The first instinct, upon finding oneself in an unpleasant or difficult circumstance, is to search out someone to blame.  Some blame takes a short time to find, such as who dented the car.

Other blame can take a lifetime to find, such as who is at fault for failure. For your individual failures, your group failures, for every disappointment, anxiety and fear you have ever entertained, you want to make someone responsible.  Is this how you want to spend your time?  Do you want to spend a lifetime in this pursuit? Why waste so much time?

 

First stop blaming

 

 

When it comes to the situation where you are now, described in the previous post, you have not been slow in finding blame. You have argued over who is most to blame for the wars, the changes in your circumstances, the dysfunction, the rise of frightening new illnesses, everything challenging and upsetting. You have spent the last twenty years at least in an orgy of finger-pointing over which ideology, or party, or leader is most to blame for where you are now.

What has this accomplished?

You have almost no national dialog that does not generate into name-calling. Compromise is seen as weakness; collaboration is an anomaly.  Every problem prompts partisan bickering. You have a dysfunctional national family. Nothing gets solved. Is this what the founders intended?

 

Assigning blame solves nothing

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First of all, stop blaming. To start where you are now means to stop searching the past for a way to blame someone. Should you blame this decline in prosperity on trade deals? Or on lack of regulations that freed corporations to act like the impersonal entities they are? It doesn’t matter. Assigning blame has never solved anything. Better is it to start where you are now. That means to stop living in the past, where you are searching out faults to bring into your present.

 

 

Stop spending any time in the past. Stop making it important to you.  The present is where you make decisions and where you are now. The present is the only place you have control over your own destiny. For this reason, whenever you catch yourself dwelling in the past, stop.

 

 

Cultivate instead the attitude of an outside observer. Act as if you just landed here from another planet. You are not making any assumptions, but watching and learning.  The present situation is all you meet and all you know.  You are like a newborn child. All that presents is something to be dealt with, and nothing causes anger or fear.  These are both learned responses.

When you commit to stop living in the past, the next step is accomplished easily for you. You begin to observe anger and fear as being outside of yourself. You see how they derail every discussion. It is natural for you to give up anger and fear when you see how useless and counterproductive they always are. As you yourself see the futility of anger and fear, so do you teach others around you the same thing, and thus does it grow.

 

Deciding to stop blaming and living in the past, practicing this consciously, watching anger and fear fall away from you uselessly, all these, as wonderful as they are, are but prelude to the next step. You are clearing the decks.  Free of anger and fear, released from the past, you now make the sovereign decision of deciding what you want. This can be done on an individual level, or a group level where the group can be any subset of the entire planet.  The more of you who can consciously and solemnly decide what you want, the more this positive energy is increased, gathers a life of its own, and returns its care a thousandfold.

 

Time to become sovereign