The Effect of Enormity

Enormity. It's the realization of the weight and power of the forces arrayed against us. I hesitate to call it evil. I'm poking around whether the concept of evil is worth its weight. Let's leave it as destructive forces….

What strikes me is that we tend to find it quite reasonable to respond to the Enormity of the destructive forces we face today and focus on the effect this has on our mood. I find this to be entangled with the series of assumptions and habitual accommodations we make through all the ways we make judgements in this culture. It appears to reflect the primacy we give to maintaining our attitudes over engaging with what is.

Does this come from our sense that we are at the mercy of our emotions? Is it because we form our identity around how we feel? Is it an ultimate sign of our sense of entitlement? "How I feel is more important than the consequences of how I act."

However we arrive at this position, it forms another layer of enormity. Perhaps the most significant enormity we face. Significant and also perhaps causative. It's possible that the rest derives from this.

I keep returning one way or another to how we dis-integrate. If integration is having access to and vital connection with as much of what is as it is possible for us to have, then disintegration is the breaking off of parts of this potential and losing access and connection. The dangers of dysfunctional delusions – as much as we are tied to having an "operating system" of conditioning between us and what is, we are tied to delusions. It's just that some delusions align with our reality and lead us to behaving in a functional manner, while others send us farther and farther into dysfunction.

The dangers of these dysfunctional delusions are veiled by the way we are insulated from the effects of our actions. We are coming off a time when we've had the greatest level of insulation we've ever had. This has led us to adopt and hold onto behaviors that would never have been possible before and will no longer be possible again. In the meantime they hold us over the edge of the precipice that is the enormity we face.

Our identification with these delusions, culminating in the one that claims how we react, how enormity makes us feel, is more important than its consequences, leads us away from integration. Funny how the myths around freedom, self-expression, and niceness all push us to honor our feelings above all else.