Guest Article By: Gregg Braden
Excerpts From: Deep Truth – Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destine, and Fate
Publisher : Hay House
Sometimes it’s a good idea to study a problem thoroughly before we act.
The more we know about a difficult situation, the more certain we can be that we’ve found the best solutions to the dilemma. But sometimes prolonged study is not so good. There are times when the best thing to do is act quickly to survive the immediate crisis, and only then to study the problem in detail from the safety of the time bought by taking decisive action.
Maybe the best way to illustrate what I mean here is with a make-believe scenario:Let’s say that on a beautiful, clear, and sunny day you’re crossing a stretch of highway with a friend in order to get from your house on one side of the road to your friend’s home on the other. Suddenly you both look up after being engrossed in deep conversation and see a huge 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig coming directly toward you.
Instantly your body’s “fight or flight” response kicks in so that you can act. The question is: How? You have to decide quickly if it’s best to move forward, or go back to where you’ve just come from until it’s safe to cross. You and your friend both must choose, and choose fast.
So there you are, in the middle of the highway, with three lanes in front of you and three lanes behind you. Your dilemma is this: Do you have time to move forward to your destination—the other side—or is it best to move backward to the place you began?
To answer the question with absolute certainty, you would need information that you simply don’t have at your fingertips in this moment. You do not know, for instance, whether the truck is empty or loaded. You may not be able to tell precisely how fast it is moving or whether the driver can even see you on the road.
You might not be able to recognize if it’s a diesel- or gasoline-fueled truck that’s coming your way, or what make the vehicle is. And this is precisely the point. You don’t need to know all of those details before you act.
In the moment that you’re crossing the highway, you already have all of the information necessary to tell you you’re in a bad place. You already know that your life is in danger. You don’t need such details to recognize the obvious:there’s a big truck heading your way . . . and if you don’t move quickly, in a matter of seconds nothing else is going to matter!
While this scenario may sound like a silly example, it’s also precisely where we find ourselves on the world stage today. Our paths as individuals, families, and nations are like those of the two friends walking across the highway. The “big truck” that’s bearing down upon us is the perfect storm of multiple crises: situations such as climate change, terrorism, war, disease, the disappearance of food and water, and a host of unsustainable ways of dealing with everyday living here on Earth.
Each crisis has the potential to end civilization and human life as we know it. We may not be in agreement as to precisely why each of these events is occurring, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are actually happening now. And, like the two friends deciding to move forward across the highway or go back to the safety of where they’ve come from, we could study each crisis for another 100 years . . . yet the fact is that there are people, communities, and ways of life that will not survive the time it takes for our all of the data to be compiled, the reports to be published, and the results to be debated.
The reason is that while we’re evaluating the problem, people’s homes will be destroyed by earthquakes, “superstorms,” floods, and war; the land that gave them life will stop producing food; their wells will dry up; oceans will rise; coastlines will disappear—and those individuals will lose everything, including their lives.
While these scenarios may sound extreme, the events I’m describing are already occurring in places such as Haiti, Japan, the Gulf Coast of the United States, and drought-ridden Africa . . . and it’s getting worse.
Just as it makes tremendous sense to move out of the path of the big truck coming our way on the highway before we study the problem further, it makes tremendous sense to move out of the way of the multiple disasters looming on the horizon before they take an even greater toll.
And just as the direction we choose to move on the highway determines whether or not we get to our friend’s house on the other side, the way we decide to take action in the face of the greatest threats to our existence will determine whether we succeed or fail, live or die.
Our choices for survival all point back to the way we think about ourselves in the world, and how our thinking leads us to act. The message is that we must act wisely and quickly to head off the collision that awaits us on the highway of life we’ve chosen to cross.
Maybe Albert Einstein said it best: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”
Developing a new level of thinking is precisely what we need to do today. We know the problems exist. We’ve already applied the best minds of our time, and the best science based upon the best theories available, to study those
problems. If we were on the right track with our thinking, doesn’t it make sense that we would have more answers and better solutions by now?
The fact that we don’t tells us we need to think differently.
Check out the books below by Gregg Braden !
