“Idris: Are all people like this?
The Doctor: Like what?
Idris: So much bigger on the inside.”
Neil Gaiman
Creation said:
“I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it.
It is the realisation that they create their own reality.”
The eagle said,
“Give it to me. I will take it to the moon.”
The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”
The salmon said,
“I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.”
The Creator said, “No. They will go there, too.”
The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”
The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there.”
Grandmother who lives in the breast of Mother Earth,
and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said
“Put it inside of them.”
And the Creator said, “It is done.”
Creation story from the Hopi Nation, Arizona
Instead we have got clowns, oafs, goons and zombies running the show and calling the shots, and that is not counting the demons and narcissists who manage to flourish in the political garden too. There is no standing back anymore to get the bigger picture, perhaps there never was and that is a big part of the problems we face today. Rather we leave it to ‘the experts’ to make the decisions needed to care for our planet and our survival who then instruct us on what we may and may not do.
I think the big lesson of the last few years is that this must change. We need to take responsibility for ourselves beyond our personal daily lives. What I believe Jesus came to show us. He needed to tear us away from our reliance on despotic leaders as representative of a God who lives above us, who may be malign or benign, and his/their laws. We need to turn inward to find the ‘father’ within us. Two thousand years later perhaps we are beginning to hear the message. Our technology may change by the day but we do not. It is reasonable to suspect that we have hardly ‘progressed’ at all through the last two millennia. All that I can see are subtle changes in our morality leading to some changes in our ethics. But how quick are these to fall away when we suspect someone else of wanting to have what we consider ours. Are we less selfish, more loving and considerate, do we refrain from behaviours that when others partake we don’t feel good about, is war still our default mode when big disagreements take place from families to nations? Do we still take the loves of others? Will we still turn away from what we don’t want to see or know?
The time is now to lift up, look under, peer around the back and over the top of, and once we have completed a close-up interrogation, to then move further and further back to gain the greatest overview—the big picture—and then turn our gaze inwards to our own souls. No stone should be left unturned. I must be crazy in my wish to turn over a rather large and dangerously positioned rock to see what else might be tucked in with it. But going by the horror, fear, indignation, and joy from some groups, that Roe v Wade has brought up, I decided it was important to see if, on further reflection, I could learn something more from this difficult and contentious moment. I have no doubt, in this era of wokism, it is somewhat of a foolish idea, but why else might I be here witnessing these decidedly weird times if not to learn as much as I can about myself and the world.
Our default position more often than not is to simply react—a behaviour we are well-known for, hence the popular ‘knee-jerk-reaction’ saying. A saying that surely only makes sense to those because they are old enough to recall the doctors giving us children a quick tap with a little rubber hammer to the area just below our kneecaps as we sit with our feet dangling. If our foot jumps forward involuntarily then all is good in the skeletal department I believe. I can’t remember exactly what it told the doctor but it was as important as tapping our chest and back to hear and feel something that experience allowed them to decipher. I suppose a little like some of us tapping a watermelon to see if ripe. But unfortunately it is that old predictable knee-jerk-reaction that seems to have permeated our lives in more ways than one. And it is exactly what has made our behaviour predictable to the powers-that-be, as edible as a piece of cake, you could say, leaving only the crumbs for us peons to quibble over.
If I were asked more than three years back whether Roe v Wade could or would be reversed I would have said—highly unlikely. But if I were to have been asked in the last couple of years, I would have answered—I ‘dunno’ because frankly nothing is sacred and everything today is on the table.
Erroneously or correctly, synchronicity guides my thinking and has for many years now. Either I have got sharper at picking them up or they really have speeded up as something of a bigger carrot to guide humanity towards the possibility of seeing more of the bigger picture. A bigger picture that I believe the Great Spirit offered to us young souls when he wrote his great logorithm, Creation, which we then set in motion when Eve drew the short straw and ate the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
My day started with having read the above mentioned news and observing the unfolding drama, and a short while later a couple of a-causal events collided revealing to me what I have come to call affirmations that I am thinking in the right direction. Of course I have no way of being sure of this except that I am happy doing it.
A short while later, I was drawn to a clip, called The Eternal Principle, on YouTube of one of my favoured guides, Joseph Campbell. In it and referencing Arthur Schopenhauer, he says, “When you get older and look back on your life, it seems to have had an order; it seems to have been composed by someone, and those events when they occurred that seemed to be accidental and occasional and just something that happens, seem to be the main elements in a consistent plot.” It is not that it is a new idea for me but rather it is the timing of it popping up. A little later, there was a further reminder when an article with the following heading came up: An Astonishing New Theory Claims that Past, Present and Future Exist Simultaneously. Well, for that to be the case, it all has to have ‘been written’ before hand, surely, otherwise how could it be running simultaneously. But perhaps that is again down to only being able to see time as a linear progression—a Catch 22 situation. My mind is a muddle! But never the less, again not altogether a new idea to me. I have been enjoying toying with time for many years now. One of my cocktail of theories is that it is the setting down (into the ether or even the background field perhaps) of our accumulative memories that give time its energy and we know that energy makes things move. It is nigh impossible for us to see time as moving forward and backward from the now.
