Why Don’t People Understand?

What is the matter with the people in this world? Why can’t they see the very obvious truth, that each of us has value, and that what we share in common with each other is so much greater in importance than the ways we happen to differ? With so many people pointing the way, why don’t they listen, and act accordingly?

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve had thoughts like those. Eventually it began to dawn on me – the world has been blinded by the propaganda advanced by their so-called leaders. As a result of this blindness we remain ignorant of truths lying right in front of us.[1]

Obama as Antichrist

The current domestic political situation is instructive. If there was ever a time to diligently search for solutions that will benefit us all, it is now. Who in their right mind would aim us in the direction of confusion and misinformation?

Yet there are a significant number of us who choose to believe that President Obama is a closet Muslim and a Nazi: that he wasn’t born in this country, and that he wants to pass a law mandating “death panels.” But this is just a single example of the nonsensical perspective that is nurtured by a certain segment of the media and then becomes a deep belief of all those who cannot see the distortion. But this is just one example.

Why would anyone aim to cultivate such fantasies and live by them?

Caution, Unseen Hand at Work

Perhaps Maynard Keynes’s “unseen hand” is at work here – the unseen hand of the marketplace. Fact is, there is money to be made by publishing information that distorts the world and creates suspicion, paranoia, fear, and conflict. The unseen hand caused to appear hungry, aggressive whose raison d’être is to specifically cater to those of us who are thus ignorant of the truth. After all, there is money to be made in the business of keeping people ignorant, and since “greed is good”. . .

We have not been taught to respect the truth, and the media generated distortion results in our never having an opportunity to even see the truth. We have been pumped full with propaganda and pap. (By the way, breaking with tradition, when I use the term media I mean to refer to all the communication tools and weapons aimed at us by the world we live in.) Our Information Universe is heavily impacted by media in many forms, ranging from our schoolbooks, with their stories of brave Columbus, and self-sacrificing Custer, all the way to today’s increasingly politically pitched news media.

This carefully manufactured blindness has resulted in our being ignorant of important facts because they are invisible to us.

Waking Up to the Media

I gradually began to recognize how deeply our culture has been twisted by our media. Our history books and prayer books, our newspapers and television have all systematically distorted the truth. Facts have been distorted and so has the mode of reasoning by which these factoids are examined and evaluated.

The problem is that not only has our global information system failed to give us the truth about ourselves and the world we live in, it has also not given us the tools we need in order to see the actual solutions that abound all around us. We desperately need to acquire and employ those tools that will enable us to be be certain that the decisions we are making are wise decisions.

To feel secure in the correctness and wisdom of our decisions we must examine the truth impartially, with freedom from prejudice, with an eye free from longing. We do not want our desire to see things a certain way to influence how we are seeing things. At least not too much. We need to strive to understand the truth, and to see more than merely projection of our prejudiced fantasy onto the current situation.

Any attachment to the past distorts our view of the present to some degree. It can be on other way – our present will always be colored to some degree by the past, at least until we have reached a stable state of enlightenment. Wisdom decrees that we reduce this distortion to the minimum, accept that some distortion remains, and then to take the transformational step of looking beyond the distortion. We must turn to a deeper intuition (the Force?), to enable us to sense what is deeper, and to set our journey by that deeper, inner standard, by the deeper essence of the situation, rather than just the situation itself.

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[1] Sometimes we even go so far as to imprison those who would shed light on the world, as with the fate of poor Galileo, and those Joe McCarthy’s hearings abused.

Individuals Combine Inner Wisdom and Social Networking to Create a New Type of Leadership

Emmett Miller, M.D., Pioneer in Mind-Body Medicine, Releases CDs to Awaken the Leader Within

(Los Altos, CA) January 14, 2008—Candidates running for president are spending millions on campaigns to demonstrate to voters that they are the best qualified to bring about change and lead the country to better days. But, to find true leadership that brings about change, individuals need to vote their conscience by first accessing their inner wisdom. By awakening the wisdom deep in the core of their being — their inner leader — they can guide thoughts and actions and use social networking to create a collective wisdom that brings healing change to themselves, communities and civilization.

