Too narrow and narcissistic?

I am coming to believe lately that my latest search for love and even a lot my life lately has become far too self involved and narcissistic. It really bothers me a lot in quieter moments. I know as an empath I feel a lot but is that really an excuse for sitting on the sidelines all the time and being a bit too anxious to interact. Could it be an excuse at times for not getting out there and getting more involved? These are some questions I am asking myself lately.

I read a great piece from Marianne Williamson’s book From Tears to Triumph this week. It spoke about how researchers did some research with depressed monkeys removing from a certain population and when they were removed a lot of the population ended up dying. This is what she writes on the subject :

According to one analysis the chimps perished because the so called depressed chimps among them had been an early warning system. The depressed chimps had been depressed for a reason : they registered that a storm was coming, or snakes, or elephants, or disease. The presence of the depressed chimps had been an evolutionary aid to the survival of the entire population; in their absence, the other chimps did not notice the dangers that lurked. (This goes along with an idea I recently read about that people with so called bi polar illness are more attuned to collective conditions emotionally than others, are more absorbant and empathic as well as creative.)

Nothing could be more effective than an early warning system among people or among any other species. And nothing could be more dysfunctional than to ignore the warning or take the edge off, And we do this in so many ways.

Our contemporary popular culture is itself a numbing agent, making us inappropriately comfortable when we should instead appropriately uncomfortable. There is even an ersatz spirituality now cultivating the belief that since the world is an illusion anyway, why bother to act to try to fix things? What a convenient excuse for not helping. In fact, no serious spiritual path gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. We’re not here to ignore the darkness of the world, but to transform it. And in order to transform the darkness, we must at times engage it.

Only the ego believes that we have no responsibility to address the pain of others, or that there will be no bitter consequences if we do not. But the Law of Cause and Effect is real; or to put it another way, karma is a bitch. Of course it hurts to register the unnecessary suffering of others, but it will ultimately hurt much more if we deny it. A ribbon of love runs through our veins, like electric impulses, connecting us to every other living thing. Acting out of accordance with this reality puts us out of our centre and out of our joy. We give ourselves more emotional permission to party in the evening when we know we did all we could to be there for others during the day.

Many of us feel like we’re aliens in this world – because spiritually we are. And feeling spiritually homeless, of course we feel sad. But we’re on earth to make it our home, not to acquiesce to all the ways that it isn’t that now. The manifestations of fear have become so potent – yes, within a realm of illusion, but within the illusion people suffer and die – that it is time for a great revolution of consciousness. It is time to claim the earth for the forces of love.

Nothing is a greater antidote to depression than to join love’s revolution, taking even the tiniest step to contribute energy to the transformational wave of consciousness now rising up among us. This is not just a way to make a dent in the epidemic of depression; it is the way we will save the world.

We transform the world with every loving, forgiving thought. We transform it with every political, social, or economic act of resistance to a loveless order. We transform it with any act of creation that points to a new way of being on the planet. That transformation ….is the evolutionary next step for humanity.

We will take that step, or we will become extinct like any other species whose behaviour becomes so maladaptive, so against the grain of its survival that it is literally cast off the earth. That is where we are headed now, and yet, we can choose another way. As with every other miracle, God shows His hand at the most amazing times, in the most mysterious of ways. In the darkness of night there is a star of new hope, as there has always been and always will be.