It’s Sunday morning, 7am, I’m still in bed. It’s a rare thing, I’m usually up coaching someone or walking the beach doing podcasts, or at the least riding my bike.

But today is different. The Taliban are attacking Afghanistan – again – America is pulling out – just like Vietnam – and millions will or have died. I wanted to absorb this and where better than a warm comfortable bed, sun shining through the windows, coffee in hand and perfectly healthy and safe. The contrast doesn’t go unnoticed.

The graphics in the media are enough to make, even this paradise of my white doona cover, white sheets and pillows seem stained. I force myself to read where my senses want to run away from. I do not want to allow my imagination to dominate my view. I search world news, it’s all bad.

After 20 minutes of this, my second coffee and a few interrupted text messages it’s time to close my experience – and to do so, I ask myself, “where is the order in the chaos” – “what’s the benefit?”

Every cell of my lower mind wants to fight me. I feel repulsed at even asking the questions – I am immersed with compassion and empathy for those who suffer, but what good will that bring?

I must first excuse myself for defying my lower mind, the all it nothing part of myself, who disowns me for this questioning process – I hear myself say to myself “how could you?” But I must. My lower mind simply feels safer if I just follow the yellow brick road, and feel sad. Why, because it fears violence, it needs to be safe, and in condemning violence and hate, it puts safe distance between me and those victims. Ultimately it’s my fear of death and feeling bad for victims in Afghanistan, is just my lower mind making a barrier between me and Cruelty.

As Afghanistan returns to Taliban rule so too do the profits of the country’s resources. Which is ultimately the aim of control of the people. This in turn will fund terrorism in a mission to control the world. We know the story, we’ve lived it many times.

My higher mind knows that we are not separate, that the mission of my lower mind, to protect me, self, is a natural reaction to danger, but it doesn’t work. My higher mind knows that feeling sad for the victims makes no benefit to them, it is entirely narcissistic.

My higher mind knows that there are two sides to everything – hence – I’m asked to seek and find benefit to the world for this terrible travesty in Afghanistan. I see easily the drawback and suffering, it takes me half the morning to find even a few benefits I can swallow.

My purpose in writing is not for you to understand me, but for you to understand yourself. Yesterday I sent my clients the following quote.

What you think you become

What you feel you attract

What you imagine you create

The Buddha

And so if I think by my lower mind I become a victim too. If I feel sad, I attract sadness, if I imagine suffering, I create it.

My mission is not to help you understand my answers to my higher mind questions but to make obvious how you understand yourself. If on the one hand you wish to become a leader, attract love or abundance and create a better world, your view of Afghanistan, or Covid, or Terrorism or cruelty must be carefully planned, otherwise, inadvertently, you will fall into the hands of your own personal terrorist – your lower mind, your all or nothing self, the narcissist lurking within, your ego.

I’m not condemning lower mind sensory thinking, it makes us human, I am however sharing, that at least for me, I do not want to be aspiring for one thing and then, through pre scripted reactions, causing the opposite.

With spirit

Chris