Firstly, I have updated my pagans for peace project post, at http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/pagans-for-peace-introduction.html. This now begins:
Post Script
I am now aiming to meditate on peace regularly every Sunday evening at 9 P.M. My intention is to get a wave of energy rolling round the planet, which is intended to tie in to the energy created by those following the ideas channelled by Phyllis V. Sclemmer (see the paragraph highlighted in green under Commitment Level 5 below) and both contribute to those energies and help them to spread around the world.
The technique I will be using is:
- as always, establish protection, including doing (psychic) flaming to cleanse my aura and the space I am working in (see http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/expecto-patronum-flaming-and-bursts-of.html);
- hold a "World Peace" Talismanic Tetrahedron;
- activate at least my solar plexus, heart and intermediary chakras - see my posted workshop notes here and here;
- flush my aura with emerald green, royal blue and royal blue, as per the channelled instructions;
- generate feelings of love, peace, joy and respect (I do more than "just" feelings of peace, as acheiving and maintaining a true and BPF [5] valid peace is such a complex matter);
- strengthen those feelings (energies) using the alternate nostril breathing exercise I have described here;
- radiate those energies to the world for 18 minutes;
- close down, and then centre & ground, close my aura and close down my chakras (see http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/grounding-and-shielding.html and http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/non-physical-health-and-strength.html).
I have also updated a post that post refers to: the post where I introduced the topic of Talismanic Tetrahedrons: the update is to add most of my workshop notes that I've been using for a couple of years on this topic - I left off the Appendices, and cut out some of the minor figures. The updated post is still at the same link - http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/talismanic-tetrahedrons.html.
And now, that talk, which was inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley's [1] "Heartlight".
The Means Shapes the End
There is a saying that “the end justifies the means”, and I’d like
to begin this talk by encouraging you to think about this.
Now, there are quite a few interpretations of this.
One that I am reasonably comfortable with is that great goals
deserve great efforts. If someone is trying to end world poverty, or world
hunger or thirst, for instance, that is both a noble, meaning spiritually
valid, goal, and a very, very, very large undertaking. If they are going to
have any hope of realistically achieving it, they need to make a massive
effort.
Of course, if they are trying to achieve something like world
domination, or resurrection of the Melbourne Football Club, those are also very
large undertakings, but perhaps less spiritually noble ... and perhaps less
likely to be successful in the case of the Melbourne Football Club.
Another interpretation of the saying “the end justifies the means”
one that I am not so comfortable with, is that it means sometimes one has to do
things that are morally questionable, in order to achieve a goal that is for
the benefit of others.
If I take an example of this from public life, mergers of
companies often come with redundancies - sackings, in other words. To those
people who lose their work, the merger has been a complete disaster. To the managers
who arranged it, however, if the outcome is a more efficient, more profitable
company, they will consider the pain they had along the way acceptable -
particularly if most shareholders say they are happy with the final outcome at
the annual general meeting.
The managers and the happy shareholders would say “the end
justified this means”, but a lot of other people directly
involved in the situation wouldn’t.
Let’s consider a couple of other examples of this second
interpretation of “the end justifies the means”, the view that
anything necessary should be done to achieve “worthy” goals.
I’ll draw the next one from my political lobbying experience, well
over a decade ago now. I had been what is called a co-convenor of a particular
lobby group. We achieved, after several years of intense effort, building on a
couple of decades of efforts by many very capable and talented people before
us, the most urgent changes to the law that were needed for our community, a
community that was, at the time, quite unprotected, and still remains subject
to the terrible effects of discrimination. A decade ago, when we had our
initial success, I was exhausted and nearly broke from funding things like
massive phone bills, so I retired from that role - as did my other co-convenor.
With quite some difficulty, we found a couple of people to
replace us, and sailed off happily, if metaphorically on the part of my friend,
into the sunset. I was living on a boat at the time, and could, of course, sail
off into any sunset – or sunrise – I wished … subject to the state of tide.
Going back to the lobby group, unfortunately, things started
to go awry after we left.
The problem was that one of the new co-convenors decided that
the goals of the group were so special, so worthy, that it was acceptable to
start being controversial, to start being deliberately provocative.
Now, there are times when that can work. In the late 60s and
early 70s, when sexism was a major problem in society, and many places didn’t
even have anti-discrimination laws, some women’s right activists started off effectively
asking for equal power with men in society, and were told “no, no, no, we think
30% of power to women is enough”. In response, they started the campaign for
“all power to women” - and, in response to that, those who had been blithely
prepared to give 50% of the population only 30% of the power suddenly said “no,
no, no, 50% is OK”.
In the case of the new co-convenor at the lobby group in the
early 2000s, however, the campaign was based on an idea which disenfranchised -
don’t you just love that word? I do - took me long enough to find the spelling
in the dictionary. Anyway, the campaign cut out some of the people the group
was supposed to be representing. I won’t go into details, but it would be a
little bit like an indigenous rights lobby group deciding to exclude indigenous
people living in a city or town.
