Saving the world - Reverting back to ourselves

As a child, I could not help but wonder how come adults allow the situation I was watching on TV to happen, to exist; I saw images of children in African countries starving to death on the 8 o'clock news, followed by Hollywood shows that portray extravagance and wasteful, hedonistic habits.

As a child, I could not understand the preoccupation people had with schooling, testing, examinations, career, succcess, wealth. It was as if it was some linear, fool-proof assembly line that was failproof. With the sort of vigour and emphasis people put on those benchmarks, it was as if they were the signposts to the yellow brick road. Then there was marriage and child-rearing and status and glory and fame, etc. Not to mention the rigorousness of religion, the fear of loss, the upkeeping of traditions. If adults had it all figured out, why was ther so much war, poverty, suffering, fear and violence in our world?

Obviously, we have to realize that the adult model is completely illusory and self-destructive. As such, it would make sense that to inherit the same old ways of thinking about life will produce the same old world with its war and its poverty and its insatiable destructive greed. And then we become the adults that children wonder why, if we were in charge, aren't we doing anything to save the world?

It is us who are doing this to the world; we adults. It is us who created wars and hunger and poverty. It is us and the same model of thinking which we inherited through various vehicles such as religion, race, traditions, culture, schooling, nationality, customs, etc that keeps us trapped, removing the curious, faithful child and replacing it with the type of adults that replicate the adults before them and contribute to the wheel of destructive momentum we find ourselves in.

We cannot eradicate any of the world's problems if we continue to think, behave, believe, react and respond in the same ways the generation(s) before us have. To save the world is to revert to the way we were, before the corrupt layers of unknowing, ignorance, ignomity became encrusted like carbuncles all over our soul. Interestingly, the word "mualaf", the label Muslims give to new 'converts' of Islam, means 'to revert back to the truth'. Perhaps this reversion Islam reminds us is to return to our soul-state, eventhough Mohamadenism itself has also become a victim of traditions.