Outrage Overload

Original Photo from Liber

The world is an angry place. This is another barrier that tends to keep people from exploring the space between, allowing themselves to drift into the world of spirit, and projecting their consciousness. Anger itself is the enemy of understanding. It muddies the mind with no purpose.

Right now we're angry at greedy bankers and investment hustlers. Last year in the U.S. it was the illegal immigrants. The focus changes, but the drumbeat of trouble and blame never stops.

On the TV and radio, on every station you have opinion makers of every stripe telling you who you should be angry at and why. All this anger changes nothing. It can't because anger is not an action. It's a reaction and a distraction.

Outrage sells commercial airtime, it releases chemicals in the system that we've not only grown used to, some of us are actually addicted to them. We need anger, fear, and violence to maintain the distorted chemical stasis our brain has gotten locked into.

Those chemicals, just like a drug, prevent people from thinking clearly, and prevent people from taking a longer view. Even when you're no longer thinking about the latest outrage, your body is still experiencing the impact of those chemicals. They are destabilizing and crippling.

I'm not trying to say it's an intentional control mechanism for the masses, but it perpetuates inertia. This cycle has been going on for most of recorded history. The only thing that changes is the face of the enemy, be he a large or small one.

Correct action is required for change to take place. If we were to take all the investment shysters and their banker bosses and put them in prison today, a whole new crop would spring up overnight. The problem is not a handful of criminal, or criminally incompetent money men causing glitches in the system.

The problem is the system.

The investment professionals, in their subconscious, were doing the right thing. We highly reward people for collecting money, regardless of the human cost. At best we offer a pat on the back to people for doing the right thing. More often we just call them fools.

For most of these finance experts if they had refused to go along with the policy of making risky bets they would have found themselves on the street, unable to find work in their field, unable to pay their mortgages and feed their families. In our culture this may be the penultimate punishment, second only to death.

Whether what they did was wrong or right is not the right question. We already have the answer. The question we should ask ourselves is how do we fix the culture, so that this doesn't happen as an unavoidable part of a malformed system. That, however, is a subject for someone else to take on.

If you wish to explore the inner world, and the world of spirit, you would do well to extricate yourself form this cycle of blame and outrage. Your body can't relax and your mind can't focus properly after being bombarded with anger, fear, and blame.

If you want to actually change anything in this world you will also have to extricate yourself from this limiting mind set. Outrage is disabling. It accomplishes nothing, but requires a lot of energy to maintain.

As much as being informed is a good thing, being overloaded is bad for you and those around you. Being driven to unreasonable emotional responses by the information you receive can be quite dangerous.

The calm mind can see solutions where the angry mind only sees red. The still mind can see all aspects, where the turbulent mind only sees the single wave of thought that's drowning it. You cannot find spirit by flailing angrily in the dark.