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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: |
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Non-Transcendental Thought: The Right Wing Psychosis?
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by Bill Douglas |
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There are many mind body sciences that have been honed over centuries of research to promote transcendental experiences. Transcendental experiences are often identified as those where the brainwaves shift primarily to alpha waves. It is a primarily right brain experience, or non-analytical experience, that requires and enables the mind to float and drift without being tangled up in the daily problems and challenges, but expanding beyond them to states of free form thought. Those who've not experienced the benefits of this see it as escapism and left-loony thought. However, in our increasingly complex world of 6 billion citizens, a shrinking ozone layer, an expanding CO2 layer, and societies achieving nuclear power left and right, the ability to expand our thinking beyond our current limitations may be essential to our very survival.
The great American author, Kurt Vonnegut, recently wrote that psychotics are running our country today. He explained that we allow that to happen because psychotics tend to be very decisive linear thinkers. That certainty they have impresses us and reassures us. The folly of this is that there is nothing contemplative about it. There is no place for transcendent non-linear complex thought in this world we have allowed to form around us. Over time this unreality unravels, but time and time again our society is carried down the rosy path paved with the carcasses of those who died unnecessarily, whether it be Vietnam (3,000,000 dead), Central American wars, Iran-Contra, Iraq-Gate, or the flawed trickle down economics that left our nation reeling in debt.
Most right wingers have a complete disdain for non-linear thinking, and dispute the transcendental experience, even in the face of mounting medical research that it can greatly improve health and mental and emotional well-being. Why?
Judging from their way of looking at life and approach to issues, they are incapable of grasping the transcendental experience of complexity, and therefore dismiss such notions out of hand rather than accept that they have work to do in expanding their consciousness.
Those who have experienced complexity through the non-linear techniques that promote transcendental experience, realize that the three-dimensional world we live in is only a façade of the greater reality that must be dealt with. Through the transcendental experience we begin to realize that our lives are not isolated incidents but rather a long continuum of events that unfold in an order that is complex and interdependent. We realize that who we are today is a culmination of many interconnected events, and a web woven of the love, assistance, challenge, and strife of many interactions with many other people, places, and events.
The right winger sees a disconnected world that frees them from acknowledging any assistance from others, and thereby excuses them from any responsibility to contribute back to others beyond their immediate daily experience. Sociologists find that heavily Republican cities are often not very large donors to charities per capita rated by income. Why? Because they cannot see their connection with the larger society.
This linear, non-complex, way of viewing the world has disastrous consequences for all of us. It costs our nation much money. Two examples, healthcare and prison care, which are heavily contributing to our national debt. Most of the uninsured poor end up using very expensive emergency care facilities anytime they get sick. The cost of this expensive crisis medicine is picked up by tax payers at the these public, often county, facilities. If tax payers joined together to provide public healthcare, much like a national Medicare system, we could have healthcare for all without paying anymore for it, according to Presidential Candidate Representative Dennis Kucinich. So, we wrack up endless and needless national debt for unnecessary healthcare costs, simply because right wingers with the help of the corporate media establishment convince people that we save money by denying millions access to normal medical care.
On the prison side, we spend twice as much to send a child to prison as we would to send the same child to Harvard University. This is profound when you realize that we in America incarcerate more of our people than any nation on the face of the earth (per capita). And this is outrageous when you realize that much of it is completely unnecessary and avoidable. How is it unavoidable, you may ask?
Head Start is a nationally funded pre-school program for poor children. Research indicates it reduces a child's likelihood of ending up in the penal system, while increasing the child's likelihood of ending up in college. A college student is likely to pay taxes and contribute to society, while a prisoner is likely to be an ongoing burden to society throughout his/her life. Despite it's success, Head Start has never been fully funded in America, and in fact less than half of those qualified have ever gotten it, even though we know that it saves us enormous sums of money. Why is this?
Right wingers have fought fully funding Head Start, while fighting for endless construction of prisons. This is like pouring gasoline to put out a fire. But, we are not talking about logic here. We are discussing a psychosis of disjointed non-complex awareness that is referred to as right-wing thinking. It is shared by many in Congress, but also in our television news pundits, who bully and force guests into quick decisive answers to complex problems. If they can't give a 3 second sound byte solution to a global or national problem . . . then they don't deserve our attention, is the Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly right wing psychosis we've allowed to form into what passes for our national dialogue.
