The False Binary: Individualism vs. Collectivism
Hello Mythsfits!!!
(If you’re more of a video person than a reader, you might enjoy this.)
I have made a habit of sitting under the sky every morning, most often coaxed out by my rescued cat Paco. Being under the sky first thing in the day has shifted my reality completely. I now notice the single chubby bee that blesses the pink morning flowers of the purple heart plant, and the still-bloomed four o'clock mix flowers that bloom in the evenings and close forever in the day when the sun is full.
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This morning I was able to see clouds that felt like messages, in odd wispy shapes, in the early September “false fall” of New York, and when I asked my guides (because I do believe we all have spiritual guides) if they would show me a sign in a particular cloud, I saw a pink and green opalescent rainbow above me within that particular cloud. I literally gasped, because I had already forgotten I petitioned them to for some sort of sign, and I had never seen anything like that in the mid-morning sky. In that moment I though and truly understood how magical we all are.
Magic is pouring yourself wholeheartedly into something and then letting it go, as my friend kate reminded me recently. Both states, that of true committed devotion, and the state of letting something go require faith, faith in yourself and faith in this universe. I often wonder what good it is to faith have in one without the other.
All Evolution Begins in the Imagination
There is a lot of evolution happening right now. Perhaps this is connected to the pandemic forcing us to be alone with our thoughts. It is very interesting that the pandemic coincides with the United State's first Pluto Return; we are all witnessing what it looks like when a system has to rebirth itself and die off in the process while we are all still living within it. On top of all of this, the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, (the beginning of a 2,160 year long period when the earth's axis points at a new constellation that shifts the theme humanity is working through) or maybe it's because a shift in humanity's timelines has been prophesied for thousands of years in the Toltec tradition, as a transformative choice point in which many of us would reawaken to our spiritual selves.
Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt in my mind or the rest of me that we are witnessing a massive shift in culture and consciousness. If we are going to be part of a different world, (which we are), we need to begin to see reality in a new way.
One thing I believe is crumbling is linearity, and along with it, binary thinking.
Natalie Miles said this year was going to be all about polarity. I feel that since I was born in 1983, everything has become increasingly polarized. I don't actually think polarity is a bad thing in and of itself, it teaches us the edges of extremism and shows us when to swing back to center, but when we identify with a particular pole as who we are- I believe that identification creates unhelpful paradigms that drain our energy and prevent us from relating and innovating.
From Newsletter - Start Here
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From Newsletter - Start Here 〰️
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Difference is natural between people, and having strong opinions is also very natural. Where polarity become unnatural, to me, is when our political culture and media rewards people for digging their heels into one particular view, and labels people who change their minds as “flip floppers” not to be trusted. The people who benefit from the system we live in, which treats people like consumers and laborers, benefit from us identifying with one particular extreme or another. This creates an us vs. them mentality, which manipulates us into antagonizing one another rather than paying attention to what our elected officials (who we pay, by the way) are actually doing, or noticing how most people want the same things, and are fully capable of coming to an agreement with how work together if given the tools and opportunity to develop a relationship, but I digress.
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In our political culture, we are punished for changing our minds, but
learning is literally changing our minds.
Two concepts have been pitted against one another are individualism and community. Capitalism, and the foundations of the systems we live in, including White Supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and colonizer mentality have one assumption, which you can find in any conventional economics 101 book or video:
resources are limited.
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This assumption then creates the idea that we are all in competition for these limited resources. Darwin's concept of evolution and survival of the fittest also contributed to the concept that this is our natural state. (You may be surprised to know that there was a competing theory against darwin's that proposed the idea of cooperation among species as an evolutionary advantage, but the politics of the day ended up favoring Darwin's idea.) What people often forget is this: our concept of what is natural affects the systems we set up, and
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what we conceptualize as natural is:
a matter of opinion
a matter of philosophy
a matter of culture (aka highly subjective and unconscious)
How can you teach people to undo the grid of oppressive scarcity-focused systems we are in and not welcome a diversity of thought?
(*It is not lost on me that a lot of people who are agitating for “free thinking” in mainstream media stand for ultra-right homophobic opinions, and equate free thinking with having the right to spread disinformation and misinformation. Free thinking should not be bundled with the cultural ideas of Qanon and other mass weapons of distraction, they are distinctly different ideas.) The foundation of oppressive systems (to me) is an assumption that there is one right answer, and that one can presume they have access to this one right answer and
either for their own gain or because they feel it is for the good of the other,
they can take their view and impose it on others, erasing the others energetic sovereignty and assuming they have a better (or more objective) perspective on the experience of others.
This energetic is very much present in White Supremacy and heteropatriarchy, but it can also come in other forms. What I like to feel into within every community or relationship I am entering into is if there is a culture that permits questions and disagreement.
When we oversimplify the ideas of individualism versus community care, we ask people to choose between connection to others or connection to themselves rather than seeing our connections to self and other as interrelated, dynamic, and perhaps even, in cooperation.
