Just like understanding the balance of triangles, we need to understand the cycles of circles. Our individual and personal circle of life can be easily affected by the larger circles around us.
We are a story within a story within a story. For instance, you have a personal story worth five bucks (read five bucks). You are the main character, or the CEO, of your life. You make decisions and choices to live successfully during your lifetime. This is where the triangle of health, happiness, and success comes into play, yet it is related to this personal circle.
Since I am talking about circles, let’s stay with the circles. After you have learned about your personal circle, or I should say your teacup, you need to learn about the neighboring circles. You learn to relate to the people around you, just like in your community. You can vote for the direction you want your community to go, but that is the only power you have. The outcome of your vote is not in your control, so you have to come to terms with your limits and understand you have no control over many different things in your life. This circle includes your race, gender, nation, and religion. They dictate and show their power to let you know that they are more powerful than you. They have the power to punish or shun you, put you in jail, or even kill you for disobedience in the name of control. You have to use your personal politics to live within the boundaries, rules, and laws of the land you belong to, regardless of the demands of your personal circle.
In the second circle, we do the same. Even as communities, we try to control things in the third circle. This can create the same frustration for the community as an individual feels when the community does something he or she does not want. We need to comply, even as communities, to create a balanced environment to evolve further. I see wildfires and the efforts made by communities, yet wind can lead to out-of-control fires.
By accepting mortality and health-related issues, we can set the rhythm to evolve without frustration. You don’t win a war against cancer by going to war; you continuously pursue evolution to get better and use more of your brainpower. This rhythmic pursuit can help to adopt evolution one level at a time.
The third circle I am talking about is where your all-powerful second circle is powerless. This is where nature and God reside. Amongst all these complexities, you have to really know your politics to spend a mortal life with happiness and contentment because you, as an individual, depend on the oxygen from this circle.
Our rights and wrongs change not only as individuals but also as evolving organisms, meaning we change in the second circle over time. The obvious changes and evolution of our societies are well documented, except for religious rules, but even religions these days try to shake off their extreme behaviors. The Pope has made statements about these changes, but we will have to see if they stick to them. Our world has been going back and forth with governmental changes. If we give power to religious people, they would like to take us back to the era of the prophets. I would like to see if other religious leaders come out and preach human rights over old rules dating back two thousand years.
As children, we learn something we don’t agree with. As teenagers, we think that was stupid, and when we become adults, our rights and wrongs change places.
In exactly the same way, our belonging groups can change with evolution. We condemn and believe that slavery and gay bashing are crimes nowadays. Canada becoming a sanctuary for Russian gays shows signs of these changes. Our sense of human rights is overpowering the politics of our sense of belonging to conservative groups. Acceptance of Syrian refugees, and the Omar Khadr case, regardless of social divide, are good examples of our evolution. In the past, it would not even have been a topic of discussion.
Evolution is at the core, foundation, or genes of human beings, with the wisdom to see or envision the future. The sooner we adapt to the coming changes, the better. It is important for the individual to know what is most important in personal mortal life, circle, or teacup. To me, personal happiness and contentment should top the agenda. Remember, regardless of the circle you are in, it will always come down to your personal happiness and contentment as an individual in your living years.
If changes happen in your next circle, where you don’t have control, you have to adjust accordingly to live your mortal life with the top goal of happiness and contentment.
If you are unhappy because the opposing political party won the election, or you are cleaning up after a natural disaster, it is you who has to adjust to keep going because you are the CEO of your life project. Events, situations, and circumstances are part of a big project; they should be just that. They should not have the power to bring your whole life to a screeching halt or break down your belief system. Losing hope because of an event or situation is looking at life with a narrow-minded and limited vision, as if it is a department instead of a project.
Knowing the wrong is easier if you put yourself in others’ shoes rather than demanding others to fit into yours. People change gradually, so the problem is not the change itself but rather the speed at which individuals adopt changes. Some don’t want to change at all, while others want to change everything instantly.
I prefer to look at the journey of humanity where the reality is that we have already come this far. We have a lot to show—just look at the people with cell phones in their hands. Our history shows constant changes, and resistance to change has always been constant and a part of our evolution. Yet it has never been able to stop progress. From no religion to religion, from one religion to another, from communism to socialism to democracy and back and forth, there is still progress to show. Just look around: the number of moderate believers is growing against the extremists.
At the base of all changes, you will always find an individual’s imagination, regardless of the size of the change. It always starts from the thoughts of one human individual. Every group is made of human individuals, yet it is there to nurture or destroy the individual’s imagination, which creates or destroys reality. If reality is not created, the group will lag behind because of the brain drain.
