User:Johnpnts

A Challenge to You: Prepare to Experience Truth

Dear Reader, Throughout this short essay, I would implore you to take these words seriously. Take these words to heart, and please be open to your innermost self. You are a hypocrite. There is no denying it, and the hardest part is knowing that you are hypocritical, and yet expect others to be non-hypocritical. It’s OK.

Every human being is a hypocrite. Singly and in groups, we all say one thing and do another, and we all do it with the knowledge of our hypocrisy. It is part of being human and may be a necessary product of our ability to form complex societies and relationships. On grand scales involving many people, hypocrisy is responsible for war and death, bad governance, poverty, inequality, and the list goes on. Do you believe that you, a seeker of truth, can be honest enough with yourself as a single human being to move your life, as you know it, in a different direction? Does human compassion outweigh indifference? Do “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the self”? If we ever needed answers to these questions, the time is now.

Can you give up something? Perhaps a way of life that you have envisioned for yourself? Could you replace that vision with a picture that includes more than yourself, in effect minimizing your ego and desires in order to achieve a higher purpose? Would you use some of your short time on earth to truly contemplate a change in yourself and your outlook on life?

I ask these questions to you, whoever you are. I don’t have the answers, but I am willing to ask you to think about where you are headed in your life as an individual, and as a member of a group of animals that now controls and changes the planet at will.

I believe that humanity is ready for a fundamental change. I hear it on the news, from my friends, on the internet, and almost everywhere I go. It’s less of a conversation and more of a feeling, a gathering of forces unseen but palpable. I feel a collective guilt, a feeling of selfishness, a circling of wagons as if our little group of societies were about to be attacked in some way. It’s hard to explain, this feeling of impending change, but I can think of no better way to describe it. It is the beginning of something, or the beginning of the end of something.

I also feel great hope, as if I were a part of a grand and glorious new world in which we had become enlightened and more homogenous. A world above petty and selfish “I have mine, get your own” thinking and actions. A world obsessed, not with gathering