How is it that through me writing I can affect in changing the world? This is a seemingly big question but it does have rather simple considerations to better understand why is it that world change begins with self-change. First of all is about coming to understand and realize that self-change begins with understanding who one is as the mind. How does this operate?
What we see outside as the ‘mess of the world’ and all of the current wars, crisis, famine, poverty, disrespect and dishonor to one another is our creation. How do we create this? Well, we are all participating in the world and we are all collectively tacitly agreeing that the misery, pain, suffering is just ‘what we agreed to,’ and so justify it with constructs like nations, money systems, races, religious constructs of all kinds including the religion of self as the ‘who I am’ as a personality compared to this/that person. What happens is that when we divide/split ourselves in these constructs, we become subject to what we know, are told, get taught which is all knowledge and information in our own mind. We then define ourselves entirely by what we learn throughout our living years and integrate it within ourselves as ‘how things are’ and not question it because ‘well it’s all that I’ve ever been/done so why should I even question it’? which includes thinking, feeling, becoming emotional, doing what our parents and authorities tell us we should do and so, by not questioning ourselves in our minds, we then of course by default do not question the world around us – and vice versa. In my case first came the questioning of the world, misery, problems around me and ‘out there in the world’ and later on questioning myself as the source and origin of this mess-world we have created.
What’s the role of writing oneself in beginning to understand the mess of this world as our creation?
Through writing we start seeing ourselves as words, through that we start developing our self-awareness which means getting to see ourselves beyond the veil of who we are as the mind, as a personality, as part of a particular culture, religion, education, family, political affiliation, preference or anything else that we’ve defined as ‘who we are’ and instead start questioning all of these ideas of ‘who I am’ as a first point of existential self-assessment. Otherwise, I mean, how can one ever get to a point of understanding about ‘the mess of this world’ if we see it as some kind of ‘amorphous mess created outside of ourselves’? It doesn’t make sense, does it? Where’s our role in it then? Whose victims would we then pose as if we believed we had ‘no say’ in how the world works? Absolute abdication of self-responsibility is what happens when we make ourselves subject to these ideas where one sees the problem ‘outside of oneself’ which is how through writing one starts understanding that the problem, the friction and conflict is derived from one’s participation in the mind, in one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions and living that out in the world as ‘our ways of coexisting/dealing with one another in the world’ which is then entirely mind based = not considering how we affect one another, what is involved in the decisions we make, who gets benefited and harmed by the tacit agreements we have as society.
Another aspect is that we tend to want to change ourselves/the world in quantum time/in one go, just because the water is ‘up to our necks’ which means one is having the consequences at the front door or already well into it and so there comes a desperation, an emotional experience attached to such consequence in a way that the ‘desire for change’ becomes just that, a yearning and fueling desire which is nothing else but an energetic experience that in the end amounts to anything, as an energetic experience in the mind doesn’t support us to change in itself, however we can use such mind experience to rather question ourselves about it: why does this sadness exist within me about how the world system operate? Are my emotions about the conflicts/wars going to create peace? Is my anger toward ‘the powers that be’ going to make any difference in how our society is hierarchically structured? And at the same time the other starting point can come through: does writing about myself, my mind patterns and habits going to amount to any form of change in this world? And within this I would say that there is no certainty other than the certainty we can give to ourselves that we are in fact, as a first point, actually beginning to question ourselves and introspect as to why and how the problems in this world are created based on the ways we think, act and speak as human beings, which are nothing else but broad categories to name our fears, desires, wants, obsessions, insecurities, value/worth perceptions, judgments, etc. All of this is what becomes the fabric of the world system as ‘the mess’ we believe we are separated from, which we are not as it is our day to day participation in this world as people in our minds that generate then the nature of the ‘world system’ which we tend to see ‘outside’ of ourselves or ‘too big’ to change.
Then, how will one’s writing process eventually become a solution for people starving, suffering and how do ‘I’ walking this written process amount to any of such world-solutions that are very needed?
