Tag: Understanding

Self-Awareness leads to Awareness of others

Most of us at some point in life will fall into the trap of believing that everyone else thinks like us. That in the same circumstances, they would choose to do and then do exactly the same things that we would do too.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are the sum of our experiences. And if we have not understood and learned from all the things that we have experienced, we are very likely to repeat any mistakes or poor decisions that we have made over and perhaps over again.

Self-awareness is achieved by taking the time and making the effort to ask why things happen, how they happen, what role we played in making them happen and asking all the questions about events which feel meaningful or create an emotional response for us.

The process of becoming self-aware is the way in which we equip ourselves to reach a place of understanding of life around us that steps beyond the simple process of attributing blame.

It sounds like a lot of work. But like most skills we learn and assimilate as we grow, once we have mastered the basic process, it is a skill that can very quickly become akin to muscle memory and help us in the very smallest, yet the most significant of ways.

For us to live, experience life and to survive, the reality is that we don’t need to be fully conscious or self-aware in terms of our metal being.

Indeed, many people have lived entire lifetimes and good lives too, without thinking deeply about anything they experience and without feeling any need to do so.

There’s nothing wrong with living a life with limited self-awareness, if the individual concerned isn’t making decisions or isn’t taking responsibility for the lives, experience and wellbeing of others. Especially when those others are going through experiences in life that those who have accepted responsibility for them do not properly understand.

This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com

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The foundations of Awakened Politics are self-awareness, awareness of others, values, integrity and humanity

It seems incredible that the concept and existence of an alternative values-driven world to the one we currently live and believe in must be explained. But this is where the world is and where we really are today.

The fundamental basis of Awakened Politics and therefore Good Government, is always doing the right thing for everyone, even when they are not present and represented, or it would appear that they will not be affected by whatever our Politicians are about to do.

Awakened Politics and Good Government is about valuing People or the Person, and the experience they are having, more than what is outside all of us, or what we might know as ‘things’.

When we can care and understand about ourselves, we can care and understand about others – or choose not to do so, if that should be our own genuine choice.

Politics and Government by its very nature and purpose is the care, service to and consideration of all others and the governance of all things that are external to or outside of them.

This care, service and consideration must always be provided by people who are thinking, acting and behaving in a Fully Conscious way when taking or enacting that responsibility for others.

There is and can be no in between. Or somebody, somewhere will always be failed.

This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com

How is Awakened or Conscious Politics different when we are all awake or conscious anyway?

Medically or physiologically speaking, yes, if you are reading this page, you are ‘conscious’. Also, in these same ‘literal’ terms, you are likely to be physically ‘awake’ too.

What some people may not realise, or indeed, what many of the people around them may not realise is that what they currently understand to be conscious or to be awake is only partially so.

In terms of absolutes, people may not be ‘Conscious’ or ‘Awake’ at all, if there are things going on in the world around them or that are contributing to the experience that they are having that they are neither conscious of or aware of in any way.

That absence or lack of awareness most often exists in terms of peoples understanding of themselves. Why they feel the way they do about things. Why they react the way that they do. Why they are motivated in the way that they are. And how experiences they have themselves affect and influence them in their future – usually without them giving the matter any thought.

If a person is not fully aware of or can make consideration of, or allowance for everything that is going on in a situation over which they are making some kind of judgement or a decision, they are not ‘Awake’ to or ‘Conscious’ of everything that is going on. They will therefore be making that decision or judgement unconsciously.

Politicians are not and have not been making decisions consciously. If they were and had been, the world today and the experience that we are all having of it would be very different in just about every conceivable way.

This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com

Missing the point about Politics & Government: The Devil is in the Detail

We are all guilty of having allowed ‘The System’ to degenerate and for things to have become as bad as they are, because as a majority, we take it for granted that the way that everything works is as straightforward as we believe and think.

Politicians are the same as the majority of us. Before they are elected or appointed, the majority of them have been looking at and interacting with life in exactly the same ways and there is nothing different about most of them that makes them better able to deal with Public Policy and managing the things that are important to all of us in any different way.

What Politicians, senior executives in the Civil Service and in Local Government fail to recognise, because they have no experience, acceptance nor understanding of the wider picture, is how the services, creation and running of infrastructure or anything to do with the Public Sector interconnects with not only so many other areas of Public Policy, but has a direct impact on so many different areas of life for so many different people, businesses and organisations too.

Public Policy is made today, as it has been for a very long time, based on dealing with the effects of issues or problems. Decision makers are unaware of or deliberately avoid dealing with the cause.

This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com

Levelling Level | Homelessness & Wiping the Slate Clean

Successfully creating and maintaining a societal benchmark that prioritises the ability of everyone to be able to sustain themselves and their life and calling it the Basic Living Standard, doesn’t mean that it will be impossible for the circumstances that some people find themselves in to enable them to fall through.

Achieving Levelling Level as a standard should significantly reduce the number of people who find themselves homeless simply because of being in debt, unable to find work or being able to pay for accommodation.

But like anything else anyone does to help others; Levelling Level will not cater for the people who find themselves in difficulty because of addiction – which a fully corrected system should also cater for without being seen.

