Are We Going Mad?

Gary Gorrow

At the age of 6 Gary Gorrow embarked on a personal quest to discover the true meaning of life and learn the deeper purpose to why we are all here. His mother would often find him sitting on the floor of his room looking out the window in deep contemplation. This search led him across the world to teachers and great life experiences. Today, Gary is one of Australia’s foremost vedic meditation teachers and a leader in the next generation of Self growth experts. He dedicates himself solely to working with individuals to maximise performance and achieve success in all areas of their personal and professional life.

 

Are we going mad?

This is something that I’ve contemplated for a great deal of my life. I’ve been fascinated brought from a very young age all about the human condition and I’ve made many wonderful discoveries and realizations. And I’ve discovered that we’re not going mad, we’ve actually gone mad. We were never sane to begin with.

But what is happening is we are awakening collectively. There’s a massive shift in human consciousness that is happening and if you’re on the planet right now, you’re going to evolve whether you want to or not. You can do it electively or you can do it by nature’s force of hand. So I’m a big fan of moving with the tide rather than swimming against it so one of the things you’re gonna learn at the end of the night is for some simple but very vital things that you can do to evolve yourself in this world, in this short epoch of time that you’re in the human body.

So anyway, on to the theme of “Are we going mad?”, the long and the short of it is we got that. We are totally mad, we’ve all gone crackers.

So how do we awaken?

But I always look for evidence, I don’t like to say yes that is so… I’ve never been one to embrace something without running it through a process. So what I did when I looked at the theme of madness, I thought “are we mad?” and I thought well yes, but what else?

Are we insane?

Are we stupid?

Are we ignorant?

We’re all those things. We’re not one thing, we’re a conglomeration of all these qualities. So just let me get this working and let me begin. Beautiful. It’s amazing. I’ve got the slideshow on this phone. Isn’t that cool?

Are we getting mad? Yes, madness is extremely foolish or being ill-advised. In a frenzied mental or physical state. You have to say 95 percent of the planet would fit that model.

Are we stupid? Lacking intelligence or common sense. Dazed and unable to think clearly.

How bout insane? In a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior or social interaction. Seriously mentally ill. Seriously. And this is the problem with insanity because no one who is insane ever believe themselves to be so. And how do we determine someone to be insane? We just go by whatever the commons standard is and if you don’t fit that then you’re insane. That’s how it works. And in medieval times when they believe certain people are insane like witches they would subject them to certain tests to determine whether they were. They would wrap, put them in water and drown them and if they floated to the top they’re insane, if they sunk they weren’t. Great test.

So what we really don’t know is how deeply disturbed we are as human beings because we’re all suffering from the same condition. We’re all suffering from the same problem. We’re all swimming inside the same state. So what we need to do is look for the evidence so I consulted some very wise individuals and asked what they thought of the human experience. And Einstein said that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity and he wasn’t so sure about the universe. Absolutely certain that he was too busy.

Then, I consulted the Dalai lama and wanted to hear his thoughts on what he thought was the most curious thing in the world and he said, “Man and women, and Russian women”, he said, “because man will basically sacrifice his health to make money and then what it’ll do is sacrifice his money to recuperate his health and then he’ll live in a terrible state of anxiety about the future so much so that he won’t live in the present and then he’ll die having not lived at all”.

And then there was Martin Luther King, he said that “Our material power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men and this is really the state of the world”.

So what I wanted to look further was what is the evidence of our time. We’ve been gifted with this absolutely exquisite physiology. The human brain is the most divinely credit thing on earth. It’s really the crown jewel of the entire universe and we use five percent of it. Is that normal?

That’s common, that’s not normal.

So we really need to look at why’s that that we suffer from chronic brain failure. Our heads could really be that big if we aren’t using that much of our brain. We’ve got this massive kind of gift inside us and there’s ways to actually invoke its potential. Modern life is not designed to bring enlightenment, it’s not setup. The design of the universe is that everything should thrive, everything should flourish. Heaven is encoded into everything in this universe. The problem is human beings are like a wild card in the deck of creation; everything else is governed by the laws of nature; human beings, however, are governed by their intellect and this usually send some serious distortions within the intellect which create messy problems in our lives. We’re gonna address that soon. But human beings have the potential to live heaven on earth.

