We carry on with another powerful quote. This is one that when you read it, you just know in your bones that it is true. And as you further look at the world around you, the more you see evidence of it everywhere. At the end, as usual, we close with a question that you can use to apply to your own life.
Good digestion!
“There is only one problem in the world, and that is the low level of consciousness of the people in it.”
Dario Salas Sommer
We are confident, cocky even. We’ve built looming cities, vast economies, warships and planes. We have scaled the mountains, plumbed the depths of the oceans, and have even made journeys into outer space. Our precious scientific discoveries evoke our pride and satisfaction, yet anyone who really puts thought to the matter will have to conclude the same thing:
Mankind is still in its infancy.
Not because we need to step up our science to make more progress to match our science fiction fantasies, not because we have not sufficiently conquered nature, but because our technological ability has far outpaced other, more important skills.
The quote implies that without consciousness, all the other abilities we acquire, instead of helping us to lead better lives, turn into “problems” for the human race.
War, disharmony, aggression, imbalance with nature, and so many other problems show that our intellectual faculty is completely separate from our ability to understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us. We are like the unsupervised pre-teens in William Golding’s “Lord Of the Flies”, confident, oblivious, and scared out of our wits.
This condition threatens our harmony, sanity, happiness, even our very survival as a species. Albert Einstein himself said:
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” Albert Einstein
There is a good case to be made that this new manner of thinking is consciousness, our ability to see the world and one’s place within it with clarity and objectivity; our ability to actually Love; our ability to act at a higher level than animal instinctive self interest.
The quote implies that, because the problems in the world are anchored to a low level of consciousness, if enough in the world people become conscious, the problems which threaten our wellbeing will lose their weight and power.
Another implication of this quote is that our personal problems as individuals, can also be caused by a lack of consciousness, a lack of awareness of ourselves.
So we come to a worthy question for reflection:
Could it be that what you think of as troublesome problems in your life are, in essence, simply a lower level of consciousness?
Does this give you motivation to raise your level of awareness?