Around 2000 years ago, some carpenter from a small town in an outcast tribe started a movement and didn’t even bother to label it. He went around for three years doing some inexplicable stuff no one had seen before- so they called it miracles. His so-called miracles healed sick people, the blind, the lepers, and the deformed. He did some teachings, too- practical yet fundamental stuff. But, perhaps, his greatest impact/miracle was his ability to accept the castoff and the misfortunate, the ones no one else in society wanted to deal with, associate, accompany with, or tolerate. The outcasts he reached out to were not just the poor, the diseased, the criminal, the widows, the hookers, and so on. He received anyone who needed him without judgment or prejudice. At the end of a three-year campaign, he was nailed to the cross, and the very people whom he helped for three years came to be the spectators. Gradually, in the following years and decades, some other dudes showed up in the scene, labelled his movement, and organized it into a religious framework with some “newly-aged” doctrines mixing the old books and Greco-Roman mythologies.
I’m not a religious person, but I have studied the man and the background of his tribe and the whatnot before and after him. From what I see, he gave back more than he ever received in his short life. He addressed every fundamental flaw in his time’s social, religious, and cultural infrastructure, such as social and economic inequality, gender inequality, and education and healthcare shortcomings. The examples he set and the life he demonstrated manifested someone who just wanted to heal whatever he could see needing healing. In three years of his active involvement, he did more than you could expect from a human being.
The developed world, prominently North American society, has welcomed and embraced the culture of the good-bad vibe in the past few decades. In societies where privilege and access to all fundamental human rights are taken lightly and for granted, in other words, entitlement and customization to what is given have become the underpinning of the cultural norm, people have learned to reject what they call a bad vibe and drawn to what they feel the good-vibe.
This characteristic immaturity in the fabric of the culture has grown in ideology and spread in scale to the point that it is tearing itself apart. In physics, the current mathematical frameworks claim that space will continue to expand until the space-time fabric tears itself apart, which is precisely what we are doing to our societies. As a result, the idea of reaching out and helping others is becoming more and more foreign, especially to those who have the capability to help.
In many religious and new-age circles, the tendency to associate with like-minded and same-vibe people is so great that they have become symbols/means of exclusion. You often hear the phrase, “I don’t want to hang out with them; I sense a bad vibe.”. Either the new-age ones don’t want to hang out with people of other-vibes, or the religious ones always are after some kind of conversion.- the exclusiveness of interactions has become the characteristic norm of our societies.
Why have we descended so low? It is clear how; it’s just a natural progression on the path of least resistance. But my question is, why? In societies where we have everything at our disposal to help each other, we have resolved to a binary conclusion of either inclusion or exclusion. Did Jesus or thousands like him give a shit whether someone was broke or depressed or had good vibes or bad vibes or whatnot? They used their resources and reached out. They kept it simple, and it worked.
We have everything we need to reduce the gaps and close them. The gaps that separate us economically, socially, and religiously. The state of maturity of a society is a function of its functionality as a healthy organism. The entire societal body is suffering from these carcinogenic and growing gaps, and every one of us is capable of doing something about it and collectively healing it.
Many of us are privileged enough to turn ourselves into instruments of healing, not to assume being an instrument of healing; there is a huge distinction between these two. We can receive the world and give to it more than we receive from it. This is the very essence of personal and societal maturity.
Payman Janbakhs, Ph.D.