Most of my life I have been preparing to ‘go’, not in a normal ‘death’ sense where a person has that sensation of ‘giving up’ and wanting to escape pain, to evade life’s suffering because it seemed too much; it’s something very different. It would be easy to say that maybe I read too much Bible doomy and gloomy as a kid and inherited the attitude of ‘anyone who loves his life will lose it’, a quote from a very poorly translated Christian scripture that makes people feel extremely paranoid and scared of life it’s not that. However it would be easy if there was no further investigation to be dismissive about anything relating to the subject of Earth Changes.
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Let’s look at our world
Generally the broader community is very uninformed or is looking away. Our history books and news media gives us a paint-by-numbers view of the world and bypasses a lot of the quality stuff, this keeps a lid on new knowledge that challenges the story of the world as we know it. Many people don’t even realise that classical physics has been updated by quantum physics. If you are interested in Archaeology you’d have an idea that there are new finds on a regular basis that don’t make it into the mainstream media, remains of mysterious civilisations every so often are popping their heads up from under the earth. If you are science or tech savvy, or watch TED you may know that Satellite Remote-Sensing Infrared is now being used to map the subtle changes on the surface of the earth, it seeks out irregularities that would be missed by the eye with the more traditional methods of research and excavation, it puts a few brakes on the endless intrusive digging that is both time consuming and unnecessarily potentially destructive. There are long lost cities, relics and civilisations under the ocean off the coast of Japan, India, the Bahamas and other places, complete with an equal amount of fantasy and plenty of debunking. Regardless of who was here in the past, what they achieved and the stories about them, real or imaginary, it would be unreasonable to say there had not been any well developed communities who left a trail in the sand, there are things that ‘just wont blow away’, these time capsule things remind us of their existence, our temporariness and it creates a challenge for us to update our history books and also maybe we could even reconsider the myths and legends of what was previously perceived as backward cultures. Many of these ‘backward’ cultures did a great job of fitting transparently and comfortably into the Eco-systems for thousands of years; some mysteriously disappeared… well it is a mystery to us when we try and make sense of them now.
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Possible Futures
We keep hearing dooms-dayers talking about things such as the world is going to shift its axis, movement of the magnetic polls, tsunamis, we could get hit by a comet, some say we’ll fry, others say Northern Europe will freeze over, if that’s not enough to fill senior nappies then what is? Are these people total nut-jobs? Why can’t they just enjoy life like everyone else? And then there are the conspiracy theorists, we better throw them into the mix. Some say the ‘elite’ are building spacecraft to vacate the planet and the worlds financial resources have been stolen and channeled into their projects because they know what’s coming and there are underground cities. Stargate people say the elite will be stepping into other worlds without us and then there are an endless array of Jesus possibilities. He’s arriving in the clouds, grabbing those who did the right thing and then heading off to somewhere else, the chosen ones near their Beloved while everyone else eats hay. So what can we make of this?
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Lots of Ways to Die
We don’t have to think back too far to see there is instability. I am reminded of years ago when I was in Nepal a women said to me, “these tourists are crazy, they don’t realise there is a jungle out there, they think just because there are a few tourist restaurants and shops they can wander off anywhere and be they’ll be OK. It’s not safe, there are tigers out there”. Strangely enough, that was an eyeopener, it pointed out to me that just because we can ‘frame’ things a certain way, doesn’t mean that we have control over nature, we are in many ways vulnerable. In 2004 we had the big tsunami, there were three hundred thousand deaths. In 2005 there was Hurricane Katrina, it wasn’t way off somewhere in a remote desert, it hit New Orleans a city with 370 thousand people. Then we had the earthquake that triggered the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident, it polluted the oceans, killed people, created devastation, a combination of nature and man-made problems kicking our asses, we know the impact and flow on will affect us for centuries. And yes there is a shift in the magnetic poles, apparently this is a normal thing for this planet we live on, I don’t think we need to develop pole paranoia, but when we do a little looking around, we can conclude it’s not too far fetched that a magnetic pole shift could disturb a lot of things. The coastlines are moving, some people invested their money in building mansions overlooking the sea, they never considered that their palaces would one day be uninhabitable. We can look back to the Chernobyl accident which was a human stuff up and while on catastrophe I may as well mention the devastation in Syria, in 2013 it was estimated there were at least four million homeless. There is also the whittling away of the Amazon Rain Forest and let’s throw in the Greek Austerity Package and the economic chaos, I won’t even start to point the finger at who and why, this would be a totally different discussion but it is yet another example of the mad fragile world we are in.
