I was asked recently, during a conversation about whether conscious evolution was a movement and what would happen to religions, what about the fundamentalists? I certainly don’t have an answer, and I don’t think my strengths are necessarily in giving answers. The most important part of finding answers is in asking the right questions.  So how do we think about the fundamentalist Muslims the media tells us to worry about?

Following, then, are straight-thoughts: simple content strung together to evoke your own interpretation and answering abilities:

• how are the qualities of thinking we see in fundamentalist Islam similar to that of fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism, Athieism, and Scientism?
• how do we understand the fundamentalists of any culture/religion from the wiser flavors of the same tradition?
• how can we separate the actions of Islamic terrorists from their historical and modern cultures?
• how can we separate the actions of the fighting groups of the middle east from their perceptions of the West? how can we understand their major points? how can we hear their criticisms within an honest appreciation for our own role in their history, and in fact, the entire history of the world?
• how can we be truthful about the US’s role in all this? (a wonderful resource here is Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins)
• how can we understand “cause and effect” to be more than a simple blame game, and appreciate a vastly complex exchange between cultures over a tremendous amount of historical time?
• how can we separate their perceptions of our actions from our perception of their actions? how can we know if any of these perceptions is correct in any sense of the word?

I think that the point is that the Iraqi situation the world is in, not to mention the many other conflicts and crisis around the planet, cannot just be boiled down to “they are crazy.” We are to blame. They are to blame. There is in fact no us nor is there a they. There is only a we. We have found the enemy and it is us. The ONLY way we can really get past our conflicts in the world, and in our personal individual lives, is to have a hard and long look in the mirror and ask two questions: “how have I contributed to getting us here?” and, “what can I do now?“