The vedic view and I’ve really come from that vedic lineage which has given us yoga, ayurveda, all the wonderful systems in Indian philosophy, unity, wonderful music, maths, architecture, these all have their origins in the vedic system. I was very fortunate to become a student of it at a very young age. The vedic view is that heaven exists but you need to culture your nervous system to be able to deliver that to you. Stress and chronic brain failure do not elicit a heavenly blissful experience so there’s things that we need to do to transform our nervous system and really get in the driver’s seat. Because we live in an age of inducement and if we keep going along with societies patterns and increasing weapons of mass destruction we’d never actually going to meet our potential, we’ll just continue to struggle. So one of the things we need to do is really understand the power of of the brain. There’s something which is far more powerful than that and that’s the mind and there’s something which equips is that which is much more supreme than that and that’s your spirit, that’s your being and we’re gonna get to all this. But let’s just stick with the evidence for now. This place still exists on earth and for me that’s a sure sign that people are demonstrating stupid, moronic, idiotic, imbecilic behavior. We’ll know we’re in an age of enlightenment when there are no golden arches on this planet. That’ll be the defining evidence, really, the destruction it causes to the environment, to our bodies… horrific. Beer – there’s more liters of alcohol consumed on a planet than there are people, that’s not good. But this has become… Wine if it’s non-alcoholic, we’ll say wine is fantastic because it’s got anti-oxidants in it, so does an apple, so does grapefruit juice, so does a piece lettuce. So the antioxidants they’re everywhere, they’re not just in wine. It’s got all the brain killing chemicals in it too. But if you wanna drink a wine, bless it first. People still do that, we know how bad it is but we’re just kinda still smoking. Fortunately, we don’t have to passively do it any longer. Hallelujah. This would’ve once be a room full of cloud, clouded smoke.

Another, more evidence for idiotic behavior comes when human being step into the role of creator and manipulate what mother nature took billions of years to perfect. Genetic engineering is something which is going which is horrific. I’m drawing your attention to this because I’m on it of the view that if enough people become aware of something, that creates a shift within the collective. It’s not meant to highlight all the negativity of the world, there’s enough of that that goes on. You know newspapers and television stations are dedicated to highlighting that activity. I’m not here to do that, I’m just here to create awareness. That’s an important thing. We’ll get on to the good stuff later. Another thing that baffles me that humans do with food is that we spray all these chemicals on it. These chemicals are poisonous chemicals; we spray it on the food and then we eat the food. When you look at a broccoli you can have up to forty different chemicals on it. Apples are sprayed sometimes a dozen times before it gets to your mouth so we need to be careful what we’re doing to the food and what it is that we’re putting into the body because we are what we eat.

This is another wonderful demonstration of stupidity: is we live on an earth where people are investing more money in weaponry than we are in education, than we are in health care, than we are in things that promote peace. If we still live by this view that we can kill our way to peace, that’s just the most imbecilic concept. It’s like screwing someone and, you know, sleeping with someone, having sex and think it’s going to restore virginity. It’ll never do that. It’s not possible. So wars are perpetuated by ignorance.

John Lennon, he put up a wonderful billboard once and he upset a lot of different people in his time because he was a voice. He was voice for change, he was voice to challenge the hierarchy of power and he put up a wonderful poster at Time Square New York that said, “What if we had a war and no one turned up?” and this is what we have, we have a war, we have a life that is being set up that we are all unconsciously upholding. We’re participating in the madness. What if we didn’t turn up? The whole thing will change, the whole dynamic with the world would shift. It’s because one person does something and then a one of the concepts or the fundamental ideas of vedic science is you become what you see. Consciousness has this habit of becoming whatever it’s perceiving so children learn through osmosis.

Every human being basically gets woven into the fabric of society and inherits a belief system, fault patterns, mental conditioning. But what if we were to challenge what we see and step away from it? If then, that would give permission for others to do the same and you would start to notice that whole thing would collapse, would break down. We are more powerful than we think — spiritually of course — but just in terms of how we can affect change in our world. We tend to think that it’s bigger than me, I can do nothing about it. We tend to think that governments have the power or institutions have the power. I have to tell you that that is not the case at all; it’s when the many actually acquiesce or give up their power that then they’re powerless but the government’s, excuse my french, are shit scared of people waking up. I had a friend who was intimately connected with the royal family and a political family they were, I won’t say which country but basically they’re a president of a country. And there was a conversation that happened between my friend and this family and they said — you know he’s pretty conscious guy — and he said, “ Don’t you think that your government will be well served by investing in programs that awaken your people and do these things?” and they said, “We don’t want that. If we do that, we can’t govern and rule and we’ll be voted out of office”. And this is what happens. They are in power because we think that they have to be.

