The
Next Step
“Our
body is like the Earth. Not only those near us, but people, events, and actions
thousands of miles away are capable of affecting it. What is happening now,
what has happened in the past, what others are doing and thinking, all influence
our health.”
Thich
Nhat Hanh (The Energy of Prayer, p. 94; Parallax Press, 2006)
Just as the moon affects the tides, what is happening around us affects us, even if we don’t know it’s happening. This is an understanding of cause and effect that perhaps we haven’t contemplated before. It may be an ancient understanding of the interconnections of all creation, but it is newly coming into modern human consciousness. The interesting part of it is that once a new understanding explodes into awareness, it comes from and moves in all directions.
This understanding
of interconnectedness has been dawning for several decades. I remember hearing
it in the 1990’s from Joan Borysenko and Caroline Myss. A little later, Larry
Dossey, MD, started writing books about prayer, and the mysterious fact that
people going through heart surgery do better before, during and after if people are
praying for them—even people they do not know. It is a spiritual awareness—Thich
Nhat Hanh is Buddhist, and Carolyn Myss is Catholic—but an energetic reality is
that is also taught by nuclear physicist and energy healer, Barbara Brennan,
and theoretical physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. He says: “We are all
connected. To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest
of the universe, atomically.”
Thich
Nhat Hanh wrote in The Energy of Prayer, (p.93) “Right now, the collective consciousness
of our society is in very bad health…In the cities, you only need to look at
the sights, listen to the sounds, and be in touch with a small number of
people, and you can fall sick.” Keep in mind that this book was first
published in 2006, fourteen years before the Covid 19 pandemic. One could
almost say it was prophetic.
We tend to think of
disease as caused solely by the transfer of germs from one to another, and that
is a cause, but the conditions for that germ (virus, bacteria, fungus) arising
are established long before the disease manifests. We cannot pollute the planet
and expect not to be affected by our own pollution. We cannot engage in decades
of violence and expect not to be touched by it. When we humans create conditions
of war, street violence, hostile rhetoric, angry, threatening language, and
hatred, we set the stage for our own demise. When we begin to understand this
and change our behavior, we can turn this ship around.
Right now, our solution
is to blame somebody else—the Democrats or the Republicans, the Chinese or
Russians—anyone who doesn’t look like us or believe what we do. One of the
reasons someone like Donald Trump won election in this country is because he
embodied these hostile traits. In him, we saw ourselves clearly for the first
time. Some of us were drawn to him and some of us were repulsed, which again
shows the ill health of our collective consciousness.
We MUST understand the
interconnectedness of all things. We must grasp that this awareness is what
will save us from extinction. Thich Nhat Hanh said it this way: “We and God
are not two separate existences; therefore, the will of God is also our own
will. It we want to change, then God will not stop us from changing. The poet
Nguyen Du put it like this: ‘When necessary, the heavens will not stand in the
way of humans/ The result of past actions can be lifted,/ future causes and
conditions can be created.’” (The Energy of Prayer, p.25)
There is hope for
humankind, but we must make the evolutionary leap from confrontation to
cooperation. It begins with changing hearts and minds—yours and mine.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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