I have a few thoughts I'd like to share about the past week and a half, where we have witnessed a remarkable rampage, where a particular image has been pushed forward before our eyes again and again, until for many it almost began to feel self-evident - yes, nearly inevitable - that the USA stood with its great war machine switched on and ready, prepared to turn itself against Denmark, Europe, NATO and everything else we associate with stability and order in the world.
It was an insane image, but an effective one of its kind, because it wasn't served up as hysteria, but as something that slowly slid into consciousness, little bite by little bite, wrapped in headlines, expert statements and selectively chosen "facts", which together pointed in one particular direction, until the notion took shape and settled as an inner truth -
We're going to war. With the USA... Because now they've become the evil ones!!"
What's interesting is not just that this image could arise, but how easily it could be drawn down over our lens and view, almost imperceptibly, like a colored filter that changes the entire landscape without making a fuss about itself. Suddenly old alliances began to look threatening, familiar power-political mechanisms to be interpreted as aggression, and ordinary great-power politics to take on the character of moral decay.
Not because reality had changed dramatically, but because the story about it had done so, and because repetition slowly made the notion more real than the sober connections it ought to have been held up against.
Let me stop here. And switch tracks.
But hold that thought - I'll return to it.
For there is something wild, almost disturbing, about being human, which we rarely stop and look directly in the eye.
Namely that we don't live in the world as it is, but in the world our mind ceaselessly creates for us, moment by moment, layer by layer, interpretation by interpretation, until it feels just as real and immovable as gravity itself. We walk around with an invisible architecture in our heads, an inner landscape, which shapes everything we see, everything we feel, and everything we believe is true - and in this sense the human being is not merely a creature that senses reality, but a creature that is continuously co-creator of it.
The old texts say that man is made in God's image, and for too long people have imagined this image as an external form - a caricature of the divine reduced to a figure on a throne somewhere above the clouds.
But the image points elsewhere, deeper inward, toward consciousness itself. For we have been given three powers, which are both gifts and burdens, namely the capacity to observe, the capacity to assign meaning and the capacity to create, and with these three a human being can build an entire universe inside its own mind. What we think becomes what we feel. What we feel becomes what we see. What we see becomes what we believe. And what we believe becomes the reality we move around in and call "our life".
This has nothing to do with modern slogans about manifestation or self-aggrandizing illusions, but is a meeting point where psychology, neuroscience, spirituality and metaphysics quietly give each other their hands. We can roll our eyes when someone speaks of "my truth", and it's understandable, for there IS something self-deceptive about the thought that truth is merely a private matter of taste - but what's uncomfortable is that everyone actually lives in a reality that is true for them. The Mormon mother in Utah, the Muslim father in Cairo, the Buddhist monk in Nepal and the atheist researcher in London have all had moments, experiences and coincidences, which for them confirm that the world hangs together EXACTLY AS they understand it - not because they have found the whole truth, but because they have found a truth that fits their conditioning, their upbringing, their wounds, their victories and their hopes.
Most of what we call our convictions, our politics, our fears and our religious notions, was laid into us long before we had any chance to choose for ourselves. Family, culture, social circles, algorithms, traumas, teachers, heroes and enemies weave together a net, which shapes our worldview, before we even understand what truth is.
As it has been said, the unconscious will steer your life until you make it conscious, and you will call it fate, while in reality it is merely a script you have never read, but nevertheless are performing in.
But here lies the decisive dividing line, which our time often forgets, namely that something can feel deeply true and simultaneously be deeply destructive.
Some realities lead to love, responsibility and stability, while others lead to dependency, bitterness, chaos and slow self-destruction. That a reality is experienced as true from within, doesn't automatically make it healthy.
This is where societies split, cultures collide, religions become aggressive, and politics loses its humanity, because people begin to believe that if my reality feels true, then yours must be a threat, without understanding that we all wander around in dreams, painted by our past, our pain and our particular way of seeing the world.
But there exists an antidote - simple in its formulation but demanding in its practice, namely to let people have their reality, as long as it doesn't destroy yours.
Respect doesn't presuppose agreement, and compassion doesn't require that one abandons judgment. One need neither validate every notion nor call the unhealthy healthy, but one can let others live their lives, while oneself beginning - consciously - to write the script for one's own life, rather than living on autopilot.
When one looks back at the oldest spiritual traditions, from eastern wisdom streams to early Christianity and the Stoic thinkers, there runs a quiet common recognition through them all, namely that we are fragments of the divine, experiencing creation from within.
We don't merely live in reality - we are co-authors of, and co-creators of it.
Most never discover it and live their entire lives in a script that others have written, but once one sees it, once one understands that the world one walks around in is to a large degree something one is oneself helping to shape, then something changes fundamentally.
The fear of others' realities releases its grip, the need to attack them disappears, and one begins instead to take responsibility for one's own. For thoughts are the drawing, words are the commands, and actions are what gives form and weight.
You are not trapped in reality - you are in the process of building it, and once you take ownership of it, there opens a possibility to live more consciously, more truly and more wholly, than most ever reach to imagine.
And then back to where we came from.
For in the past week and a half, quite deliberately, an attempt has been made to take over precisely this process in you - and in us. Work has been done to plant a narrative so deeply, that it slowly drew The Human Being away from itself, away from its own inner compass, and instead took possession of thoughts, words and actions.
Not by raw force, but by repetition, simplification and morally charged images, which made it easy to feel certain and difficult to remain open. In this way many were animated to believe that they knew THE TRUTH so completely, that other people - their own countrymen - their own friends - could suddenly be identified as enemies or traitors, merely because they saw things differently or refused to be drawn along by the same narrative.
It is a life-threatening mechanism, not because it always ends in violence, but because it begins with something far more subtle, namely the separation of the human being from itself. When the inner dialogue is replaced by an external narrative, and when nuances and hesitation are interpreted as weakness - or disloyalty - then The Free Human Being slowly ceases to be free.
It becomes instead a tool, an echo, a voice that repeats what it has already heard, without any longer asking where it comes from, or what it does to the soul.
One uses this mechanism - I hope - because one knows it can create fellowship, mobilization and gathering, a quick "us" against a clear "them"... but in reality it does the exact opposite.
For genuine fellowship doesn't arise by uniformity of consciousness, but by people who stand firm in themselves and therefore can meet without fear. When the narrative moves the human being away from its own center, it replaces responsibility with belonging and conscience with loyalty, and in that moment the fellowship begins to crumble from within, even though from the outside it may look strong and united.
This is precisely why this form of narrative power is so effective and so dangerous at the same time. It doesn't speak first to reason, but to identity, to the need "to belong and to stand on the right side of history". And once that grip has taken hold, it becomes almost impossible to speak about proportions, context and long-term consequences, for every objection is experienced as an attack, not on an idea, but on the fellowship itself.
What ought to have been a shared conversation between adult people, who share a country, a history and a responsibility for each other, thus risks transforming itself into a moral confrontation, where the one who hesitates becomes subject to suspicion, and the one who questions becomes shamed. And precisely there, in this slide, one can see how narratives not only describe reality, but begin to create it, in a way that splits more than it gathers, and which leaves the human being farther from itself, than when it all began.
That is what I want to warn against.
Quite clearly and without reservation.
That - and those who lead in this way - are not leading you where you think. If it is freedom - and freedom of conscience - you are after.
Good evening, friends. ❤
