OK, I'll get on with it :)
There are something like seven billion people on this planet.
Gosh, that's a big number. ... It's a nice day outside - wonder if I should get a cuppa and sit out there to help my recovery from my cold and today's migraine?
Flippant response isn't it? And yet that is how we tend to deal with things that are unimaginably big, or unimaginably powerful (whether good or bad), or in some way something we don't want to face up to. We switch off, and turn to matters that are comprehensible to us, often matters that are personal.
Well, I'm going to the unimaginable (I hope!), and have a go at making that vast number a little more comprehensible.
And I'm going to do it by guiding you, Dear Reader, back (assuming you have left) to high school. (Which assumes your education system has primary and secondary or high schools, which is the Australian system - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_school#Australia for more on this. I won't do more than point you in the direction of this: attempts to help you comprehend 7 billion on a personal scale is one thing, but trying to help you understand the variety of education systems - well, I'd more cups of coffee for starters :) [3] )
In Australia, a reasonable number to assume for a typical class at high school is around thirty kids. My class at high school was a bit smaller, but I know of classes with up to fifty kids back then. Let's say thirty. That's the number of human beings who shared the traumas and triumphs of high school with you. If, like me, you've had a chance to met up with most of them from a twenty five year reunion (oh Goddess that was a while ago now :) ), you'll know that most turned out to be reasonably normal people, some were lastingly scarred by bullying and pecking orders [2] and Queen Bees and Wannabes, some had done so much "living" they looked thirty years older than the rest of us (well, one did - I kid you not), and some of the least likely had done some quite impressive things, including the woman who had organised the reunion, who was a timid mouse at high school. As an adult, none of the nightmare kids I'd had to deal with looked like a nightmare, but I could see many still had their own nightmares. Other kids had become simply outstanding adults. All of us had changed, and I thank the Goddess we had mostly escaped the petty nightmares that so many indulged in (make up and hair, who is with who, etc) that was and still is high school (just remember, I've already said some kids were permanently scarred by their experiences at high school).
It's quite a powerful little group, one that I have a range of reactions to, but all are personal interactions. These people are not numbers - they're people, real individuals.
So let's look at the rest of the high school I went to - which we colloquially called Milton Street, but was officially called Mackay State High School.At the time we - my adoptive sister and I - attended, it had around one thousand students (the website says it still has 980 - and wow! I'm there, under a former name, in the list of duxes). At that time in Queensland, we rarely wore shoes - we would walk across bare bitumen in the scorching summer sun barefoot to impress the tourists from down south. I really regret that I have such soft feet now :( During the wet season (actually, all seasons), we would carry our shoes to school with a towel in our back pack, so, after we had walked through the minor floodwater caused by the railway line behind our house (incidentally, Mackay had 6' [1.8m] deep open drains on the sides of many roads at that time, which were great for catching drunk and unwary drivers, and only worked when the tide was out, because of the low, flat land the place was built on), we could dry our feet and put our shoes on.
Cute, quirky story, eh? Well, probably every single kid in our class had such stories - I can think of many as I write this now, but won't breach their privacy.
Do you think the other classes were any different?
There would have been around thirty classes when I was at that school, each of them full of as unique individuals as mine was.
Think about that for a little while. It's a quite a little spectrum of humanity, isn't it? Thirty classes, as many classes as there were students in my class, each as full of real people, good and bad, as mine. From here, looking at it that way, I get a better understanding of what motivates some teachers to attempt their noble profession. At the time I was there, I was asked if I wanted to become a teacher (an English teacher), and I said "no" because of the disrespect and bad behaviour of some students towards teachers that I had seen, but if I had had an adult's perspective at that time, maybe I wouldn't have: maybe I would have taken up teaching.
Anyway, be that as it may, I didn't. Have you got your head around that school? Fascinating, isn't it, to think of all those humans in that place?
Let's gently jolt your head a little further, Dear Reader, and, in the same way that I sought to have you understand my high school as one class for each of the students in my class, let's think of the situation where each student represents a school.
Wow. It's a bit mind blowing - all that diversity and spectrum of humanity, an entire schools worth for each of the students in my high school.
It also starts to get a bit vague here, at (roughly ! There is a mathematical error here, but it is much less than 1%, so I'll ignore it :) ) 1,000 to power of two - i.e., 1,000 squared, or 1,000,000. One million.
That's a quarter of the city I live in. Now, there was a range of ethnic groups at my high school - "whites", Maltese, indigenous and Islanders, who had been brought in as slaves to work the cane fields (yes, Australia had slaves - that particular part of it was called "black birding", and was terrible; the descendants of those slaves were referred to as "Islanders"). There is also a wide range of ethnic groups here in Melbourne - Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and so on.
