Learning from the past

1051:

Repairing Earth means repairing ourselves, and the most productive way to do that is by learning to put ourselves out a bit.  Altruistically.  But we need to look at our history and learn from our mistakes, so we don’t fall on our altruistic sword.

Since we can’t know what’s up ahead (any more than we can reach out for the stars) we have to learn from the past to bring the future into being.  Maybe we (and I suppose I mean vegans) see one simple, sparkling idea which stands out from all the rest, allowing us to think differently, more constructively.  By making such a radical alteration to our daily food regime we start to think differently.  As soon as we change our thought patterns, our whole nature changes.  A wind blows through us.  There’s a ‘wanting’ for change, and uprooting of self interest, even a wanting for others’ welfare.  This ends up being a turn-around from doing everything with a self-interest motive.  It’s an alternative outlook.

By taking this ‘other view on life’, it might turn out to be our greatest asset.  On a collective level, the anti-violence of vegan lifestyle could come to represent the greatest salvage operation from a previously war-torn century.  By empathising outside of human interest, by considering the vegan principles of non-violence and harmlessness we see a way of being constructive.  We come up with both a consideration of our shame mixed with a resolve to repair.  Maybe this is where we are becoming conscious of consciousness itself.  And through that we are coming to see how we can initiate our own ‘evolution’, by applying some empathy to our outlook on life.

Looking back on how things have turned out, it’s hardly believable that so many of us could have participated in so much barbaric behaviour.  Future generations will ask with wide eyes and open mouths, how did we allow things to turn out the way they did.  And yet, at the same time, they too may still not be able to see what they’re also involved with.

How do we, in the middle of this particular era-of-barbarism, stop?  How do each of us stop and take stock and consciously alter course?

Perhaps we have to look back at the extraordinary events of the mid 1940s, where we see human nature in all its extremes.  We see bravery, altruism, waste and cruelty.  It would be sad to think we could take nothing constructive out of all this.