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September/October 2004 Editor's Viewpoint
From the Editor: Truth and Consequences

Miriam Knight

Reading Drunvalo’s article on the impact of global warming, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the consequences we could be facing sooner than anyone could have imagined. Funny things, consequences – they are those things that we never focus on in the course of daily life, but have a nasty way of coming back to bite us.

It is human nature to put pleasure and convenience first and to blame anyone but ourselves and any circumstance but our own actions for the consequences. What is so sobering about Drunvalo’s article is that our collective choices, even if made in all innocence and ignorance, are what have put us in danger of losing everything. It is useless and disempowering to throw up our hands and blame "Them." In Pogo’s immortal words, "We have seen the enemy and they are us."

An external threat of this magnitude rather puts things like politics and terrorism into perspective. The street theater being played out daily on the screens and pages of the mass media seems more and more an irrelevant distraction from the immediate business of putting our world and our societies to right. The choices we are faced with at the ballot box this November are not the real ones we need to be making. Those are merely the choice between blatant greed, exploitation and power mongering, and more subtle, camouflaged variations on the same themes.

The real election is in our individual choices of how we live, the values we live by, and to trust in ourselves, in our fellow man and in the goodness of the creator.

It is interesting to hear Londoners talk nostalgically about WWII and the Blitz. What many remember most is the feeling of togetherness and mutual support of everyone across every level of society. They got through those terrible times by putting selfishness aside and working together for the common good. The threats we are facing today – whether from homeland security, global environmental disaster or hunger and poverty – make the V-2 rockets seem like peashooters. Our daily choices of how we spend our money or whom we elect to represent us create our reality. Choosing personal gain or comfort at the expense of others cannot be an option any longer. The only way we are going to survive as a society, indeed as humanity, is by weighing our choices against the greater good.

Dr. David Hawkins is surprisingly (and encouragingly) optimistic about the level of spiritual advancement of the American people. He believes that a small fraction (about 7%) of the population operating from a place of integrity and truth can raise (and in fact has raised) the level of the whole. That means that each of us has both a great responsibility and great potential impact when we make choices of conscious integrity. That also means that an effort like the New Energy Movement, being launched in Portland on September 25-26, really can make a difference.

We are not sheep to be herded into pens to be fleeced and milked dry; we have power if we will only take it back. In David Hawkins’ definition, Power derives from actions motivated by truth, integrity and the greater good. Real power will always overcome Force in the long run, but it is up to us, individually and collectively, to move into that space.

The great spiritual healer, Bruno Gröning taught that for a person to be healed, the belief in goodness is as necessary a prerequisite as the will for health. If we really wish to bring our planet and our society to a sate of health and sustainability, we must put aside cynicism and despair and believe in goodness.

---Miriam Knight