May The Unseen Be Seen

Statue of Truth outside the Supreme Court of Canada in the capital City, Ottawa in the province, Ontario. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Tomkinsr at English Wikipedia

by Caitlin Johnstone

May what is unseen become seen.

May the hidden dynamics of oligarchy and empire be revealed to all of humanity.

May the depravity of the powerful be exposed before everyone.

May government secrecy end.

May the public become aware of the pervasiveness of mass media propaganda.

May people realize that they’ve been deceived about the world since childhood.

May there be a widespread recognition that things are not as they seem.

May obfuscation and distortion be replaced with truth and clarity.

May the public grow more conscious of the reality of class dynamics.

May the public see money for the made-up game that it is.

May people begin clearly perceiving the horrors of war and economic sanctions, and feel it all.

May awareness sink in of the need for urgent climate action.

May we clearly see the existential need to begin collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem before we destroy it all.

May we all become conscious of racial and sexual dynamics and inequalities.

May we all look squarely at the unacceptable cruelty of factory farming.

May manipulators and abusers everywhere be recognized for what they are.

May abusive dynamics everywhere be clearly seen: in nations, in communities, in families, in relationships.

May unwholesome interpersonal relationships move into clarity or meet a natural end.

May unjust restrictions on consciousness-expanding substances be ended.

May everyone everywhere become conscious of their inner workings.

May our psychological trauma move into the light where it can be healed.

May our unconscious mental and perceptual habits move into consciousness.

May we all become conscious of the illusory nature of self and separation.

May we all become conscious of how experience is really happening.

May we all become conscious of our own true nature.

May we all see clearly what is happening, both inwardly and outwardly.

May we use our clear perception to move efficaciously in this world, and collaborate as one toward health and harmony.

May we build a sane and healthy world together that is based on truth and clear seeing.

Amen.

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Ecological approach to studying peace and war

It is unlikely that the human capacity for inhumanity can ever be adequately explained by any one theory. We believe that all behavior is multi-determined—that is, many forces at a variety of levels contribute to any one type of behavior, including aggression.

We subscribe to what has been called an ecological approach to understanding complex behaviors. This approach involves constructs reflecting different contexts that influence individuals and are in turn influenced by those individuals. That set of constructs includes: the macrosystem, the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual.

For example, an individual’s concerns about “national security” are influenced by:

  • The values and mass media positions of the society at large (the macrosystem)
  • The views expressed in places of worship, neighborhood, and more local media (the exosystem)
  • Lessons promulgated within the home and family (the microsystem)

Moreover, individuals bring to all of their interactions their own genetic heritage and the results of their personal experiences, beginning in the womb. Sometimes that heritage and those experiences can lead individuals to behave in ways that change the microsystem, or the exosystem, or the macrosystem. Think of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.

Consider also your own views on national security, on torture, on terrorism. How many influences on those views, at what levels of experience, can you identify?

In our next post, we start considering psychological theories that focus on thoughts and emotions that individuals bring to their interactions, as well as the thoughts and emotions they carry away from those interactions.

Individuals’ tendencies to incorporate ideas from the different environments in which they grow and to which they adapt can lead to a great deal of ingroup and outgroup thinking that can provide a basis for enduring conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology