Beyond Obamacare

The surface debate over the economic and social feasibility of Obamacare resembles a conversation of two people stumbling towards the same hole while arguing about what clothes to wear for the journey: it does not matter whether they are going to wear red or blue or whether it is going to be sunny or rainy. Both are simply walking into the same hole. Yes, both sides have valid concerns. Yet, both are arguing about “health”care while being blinded by their own disease. In a society exclusively governed by reason, it is possible to endlessly argue without questioning the premise that is creating the hole in the first place. In this mindset, wider and new holes are created each day.

Disease is at the core of the socioeconomic exchange of society and “health” has been long relegated to a small compartment of disease management. Our mind-ruled society fosters a wide range of addictive behaviors that are feeding the disease machine. We live with and feed these addictive behaviors on a daily basis. We each respond in different ways: some of us are numb to the fact we are addicted in the first place, some of us survive with a hopeless smile on our face thinking there are really no other viable choices, some of us make healthy choices while complaining about the global disease thus ultimately feeding malaise. The numbing strategies to hide or cope with the disease are endless. As these strategies become more sophisticated, our individual and collective bodies are steadily deteriorating. The stress of living in a mind-ruled society is far reaching and “health”care costs are exploding everywhere – including and increasingly in areas of the world that are considered “wealthy”.

The disease-feeding machine reaches deep, right into the halls of hospitals where ailing patients are literally fed sugar filled and junk food meals. Allopathic doctors who fill our “health”care system have been taught and encouraged to look at the human body in disconnected compartments at war with each other. Remedies to restore balance are sought from this narrow, cropped perspective. When a medical condition is capable of being decoded from within the linear mind, a remedy is found. When a condition is unclear and uncontrollable from the standpoint to the mind, doctors scramble to make sense of the natural complexity of life. In the despair of their own impotence, they offer quick-fix remedies that – even when well meant – are often harmful to the individual body and to the public body because they disregard the impact on the whole web of life.

Our hospitals are filled with people looking for a quick fix without taking responsibility for their own unhealthy choices and with doctors offering a quick fix for their ignorance to recognize the human body as an interconnected web. This is a natural and heart-logical consequence of a diseased public body. There will be little change as long as our “health”care system – an organ of our public body – is anchored exclusively in the mind and is refusing to breathe through its heart and body. At its core, a mind-ruled society is a mentally ill society. It creates insane solutions in the name of reason such as “health”care system that feeds the very disease. A mentally diseased public body cannot realize its own insanity and will continue to find eloquent reasons to justify the premise of its operation.

Thus, moving beyond Obamacare, let’s start to question how we are feeding the mentally ill public machine through our own daily choices. We have the capacity to turn the machine into a living body that breathes through its heart. This requires that we start to disentangle and feel our repressed feelings to end the numbness of our bodies. It requires that we take honest inventory of our life style choices and addictive behaviors. If we are light-heartedly serious enough, we can continue in that we disengage from our numbing strategies and look at the impact our daily choices are having on our “health”care system. We can go a step further and stop making excuses for our choices. When we need support we can reach out for genuinely qualified help capable to feed the interconnected web of life rather than an outdated disease machine.

When we become adults and learn to take radical responsibility for our individual and collective choices and celebrate our ailing individual and collective bodies, we have opened the gate to the heart. When we start to cultivate the heart intelligence of our individual body, we are bringing to life a heart-intelligent, healthy collective body where Obamacare will be just a faint cosmic joke.

A fun practice: What is the main feeling that is creating stress or disease in your body? Anger, sadness or fear? Take inventory of one addictive behavior and determine its impact on the public body. Discover the fun of being awake.

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From COR PUBLICUM:

“A society that is immersed in its fear of the uncontrollable spreads with each pulsation a disease. A society that lives in heart wisdom and embraces the unknown factor is one that creates balance and health.”

“A mind-ruled society is continuously at war with disease.”