Well, writing in itself as in ‘just writing’ is not a solution to it and there is a whole lot to understand as to how we have come to create the world system in the same mechanisms that we function as at a mind level. Writing enables us to identify how we operate within and without of ourselves, it assists in tracing the patterns and becoming aware of our responsibility to it. An example is getting to understand how we have come to agree to believe that wealth and poverty are acceptable, which is a belief within ourselves. It’s about investigating how we have kept countries in deliberate poverty and some others as deliberate royals in order to maintain the disparity going as the ‘legit’ reasons for poverty and wealth to exist and the ever present inequality. Poverty is the outflow of us not considering all beings as equally deserving the right to live in dignity and so believing that some countries/nations/corporations are meant to have ‘more power’ because (list/name justifications here) and within that, one falls into the trap to justify the existence of poverty and abuse with such reasons/justifications of why it ‘makes sense’ apparently to have rich and poor to such extremes in this world. Some of the reasons for poverty being that then, there will always be sufficient people living in survival mode that will be willing to work at no matter what ‘rate’ to get money to live and so in turn, serve the minority that has most of the power and control – money – to pay for it. In this, can’t we see that the reasons/excuses/justifications are exactly the same ones we have at an individual level when it comes to justifying one’s personal interests such as greed, not wanting to take self responsibility or wanting either a leader or a servant to do things for us? Same arguments apply, it’s our greed and self interest what drives this reality around, It’s who we are/what we accept in our minds that which exists as ‘how the system operates.’ Another example here: what is money if not a mind construct, an ‘agreement’ that we’ve come to place our blinding faith and word into to make it real – without such agreement and belief into it: money would be no different to the toy paper money that I used to play with as a child.
So what is the principle standing behind money? A belief in value – and what is a belief but a mind construct, a belief system, a set of accepted knowledge and information we impose onto reality, that we become it/embody it and stand in as the actual ‘living force’ of this entire mess; we are the ones that make it ‘functional’ through the ways we think, act and speak without consideration of how we affect each other’s lives, environments and minds with the ways in which we tacitly agree to participate in this society as a whole. And this is how through writing and understanding how our own programming, our own ‘environmental influence’ shapes how we behave, the decisions we make, the starting point of our decisions and how we interact with one another we come to realize that the unfortunate – but self-created – outflow of events as all the abuse in this world is actually nothing else but an outflow of who we are/what we have become ourselves in the mind: our acceptances and blind allowances. The most common example is once again money: one would not be able to ‘make it real’ if it wasn’t by a series of mind constructs, beliefs, ideas, perceptions, assumptions, indoctrination that we have come to assume as ‘how things operate.’
This is how when looking at a particular problem and investigating its causes, invariably, no matter which aspect of this reality you take into investigation as part of the world system, it will be able to be traced and brought back to self, to who we are as the mind, which is why this process of change is multi-dimensional, at all the various levels in which we have layered our reality.
Imagine you have a very neat white room with various essential objects to make it into a definition of a bedroom: bed, night table, a lamp, a dresser to name a few ‘essentials’ so to speak. But, what happens when one starts adding more and more decoration and furniture over time, from all the various preferences of the people living in it throughout the years, along with layers of paint, deterioration that comes with use, all the various complete overhauls of the space’s purpose etc. Of course this room will end up containing all those changes throughout space and time accumulated as layers of ‘time’ according to all the people that have used that bedroom/space. So, getting it back to that initial pristine white room with the essentials to function will take a while, a cleaning/dismantling process within the consideration that just ‘destroying’ the room is not an option. The same applies for ourselves as our individual and global process: it will most certainly take a long time to do the changes we want to see or envision can be implemented in this world and in our personal lives. However why waiting for such ‘ideal’ if we know beforehand that ideals don’t come or appear as some kind of ‘spontaneous creation’: things/events/circumstances are always directed, there’s someone’s effort and intellect placed into it, and that’s where we go back to realizing that it is us that create such ‘global decay’ over time, because the Earth in itself was quite fine managing itself – so the ‘mess’ we perceive of this world as a separate point from ourselves, is in fact a life and a deception that we have to become self-honest about: we’ve created it ourselves and so it’s about becoming self-honest to be able to take self-responsibility here.
