We are doing some things right

Violent crime is down 12 percent over the last year. All crime is down by 6.6 percent. And I’m suggesting this tells us we’re doing something right. Certainly the best of our law enforcement folks are making a difference but I think something else is going on beyond their valiant efforts. It has to do with more of us becoming conscious of our collective responsibility for all forms of violence. I think this is a sign of a shift occurring in our relationship to our lives as humans to one another, to our species and to all others including this planet as one whole being.

I think there are different degrees of this consciousness. More of us are seeing clearly and talking about it. But even more are influenced by it without being likely to talk about it. I’m clear that there are more of us everyday consciously, intelligently choosing to focus on what is working. At the simplest level, it takes recognizing that our complaints about our experience of things like Windows and Facebook are details in the midst of a much larger whole of what is provided that serves us in powerful ways. It takes us seeing how petty we get about the details when we have widespread agreement about having the world work.

Driving is a great example. If I were to be told, w/o knowledge of how it does work, that we were going to put millions of individual humans in control of vehicles weighing tons and capable of velocities above sixty miles per hour; and that they will travel in huge migrations of thousands at a time traveling side by side a few inches apart at these speeds; I wouldn’t expect it to turn out anywhere near as well as it does. It indicates to me that, in general, a large majority of us are both smarter and more sophisticated than I think. And that the world as a whole is working as well as it does is astonishing.