How do we think?
We want to think about the way we think.
What is present here in this thought?
Is there a certain fixation?
Is there a certain need?
Is there a certain assumption?
Where is my stance coming from?
What is shaping it?
What is conditioning it?
How much of my perception represents reality or interprets reality?
We want to reflect about how we think so that we can get some freedom, so that we can create some space in us and among us, a space from where something new can start to emerge.
It seems appropriate to say that this kind of exploration has become a collective imperative.
Many of us are aware of the perverse consequences of our systems and our painful co-participation in them. Collectively we are confronted with this paradox of a system that fails us and nature, and that we keep feeding and perpetuating as we go on with our daily choices as consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, policy makers, or whatever our role is.
Even when we are choosing consciously it is difficult to escape the feeding of a system aimed at perpetual growth and driven by greed. The organic item we buy that pollutes all the way from sourcing to delivery, just to name an example.
In this system virtually everything has become a commodity to be monetized, even the most precious and sacred such as the gifts from nature and our own gifts. A system that has promised to deliver, seems to be depriving us on some fundamental levels. We are missing for example the experience of being in good relationship with nature, and with each other in joyous reciprocity.
At a global scale we have often substituted reciprocity with exploitation, co-dependence and overpowering. We see it in global sourcing, the global labor market, the global outsourced production and the climate emergency. The current crisis is helping us see that what supposedly was making us (some) stronger, in fact is making us (all) vulnerable.
What to do? What to do when we become aware of the problem and that we personally are part of it? What to do when there is no readily available solution?
Perhaps the first step is to surrender the need for a solution. Perhaps we are being confronted by a paradox that requires our ability to hold it long enough in our awareness. A collective, active contemplation of the assumptions, premises, and mindset from where our system has emerged.
Individually and collectively we need to be strong enough as to acknowledge our co-participation in the suffering of the world; to feel the pain, the grief, the shame, the frustration, the anger in that…and then open together into a space of exploration.
As we learn to hold together our awareness on the fundamental mindset we all carry, a new creative space may emerge. A space that is not rushing or pushing for creation but that is allowing creation. Perhaps we may even learn to let go of our limited ways and lean into the web of life, so that life itself in all its forms can joins us in our exploration.
And perhaps, before we do anything new, we can practice stop doing what we are doing, as the Corona Pandemic is forcing us to do.
Verónica Lassus
Bibliography:
Bohm D. (2004). On Dialogue. New York: Routledge Classics.