Back to the example of the bedroom over time: when one is absorbed in the mind, we tend to not see the connection between the mess of the room we have around us as our environment and our direct participation in having actually turned that room into the mess it is, and not only ‘us’ but also containing the previous inhabitant’s traces and past decorations/use and deterioration of the place – this is exactly what we have inherited as this world and what we currently live as in our own bodies and lives. So we know that it won’t be an ‘easy step’ to simply try and ignore our own participation in the creation of this mess and merely focus on being depressed, sad, angry or frustrated about the mess we see around us as that messy room. Why not instead dedicating ourselves to go dismantling the mess point by point, layer by layer of dust, deterioration, getting things sorted back into their place, getting rid of other things that are no longer required, doing the necessary reparation work, replacing any parts/components that have been overtly used and so essentially take the time, space and actual process to see how one can best improve one’s room according to also assessing the furniture/items you can still keep/use, some others that you can use as foundation to build something else with them that is more reliable/sturdy and with a renewed purpose. The same applies to our process in our minds: it’s about being able to assess one’s mind, personality, one’s participation in this world within such personality and see if what I am living/doing is in fact best for all, if what ‘moves’ us every day is only self-interest or if we have integrated some principles in our lives – therefore we can also become creative in such process as well, realizing our physical limitations in terms of money/space/time to create something, but definitely to not die merely ‘trying’ to change or to get to some developments, but simply make it our purpose of living: to get to live to our fullest potential as individuals and as a collective, humanity.
Eventually, as more and more people start realizing that the mess, the problems, the perceived lack, crisis and problem in this world originate at a mind/individual level, by all the behaviors, ideologies, ways of interacting, what we accept and allow, thinking, how we feel about ourselves and each other becoming our starting point of ‘who we are’ then we can certainly start ‘connecting the dots’ or ‘filling in the gaps’ to see that the problem we would vastly usually see as something ‘separate from ourselves’ and believing ourselves to be ‘helpless to change,’ will be so no more – why? Because then one understands and comes to realize that things like sadness, helplessness, worry, fear, anger exist as an emotional experience that we blind ourselves from actually physically assessing what is and would be possible to change in this world, how can we correct or align things that are currently not working at an individual and collective level in the first place. That is also possible when one understands through writing out one’s personal process of self-investigating one’s mind that becoming sad, angry, frustrated at ‘the problems in the world’ or at seeing wars, poor people, hungry people, seeing other humans as ‘the bad guys’ will not solve the problem, but merely reinforce the idea that we are the ‘victims’ as in ‘this is being done To us’ without realizing that we are in fact the victims of our own personal experience as emotions about it, which in the end stands as an obstacle to genuinely change – or a comfortable lie/blindness as a justification to not change.
So in essence, does writing have an impact on the world around us?
Only writing in itself will not. Writing used as the tool of self investigation such as the writing of one’s patterns, behavior, preferences, fears, worries is a method to get to know ourselves and so get to understand how we operate/live, what we have come to accept and allow. Writing can also be something that promotes in itself change, that inspires people to actually start looking within themselves such as what we do here as part of this process of self-awareness and self-honesty, where we start questioning everything that we’ve been and so assess whether what we are, do, what we participate in at an individual or collective level in fact stands ‘the test of time’ which is a saying to point out that the mess is created when we do/act/think in ways that are not best for all, ways that only benefit ourselves and do not consider all parts/people/beings involved. So, this is something that would not be possible to assess if one hadn’t actually begun to write/explore one’s life, motivations, purposes and so take the directive action upon it, to physically start testing out these alignments as part of what we see makes sense to change in one’s life and one’s participation in our everyday living. For this, writing then becomes a ‘self-tracking/self-assessment’ tool so that we can also go understanding how ‘the way the world works’ is primarily a reflection of these same individual patterns we face at an individual level. Then, the world stops being this ‘amorphous mess’ and starts ‘making sense’ from the perspective that we see our direct outflow and consequence created by the way we live in this world, what we come to ‘agree’ about and how that affects each other’s lives, which includes all living beings on Earth.
So, to get to world change, we require to first stop the mess, the continuous conflict and friction within ourselves in our minds and deliberately start aligning ourselves to practically assess in every moment whether what we do/decide to do is self-supportive for oneself and others, using words to script the new foundation of what we see is best to live by, words that benefit myself and everyone else as well. By doing this, one realizes that writing is the workshop process, it is a starting point for self-change. However the changes and solutions to affect world change do require global collective participation, which is how we will only be able to change people’s living conditions around the world when more and more people realize that we create ‘the world’ as a direct reflection of who we are in our minds, and that’s how the process of world change begins with self-change and one by one in our collective decision to structure solutions that place an order to our self-created chaos, we can come to generate solutions that will affect each other’s lives to better them. This is essentially what self-writing does and from there, one can also start expanding into introspecting about the world system, investigating the sources of the problems and aligning them by our decision to do so, to do and agree what is best for all.
Try out the tools of Self-Support such as Writing, Self Forgiveness, Self Honesty and Self Corrective Application at the online free course DIP Lite : http://lite.desteniiprocess.com/
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