Tragedies

In case reminders are needed, it’s meditation on Sunday and you’re welcome to join us.

It’s at 7pm GMT every Sunday, without fail. Times vary in different countries, and these and other necessary details are here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

If at this time you’re working inwardly with Gaza (or Ukraine, or Sudan, or…), there’s not a lot we can do right now except care for people, to ease their hearts, mop up the dead and help people make the best of a hellish situation.

It’s tragic, but the bit we can do is to etch these events in the collective psyche of humanity and to help the world come to a very necessary conclusion, that this kind of thing is not part of our future.

This needs the building or reinforcing of a world consensus, deep in the heart of humanity. This isn’t as impossible as it seems since so many people are now tilting that way, many of them quietly and surreptitiously within themselves, and the real problem we face concerns what I keep quoting over and over, from the 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke…

“For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing.“

It’s arguable that, on Earth, the goodguys actually outnumber the badguys (though that’s over-simplistic and reality is more like shades of grey). Yet the energy-balances are tilted the ‘wrong’ way, giving much more apparent power to the Netanyahus and the conflict-stirrers of this world than they deserve.

Yet in the final analysis, the energy-balances actually tilt the other way.

As humans, we are mixed – there is darkness and light within each one of us. We’re challenged to examine those balances within ourselves, since the state of the world and the state of our selves are intimately connected. Buddhists call this ‘non-duality’. Christians call it ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. I am he as you are she as you are me, and we are all together.

One of the best ways the losses and pain can be redeemed is to shine a psychic spotlight on these events, to help build up a tidal wave of awareness in the world psyche which simply says ‘May this be the defining event that makes this the last time it happens‘.

Perhaps we cannot right now save people like Gazans from their plight, but we can turn their sufferings and deaths into meaningful sacrifices for wider change.

We don’t want to set up a new conflict – this isn’t about a battle between light and darkness since both are part of reality. It’s about bringing the light and the dark into stronger relationship so that they interact properly and come to a new balance.

In personal growth this is called ‘owning our stuff’. The world needs to own its stuff.

With love, Palden

Both pictures come from Beit Lahem or Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine in 2011. The boy below is now a young man: I wonder what he’s thinking nowadays?