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“Solve one problem, and you keep 100 others away.” --Chinese Proverb
It's important to look at how ‘fight or flight’ can start branching out into the world and at this point you really don’t need me for this. These are just more of my thoughts. I'm sure many of you can start to connect the dots and see how different things are going to start affecting different things as ‘it’ will poison every one of our relationships, our careers, our businesses, governments and the world at large.
Until we overcome it, we risk the chance of losing the opportunity to. Where things could get so negative that we lose all possible hope.
“Overcome fight or flight mode, save the world.”
One of the most interesting TV series I’ve ever seen is a show called ‘Star-crossed.’ In this show an alien species crash lands on earth and are assumed to be evil and are ruthlessly gunned down and hunted. Over time they managed to survive and the program is initiated to try and help them co-mingle with humans in an attempt to create peace. The human race is on edge and afraid of what they might do while understanding that they have relatively no technology or ability to defend themselves. Still, a group of humans are so certain of their “diabolical nature” that they incessantly work to destroy them in every way possible until there is none of them left. At the same time a small group of these aliens are so certain that all humans want to see them eradicated and begin to plot ways to overcome the humans, possibly even enslave them.
It appears that these two sides may never find peace. It appears each side but the other has no interest in working with them towards a common objective. But it turns out that the battle between these two sides is actually the battle between the few individuals who have let their fear get to them, who let their stress and worry of the potential evils of the other side that they became engaged in a war against them, pointing to the actions of the extremists on the other side is evidence to justify their own actions.
In that story, the extremists were not bad people they were just so afraid of possible harm of the other side that, to them, their evil became justified. If that makes sense. In their stress they became highly aggressive, violent and laser focused only on the things that they held to be true whether real or imagined. Anyone who thought otherwise was a fool, naysayer or spy that did not deserve the same rights and power as they did.
We so often, and to easily fear the potential dangers of the other side, mixed in with a few of their crimes in present time that we allow our anger to grow, we allow our focus to laser in and we completely neglect our own responsibility for our own actions that could be fueling them.
And the more that stress and its resulting fear, anger and paranoia dictate our logic, thought processes and actions, the more we guarantee our own demise.
Across the world we can see how the more stuck different groups get into their own beliefs of who's more wrong or who's more right when all that matters is, “How can we fix things now?”
In a relationship we may vehemently hold onto something that we think is the truth or our own revisionist/half-truth history, enraged that the other can't see it. They believed their singular relationship was unrepairable and it will be, as long as both are in ‘fight or flight’ mode, where listening is impossible and conflict resolutions are a joke.
I find that fascinating because then if you step back and look at long complex issues on a political scale, actual peace, understanding and resolution can seem beyond impossible when we can have trouble with just two individuals agreeing on what the truth was from five seconds ago. But that’s how fight or flight works.
I shudder to think of how, in today's modern hectic world, where suicide hotlines are exploding, where wages are stagnant, and cost of living continues to rise towards a distant but not too far away society akin to 1984 levels of poverty or similar to the ‘In Time’ movie with Justin Timberlake.
As a society, modern living is simply becoming too stressful to be able to operate efficiently were even children have to understand these concepts just as much as we do. I wonder how much value we could be losing as a society and as a world from all of the inventors, dreamers and artists who would be inventing but are in so much pain and stress that their inventions die the worst death of ‘never existing.’ Or what would happen if Einstein was born in today's society. I believe he would be stuck in his mother's basement depressed and not believing in himself. Beyond the truly staggering direct and indirect costs of stress in the fight or flight system I believe we are losing far more value from loss inventions, voices and dreams.
Whatever one is doing in life, it is going to be poisoned with stress dictating its anger and venom. And that if we want to get better in any area of our life we have to first learn to overcome stress itself.
This world could relatively easily become such a blissful heaven on earth, where transparency, truth, honesty, justice and prosperity were the rules of the day like. The entire reason I believe corruption and greed exists is ‘stress induced cultish beliefs,’ that we’ll cover in a later chapter, that they and only they know the truth thus they and only they deserve to have power and thus they and only they have should have rights.
The whole point of a democracy is that our minds are united for the common good, not against each other. Like it currently is as ‘fight or flight’ would demand for “The greater good.”
