A chapter from Candice O'Denver's book "Clarity in Everyday Life: A Handbook and Guide"

1. GLOBAL HUMAN COMMUNITY
It’s important to understand that most of us have been educated by our
family, our schools and our environment in a way that is quite off base, and
we have actively chosen to adopt the information that was offered to us. We
learn all sorts of things: for instance that our identity is based on a past, a
present and a future and that the totality of all our viewpoints—past, present
and future—constitutes our identity. We hear ideas about psychology and
science and other things, and we accept these things as true. But our true
identity can never be fully understood by descriptive frameworks.
Only when we understand that we have electively taken on this
information can we also feel that we are empowered to change our
relationship to it. If we say that someone else has educated us improperly
and we blame institutions or people for that, then we are automatically
placing ourselves in a disempowered position of helplessness. We’re blaming
the people and institutions that imposed the ideas on us that have made us
do whatever we’re doing; however, it is essential to not consider oneself a
victim of other people’s actions.
We have relied on educational, governmental, religious, medical and
spiritual authority figures to tell us what is true about our identity. We
simply accepted whatever we were being told by different authority figures.
Instead of relying on these authorities, we need to clearly understand the
nature of our identity based on ​our own ​experience of that identity.
Whatever the developmental process has been like for us, we have a right to
choose a different developmental process right now.
For the first time in human history, due to the Internet and advanced
forms of telecommunications, there is a great wealth of information available
that cannot be controlled by authority. The whole idea of relying on
structures of authority is collapsing, and human society is beginning to
recognize its own unified power. When we recognize our own unified power,
then we can organize for change as a global human community based on
open intelligence and not on conventional beliefs and structures of authority.