If I look at Vietnamese people, well, I've worked in Vietnam, and made friends with the woman who cleaned the rooms of the hotel I was staying in. I'd been told before I went that I probably wouldn't get an invitation into any Vietnamese homes, but I did, into Thuyen's home. She provided me with wonderful meal, and I took some photographs of her children for her. It was an interesting evening - at one stage, I made a paper plane to entertain her kids, and then had a constant stream of the neighbourhood kids throughout the night coming in to see the crazy Western lady who could make paper fly. Going back to the education basis of the analogy I'm using, Thuyen wanted me to bring her daughter back to Australia to get a good education, and break the poverty cycle that had trapped her. I looked into it, but didn't have the money and, as a single woman at the time, wasn't likely to get approval for that. It's sad, and now Thuyen's daughter would be grown, and probably have her own family - if she survived.
I've seen photographs of the Vietnam War (they call it the American War, and actually have - I was in Ha Noi - one of the best museums I have ever seen, dedicated to their struggle for independence), and some of the victims look disturbingly like Thuyen - which makes the whole experience a far more personalised matter. (There was also an excellent novel ["The Sorrow of War", by Bao Ninh] written about a North Vietnamese scout that I have read. The experience of fighting was born largely by Vietnamese soldiers on both sides, and above all else, by civilians ... )
I've also known Chinese people (that's a simplification if ever there was one!) people I worked with in Wei Hei who loved playing cards, and would have got on very well with some of my high school classmates, who held card marathons on some school holidays, and some of the younger engineers I currently work with, who play cards every lunch break.
I have personal, human stories about many of the people I have worked with overseas - and that came about through being an engineer working in water and wastewater treatment, so maybe being an engineer rather than an English teacher was an OK choice, as far as that aspect of it goes.
I tried to use some of my engineering knowledge and connections after my last trip overseas, to Mongolia. Most of my work was in the Gobi (see here and here), but I also found out - from a Mongolian colleague - about some of the problems in Ulaan Baatar, which has annual flooding that kills dozens of people. We had floods every wet season in Queensland, and a few people would die (including a friend of the family, who was referred to as "Uncle" and drove off a notorious low bridge called "Hospital Bridge"), but not as many as in Ulaan Baatar - which is less than occurs in Bangladesh: I worry every year that some of my former workmates may lose people in the annual flooding, and at work we recently held a fund raiser as some of our company's staff had lost people in the recent terrible factory collapse. Going back to Mongolia, I tried to get some interest in a foundation spending some money for a study for an idea I had about fixing the flooding, but no success.
I also had an even less successful attempt at getting improved insulation for the gers about the outskirts of the city (the central part of the city has plenty of heated apartments built by the Russians), so that maybe they could get through a winter burning coal, without having to burn shredded tyres. Of course, the coal is bad enough in terms of the air pollution problem, but it could maybe have been a small improvement ...
Wow. All these stories, all this humanity, all this unique individuality ... and we're only still dealing with one million people.
What happens if you start to think of each of those one million students in those one thousand schools, being a link to a further school?
It's getting even more vague, but here I could perhaps start adding in some of the stories of people from Africa, which is somewhere the company I work for also works, or Europe [4] - including the UK, where my partner is currently visiting family and friends, and could doubtless add plenty of "human interest" stories ... and we're only up to one billion people: there's six more to go ...
One of the things that news editors too often - in my opinion - do is choose human interest in terms of groups that they think their readers can relate to - hence the offensive bias towards news stories that have white victims, particularly young, pretty ones. It's sloppy, lazy, downright bad journalism. What these editors should be doing, in my view (and some do), is getting their journalists on the spot to start delving into the human impacts, the human sides of stories, so we can all understand the true, human impact of what is happening there, and of living there, and have a humane human response - a compassionate response.
A few months ago, over one thousand people died in the Himalayas. That's my entire high school of human beings gone. That's the sort of people I and colleagues have worked with, so I can also relate to the humanness of this disaster through them, the people I've known - as I wrote before, I dread the annual flooding in Bangladesh because of a former colleague's family and friends there. EVERY person there who is affected by those floods is a real and unique human being, but I can better conceptualise that by approaching it through those I know, and other devices such as the schools idea.
So what can I do about this?
Well, activism is an obvious answer, but this blog is largely about psychic stuff, so let's examine that for a moment.
Let's go back to your high school class. If you had 29 people whispering about you, staring and sniggering behind their hands, you'd start to feel pretty terrible. Now, if you had the same number of people being warm, supportive and encouraging, you'd start to feel pretty confident, and pretty inspired.
