Showing posts with label common sense. Show all posts
Showing posts with label common sense. Show all posts

Friday, 19 December 2014

Post No. 626 - Reading



G'day, hello, howdy, hi, zdravstvujtye (some of my work colleagues are Russian, including an absolutely invaluable administrator who has recently taken maternity leave - may she and young one and family be blest), guten tag (where I have connection owing to a recent past life), sveiki, czesc (I have friends, not just colleagues, at work who are Polish), bonjour (colleagues at a former workplace were French, and we practised and tried to extend my woeful and limited range of this language), selamat pagi (one of the best junior engineers I ever worked with was Malaysian, and she taught me a few words), annyeonghaseyo, pryvit, bitaem, como vai (a friend of mine a few years ago, although not Brazilian, had Portuguese ancestry), ¡Hola (a former work colleague and friend, a VERY talented artist - with a Mexican sensibility to her artwork, particularly around the Day of the Dead - used to teach me Mexican Spanish), Selamat pagi, ni hao (ah, my work trips to Asia, and the many wonderful, wonderful people I have met there - and some excellent work colleagues and friends here, as well), bongiorno (my current home city of Melbourne has lots of Greeks and Italians, who have made our culture far richer - and made us coffee snobs :) ), hoschakal, hejsan, ciao, jo napolt kivanu, chào bà, chào ông, yiassou (from the city which has, I understand, the largest collection of Greek people outside of Greece), ceau, salam wa aleikum, sawas dee ka, dia duit, hoi, hei, namaste, marhaba, dobry den.

Well, after a hectic few weeks, I'm going to start trying to catch up with a few things on this blog, beginning with the reading links I've accumulated.


and more generally:


[1] BPLF = Balanced Positive (spiritual) Light 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


Gnwmythr, Wéofodthegn 
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux … aka Morinehtar … Would-be drýicgan or maga ... )

My "blogiography" (list of all posts and guide as to how to best use this site) is here, and my glossary/index 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 join me at 9 PM on Sunday, wherever you are, to meditate for peace), and here for my bindrune kit-bag. I also strongly recommend learning how to flame, ground and shield, do alternate nostril breathing, work with colour, and see also here and be flexible. 

I am a Walker upon the Path of Balanced Positivity, seeking Spiritual Maturity.
  • neither eloquence nor inarticulateness inherently indicates correctness, but, as words can kill, the right to freedom of speech comes with a DUTY to be as well-informed, objective and balanced as you can be.
  • Gnwmythr's Stropping Strap: Occam's Razor only works if  the simplest solution is actually recognised as being the simplest, rather than the one that best fits one's bigotries being labelled 'simplest'.
  • Our entire life experience, with all the many wondrous and varied people, places and events in it, is too small a sample for statistical reliability about Life.
  • May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
  • Being accustomed to interacting via certain rules makes those rules neither right nor universal.
  • Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master.
  • The means shape the end.
  • My favourite action movie of all time is "Gandhi", although I've recently come across "Invictus" and might put that one in to that category. 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.
  • All of the above - and this blog - could be wrong, or subject to context, perspective, or state of spiritual evolution ...

Human dignity is the inherently cumulative holistic combination of human rights, wellbeing and potential, and all actions or interaction which promote, realise or facilitate same. The converse also applies: whatever degrades, diminishes or robs humans of dignity, is inherently undignified.
Gnwmythr

The “purpose” of spiritual evolution is not the attainment of “spiritual perfection” - not in the sense of not having to evolve further, at any rate, since there is no such thing. We need to evolve in order to grow - but we can take rest breaks (hopefully well earned :) ) along the way. No, the “purpose” of evolution is, rather, to perfect our ability to learn, and thus grow.
Gnwmythr
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Females, get over 'cute'. Get competent. Get trained. Get capable. Get over 'cute'. And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy, get over that. Because we use those names to infantalise females – we keep females in their 'little girl' state by the names we use for them. Get over it. If you want to be taken seriously, get serious.
Jane Elliott

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.
(based on writing by) Edmund Burke

We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy

Tags: abuse of power, asceticism, common sense, discrimination, Druid, health, meditation, perspective, racism, reading, rituals, sexism, society, well being,
First published: Fryrsdagr, 19th December, 2014
Last edited (excluding fixing typo's and other minor matters): Friday, 19th December, 2014
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Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Post No. 384 - An accident: a story

I passed an accident this morning, on the way to work - I'm going to tell you the story, and a few others that come to mind. My apologies: this is a bit of a "get it off my chest" post.

