12/23/19 – Weekly Post: I have been doing Podcasts for a while now on selected topics through “The Building Peace Initiative” and it has been a challenge. There are plenty of topics to address but how does once express their thoughts in a coherent and concise manner that is understandable? I am making the effort to do so and it had led me down some interesting avenues.
Over the last several months I have begun to consider greed as a form of mental illness with three dimensions: physical, mental/emotional, and spiritual. This greed has been normalized and even extolled in our cultures. But greed is also causing great harm on an individual, social, and environmental level. We are literally killing ourselves (see obesity and diabetes rates) and each other, through global warming and climate change, by our habits of overconsumption.
While working my way through the book: “Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World” by Matthieu Ricard I came across a chapter titled: “Institutionalized Selfishness”. It addresses a lot of what I have observed including the cultural component. So why is this important? Many of us are aware that something is dreadfully wrong but we cannot verbalize it. It is a feeling, a sense of something amiss. You are not alone. When a renowned expert validates your thinking it makes a difference. It is important to reach out to each other providing support and information.
I encourage you to seek out others who are also concerned about not only our future but our present and to provide spaces that can be a refuge where we can begin to talk and determine courses of action that will address our concerns. Here is a Holiday Thought to consider:
“Voluntary simplicity is at once joyous and altruistic. Joyous because it is not permanently plagued by the hunger for “more”; altruistic because it does not encourage the disproportionate concentration of resources in the hands of a few, resources which—were they to be spread evenly—would significantly improve the lives of those deprived of basic needs.”
-Matthieu Ricard (The Happiest Man in the World)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-happiest-man-in-the-world-433063.html