From the time we wake up in the morning till we go to sleep at night, the media is constantly informing us about what’s going on in the world. And whether we are tuned to the local TV station whose top story is about the latest mugging, robbery, rape, or killing on the streets of our cities or National Public Radio keeping us up to date on the number of innocent victims from the latest car bomb in Afghanistan, suicide bomber in Iraq, or typhoon in the Philippines, the news is almost always bad. True, the common wisdom says that “Bad news sells newspapers”, but that’s precisely the issue. Why should bad news grab our interest more than good, and what might that say about the nature of humanity?
Building our thoughts off of last week’s blog, I believe that bad news sells simply because we are still more interested in our own personal safety and welfare than we are in the general welfare of humanity as a whole. And as much as we’d like to think we have empathy for the innocent victims, when we read of the tragedies of others, though we might not want to admit it, we generally sit back smugly knowing that it happened to the other guy.
There is the old joke about two friends, Joe and Sam, who meet on the street. “How’s it going?” asks Joe.
“Terrible”, says Sam. “My wife left me and ran off with my business partner”.
“Could be worse”, says Joe.
“That’s not all”, Sam goes on. “My son is in jail and my teenage daughter is pregnant”.
Joe nods. “Could be worse”.
Sam throws up his hands. “And if that’s not enough, last night my house caught fire, my car was broken into and smashed, and this morning the doctor told me I’ve got a kidney stone the size of Gibraltar.
“Could be worse”, repeats Joe.
“Worse?” yells Sam at his wit’s end. “How could it be worse”?
Joe shrugs. “This could be happening to me”.
My former teacher, the late Ramchandra Gandhi, would never have said that. He coined the term “apparent non-self” to indicate the individual who appears to be in a separate body but is really ourselves at its absolute core. ‘I’ consciousness. The feeling of living, of existing, of being. This is where we all come from. This is where we are one and the same. When we say “I am…” we speak an absolute fact, common to us all. Anything we add after that to describe our uniqueness is merely an adjective separating one physical manifestation from another.
Bad news will cease to have its hold over us only when our inner commonality becomes as real to us as our outer differences are now. At that time we will recognize that not only is the suffering of one the suffering of all, but the joys and successes of one are the joys and successes of all. This web site, Games of Consciousness, and The Roving ‘I’, the writings on which these sites are based, are part of a much larger, not as well publicized attempt to speed up this learning process. And ain’t that Good News!
peace…………………..ag
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Experience the new consciousness for yourself at GamesofConsciousness.com