I was stopped at a set of traffic lights, wondering idly why the traffic in the left (i.e., outer, or closest to the kerb) lane hadn't been moving, when I looked up around 80m ahead, and saw a truck stopped as it was evidently turning left. Perhaps traffic, I thought? Then I saw the driver running down the LEFT (i.e. passenger) side of his truck, and saw the upper half of someone lift themselves off the road into view, and flop onto the nature strip. Moments later, the driver picked up a bicycle and leaned it against a nearby signpost.

Damn. At least the driver was doing the right thing, and would have a radio plus phone and so be able to get help.

It was a bit difficult to understand what had happened. If I looked at where the truck was stopped, and that the cyclist was near the rear of the tandem trailer (the truck was what we term a B-double) ... had the cyclist ridden into the truck, or had the truck turned without indicating?

I don't know. I probably never will - and, given that someone was hurt, I really don't care what caused it.

What I do know is that the truck driver talked to the cyclist - well, he leaned over, hand on her shoulder, and I - from 80m away - assumed he was talking to her. Then he went back, got into his truck, and drove off!

****! There were at least a dozen cars closer than me to the accident scene, but no-one was showing any signs of getting out. I was in the centre lane, so I couldn't park because of the stopped cars (the traffic lights were still red) on my left. I looked at the other side of the road: no parking, but a servo (service station), I could do a U-turn and park there.

As I looked back to the front of my car to prepare to move, however, I saw a whole group of people arrive to help her - and the truck driver also turned up, so he had evidently been moving his truck to avoid blocking traffic (probably well-meant, but I suspect the traffic police would have wanted it left where it was so they could measure and assess who to blame).

OK, I would have fairly clearly been redundant, and maybe even just one of those onlookers (I hate the ghouls who stare and treat accidents and others' misfortune as entertainment - goes back maybe to when I was a kid and idiot hit our car and I was being stared at by some young men who were amused at my distress) who gets in the way, so I kept going, and sent the poor cyclist as much healing as I could, and a little to the truck driver as well.

But I did quite a bit of thinking as I drove to work (well, I usually do, anyway).

I hate helping at accidents. If I'm asked about it, my answer is usually that I hate seeing people hurt in real life, and I'm not too fussed about a lot of blood.

Yeah, I know, weak and wimpy.

Yet most of the accidents that have stayed with me haven't involved a lot of blood. One of the first I had to deal with was  when I was out jogging while at uni, and a car drove around a corner too fast, hit a roundabout, and rolled over. As the car rolled, it partly turned, and a car coming the other had no chance but to run into the ROOF of the rolled over car. I don't think any of us (only two, actually - me, and the driver of the car that had been coming up the hill, who reversed, stopped and got out while his passenger ran into a house to get someone to ring for an ambulance) sprinting to the rolled over car were looking forward to what we were going to find, but the drunk driver only had a cut finger. (Which reminds me of the story a nurse friend at that time told me, of her mother seeing a drunk get hit by a train, fly through the air, and then stagger to his feet, swear, and toddle off - apparently none the worse for wear.) I left my details as a witness, but wasn't needed as the drunk driver admitted his fault.

I came across another drunk driver who had had a prang a couple of years later, when I working on the edges of outback Queensland. He admitted he had been driving too fast, and drinking, and had slid on a corner, ending up going rear end first into an embankment. The problem was, he hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and had flown up in the car, and left a very visible dent upwards in the roof where his head had hit.

He claimed to have a couple of mates a few minutes or so (yeah, right - I was with him for an hour, and didn't see anyone) behind, and was worried about being charged for drink-driving, so he asked to be taken to a nearby pub. I talked to him about the dangers of concussion, including the dangers of masking it with alcohol, but he was insistent, so we left a note saying where he was on the car (it was off the road, out of the way) and took him to the pub. At least other people were there, and they could keep an eye on him. They also had a phone: this was in the days before mobile phones had yet been invented, so getting access to a landline was good. If need be, they could get a chopper in.

