Originally Posted by
Andrew Weiss
A different point of view:
This is from the latest book I'm working on. I don't use the word "God" in this section. Whether you use the word God, or Divine, or True Nature to describe it doesn't matter to me. And whether you transform your consciousness through Buddhist practice, faith in the Christ or in Allah, or through other means doesn't matter to me; I believe what matters is that each of us takes that step.
This world we live in is the creation of our common consciousness. Every aspect of it, from the ones we love like the beautiful sunset to the ones we abhor like the ethnic cleansing in Somalia, is the created, manifested result of different aspects of our common consciousness. Ethnic cleansing, whether it occurs in Somalia, Yogoslavia, Tibet or Nazi Germany is the inevitable consequence of deeply held fear of those who are different from ourselves; so are the resulting mental formations which tells us that only we know the real truth, only we are truly pure, and those “other people” deserve to be slaughtered and tortured. Look deeply into yourself and see whether that fear of the “other” lives in you; unless you have worked with it already, I have no doubt that you will find it deep inside, whether you have ever acted on it or not.
The inevitable karmic conclusion, the result of cause and effect, is simple: we will continue to have ethnic cleansing so long as those mental formations about the “other” play a dominant role in the collective consciousness. Once that settles in, you will begin to see what a big and powerful undertaking it is to work on changing the collective consciousness. The more of us who hold a different point of view, who see the fear of the “other” as an opportunity to work toward peace and understanding, the more likely those old mental formations are to give way.
We play out our collective karma on the stage of this planet and this universe. The karma each of us embodies is both a piece of our collective karma, the result of our collective consciousness, and our own individual karma, the result of our individual actions. If we have a common consciousness of scarcity, of rich and poor, then for each person playing out the manifestation of surfeit there is someone playing out the manifestation of lack. And it just may be that the person playing out the manifestation of lack is doing so, not because she did something awful in this lifetime or a former one which would mean she “deserved” to be poor, but because she is a great being who has taken on this manifestation out of her compassion and love so we can see how degrading and destructive poverty is. When we delve deeply into our collective consciousness, we can see how many beings have sacrificed themselves, lifetime after lifetime, in their effort to change our collective consciousness by showing us the consequences of our collective karma and trying to awaken our compassion. We can listen to them. The Cambodian Buddhist monk Maha Ghosandanda wrote a prayer for world peace which begins, “The suffering of Cambodia has been deep. From this suffering arises Great Compassion.” We have the opportunity to harness this great compassion and change that deep suffering by changing our consciousness.
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