There's nothing to fear but fear itself for it will paralyze you in the face of your opponent or of the various things that you wish you could achieve. There's nothing to hate but hatred itself for its advice and actions will only lead to more situations that are then worth more hatred, for hatred only begets more hatred, war will only beget more war, negativity will only lead to more negativity, even in disrelated fields.
Mechanically the same thing happens. For pain begets more pain. It's just called the pain-spasm-pain cycle. We get pain in an area of our body and our brain can't tell if it's from a muscular trigger point or if it's from a puncture. Then the brain will send a signal to slightly tense up that area to restrict potential blood loss but because the area is now more tense it becomes more likely to create future trigger points and pain. When that cycle goes out of control till ‘the whole body is in pain’ that can then become known as fibromyalgia, especially when the nerves become over-facilitated or oversensitive, similar to when you get a sunburn, when light pressure is registered as high pressure or painful. It's interesting to watch it in action mechanically and not just energetically.
‘Fight or flight’, or we can call it ‘stress mode’ or ‘Eeyore mode’ if you will, is forcing us to become more and more enraged over our own triggers and less and less able to have a conversation and turn ourselves only to those who will shout the loudest to then lead us into the chasm.
We can't blame our government or our leaders for the way things are going if we can't ourselves bring peace to our own minds and relationships. Yes, protest. Yes, be active. But at the same time, we can't be so preoccupied pointing the finger at everyone else. We don't need to point the finger at anyone, including ourselves. For some reason, in order to improve, we think we first have to say that we're wrong or bad or something. When self-improvement is simply the beautiful path to becoming more attractive, more able and more successful.
We will generally repeat the mistakes from our history not because we don't know it or ignorance to it but because we will often learn incorrect lessons. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but I say that’s ONLY if you learn the right lessons.
Imagine there's two dancers in a dance class wearing boots and they step on each other’s toes and it becomes this endless argument of who stepped on whose toes worse:
“Yeah?! But you twisted!”
“Yeah but you're heavier!”
It becomes this apparent unsolvable argument. Yet when in rest and digest they may say, “Why are we the only ones wearing boots in a dance class?” Yet in ‘fight or flight’, walking away from that they would say, “What we need are bigger boots!”
It's just comical, almost, the lessons we take away from things when we're already in pain or stressed or angry. For those lessons will always just lead to more of the same. For energy begets energy of the same kind, even in disrelated fields.
So, I hope from this chapter that you can see where this is going. I'm sure you can come up with countless ideas yourself in how much “Eeyore mode” or stress mode is affecting us. It’s incredible.
Till we learn to truly each prioritize our own self-improvement, we don't have a chance of solving the riddles of world peace, corruption, greed, and so on. And greed, I would say is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who's greedy wants more for themselves no matter the cost to others so they can remain strong. True greed leads to just holding onto larger and larger amounts of money which then will devalue their assets overtime and lead to stagnation like in the show ‘Heroes’ where they say, “If you're not going to do something for the right reasons at least do them for the selfish ones!”
For example, oil companies don't need to believe in climate change but they do need to transition anyway due to a finite amount of resources. And we as a society should honor and help them with that transition.
Fight or flight mode is about retaliation, punishment, anger, violence, overcoming one’s assumed opposition etc etc. The division in our world is growing steadily despite the efforts of great souls out there trying to do their best to fight for peace. If we continue down the path that we have been, if we continue to let our fears, hatred and emotions take our courses of action and who we support in politics – then is easy to see how much more negative things could become.
But despite how afraid we are of a negative future, despite how angry we are over the actions of the other side, we must fight to keep our own kindness and willingness to listen to the other side and check. I know from experience that no matter how extreme a cult may appear there will always be true and valuable things that they worry about and that by dealing and improving those issues then can de- radicalize even the most extreme cults. You can’t reason with them. You can’t attack them. You can’t even easily defend against them. But you can absolve them by simply fighting to remain an unbiased person.
I truly believe the “world peace begins with self-improvement” and if we can each refrain from so quickly pointing the finger and take more responsibility for the energy within our own minds that we truly can have a chance to prevent our world from continuing to operate in fight or flight mode, where our very survival of the species is in question.
(Excerpt Form our book)
Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels
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