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What’s Your Salvation Package Flavor?
Often when people talk about Earth Changes there’s usually some type of religious or spiritual banter that goes with it. Some reckon a God Being is going to save the day or in other people’s versions of the ‘truth’ the ‘Chosen Ones’ are going to magically ascend into another state of consciousness, while those left behind will suffer the fate similar to Lot’s wife (a character from the Bible, her hubby told not to look back, else she would turn into a pile of non-Pink-Himalayan Rock Salt … and curiosity got the better of her). In this frail world it’s easy for people to get caught up in fear and to create a ‘redemption pathway’, a feeling of hope for the future-life and trust in what they believe to be God’s promise, in their thinking they become ‘one of the elect’ who will survive the tribulations, fire and brimstone. Some are so confident they are not concerned about the world around them because it’s going to be totally trashed soon anyway, so what’s the point? And of course there are the millions who are comfortably uncomfortable and confident that Global Warming will impact on multiple aspects of life on the planet, their bottom line is if we don’t take a left turn or if there’s no intervention we and many of our animal cousins are going to be part of Planet Earth’s history, not future, so it seems.
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What to Do?
So what do we do with the predicament we are in? Whether we are scientific about it, devoutly religious or one of those who are arrogant enough to refer to themselves as ‘the faithful’, not even realising it implies that members of other faiths are not perceived as faithful, a disciple in a pyjama wearing whacky cult, a New Ager waiting for some type of transformative redemption or we may just be an average social network user being bombarded daily with pictures of polar bears sitting on large ice blocks in the Arctic or a subscriber to the alternative news site that covers crimes against humanity happening from one side of the globe to the other and end up confused because at times it is impossible to work out who on earth are the good guys and have become so cynical we assume that everything on the mainstream news is propaganda with an ulterior agenda and maybe there are alien lizards ready to gobble us. Regardless what ‘take’ is on it all. it’s not looking pretty out there. How can we live? Do we just dumb ourselves down with drugs, alcohol, lose ourselves in a maze of objects, chasing sensation after sensation, stuffing more exotic food in and fill our worlds with digital bling?
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So what happens if there is a break down in society, what happens if the electronic grid goes down, communications networks fail? Have you ever been locked out of an apartment because someone has vandalised the electronic security of the building? That gets annoyingly difficult, particularly if you live on the sixth floor like I do. Our fire alarm gets triggered every so many days and dozens of people end up on the street in their night gowns, people holding babies looking confused. Have you ever been in a situation where the transport network suddenly gets interrupted and stops, you’re stranded? People get feisty, really irritable very fast. Or have you ever been in a bush fire or flood? The shelves on the supermarket empty out rather fast, baked bean share price peaks overnight, people suddenly become rather self centred, it’s every man for himself until the calm sets in and the community works together in a school hall and acts of kindness start filtering in from those outside. Have you ever lived somewhere where the water has become undrinkable or the power goes out and everything starts to freeze over, when the cold starts to hurt your bones? Or if you lose your ID and can’t do anything because the ‘system’ won’t let you, you don’t exist. Or have you been alienated, an outsider where it’s impossible to do basic things? This all sounds a little depressing, but most people who have been on the planet a while and traveled would have found themselves in crisis states of various levels resembling some of the things mentioned here.
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Let’s Look Ahead
We know from experience that people can be a little difficult in times of crisis; it brings out the crazies, and we also are well aware there are kind people on the planet who carry out phenomenal acts of bravery, they may even lose their lives trying to help others. And also we have all had religious people shoving pamphlets in our faces or knocking on the front door attempting to save our souls because it is their understanding of ‘truth’ and like the Blues Brothers they are on a ‘mission from God’. In times of a great Earth Change calamity (pick your disaster here, we have a few options) these people are going to come into their own; “we told you, we warned you, the Lord, He’s-a-coming” ; there would be great chaos and this would be seen as the final window of opportunity to ‘do the Lord’s work’. With fire and brimstone at the doorstep (or other option), if that’s not convincing, what is? Temporarily it’s a fair argument in moments when the world we know around us is destabilised.