I’ve been working on a few different global initiatives and what we’ve always found is that we need funding to really make something happen. And then you go “Okay what makes something worth funding?” and you think well, you have to have a product or you have to have some company that gives the service and if that appeals to a lot of people, that company will exist. So the companies are dependent on the people. If the people suddenly thought, “Alright, banks a great but we’re just gonna change the model and that we’re actually gonna print our own currency”. The banks will be out of business and these things can all happen but we don’t believe they can.

Anyway, we’d move on from war to this. Another thing that we do daily which kinda makes me sick is we put these fossil fuels in our cars. Why the hell are we doing that when we have an inexhaustible supply of solar energy? We have wind, we have geothermal, we have water, we even have zero point energy which Nikola Tesla tapped into many, many, many years ago. Probably the greatest invented that has ever walked the face of the earth. But his research was unfortunately funded by JP Morgan who owned all the patents and when Nikola Tesla showed that he could tap into zero point energy and transmit energy through space just through the , JP Morgan said, “Where do I stick the ? It’s not profitable”, so he was burned. But a time is coming and it’s coming very soon when we will cease to use coal, when will cease to use petrol. It’s going to happen in our lifetime partly because basically peak oil’s over, we’re on the downhill and we won’t have this stuff but the technology is there, exist. And the problem with human beings is that we don’t generally do anything until we’ve run out of other options. You have to work til the eleventh hour til everything’s bad enough til you know there’s actually no more petrol then we’ll go “okay now we should look at something else”. But if we can all start to awaken to these concepts, it’ll begin to spread like wildfire. This notion circulating in the collective starts to promote that sort of thinking and then we see it start to manifest to be reflected in industry.

Another problem that we have is that our education system is based on a very old model, it’s a hundred years old. To reckon the world would be a little bit different now than it was a hundred years old. We sent people to school and these kids come out and they know nothing about health, they know nothing about their own mind, how it works, their own consciousness, how to nourish relationships, how to artfully live and exist on the planet, how to communicate, how to be generous and kind. We don’t learn anything valuable in school. I found it absolutely torturous. So education obviously needs to change. And Aristotle, he said something so beautiful, he said “Educating the mind without educating the heart is actually no education at all”. So we need heart-based education and this is what’s Soul Session is doing, filling the massive void in the market.

And this is just too another example of stupidity, this guy got into office not once but twice. And then we voted him out, we put Barack Obama and the even stupider thing is that we thought things would change. And what those political people do is just reflect the average state of consciousness of the people and they enslave to governing according to the deserving power, to the intelligence and the conscious level of the people. They can do nothing other than that because if they do anything other than that what will happen is that we’ll vote them out or you basically have a political system that is governed by power and force and people have no freedom. Can’t have that anyway, they got him voted in twice. The idiot. Anyway, another thing that human beings do is we consume a lot. We live as if we have an infinite supply of matter. We don’t. We live in a finite planet with finite resources yet we consume far more than our share. Do you know that eighty percent of the world’s resources are consumed by less than 20 percent of this population? Scary. So if everyone live like that we would not need one earth but two. So are we going mad? Is the world insane? Yes, definitely. What do we need to do? Often it’s basically identifying something and doing the opposite. Wonderful vedic principle, just basically do the opposite. Really simple. We’re consuming lots what do we do? Learn to be sustainable. Consume less, live simply. All these things. We do this. Species on our planet are becoming extinct. And there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of species every single year. We owe it to those creatures to care for them, to love them and to understand that we don’t own this planet, we share it. It’s not ours to govern and rule, it’s really ours to nurture.

Another thing that people do, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, if we go in the pursuit of money and I did it for a long time and then I realize that it’s just the stupidest thing. I had this idea that if I was able to get enough money or just in general, I think we all suffer from that delusion, if we can just get enough digits in the bank what we will then experience is a freedom and a bliss and just a lightness to our life. And so I think a lot of people do believe that this is why people work about 60 hours a week. Chasing a shadow, a false target. I’ve had the great fortune in my career to mentor millionaires, billionaires, sit down with people who have got a lot of digits, who’ve got a lot of matter and what I found is that they have an equal number, what if not, more troubles, than the people that are poor. I couldn’t believe it. It was such a revelation for me. Yeah, we don’t need to do that, what we need to do is go after what the heart tells us to. If you go after what you love it’ll translate into wonderful wealth and affluence. If everyone on the planet was to do what they love, imagine what the world would be like. Imagine what the atmosphere would be like. But we do things because we feel we have to and this is just a disease, it’s a disease within the thinking mind, within the structure of the intellect. You don’t have to do anything, you have to do what you love. That’s the universe’s commandment to you: do what you love. That’s how you’re getting freedom in this world and with passion and purpose flooding all the benefits. And if you don’t get the money, who cares? You’ve been living in bliss anyway.

