We Are Living in the Age of Falling Walls

Written on September 3, 2006

If you look long and hard at the world around you, you soon realize that the walls we persistently try to erect are now falling at our feet.

We build these walls to create boundaries of protection. Through our rules, laws, and social conventions, we form mental boundaries that are meant to dissuade people from committing dangerous acts. Through our inhibited conversations and facial masks, we form emotional boundaries that are meant to guard our hearts, which we believe to be too fragile. And through our various security measures, we form physical boundaries that are meant to defend against the powerful, “evil” forces that we imagine to be knocking at our door.

We develop these barriers in order to shield us from the dangers of life. Some barriers are aimed at containing the potent forces of nature. Other more personal barriers are attempts to protect ourselves from ourselves. And finally, we also have social barriers that we think will keep us separate from other people we so ignorantly call our enemies. But you only ever have enemies where you have not taken the necessary steps to develop allies.

Inevitably, the barriers that we consistently choose to create will have to come down because they are barriers of delusion, based on the illusion that we can maintain our separateness from others. Ultimately, we are not separate from others. So we can either continue trying to avoid the challenges that come with uniting, or we can do what we will eventually have to do anyways: learn to truly appreciate our differences and form real, substantial, and committed relationships.

This choice is even more important now because we are living at a time when the social trend of unity is blazing forward regardless of our individual decisions. And as the barriers come down, we will be forced to embrace our commonality or fade into our ignorance.

Simply look at the signs around you, and you can clearly see the process unfolding. For example, notice how airports are continuously attempting to create more sophisticated barriers of security in a hopeless frenzy. But in the end, you can be sure that, with every security innovation, the terrorists will eventually get smarter. We will never create a perfect security system because every system contains undetected loopholes. Similarly, we are also extending these baseless boundaries by searching for terrorists around the world with a blatant disregard for the fact that every capture will simply prompt a new recruit.

Do you remember the good old days, still prevalent in some areas of our country, when you felt secure leaving your door unlocked? If so, then you know that we do not have a problem with our physical security. The problem is in our psychology. Barriers are only meant to be short-term solutions to our much deeper issues. In fact, their purpose is to give us the time to resolve these deeper issues. And if we do not treat the source, sooner or later, the problem will simply become smarter than our band-aid protections. Right now, we just happen to live at a time when we can no longer only treat the symptoms. This time, life will force us to treat the source. Our ineffectual attempts at artificial boundaries are going down.

Another example of this trend toward falling walls surfaced on the video website, YouTube. One of the most popular recent videos demonstrated how the locks on your doors can no longer keep anyone out of your home. Viewed by over 300,000 people in its first day, this video shows how any ordinary person can break into the most sophisticated lock systems in the world within minutes!

We can look to our children for yet another example. Currently, there are laws that prohibit teenagers from driving with their teenage friends in the car. But instead of giving into these barriers, children often choose to get smarter by having their friends ride along in the car trunk instead! You see, the problem was never in our laws. The problem is in how we raise our children. The problem is in the kind of role models we choose to be for them.

Yes, the protective walls of this world are falling like a series of cascading dominoes, and this trend will only accelerate in the coming months and years. In fact, you might be feeling its effects in your personal life. You might notice that your old emotional defenses can no longer keep you from having to confront deeper, more sensitive issues. You might have experienced your righteous ideas opening to include the ideas of others. And you might have even experienced, witnessed, or heard about some kind of physical break-in. The list can go on. These examples are simply examples of the smaller, more personal parts of the developing global trends.

On this more global level, we will also have to learn that we cannot create physical boundaries to keep immigrants out of our country. We will have to learn that we cannot create buffer zones to prevent Israel and Lebanon from fighting. We will have to learn that we cannot use economic sanctions to prevent tools of war from proliferating. Instead, we must vigorously and proactively pursue deep and extensive dialogue to build trusting relationships that form the basis for truly mutually-beneficial agreements. Not mandates. Agreements.

If we choose to continue on our current path instead, we will inevitably make decisions and take actions that will lead to even more destructive outcomes. We must begin treating our external problems at their source, and their source is within us, in our perceptions of scarcity and separateness.

Every revolution has been founded in our sense of separateness and our experience of scarcity. It has come from our unwillingness to share with each other, our unwillingness to brave the difficult path of moving beyond our current scarcities toward new technologies that would create abundance, and our unwillingness to unite in the common causes of our lives and our world.

Our current falling walls are simply part of that larger process of revolution, which occurs about every 250 years. And during every revolution, there have always been antecedent signs that signaled the need for a change of thinking, feeling and doing. The last time this process unfolded, we created the French-Indian War, the Seven Years’ War, and the American Revolutionary War.

I am sure the people who lived through those times had enough signs to give them ample time to develop enough humility and courage to work out their differences peacefully. Unfortunately, they did not seem to listen as well as they could have. And I certainly hope and believe that we can do better.

To learn more about these ideas and what you can do about it,

you can purchase the book Thriving at the Brink of Disaster at:

www.inspiringrevolutions.com/thriving.php

To begin applying the ideas in this article to your own life, answer the questions below:

- When in your past have you let go of an emotional boundary that had been protecting your emotional well-being so that you could then create a deeper, more fulfilling connection?

- What caused you to create that emotional boundary in the first place? What prevented you from letting it go earlier? And what did it take for you to finally let it go?

- When in your past have you let go of a mental boundary that had been protecting your ideas or beliefs so that you could then embrace a more progressive idea or achieve a deeper understanding of life?

- What caused you to create that mental boundary in the first place? What prevented you from letting it go earlier? And what did it take for you to finally let it go?

- When in your past have you let go of a physical boundary that had been protecting your body or your possessions so that you could then use your body more fully or share your possessions with others?

- What caused you to create that physical boundary in the first place? What prevented you from letting it go earlier? And what did it take for you to finally let it go?

- What mental, emotional, and physical boundaries do you now have?

- How do scarcity, separateness, and distrust place into these boundaries? How can you rise above your distrust and lay down your boundaries in order to build trust and open up the possibilities of union?

- What possibilities exist for you and others by laying down these boundaries and having the courage and openness to work together and accept your different ways?

- What desired emotions, what new ideas and beliefs, and what new levels of abundance will be possible once you lay down your boundaries? How will that new sense of self and that new lease on life lead you to more of what you truly desire in the end?

- What challenging choices can you make and what challenging actions will you take to start the process of openness and change right now?