Letting go of ideology

An ideology is a collection of beliefs about the world and how it works. Our ideologies often go unexamined because they were picked up when we were young, and now run like programs in the background of a computer, subconsciously guiding our decisions. When deconstructed the beliefs that make up out ideologies are often false.

For example I have the belief that it's 'bad' to put toxic chemicals on the earth or ourselves. But when I look closely at this belief I find that it’s actually not true. Sure, from the perspective of our human life it matters whether the soil and water is polluted, and it matters if we harm ourselves and the other creatures on our planet. But with a wider perspective on time and space we see that it doesn't matter at all. The universe is a kaleidoscope of different atoms connecting and then separating, creating all the various forms of matter around us. That shampoo running down into the soil will eventually split into its component parts at the molecular level, one joining a tree, the next becoming part of a complex soil colloid. It does not matter what I do in my short life, the process continues unimpeded.

Yet, although I know this, I’m still attached to the ideology of sustainability and its doctrines, so my thoughts and behaviour are inconsistent. To prove my loyalty to the ideology I still find myself participating in critical discussions about 'the things that are wrong with the world', even though I don't think there is anything ‘wrong’ with the world at all! On the other hand, I increasingly rebel against the constraints I've created for myself and act in ways that are out of alignment with the ideology. Then I feel like a hypocrite and am filled with guilt and self-recrimination.

And from here flows a positive torrent of judgemental thinking! Because I judge myself I project this out onto others and feel judged by them too! Seeing through the ideology I find myself judging others who adhere to it, yet also judge those who live free of the ideology because my mind is so thoroughly programmed by it. My judgement is also motivated by jealousy at the freedom others have chosen... I want this freedom for myself!

All this unnecessary anguish! Time to let it go...

This doesn’t mean I'll now fill my cupboards with toxic chemicals and start spraying the weeds in my garden. I'm a sensible human being. I can see this is not intelligent. But neither is spending valuable time worrying about it, or feeling guilty every time we eat meat or processed food, drive a car or buy a new kettle. So much energy wasted! Easier to let go and allow things to be as they are. Allow others to believe and live as they like. And most importantly, allow myself to live as I like. So that if I want to became an old lady with rainbow streaks in her hair I can :)

Letting go of 'rights'

Many people believe that human 'rights' are something we are born with. But have you ever stopped to think that maybe 'rights' is just another concept someone made up?

Years ago at university I took a course in Chinese history and philosophy. One of the things that stuck with me was an article that compared eastern and western views of rights and responsibility. In the west, the idea of individual rights is sacred; we believe that everyone is equal and we should all have access to certain things that are considered necessary to our well-being.

However in the east they look at things differently. Instead of seeing things in terms of rights they instead focus on responsibility. From this perspective, when each person fulfills their responsibility to others everyone's needs are met. The Chinese philosopher Confucius established the basis for this worldview. Even today if you ask a modern Asian young person about their ambitions many will talk about getting a job that will allow them to support their family, while in the west many young people are more interested in their own individual success.

Now I'm not saying that one or the other of these views is the right one. But I am suggesting that just like so many of the things we hold onto, the concept of rights is just that: a concept. More than this I'd like to suggest that this concept of individual rights may actually hold us back from being free and prevent us from evolving as a culture.

Take for example a woman who deeply desires to have a child but because she does not have a partner, or is not in a stable financial situation, this option is not available to her. In this instance her belief in her 'right' to have a child might cause her to see herself as a victim, to feel that in some way she has been cheated by life. This view of herself can only lead to unhappiness.

And while we all go around demanding our 'rights' we forget that as a human species we are actually denying these rights to the majority of people. In fact, your 'right' to own an iPhone or to have four children may be denying others access to more basic necessities such as clean water or food. Not to mention the needs of other species on our planet.

Human rights and social justice are often considered to be synonymous, but perhaps it is this very idea of 'rights' that gets in the way of developing a truly socially just society. Perhaps this separation of ourselves into individual units is promoting a competitive, grasping culture that divides the world into winners and losers.

Instead, we could see through this illusion of separation and understand the world and ourselves as they really are: a interdependent whole in which every element is indivisible from the rest. From this perspective it might be possible to create a culture where the needs of all beings are met, for as Joanna Macy points out in her beautiful book World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal, ‘to truly perceive all life as interconnected challenges many of our most automatic assumptions about what we are and what we need’ (Macy 2007).

What are your thoughts on this?

Letting go of our ideal world

One of the things I find most difficult to let go of is my vision of an ideal world.

For many years now I have worked as a social and environmental activist trying to bring about change through education and community development. At first this work came from a sense of outrage: how could people be so greedy and selfish, so blind to the suffering of others and so ignorant of the beauty around them? After a while I began to realise that people do not mean to cause harm. Mostly people act out of fear, or out of a desire to build a secure, happy and safe little world for themselves and their families. So my work began to be about developing awareness, building connections and demonstrating a better way of living.

But of course no matter how noble our desire for change may be the world does not conform to our ideals. If we are too attached to this ideal then inevitably we will begin to feel as though our work means nothing, that nothing is changing. And we think that we cannot be happy while the world is the way that it is. At this point a feeling of hopelessness sets in. Even though we realise that we cannot change the whole world we still cling to our precious vision, we still refuse to accept the way things are even though we can see that we are struggling against the current.

Image: Copyright AD-Passion.

Letting go of how we want things to be is easier if we are able to acknowledge that we cannot always see the full picture, that reality is a much more complicated place than we can comprehend. It's useful to use the metaphor of a camera lens to see this more clearly. We can zoom in close and then our little world and our concerns about it are very real, or we can zoom out and see, perhaps for the first time, that our planet is a tiny speck of dust in the immensity of a vast universe, and that our human species has existed only for a second in the larger timescale of universal ages. We see more clearly that these things are not our responsibility to fix and we can let go of our struggle to change them, our need for things to be a certain way.

In reality the polarities of hot and cold, dark and light, good and evil are necessary to sustain the dynamic equilibrium that makes our world the wondrous, diverse and magical place that it is. The universal laws that govern life are constantly working to keep these polarities in balance but this is not a static process; there is a continuous movement from balance to imbalance and back again. From our limited perspective we cannot see this very long-term, very large-scale process. We see only that things look out of whack to us and so we panic.

Ironically by letting go we are freed to act in ways that we may not have seen from our narrow perspective. When we are tethered to an ideal we quite often also tie ourselves to all sorts of dogmas that prevent us from making a wise and loving choice in the present moment. We are too busy scheming, too caught up in our strategies and plans to see the potential for change right here and right now. Usually this change is what we social engineers might see as insignificant: perhaps it involves correcting a prejudice we've been carrying unconsciously in our minds, or maybe it's a simple connection between two people. Yet if we use our telephoto lens again we see that small acts such as these can change the world too: because the microcosm is just as significant as the macrocosm. It just depends on how you look at things.