Bellefontaine, Ohio Shocked Over Scott Moody Shootings

Last Sunday, May 29, 2005 – a week ago – I delivered a sermon to a small church in Hudson, Florida. My topic was “Healing Humanity’s Destructive Side.”

My message was this: we are composed of both soil and spirit. We are dualistic in nature. We each contain the very best – and the very worst – in humanity and that realization is the key to creating a better, safer world.

I made it clear that I was not just talking “in general terms” in reference to our species as a whole, but saying that we each – as individuals – carry all the stuff of humanity within us. Each of us taps into, feeds and receives information from humanity’s collective consciousness and because we are joined to it, we each have access to all qualities contained within it.

Now, today, I read the following headline on Earthlink: Ohio Community in Shock Over Shootings.

On May 29th – ironic for me since that was the day I delivered my impassioned plea for people to “heal their piece of collective consciousness” and stop tragedies like this from occurring – a teenager in Bellefontaine, Ohio did something completely out of character.

Scott Moody, scheduled to go through high school graduation exercises later in the day, entered his grandparent’s farmhouse – where he was a frequent visitor – put a gun to his grandfather’s neck as Gary Shafer was fixing breakfast and shot him three times. Scott did not stop there. He found and killed his grandmother. Then he went back to his house, killed his mother and two friends who were at his home and then killed himself.

Now, no one can believe this boy – who was reportedly respectful and hard-working and appeared normal in every way – did this. Or rather, they know – intellectually – that he did it. But they cannot reconcile the boy they knew with this horrific behavior. It makes no sense to them. Many knew him from the time he was a small child. And they are at a complete loss to explain his actions – and who exactly he was – when he acted them out.

Sadly, this story demonstrates the principle that we must recognize and accept if we are going to change this world for the better :

We each are capable of all behaviors – good or bad. And trying to separate the world into “good” people and “bad” people compounds the problem. Instead, our task is to – individually and collectively – learn how to heal collective consciousness. Labeling certain people as sinners, blaming others for influences we feel put us at risk or building more and more jails in which to throw people after the fact are not preventing these kinds of tragedies.

In order to stem the tide that is threatening to engulf us in unexplainable behaviors and violence, we need a shift in thought and approach. We need – each one of us – to recognize something we deny and resist: that these people who act out violence are doing so on behalf of all of us.

Let me repeat that. These people, for whatever reasons – are acting out these behaviors on behalf of all of us.

For we all contain the seeds. And until we recognize that we carry those seeds and begin seriously growing other seeds that will give rise to compassion, love and spiritual fearlessness, we are going to not only keep getting what we are seeing now, but the incidence of this kind of senseless violence will increase.

A huge reason for what is happening is due to how we allow our minds – and our individual pieces of collective consciousness – to be programmed.

I don’t watch much television. Why? Because when I turn it on, as I did last night, I flip from channel to channel finding program after program focused violence and crime.

I don’t blame the media entirely. The media is not “doing the right thing” in my opinion by catering to our baser instincts. Still, this is a profit driven culture – as opposed to a culture driven by respect for the Spirit within – and they provide what we tune into.

But making the choice to watch violence and giving into what really is an addiction or craving to have our "fight or flight" responses activated – and our refusal to wake up and realize what that craving for vicarious excitement is doing to us – will be our undoing based on this truism:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Obsession with watching re-enactments of grisly crimes cannot help but pollute our collective consciousness with more and more ideas and variations on cruelty, depravity and heartlessness.

The magic – and curse – of being a part of collective consciousness is that even if Scott Moody never watched those shows, hundreds of millions of us do. And he – like all of us – draws from that energetic body of archetypal and mythical information to inform his own ideas and behaviors.

Don’t ask how Scott Moody slipped so disastrously out of character. Ask instead why we make exulting in violent books and movies such a priority in our culture. If you can answer that, you will have the answer to Scott Moody’s heartbreakingly tragic actions.

More importantly, ask yourself this: Do you want to continue to contribute to reducing humanity to its baser actions? Or do you want to give birth to the greatness – the magnificence – within you and humanity?

For you – and I – feed one or the other with our choices of what thoughts we think and what ideas we allow to prevail within us. We either feed the monster or feed the angel inside us.

There is no neutral ground.

So – which one are you choosing to feed?