Karmic Gravity-Climate Change-Angry Planet

We need to understand why any mayhem caused by Nature has nothing to do with either bad luck or divine punishment, just as we need to understand that it is simply the only way Nature can stop us in our tracks in such a way that we are pushed to pause, open our hearts, trust, repair and heal - not merely 'rebuild' and return our lives to normal as quickly as we can.

27 September 2014 – Mount Ontake, Japan

Magma heats up water deep inside the volcano. Water becomes steam. Steam bursts out of the volcano = a highly unpredictable phreatic explosion.

It is satisfying to lean back on such scientific facts and talk about the viscosity of silica-rich rocks, the degassing process happening inside a dormant volcano and Hydrogen sulphide gas.

However, it fails to explain why more than 200 trekkers and strollers out on the mount to admire its colourful foliage on an otherwise lovely day, ended up trapped in a horrific, eerie darkness and struggling for breath in the billows of thick ash clouds.

It also fails to explain why more than 50 persons, all there at the same time, at the same place, presumably for the same reasons as the others, have become parts of the death toll stats.

Today, rescue efforts on Mount Ontake have been halted by the approach of Typhoon Phanfone.

January 25, 2014

Of course, we are in charge of our lives and of our plans, but only as long as nature snoozes on impassively as we collectively, haphazardly and blindly, stack on karma.

We need to understand why any mayhem caused by Nature has nothing to do with either bad luck or divine punishment, just as we need to understand that it is simply the only way Nature can stop us in our tracks in such a way that we are pushed to rethink our own, and therefore our collective, cultural way of ‘doing life’.

In the words of Catherine Crowe, “ ... action, once begun, never ceases – an impulse given is transmitted forever; a sound breathed reverberates in eternity; thus the past is always present ...” [1]

Thus, Nature, it would appear, suffers from more than the physical pollution of her air and of her seas and of her earth. Like Soul, Nature suffers from the energetic pollution we, separately and collectively, project outwardly through verbal and physical aggression, through the negativity of thoughts, through the reactionary nature of our energy, of our emotions and of our actions.

Though we are no longer children unaware that our shouts, our tantrums, our childish pettiness and selfish priorities go a long way in creating our own karma, we do, on the whole, often behave as children hell-bent on getting their own way.

We do it with our loved ones when they fail to comply with our expectations.

We do it in the workplace and in the streets when, self-righteously, we feel overlooked and disrespected.

We do it in the political arena, seldom thinking of the greater good of the people, of the country, but mostly thinking about personal posturing within our party of choice.

And, of course, we do it to nature as, by hook or by crook, we do our bests to go deeper and further into her core to suck out of her most remote caches of oil, of gasses, and of the minerals we need to maintain – and enhance – our personal economic status and that of our country.

We do that regardless of the destruction and violence our relentless pursuits for comfort and wealth generate - mostly in other parts of the globe, rarely in our own.

When Nature feels that enough is enough, like a concerned mother caring for her progeny, she does her best to stop us in our tracks and give us an opportunity to rethink our thinking.

Nothing is random and erratic when it comes to the order of the cosmos and the order of Nature. Science is constantly reminding us of this. Random and erratic responses are strictly human.

Though Nature is endlessly creative in all that she produces and generates, it seems she responds to our overly-indulgent economic and moral-cultural patterns with varying degrees of severity.

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1. Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature, The Aquarian Press, 1986 p.24

Relatively benignly, at times, Nature shoves us around, maximising lack of comfort and disturbance to our carefully eschewed planned and utmost priorities.

This first-level intervention was once again illustrated a few days before Christmas 2013 when hundreds of cancelled flights at Britain’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports were grounded by a thick blanket of fog.

Thousands of travellers from all walks of life and with varying thresholds for patience, respect, compassion and tolerance found themselves desperately scrambling to board planes and get to their destinations in time for the festive season.

Most remained penned in transit lounges in the midst of utter chaos in what is now remembered as ‘hellish, sub-human conditions.’

A few days ago, in the first week of 2014, in one single day, some 2000 flights were cancelled at New York’s LaGuardia Airport because of the snow storm that had slammed over the city.

There, thousands of travellers described their experience as ‘horrifying’. Similarly, in the States and in Europe, rail passengers have had their own plans and priorities disrupted.

Airports and train stations are akin to our digestive system: in at one end and out at the other.

When transit inside these places does not operate efficiently, the system gets clogged up, complications happen and spill over.

Our energy field gets similarly clogged up when the Me/Mine First knee-jerk reaction is our principal method of interaction with the world.

This modus operandi affects the ones closest to us, whether the closeness is through a sentimental bond, a blood bond or the bond created by the semi-permanent proximity generated by our work environment. Impatience, intolerance, self-righteousness also affect us throughout the, even more, temporary situations experienced, for example, in transit lounges and daily commuting.