The most wealthy person I’ve ever met was a man by the name of Wer Meshwa in India and he was a tiny, skinny, little, saintly man. I kind of doubt I’d end up looking like him when I went finished with India. Before I went there I was 65 kilos and when I came back I was 55. But as my masti used to tell me “thin in body but big in consciousness”. I was willing to make that sacrifice. But anyway, Wer Meshwa was a very beautiful man and it we just happened upon each other from the banks of the Ganges River one day. And I could just feel in his presence that he wanted for nothing and he had literally nothing. He had little bag that contained a sacred text and some photos of his master in it and that was it. And he needed nothing. And this man just sort of walked around India. Although, in that continent there’s a little bit of a system where you fund those people to continue to do that because what they’re doing is supporting the spiritual fabric of the country so they’re supported, could give them homes and money and food. And so I did the same thing but as I handed him some money, he kinda looked at me and went “What’s that? Why do I need that?” and I… “You need that for food”. But what we need most in life is not food, money, shelter; these things are actually a given in our culture. No one in this room, and I could bet on this, has never gone 24 hours without food. You might have electively done that but no one has ever not had access to food. No one has never had access to a house, a bed, roof, shelter. We don’t suffer from any of this on our culture but what we do suffer from is the stuff that we genuinely need. We’ve gone from survival, we need to actually go into those higher spiritual planes and awaken that in our lives because if we don’t, we suffer and that’s why people are really suffering in our culture because they feel so disconnected. That’s the greatest cause of all human misery: we disconnect from ourselves then we disconnect from each other, we disconnect from our planet, we disconnect from our purpose and with that disconnection comes all these symptoms that you see before you. So how do you remedy that? Connect. We’ll get to that in a second.

The other thing that people tend to be doing is just moving too quickly. Life just moves too fast. I know one person that has maids, servants, several PA’s, staff and and still her life was a hundred miles an hour… so busy. I’m thinking what does it take to stop? What does it take to be still in our culture? It takes a decision. You have to want to do that and you have to get off the treadmill and know that’s possible and know that your life will flow in whatever direction you’re guiding it to. And if you’re just caught in the static of life, you’ll just remain there. You never stop. So we’re always intent on arriving somewhere. One of the key things to realize is that you’re there now. We have to drop the idea that the future is better than now, that there’s another place, time or something else waiting for you that’s better than what you have right now. That’s a total delusion. Because if we have that idea, we’re always gonna be on a quest. We’re always going to be seeking but we’re never actually going to realize. We have to understand that what you have or what you need you already have, you possess. It’s all inside you. Within your own consciousness. And that’s what we really are seeking in life — is a state. That’s kinda what all my researches told me is that ultimately when you boil what human beings want, they want an experience. That’s what we all want. Well I think I need to work hard, I’m gonna make loads of money so I can have a house. And why do you want a house? So you can have the experience of being in a house or owning a house but the problem is it’s dearly bought because you’ve spent 30 years and you work your butt off and then by the time you get into the house you’re spent. Your adrenals are burnt out and then you get cancer and you die and that’s it. You know, so we need to enjoy the process and the process is where the joy lives. If we think that it’s in the end point, the end is so finite, it is so small, you think I’m here, I wanna get here, you get there and then what? That moment is so over. And then what you’ll find your mind will project itself away from the now again and go “okay that was good” and we got a bit of oxytocin and then we felt a little bit of elevation when we acquire that thing or achieve that, “I need that again” and then we go on another quest. That might be a five-minute quest to the fridge or it could be a five-year quest to, you know, being a part of a film or something like that but what I’ve learned is it is the process that we must endeavor to become one with and to relish in. And it’s the experience of fulfillment and connection that we all actually crave but it just gets disguised and we identify with the projection rather than actually the source. And so that’s what we all want, an experience. And what is the greatest experience you can have on the planet? We’ll get to that after.

And we know that we’re silly when we do this, well this is a response to human beings when they know and have an awareness that things aren’t right in the world what do they do? Just kinda pretend that it’s not there. Other people will take care of it. Someone else will fix it. That’s not a good approach. We need to do what we can do in our lives, it doesn’t have to be a massive thing. You don’t have to end world hunger, find a solution to poverty, you might be commanded to do something like that but it might just be playing with your kids, creating a beautiful home life, being loving to your friends, being generous to strangers. These are really great little things, they’re actually the building blocks of humanity so we need to do little things well. So anyway, why are we so stupid? There is one fundamental reason…

LeeAre We Going Mad?

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