The Challenge of our Time

Numbness: why we must overcome it

A White Paper by Klaus Heinemann
8/5/2021; latest update on 4/6/2022

“We are One Earth, We are One Humanity, We are One Spirit (“of One Origin and Destiny”).”
This poster was published in 1973 by a peaceful consciousness raising San Francisco Bay Area-based NGO, “Creative Initiative Foundation,” in which we were fortunate to have participated, to communicate our planetary interdependence. Half a century later, the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by the senseless bloodshed in Ukraine, portends re-validation of the wisdom of this statement.

One of the most impressive sites of the gigantic Iguassu Falls, where Brazil and Argentina and Paraguay meet, is the “Devils Hole” (photo above). Immense amounts of water crash into a huge, almost circular “hole” of several hundred feet in diameter. There is a narrow steel bridge/path, starting on the Argentinian side that literally ends at the rim of the Devils Hole, from where you can look right into the eye of this huge funnel. You are totally overwhelmed by the raw power of nature around you. You feel as if you are standing at the edge of a black hole. Our knees trembled on the sheer thought of what might happen, were we to fall over the railing and get pulled into this aquatic inferno.

But then our mind begins to get a hold of us. After a few minutes, wew open your camera and try to get the most impressive shots from the best angle, and after a few more minutes of that, we walk back on the pathway, and we begin to rationalize what we have seen. How does it compare to the Niagara Falls? Or the Victoria Falls? How many cubic feet of water are falling down the hole per second? And on and on. We have become numbed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been teaching us that we must tackle the societal problems of this world. We have lost more than 1.1 million American lives to this pandemic, and many more millions of fellow human beings world-wide. And then we were blessed with the successful development of vaccines that strongly reduce the spread and severity of this disease and have offered it, free of charge, to every person in our country. Yet, while billions of people in many less fortunate countries all over the globe would just love to receive any one of these vaccines, so they can be spared from this highly infectious killer-disease but cannot afford it, tens of millions of people in the United States alone have refused to get vaccinated and said “no” to doing their part to help end the pandemic. They have become numbed to seeing the deeper meaning behind the pandemic.

And while this all has been unfolding, hundreds of thousands of desperate people are fleeing unbearable living conditions in third-world countries; tens of thousands drown year by year in the Mediterranean Sea; thousands of helpless children are being pushed by their despairing parents across the Southern US border for a better life in the promised land to the North; and millions of fellow human beings are driven from their homes by acts of war all over this world.

One should think that all this should be more than enough to bring us to our senses. But then, totally out of the blue, one single dictator dwarfed it all. He had amassed a level of power that he, single-handedly, can irreversibly change all life on this planet as we know it. This one single human being has begun to play poker over the long-term survival of humanity. He has control over nuclear arsenals that, if unleashed, will render the entire planet essentially uninhabitable. He threatens to use this power. Unprovoked, he attacked a peaceful neighboring highly developed country, and millions of innocent citizens alone were driven out of that peaceful country during a genocidal war imposed on them by the ruler of their neighboring country. The world has fallen back into holding the survival of civilization hostage with acts of genocide and blackmail with potential use chemical and even nuclear warfare.

WHAT IS GOING ON? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN? How COULD WE let this happen? All these tragedies cry out for our response. What are we doing about it? Have we really learned what it means to be world citizens? We have become numbed — numbed to perceiving where the world has come, numbed to looking at our own “footprints” in this world.

Stepping beyond this numbness is an ethical challenge of paradigmatic dimensions. It is the most consequential challenge mankind has ever faced. Bigger than humankind has ever faced in its entire history. Bigger than WW1, which killed 45 million people, or 2.5% of the world population at that time. Bigger than WW2, where 3% were of all then living human beings perished. Bigger than what we termed WW3, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has already taken 1/3 of 1% of American lives. Bigger even than the bubonic plague in the 14th century, which took the lives of more than 25% of the world population. The radiation and subsequent “nuclear winter” that would be unleashed when only a fraction of the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers were detonated would be cataclysmic and essentially make the entire Earth uninhabitable.

Have we forgotten what we learned from dropping just two “small” nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? They killed 200,000 innocent human beings — and yet they were many times inferior in destructive power to each of the thousands of nuclear weapons we now have in our arsenals. These “tiny” nuclear bombs were so devastating that, in the aftermath, responsible military and political leaders in the world understood that they had to agree to not ever again use such weapons. This did not prevent armed conflicts — we had plenty of them since 1945 — but the world successfully took the “option” of using nuclear weapons in armed conflicts off the table. This lead to no-nonsense nuclear non-proliferation and, eventually, nuclear disarmament agreements. This worked.

