The collective manifestations is of the insanity that lies in the hart of the human condition constitutes the greater part of history.
It is to a large extent a history of madness.
A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, Penguin, Australia, 2005 My writing began twenty years ago when I began investigating this madness.
I began this journey when I come to accept that my life was completely mad and that I needed to change that.
This is a very common beginning to the spiritual journey.
If your world was not insane why would we be looking for a better way? The new consciousness that is discussed so widely is not a new consciousness.
It is a consciousness that we all have within.
We can end the insanity, both our own particular brand of insanity, and the insanity of the human race by understanding how the insanity comes about.
It comes about through judgment, and that has been the underlying theme in this series of articles.
At the very beginning of our western religions we have the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Not strictly true because Adam was the predecessor of 'The Man' in the garden, and 'The Woman' did not become Eve until she was expelled from the Garden of Eden and was 'known in the flesh', and became the mother of all things.
There is the possibility that the switching of names in the text may be a way of differentiating between what is a physical history and what is symbolic.
This would certainly solve the contradiction in Genesis that 'Man' (Male and female he created them both) had existed and 'gone forth and multiplied' long before the Garden of Eden incident.
I do not want to get into the argument about whether or not the story events in the Garden of Eden where physically or they where symbolic.
It does not really matter, because the active ingredient in the storey is 'Do not eat the fruit from the true of the knowledge of good and evil.
' In that one line lays the cause of the insanity of the human race.
I think there is a strong possibility Genesis (or more likely the more coherent and earlier Book of Enoch) was written at a time when the consciousness of the human race was in free fall.
It tells us exactly why the degeneration of human consciousness was happening.
We had invented judgment.
Judgment is the knowledge of good and evil.
The human race has been on this planet for at least one hundred and forty thousand years according to archaeological remains.
But history only began at about four thousand five hundred years BC, around the area of Suma which is now Iraq.
The Book of Jubilees, which is an almanac supposedly chronicling the events since the Man and the Woman where expelled from the Garden of Eden places the events in the Garden at about four thousand five hundred BC.
This dating comes from aligning Noah's big flood in the Book of Jubilees with the big flood that is know to have occurred Suma at about three thousand two hundred BC.
How come the human race was around for at over one hundred and thirty thousand years with no history of any sort and then it suddenly exploded with what we call civilization? The generally accepted the human race was so primitive that it didn't have the means to write a history.
It sounds harsh to say that for all that time we where so dumb we didn't invent the technology to record history.
There is an alternative that there was no history of that time because there was no conflict.
Today we woke up and played with children for a while.
Then we spent the day looking after the planet (Adam's job according to the Bible).
When we home with the food we had gathered during the day, had a meal, played with the children again and went to sleep.
Where is the conflict needed to make history? But then events in the Garden of Eden take place.
'Do not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
' Do not judge.
Suddenly all the technologies needed to record history are there.
In particular there is conflict.
Judgment sends us insane because judgment is a wild guess about things we do not know.
We then claim what we do not know to be true.
Our judgments are completely divorced from reality.
So the present state of the human race is that we make wild guess about things we know nothing about claim them to be true.
Invariably this wild guess includes the judgment that something, or someone, is good or evil.
The next step is to act on our judgments.
If we look at the recent history of the human race you will see that it is one of total insanity based on 'truths' that where simply not true.
When judgment is the basis of our truth the whole world acts insanely.
The insanity of judgment may be localised to one person, or it can be used by a few to bring insanity to a whole nation.
Hitler used a time and tested method of judgment against anyone he saw as not fitting the Arian ideal of the master race.
That method works in three parts.
The first is to use judgment to create a campaign of lies and misinformation.
Today we would call it 'spin.
' In Hitler's case the target was Jews, Homosexuals and a host of other 'non-people.
' Then the lies and misinformation are elevated to fear.
When sufficient has been created fear that fear is used to destroy the target people.
This method has been used for six thousand five hundred years.
It is the history of our history that repeats over and over.
Our Western religions are not the only religions that contain the same warning about judgment.
The Taoist text contains 'The people lived happily together like the branches on a tree, then along came the Yellow Emperor who invented rules and regulations, and the world went straight to pieces.
' Stories exist all over the world having little in common with the Garden of Eden incident.
But if you look at the essence they are remarkably similar.
I don't believe that there is an inherent fault in the human brain that causes our insanity.
I believe that the problem is that our judgments are not real and so our judgment based decision have nothing to do with reality.
