New York. I tuned in at the exact moment the second plane was flown into the Trade Center building. Only a few years before I had stood on top of those buildings myself and the view of what was happening was not only shocking, it hit me personally for that reason. When a little later the buildings collapsed my horror was intense even more than my family who had never been there. That was the first time I heard about Bin Laden.
Aparently his name was already subject to issues in the Netherlands but in Spain where I had lived I had not come across him yet. Nor had I come across a huge moslim population s.a. in the Netherlands. Without any hessitation or difficulties I had always happily lived and worked in a multi cultural environment in a constructive and open way. I had come to the Netherlands with exactly that attitude. I did not know otherwise.
The combined effect of the attack on the buildings, a terrorist that claimed world leadership on chaos and the possible connection with moslims that live in the same street as me and my children caused a shock for me personally and the entire world. Suddenly one didn’t know who to trust anymore, not far away but extremely nearby.
Before 9/11 I walked the streets with my own identity and connected on equal and trust level with anyone, no matter what color, religion or origin, without a doubt in my mind. After 9/11 I was suddenly forced to reflect about important things like equality, safety, trust, cooperation…… The basics of the column of values.
One forces one self that 99,99% of all moslims are great people with the same worries and challenges as I have. But can I freely feel safe? Can I feel safe when this terrorist Bin Laden is out there creating an invisible virus over the back of the moslim religion throughout society? Who can I trust? No one anymore?!
When a year later the politician Pim Fortuyn was shot dead in the Netherlands everyone was relieved that the killer was not moslim. We sincerely feared a civil war if it had been.
Fear is something that one needs to deal with. You can be critical to yourself and pick up history books about the horrors committed by christians. But that was centuries ago. One can look at the nice islamic neighbors with whom you deal on a daily basis. But still this thing inside keeps asking if we reason the same about issues of life? Does our cultural herritage behave the same in a situation of fear? No it does not.
When the boms exploded in the underground of Madrid my 9 year old daughter was nearby with her mum. Again terror came too close. When you look at the video images of the youngsters with their back packs in the London subway you see boys that you see everywhere, every day. Who is the next bommer? The guy standing next to you at the bus stop?
Bin Laden was the hidden symbol of this virus, the mother of all evil that kept this fear and uncertainty alive. There are obviously people who wanted this to be kept in place. Fear is a great condition for dominance in an unsustainable and vulnerable world. It has been used to demand billions of dollars/euros for investment in fighting terrorism, attacking countries and get certain foreign policies through that would otherwise never had seen the light. Surely people ask themselves if Bin Laden ever existed or invented for material purposes just like Santa Claus is claimed to be a Coca Cola stunt.
The Osama Bin Laden effect, whether live or invented, is real enough to make the column of values collaps and get individuals to grasp back to the only securities they have: their own cultural herritage and identity. You can feel safe in what you believe in or have been culturally educated. You can feel safe when you close yourself off emotionally and physically from interrelation with others with the personal excuse that the level of safety in the column is not secured at all. People get individualised and focus on personal greed and external securities s.a. material wealth, aggression to others and total paranoia to continu with this process. While the symbol of terror and chaos is alive there is no incentive at all to change as the personal investment and risk is too large.
Global instability and crises are caused by numerous parallel issues that do have a common ground of fear. Fear for terror, fear for poverty, fear for shortage, fear for subordination, fear for lack of control ……..
Now Bin Laden is dead. This symbol of global terror is eliminated. It does not matter whether he was real or imaginary. He is pronounced dead. Naturally there are people who want to keep him alive to maintain terror. Others want his dealth to become yet another symbol for a cause. Whatever the motivation of people the disappearance of the perceived source of this virus of chaos is an opening for all of us to breath and look around to see if we can trust people again. Our neighbors cannot be infected by this virus anymore, not this one anyway, which places them again at the same level of equality as I. So we can interact again without reservations.
The effect of Osama Bin Laden is that the layer of safety of the column of values can be restored. Why should we not worry for Al Qaida? Al Qaida was a subsymbol of the mother of all evil on global level. Of course Al Qaida can still do some important damage but it consists of fragmented groups of wrong idealism that has no source of symbolic inspiration anymore. The global leaders of Al Qaida may be powerful but have not the image of devilish fear as Bin Laden had across the globe even before 9/11.
Bin Laden is gone and the careful process of recovery of values can start, starting with each and everyone of us, embrassing our moslim brothers and sisters as they can embrasse us again, eliminating fear while working together again on this higher purpose that unites us all: a safe, healthy and vital society.
Vital and Human Education
“When a baby learns to climb the stairs you teach him or her how to go down as well”. With this well known sentence we show that everything new that we learn may have important consequences. We are so worried when children learn to walk, ride a bike or climb a tree. Why are we not worried when the go out to work and may contribute to the elimination of our natural resources? Or the global warming?
When we educate our children we learn them how to grow up and warn them about the risks of every novelty they master. Yet we teach them in schools that money is important, fashion clothes make you popular and daddy’s big car makes him important. We teach our children how to compete with grades and numbers, how to learn to calculate and push them to learn for a carreer. We teach them to perform according rules and those rules are in which they need to perform. In fact we want the youngsters to grow up robotised in a system work, taxes and material securities.
Sir Ken Robinson in his TED show explains clearly that the current education eliminates all creativity of the children. Sugata Mitra shows us that children can indeed teach themselves. Experiments in the Netherlands with environmentals improvements in the classrooms show that aggression, psycological disorder and learning difficulties disappeared. With all this wisdom and proof one asks himself: “why do not all schools adopt measures to improve child education?”
There seems only one answer posible here. The schools are built and run within the confinement of material excellence, i.e. it all has to perform within a budget and address simply those issues that are important to learn how to behave in the material system. What the consequences are of such education is of no importance what so ever as these are covered by other interests.
When we consider that the rational mind of a human being is only one fifth of its entire complexity of wisdoms we find that education on rational progress only is a way to produce unbalanced people, a threat to stability and an economic as well as social disaster. Education focused on the material complexity only makes incomplete human beings that start looking around to find themselves when reaching adult life. Often, after performing in the system for a while, they discover that the miracle and gift of life is much more than just work, sleep and work again. They start looking around to be completed through experiences that complete their existance.
A human being consists of at least five wisdoms: intelligence, emotional, spiritial, physical and (self) consciousness. The latter is the glue of everything and unique to human kind. We live our lives in one large adventure in which we get in touch with all the wisdoms through the development of our consciousness. We enhance this wisdom through developing a purposeful drive that gets us to experiences new things in life that need to be settled in our moral conscience too. In fact, as we progress in complexity along the line of material complexity, we get challenged continuously to adjust and rebuild the moral complexity of our being again. We do not just develop our ability to do by performing but also to be by feeding our identity.
Education should hence start at an early stage to address these wisdoms as a whole and allow the young child to discover in depth to be self conscious, self sufficient and open to the consequences of everything he learns by doing to his own identity and the effects on the surroundings. This we call Vital and Human Education, established in experimental stage in Holland now through the SMART USS project. Here we want the adult to remain as creative and free as a child, discovering the magic of the energetic world as well as the material world, finding and maintaining the balance between all personal wisdoms through thorough self consciousness and personal satisfaction through purposeful drive along the line of sustainable progress.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 