Let's make the world whole!
Have you ever felt that you are one with the world?
If you have, you know how it feels to be whole.
Then you sense what the world actually is: one whole.
Then there is no you and the world, you are the world.
The world we live in is in chaos
because the way we think is in chaos.
There is a systemic fault in our thinking
which prevents us from being whole and one.
We live in two worlds.
World 1 is what happens right now.
World 2 is what we think of it.
In fact, there is only one world: the one we share.
The universe is one unbroken movement,
but our thinking divides it and makes it personal.
Many people think that thinking is all there is.
It is NOT!
To change world 1, world 2 must change.
The next few years will be crucial for humanity.
We must change our course NOW!
To cleanse the world chaos we must rethink our thinking
and uncondition our minds.
We must put thinking into its proper place.
The good news is: we have the tools to do this.
The bad news is: we do not use them.
To use them we first need a new mental map.
We must correct two fundamental errors in our ego-system.
Our worldview is based on false assumptions.
Because of this, we do not see the world as it is.
When we look at the world
we actually see our own assumptions.
We together make our world a mess.
To connect with the world in a new way
we have to see that we literally are the world.
The world crisis is self-made, therefore we can solve it.
We must urgently change our human agenda.
Together. And individually.
The solution is: being whole and one.
Can we create a world that is whole?
The answer is: Yes and no.
Yes, if we correct the errors in our thinking.
No, if we stick to our present worldview.
The key question is:
Can we see that the world is whole and one?
My mission and passion
is to make the world whole and one.
If you share this, I invite you to find out how.
The journey begins with three BIG questions:
1. What is true?
2. What is right?
3. What is possible?
Our life depends on the answers.
Life is not a dream.
It is not an opinion.
It is real.
We share our life with other people.
Nobody owns the world.
We deserve a good life.
Life is good when you feel whole and one.
The Story
In September 2015, the United Nations announced Agenda 2030. It sets 17 ambitious goals for all nations and every individual, calling us on a mission that sounds impossible: to end poverty, stop hunger, bring well-being and health for all people, good education, gender equality... and, of course, world peace by the year 2030.
Can you even imagine a world like that?
If you can imagine it, could we make it happen?
In October 2016, I joined a scientific team to take part in the Helsinki Challenge, a science-based competition organized by ten Finnish universities.
In 2017, teams competed to find solutions to 17 global challenges mentioned in the UN Agenda 2030.
Our team with eight members went to the root of the problem. We wanted to solve them ALL at a fundamental level.
We decided to find ways to change the process of thinking because thinking is behind social, economic, environmental, and political problems.
Our starting point was the work of physicist David Bohm and his books Changing Consciousness and Thought as a System, in which Bohm points out the root cause of the world crisis: our thinking process. We do not rule it, it rules us.
We are especially blind to our ego-system. Our actions harm us but we do not stop acting irrationally.
Our team did not succeed in the competition, but the problem fascinated me so much that I wanted to study it more by myself.
I wanted to answer two questions:
1. Can we solve global problems?
2. To do that, what should we do differently?
This book is my answer.
The Mission
I re-read Bohm's books and listened to all 11 weekend seminars he held in Ojai, California from 1986 to 1992. I visited Birkbeck College Library in London to study the David Bohm archives.
Bohm showed us how to solve the world crisis. Together and quickly.
It is essential that we want to do it.
In this book I write about what I learned during my intense three-year project. Let's have a serious dialogue about how to change the world.
For me, the enquiry started 42 years ago. Reading Jiddu Krishnamurti's book Freedom from the Known in 1977 changed my thinking about thinking. Soon after that, I heard about David Bohm and his work.
They both say we need a mutation in the human psyche. It would connect us to the world in a fundamentally new way. I feel that their insights can transform our outlook on life.
Since 1997 I have worked with a Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen. His concept of systems intelligence (with Raimo P. Hämäläinen) gives an inspiring tool for seeing the world we live in. Systems intelligence helps us to act wisely in the whole of life.
An important influence has also been the Finnish philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen. His brilliant book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order is vital reading for anyone who wants to deeply understand David Bohm's thinking.
Paavo Pylkkänen worked with David Bohm and they were starting to write a book about the mind when Bohm died. The reason Paavo asked me to join his team in the Helsinki Challenge was the book I wrote in 2015 about the 52 dialogues Krishnamurti and David Bohm had from 1965 to 1983. I use some of that material in this book.
I met both Bohm and Krishnamurti and feel familiar with their work. One sentence summarizes their point of view: to change the world, we need a mind that can see and be the world.
Unfortunately, solving the world crisis is not the first priority in our life agendas now. To succeed, we need people who want to go to the root cause and eliminate it. We have no time to waste now because our home is burning!
The future of humanity is at stake. We must stop reacting and start to act! We are wasting time trying to fix the symptoms here and there. We must go to the very source of the disease and heal it.
From seeing to being
There are two parts to this book.
In the first part, we investigate what seeing the world means, and how that would change our outlook on life. Correcting the two errors in our ego-system might clean the manmade mess.
In the second part, we focus on what it means to live at one with the world. What happens to the mind when it is aware of its movement?
In direct perception, our thinking changes profoundly. Then there is no inside and outside, no sense of a separate self, only the flowing motion of what is actually happening. You feel the ecstatic joy of being alive. Then there is no you and the world. You are the world.
In the last chapter, I summarize what we can do right now to solve the world crisis.
To find the root cause of the world crisis and eliminate it we need new tools, such as insight, intelligence, attention, and direct awareness. They transform the way we see the world.
To see the world means that you feel you are the world. This insight totally changes the meaning of the word 'individual'. When there is no separate self, the individual is one with the whole.