After sitting with clients this week, I am struck by how much what seems to be the rise in hate and cruelty in the world is affecting people—myself included. It elicits a deep sadness in me that the most natural gift of being human— to love and be loved—is thwarted by fear and ignorance. Last year had the highest tally of reported hate crime incidents since 2008, when 7,783 incidents were reported to the FBI.
I recently reread some of Paul Levy’s penetrating teaching on how to break the trance of evil, In his book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, Levy shows us that within the very force that can destroy us lies the hope of what can save our world at this time. Levy describes wetiko as a non-local, transcendental force that cannot be adequately expressed in language, because it is not a thing. The abstract nature of the English language fails to account for such dynamic forces as wetiko that affect us all the time yet are not visible or measurable.
In our digital world, we are constantly being bombarded with new ideas and trends and even conspiracy theories that seek to take hold in the culture at large. Gladwell did in-depth research spanning a number of different fields, industries, and scholarly disciplines, and identified three key factors that each play a role in determining whether a particular trend will “tip” into wide-scale popularity. Not so ironically, he calls these three variables, or “rules of epidemics” the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
We face the task of loving our world and one another back into wholeness. We can only do that if we learn to be open from the center. Desmond Tutu said, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”
As human beings we are a complex web of interconnection, an eternal unified field of consciousness. The simplest way to explain that is that we exist in a space in which the observer, the process of observation, and the observed, are all one. We are not separate from all that we have created, and this realization can awaken us to the power we possess individually and as a collective to create a magnificent and desired future.
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4
There are some things I am beginning to know with riveting clarity as this virus works its way over the land. “Beginning to know” are the operative words.