Dr. Emmett Miller, an internationally recognized pioneer in the field of Mind-Body Medicine has released two CDs, Awakening the Leader Within and Healing Our Planet as a way to facilitate individual and global healing. Miller uses guided imagery to get individuals to relax physically, concentrate on breathing, quiet their minds and come into the present. In this state, they can access their inner wisdom and make new, intentional choices. It opens the psyche to connect deeply with others to accomplish distributed leadership. Once people use inner wisdom to guide thoughts and behaviors, they can apply this same process to behaviors in relation all of their surroundings and guide interactions with the people they connect with daily such as family, friends and co-workers.

“The concept of seeking leadership from within — as opposed to looking for it among politicians, business executives, religious zealots and others—is the outgrowth of my work in the field of Mind-Body Medicine,” said Miller. “For 35 years, I have helped people learn to access and use their deeper resources for self healing. This usually involves releasing maladaptive ways of thinking and behaving learned in the past, and developing wiser ways to interact with oneself and the world. I soon found that the same principles were effective in family therapy and in work with organizations and communities, up to the state level with California’s Self-Esteem Task Force. I also found this same wise guidance could be applied to each and every aspect of a person’s life and extend out globally.”

By combining inner leadership with social networking, people can create collective wisdom that  brings healing change to communities, organizations and civilization. Social networking enables those who are cultivating their inner leadership abilities to share their wisdom and passion with others on the same path using conversational models. For example, www.theworldcafe.com uses innovative social technology to enable communities of people throughout the world to explore issues and solve problems, then to share information with other such groups via the website.

What sets Miller’s approach apart are two things: the idea of looking inside for the leadership and collaborative community action that is so clearly lacking in so many areas of society, and the idea that external leadership can be traced to a lack of leadership within. The approach uses the same power tools that are used in therapeutic context to access deeper aspects of the psyche. Tools include deep relaxation, use of guided imagery, meditation and cognitive restructuring techniques.

Most people do not understand the principles of wise leadership of their personal lives, and thus cannot understand the principles of how leadership works in the world around them. They abdicate responsibility and choose poor leaders, which creates a vicious circle. The moment one discovers the leader within, the helpless stance begins to disappear, and people become aware of the enormous power they have to create the right leadership for themselves, their families, communities and the world.

“The purpose of my program is to access the wisdom to discern what needs to be done – but it goes beyond that, to turn a person’s intellectual knowing into a powerfully felt sense of commitment to carry out an internal revolution and seize control of his or her life.”

Miller’s approach also goes beyond the old paradigm that the observer is separate from that being observed, that we are separate from others and the environment. People have an important part to play, and their inner healing has an important effect on the world. No man is an island, and an important part of this program is to inspire us to connect with other similarly empowered people (kindred spirits) to heal the environment (physical and social and planetary).

According to Miller, few people are aware that they have the power to control their own lives. People have been suffering from a kind of cultural ADD, distracted by the pace of life, the demands and manipulations of the media. Individuals have been misled and distracted by the 24×7 infotainment channels, advertising, sexual hyper-stimulation and manufactured threats that keep people anxious. This preconditions people to accept conditions that, while falsely promising happiness and security, merely create wealth for a powerful few and cause great economic, physical, mental and spiritual suffering for the population at large.

This ongoing abuse  has sapped individual self-esteem and led to beliefs of not being good enough or powerful enough to change.  Additionally, people have been misled from within by addictions, prejudices, and stress. They haven’t been given access to the tools of self-awareness, self esteem and self-empowerment.

“Those who begin to experience leadership from within feel anything but powerless. They feel inspired, enthusiastic, and in love with life and the possibilities that abound. They see meadows, not minefields, stepping stones, not stumbling blocks. They see the incredible opportunities that lay before us to change the direction of our society and our planet, as well as our own lives. I have seen it happen thousands of times. This has been my life’s work. Now, with the advent of digital media and the Internet, I have found a way to publish it to the world. The time has come; the world is awakening to the need for change, and new leadership. I want to help individuals create individual and distributed leadership that brings about positive change for each and every member of society.”

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