(Continued from Part 3.)
The Assumption of No Solutions
Werner calls the assumption of no solutions “perhaps the most pernicious and insidious aspect of the unconscious, unexamined structure of beliefs through which we perceive hunger and starvation.” (1)
There wouldn’t be a person on Earth who would “tolerate 21 children dying every minute as a result of hunger if we thought we had a solution that would prevent their dying.”
Everyone would get up off their couch and get to work to end conditions like hunger on our planet if we felt there were solutions. But we believe at a level that can be reached only by realized knowledge (as in an “Aha!”) that there are none.
Nothing we’ve ever tried has worked. The situations we face are incapable of solution. No one we know can think at the level required to solve the problem. And, hey, you know your idea? It won’t work either. Werner says:
“The truth is that people do not die of starvation because there are no solutions. The failure to grasp that is what makes people ask: ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’
“As if what we did or didn’t do were what caused the problem to persist in the first place.
“What they want to know is, what more are we going to do about it? What better solution have we come up with? What are we going to do that is different from what the experts have already done?”
He asks us to “look into your own structure of beliefs, inside the condition from which you think about the persistence of hunger, and observe that you do believe there are no solutions.”
“While confronting this belief, get that there are solutions. And they are not merely good ideas. …
“Fifteen million of us do not die as a consequence of starvation each year because there are no solutions.”
Resources are scarce; the problem is inevitable; and there are no solutions. So we may as well give up right now. Hence our lethargy, apathy, indifference, etc., that Quan Ying and Archangel Gabrielle commented on lately. (2)
And hence our sense of defeatism in approaching our work. We know at the outset that what we do will simply be an empty gesture. At best it’ll keep some families comfortable for a while before the whole effort is forgotten and fades away.
Tomorrow I’d like to add a fourth filter to the three Werner has provided us with.
(Continued in Part 5.)
Footnotes
(1) All quotes are from the Hunger Project, Ending Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come. San Francisco: The Hunger Project, 1977.
(2) “The Goddess Quan Yin on Indifference and Apathy” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/02/10/goddess-quan-yin-on-indifference-and-apathy/ and Archangel Gabrielle, “Eradicate Indifference,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/02/12/archangel-gabrielle-eradicate-indifference/.