The more obsessed, committed, and certain we become, the further we get from peace, love, and truth.

In reality, there are no sides to be taken. There is no good side and bad side. There are no good people and bad people. These are just our minds striving to create mental models of the world. They are illusions.

These mental models can be helpful, like when they tell us that under a fruit tree we’ll find fruit. But in a global society, they create conflict, hatred, and the illusion of separateness.

It is wonderful to fight for a cause. But when we fight against people, we are denying in them what we feel is so valuable in us, which is our point of view. We’re denying their experience. We’re denying their ability not only to maybe have a good point, but their ability to learn, to grow, and to join us.

Because we are seeing them through this filter of bad and unworthy, they put up their walls. They put up their defenses. They dig their heels in on their side, and they will not be able to hear reason, facts, or logic. And we only end up hurting our cause.

The truth of the matter is: there are no good models of this universe. It is too complicated and vast a place to have any model that we can create that accurately reflects all of the nuance, all of the forces that go into making this world and universe the way it is.

This is why nobody can predict the future. This is why we can barely predict the weather. Even our best mathematical models cannot incorporate the complexity of reality. We’re just now starting to question some of those models, that maybe they were leading us in the wrong direction. Maybe they looked good on paper, but they can also discount a lot of truths. Any model is an oversimplification and only reality itself — free from models, interpretations, analysis, judgments, labels, and opinions — can be the truth.

No matter what we try to understand intellectually — whether it is science, medicine, religion, or political causes — the more certain we are, the more wrong we are. Because human beings can barely understand 1% of this vast, infinite, and eternal universe.

On an intellectual thought level, we can only keep one thought in our mind at a time. We have a very limited dictionary of words that we know. We cannot even fathom all of the things we don’t know. The 1% we think we understand might actually be more like 0.000000001%.

So, to be open, to be able to listen to the other side, to not condemn, to, in fact, love and try to build bridges and maintain humility, is something we don’t see on TV or online very often. When we watch public debates, they get two people who just want to fight. We never hear, “Well, that person makes a really good point, I’m actually going to change my mind on that one.” We just see people screaming at each other.

The fact of the matter is: we can only move forward as one people, one planet, one life. We can only hope to build a more loving, peaceful, healthy, safe, and abundant world when it includes all of us. We may think we know the best way to reach that better future, but maybe we didn’t think of everything. Maybe we had a blind spot. Maybe when we scale up our ideas, it can lead to some real trouble. Maybe we also need to always be listening.

We have to maintain humility, openness, and honesty with ourselves about what we don’t know if we are to have the ability to be at peace with the truth that we don’t know everything. The only way our species evolves is to keep building bridges, keep fixing our mistakes, and keep moving forward in compassion, together. 

We think we live in this world where you’ve got to be on the red team or the blue team. You’ve got to identify with this group or that group. But we don’t have to play by those rules. We can identify with the human race, or even better, with life itself.

Isn’t it funny that according to the Bible, pride is a deadly sin, but it’s the only sin we’re PROUD to have? We are so happy to tell people how proud we are of our kids and our family, our school or country. 

Pride is great when it includes all of life. But pride frequently comes down to just my country, my race, my religion, my family, and we are rarely able to feel pride for an outside group.

So the bigger we can make our identity, the more that feeling of pride can actually become beneficial and can help us in moving toward that place as a species that we all have as a gut instinct to move toward. 

When pride is closed off to a select group of people, it creates conflict. Then, we’re only proud of some person or group compared to someone else, of one person’s achievement over someone else, or some group’s victory over some other group.

But we do not have to play this game of division. We can move forward in the best way possible for all beings when we become open to the fact that we could be wrong, when we can see our own faults, and when we can see the humanity and interconnectedness in others. 

In the fight for progress, we don’t have to make someone else wrong. We can share ideas with each other. We can stay focused on the values of compassion and peace. And if we do go offcourse and lose ourselves to heavy emotions, we can quickly find that middle path again, that center of balance, the peaceful warrior within.

We all know people who have gone too deep in some direction, whether it’s an obsession they found online or some other influence in their life, and we all wish for this person that they could just lighten their grip a little, let go a bit, and relax. That’s how it is for anything we become too extreme about. The further we go down that road and block out everything else, the more our life tends to spiral downwards. But the more we can widen our perspective and not be so narrowly focused, the better off we’ll all be and the greater impact we’ll have on our loved ones, our community, and the planet we call home.

The good news is, it doesn’t take years of learning or developing some new skill to create positive change. Right now, we can open ourselves up to truth, possibility, and to the great mystery of life. Total inner transformation is possible right now. Which means global transformation is too.

There is nothing we need to learn, discover, or even master that will complete us. They will only take us further away from the recognition of the truth — that we are already whole. Ancient man, living in caves with few simple possessions, was enough for them to lead fulfilled lives and it is enough for us. Everything else, all of our modern inventions, is just a bonus.

We are capable of recognizing the perfection that already exists within us, just like every other animal in the animal kingdom that wants for nothing, just like every tree and plant that has no doubts or fears.

The notion of “sides” is a fallacy.

Oneness is the truth.

So my plea to you is this: don’t lose hope. History shows us that hopelessness is a losing bet. Don’t succumb to anger, despair, hatred, or fear. No successful movement was ever based on those dark emotions. They only create more enemies and more resistance to positive change. See how love, peace, joy, and a dash of good humor, are the only things to ever truly change our world for the better.

Humanity is only as good as we help it to be. When we all do our part, darkness will have no place left to hide.

Much love,
Todd