As soon as I got back to civilisation after that trip, I bought the biggest first aid kit I could find - one that was like a small suitcase, and added it to the two spare tyres, 12V soldering iron, folding shovel, space blanket, ropes, tow wire, tool kit and other paraphernalia I kept there.

I was working in some pretty isolated places at the time, and had to be fairly self-reliant if anything happened. (I was very disappointed, many years later, when I found part of the soldering iron had fallen off, and I couldn't use it ... at least I was living in town most of the time then, so it didn't matter.)

The next accident I want to write about was probably around a year or so after that, and also involved a truck. The conditions were wet, that sort of wet it can get with tropical rain, and a stupid car driver had cut in front of a truck - too close, and going slower than the truck, so the truck driver had slammed on the brakes, and slid off the road - right over three teenage girls who were walking along the edge of the road.

No mobile phones in those days, so one of the people helping took off to tell the girls' parents (they were all conscious, and could give names and addresses), and I helped get two of them into the ambulance. One girl was screaming with shock and pain, but pain only in her face, and she was not moving: she probably had a damaged spinal cord. The other had at least a severely bruised leg, too injured to walk on.

That was one accident, despite the lack of blood or visible gore, that stays vividly with me, now, more than 30 years later.

(Coincidentally, that accident also led to the ending of a relationship. I arrived home distressed and wanting to talk, but my then-partner wanted to keep watching TV. I am infinitely better off now - my partner has been very supportive today - despite being in terrible pain from an abscess - following this morning's accident.)

So, to today.

I've been thinking, of late, that pedestrians - and some cyclists - seem more suicidal than normal, almost like they are at Christmas. I don't know why it is, but I've considered writing a post about it.

I guess now I am.

There's a lot to consider about safety on the roads, and it largely comes down to being alert, RESPONSIBLE, and remembering that you are SHARING the road.

I think, however, it is important to for pedestrians and cyclists - and (motor)bike riders - to remember that, if they're in a collision with  car or truck, it isn't likely that the car or truck will be worse off, no matter how in the wrong the card driver is.

Our local tram company has a safety campaign based on pointing out that trams weigh the equivalent of 30 rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), beside a drawing of a rhino on a skateboard, and asking people to take the appropriate sort of care.

That's sorta along the lines of what I'd been toying around with when I was thinking about doing a post, before this morning's accident. When we were gatherer-hunters, if you came across a predator, or even just a very large herbivore, you were careful. You knew you could be injured or killed, and of these, being injured was probably the worse.

These days, maybe people think they the right to be there so consequences be damned, they'll expect others to do the right thing - and they don't have any precautionary thoughts about what COULD happen. Maybe they're just so used to the situation that they have become blasé about the danger. Maybe it’s a misplaced chutzpah - or the sort of attitude that led to humans (arguably, deliberately?) wiping out anything they considered a danger (and a lot of things they considered good eating). Maybe it’s just the stresses and strains of living leading to tiredness and being too busy.

I don't know. Reminds of the "joke" about the tombstone that reads "here lies John Day, who died maintaining his right of way" * .

It doesn't matter, anyway. Just ... take care out there, please? Whether you're a driver, a pedestrian, a cyclist or a biker, take care.

And oh, if you're scared of helping at accidents, it may be worthwhile pushing yourself to do so. What is worst may not be what you expect, and it may lead to some good changes - such as doing first aid courses (they need to be kept up-to-date, by the way - I could do a post on the changes since my days as a kid in the lifesavers to my last course, where "ABC" had become "DR ABCH", but I'll spare you that).

It may lead to some changes, as well - not just in you, but in society.

Also, sometimes what people need isn't medical care. In the last refresher course I did (we have to do them every few years for work, but there are free course out there, I think - here in Australia, at any rate), when the instructor asked what could be the main concern of someone who had been injured, I was the only one to mentioned kids (no, I wasn't the only woman there, and there was at least one other woman there who also had kids) - as in, making sure someone knew to get a family member or trusted friend to pick them up from school/kindergarten/day care. Maybe the example of that man from the accident with truck and kids stayed with me more than I realised - but it shows that there is often more that can be done in situations than may at first be thought of. Maybe you can talk to the person who has been injured, just be there as a sort of instant friend.