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Different ceiling – same debt

We all know that our economic machine is founded on the premise of debt. This is what we have chosen in our long sleep over the centuries. Debt and scarcity are the revered Gods of an enslaved society. Economics within a mind-boxed society is the caged version of free choice, the enslaved version of freedom and the inconsistent version of wealth. It is poverty disguised as abundance and control disguised as freedom and opportunity. The battle over the debt-ceiling is an empty battle over nothingness, a battle between two illusionary opposites trapped in the same illusionary premise of scarcity. In a mind-based society disconnected from its roots all creative efforts are drained and tunneled into making sure that the box survives.

The debate about the debt-ceiling is hitting brick walls. One side is trying to raise the ceiling, the other to lower it. No matter where the ceiling ends and how solid the walls will turn out to be, both and all sides are still and only dealing with a box. We can look at the box from many angles and battle over where the ceiling should stop and whether the walls should be thick or thin. We can engage in an ideological battle about fiscal discipline and entitlement and decide which side is right or wrong. Is black or white better? From within the box this seems a reasonable question but no matter what color prevails all precarious efforts are going towards finding a little more comfort in the same tight box. No matter how high the ceiling and who puts up the walls, what all sides have in common is a rotten foundation: a consciousness of scarcity which can only re-create itself.

In our daily lives how much longer are we going to invest our creative juice into a box that thrives on suffering? How much longer are we going to follow the political drama over the debt-ceiling debate or the next box-induced theater?  How much longer are we looking up at the ceiling and pretending we do not realize that the house is collapsing? We all know in our hearts that the foundation is rotten but we are afraid to listen to this voice because collectively, and even individually, it is new territory. We think that heart is just another buzz word or a political incorrect fuzzy-feeling.  Often it is pure ignorance: we were never taught how to access our heart, only to numb our feelings.

At the core, we are all terrified to lose our mind. Our good old addiction to prediction is at the very least familiar. There is comfort in familiar pain. We use different ways to numb this fear: by identifying with red or blue, Tea Parties or Move On, left or right, capitalist or socialist, by radicalizing our beliefs about good and bad, by blaming the poor or the rich, by projecting on the other side what we do not like about us, by distracting ourselves with other people’s dramas and the list goes on.

We are all masters in the senseless game of the mind and we are all participating in it to avoid taking full and radical responsibility for the debt in our personal lives and the scarcity tape the runs through our minds. A mind-ruled society does not realize its own insanity, it cannot. It always has brilliant and eloquent reasons to justify its premise.

The mind now asks: what is the solution? What is the recipe? What is the outcome? We each have different ways to access the heart and only our heart knows the way. This is a response that drives the mind “crazy” because it wants to know: in a “mind monarchy” the unknown is unacceptable.

The good news is that the box is already open and abundance lies in the dark field of the unknown, in the collective breath of this present moment, in the individual heart merging into the collective heart.

Do you find your mind racing, dismissing, judging? The mind cannot accept that life is a process, and it continually resists this most fundamental truth. If we keep labeling “process” as a political statement or religious/spiritual/pagan belief we will continue to lock the box.

A helpful start is to begin to feel the fear, anger and the sadness of scarcity in our bones. Then, find gratitude for what is happening in the world right now. Then, find courage – the first few layers before we get a glimpse of our individual and collective heart most likely hurt. Then, trust – our felt-feelings and opening to the unknown are both gateways into our heart. It is in our heart where the “fundamental economy” resides. It is the health of the “fundamental economy” that determines the wealth of the “surface economy”. With our light-hearted approach to the process of life we can begin or continue to feed a healthy “fundamental economy”.

A fun practice: As you are allowing abundance into your own box, just for fun call “your” representative and in your voicemail ask them to breathe with you for 1 minute into the “American society’s fear of scarcity” (the first step of the journey into the heart is to feel.)

What the reds and blues have in common: the need for violet.

The old and outdated “blame game” between the GOP and Democrats is a testament of powerlessness of both parties. Both are barking at each other and missing each other valid unconscious messages. At the head level both sides have reasons, arguments, data, constituencies and lobbies to please, rigid beliefs of what is right and wrong. At the heart level both are numb which allows them to be involved in the same ineffective game of pointing fingers (child level responsibility) and avoiding radical responsibility (adult responsibility). This dysfunctional game operates not only between but also within the parties. The GOP is re-directing responsibilities to the Tea Parties and Democrats will sooner or later point the fingers at their own leadership. This is the end result of any dysfunctional game: it self-sabotaging and self-destructive.

