Why everyone wants a change, but nobody wants to change?
Just see how you feel with these questions…
Who wants change? Who wants to change?
Who wants to save animals? Who wants to go vegan?
Who wants to abolish black money? Who wants to pay the tax?
Who wants a clean ocean? Who wants to give up plastic?
If plastic pollution became so bad and “we have a 90% chance of having cancer in 2 years from consuming microplastic” became a reality, will you seriously consider getting rid of plastics? In this scenario, you will change even if using single-use plastics is still normal where you live. Because it is the only solution to avoid getting cancer, and you know what “having cancer” means.
But why did you wait until the problem became so big? Why didn’t you change while the problem was easier to manage?
Why Do You Accept Normal?
Do you feel like your days are filled with normal activities? But what is “normal”? Our idea of normal reflects what you are used to. For example, you see fizzy soft drinks everywhere and many people consume them every day. Some claim that they drink the Zero-Sugar version and there will be no problem.
When you see everyone around is doing the same thing, it makes you very comfortable to accept it as normal. But it is dangerous to make that assumption because it is not necessarily the best or healthy. In fact, Aspartame (an intense sweetener added to sugar-free foods) is again listed on JECFA Priority List of substances for evaluation. Ace-K is another sweetener that is approved by FDA and EU with limited data on the long-term health impact. Even though Zero-Sugar foods and drinks are sold as healthy snacks, an 8-year observational study found that people who consumed more than 3 beverages with artificial sweeteners per day doubled their risk of being overweight and obese. The same study noted that people increased in weight even though their total daily calorie intake was lower.
Question… Do you want a healthy body? Do you want to eat healthy food?
In this modern society, we think that we are free and can make all choices with no constraints. Maybe not. We just don’t realize that we’re conditioned by historical circumstances, social economic factors, the larger political picture, and our communities. If you don’t consciously choose, you don’t know what consequences you will get.
Inconvenient Truths
We make a lot of decisions every day from what to eat to what to buy. How many of those decisions do you make consciously? How many bad choices did you made anyway even though you knew? This automatic ignorance of inconvenient truths is the key to understanding how we can solve challenges and problems better. In other words, understanding our thought processes to deal with negative truths is the starting point to the solutions.
Confirmation bias, the tendency to look for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that supports what you want to believe, is a shortcut to approving our decision quickly. This of course comes with a big risk, ignoring negative information or inconvenient truths. No one says “no” to the positive truths, but when you see negative ones, what would you do?
When you feel resistance to the truth, it will be always a negative one. Note that “Negative” is subjective. Because another person could say that is positive. Why don’t you want negative truth? Because you believe it leads to something bad or unwanted. Usually, this is a negative consequence that you feel like you can’t deal with or can’t do anything to change. You could feel powerless while you don’t know whether the consequences actually exist or not. Therefore, we tend to experience truth as leading to only bad things, never solutions. We mostly associate truth with negative consequences. But we also don’t understand how any truth, even negative truths, could lead to something positive.
What is Truth?
Truth is the only opportunity that enables you to create what you want in real the world. To bring things into actual creation, you have to be in a space of truth, and you have to be in reality.
Truth is your only access to solutions. The only power you have outside of reality is to pretend. You may already know the power of believing “anything is possible”, but you need to understand the power of looking directly at the truth at the same time.
Truth creates growth. Lies, pretend, and illusion prevents expansion and growth.
Not seeing the truth and reality will leave you with a problem.
Truth is the only stable thing. Truth brings you closer to the solutions and it prevents problems from getting worse.
What is Not Truth?
You absolutely can build a narcissistic bubble reality for yourself, only for you. You feel good seeing only positive things in your world. Then, when something challenges your world, you can reframe it regardless of how much of an illusion that is. It makes you feel good again.
When you live in an illusion, your reality bubble, you will be able to escape the experience of any consequence. But you still live in a universe based on the law of cause and effect. You’re no longer receiving truthful feedback from others and the universe at large. You are uninfluenceable. You officially separated yourself from the outside real world.
Choosing this path for the sake of own stability, personal sense of peace and control will have big consequences on a way. If you make a decision based on anything but the truth, you are looking at short-term results, something that will crumble. The truth will always be revealed eventually.
What is Reality?
