Focus On Building The New

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” -Socrates

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller

I admit that I’ve messed up on this one massively. When I’ve seen something that upsets me, or blatant ignorance ruling people’s life; when I’ve witnessed abuse, injustice and poverty (pretty much anytime I watch the news) I have to go there and be angry and loud, make my point clear, raise my fist and fight against it …I’ve been such a fool.

We live in a culture where “Against” is so pervasive that we always have to be against something: against war, against abortion, against GMO’s, against child labor, against guns or against gun control, against pollution, against cancer, against, against, against, and every moment that we spend focusing our Attention with this attitude, we’re actually contributing to perpetuate that which we don’t want or at the very best just stalling things.

If you are unfamiliar with the Law of Attraction, right now you’re probably starting to feel “The Against” bubbling up inside your chest and screeching something like: “But we have to make a stand if we want a better world you spineless hippie!!” …that’s the very “Against” I’m talking about! —We live in an “Inclusive Universe”, which means: “That which is like onto itself is drawn” or “As above so below. As within so without”.

This means that you cannot exclude from your life experience what you have inside yourself. Whenever you focus your attention on anything (either consciously or unconsciously) you are attracting that very thing into your life, whether you want it or not.

For example, if you hate the idea of GMO foods taking over, instead of being against it and ranting all day about how messed up they are and participating in rallies against them, etc; focus your attention/energy/efforts on being Pro-Organic foods, have a blog and write articles or make videos about how awesome organic foods are. Be part of social/community/online movements that create local organic food distribution channels.

Forgetting for a moment the New Age stuff. The fact is that people vote with their money. If you buy organic food yourself and focus your efforts on helping the demand for these foods supersede the demand for GMO foods, you are doing something that actually has a chance at reaching the change that you and many more people desire.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with sharing information, it’s important that people become aware of what’s going on so they can have their own preferences and make their own decisions as to what they want. What I’m referring to here is the personal attitude, the emotion that you feel when you express it:

Are you angry that whatever you don’t approve of exists and you feel that you have to do something because you’re afraid these atrocities/monsters are going to take over the world? If that is so, then you’re actually contributing to their expansion by giving your attention to “Them” because your words and actions are motivated by fear rather than love and nothing healthy grows under the shadow of fear.

If you really want things to change, like Socrates and Mr. Fuller said: you have to Focus on Building the New. It is impossible to get rid of anything that you don’t want, because your mere attention on wanting to get rid of it, perpetuates it —Whatever You Resist, Persists!— What you have to do is move your attention completely into what you want. Move it away from what you don’t want and into What You Do Want.

You will know that you have done this when you feel relief. When you feel “inspired” to move forward with what brings you joy rather than feeling “motivated” to do something about it because of fear, because “something must be done to stop this!”

I acknowledge that it is very important we all have the contrast in life, to look at those things that we don’t want because this is when our preferences are born —our desire for things to be different, to be better, this is the very process that drives change, that fuels expansion… evolution.

Where we get stuck is that after we have observed/experienced something that makes us have the preference: i.e. “I don’t agree with this” (which is absolutely perfect by the way), for the most part we have the habit of letting our negative emotions about the issue take over and this keeps our attention fixed on the things that we don’t want. Nothing wrong with this either, except it’s counterproductive to your desires, to what you really want to achieve, which is the experience of the opposite.

I want to be clear that I’m not looking to single out here what’s good or bad, this whole post is about efficiency. It’s about actually doing something that’s going to generate the results that you are looking to achieve, whatever those may be.

Consistent expansion is the driving force that fuels all of life. What we have to realize is that it’s not necessary for something that we don’t like to change in order for us to have what we want, all we have to do is create what we want and ignore what we don’t want. When the new that we’ve created reaches a state of maturity and critical mass, it will naturally replace the old system in kind of the same way that a new technology replaces an older one.

…And yes in the past, social movements have always required strain and struggle, but it doesn’t have to continue to be like that in the future —these strains may just had been a lack of knowledge and/or understanding of available resources. Think about it…

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I’m wise, so I’m changing myself.” -Rumi.

-Epiphanio.

—>> P.S. Click here to learn more about How Creativity Saved My Life