Many thanks to Sunil for posting his excellent Medium post in my FB group Signs of a World Awakening - if you’d like to join follow me on FB (Ken Homer) and I will be happy to invite you. A couple of excerpts:
"The Experts* Have It Wrong
(*Experts: the majority of narrowly specialised theorists including snake oil salesmen)
“When setting out on a journey do not seek advice from those who have never left home.” ~ Rumi.
“Post-COVID” has become a moving target and experts have theories of what normal will look like after the pandemic runs its course. Many seem to be comparing the pandemic to events of the past to find their answers: Spanish flu, WWII, the Great Depression, the attacks of 9/11, the 2008 financial meltdown…and the list goes on. As we’re painfully learning more and more about the virus though, #Covid-19 doesn’t fit neatly into any past patterns. So these experts will all be more or less wrong.
There’s a fable from India (in the Panchatantra) of four scholar friends who come across the carcass of a lion and each of the “learned” three wishes use his expertise: one is a bone specialist and he can put the skeleton back together, the second has the skills to add flesh and skin and the third knows tantra to breathe life into the animal. The fourth pleads, “Please give me a moment. I wish to climb a tree before you make use of your scholarship.” The “experts” who went back to the normal of the living lion, got eaten. The fourth, who used “common sense”, lived to tell the tale…
…The world is always re-writing its code of life and this pandemic is a stark reminder of Nature’s ways. No amount of research, expertise or knowledge is going to get us back to our old normal. Realising we are Nature’s creation and not apart from it—combined with imagination, creativity and innovation—can move us to the next level.
It is
>> Less about being only individuals than understanding, respecting and preserving what we are part of.
Less about restarting the economy than reviewing, rewriting and renewing our values .
Less about reverting to our old business-as-usual than reinventing our commercial ways .
Less about reaping profits from scarcity than spreading and sharing the abundance of the world.
Less about nationalistic protectionism and more about global cooperation and ethics .
It’s shifting to higher gears of consciousness and leveraging humankind’s very first opportunity to build the world from the ground up, armed with the benefit of hindsight, and the amazing technology-enabled tools we’ve created.
Our minds are conditioned to quickly jump to solutions, and not linger in the problem space. Humans have a tendency to see patterns everywhere, which are important when making decisions and judgments and for acquiring knowledge; we tend to be uneasy with chaos and chance (Gilovich, 1991). Unfortunately, that same tendency to see patterns in everything can lead to seeing things that don’t exist³. Somehow, we are conditioned to fitting problems quickly into solution shapes we have seen in our past. Not being able to do so, makes us very uncomfortable. We’re more at ease when we can recognise a familiar pattern, but “if all you seek is knowledge that you already believe you have, then that’s often the most you will ever find”…
… “ The methods we have developed over the years to recognize and respond to commonplace disruptions seem increasingly, painfully inadequate when the world appears to be falling apart. It’s hard to see the big picture when everything insists on coloring outside the lines ,” writes . “ To borrow a concept from chemistry, there has been a phase change in the nature of our social (and political, and cultural, and technological) reality — we’re no longer happily bubbling along, the boiling has begun. ”
Full post here: https://sunilmalhotra.medium.com/back-is-not-the-way-forward-cb63f99da9e5