These agreements were carefully crafted such that one person alone would never be able to — or amass the power to — break them. It would have to be a concerted effort of several individuals to start a nuclear war. All parties understood that the agreements prevented “mutually assured destruction” (“MAD”). This has spared humankind from experiencing the madness of a conflict in which these weapons were used. This “truce” that started in 1945 has lasted for three generations. And now, one mad dictator is threatening to change it all.

The paradigmatic change mankind is now facing goes beyond merely “editing” — if we even get that chance — the text of these agreements that have successfully postponed mankind’s nuclear Armageddon.

We must change from inside out. We must re-connect our souls with the purpose of our existence. We must become and live as conscious, loving, caring human beings.

(Much of the book “Expanding Perception — Re-discovering the Grand Original Design” deals with this topic). We invite you to read more about this paradigmatic challenge and rewards in our White Paper “A Call for a Paradigm Shift in Ethics?.”

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Note to Numbness:

Becoming numbed is no new experience to humankind. It happens all the time. Something new is added to our basket of life experiences, and after an overwhelming initial reaction, which is genuine, our mind diminishes its significance, and off we go into numbness toward this experience and the expectation of yet another overwhelming new one. Here are some examples (updated on 5/5/23):

  • (Added on 4/6/22): When Putin’s war on Ukraine started on February 24th, 2022, the world was horrified. For days on end, the U.S. news channels reported about nothing but that, 24 hours a day, for days on end. Even the German evening state-TV newscasts, which hardly ever before exceeded 30 minutes, lasted up to an hour. And now, 6 weeks later, while the ferocity and cruelty and senselessness and unimaginable tragedy of that unjust war kept spiraling to ever-increasing travesties, day by day, the newscasts are back to “normal” 30 minutes duration — still focusing on factual reporting on the war, but then moving on to the sometimes petty news business of the day. People don’t want to hear any more the horrific news about the war. They are more interested in the spiraling price for gasoline at the pumps and the inflation of their dollar and Euro than listening to new reports of the Russians shelling hospitals, over a hundred of them by this day, killing children by deliberate bombing raids on buildings where children are being sheltered, and brutally raping and murdering civilians, thousands of them. We are getting numbed about hearing such dreadful news.

  • In August 2021, CNN headlined the following comment: “[Hurricane] Elsa is approaching the US Mainland.” Does the fact that Elsa was sitting at that very time right above Cuba not count as newsworthy? Are the people living in Cuba and being clobbered by that brutal weather not matter, because they are “just” communist Cubans and not Americans? We have been numbed to nationalistic bias.

  • in 2016, when presidential hopeful Trump got caught in the “Access Hollywood” sex scandal, we thought that this would for sure be the end of his candidacy. Then additional scandals kept surfacing, each one dwarfing the previous one, almost on a daily basis: Stormy Daniels, Moscow hotel, Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Gaetz, the “quid pro quo” in the Ukraine, 29,000 lies uttered from the White House, and on and on, the big lie about his election loss, his theft of classified documents, etc. etc. — and in spite of all of that a third of our entire population responds with “Who cares about that? He (Trump) is God’s chosen quarterback!” We have become numbed.

  • We get upset when another shooting war erupts between Israel and and the Palestinians. And then we see the destruction and are elated when a cease-fire is arranged. And then, a week or two later, the senseless destruction starts up again, and it barely makes it into the evening news.

  • On January 6th, 2021, an angry mob stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, the symbol of our free country, and almost succeeded in taking down our democracy. And six months later our Republican lawmakers — setting personal interests (to get re-elected) ahead of their sworn duty to preserve our democracy — block an investigation into what happened.

  • There isn’t a day that goes by without a mass shooting somewhere in our country. Every one of them is followed by a calling f or more stringent gun laws, but not even the most heinous mass shootings have had the logical side effect of tightening our country’s liberal gun laws. We continue to interpret the 2nd Amendment to include weapons designed to fight wars. We are numbed about domestic gun violence.

  • The pandemic has already cost us Americans more than a million lives. We hear an update of this sad number on a daily basis. It becomes a number, totally separated from the fact that each one of them is a permanent loss to a family, an empty chair at the dinner table, a grandmother or grandfather or father or mother or son or daughter or friend gone. But not only that, do we really care that many more millions of world citizens in other countries have also lost their lives to Covid? It seems that we get numbed inversely proportional to the physical distance from us.

We are becoming numbed. Numbed to sensationalism. Numbed beyond comprehension. There is a meaning behind the human experience. Every human being is an essential part of the “Grand Original Design,” and with our consciousness we contribute to the very essence of that which GOD is. Numbness is the quintessential enemy of consciousness.

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We point to our books “Expanding Perception” and “Phenomena: Code of the Grand Original Design” for much more on this subject.


Klaus Heinemann, Ph.D.

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