So if nothing happens by accident, or as I am inclined to believe, ‘all is written’, then there is always a relevance to everything that happens, and we ought to pay more attention than our usual emotional response. So what might that relevance be?
It is hard not to have an off-the-cuff reaction to the big events going on around us, and I think it is fair to say that too often our reaction is followed rapidly by the apportioning of blame, and often that is an end to it. We may attack silently, sometimes verbally or worse, those we blame, or we box the experience and no real lessons are gleaned. But what if it was always beyond the control of the person or persons we hold responsible because ‘it is written’ anyway, no matter who carried it through? What if everything that happens is always a lesson waiting to be learnt—never a command—just an opportunity? I am not saying that we don’t have choices. It is just that the choices we do make determine the next stretch of the path we find ourselves walking, sometimes running, down. And that they were always anticipated. It works as clearly on a collective level as it does individually. I do not see myself as a fatalist but rather that all destinations having been written, we will always end up fulfilling our individual and collective destinies, via one route or another so to speak. This would only have consequences in the afterlife for our next sojourn into an earthly body. Karma is what I am referring to. So having decided one way regarding the initial Roe v Wade case, 1973, the possibility was pre-determined that one day we would arrive at a junction where a choice was back on the table. But why might this be?
Could it be during the times leading up to 1973 that we needed to break away from withholding a woman’s right to speak up for herself in what happens around her fertility, as in who manages her affairs especially concerning her body. Having achieved this consideration, and having determined the limit of 12 weeks in which a decision to abort could be made, did we then go too far such that little consideration is given to the consequences of the fact that copulation leads to the probability of a pregnancy. Today a woman will make love with no precautions, and all she needs to remember is to take the morning-after pill within 24 hours. There have also been some dreadful changes proposed to the abortion laws in some US states, and even some murmurings along this line in the UK. An example of one is to allow abortions until full term, including after a ‘live birth’. We have not exactly measured our behaviour very well when it comes to the gravity of the responsibility we have to respect our bodies and the sanctity of life, and perhaps a modification is required to bring the pendulum back somewhat to a more ethical stance.
The recent Roe v Wade reversal, you could therefore say, came about on the basis that the judges were ‘driven’ to revisit the decision. They decided that it is not a constitutional right, but rather a federal decision, whether to allow abortions or not. It could be a choice that initiates a new path for us all. Residing at the state level to decide what to do going forward, one could say that it is for the community to decide what reflects their views, and the rules can be reviewed at any time. I find it interesting that now there are definite new choices to be made again, and in any case whether communally or individually, both will lead to a new set of consequences. Perhaps we may find the courage to follow through on our personal ethical decisions no matter what life throws up for us.
When it first came into being (1973), if what we needed was a loosening up of old ways of thinking, of not being bound by old laws and judgements, perhaps what we need now is to look back and see if there were babies we threw out with the bathwater. (Yes, I know, but I don’t think unreasonably cruel.) I am reminded of how I have come to view Jesus’s coming to Earth. He needed us to look inwards and find where all truth was hidden, and not to believe that we establish ourselves as ‘good’ people by how well we follow God’s laws. St Paul had a lot to say on this in his various ‘letters’ to the emerging Christian communities. Personally, I see now that Jesus, deeply misunderstood by the people of his time, even his own Apostles, and probably not yet fully understood, may well have come to set something in motion for these times we live in now. I know this won’t be a popular view, but it sure helps me to understand so much more of our history, the religion that is Christianity, its doctrinal requirements, and why so many of its ‘Volk’ have dropped away. Christ Consciousness feels to me like everything we need to find and feel. What is today asked of us by having our attention once more drawn back to Roe v Wade is something of a new lesson. By seeing into Consciousness more deeply, have the opportunity to choose for ourselves that life is sacred—to know we now can choose for ourselves whether to live by this or not. Through my own life experiences, I came to a decision that I would never again abort a foetus, no matter what the circumstances—a lesson I learnt a very long time ago. For me there is no confusion, and certainly no knee-jerk reaction to this issue, because I have left no stone unturned about the subject. It has also taught me not to judge another because it is an extremely complex decision with no easy answers. But then, who said life was meant to be easy?
A little aside, and something that could illuminate further what I am trying to grapple with. It was not Frodo who did the right thing by throwing the Ring into the furnace of Mordor. His desires made him hold onto the ring, and with slipping it onto his finger, all resolve left him. This gave Gollum the chance to take it off him in a rather gruesome way. Once freed from the direct power of the Darkness, Frodo rediscovered his courage, and the will to fight to the death if necessary and was finally triumphant, perhaps with a little heavenly support, when Gollum lost his footing and the Light was able to win this epic battle. The fact remains though—it was the Darkness (as represented by Gollum) that enabled the Light to prevail. So are they really two different things? A subject for another story I think. JRR Tolkien certainly knew how to tell the stories that matter the most to living a meaningful life, and it is up to the rest of us to decipher what it is that could be most beneficial to our lives.
We must never stop seeking the lamp-lighters and rainmakers here, there and everywhere. They can light our way in times of darkness, and make sure we don’t go without what we need to sustain us. They have not forsaken us. It is just that our eyes and ears stopped seeing and hearing their messages, or perhaps we simply stopped wanting them in our lives.
jennie's red book 