When Adi and I were recording our latest episode last week, “Staying Sane in an Insane World,” I talked a little bit about humanity as a single organism, as a whole body in which each of us is like a cell. And just as a body that stays out of balance for too long begins to manifest physical or mental disease, the body of the world as a whole must manifest its delusions, inequality, and other imbalances somewhere.
We need only look to history to see how wealth imbalance invariably leads to the collapse of empires … when a few people hoard far more resources than they need, the effect is exactly the same as cancer cells stealing nutrition from an otherwise healthy body. As cells starve, the body begins to die. But the process takes a long time, and it puts us through hell first.
The mass shootings in the U.S. erupt like boils now on a daily basis, and — setting all arguments about guns aside for a moment — from a purely spiritual standpoint can be seen as physical manifestations of the extreme mental stress the country has been under for the last couple of decades. It is both tragic and absolutely predictable given the toxicity of the public discourse.
Seeing these dynamics can help us understand them, and from there we can choose our responses and stay centered in our practice while everything feels like it’s blowing up. The world may collapse around us, but we don’t have to abide in unconscious suffering as it does.
Episode 30 “Staying Sane in an Insane World” is available now exclusively to our subscribers on Patreon; go to Patreon.com/IntoTheMystery. It’ll be live everywhere else starting July 6. Namaste, Rishika 🙏☺️
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