Pause for a moment of uncompromising reflection on what you understand your life to be: the things you’ve done, said, created, and believed. How much of that has remained constant throughout the years? If you’ve been honest with yourself in this process, you’ll gladly admit that “you” are not nearly as permanent as you once assumed.

It could be argued that there’s little to be gained by revisiting the past: after all, what’s done is done, and we can only affect the future, right? Then again, remember that our actions are directly and inextricably influenced by our perceptions, beliefs, and worldview.

If anything, it’s the willingness to become intimately attuned to our most sacred and cherished assumptions, (re)examining them compassionately within the framework of who we are now that provides us not only with the strength to discard the obsolete aspects of our being, but to synthesize yet greater integration with the natural universe, and in doing so, awaken into our true essence. This catharsis, this birth, this abandoning, is who we are.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin

As Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson express so eloquently in the brilliant documentary What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire:

It’s time to be thoughtful and learn what’s going on. A paradigm shift will require that we question our deepest and most fundamental assumptions. And that will require that we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last.

It’s time to be truthful: the dominant culture is destroying us. What would happen if we let ourselves feel our feelings about all of this? Our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves.

The essence of this returning is the honesty and unflinching ability to—as necessary—abandon everything we understand ourselves to be, admitting any illusions and mistakes, and like the phoenix, emerge from the ashes into our real destiny. It’s almost inevitable that the process of adopting a new understanding will result in accusations of inconsistency and revisionism, but the cultural change so critical for our survival can only occur at the individual level.

In the most recent entry on his website The Earth Blog: Giving the Earth a Future, Keith Farnish bravely walks this sacred path, and gently releases his attachment to a number of his essays, many to which he devoted weeks of his life. What a magnificent expression of love, particularly within the context of materialist Western culture that rewards accumulation, competition, and glorification of the ego above all else. In that light, it’s not surprising that we have such difficulty admitting error—the culture pressures us to be perfect, yet the ultimate irony is that the unattainable illusion of perfection takes us in the opposite direction from what we really need: inclusion, community, and cooperation.

It requires real serenity to say “I was wrong.” But far more critically, this admission can only be borne of compassion and the remembrance of our fundamental unity.