OK, now let's extend that to the entire school. Let's say you had 999 people who were thinking badly of you. That's more people than in many magickal movements - certainly more than in many magickal groups, and that sort of thinking does have a power that goes with it - even if it has no conscious magickal ability to back it up. Pretty worrying isn't it? Now turn it round: consider the situation where those same 999 people were thinking well of you. You'd feel like you could do miracles, wouldn't you?
If a natural disaster was so massive that it affected one million people, there are still enough people on this planet that each one of those people could have that same feeling of being able to do almost anything.
Wow.
If the disaster is smaller, perhaps affecting only a thousand people, they could each have up to one million people sending them positive energy. That's as if each one of your class mates got an entire class behind them, and then each and every student in the entire school got another entire school behind them. (I'm ignoring the slight mathematical errors for the sake of artistic licence and flow :) )
For each person.
That's what you can do: you can do your part of contributing to the wellbeing of every other person on this planet.
If you can also do so with magick as well as love, well, then that would be truly magical.
Of course, all this depends on being able to know about events overseas, so here is a list of web pages I've found useful for that purpose:
- http://www.csmonitor.com/;
- http://www.theguardian.com/au;
- http://www.un.org/sg/spokesperson/highlights/index.asp;
- http://www.hrw.org/;
- http://iwpr.net/;
- http://theconversation.com/au.
If nothing else, once you've found out about an event that you could usefully send some positive energy to, duck over to nshrine and find a shrine to light a candle in (which I spent two hours doing this morning).
[4] I could also add in a story about a Czech guy who first went to Mongolia in the 1980s for an international geophysical project, was shown how to put up a ger and given a four wheel drive, and then, when he asked about what he did for food, he was handed a rifle ... He never used a map, never got lost, and reminded of quite a few people I worked with on mine sites in Queensland.Oh, and one of my Polish friends at work has, like me, lived on a yacht - but she did that in Europe. She is a qualified mining engineer in Europe, by the way, but her qualifications were not recognised when she came to Australia, and so she wound up with a job as a drafter.
[3] Joke, Joyce
[1] BPF = Balanced Positive (spiritual) Forces. See here and here for more on this.
[2] Please see here and my post "The Death of Wikipedia" for the reasons I now recommend caution when using Wikipedia. I'm also exploring use of h2g2, although that doesn't appear to be as extensive (h2g2 is intended - rather engagingly - to be the Earth edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").
Love, light, hugs and blessings
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux?)
My "blogiography" (list of all posts - currently not up to date) is here.
I started this blog to cover karmic regression-rescue (see here and here), and it grew ... See here for my group mind project, here and here for my "pagans for peace" project, and here for my bindrune kit-bag.
- One size does NOT fit all.
- May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
- A home is for living in, not feeling, becoming or being rich or a “better” class than others.
- The secret to being (financially) rich is not to have lots of money: it is to have an income above the poverty line, and then make whatever sacrifices are necessary in order to live within 90% of your means.
- Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master.
- Armageddon is alive and well and happening right now: it is a battle between the indolence of "I only ..." and/or "I just ..." and what Bruce Schneier [2] calls "security theatre" on one side, and perspicacity and the understanding that the means shape the end on the other.
- The means shape the end.
- Sometimes you just can't argue with a biped that is armed with a sharp stick, a thick head and not too much in the way of grunts.
- Spiritual love is far more than just an emotion - it is a concept, thoughts, actions and a way of living.
- One of the basics of serious spiritual / psychic work is that the greatest work is that which we do on ourself, which seems trivial to many. Our own Innermost Essence, which is our Higher Self / Soul / Spirit, has the power to do so much, and is actively participating in the creation and sustenance of this physical reality. Some mote of our conscious or unconscious knows that, which is why we seem inclined to be dismissive of Self Mastery - which is a bit like the child who sees an adult spending money to buy toys, and fails to recognise the daily grind of work which has led to having the money.
- My favourite action movie of all time is "Gandhi". However, I loathe the stereotypical action movie - and, for similar reasons, I loathe many dramas, which are often emotionally violent, more so in some cases than many war films.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing. (based on writing by) EDMUND BURKE
Your children are not your children. ... They come through you but ... they belong not to you ... for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow KAHLIL GIBRAN
We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Those whom we cannot stand are usually those who we cannot understand P.K.SHAW
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, and the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change." SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY (US Attorney General 1966 Speech)
People I'm currently following or reading, or have considerable respect for, include:
- Red Catherine, a Romani woman living on Artemis, in South Australia;
- T. Thorn Coyle;
- Fire Lyte;
- http://paganinparadise.blogspot.com/;
- The Wild Hunt;and
- the Order of Scathach.
First published: Tysdagr, 5th August, 2013
Last edited: Tuesday, 13th August, 2013