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The World Ends Today … Nahh it Doesn’t
I think this last minute evangelising needs a little consideration, I see it as a given, it’s definitely going to happen one day somewhere; I consider there to be some serious problems with that attitude. A religious or spiritual man and I use the word religious here as meaning ‘someone who follows a set of principles that are virtuous’ (I will exclude the word ‘morality’ as it has other connotations and changes from sect to sect) is not rooted in fear. Fear is natural part of human nature but having it as the foundation for a relationship with a God is something I would seriously question. From my window, my understanding of the Underlying Principle that sustains the Universe is, it is benevolent, nurturing, not something to cringe from, but I best not get caught up on detail and personal preferences and flavours. Real religion or spirituality or however you care to define it is about NOW not just about the ‘future life’; I see that evangelism may have a weak argument for last minute recruits but if we look closely, there is some substance missing.
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Finding Integrity and Humility
When we attempt to live with integrity, with empathy, with compassion, we leave a trail of beauty throughout space-time; it reaches into the depth of our being, spreads to the world around us, back through our past and way out into the unborn future; it is constant, it may fluctuate but it has a solidness about it. What I would define as a religious or spiritual man (woman or other) is somebody who dips into the well of the wisdom of life, seeks it out and attempts to perceive it in those around him and extracts the ‘juice’ from the experiences he passes through. Exclusive religion and spirituality has a bad odour about it, it has a temporary hypnotic euphoric feeling but it is insular and separative. To be in a crisis, in a serious Earth Change moment of some type and not find our humility, to not understand and embrace a suffering humanity and instead, to consider oneself as God’s spokesperson, someone to correct the behaviour of others is extremely arrogant; I do understand that a religious fundamentalist would disagree. People have the whole of their lives to develop a deep understanding and live with integrity; the idea of at the last minute attempting to convert people and save their souls is totally missing the point and is elitist.
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Caught in the Mouse Trap
In a time of Earth Change of any type, there would be those who are incapable of doing anything else apart from complaining, surrendering to fear and grief, this is understandable considering the lifestyles we all lead, we’ve dumbed down our relationship with the ‘living being we are a part of and move in’. Our micro-worlds are often controlled by remotes; some of us eat food ‘nuked’ in the microwave, devoid of nutrition; mechanical automated objects do everything for us, we are ‘away’ from nature, the earth and we move in a fabricated world. City people as a rule fit the model a touch more closely than country folk. For many, everything is push button and there is movement from one air-conditioned space to the next, we eat out because it’s convenient, forgetting that what goes into us creates the ‘future us’ and we imbibe the feelings of others and whatever chemicals and garbage may be in the food. Cities are full of people shuffling numbers and papers throughout the day, it’s the information age, so many of us are dealing with virtual objects, things that aren’t real or solid; lifestyle is based around consumer culture where money gets us what we want, “just keep it comin’ baby the old one’s not good enough”; even those with limited funds buy cheap pre-made food and accumulate piles of useless junk (says he with a dozen guitars); the world of objects is bulging at the seams. Is it any wonder that the living being Mother Earth would object? Of course, if and when the ‘compost hits the Earth Change fan’ a person would seem overcome and bewildered, things would suddenly be ‘TURNED OFF’. Our dependencies would be screaming at us saying ‘feed me, gimme gimme gimme’. EVERYTHING would collapse. Am I paranoid? Straight ‘no’, I am quite grounded. Whether a person be a scientist, a religious zealot, a doomsdayer or an off-the grider-bunker-hippy, we are in serious strife.
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What to Do?
Based on the various sources, some true and others that may be a fantasy, if we see or can assume what may be coming to the world around us, how do we prepare? Do we need to go ‘full bunker-man’ with Elma Fudd complete with shotgun in hand? Do we just lie down? Do we really need to do anything? Will signing up with a religious group and hoping we get it right be enough? Will the spaceships come and take us to inner-earth, then to outer space and other dimensions? Or if there were another Ark, with so many pairs of species who might eat each other, will there be room for us, will we be on the list? Is there enough space for us? Or shall we just let things be? Or is it better to go full native? Are we chosen? Have we done enough for a God to say, “yep take that one, hop in the right queue”?
