Toxic Drums mission

I don't know.  What do you do?  I have this web site and this blog and I have just read an article by Chris Crum about Darren Rowse called Taking Blogging  From a Hobby to a Business.  One message is basically define your audience and just do it.  Well I have no real idea who my audience is and I can't seem to get around to "doing" it.

Initially I thought Toxic Drums was about "saving the world".  Quite a commendable objective I think.  A bit grand but why limit your horizons.  Actually I know that I am a very small part of any attempt to prevent humanity destroying itself but each part matters so I am happy to sit with that objective to start with.  Saving the world (or humanity) has the potential to cover a host of subjects.  There are different aspects from which one is trying to save the world like pollution, starvation, war etc. and then there are the various modes by which humans achieve these ends like politics, business, science etc.

So I am happy to split these things up and to look into them and to discuss them, promote interest and insight, to express views and even solutions (if anyone's offering).  But then there are the ways that humanity seems to operate that seems fundamental to the fact that these issues are problems.  Eventually I get to the way our culture seems to operate which actually explains a lot about how the various errors are occurring.  It's like a grand unification theory of what is wrong.  So the individual issues seem less relevant since they can all be handled with the new insight into what the fundamental problems are.  Well it seems complicated but perhaps on one level it is not.  The truth seems to be...

The fundamental problem is lack of love.

It seems almost trite to say that.  But all my thinking and my experience confirms it and I am left thinking of issues like religion, psychology and education.  They are all subjects relating to love.  Okay so they don't all admit it but in some respect they do all relate to love.  Religion makes it explicit, education has it as an excuse and psychology is trying to understand the emotional stuff that seems ethereal otherwise.

I have spent a large part of my time alive looking for some REAL way to understand what is going on.  On the one hand I have been looking for answers to angst.  I am distressed, bewildered, unhappy, depressed, anxious, stressed etc and I don't believe it has to be like this.  So I have looked for answers.  I have searched religion, psychology and finally counselling.  I have found only one thing that has real practical substance and that is counselling.  It is not that different people can't find therapeutic results from different disciplines but it is my experience that religion is too much about itself and corrupts love.  Psychology tries very hard to remain academic and ends up being a good observation of distress but lacks real resolution and remedy.  Counselling, on the other hand attempts to 'practise' therapeutic action.  It fails a lot of the time but there seems more chance of success through this route than any other.  I will mention the likes of Arthur Janov's The Biology of Love and Dr Robin Skynner's Life And How To Survive It as places to look for some serious insight into the modern understandings of what counselling can really achieve but my point here is that no amount of talking about it actually fixes the problem.  Action is required and for all the theories that abound the inner knowledge of love is the best and probably the most accurate guide.