Interestingly, the ‘hellish sub-human conditions’ experienced by many in the U.K. airports might trigger an inquiry. Indeed, a deep soul-searching inquiry is needed, but not one carried out by aviation authorities.

We, aware beings, are the ones who must conduct an inquiry into our needs and response patterns: what lurks deep within our persona once our buttons are pushed ‘far enough’.

We need to know.

Another illustration of that first-level way in which Nature at times interferes and spoils our plans of escape, discovery, relaxation and even research is that of Akademik Shokalsky, the Russian ship that found itself trapped on Christmas Eve in a sea of Antarctic ice some 3 meters thick.

Though the passengers, not in any imminent danger, overall seemed to have a good time, they nevertheless remained ‘prisoners’ of the ice for a week - just beyond the reach of rescuers.

During that time, whatever plans and priorities crew and passengers may have had were put on hold – perhaps long enough for some of them, if not all, to ponder, rethink and redress.

Whether we are put under testing ‘lock up’ conditions that are frustrating at times, degrading at other times or whether we are on an ice-strengthened Antarctic ship trapped as effectively as a flower in an ice-pond, or stuck in peak hour gridlock, Nature’s intention is always the same. She is extremely single-minded about waking us up from our somnolence, as she yields Karma made-to-measure.

Symbolically, the unyielding meringue-like peaks of static frozen sea that held the 74 ship passengers in a place of desolate, but pristine, amazing beauty represent the mounting need to warm up our heart, to chip away at its own ice-strengthened conditioned nature, as well as melt that of the ‘companions’ with whom we are journeying in this lifetime.

Nature’s intention goes a lot deeper than having us merely make the most of a bad moment by attempting to have a whale of a time.

Perhaps less spectacular but certainly deadlier, as each carries its own death toll, therefore a definite step-up in severity, are the snow and ice storms that have been blanketing Europe, Canada and the north-eastern states of America on a regular basis - and most recently, in the early days of January this year, by the extreme Arctic conditions unleashed either by the Polar vortex – or by a slow jet stream.

These storms are quite damaging under their deceptive, fairy-land whiteness.

They cause wide-spread misery, affect millions of commuters and burden local economies.

21 deaths have been reported across the Central states, South and Northeast states of America in the past 3 days alone. In varying degrees, these critical seasonal changes affect the local economy in a number of ways.

While Nature covers our world with ice and snow, while she blinds us with sleet, she proclaims her reign over us.

We scurry back to our homes, desperate for shelter and warmth. Once there, power cuts keep us away from our usual separate, often mindless distractions. No warm and comforting drinks.

Our favourite edibles languish in a deep freeze of their own.

Seated around makeshift lighting, spouses/ partners, girlfriends/boyfriends, parents and children, siblings – we all find ourselves together in the evenings, as in bygone days, but with much less to share.

In this century, within the home, we have developed the art of limited conversations and limited communication with each other.

We have limited ways to truly understand the other.

We have limited acceptance and limited patience with each other.

The thought of disclosing or of giving more of ourselves than we are prepared to give - or even ‘sacrifice’- has become intolerable.

We also have limited trust in each other and, therefore, we feel limited, conditional love for each other, as well.

Indeed, power cuts create havoc – a most purposeful sort of havoc, if we take the opportunity to reflect, rethink and reconnect.

Intended to work on our psyche along the same principle, though at the other end of the temperature spectrum, are the hordes of leaping bushfires that increasingly become mega-fires billed to become the ‘next’ global danger. They occur like clockwork in the American West and, recently again, in rural New South Wales, in Australia. Many of these are started by arson, at times very young ones.

It’s a convenient fallacy to assume that wrong-doers, such as arsonists, are the product of a dysfunctional home life.

They, as any wrong-doers regardless of their age, are part and parcel of our culture. They have not beamed down from Planet X just to set alight our bushland and forests.

Wildfires do not usually take lives but they affect our property, our economy and ‘destroy our soul’, as some would say.

By plunging us through fire and ice, Nature’s intention is to strengthen us from the inside out - not to toughen us – as we see and sometimes feel in real time the destructive effects of separate, frosty, icy ways of being, and the careless, hot-headedness that wrecks lives.

They either leave us cold and stiff or charred and gutted from the inside-out – barren.

And so, in terms of personal emotional/spiritual growth, it is our individual and collective karma that, in fact, brings us together – not against each other - in what often appears dire but always shared or share-able circumstances.

Because of our faith in science and materialism, we are morally and culturally unlikely to respond as expected, certainly not in the foreseeable future.

However, it can be argued that Nature’s global objective is to enable us to learn to accept What-Is and to accept ‘the other’ with an open heart.

This goes some way to explain why Nature is going to go on hammering us, for the greater good of us all until ... something changes deep within our self-interested, self-focused lifestyles.

Global warming – or not – for those of us who survive them, natural disasters are dire warnings.