If there were a measuring device to measure the smarts, strength, and ability to live for oneself and help others, imagine you are standing on the bank of a river and need to get to the other side. Before jumping in and drowning, you have to think, plan, and then act on your plan. You can gather some branches, make a raft, and row yourself to the other side. It’s not simple, but in a nutshell, this is what it’s all about.
If this godly wisdom, power, energy, and ability to do everything is measured, metaphorically it is worth five bucks for each individual. If the whole community contributes their five bucks to build a bridge, everyone in the community can cross the river whenever they want. But here comes the problem: when the community gets involved, things have to run with rules, and the rules should be equally followed by all community members. But with the politics of control, everything changes, and the five bucks take a back seat because of the metaphoric big brother.
Logically, a single individual is weaker than the big family, community, nation, or religion, depending on whether they get along and work as a unit. One can be very smart and have a lot of resources to hire many helping hands to function at a higher level. Either way, that smarts still come from that five bucks.
Fighting infectious diseases like the Ebola outbreak, issues with global warming, the spread of the internet, or even building the space station is best done if humanity comes together with five bucks at a time. These days, times have changed. Infections and global warming don’t stay within our political boundaries.
An example: a human cell is meaningless on its own, but with the right circumstances, it has the power to create a whole and functioning human body with limitless potential. We each have trillions of cells in our bodies. Individually, a cell may be insignificant, but when they work together, the potential is limitless.
Internal space has its intricate functions of trillions of cells, which seems chaotic, but we have been learning to survive disease. We have been learning about external space as well, regardless of our control over it. This all points towards the bigger circle that holds our health and death. Trying to control without accepting it creates an even more chaotic situation. The stress of learning our responsibilities points to the need for a belief system. A belief system helps us be at peace with mortality. I still believe we need to do everything in our power to evolve further because we have not hit our potential. As human beings, if we pursue, we achieve. Modern technological advancements and medical and genetic breakthroughs don’t come with the attitude that “God will save me, so I should pray regardless of my lifestyle.” To me, prayers are and should be left until we have done our best. If you are on the other extreme and believe you are the one doing everything, you need to know that without oxygen, you are a dead duck, so don’t take all the credit. It is not God alone or you alone; everything is done by both of you together. Create balance to accept your responsibilities as a CEO and believe that you are being helped so you can create some inner peace for your mortal life.
Back to the circles: all my knowledge has never been, is not, and will never be about controlling to reach extremes. It is all about creating balance for the individual to live a mortal life with all its difficulties because it is the reality.
I believe most of our mental health and other happiness and contentment-robbing problems start when we want to fit the larger circles into our smaller one. If you want to control even godly events, sooner or later you will run into a situation where you lose control, and most of our problems start when we feel out of control.
A belief system teaches about these things by saying that God is doing everything and we as human beings have no control whatsoever, yet they have the strictest punishments for human disobedience. I have two problems with this philosophy. One, God’s work is done physically by human individuals, so they can’t be insignificant. Sure, we depend on oxygen to perform the physical work of God. Second, it is not that humans or God are doing everything separately; it is done with equal efforts, so it is not one or the other or who is doing more. It is the balance because of the individuals’ ability to reciprocate regardless of mortality. Just like our cells do their job to keep us alive, we do that for God.
If you believe God is doing everything, then you have to know how things are being done physically if God is only spiritual. Where and how do you fit the five bucks you got before birth? You have been told that it is not enough, so you have to put up with our political agendas. This not only robs the individual of self-esteem, but it also makes the individual limited, which God had never meant. We are not a drop in the ocean; we are the ocean in a drop. So any education that limits and holds back the human individual is against God’s will because otherwise, logically, we would not have the five bucks individually.
If you believe that you are limited, you have to look at your education or the data you have been instilled with critically. The potential you carry is related to God himself, not to your politics of a sense of belonging as a group. A group makes the individual weak so he or she can be controlled.
If you look at our governing systems, some go too far in the dog-eat-dog philosophy and some try to help the individual to the point that he or she stops seeking his or her potential. Help should be there because I believe if a community wants the individual to follow rules, the individual’s basic rights should be met. No one should go hungry. If a hungry individual breaks the rules, it is not the individual’s mistake; it is the community’s fault. Sure, we need rules to follow, but we should have rules for our groups as well so they don’t trample on individual human rights.
As healthy human beings, we have rights and responsibilities of reciprocation, not only to God but with our communities as well.
So playing your part is a must. Honest living creates inner peace. Using others or the system is like making yourself a limited being who does not want to reach his or her potential. Reaching and living to our potential is a responsibility we all have because not only as individuals, but as communities and as part of God, all our evolution depends on it. If the community is the right one, it will encourage it because it helps the community in the long run. If the community is hindering, the brain drain should happen to that community because regardless of religious beliefs, it is against God’s will to keep human individuals from reaching their potential.