So the way forward would seem to do away with judgment.
'Nothing is good or bad save that it is thought to be so' (The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare).
Good and bad only exists in the head.
If there is no good and bad what is there? There is choice.
Take away the judgment from Iraq and what is left? People killing each other.
Take away the judgment from the Palestine and what is left? People killing each other.
If this is not good or bad what else is there? What is left is choice.
Is this what we want for the human race? The alternative to judgment is choice.
The alternative is to see things as they are and decide if we this is what we want.
With judgment we have no choice because our decisions are not based on reality.
Jesus put it nicely in the Sermon on the Mount.
'But let your communication be yea yea, or neigh neigh, for beyond this cometh of evil.
' You say yes to what you want, no to what you don't want.
If you go beyond this you are into judgment.
This is called choice.
Nobody can tell you that you choices are good or bad, it is simply what you want.
Choice is a minefield to navigate.
It relies on truth.
If you do not know the truth you have no choice.
Are Australia and America democracies? I don't think so.
A democracy can only exist if politicians tell the truth.
That has proved to be far from the true.
The spiritual path and the physical path to a new consciousness for this world go hand in hand.
The spiritual part is the awakening the falsity of judgment and how it destroys reality.
With this understanding comes the awareness of the illusion we live in.
Nothing is the way it is judged to be.
Also there is the awareness that we can choose something better if we want to, but to do that we need to be told the truth.
In the physical world we can bring about the new consciousness by demanding we are told the truth.
There is the judgment that something must be true because it cannot be proved false, and that something must be false because it cannot be proved true.
These two forms of judgment are used to tell us lies, even if the liars do not know they are lying.
My previous article Escape the Judgment Trap details these two basic forms of judgment so I won't repeat them here.
Imagine living in a world where politicians told the truth.
A world where advertising agents gave factual information about products instead of just images.
Imagine going to vote and knowing what the true policies of each candidate where.
I will leave you to add whatever you want to this list.
We can create that world if we choose to.
We are living an illusion.
It is an illusion because judgment distorts reality.
Nothing is as it seems, it is only what we judge it to be.
The way forward to a new personal and world consciousness is to tame judgment and see the world as it is.
Then there will be the choice of what we want it to be.
It is to a large extent a history of madness.
A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, Penguin, Australia, 2005 My writing began twenty years ago when I began investigating this madness.
I began this journey when I come to accept that my life was completely mad and that I needed to change that.
This is a very common beginning to the spiritual journey.
If your world was not insane why would we be looking for a better way? The new consciousness that is discussed so widely is not a new consciousness.
It is a consciousness that we all have within.
We can end the insanity, both our own particular brand of insanity, and the insanity of the human race by understanding how the insanity comes about.
It comes about through judgment, and that has been the underlying theme in this series of articles.
At the very beginning of our western religions we have the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Not strictly true because Adam was the predecessor of 'The Man' in the garden, and 'The Woman' did not become Eve until she was expelled from the Garden of Eden and was 'known in the flesh', and became the mother of all things.
There is the possibility that the switching of names in the text may be a way of differentiating between what is a physical history and what is symbolic.
This would certainly solve the contradiction in Genesis that 'Man' (Male and female he created them both) had existed and 'gone forth and multiplied' long before the Garden of Eden incident.
I do not want to get into the argument about whether or not the story events in the Garden of Eden where physically or they where symbolic.
It does not really matter, because the active ingredient in the storey is 'Do not eat the fruit from the true of the knowledge of good and evil.
' In that one line lays the cause of the insanity of the human race.
I think there is a strong possibility Genesis (or more likely the more coherent and earlier Book of Enoch) was written at a time when the consciousness of the human race was in free fall.
It tells us exactly why the degeneration of human consciousness was happening.
We had invented judgment.
Judgment is the knowledge of good and evil.
The human race has been on this planet for at least one hundred and forty thousand years according to archaeological remains.
But history only began at about four thousand five hundred years BC, around the area of Suma which is now Iraq.
The Book of Jubilees, which is an almanac supposedly chronicling the events since the Man and the Woman where expelled from the Garden of Eden places the events in the Garden at about four thousand five hundred BC.
This dating comes from aligning Noah's big flood in the Book of Jubilees with the big flood that is know to have occurred Suma at about three thousand two hundred BC.
How come the human race was around for at over one hundred and thirty thousand years with no history of any sort and then it suddenly exploded with what we call civilization? The generally accepted the human race was so primitive that it didn't have the means to write a history.
It sounds harsh to say that for all that time we where so dumb we didn't invent the technology to record history.
There is an alternative that there was no history of that time because there was no conflict.
Today we woke up and played with children for a while.
Then we spent the day looking after the planet (Adam's job according to the Bible).
When we home with the food we had gathered during the day, had a meal, played with the children again and went to sleep.
Where is the conflict needed to make history? But then events in the Garden of Eden take place.
'Do not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
' Do not judge.
Suddenly all the technologies needed to record history are there.
In particular there is conflict.
Judgment sends us insane because judgment is a wild guess about things we do not know.
We then claim what we do not know to be true.
Our judgments are completely divorced from reality.
So the present state of the human race is that we make wild guess about things we know nothing about claim them to be true.
Invariably this wild guess includes the judgment that something, or someone, is good or evil.
The next step is to act on our judgments.
If we look at the recent history of the human race you will see that it is one of total insanity based on 'truths' that where simply not true.
When judgment is the basis of our truth the whole world acts insanely.
The insanity of judgment may be localised to one person, or it can be used by a few to bring insanity to a whole nation.
Hitler used a time and tested method of judgment against anyone he saw as not fitting the Arian ideal of the master race.
That method works in three parts.
The first is to use judgment to create a campaign of lies and misinformation.
Today we would call it 'spin.
' In Hitler's case the target was Jews, Homosexuals and a host of other 'non-people.
' Then the lies and misinformation are elevated to fear.
When sufficient has been created fear that fear is used to destroy the target people.
This method has been used for six thousand five hundred years.
It is the history of our history that repeats over and over.
Our Western religions are not the only religions that contain the same warning about judgment.
The Taoist text contains 'The people lived happily together like the branches on a tree, then along came the Yellow Emperor who invented rules and regulations, and the world went straight to pieces.
' Stories exist all over the world having little in common with the Garden of Eden incident.
But if you look at the essence they are remarkably similar.
I don't believe that there is an inherent fault in the human brain that causes our insanity.
I believe that the problem is that our judgments are not real and so our judgment based decision have nothing to do with reality.
So the way forward would seem to do away with judgment.
'Nothing is good or bad save that it is thought to be so' (The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare).
Good and bad only exists in the head.
If there is no good and bad what is there? There is choice.
Take away the judgment from Iraq and what is left? People killing each other.
Take away the judgment from the Palestine and what is left? People killing each other.
If this is not good or bad what else is there? What is left is choice.
Is this what we want for the human race? The alternative to judgment is choice.
The alternative is to see things as they are and decide if we this is what we want.
With judgment we have no choice because our decisions are not based on reality.
Jesus put it nicely in the Sermon on the Mount.
'But let your communication be yea yea, or neigh neigh, for beyond this cometh of evil.
' You say yes to what you want, no to what you don't want.
If you go beyond this you are into judgment.
This is called choice.
Nobody can tell you that you choices are good or bad, it is simply what you want.
Choice is a minefield to navigate.
It relies on truth.
If you do not know the truth you have no choice.
Are Australia and America democracies? I don't think so.
A democracy can only exist if politicians tell the truth.
That has proved to be far from the true.
The spiritual path and the physical path to a new consciousness for this world go hand in hand.
The spiritual part is the awakening the falsity of judgment and how it destroys reality.
With this understanding comes the awareness of the illusion we live in.
Nothing is the way it is judged to be.
Also there is the awareness that we can choose something better if we want to, but to do that we need to be told the truth.
In the physical world we can bring about the new consciousness by demanding we are told the truth.
There is the judgment that something must be true because it cannot be proved false, and that something must be false because it cannot be proved true.
These two forms of judgment are used to tell us lies, even if the liars do not know they are lying.
My previous article Escape the Judgment Trap details these two basic forms of judgment so I won't repeat them here.
Imagine living in a world where politicians told the truth.
A world where advertising agents gave factual information about products instead of just images.
Imagine going to vote and knowing what the true policies of each candidate where.
I will leave you to add whatever you want to this list.
We can create that world if we choose to.
We are living an illusion.
It is an illusion because judgment distorts reality.
Nothing is as it seems, it is only what we judge it to be.
The way forward to a new personal and world consciousness is to tame judgment and see the world as it is.
Then there will be the choice of what we want it to be.