Denial, best precursor to change?

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the reluctance of people to believe in climate change, prompts one to consider the deeper causes.

As many cancer patients who've recovered often admit, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. Why? Because it forced them to seriously take stock and change.

To understand this process it's important to realise some fundamentals of life: namely, we're all interconnected, and we're necessarily "pre-aware" of impending events and outcomes on some level of our awareness. We can't not be, at least in intuitive terms, as anything else would require weird, nonsense disconnects (that I've explained in more detail elsewhere before).

So that begs the question, "why would we ignore the messages that we're receiving to give ourselves cancer?" Answer: Mostly it is habit and cultural belief-systems that "force" us to ignore the subtle warning signals. But quite ofren, ignoring the signals lets us enter more deeply into 'danger territory', which, when faced, gives us the life-or-death impetus to really go for it and break through old habits and beliefs. Friends, family, neighbours and work colleagues who previously may have inhibited change, become of secondary, passing importance. Their opinions matter little, for now it's an intensely personal matter of one's own survival, a substantial matter of life-or-death.

Some, in the face of the dire need for change, simply give up and die. Some, through medical intervention, survive, but continue along old pathways that see them developing 'recurring' symptoms and disease.

But those who do survive, change and flourish frequently recognise the value of the challenge they allowed develop through having repeatedly ignored the intuitive signals that (as explained elsewhere) simply cannot be absent or entirely foreign to us.

I sense we're doing the same on a mass cultural scale.

We'll deliberately ignore the warning signals until we're well and truly up against it, then, and only then will we dig deep and find new solutions to old ways.

Only then will we move beyond old mechanical-world models to realise we live within an amazingly personal participatory universe.

Only then will we find the impetus to break through old traditions that hold us back.

Only then, it seems, will we break into a new, creative, rambunctious, vibrant, egalitarian and fulfilling reality.

Either that, or the human race is finished.