Have you noticed how history repeats? Like a record stuck in a groove, we seem locked in a never-ending cycle of wars, atrocities, genocides, rape, pillage, murder, corruption and all kinds of abuse – events we soon thereafter label as ‘history’. Despite the devastating results of all this calamity and chaos – much of which impacts us for generations – we refuse to learn, doggedly creating and re-creating the very conditions that allow the devastation to not only flourish, but replicate and mutate like a virus across the planet.

 

After these events have passed, we either allow ourselves only the merest acquaintance with the facts, or immerse ourselves in the ‘story’ of them – or, we write them off as myths, all without considering what they are showing us and what they truly mean. We ignore the reminders we receive every day and sometimes every minute in our daily news. We switch off the TV and make a cup of tea, we wring our hands in despair and hope it all goes away, or that someone or something will change things – or we busy ourselves by starting a cause, by setting out to find a solution (but never the answer) to our woes.

 

Atlantis is one such story, an event now largely relegated to the realms of fantasy. Yet the experiment that was Atlantis was all too real. It represented a time when the mind was a weapon, when the supremacy of one race, of one skin tone over another, was an everyday reality.

 

But wait: was Atlantis really only a ‘once upon a time’? Or is that era, that reality, our everyday reality, right here right now?

 

At the time of writing, the Christchurch massacre had just taken place. It was one of many such occurrences that has shown us, prior and since, that the Atlantean consciousness of supremacy is alive and kicking, and in this case, on our very shores.

 

Yet what do we do with such information? The Christchurch incident, the product of a lone shooter, was by some dismissed with a ‘he wasn’t from here so it’s not about us’ stance. For others, it provoked the desire to put an end to intolerance by creating new sets of rules or interventions for doing so. Some of these suggestions were sensible, yet in truth they were little more than tiny bandages attempting to staunch the flow of blood from a gaping wound.

 

We first need to understand that this event – and those like it that occur every day in every country around the world – stem from the beliefs we hold about ourselves and others. We need to know we are all wounded, acting out our unacknowledged hurts as we limp around, abusing ourselves and others as we go.

 

We fail to realise we have each created our own Atlantis, a virtual continent of harm – now deeply submerged as the pain we refuse to let see the light of day – even though our own actions show us, with faithful repetition, that we are locked in a perpetual cycle of personal and planetary misery. 

 

 

With every breaking day, we avoid the opportunity
that arises with each fresh sunrise to address what lies
beneath, missing the opportunity to relocate ourselves anew.

 

 

Instead we wonder why we have disaster at every level – global, national, local, in our communities, our families and within ourselves, and in nature. Or, we think everything is perfect in our little corner of the world, studiously avoiding the ugly truth. Whichever way we choose, we consistently and constantly ignore the signals these collective and individual myths, these truths, are sending us.

 

Failing to collectively learn what was shown to us so clearly with Atlantis, we remain so wilfully unaware of what we have been creating, re-creating and magnifying since then – so wilfully and slavishly devoted to what we think rather than what we feel – that another correction that reflects to us the magnitude of what we have created might be exactly what is needed to get us to stop.

 

Yet we have – often quite literally at our fingertips – the exact tools we need to avert disaster, with which to extract ourselves from the comfort of another cup of tea and begin to arrest the momentums we perpetuate: the messages we receive from everyday life.

 

Yes, the dysfunction we live in our relationships, in our families and at work; the disharmonies, illnesses and diseases that show up in our bodies every day are the reflections that tell us something is not working and that we are not living in a way that honours who we all are. They are the tools we can take hold of, examine and understand in a way that will tangibly demonstrate to us whether or not we are on the right track.

 

We are offered endless opportunities to examine what’s going wrong and ask why, to understand our suffering at the individual level, to take responsibility for it all. And it is quite simple – we can stop the personal and global race towards another Atlantis and make the corrections for ourselves, and everybody.

 

It’s not ‘all good’. Our private and collective tragedies play out every day, with every cycle ‘round the sun’, and will continue to do so until we stop and change ­– or are stopped and changed.