REPOST: "PERSONAL HARMONY IN THE MIDST OF COLLECTIVE CHAOS?" A GREAT COMMENT AND QUESTION!/PL RESPONDS!"

"A2PERSON" wrote the following in response to the FPL post "POLITICAL LEADERS CANNOT HEAL THE SOUL OF AMERICA!":

Peter, I'm a long-time reader of your blog and have valued your comments over the years -I've often had comments on the tip of my tongue but now it seems to have manifested in reality! Some background: I've been deeply engaged for the past 3 years in working through my character structures -schizoid, oral, and now narcissistic, and your blog has served as a consoling, not to mention entertaining resource to supplement my own self-work.

Regarding your sobering if apocalyptic stance on the devolution of the USA, much of it rings true to me, and, certainly, on a macro level I should be bursting with despair at the delusional self-destruction swarming about me. However, I'm a state in my spiritual life where I've never been more hopeful, more integrated and more enlivened -and I still have a long way to go before I 'hatch'! There's a paradox for me concerning the aughts: across a variety of dimensions, this last decade was stagnant, lost, possibly even regressive, and yet, personally I've undergone great awakening, healing and self-insight. Despair doesn't feel entirely organic to me now -a pervasive "fear of life", to cite one of Lowen's books, is losing its hold on my each day and my inner empowerment is incongruent with my outer disempowerment. In terms of the practical world, I'm currently pursuing a grad degree in public policy and am planning my next move; I'm not sure if I want to stick around the USA for such an "intervention." (Know any good bioenergetics therapists in Canada? ;-) but I also don't want to be overly reactive. Are you able to speak to this tension between the positive trajectories of individuals doing inner work and the societal descent into egoistic chaos? I'd like to be the so-called "100th monkey" AND be self-protective. Can this realistically be done?
Cheers!

p.s. just read your latest posting, after this one, and it seems you start to address my issue after all.


Here's PL:

Thank you very much, A2, for your readership and your very thoughtful comment and question, and especially for your dedication to your own self-work. More than anything else, it is what the world needs right now.

Yes, we are always creating our lives from two places, one personal to us, one en masse, and yes, it certainly is realistically doable to be experiencing personal harmony and growth in the midst of a collective "contraction," as it were. And what you create personally will always ultimately rule. No one is an island, it is true, but how that applies here is that while you are creating conscious harmony for yourself in your life, and so choosing not to contribute to the negative creations around you, you are helping to mitigate the negative effects of those creations in the human condition.

I addressed the question you are asking about individual versus collective reality in other words in my pre-New Year's post entitled: "THE WORST OF TIMES OR THE BEST OF TIMES: WHO'S DECADE FROM HELL WAS IT?!"

Here's an excerpt:

But... was it truly "the decade from hell?" The interesting thing is that the answer to that question depends on from where you answer it. We are always creating our reality at two levels - individually and en mass. In spite of it all, I know people who fell truly, deeply in love during the 00's for the first time, or who created a masterpiece in their chosen art form, or found abundance without cheating or stealing from anybody else, or who healed their minds-bodies-and-spirits in miraculous ways without the slash-and-burn mideaval methods of mainstream medicine. Yes, a lot of good most definitely happened to many individuals, all within the larger context of debacle after debacle at the public levels of reality.

So, can the best decade, personally, simultaneously exist within the worst decade collectively? Of course. As long as you're not thinking and living your life from a strictly dualistic place.

A concomitant question that arises is: Can we be evolving collectively as a species if as a species we are collectively doing so poorly? Well, I suppose that's like asking if an alcoholic is evolving when he's in the process of hitting bottom. The answer is to some degree unknown because it all depends on what is done at the bottom, what choices are made there, and then, what the follow-up is. As a country, we may certainly be at our bottom, although just when it seems that our degree of denial has brought us as low as we can go, Joe Leiberman and John McCain raise a toast and take another swig of single malt bullshit!

Nonetheless, folks, you create your own personal reality from the inside out, and our collective reality, just like the weather, is a manifestation of all of our personal realities combined. So, as we approach a new decade, my advice is to continue to be as conscious and loving and connected as possible in your life, and perhaps you will be the Hundredth Monkey.