Why does humankind repeatedly return to the brink of disaster and so often get sucked into it?

Answer 1

At the world-wide scale, humanity has multiple ancient and deep-seated misconceptions that have yet to be correctly identified, and taken seriously, by a sufficiently broad section of the population.

The most influential and damaging of those ancient illusions is that God and humanity are, somehow, separate, and that each individual person and each nation is separate from the next. That is simply false. God/Life/the-Universe is one. Unity is the reality. Until we set ourselves free from our illusions, and especially from the primitive root belief that disunity exists, our present problems can only get worse.

The world's worst-ever disasters will be averted when we are truly ready to accept and experience that we are all one.

The vast majority of humankind still lacks insight into the true nature of this, its most telling issue.

This is an issue that has existed for several millennia, but which has become a far greater risk to our collective happiness and survival ever since humanity established itself as a single global community.

Our world has shrunk conceptually to the point where all of us, with our considerable mix of creeds and cultures, are very alertly and nervously sharing a single community.

One striking effect of this is that many, if not most, of us feel uncomfortable and insecure. For the last several decades this has been the elephant in our ever shrinking room.

It is common to wonder, "Has the world, and its experts and its leaders, stopped to carefully consider where the real problem (and its solution) exists?" Commonly proposed solutions include:

1. Zero tolerance policing and the irresistible force of modern military might.
2. Economic strategies and sanctions.
3. Political solutions.

Throughout history, solutions based on each of these three concepts have been tried over and over again. None has worked. They are still not working. They have failed to work simply because the problem (and, thus, the way to deal with it) exists at an entirely different level.

Our global problem exists at the spiritual level: at the level of our underlying beliefs about 'life, the universe and everything'. However, a working solution at this level could be like nothing we might imagine.

Our world has a long history of being spiritually arrogant, short-sighted and stubborn. We have unwittingly abetted our problems by holding fast to our old, limited, and vexed spirituality. Consequently, collective human spirituality -- which could have given us a working solution -- has instead prolonged and worsened the problem. This is neither accusation nor indictment; it is a plain observation of what is so.

While disagreement between different spiritualities (religious/cultural traditions) has often been experienced as a danger in itself, the root problem is a major conflict within the collective human spirituality as a whole. It issues from the inaccuracies that we all have in common in our deep-rooted and largely subconscious beliefs about life and about God. These inaccuracies originate in our earliest history, and they have tenaciously persisted, even to the present time, as the collective spiritual illusions of humankind.

To see this, consider the time when human beings first became self-aware. At the dawn of primitive human culture, our inner awareness had only begun to unfold. We focused on our experiences of hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain, and our daily action plan and way of life were designed to satisfy our basic requirements of physical comfort and wellbeing. Because our inner (spiritual) life was largely undeveloped and undiscriminating, we took to heart a belief that life was about survival, about meeting material/physical needs. The first illusion - "Need exists"- derives from our earliest experience.

This, and other illusions that stem directly from it, have been consistently passed on into each new generation to the present day. Our very serious global problem exists because, unwittingly and from the beginning, the whole of humanity has lived inside its own very long-standing illusions: about God, and about life.

The following spiritual information is evidenced across the world's wide variety of sacred writings -- including the Holy Bible (New International Version) which I use here as a reference.

For us, our Universe is all that is. It is both spiritual and material/physical. It is thus the whole of Life. And this Life is intelligent. The whole Universe, the material and the sentient, is subject to the same physical and spiritual laws. Everything in our Universe is connected/unified. The Universe is one; it is a unified whole.

It follows that are we are not merely the transitory offspring of the physical universe; we are the offspring of God (the Spiritual side of the Universe) -- Acts 17:28 and Galatians 3: 26. We are not part-material and part-spiritual; we are truly spiritual beings. Our physical bodies are finite and temporary, but you are not your body. A body is a temporary possession; it is just something you have. You are divine.

Our spirits are infinite -- Ecclesiastes 3:11. Our bodies are the vehicles through which we express and experience our divinity. As such, we have far more freedom and far more ability than we have so far noted -- Romans 8:18. In summary, we are divine beings that possess physical bodies.

Jesus Christ was directly from and of God, as are we all. The salient difference was that he knew it -- he had the confidence (faith) of it. When we accept that same confidence for ourselves, we then know that we are not merely born physically (simply born as flesh and blood), but conceived and born of God -- John 1:12. In truth, we always were spiritual beings. In the beginning, God, the Spirit of Life, breathes a human spirit into an inert human body that he has prepared from the elements of the earth. As he does so, the body comes to life -- Genesis 2:7.

Jesus thus came to reveal God to us, and to show us who we really are -- John 1: 9, 13, 18 and Colossians 1:26-27. This had long remained a mystery, not only to Israel but to the world as a whole.

Unfortunately, The Bible and other sacred writings from around the world have given what seems to be a mixed, self-conflicting message. Talk of God's "wrath", a real place termed "Hell", something lacking in the human makeup, and eternal death-destruction-condemnation, are inaccuracies that deny the truth of God's unconditional love for the creation, including us. Those inaccuracies reflect the fact that, at a very deep and primitive level, we believe that we are separate(d) from God due to some innate or inherited fault. This is a very powerful, destructive illusion: that disunity, or separation, characterizes Life and the-Universe.

When it comes to taking dictation from God and later reading back what he said, we are not always perfect secretaries. Those errors in, or false interpretations of, the world's various works of scripture almost certainly result from the tenacious spiritual illusions that have kept us blind from the onset of our history.

The most influential and damaging of those ancient illusions is that God and humanity are, somehow, separate, and that each individual person and each nation is separate from the next. That is simply false. God/Life/the-Universe is one. We are all one -- John 14:11, 20 and 17: 6-26.

Bodily, we all consist of one family of elementary particles intrinsic to the whole natural Universe, while our life and intelligent consciousness flow through us from the One Spirit of the Universe.

The problem is that we believe we are separate: from each other, and from God/Life/the-Universe. When we begin to believe and accept that we are one, we will begin to solve the largest problems of mankind.