My Personal Journey and Why I'm building a New Earth
I was born in a middle class family in the centre of Delhi to parents who each had four and three siblings themselves. Both my parents have struggled to purse higher education and earn a decent living as professionals. My mother is now a professor in DU and my father is retired having worked as a bank manager.
Having had a humble beginning, I always asked my parents how as a society we’ve not managed to ensure 24/7 supply of water and electricity. Even as a child I asked why do we need to pay for water supply. Isn’t water freely available throughout the earth?
Fed up with my relentless questions of a society with a better quality of life, my parents eventually moved us to a condo where we didn’t have to rush out to a water tanker and wait in the queue for water, just to take a bath early in the morning, whenever the whole neighbourhoods water supply ran out.
In the condominium we had 24/7 ground water supply and power backup, but at a higher cost in terms of maintenance. This showed me economies of scale work, when we as a society collectively demand a better quality of life.
However this led to me question why is it that not everyone is demanding a better quality of life, why are people not making sure the government provides everyone a better quality of life rather than relying on private infrastructure by corporations. Is it that they don’t want it? Or is it that they feel they don’t deserve it? Or maybe they’ve tried fighting for their rights and given up? Or rather they feel it’s easier to improve their own lives than work together with others to better everyone’s lives.
Sitting in the bus or a cab while going and coming back from school, I used to look at all the different ways people go on about their lives on the street. First I used to think about economic models, why is there an economic disparity. Why is a person sitting on the street selling fruits and not doing something better or more productive/lucrative?
Is it true that not everyone provides enough value to a society to justify having equal income and thus hierarchy in a society is natural. Assuming that to be true, then why does not everyone have an equal level of intelligence or is it just that not everyone has been given a equal opportunity to develop their intelligence and mind.
Soon I realised it’s not just intelligence a society needs to thrive. There’s something else that drives people to use their intelligence in a short-sighted manner. Humans are mostly emotionally driven beings. For the most part of the human history, humans have been driven by fear. Fear of survival that translates to greed, gluttony, lust, violence, etc.
This is something I saw distinctly in the various instances of me being bullied in school. My peers trying to show dominance in order to be accepted by their other peers. Conformance and being part of a group has always made humans feel a sense of safety and control. More than their peers, it’s their parents and teachers approval that they sought. And adults seemed to have reached a conclusion that keeping one’s head down and being conformant to whatever the current society deems normal is the best way of survival.
I was always an outcast, not afraid of speaking my truth. Did what I wanted to do or at least tired to do so. It was not long before I understood it’s not so easy to share one’s truth, not until the other is ready or willing to accept a truth. I accepted this reality and started working on my own, in the shadows, on ways I though I could best improve the world. Found the least violent and high leverage way of making a positive impact on the world.
As I embarked on this journey I found a gapping whole in my chest. Why was I doing this? Why do I need to improve the world? Who am I to better this society? What is my motivation to do so?
My first realisation was, this was my way of feeling worthy enough of being loved. If I could make this world a better place, perhaps it would be able to love me or at least acknowledge me for who I am and I could grow to love it as well. I would learn much later, that my feeling of abandonment and lack of self-worth came from a childhood incident that I didn’t feel safe enough to accept and process at that point.
However that was only a part of the reason. I had reached a point in my life where I felt good enough to be loved, if not by the world, at least one person. I fell in love but then quickly realised I know nothing about love! What is love? How do you love? Is it something you do or feel? How do you express that love?
My first love didn’t materialise into anything because I was grossly inept. This was the phase in college I started going deep into philosophy, I read multiple books on topics as diverse as spiritualism, love, mysticism, Sufism, consciousness. I dived head first into spirituality and tried to understand my own inability to love. My spiritual journey started in 2015 and still continues till this day.
As I read through “The Adventures of Consciousness” By Satprem, I see now that the earth doesn’t need people with more advanced minds and intellect, no that’ll still lead to a divided society, beautiful, yet still divided by infinite true perspectives.
What we need is a world led by love, a global consciousness with enough space for innumerable possibilities, diversity and expressions of life without mutilating it. This is what I envision as the New Earth.
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