The reason that we humans are seen as resistant to change is not because of a conscious desire to remain the same.

Rather we human beings, these great masses of cells, bacteria and the environment all working together to maintain a coalescing ‘self’, are resistant to change because what and ‘who’ we are is a sum of constituent parts that has formed to best suit our survival and own ‘goals’.

Like an ant farm or bee hive where the individual parts would fight to the death to protect the hive, our constituent parts fight via our most powerful defences, our emotions and our ‘world view’, to protect what we ‘know’ against what we ‘do not know’.

If another ‘self’ points out weaknesses in a view on ‘reality’ that we hold dear it frightens us and we argue, fight or ignore that intrusion into our minds and our views of our ‘self’ and where we fit in the world.

This is also why only trusted other ‘selves’ such as family, friends and loved ones are ‘allowed’ to question our world view, because they do not pose a threat to our whole ‘selves’ as a similar ‘attack’ from someone ‘outside’ of our ‘circle’ of ‘trusted’ others. That is why our family or friends can ‘attack’ our world view and therefore our ‘selves’ without inducing fear.

Once again we humans have evolved a layer of complexity to our defence of our world view and our ‘selves’ to allow for us to be gregarious creatures without leaving ourselves open to distraction from our life goals.

We have accepted subconsciously that to survive we must accept other possibly opposing world views into our own inner circle of ‘self’.

For example, if we wish to be successful in business, we build into ourselves the ability to live half in the present and half in the future, forever separating “important” from “non-important” segments of reality ‘on the fly’ to allow us to make supposedly ‘clear’ business decisions. Sometimes these decisions will force us to choose future ‘success’ over the well-being or best interest of others.

If we wish to be better counsellors or teachers we train ourselves to be completely in the present, our ‘selves’ open to life’s experiences and the input of everyone and everything around us, such as children.

Once we have created these “selves” and lived in them therefore proving their resilience in our reality, we then are “frightened” by change because ‘change’ in this instance means ‘risk’, not just to our way of life or happiness, but also to our very “selves”. Change is then a direct threat to the very universe we inhabit, our ‘reality’ including our world view and everything that we believe, that holds us together, that makes the ‘self’ we have created. If we alter our “selves” what will we become?

It is the holding onto ‘self’ that not only assists our survival and relative ‘success’ in this world, but that also maintains our continually transient sense of well being, even if that well being is negative. What defines us controls us.

How we define our ‘selves’ limits our ability to ‘see’ with clear eyes what is, as opposed to what we want to see.

This putting on of emotional blinkers is not necessarily a conscious decision, rather a series of subconscious decisons centreing around our continual ability to reinforce our own world view through filtering the outside world until it fits with what we ‘know’ to be true.

Amazingly this same survival trait of our whole ‘selves’ processing and re processing reality, chewing it and turning it over until we are able to digest what we experience without altering our core ‘selves’ too drastically from the survival mode the majority of us humans live within, is the self-same reason that good people fail to make good decisions, that successful business people make drastic mistakes ‘on purpose’, that good teachers and counsellors can ‘get it wrong’ and that all the hard work in the world can still lead no ‘where’.

Our focus on ‘success’ and getting ‘somewhere’ is not just the source of all of our suffering. It is also the source of our failure.

In our desperate attempt to ‘do well’ and ‘be successful’ in whatever mode of life we choose we lock down our ‘selves’ from the amazingly complex beings we are as children, able to absorb and correlate reality to the ‘solid-state’ partially blind adults that we become.

We voluntarily throw off the freedom of open-eyed wonder shouldering instead the yoke of a self made reality, deciding at the same tike as individuals to hold onto a ‘self’ that does not exist in any real terms outside of our own collaborating constituent parts.

In essence we ‘believe’ in a fantasy of a ‘self’ that separates us from everyone else that is no more a single being than a beehive or termite colony. This ‘self’ then needs to be defended at all costs, with fantasies of ‘greater beings’ that ‘created’ us to resemble ‘themself’. This defense of our fantastical individual ‘soul’ is necessary to continue the fantasy that is ‘humankind’.

In reality, we are unique because any grouping of thousands or even millions of constituent parts will come together as a recognisable yet ‘unique’ whole. All ant hills are recognisable as anthills, with similar constituent parts, yet all anthills are unique (‘individual’).

Therefore we could say that an anthill or behive is as much a single being, an ‘individual’ or ‘self’, with the same right to mutual respect, love, empathy, compassion as any human being.

We may never be able to ‘rise’ above or out of our own subconscious-driven fear of change.

We may never be able to evolve psychologically to the point where we can separate our view of our ‘selves’ from the ‘reality’ we live and die within.

Yet maybe we can recognise that our so called ‘selves’, which we wilfully build and defend with every ounce of our strength, are no more special or unique in existence on this earth than each ant hill or beehive.

As such we should treat all living wholes, from the smallest insect colony onwards, as equals to humans instead of treating them as second class citizens of the world we inhabit.

Until we recognise the truth that we are fantasies of our own making we will continue to destroy the world we inhabit with our arrogant gorging.

Our ‘selves’ are no more special than plants in a garden and in fact are a lot less useful to the planet we inhabit.

At least the plants in our gardens clean the air and refresh the soil, feed the insects, support the cycle of life.

Compared to plants, humans are no better than a leach on this earth.

To stop being a disease we need to wake up and realise that all life is at least as special, if not more so, then ourselves.

Until then, our future as a race of ‘individuals’ is a guaranteed dead end.

Happy trails! 🙂

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