There is a concept that there is no such thing as reality and reality is in the eyes of the beholder. People who support this idea argue that until we can see reality, it exists as a wave of potential and probabilities. The funny thing is though, this non-reality concept itself proves the existence of reality. There are many potentially different ways of observation, but there is a reality that includes all individual perspectives (universal reality). For example, at one level of existence, there is no death. Energy doesn’t die or be created but is simply recycled. Obviously, it is not true in the physical world. Every life has its end. Both are a part of universal reality, which is death exists and doesn’t exist.
Both individual and universal realities are valid and important. In your daily life, you are interacting with your own sense and emotion to manage your life. That is your individual reality. But when you try to improve your life or find a solution to a problem, you need to step outside and look at other perspectives. This means you need to expand your individual reality closer to the universal reality. For example, your reality is that you don’t see or feel microplastics coming into your body through every breath you take. But science can prove that you have microplastics in your body and we need to do something about it.
Again, you can create your own reality (individual reality), but it is not true when it comes to universal reality. The non-reality concept should not be a way to escape from the reality, and we must accept that we don’t know what we don’t know. While you deal with your own reality, be aware that there are different perspectives out there and it is possible that universal reality can change. Because universal reality is a co-creation, and everyone including you is contributing to the creation of it.
Why Do We Resist Truths?
If you feel a conflict between accepting the truth and a little bit of resistance to it, you want to keep stability. We prefer simplicity over complexity. We prefer not to change. So, when you face negative truth that challenges and destabilizes your reality, you are very destructed. Most people don’t want it because it makes them feel they are in a trouble.
The reality is exactly the opposite. When new truth enters your world in any situation and that truth destabilizes or destroys something, whatever is being destabilized or destroyed was not actually real in the first place. It was an illusion. But the problem is that illusions often give a false sense of stability, which some people are willing to commit to. It is easier to hold onto the illusion.
We only ever accept the truth when it seems like the pain of not accepting the truth is higher. This is a recipe for absolute disaster. If we won’t accept a negative truth and so we do nothing about it, we will end up in a crisis. If we keep reframing the problem and illusion, we will one day realize the truth became far too big to avoid consequences. For example, let’s imagine that a negative truth is that human beings are on the way to making the surface of the earth uninhabitable for themselves and millions of other species. Do you know how bad the problem has to get for a person to swallow that truth and be able to see it? Can’t we take it seriously until we actually experience a crisis? Do the problems need to become unmanageable first so that we are forced to believe the truth is destructive? And that is why truth is mostly associated with negative things. It is a vicious cycle…
Law of Cause and Effect
We want to believe “there are no consequences for the truth.” That’s our very honest truth. Unfortunately, we are in a world with a law of cause and effect. Whatever you do or don’t do, you will have consequences. The consequences could be either good or bad though. This means you cannot avoid consequences and you have to expect to have one. Therefore, you should choose what consequences you want carefully and consciously. If you don’t choose them, whatever the consequence will simply happen to you. We cannot manifest a good future without seriously looking into the truth.
When you have difficulty choosing a consequence, take the time to deeply go into each scenario. That is to experience the possible consequences by seeing into, feeling into, listening to, and powerfully understanding what you will go through. If you could be clear about which path you want to take, that’s good. But if you have multiple options at odds, find an alignment based on the information you gained. Find whatever unifies them so that both can make a decision, but together.
Coping with Difficult Times
When you became aware of the negative truth and haven’t been able to find a solution, you will feel frustrated. You may even feel guilty about still being a part of the problem. For example, a contradiction of understanding the climate change issue while continue living in a modern lifestyle can breed guilt and shame. It is true that reducing individual consumption could contribute a little, but it is also true that climate action needs to beyond consumption to production. Because we can only buy what is produced.
Regardless of if we buy less or more, corporations already extracted resources and produced products. If we don’t buy, the products will be wasted anyway. So, we need to change from the very fuel, materials, and product designs to have little impact as possible so that everyone can live a sustainable life. Not just those who have the time, money, and energy to completely change their lifestyle. The truth is what individuals can do is limited and you can only do your best within your capacity.
To cope with the challenges and stresses, you can find many ways such as yoga, meditation, solitude, gratitude, etc. Just be aware that these are coping mechanisms, and you are not changing the negative truth by practicing it. You need to question if feeling good enough without being in reality and standing in the truth. It’s very important for you to know where you stand on that issue especially going into the future life, a path for humanity.
Source
History of water supply and sanitation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sanitation
Fueling the obesity epidemic? Artificially sweetened beverage use and long-term weight gain - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18535548/