Fair Media found that leading up to war on Iraq, only 2% of the news sources on US television news were either skeptical or opposed to the war, while over 90% were pro-war. Why is this? Because those who were skeptical of the war saw a complex multi-layered scenario that would/could unfold in many ways that would not be good for us or the world. We now see many of their fears being born out in post-war reality, as daily buildings blow, people die, and a country descends into increasing chaos, and our tax dollars go spinning down a sucking black hole of despair.
So, if the 2% of media sources apparently had legitimate points to make about the dangers of leaping into a war, why were they relegated such a small amount of the air time? Because their positions were "complex," while those who wanted to leap into war had one dimensional points that could be made "decisively" and "instantly," fitting within the 3 to 5 second sound byte answer we demand of those we put our faith in.
Now, the internet has become a home for millions of those seeking more complexity in thought. The internet allows one to see a current situation from a historical perspective, and with deliberative contemplation of the future ramifications. Which is what transcendental experience develops in the practitioner. Those of us who regularly relax into the complexity of non-linear awareness are drawn to a larger understanding, and a more holistic desire for information.
When dealing with international issues this is especially needed. For example, if we look back we see that the democratically elected president of Iran was over thrown by the CIA and replaced with the brutal dictatorship of the Shaw of Iran, who murdered tens of thousands of Iranians. When a popular revolution in Iran led by the Ayatollah Komeni finally over threw the Shaw they were outraged at the United States for inflicting the Shaw on them. Most Americans, to this day, are unaware of why revolutionary Iranians were angry at us.
Why does this matter in our current time? The radical Moslem revolution in Iran startled CIA and NSA experts in America at the time. They thought we needed a secular leader in Iraq to balance and limit the expansion of the radical Islam in Iran that had been the result of our destroying Iran's democracy and replacing it with dictatorship years before. Therefore they (the CIA) chose a powerful secular leader to support in his jostling for power in Iraq, and his name was Saddam Hussein.
The United States was an ally of Saddam Hussein, even when he was gassing Kurds in Iraq, and in fact many of the chemical precursors were purchased by Hussein from suppliers in the United States. The irony for those of us sitting in comfortable armchairs in the U.S. pondering this, or the horror of it if you were Iranian or Iraqi, was that at roughly the same time the Reagan Administration was secretly and illegally providing weapons to the Iranian government, so that they would help to support another illegal U.S. action against a democratic government in Nicaragua.
So, as you can see, we are on the road to madness. We must transcend our current obsession with immediate simplistic answers to questions of great complexity. We must embrace transcendental practices to promote health and focus in business, education, healthcare, etc., not only because it helps with health and mental clarity, but because it cultivates in us an ability, and a desire, to see the world in all it's wholeness and richness. It enables us to hold various realities and facts in our minds, rather than squeezing out such facts to force our consciousness into a dualistic simplistic reality, such as "you are either with us, or against us."
If we want to live in the good/bad, dead or alive, wild west of a world . . . we're on the right course. However, if we'd like a new renaissance expanding ever outward with more abundant and compassionate solutions to the problems we encounter . . . we must become a transcendent society.
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Bill Douglas,
Tai Chi & Qigong Author |
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Bill Douglas is the author of the #1 most popular T'ai Chi book in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
He can be reached at smartaichi.com His work, called "visionary" by the world's top T'ai Chi experts, is entitled, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong."
Bill is also the presenter in Britain's #1 best selling T'ai Chi DVD, Anthology of T'ai Chi & Qigong: The Prescription for the Future, and author of the acclaimed inspiration book, The Amateur Parent - A Book on Life, Death, War & Peace, and Everything Else in the Universe. It is available at www.smartaichi.com, and at amazon.com.
Bill is also the Founder of World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day:
worldtaichiday.org
and World Healing Day:
worldhealingday.org
now celebrated annually in 80 countries and recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization for it's healing work.
He is a media source on a host of natural health, social, & environmental issues and has been interviewed and/or published by media worldwide, including The New York Times and The South China Morning Post.
smartaichi.com
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