Current mood:	tired, yo
Current music:	none, ssshhh, people are sleeping

Village Mindset (potentially objectional thoughts enclosed)

As I watch people mourning the cataclysm of the tsunami fallout, I am again reminded of a lesson I heard and embraced many years ago for which I have often been given the furrowing of a brow.  Originally, I got the thought from comments made by one of the wisest and most sacred-minded people I know of, Dr Christiane Northrup.  Dr Northrup is an OB/Gyn doc who wrote Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, which all adult women should own and read.  I don't say that about many books.

Anyway, the theory she put forth which I expanded on a bit is about "Village Mentality."  To preface, I have to say that I am still a firm believer that all things in humanity and in nature that occur are part of The Process.  [Note:  When I speak of "God" it is in the sense of "Deity" or "The All."  I don't see God ultimate as gender specific.  I feel we apply those labels to God to humanize that energy and make ourselves feel more comfortable with its immenseness.]  I don't feel that God makes mistakes and I feel that acts of human kind are, in actuality, acts of God, whether we are able to see them as positive progress or not.  God does not view the world and life as we do and we do not always understand why things happen as we do, but if we view God as perfect and God as omnipotent, we have to take the hand-in-glove bit of God also not making mistakes.  I do and it all works in my head if not on paper when explaining it to other folks.

Why then does God allow bad things to happen?  I don't think God does allow "bad" things to happen, I think God makes bad things happen.  I think that whether an event is a good or bad thing is totally in the eye of the beholder and comes from a fully selfish perspective which God does not employ.  I believe God evaluates an overall greatest good and then just goes for it.  We then apply our emotional labels to what occurs.  If the headlines read "Bush Wins Another Four Years In Office," to (evidently, according to statististics) half of the country, that is a travesty.  To half, that is a blessed relief.  To God, it just "is" and is part of The Process (which some of us are still trying to grasp and understand *grumble*). 

I am still pissed that my mother is dead.  I go to the phone to call her still and then remember that she died almost two years ago. Her death was stupid and needless, but die she did and now I am left untethered to my past.  I have no ancestry that is living.  I can't call her and ask questions about her courtship with my father or what happened the day I as born.  I also know that I am only able to view this from my perspective of loss.  I can't begin to see how her death was part of The Process, in little or big ways.  Every pebble tossed into the water has its specific, overall reason. We just can't always see it and the human ego demands that we know and understand when sometimes, it's just unknowable to us.

So how does Village Mentality come into play here?  I believe that our mind/body/spirit connection has not evolved to where our technological capabilities have led us.  While God is perfect and omnipotent, the concept of evolution still applies and there can be glitches in the system.  That is not a falability of God, but instead an inevitability of our limitation as humans.  In The Process, our evolutionary lag is but the blink of an eye, so is overall inconsequential.  To us, however, it creates "an issue."  Originally, the human evolved to be a village creature. The nomadic humans were even limited in what they could experience at any given time. Into the most recent 100 years or so, our focus was on our own neighborhood, our own "village" with limited imput from beyond those boundaries.  There were no TV's 100 years ago.  There were few telephones.  There were very few cars.  There certainly were no personal computers.  AM radio would not even come along until 1906.  Radio news did not come along until the 1930's.  Of course, newspapers were around from the 1600's, but without the other modern technological advances, their info was quite limited.  My point is that it is only recently that we have been able to acquire detailed information about events occuring beyond a few miles from our front doors.

I am all for this advancement and the computer has very much become my best friend.  I do, however, believe that as humans, we do not yet possess the capacity to process the extreme barage of negative, outright distressing information we receive on a near-constant basis about what's going on in the world.  Being American, it doesn't help that the basic mentality of the world is that it is our duty and obligation to ride in and save _____ (fill in the latest country to befall tragedy).  Countries will talk trash about us at every opportunity, but as soon as someone needs saving, they're banging on our door.  As Americans, if we know the country is providing relief to ______, then we feel obligated to learn more about it, presumably in order to learn how our tax dollars are being spent.  We can't turn on the TV any more without a news break telling us about another million or so tsunami victims that have been discovered, another suicide bombing in Iraq or other countries, another earthquake in country X...  Many people interpret this information for the most part on a very visceral level.  Personally, I think it makes them sick and contributes to a great deal of excess tension. 

I respect those who need to have a "cause" and who throw their life's energy into saving the rain forests, stopping aparteid (Is there still aparteid?  I tuned that stuff out years ago), demanding that we free Iraq, demanding that we find Osama bin Laden, demanding that we stop freeing Iraq and come home...  Our interests in what lies beyond our country's boundaries is immense.  I see people who are agonizing over the tsumnami deaths, over hunger in Africa, over whether we should or shouldn't be at war right now.  Personally, I think we would all be better off if we pulled our focus in to a tighter scope.  Let's worry about hunger in Sacramento (or where ever you live), for instance.  Since we ARE at war and are showing no signs of it ceasing, let's support our troups that are out there away from their families.  Let's raise money for the homeless shelters in your own city or the elementary school your child attends.

