2 ‘Sides’

One of the strongest memories I have of my childhood is looking out the window of a train - I smell coal, and I hear the sound of the whistle in the distance - I see smoke streaming past the window and a row of German factories, disappearing into darkness.

The feelings that come with that memory cut deep into my soul; I’m not sure why - I think it may have been my first impression of the outside world, looking out that window, the world seemed dark and bleak.

But at the same time that old memory stirs something positive in me. Maybe it’s the fact that we were on the run, leaving something ugly behind, looking forward to something new -

We were leaving East Germany for the West.

We settled in Wiesbaden, and finally got a sponsorship to come to Canada in 1951.

But even after we moved to Canada, my father never stopped talking about the Communists. He hated the Communists for driving him out of his homeland, and he hated the Communists for taking away his land.

Later on in the 60’s, when all that rhetoric was going on about communism, those memories started coming back to me. I started thinking about communism again. I thought about my father’s words, and how he hated the Communists.

But for some reason I took an opposing stand.

I’m not sure why; I thought I was being philosophical; maybe I was just rebelling.

I thought Communism had a place in the world. In it’s purest sense, it seemed like a good idea. The two ‘sides’ seemed to balance rather nicely - our individual freedoms vs. our collective concerns. Left and Right - equal in proportion.

A few years later, when I was trying to understand why my brother suffered from schizophrenia, I ran into those lefts and rights again.

I learned that there were similarities between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and the left and right ideologies in the world - I mean I could identify similar characteristics.

As you know, our brain hemispheres are split into the active and the intuitive. The two primary ideologies of the world have similar associations. Communism is associated with the body (our bonding nature - the Circle of Humanity) and Democracy is associated with our initiating hemisphere (the freedom to choose) or will.

The characteristics that identify freedom and individuality line up with the left side of our brain. And our bonding/intuitive nature lines up with the right side:

Free communities	Traditional communities
The Individual is free in a Democracy.	The individual is accountable to the Community.
The penalty for freedom can sometimes be a lost sense of wholeness.	The penalty for remaining equal can result in a lack of individual growth.
The individual sees things largely from an economic (personal) viewpoint.	The individual sees things from a traditional (communal) viewpoint.
Freedom provides us with many liberties - It's the force that's behind our creativity.	Equality is the connectedness amongst numbers - it's the force that binds.

Similarly; the ‘battle’ that’s going on inside us can be compared to the struggle that’s going on between the opposing ideologies in the world - between the traditional and the modern cultures - And in the same way that our inner 'sides' can sometimes become unbalanced, the two 'sides' in the world are presently unbalanced.

Because of individual freedom in the West, our aggressive nature has been allowed to flourish. We have collectively all fallen, because we have not learned to curb our desires and our aggression. As a result, we have collectively lost our sense of wholeness, because we're not living in a 'connected' Community.

In the traditional communities people probably have a sense of connectedness that is superior to ours. However, they too are having problems, because of the rapid expansion of consumerism throughout the world. Many more Peoples are adopting Western life styles, and as a result, are abandoning their traditional cultures.

Western ideologies and eastern ideologies are primarily based on two opposing lifestyles, that originated as a result of history.

Different ideologies emerged on the face of the Earth, because different solutions were required in different locales.

New ideologies were formed because historical circumstances complemented the emergence of a new Vision (Solution). Ideologies provided the framework for those visions, and political bodies were formed to implement and protect those ideals. Politicians replaced the original visions with generic replicas to satisfy their ‘interests’.

Appropriate ideologies were implemented, because they provided the perfect solutions for the time. They were appropriate for the time, because they effectively dealt with the needs of the time. Later, they became grounded in political systems, in order to facilitate the basis of those visions (they became integrated as Democracy and Communism).

It was inevitable that these ideologies should assume a conflicting arrangement, because like the hemispheres within us, the two primary ideologies in the world represent two opposing universal modes - the whole and the individual - our bonding nature and our aggressive nature.

In essence, the two ideological modes have a primal source, and therefore have a right to coexist. However, because of the extreme economic imbalances that exist in the world, the original ideals of both ideological modes are becoming distorted - creating a new historical need.

Because we have become entrapped in protectionist policies, both in the East and in the West, the world stands threatened by economic dominance in the West, and military (and religious) dominance in the East.

The Great Dream of the West, and the Great Society of the East, were created by humanity. But in actuality they both ‘came’ from the opposing hemispheres of our Larger Being. (Part Two – in the Beginning).

The struggle to protect each ideology has resulted in the largest military build up the world has ever seen. (This was a gross overreaction). The world body needs to understand that both ideological modes are acceptable, because they both originate from a universal source, problem is, they’re arranged wrong.

So what’s the Solution?

We need to look at it in terms of Human rights – When we come into this world, we have three basic rights - Life, which we must treat with compassion (that is our lesson) - Freedom, which we are managing to spread throughout the world - and Equality, which we have not yet learned how to deal with, and that's because Equality can only be dealt with in the global political arena.

History has proven that democracy is the best system for providing unlimited freedom of expression. However, because most of the wealth in the world is politically protected, the poor have no way of participating in our so-called democratic freedoms.

Commune-ism or Equality is when all systems work to benefit the total community. But neither communism nor democracy is pure in practice. In both instances the State is helping to ensure that the ruling elite remains in control. However, if we could rearrange these ideologies symbiotically we could probably relieve much of the stress in the world.

Since we already have political systems for both freedom and equality, we'll need to rearrange them in such a way that they are no longer conflicting.

In order to facilitate both freedom and equality throughout the world, we’ll need to provide constitutional Protection for both systems - In the next few chapters I want to try and describe why I feel this next step in our global development is so important.