The result of the new co-convenor’s campaign was some
extremely unhappy supporters, and politicians who were very bemused by the
sudden irrationality in this lobby group. Fortunately, that particular person
left that role relatively quickly, and the group was saved by my former
co-convenor.
In this case, no-one would have said “the end justified this means”,
but the flawed co-convenor had clearly thought that it did.
OK, let’s look at a third example of the interpretation of “the end
justifies the means” that sometimes one has to do things that
are morally questionable, in order to achieve a goal that is for the benefit of
others - and this one is going to be pure invention.
Well, if it’s not quite pure invention, the names have been
changed to protect the guilty.
Let’s say you want to, start a new spiritual organisation -
perhaps the Elvis is Alive Mediumship
Society. If you go about promoting this group ruthlessly, and perhaps in
ways that are quite underhanded, you may gain a large membership, but perhaps
at the expense of other, existing spiritual groups.
Now the question would have to be asked, is that necessarily a
bad thing?
I tend towards loyalty, so my initial reaction would be, yes,
that is taking from other groups, and I’d probably chuck in the word
“unfairly”.
But that isn’t necessarily the case.
IF the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society
actually met the spiritual needs of those people who had changed their
memberships more effectively, then perhaps it is not a bad thing … but what if
they were coerced, or misled in some way?
And it is at this point, nearly half way through my talk, that
I would like to introduce the saying that I wish to discuss today, and that is,
that “the
means shape the end”.
To illustrate that, let’s consider the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society. If the formation of that group
involved any coercion, or any underhandedness, perhaps rumours and gossip about
existing groups, then no matter how many members it has, or how well it meets
their spiritual needs, the group would be tainted by the moral corruption of
the methods they had used.
That’s a bit of a heavy phrase, isn’t it, “moral corruption”?
I generally avoid using it, and will continue to avoid using
it, because it has been so misused by so many people in so many situations.
It’s a little like the swastika. The true swastika is actually a very holy Hindu
sign, and represents life itself. It’s part of the Theosophical Society’s logo,
for anyone who is interested. The Nazi’s actually used a modified version of
the swastika, but they created such a powerful connection with evil by their
use of that modified swastika, that I doubt anyone would be able to use the
swastika for positive purposes for many decades, and possibly centuries.
In the same way, that phrase “moral corruption” has been
misused by so many people to discriminate against those who are different in
some way, that I consider it cannot be used without a taint of the negative
energy associated with that misuse.
And that is exactly what I am talking about with the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society: any
misdeeds done during the group’s formation, would create a link to the
negativity of those misdeeds, and that negative link would undermine, would
niggle at, what they are trying to achieve - even if it was spiritually worthy.
OK, so that’s the third example I used to illustrate the
original saying, “the end justifies the means”, now looked at
from the point of view of the reworded saying, “the means shape the end”.
Let’s look at the other two examples I used.
The second example was that of lobbying. If one wanted to
argue that “the
end justifies the means”, an example of the risks one could take
would be to, perhaps, lobby only one side of politics. The view here would be
that getting change was so important, it was best to pick the most likely way
to get that change, and just do it.
The problem with that, and it was a problem we discussed
before we did anything, back in the 90s, would be that you risk having the
other side of politics, at a change of government, repealing the changes you
had successfully lobbied for.
So in this case, what you had seemingly achieved, could be a
false thing. On the other hand, if you approached the goal properly, doing
things like educating everyone and gently bringing them along with you, then
you would be more likely to get a lasting, beneficial, effective change.
In this case, where everyone had been educated and brought
gently along a path of growth, it is likely most people would have said “that end
justified the means”, although what had really been applied was the idea that “the means shape the end”.
The first example I mentioned was that of a companies being
merged together. This is something I actually know a fair bit about, as I
started working in the water industry in Victoria in the 80s, as the Cain
Government started to reduce water authorities from over 400 to around 184,
which was then taken down to the current situation by the Kennett Government in
the 90s.
This caused a recession in the water industry, and, at the
same time, the company I worked for was bought by another company, which was
the first of four takeovers and acquisitions I experienced. In the course of
doing that, I saw the best and the worst of how companies can approach this.
If they approach it thinking only of shareholders and profit,
their management of people is generally abysmal. If, on the other hand, they do
so openly acknowledging that there will be change, and genuinely committing to
helping people deal with that change, the end result is better all round. The
goals of improved profit are achieved, but with far less personal stress to
many workers.
Sadly, that doesn’t apply to all the workers caught up in such
events, but if they’re surrounded by co-workers who, because they’re not also stressed
and worried sick are able to be supportive, well, that’s still better than when
everyone is worried sick.
