Yes to the first part, though it can be extremely difficult given the abundance of misinformation.
The second part is trickier. For me, sitting in my little room 5,000 miles away from Ukraine, it might be appropriate and responsible to simply see the facts, and to allow action to arise (or not) from the seeing: Send money to those who need it, help refugees if they end up in my town, discuss the situation with friends, and so on. But for those who are more directly involved, imagining steps to limit or end the suffering seems not only appropriate, but urgently needed! These steps should, ideally, be devised with/from intelligence.
We are the world, yes. But do one participate to what society is, as it is in fact ?
K.: To change society, you must break away from it. You must cease to be what society is: acquisitive, ambitious, envious, power-seeking, and so on. ( end of quote,)
( Commentary on Living , Series III - Chapter 18 - 'To Change Society You Must Break Away From It. )
If one break away from all that, don’t we distance ourselves from insanity for good ?
I meant the fact of human experience - not the facts (or fakes) about geopolitics nor the contents (hopes, fears, confusion) of my consciousness.
We are failing to communicate as usual.
Yes we usually pay attention only to that which serves our agenda: the task we are performing, the view we are bolstering, the feeling we are going for. The rest is noise.
I don’t know if it is possible to fully distance ourselves from anything.
If we are the world, and the world is X (violent, insane, whatever), we are X. Breaking away might minimize our X’ness, but I don’t think it would eliminate it entirely.
When I woke up on Monday morning, the first thing that came into my head was ‘Wow I’m still here!’ as a pleasant surprise. I guess in my saner moments, when I’m not agonising or ranting, I can see that the answer lies somehow in the looking rather than the reacting. It does seem to me that as Martin Luther King said, ‘No one is free until we’re all free’. Maybe that’s getting ahead of oneself a bit but it did occur to me out of the blue a month or so back and rings true somehow, however impossible it may seem.
We are far too concerned with our demise - we are dominated by our ideas of the situation, rather than the situation.
We know so much, it cannot be grasped - and the universe we don’t know, within and without, is endless.
But our conversation really is happening between us right now. And as with all relationships, we can either respond to our image of the situation, or see that our images are only our point of view.
Take what’s happening in Ukraine. Our knee-jerk reaction is to analyze and judge the situation based on our values. I’m pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian. I’m a pacifist, a hawk. I lean left, right. But what is the situation without our projection? What are we missing?