For thousands of years we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as individuals, and as a result, we have been under the illusion that we are separate from the whole of mankind.
The consequences of this are disempowerment, or the sense that one vote does not amount to much. I think this is a great underestimation of our potential as individuals, after all, if most individuals think they are insignificant, than the obvious consequence is a weakness of the whole, and an inability to accomplish things on a large scale.
It seems clear to me that we can never solve our basic problems of existence such as poverty and violence if there is no unified concerted effort by humanity as a whole. Leaving a few to deal with such problems only invites partial fragmented results which will never fully resolve the underlying fundamental cause of our problems.
And what is this underlying fundamental cause of our problems? Here is a clue from Genesis 2:17: “They (Adam and Eve) ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and instantly knew the difference between good and evil”.
Notice the sentence, “the difference between good and evil”. I think we can extrapolate from this to mean the emphasis we give to the differences between nationalities, races, ethnicities, beliefs, opinions, and so on.
So, what happened to, “Adam and Eve”? I believe what happened is that we humans became trapped in thought (ego)—or in the illusion of time and space as created by our thinking (our ego). And I think it is this illusion of space (separation) that is responsible for the emphasis we give to differences, and to the misguided perception that we are separate from everything.
Another way to look at it is that we humans suffer from an, “unresolved conflict” within our minds, or from a conflict defined by, “separation”—the separation (conflict) between you and me; the separation (conflict) between what I have and between what I want; the separation (conflict) between where I am and between where I would rather be, and so on.
Then our individual conflicts express themselves worldwide as the conflicts between nations, religions, and so on.
This illusion of separateness between ourselves and the world underlies our conditioning as individuals, and is what is responsible for the persistency of our fears, violence, and obsessions with pleasure, comfort, and security (the illusion of security, I should emphasize).
I should add that our fear is very unique in that it is a, “sticky” fear that is made persistent by the stickiness of ego, as in, “I am here”; “I am talking”; “I”; “I”; “I”; …and so on. Or to put it another way, our illusion of separation from our instincts, including from our fears, is what is making them, “sticky”, so that they seem overwhelming.
You may be interested in knowing that other living creatures do not have an ego, and therefore the fear that they feel is non pervasive, non vindictive, and non destructive to their society as a whole.
So clearly, we are dealing here with a unique human problem of mind which encompasses the whole of us in our roles as parents, teachers, neighbors, and world citizens—with one consequence of this being the creation for our children of an environment based on fear, worry, threat, punishment—and of, “dreams” which can never truly come true. We then very cleverly cover this up with acceptable terms such as, “discipline”, “education”, and, “socialization”.
Will we ever come out of it? Almost everything I have read and heard suggests that we will-- that we are an evolving species. And further, that this evolution is about to accelerate as we shift into this New Age some may call, The Aquarian Age (its a shifting of cycles, like the cycles of seasons).
But it is vitally important to understand that our evolution requires the participation of as many of us as possible in order to make this quantum shift possible, and that therefore, none of us should consider themselves insignificant!