I have to say that this has been handled well only once in my
experience – by an American company, for what it’s worth.
I’d now like to move this topic out further, to consider some
fairly low key everyday life matters.
Let’s say you do something like … take a car parking space
that someone else had been waiting for. You may be in a hurry, perhaps for a
toilet, or in need of that space because the disabled parking spaces are all
full - probably of people who don’t have permits - and you can’t walk from the
spaces further away.
If you just dive in, and then treat the person who was waiting
dismissively, I would hope that your conscience would bother you. Even if it
didn’t, however, you would have both the irritation of that other person, and
the negative karma you had created, coming back into your life in some way.
So you got the car park and the convenience, but at what cost?
Feeling guilty or stressed? Having someone else do the same, or similar to you
at some future time?
As a digression, on that point of the karma coming back to
you, I heard an excellent comment on assessing how much karma one has
accumulated, in a talk like this one, a few decades ago. The speaker said, if
you do something relatively minor, like cut someone off in traffic, how long
does it take before someone else cuts you off in traffic? If that is returned
within a few days, or perhaps a week or so, it means that you aren’t working
through too much of a backlog of negative karma, but if you go a few years and
no-one has cut you off yet … well, you’ve got a problem or two.
With that example, keep in mind that karma applies to positive
things as well. I haven’t tried doing something nice and tracking how long it
is before it comes back to me, but I’m not so worried about that side of the
karmic equation anyway.
Going back to the saying “the means shape the end”, in the case of
this example of taking a car parking space, you could actually have tried
asking – “Hi, I can’t get a disabled
space but I’m going to have trouble if I park further out. Would you mind if I
took that space instead of you?”
It might work.
And on “the means shape the end”, I’d like to
mention a saying from the training of another spiritual group, one that follows
a different path to that of Spiritualism. That saying is: “do not be trifling, even in little things”.
There is a whole wealth of reasoning behind that, drawing on several sets of
philosophy – including Zen, so I won’t try to explain that fully now, but in
terms of the notion that “the means shape the end”, it is useful. If
you do something with loving care and attention, and strive to make it the best
you can, then it will be infused with loving energies and, even if it is not
perfect, the love is going to help it along the way.
If you make a cake with love, it will taste – or seem to taste
- better than a cake made using the same recipe, but made with resentment or
grudgingly.
In more complicated matters, remembering that “the means shape
the end”, rather than trying to use “the end justifies the means”
to justify taking a short-cut or approaching things in a dodgy way, may mean
doing things in ways that can be tedious, difficult, or downright challenging.
If we consider the founding of the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society, then doing it properly would
involve talking to a lot of people, letting people know what you’re thinking of
doing and working out how to get them to think about the things they have to
think about, and doing a lot of travelling, meeting, listening, talking,
considering. Maybe, as an outcome, it would lead to joint memberships, and
working together to find out who is best suited to which group – as is done
here, when determining who should go to which development circle.
It all reminds me a bit of the lobby group I referred to
earlier, where we dealt with politicians, media, and those we were representing,
a group that is still extremely vulnerable, and still has a problem with
suicide from discrimination, our community, was probably our harshest set of critics,
but also our greatest source of strength.
Trying to act in accordance with the principle that “the means shape
the end” is incredibly difficult at times, but it also leads to
a better result – the energy is better, as I’ve discussed, but the skills and
knowledge accessed, and the views considered, are also more comprehensive and
informative. In that lobby group, by remembering that “the means shape the end” we
avoided what would have been catastrophic mistakes, took a very well guided path, and achieved our goals in a lasting way. In
fact, what we did was used as a model, not just by other states, but other
nations. Personally, I also learned a great deal, and, more recently, those
skills have been used with my work at the other spiritual group I am part of,
the Tel’Ennyn Asur, which is young and doing a lot of sorting out of systems.
Those same skills are also used every day, in all that I do,
not just in the “big” things these sayings are usually associated with.
I would, however, like to finish with a thought that is aimed
at those “big things”: if the goal is something so big, so important, so momentous, that you could possibly consider
it justified being unscrupulous, then surely it also justifies being scrupulous.
Thank you.
PS - some of this overlaps a comment I made in my recent reading post:
"I am contemplating posting about those well meaning, patronising idiots who think it is acceptable to use wrong pronouns to stimulate a "discussion" on being trans ... or even just refer to trans matters outright ... the people I've buried because of idiots like those"
"I am contemplating posting about those well meaning, patronising idiots who think it is acceptable to use wrong pronouns to stimulate a "discussion" on being trans ... or even just refer to trans matters outright ... the people I've buried because of idiots like those"
[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/or "Everyone knows ... " 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.
Tags: action, motivation, peace, talismanic tetrahedrons,
First published: Manadagr, 9th September, 2013
Last edited: Monday, 9th September, 2013