Nothing psychic in this post, not much spiritual, and a bit morbid. My apologies; it was about my needs, this time, not yours :) At least I may be able to get to sleerp now ...

* That also reminds me of one time I - still a teenager - was on a protest committee in my local sailing club. Two of the skippers in one particular class didn't like each other, and had a collision. Well, there are rules that govern how sailing races are held (nothing like as complicated or contentious as the rightfully maligned America's Cup stuff, by the way), and each skipper protested the other for breaking the rules. Well, we found that ... let's call him Skipper A, had broken what is called the port-starboard right of way rule, so should be disqualified for that, but Skipper B had made no effort to avoid a collision, which broke a recently introduced rule stating the obvious, that one should avoid a collision - so ... I did some fancy arguing, and we also disqualified Skipper B as well.

Was I popular, or what!

But collisions were noticeably avoided by all for some time, and Skippers A and B kept their resentments towards each other down to a simmering boil ... and maybe others got to think about how some situations don't have winners.

Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear") 
May the world of commerce & business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people. 

Tags: about me, common sense, danger, society,

First published: Manadagr, 21st May, 2012

 Last edited: Monday, 21st May, 2012
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Sunday, 20 March 2011

Post No. 249 - Stupid people, reasonable people and forms of travel

I was originally going to call this post "Stupid people, reasonable people, ..." but I decided that was a bit harsh, so so I changed the name to "Nongs, reasonable people, ..." - I've started referring to The L Word as The Nong Word, as the people in it are, quite simply, mostly nongs - the character of Jenny Schecter in particular, is quite alien to the down-to-earth dykes I know, and Alice Pieszecki is not like any bisexual I know. However, then I saw the episode [1] where Jenny's rank stupidity gets Moira assaulted, and reverted back to the original title.

(At least things get a bit better as the seasons progress ... I particularly liked hearing that Captain Tasha Williams "doesn't do drama". Mind you, my partner has commented that the character of Jenny seems to almost have a dissociative personality disorder ... at times they all seem to have a bit of this: oh well, it is a TV drama ... )

This choice of title was reinforced recently when I was buying petrol: as I was being served the service station attendant, someone who is quite polite and pleasant - and the reason I go there to buy my petrol - asked how I was, and the young male idiot behind me answered! What an absolute moron! Did that cretin think that because a female was in front of him the female didn't count? Or was he just up himself and decided that no-one else in the world was of enough importance for anyone to talk to so of course he was being addressed. Either way, he was a complete jerk.

There are, in my opinion, too many examples of people being, well, stupid is too harsh a word, but let's say at least foolish, or maybe naive. For example, I recently joined a few Yahoo groups. I left one when racist tripe started being thrown around, and then on one of the others, it became clear to me that someone responding to a comment from myself had completely misinterpreted the article we were discussing, thinking it was favourable, not critical, of the person we were discussing. This was then compounded when everyone seemed to buy into an apparently inspiring story about Herman Rosenblat - which even came with advice to Google him. Well, I prefer Dogpile, but in this case, I used Wikipedia, and found out that, yes, he is a genuine Holocaust survivor, but no, the amazing story he claimed was true was actually a hoax.

Another example of the sort of behaviour I am thinking of is the person who, when told I most missed giving up honey when I found out I was diabetic, said "Oh, but honey is healthy! You should still eat honey, it can't harm you". Well, stupid, actually, yes, it can - its is 80% sugar, sugar in a more natural form than refined sugar, but still SUGAR, and the blood tests I did on myself when I tried one honey sandwich proved how catastrophic it can be for a diabetic.

The important question here is: why? Why do people do, think and say these stupid things? In general, I consider people fall into many of these traps out of desperation. They want something, whether it is a feeling of connectedness, a feeling of affection, or feeling that they have got a bargain (which has at least two or three layers of emotion under it that I can identify without trying), and they allow that desire to override common sense - which, sadly, as the saying goes, is far from common.