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Losing Control
Have we lost control of our lives? If we look around at the lifestyles and dependencies we have, in most cases, the straight answer is ‘yes’, this is undeniable in many cases. There are attitudes of ‘if it is coming, why bother anyway?’, and ‘I just want live my life and not worry about the future.’ Although the approaches can’t do anything so why bother? and live in the ‘NOW‘, are both reasonable responses, of the two the attitude of live in the ‘Now’ has the foundation of something worth exploring if we are sensible about it. I consider ‘can’t do anything‘ to come from a dull mind, and in a way represents how a person already lives, it lacks the wonder of life. Life’s experiences lead us to wisdom; if we were to scale things back and have ‘gratitude’ for anything, maybe it’s ‘life’ itself that we need to give thanks for, there is a wonder in our very existence, and incredible potential in the hidden unborn future. What if older civilisations that lived on just said, “I’m finished, I give up?” As I have had serious trauma in my life, I know that at the other side of it, beyond despair there is a place we get to when the grief subsides, it is glorious. And that is why I consider it important to not have an attitude of ‘lie down’ and give up. Trauma and grief leads us to a place to readdress everything, how we live, what is important, how to ‘drop’ things, how to extract the flavor of life when it seems hopelessly empty and dry.
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Rethinking Living Now
The ‘Living Now’ idea has a lot of flippy-floppy New Age connotations; if a person doesn’t dig into understanding this phrase from the pseudo-New-Age dictionary properly, it can turn into something that a person pulls out of his or her pocket when needed and may not have a lot of substance; much in the way that people say “it’s all God”, or “it’s about Love”. ‘Now’, does not mean no future, to have no creative destiny; in ‘Now’ is gratitude, respecting the present, and I don’t mean just staring at flowers and over-checking out the details. It is deeply entwined with letting distraction subside, embracing what is possible and disregarding and accepting what is happening that we cannot change. An example of something we cannot change would be, if our loved one moves on and doesn’t include us as part of his or her life, there is no need for us to dream what will never be; we can do our natural grieving but still allow life to unfold as it will and develop ways to keep our thinking in check; nor is there a need to keep running back into the memories because we are unknowingly addicted to suffering. Living with an attitude of ‘Now’ eradicates the unnecessary meanderings in thought and in the clarity and space that is created by not being a slave to our wandering thoughts, creative possibilities come about in our future when we detach from the unnecessary things filling up our thought-space . The nature of thought is activity and its fruit is the ‘world we move into and through’, a useful underlying life-principle is to redirect the thinking so that what we do have control over takes shape in a manner that is beneficial; if we don’t address what I would refer to as ‘unnecessary thinking’, what we create in our future comes from our old repetitive subconscious thinking patterns.
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Dumbing Down and Giving Up
Where the ‘dull mind’ is at fault is it cannot see a positive future, it sits in the ‘known’, wallows in it and uses what it knows, what I call its ‘Story of the World’ as a benchmark for all experience. I am always fascinated and inspired by those people who can see a business opportunity in anything, they see hope where others miss the potential. The (late) comedian George Carlin once did a skit about ‘nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, and someone will buy it’. If you ask two electricians who have different personalities, ‘is there much work on at the moment?’, one will say, “it’s coming out my ears”, another will despondently respond, “nothing doing” and proceed to tell you everything that is wrong in the universe and it will probs include a list of health problems, a bit on politics and how stuffed the world is. This in itself tells me that the experiencer in some way has a lot to do with what unfolds in the world around us that we move in.
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Getting Off the Grid
Do we need to go ‘off the grid’, to get out and not be a slave to the system that locks us in?
What do we really need, what are the essentials? Clean water, food, shelter, warmth and a few sticks to rub together to keep us warm and yes companionship and chocolate, coffee and plenty of guitar strings. Someone said to me “if you set up something, surely someone is going to turn up with a gun and take it from you”, maybe, but my mentality is not centred around Mad Max and Hollywood. When I walk out my door I don’t expect to get run over by a car, but I know that it does happen. Personally I see a potential in the future even if Earth Changes (what ever version) were to arrive.
The world we know is changing, we need to consider this seriously if we value ourselves, our loved ones, where this will lead us, OUR future yogi already knows, being a slave to fear is not what we need here, it is our creativity and sense of brilliance that needs to kick in.
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