The title of this article is a play on our pill popping culture where we habitually look for quick, superficial fixes to infinitely complex problems. We like to treat symptoms rather than take the time to have deeper dialogues about the way we’ve been living as a society and the consequences of seemingly unrelated patterns of behavior.
These dialogues will require a certain level of humility, and must be absent of our egos trying to project and impose our individual preferences and opinions onto the collective. Instead we must begin by being brutally honest about our actions as individuals, rather than immediately jump to pointing fingers at the world around us. This is based on the notion that we are inherently no separate from everything that exists in this life.
Call it oneness, systems thinking, the divine.. whatever works for you. This is what I truly believe is the closer approximation to reality, rather than the more dualistic version that presents itself to our intellectual perceptions of the world. It’s a concept that can be studied and understood the more you delve into mystical, spiritual and even religious teachings that have existed throughout human history.
However the only way to truly embrace this version of reality is to discover it for yourself, experientially. There are ways to do this of course, but it necessarily requires a kind of death to everything you previously thought was real.. and that can be quite scary. But my premise is that this individual process of transformation is necessary if we are to actually go beyond our differences and collaborate in a way that brings about profound global change.
It’s worth noting that the title also plays on the word indoctrination, which I believe is a real force to be acknowledged and reckoned with. We are all born into a deliberately controlled society that aims to mold and shape individuals to best serve the vision of an ideology possessed by the ruling class. This force has always existed throughout our human history, and its aim is to strip us from our more tribal, community and family oriented nature so that we are more easily manipulated to serve authority.
There is a whole history here to be understood, and just because we live in the 21st century doesn’t mean we haven’t been subjected to this force just as much as generations that came before us. In fact, the deeper you look at the mechanics of this control structure, the more you realize that it has actually reached a level of efficiency that previous rulers never could have dreamed possible. It’s the analogy of the boiling frog as opposed to the explicit brainwashing we studied about the World War I and II era’s. We don’t realize our state of captivity until it’s too late.
So we will for sure get into this idea of indoctrination, because until we face these difficult truths, we’ll continue to approach our problems from an old framework of blind ignorance to the complexities of what we’re truly up against. These indoctrinations not only surround us, they have fully infected our entire intellect to the point we cannot tell our own thoughts, beliefs and emotions from ones that has been programmed into us over decades of controlled (an uncontrolled) data inputs.
The Problems of the World
It should not be some devastating mystery why we live with school shootings, terrorism, end-less wars, wide-spread hate, shitty politicians, epidemic failures in our physical/mental health and a natural environment that is now reflecting back to us the imbalanced ways of living we’ve been blind to. Because none of this is a mystery. It actually all makes perfect sense, which is not to say that the solutions are easy, or even obvious.. but the causes are in fact identifiable, and we must start here before attempting to fix things without understanding.
I want just as much as the next guy to solve all the problems of the world. The difference is I see everything happening today as perfectly divine in its unfolding. There is nothing that actually needs to be “saved”, because life itself is inherently a sort of impermanent, illusory dream that we’re constantly trying to leave our mark upon. We take it all too seriously, while simultaneously dishonoring the sacredness of it all. But that all comes from a profound forgetting of who we truly are, where we came from and what actually is the purpose of being here.
That is why I urge to approach the problems of the world from a more holistic, spiritual perspective as opposed to trying to force our intellect upon a problem we don’t fully understand. I will say upfront that I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does, at least not in the way one would expect. Universal basic income isn’t going to save us, renewable energy isn’t the only solution and taking away guns and legalizing pot is not going to make our problems go away.
These are all examples of what I would consider treating the symptoms rather than the root causes (as Western doctors often do). They are mere band-aids, and we’ve already been patched up and superficially medicated more times than our collective souls can handle. This is a call to a deeper, more profound change that starts with taking radical responsibility for ourselves before we set out to debate and assume we can fix the world around us.
About the Author
Firoze Mehta is a Nutrition Therapist Master and Certified Hippocrates Health Educator® specializing in helping people with cancer. Whatever the health condition, Firoze helps others to learn the truth about health and disease, while providing the guidance and support of a personal coach. If you're interested in learning more, click here.