ARE WE AFRAID OF THE WORLD?
IT'S AN OVERWHELMING THING, YET IT HAS ITS NATURE.
I have found in life that many people fail to realize there visions because they are afraid to pay attention to and engage with the systems and processes of the world. In the end, we all must do this. The higher we want to climb, the more profound our understanding must be. It is like climbing a mountain and the world begins to reveal itself. We all know the world is a bittersweet place. And while we wish we could all simply be rewarded for what we bring and what we do, we find out is our ability to work with the politics of life, to manage and navigate systems and respond to the forces of the world that define what we actually accomplish.
Once again, we can read books and go to seminars, but life is its own school. The world only truly reveals its secrets when we jump in. There are rules we can bend, some we can break, and those we cannot mess with. What are they? You have to figure that out along the way. We can start conservative and then figure out the risk and rule bending side of life. Or, we can start of risky and start being away until something stand in front of us to let us know we are being things not for us to bend or break.
When we seek to master our self, we turn inward and pay acute attention to what is going on. We must be patient and we must know that not everything we see or feel going on inside of us is real or true. TO understand the world we must turn this approach outward. It is the same process, only we are dealing with something that is ultimately going to define how we survive, prevail, perhaps prosper, or how we fall, how we struggle in life, and how we fail to find any reward. IN our inner evolution, we must face fears, we must pass through pain, and we must come to terms with our blindness and weaknesses. All of these things exits in the world. Our inner evolution does not change the evolution of the world. We evolve to a place and then we must find out how that finds its place in the "real" world. The path is there. There is always a path. Paths lead to what? ....journeys! Our masters degree in life is how we understand and integrate with the world. No one conquers the world. Look what happened to Caesar. A brief illusion. The world wins. We are trying to play a good game of sorts. Hopefully an honest one.
It is easy to fear stepping into the world. There are many people on this earth who come from families in which someone at some point fearless headed out into the world and established some form of success. Perhaps through joy or misery. You never know. But this is a lineage that has an understanding of the nature of working with the world to achieve success. Far more people come from families that have never fully understood how to work with the world. This is often innocent as we need to have the opportunity to do so and the past is a thing of a majority of people in paces of little opportunity. We need to invite ourselves to being world wise. Most importantly relative to our goals and visions. It is a humbling journey. But we seek to understand the systems and politics surrounding a given thing and make sure we are ready to work with those.
As many phantoms as we have inside of us that we could have reason to fear, the world is filled with even more things to fear. Easy to get paralyzed with fear on any path. Yet people achieve things and this is what we need to pay attention to. The world has rites of passage for everything. It has incredibly difficult tests for most things and yet offers ease for the courteous and persistent. For the skilled and the confident.
Our world understanding is something we collect. There are those who fail to pay attention to people who know life. People in the game. And there are those whose ears perk up and absorb every bit of wisdom floating around. I have have absorbed a lot of world wisdom over my life. Maybe too much. How can you have too much? When you have so much information you lose track of your path. So much understanding you get lost in the complexities of life. To this it is helpful to have well crafted set of blinders. Not blinders to wisdom, just blinders to things irrelevant to our journeys. When we find our selves wisely working with the world, this is a great time to reflect on a grander sense of things. But the truly wise, and I have not been such a person, Gather wisdom organically, purposefully.
Does the world have secrets? Of course. But when we discover them they are not what we think they are. This, for some, is the world of conspiracies and secret societies. Everything in life serves a purpose, even whatever appears secret. If we are meant to know a secret, life will tell us. We don't want to know all of life's secrets. And even if we did, our job remains the same. It doesn;t change. How do we be a wise us? Searching for secrets? No. Practices and persistence.
Anything that serves paranoias or fear is not going to serve us. Is the world against us? Sure, a good part of it. But so is gravity and we deal with that every day. What is for us and why would that want to help us? What is the system we belong in that nourishes us, protects us, and yes, challenges us? How do we prepare to find a place in that system? This is the goal of world understanding. If we travel and must engage with others fro other cultures we expand our world understanding, we must. Yet it is not ignorance to know only what we need to know to prevail where we are. If we serve our communities and bring value to them this is world wisdom. Perhaps we live in a small world?
No one should be afraid of tigers. Our job is to understand them. What is their nature. What makes them threatened or calls them to attack? This is true for anything in the jungle, if we are to survive the jungle. The world is unquestionably a jungle. When we began our survival was what to eat? What is poisonous? What is predator and what is prey. Now it is politics. It is processes and bureaucracy. It is setting career paths and building bridges. We are safer, but we are far more complicated.
The search for world understanding can lead us to a place of great despair if we are not careful. Truthfully, this is something we should allow our selves to feel profoundly. But we cannot live there. We face the despair of the world to let go and move on knowing all we have is our life to work with. We are navigating despair, suffering, inequity along with everything else. Don't let your understanding of the world become a burden on your shoulders. You cannot carry the world. Understanding must lead to wisdom and wisdom liberates us by revealing the limits of what can do. To know the world is to see the history of evolution and de evolution passing by through all the times and places here on our little blue ball. We are small. What is our place and time asking us to do. And what doors can we open that can allow that to a] happen in our place and time?