I stopped watching the news a long time ago.  Although, even as a former fan, I have major issues with Michael Moore and the way he uses the information in his movies, one thing he did for me was to shine a light (In the moving "Bowling for Columbine") on how hard the media and, in fact, the government, works to keep us all very afraid.  On the cable channel, "Discovery Health," they have daily segments that show us new things to be afraid of, why this and that and these are hazardous to our health.  You can't watch the news without having fear mainlined into your veins.  I just got tired of being afraid.  In magick, the theory I have found to prove out every time is that 1) what we fear, we create, give legs and animate in our lives and 2) like attracts like and what the way that you engage the world is how the world will engage you.  If you view the world as a fearful place, it will give you even more to fear.  If you view the world as a place of joy, wonder and miracles, they will come to you.  If you go into the world angry and looking for a fight, it will be happy to give you one.  You literally create your own experiences in life by the energy you bring out into the world.  That I know as fact.

Part of this came to a head when I was having financial hard times of the extreme sort.  I had to stop looking at the big picture (We're losing our house!  I can't pay next month's bills!  We have NO income!  We have no health insurance!) and narrow my focus to today.  Do I have enough food to feed the kids today?  Are our lights on today?  Is the car running today.  It was back then that, for the most part, I stopped stressing over what might happen in a week or a month or a year.  It is definitely a clarifying purge to start living in the moment and allowing now to be all there is.  That doesn't mean you make dumb choices like spending all of your money NOW because you've got it, but merely that your worries, your concerns are brought into a little tighter circle.  When you are working to keep your kids from being hungry, what's going on across the world isn't of great issue to you.  Whether you need more protein or less protein in your diet doesn't matter much.  You're worried about having ANYthing to eat.

Those times showed me how life can turn around on a dime and all of the energy, health and sleep that we invested into worrying about the future was likely wasted.  When we fully engage in "Village Mentality" and limit our fears and worries to the now and to our immediate situation, it not only frees up enormous energy to deal with ourselves and our own lives, but also deeply nourishes our investment in faith, which is one of the most valuable gifts a spiritually-minded person can give themselves. The power of faith is extreme, but hard won.  For Christians, it is the equal of "laying your burdens at the feet of Jesus."  For other paths, it's about "letting go and letting God," recognizing our own limited control (the control we think we have usually being an illusion) and taking our hands off of it and letting The Process unfold, letting the world turn a couple more time and letting powers other than our own get the job done.  Again, that isn't to say that you behave in an irresponsible manner, but that you start breathing again, say thank you for the things you have, celebrate the joy in your life, even if there are only a couple you can identify, act when you are prodded to act, be still when you are told to sit down and shut up by the Universe and purge yourself of the tensions and worries that are availing you nothing but ill health.  If we can do this about the experiences in our own "village" and in our own lives, can't we do that for situations that are a gajillion miles away that we would not have even known about a century ago?

Since I started practicing Village Mentality, I have noticed many changes in myself and how I process information.  For one thing, as I mentioned, I stopped watching the news.  I made a conscious choice that I did not need that much negativity and fear mongering in my life.  Once a week or so, my eye catches something on the Yahoo headlines as I'm performing a search and I will investigate.  I don't read newspapers.  I don't vote because usually, no one who is running for office interests me in any way.  There are two major issues which would sway my vote and both are inevitably on opposite sides of the ticket and I can't bear to vote for one, knowing I'm voting against the other.  I did take an interest in the most recent presidential campaign, but I didn't get my way and that's OK.  Again, I trust The Process, even if I don't understand it.  I know people who ended friendships and were absolutely eating one another up over political issues.  It's insane, really.  My magickal focus has gone through the roof, being able to utilize the energy I was expending elsewhere.  I am much more peaceful and calm.  I am much more *here* in the present and in the now.  When I hear now about tragedy befalling another country, I engage the news with my head rather than my heart and my spirit.  Yep, that's a tragedy... then I let it process through and move on.  It may sound cold and unfeeling, but I really think we have to limit the negativity and distressing information that we allow ourselves to absorb.  Do we REALLY need to know about the woman who had to choose which of her sons would drown and which she would save?  Do we really need to hear every personal account of loss and devastation?  Do we need to internalize every tragedy from the global community?  The media is set up with the sole purpose not to inform, but to elicit emotion, usually one of a painful variety.  I'm not playing the game any more and for me, it was a very positive change. I do highly recommend it.

I have friends who actually lose sleep over their fears of the apocolypse, their anguish over America's foul image in the world and their terror of being the victim of a terrorist attack.  I refuse to live my life in a state of fear and give over my joy to that mentality.  I have complete faith in The Process and trust where we are being led as a macrocosm, where ever that may be.  God does not make mistakes and even painful experiences ultimately take us to our own greatest good.  I believe that with every fiber of my being.  If I am going to have a moment's worry or a wrinkled brow of concern, it is going to be over something that affects me and my family right in that moment.  The rest can take care of itself.

Let's run a litmus.  I can sum it all up in three letters:  Y2K.  Mass hysteria, a couple years of terror, people ready to kill each other to wrestle down a wild can of spam or a bottle of water... all for nothing.  Nope, I'll take my Village Mentality any day.