The red game is direct and blatantly obvious. The blue game is indirect and muddled. This is just a difference in styles but the game is the same. Underneath the anger both parties are simply terrified of the prospect of losing control in their quest for illusionary power. What we are seeing are scared lost teenagers fighting for the best spot at the top of the pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is equally scared and acting as cheering fans for the team that makes them feel safer and more adequate. We all know this game well and in our daily lives we all are engaged in our own version of it, no matter if we are red, blue or rainbow. This collective unconscious behavior played out at the top and bottom of the pyramid is not wrong. It is just a game. If we dig deeper in the red and blue compartment and among the many colors that have opted out of red and blue -the rainbows-, we will find that most feel that the current game is not really working. At the same time, we all have unlearned how to inquire how the other truly feels. Inquiring about feelings requires that we feel and own up to our own feelings. It is simple to do but ridiculed in the current game because it disables one of the strongholds of the current game: the old Roman strategy of “divide and conquer”. Our basic feelings – anger, sadness, fear and joy – are what we have in common, no matter the color. They are an effective tool to pierce through rigid beliefs and positioning that keep us separate from each other and split within ourselves. As long as we avoid radical responsibility for our own collective feelings, we will continue to play the blame game and be stuck at the level of beliefs and reasons while missing the wealth of information that comes through our feelings.

In the current game, the reds are convinced the “problem” is big government, and the blue are convinced it is because of the greedy corporate monsters. The many colors in between either have stop thinking and have gone completely numb, they have joined the red or blue fans, or have partly dis-engaged from the dysfunctional game pointing fingers at the old game. Red, blue and rainbow hold grains of truth of what is not working in the game. However, the fear of losing their identity, i.e. their fear of taking responsibility for their feelings, clouds their ability to weave together their common insights and realize that they are dealing with the same monsters: corporate government and worldwide organized crime embedded in crumbling patriarchal structures. These monsters are not the perpetrators but simply the heart-logical result of a societal body that is exclusively operating from the mind and has cut off the body and heart. And we all share responsibility.

The way into our body and heart is opened through the conscious use of our feelings. The way into LOVE is opened when we learn to individually and collectively use our anger, sadness, fear and joy. A society that promotes the numbing of feelings has cut its own roots from LOVE, which is life. A society that relegates LOVE to a subsection of questionable art or places LOVE into a tight box labeled “religion/spiritual/pagan” is basically on death row. A mind-ruled society is a machine that has lost its nature as a living collective body.

Both red and blue are kicking – each in their own way – a dead machine and getting frustrated that it is not working. Under the surface, both red and blue and the rainbow majority are calling for the same: the end of the machine and the birth of a living and sustainable collective body. The ingredient that opens the birth canal is violet: the archetypal feminine wisdom, the body and heart of the collective body, the womb that gives forms to sustainable life. When the feminine wisdom is freed from the “gender box” and from the matriarchal and patriarchal battle of belief it has the power to bring to life a new collective body that has integrated the many painful lessons of the ages. Violet has the power to finally allow us to have fun while playing the game of life.

The good news is that this is all already happening as we speak. Many have identified the need for a new game, some have even created alternative games that are in their embryonic, thus in “mind vulnerable” stages, but nonetheless full of life. Many however are simply waiting not realizing that there is nothing to wait for. Time is yet another illusion of the old game. The game of the heart is available each moment regardless of the dysfunctional games around us. We all get easily sucked into the red and blue mindset in the most subtle ways. However, the more we learn to consciously feel, the more we catch ourselves playing the red and blue game, the more we have the courage to let the violet stream into our bodies, the more life force we will give to the game of the heart, the more likely we will have found our way into cor publicum: a living collective body moved by heart intelligence.

Let’s consciously feel the red and blue in all of us, breathe in the violet and let the heart game begin and refresh itself in each moment.