Thursday, January 10, 2008

Are We Getting Better or Worse?

There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are getting better, and those who are getting worse -- but nobody just stays the same, even if that is their greatest desire. So the choice we have is how do we change? Do we get better, or do we get worse? People who don’t believe they are changing, are getting worse without admitting it. In fact, they are in denial about it -- and that’s why they hope to convince everyone and themselves, that they are merely staying the same.

Life is like a shark -- that has to keep moving or it dies. Many people’s greatest aspiration in life, is that they can merely stay the same -- as they always have been and as they always hope to be, but that is not an option in life, for life is change, and one only can choose which direction.

Most often, change doesn’t come about because of entirely one’s own choices but are the collective action of individuals in society affecting each other. That sum is usually quite positive, allowing most of us to just go with the flow, whether we are consciously aware of that or not. Nobody living in any society and context, largely doesn’t go with that flow although many still think that every encounter with every other, is a grim personal battle for survival, of one against every other, without a greater context, consequences and significance.

But such thinking is largely the remnants of primitive thinking, as even the shrewdest of successful individuals, will now acknowledge, that they just see what everybody else is doing, before everybody else is aware that they are doing it. Eventually, everybody else does come around to seeing what only the most astute could see initially, and they have moved on further to see what nobody else does again. So even that vantage point, is not fixed, but always changing -- and that is what life is, this flow.

The ancient folks called this essential life force, prana or chi, and scientists later called it neuromuscular impulses or cardiovascular circulation. It is change, movement and flow at its most basic level of operation and mastery that makes much more complex and consequential action possible. Some people make a religion out of it -- while for many others, it is merely an obsession and compulsion.

It needn’t be a devotion and dedication people have been conditioned to believe it has to be -- in order to be effective. In fact, the less mystical, the better. In a world in which everything seems beyond every individual’s control, the simple mastery of personal functioning and presence (appearance), should be well within every individual’s ability to effect -- but many just don’t know that yet.

They think they have to go to gurus, consultants, surgeons, professors, personal trainers and other quasi-authority figures, to become the person they really want to be. That is what they’ve been conditioned to think.

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