By the Barefoot Doctor

Is it possible (or just childish fantasy) to think we might actually stop being such a bunch of cretins (present company excluded) and start addressing the immanent danger of self-extinction from a vast potential range of total destruction agents, ranging from being flooded out of existence by an ever-rising overly acidified sea, ever-reducing amounts of arable land to grow food, ever-reducing potable water levels and so on and so on, all the way to nuclear self-annihilation? Of course it is. Everything is possible. While we're still here, we're still in the game - we're still in with a chance.

Right now, collectively speaking we're largely still in denial and self-distraction mode – main distraction aside from making money and general numbing through asinine mainstream media feed and all associated banality, and twisted, various, vested interests urging us to pull away from each other into smaller and smaller opposing groupings fuelled by hatred and mistrust, blaming, and prejudice.

Leading up to the millennium we were doing pretty well at opening to each other's ways, joining in greater and greater groupings and moving towards a global consciousness and collectivity. But ever since the millennium that expanding yang has contracted into an unprecedented state of yin. The millennium bug was real but it had nothing to do with computers – it was a virus of consciousness.

Meanwhile as a backdrop the geopolitical power play is intensifying with China, master martial artist and longterm strategist, inexorably attaining to number one position – financially, economically, militarily - while America runs about semi-amok like a bully about to have all his toys taken away by the new (but actually ancient and far more adroit at the game) kid on the block, with never-yet-beaten Russia as China's hard front man distracting and wrong-footing America at every step. While as a distraction or foil to the main play, both blocs are conducting proxy wars that could blow up into a series of full-scale barneys at any moment. And all of this instigated and motivated by a voraciously greedy arms industry intent on selling greater and greater numbers of more and more deadly munitions.

And for the full dramaturgic effect we have the seemingly unstoppable multi-headed hydra of the Islamists' ragtag army intent on retaking the old caliphate including much of Western Europe, to provide the requisite special effects theatrical explosion to mask the scene change between American and Chinese dominance. Not that we can actually have too much of a clear world-picture as the levels of disinformation are so great it's unlikely even the main players themselves know what's going on. 

And all the while an apparent mass psychosis is taking firmer and firmer hold via the exponentially increasing collective obsession with the trivial - promulgated by an insanely sophisticated, non-stop media-based mind-wipe, inducing even fairly intelligent people to become astonishingly moronic. At least that's a small, necessarily limited screenshot of the scenario that presents at the surface of things. But as we're learning nothing in this world of illusions, this vast hall of mirrors, is as it seems and more often that not is in fact the direct opposite of how it appears.

[caption id="attachment_7890" align="alignleft" width="343"] Where you at?[/caption]

For a start nasty acts – acts of violence and cruelty have far more impact on the collective psyche - because of the shock and sensationalism factor they make much more noise than acts of kindness, which generally make no noise at all. And it would be easy from the noise level to be misled into believing the entire planet is erupting in violence and chaos. However the evidence of our own eyes shows us the very opposite is true. The majority of the 7+ billion people on this planet are actually living in relative peace and harmony with each other on a daily basis. The vast majority of us don't spend our lives violating each other. The vast majority of us prefer letting each other be, respect the right to life for everyone, aspire to fairness, decency, and balanced reciprocity in all our transactions. Were it not so we'd have destroyed ourselves ten times over by now.

Every day, every hour, every minute, billions of kindnesses are shown from one to the other, billions of acts of love. But while these don't make any obvious impact on the collective psyche because of their innately discreet and silent quality,the basic human decency, courage and nobility informing them is by far the stronger force. Picture a vast cavern in utter darkness. It only requires one tiny candle to extinguish that darkness. Light is more powerful than dark in other words. Paradoxically it's not as visible, hence noticeable. But we can trust it's there informing us collectively at the deepest level.

And it's this same light that – in contrast to the effects of burgeoning mass idiocy - facilitates the sheer genius of us being able, say, to remote-control a spacecraft zillions of miles through deep space and transmit clear photos of Pluto back to us, or creating more or less perpetual energy sources, or giving blind people back their sight by fitting bionic eyes, and so on. So while it might seem humanity is solely narcissistically obsessed by engineering the perfect appearance for its burgeoning plethora of pointless instant self-portraits, we do in fact enjoy a collective ingenuity and brilliance of limitless scale.

The goal of the game is to accomplish collective congruence so that we organically coalesce around facilitating the fruits of this genius, for it's these fruits that are and will be our salvation. The capacity to collectively organize ourselves is innate and immeasurably vast. And it's not primarily about instigating external shows – demonstrations and so on – it's primarily about encouraging the meme of human decency to spread of its own accord. This happens as more and more of us realize humanity is a family, kin, and that kindness (which shares the same etymology as kin) serves to lubricate our complex of daily transactional activity far more effectively in the main than nastiness - that love serves us better than hate.

But this isn't happening because people feel they should be nicer, This is not to do with shoulds. This is to do with understanding that the whole mindset of suffering is not obligatory, and that in fact the purpose of us being here is to enjoy it. Being alive is the very greatest gift there is. Nothing else, not wealth, status, importance, power, sensual pleasure, even love and companionship, comes close to it in terms of greatness. Being here is the gift – everything else is secondary.  

Knowing that – not just rationally but viscerally – it's instantaneously clear enjoying the gift is the point of having the gift. And as more and more of us wake up to that and hence permit the light (of love) to spread, the more powerfully and swiftly it overcomes the opposite trend. That's how herds work – memes spread exponentially. A recent study concluded it requires 125,000,000 of us to be infected by a meme for the other 7 or so billion of us to all be instantaneously infected too. This is happening anyway – it's certainly what my own near 50 years of work so far has been dedicated to and I'm by no means alone in this – and it will happen exponentially faster as each of us wakes up to the gift of being alive.

And yes it's possible this is merely childish and idealistic in its premise. But even if it's inevitable the rising sea levels are going to drown out all the noise, or whichever asteroid it is NASA calculates is due to crash into us in either 2029 or 2036 is actually going to go ahead and do that anyway, at least we'll have a far far better time of it, celebrating this gift of life while we have it till the lights go out, than if we were to waste it all smashing the place, ourselves and each other to pieces.

Find a plethora of authentic Barefoot ways for overcoming insanity and engender this hallowed state of profoundly enjoying life from the inside out, at www.barefootdoctorglobal.com