How does change happen?
A strange question to ask, it’s like asking, why does water take its form? It’s not entirely answerable. It has many contexts, many different states based on the context.
The classical scientific answer to this; Newtonian physics would say:
Exert a force on a mass, it changes.
As a culture, we still tend to think in this paradigm: If you want something, then do something to get it. Exert a force on your environment, and then the thing that you want will become.
In fact, the whole culture is constructed this way; the very nature of materialism is this concept.
Built on the certainty that if you want to change, there’ll be a physical object that you can go out and buy, that will bring that change upon you.
“Make America great again”, or “Take our country back”. These narratives both come from emotional stances of scarcity and lack; quite rightly, people are struggling at the moment. However, the narrative is off; it’s about forcing, taking, or grabbing at security.
This is not how you achieve sustainable change. Forcing change keeps perpetuating the need to change. This attitude leads to a constant, and eventually exhausting, continual need to keep adapting to the new requirement to force change. Society, economy, governance works in this way — a slave to the market. The cult of progress, it requires continual progress, and now we’re all being stretched in our capabilities.
All societies that work in this manner have collapsed in the past. The Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, British empires, you think that the western financial empire is any different?
Our fame structures work like this, flinging the next person up into the limelight until they inevitably get exhausted and get replaced by the following young and hungry person.
This only works to a point, and this is where we see the paradox creep into the frame. The people that are most dissatisfied with money are either incredibly poor people or incredibly wealthy people.
Money does buy happiness, but only to a point. It buys security, it doesn’t buy satisfaction, or fulfilment.
In fact, rich people are more likely to be non-compassionate, less empathetic, and loving to those outside of their circle, and they generally don’t live longer.
There’s something awry here don’t you think?
Let’s be cultural scientists for a moment.
We’re struggling with a time of great inequality, where the wealth gap is the largest it’s been for many years, and not even the most wealthy in our society are satisfied with their wealth. It must be a cultural narrative then.
It must be a broken or outdated paradigm.
Einstein came along and said that energy and mass are directly related:
Special relativity says mass and energy are interchangeable, as embodied by the equation E=mc².
Quantum physics has proven that ‘The Field’ exists, has this seeped into the cultural mind? No. It hasn’t.
What is The Field?
According to New Scientist:
Quantum field theory marries the ideas of other quantum theories to depict all particles as “excitations” that arise in underlying fields. The British physicist Paul Dirac started the ball rolling in the late 1920s with his equation describing how relativistic electrons — and with it most other matter particles — behave.
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The article goes onto to explain that this works fine if you’re working in the subtlety of individual particles in isolation and at slow speeds. However, if you need to consider the interactions in the complex world, you need something more.
The special relativity equation, and Heisenberg’s quantum uncertainty principle, which says particles can borrow energy from the vacuum for a certain amount of time.
Imagine driving a car fitted with a GPS navigation system that glitches every time you look at the speedometer. For quantum particles, this is a reality: the better you know a particle’s speed, the less sure you are of its position.
What has any of this got to do with change?!
Quite a lot as it happens, how do you expect to change your environment if you don’t even know the principles of how it is built?
All of these underlying principles help me to understand causality and interbeing.
Just as they mention in the articles, these fundamentals are part of an interconnected web of life’s components. It takes a lateral, and fractal, mindset to understand how they interplay.
If you are to get adept at change, you must apply this thinking.
The Tao Te Ching says, in verse 5:
Heaven and Earth are impartial
They allow things to die.
The sage is not sentimental,
She knows that all beings must pass away.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeThe space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows
Empty, yet inexhaustible
The more it is used, the more it produces.
Trying to explain, it will only exhaust you.
It is better to hold onto ambiguity.
Western society doesn’t accept death, and therefore grief, as a something to know and feel. We have shoved our old into homes far out of reach, and lament about their decline into senile bitterness; we write them off objectively because we can’t face the grief that comes from their passing.
Our societies are also in their death cycle. The more we cling to the old society, to making “America great again”, or to regaining the old British independent spirit by “taking our country back” from the EU, the more exhausted and desperate we become.
Do you see that this is a race to the bottom? No one can win in this situation.
The way to evolve this situation is to accept and surrender to grief.
We have lost a lot of what made our country’s identity, which made us feel present and useful within that society, which made us feel like good people.
We need to accept that. We need to accept that there is still beautiful goodness coming from inside each of cores. We are living in a time where it’s hard to find that outside of us. It’s asking us to think deeply about our lives and come to peace with that.
The hurts and fits of anger of the past are blocking us from this reality. They’re supposed to, that’s the journey. Underneath them is the beautiful messages; why they came into your life in the first place.
For example, I experienced sexual abuse as a child. I never thought I could get out of the pain that my life cycled through, yet, here I am because I continue to do the inner work. I still experience that pain, and I have more space to respond to what I want in life. I am not offloading that pain onto other people anymore. I am contributing in service to society, instead of burdening it with my righteous anger like I used to.
Sometimes a block to change will seem completely random and inconclusive.
For example, you’re searching for change in your business; you want more turnover, and you’re looking for efficiency in your supply chain.
A thought of your mother comes to you in a coaching session.
You get frustrated, and reject the thought, thinking that it’s annoying that your mother is popping into your head when you’re trying to work on your business.
If you’d have opened, surrendered and embraced that thought, and welcomed the feelings that come from that thought of your mother, the teachings that she had for you. Not condoning those actions, but realising the wisdom that they have for you. You’d have noticed that you exhibit the same nature as she does, an overriding control of your business; grasping at handling all aspects of it. In embracing that and processing the emotion, you could then discharge that energy in your body. Allow other solutions to come into your consciousness; maybe you could realise that if you gave other’s more responsibility with clear guidelines, it would free up the supply chain to work more efficiently.
The energy that was locked in that memory, or way of being, was keeping the mass set in a certain way.
Mass doesn’t change overnight; it’s by far the densest of energies, it’s imperceptible in its movement, that’s why it has a set mass.
Everything that happens on the planet is happening to you.
Generosity, kindness, and courage are essential now; they are a necessity if we are going to save our societies from collapsing into violence.
We have a choice over how we evolve, and part of that is rebelling against an old cultural narrative, but we don’t have to rebel in violence; we can rebel in love, and respect.
I do it for myself; you do it for yourself.
The centre of the Universe is not out there somewhere; it’s in your chest. It’s your beating heart. My centre is my beating heart.
Good luck and safe journeys.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash