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Barefoot Doctor Bit: How Can You Change Your Way of Thinking?

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Uruguay’s visionary president José Mujica, 78, prior to legalizing cannabis last week, spent 15 years in jail on terrorism charges including ‘two years’ solitary confinement at the bottom of a well, where he speaks to frogs and insects to maintain his sanity.’

 

Chatting about his political philosophy of life last week, he was impressively sanguine declaring, “The world will always need revolution. That doesn’t mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary.” (The Guardian)

 

Skrufff asked Barefoot, how can someone successfully set about changing their thinking?

 

Barefoot Doctor: “With us about to launch into another year on this mad merry-go-round we think of as life on Earth it’s timely to look at our options.

 

We tend to think about and focus all our energies on the externals of life, and as a global society have lost any sense of philosophical underpinnings.

 

We’ve become so divorced from our environment, from the natural innate relationship between us as creatures of nature and the eight million or so other animal species with whom we share this planet, from the natural elements upon which we rely – the air, the water the ground itself, from the fact that we’re on a planet at all, hence from the awareness that we’re spinning on our axis at 1,000 MPH while hurtling at 66,000 MPH in orbit around the sun, and from any awareness of the actual fundamental miracle of existence in the first place, and have become so engrossed and lost in an environment, a vast electronic womb of our own creation, we now find ourselves increasingly chasing happiness where it doesn’t exist.

 

The meeting of our survival needs notwithstanding, the quest for happiness is the greatest driver of humanity, always has been and always will be. We’ve not been terribly successful at it and with all our technological wizardry and knowhow it still remains elusive for most, for this very reason. Hence the endemic use of antidepressants, antipsychotics, alcohol, cocaine, heroin and so on.

 

And it’s getting exponentially harder as the top-down forces for manipulating external reality grow stronger, with our tacit consent.

 

We won’t change anything profoundly by attempting to use force against force to tear down the present institutions, by ripping things apart, by dismantling governments, by banishing bankers, or anything else external. Looking back through history, it’s clear that sort of violent revolution merely replaces one set of dysfunctional systems with another, usually even more dysfunctional set. Hence the state we’re now in.

 

The only way we stand even a chance of redressing the balance now is through a revolution of thought, an internal revolution that occurs within each of us, not through force or fashion but by each of us actually wanting it.

 

According to the ancient Chinese Taoist model of yin and yang, when the one pole, let’s call it yin, reaches its zenith, it inevitably gives way to its opposite pole, let’s call that yang.

 

In this instance, the trend for stupidity, greed, short-term gain, ignorance, objectivistic ambition, atomization, and all the other factors combined that presently have us speeding like lemmings towards the cliff’s edge of our own extinction, has now reached its zenith, and the seeds of its opposite are already sprouting.

 

Hence why voices of wisdom like that of such esteemed, diverse and brilliant people as President José Mujica of Uruguay, and Russell Brand, who’s been recently weighing in in the conversation with such erudition and eloquence, are now at last growing louder.

 

This revolution of thinking, however, is not about changing what we’re thinking, but how we’re thinking. And this is where my own field of endeavor in the humble but radical realm of psycho-energetics, for example, comes in.

 

While this isn’t the place to go into detail, the crux of it is as follows.

 

Enthralled by the external world we get drawn forwards into the front of the body and brain, as the sense organs, our connecting device to the external, all face forwards. This draws us into the weaker part of ourselves (the front is vulnerable), and into the noisier part of ourselves (the peristaltic motion, the heartbeat, the breathing, the emotional conflict in the solar plexus, and the tumult of conversation occurring incessantly in the forebrain, by which we describe and uphold that description of reality as we’re subjectively perceiving it).

 

As well as drawing us constantly forwards into the noise of distraction both within, and in the world, seeking happiness externally in vain, thus leading to and perpetuating the current burgeoning state of controlled global psychosis, it divorces us from our greatest wealth: historical perspective, the past and everything and everyone that’s come before, including all the lost wisdom of our ancestors we now so much need.

 

Also, relative to the front, the back is strong. The back is still: the back is silent. If we can now collectively learn to shift backwards inside, so that, like our ancient ancestors, we inhabit our backs, and start thinking from our backs, specifically the rear brain or cerebellum, we automatically divest ourselves of the distracting illusion of the electric womb, and invest ourselves instead in the deeper perspective of the reality that’s actually going on: a 7 billion strong family of people on a sphere spinning through infinite space, each of whom needs and is entitled to a fair chance of survival, all of whom need each other, as well as the planet and its vital resources.

 

Once we learn to think from the back, we automatically plug into our ancestral wisdom, from which arises a natural ethos of decency and respect, inclusionism, collectivism, and fair-mindedness, that leads to collaboration and cooperation, as exemplified by and called for by such people as José Mujica, Russell Brand, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, John Lennon, and Jesus, to name but a few, as opposed to the destructive path of domination, oppression and plunder currently holding sway.

 

In time as more and more do so and we reach critical mass all the way from the streets to the leaders of industry and the military-industrial complex, we’ll spontaneously start treating our environment and each other with more of the requisite intelligent, sensible, collaborative respect these deserve.

 

What this amounts to, rather than a revolution, is more precisely, an evolution. And it’s my sincere belief and intention that we will evolve now in this way, not through externally imposed force, not by superficial trend, but by each of us investing in, identifying with and then collectively embodying the fundamental miracle of existence.

 

And with that, we’ll each find, individually and collectively, not just fleeting happiness arising from momentary sensual gratification, but the true state of perpetual existential delight we each yearn for at a soul level.

 

And my wish for all of us for 2014, is that we make a quantum leap in this direction. Let it be so and universal delight be our milieu and norm.

 

Questions by Skrufff.

 

 

http://www.barefootdoctorglobal.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

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