No system, however well thought out or constructed, will be able to cater for every need of those who become homeless because they quite literally feel they can no longer conform in any way or do not wish to continue ‘taking part’.

If we have achieved the Levelling Level and created a system that is balanced, fair and maintained as such to benefit us all, the people who will find themselves at odds with that system will be remarkably few. But they will always exist.

We therefore need communities to have facilities that are open, without question or the perceived heavy hand of any authority or control to provide sanctuary for those that need it, when they need it without anything – even personal care – being required in exchange.

We also need to create a system where for whatever legitimate reason they might have to do so, any individual can effectively begin all over again with a new identity, in a new place, and without any ties to their former existence, at least once in their life – if they should choose.

The days of being able to choose a monastic or convent-like existence may be over or no longer exist as they once did. But alternatives already do and should be encouraged, so that one way or another, if life has become so unbearable for anyone for any reason, they are not left with living on the streets or taking their own life as the only choices they have, simply because nobody else can understand the pain they are in, because that pain which is very specific to that individual, and is an experience of pain that they themselves have never had.

Levelling Level | The right people in politics = the right decisions on behalf of us all

With so much that needs to be corrected and changed for the better, it may seem a little trivial to go full circle back to the issue of how politics works, where Levelling Level first began.

However, we are in the mess that we are in, and we are faced with the huge challenge of addressing that mess, because we have had the wrong people in politics for such a long time.

We have touched on the reasons for this issue in different places throughout this book, but the problems that poor leaders create for the rest of us will not be solved and will just be changed or transformed into a different form of those problems, for as long as we don’t set values-based rules or boundaries around the quality and ability of the people that we choose to elect.

Like everything else today, too many politicians are recruited by the existing political parties based on how their candidacy will look. The majority don’t have the life skills or experience to make decisions that will have an effect on other people’s lives, and even those who could offer something useful don’t have the conviction and confidence to stand up to a system that rejects or ejects those who do not conform.

Politics or rather public representation is NOT a job. Despite having a system or accepted career pathway for wannabes who have decided they will be Prime Minister when they are children and then do degrees and early career jobs that line them up as perfect tick-box candidates for the existing political parties, public representation or being an MP is NOT a career too.

We have fallen into the trap of thinking that things like popularity, the ability to speak or argue in public and being able to stay on message are the attributes that make a politician good.

But they are not good for anyone, when the key attribute of a good politician is having a real understanding and appreciation of how life works for different people in very different circumstances, and what strategy looks and feels like for others, when it is implemented and then put to work.

If our political system is to be healthy and work on behalf of us all, rather than be maintained by people who are only out for themselves, we must only elect people who see the role of being a public representative as a vocation or calling based on rich and meaningful life experience, and not on personal agendas in any form.

Levelling Level | The importance of Community in all things

Our distraction is no accident

If you want people to forget who they are, what they want or what they need, give them bread and circuses.

Surprisingly, these words have been around since Roman times. They reflect one of the key ways of thinking that cynical and poor leaders use to prevent people from revolting and engaging in civil unrest, when things are not going well or as they really should.

During the Covid Pandemic, we were repeatedly misled by the Johnson Government and its ‘nudge unit’, that used behavioural science, to play around with the basic fears that operate often at an unconscious level inside our heads.

By keeping everyone, or rather, the majority distracted from focusing on their own inability to lead, by keeping everyone focused on what we were being told was everyone’s duty to fight for everyone else’s life whilst putting our own lives on hold, they have so far managed to walk away from crippling the UK financially and destroying many people’s futures scot-free.

The programming that the government and the media uses only works, because of the way that our society now works.

People don’t interact with others from an early age in the many different ways that they used to. So, when it comes to learning what’s real, what’s unreal, what makes sense, or what its in our best interests to do, unless we listen without question to family and the people who are close to us when we consider everything, the politicians and the media that support them have within all of us, an open book.

Systemic Collapse is already underway

There is little doubt that to many reading this book around the time that it is published, the content will reflect what looks like an entirely different world to the one that we see around us.

Yet our lives continuously revolve around acts and events that create change. It’s just very difficult to see and appreciate – with the way that the world works today – that the kind of change that is now required – can only come about through a series of events or experiences that are equal to a complete systemic collapse. A collapse that causes enough pain that we all accept that we have to act.

That collapse, is already underway. It is reaching us through the experiences that we have had through the Covid Years. It is reaching us through what we see happening in Ukraine. It is reaching us through the cost-of-living crisis that is unfolding around us.

It is now time to accept that things will never be the same again.

As the impact of these events that are happening on our TV Screens and on our social media feeds begin to physically touch our real lives, more and more of us will realise that what has been happening is wrong.

We won’t only accept we need it, but we will also actively encourage and then embrace change.

The biggest change that we will have to encounter and travel through will be in relation to the way that we think.

Once we have again learned to value what is important and value each other as we really always should, then we can begin the process of rebuilding the world around us, correcting everything that touches our lives and the lives of others, so that the system we live in works as it really should.