Another view on this is Lobsang Rampa's comments, in several books that, allegedly, signals are not getting through to us from our Overself. If that is so, it would certainly explain the importance of meditation, which fosters that connection (when done properly, and not debased into an exercise to try and force relaxation rather than addressing the causes of tension).

On the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum is the legal concept of a "reasonable person". This is the basis of legal advice I have had, for instance, that here, in Victoria, Australia, someone using the wrong pronouns to refer to a trans person is doing something that a reasonable person would find offensive. The concept refers to someone who is mature, properly informed, without unreasonable biases - so not a fundamentalist extremist of any persuasion. (You can find a more formal definition here, and a recent opinion expressing doubt about the currency of this concept here.)

Finally, I want to touch upon the concept of physical travel. Yes, this can be enjoyable, and can even broaden the mind - particularly if you've had a sheltered upbringing (it is arrogance to presume that it will broaden the mind of everyone: some people have travelled well with their minds already, through things like ... reading, meditating, growing, their own life experiences, astral travel, etc). Personally, I often find, at this stage of my life, travel of the mind/spirit/soul better ... Travel to the country to escape the psychic pressures of the city can be rejuvenating for me, and international travel, in these post 9-11 days, is fraught with so many problems because I don't fit into the "normal" boxes that the experience in-between the trip there and back is more than outweighed by the trauma caused by security theatre. There are some places I would like to see, but I will happily wait a decade or two until the current insanity dies down and decisions about security are no longer being made by people who tend towards the stupid end of the spectrum because of their limited understanding of human beings ... which is an assessment a reasonable person would agree with :) For more on this, see here, here (especially the comments about security theatre; also, try following aviation safety generally for a little while, and then assess your perception of security risks ... ) and here (which I particularly agree with, having had some sexual assaults in my life).

Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr
(Pronounced "new-MYTH-ear")

Notes:
  1. Episode 2 of Season Three: Lost Weekend

This post's photo is yet to be posted.

Tags: astral travel, common sense, responsibility, sexuality, world

First published: Sunnudagr, 20th March, 2011

Last edited: Sunday, 20th March, 2011
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Sunday, 13 February 2011

Post No. 228 - Appropriate effort

For those of you who have a car, you'll know (hopefully) that you scale the maintenance work with time. So ... you do a minor service (oil change, grease & lube, tighten a few things, etc) every 10,000 km or three months or so, a major service (minor service plus extras, such as a tune, perhaps) every 20,000 km or six months or so, and something major like an engine rebuild or replacement only after several years and many km have passed. You don't do a major service every 10,000 km or three months or so simply because it is "better" than a major service. You use an appropriate amount of effort to keep your car going, avoiding doing an excessive amount of work for silly reasons because, by being appropriate in your efforts, you are:
(1) saving money;
(2) saving resources (which is ultimately better for the planet); and
(3) probably going to look after your car better, in the long run.

It is the same (or should be!) for housework. If you consider floors, for instance, you may sweep the trafficked areas daily, vacuum weekly, and wash the floors once every couple of months or as needed. You don't move everything out so you can do a super-thorough wash (or, if you have carpets, say a steam clean) every day on the grounds that it is "better" than just sweeping.

Again, as with the car, being TOO thorough is a waste of money, resources (brooms wear out quicker and need replacing, for instance, and that all adds up to the environmental impact we have) ... and it may indicate a problem along the lines of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or, at the very least, a problem with ego (as in trying to do feign superiority over those who do less comprehensive, but still adequate, housework: it is a variation of the problem of "trying to keep up with the Joneses" ... ).

How about taking the same sort of approach to psychic and/or spiritual work?

For example, I use prayers and flaming-shielding-grounding several times a day, psychic exercises to build my strength and practice my skills several times a week, and rituals for formal protection maybe a few times a month.

Are there other areas you can think of to make your efforts more resources and time appropriate?

Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr

This post's photo is yet to be posted.

Tags: effort, practice, energy work, common sense, appropriateness,

First published: Sunnudagr, 13th February, 2011

Last edited: Sunday, 13th February, 2011
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