Hi friends,
We are leaving early tomorrow morning, so I've lots to do today since we want to pack the car tonight and get going very early. Too bad we won't be able to have lunch with Neil in Calgary. It seems he's still abroad. Does anybody know when he'll be home again?
I was pondering life this morning as probably we all do, and I thought you might like to hear about it. We can all live our lives to help all of us in the whole world. Good ways of thinking and living are catching. I've often watched how our behaviours are catching. For instance, when somebody in a car lets another person trying to enter a line of traffic into line ahead of them, people in the cars behind often start to do the same. But if people just keep right on racing by and don't give the other fellow a chance to enter, everybody else seems to do that too. I see that all the time at our bridge. This has convinced me that we often follow along with what other people are doing, without thinking much about it.
We also can cause other's to think about why we behave and think the way we do, and some will decide they like our way better, and do it, too. Example is Tthe direct way to become a healing influence in the world. I think there is an even wider effect from the way we think and feel that is subtler, but goes much further out into the world than examples we see or hear. It's through our thoughts and feelings.
This is what happens when a large crowd of people turns into a mob and does things they would never do if their accumulated thoughts and feelings hadn't changed them from a crowd into a mob. This changing from a crowd into a mob seems to be like a when a lot of grasshoppers together. When they reach a critical number those grasshoppers actually change colour and and become hordes of devouring locusts. For ages scientists didn't know where locusts came from. Then they discovered that they were common grasshoppers that had reached a critical mass, and turned into quite a differently behaving locusts capable of devestating everything in their path.
These examples of grasshoppers into locusts, and crowds into mobs can work in the opposite way, too. Once a "critical mass" is reached there is a tipping point. It may tip into something very scary, or something very good. I think the more of us who accept each other, the more chance there is that we will tip at a critical mass stage, and it will affect all the people in the world for the better. There will be more unity, cooperation, reluctance to hurt and make war, or to go along with it. It seems to be the way to change this world into a peaceful place for all of us.
We can help with out ways of living so that it catches on and ripples spread wider and wider out through the whole world. We can do our bit to make this world the peaceful, beautiful home it can become for all of us. The human race has matured physically and materially. Now we need to become mature emotionally, ethically, morally and spiritually. In the lives of individuals that part of us begins to strongly mature later, too, than we do physically and materially. It is a very recent discovery that it can take up until age 25, althoug physical and intellectual strength is greatest around 15.
A few scientists are beginning to wonder if all the planets in the universe may be at this same period of development that we are as a human race on this planet. That is, moving out of adolescense into maturity. If so, it would be another of those patterns that seem to run thorough the whole structure. For instance, the baby in the womb of the mother goes through the forms that the human race did to develop physically to the way we are now. That's why there is even the vestige of a tail in us. Clouds in the sky often get ridges just like sand in water. YOu can look for repeating patterns everywhere, from the macrocosm to the microcost, which reflect each other, too.
String theory is fascinating. What I can understand of it. Imagine! -- Eleven dimensions, parallel universes.... I think a lot of what has seemed mysterious to us in the childhood and adolescence of our race is going to start to fit into the picture science is building, and become understandable to us intellectually as well as through inspiration and revelation and amazed observation.
The trouble is we have to grow up fast in order to save ourselves and our world. We need to get along together and begin to repair the damage that has happened, instead of making war, and not cooperating and talking together.
About this, Baha'u'llah said that the various races of humankind lend a composite harmony and beauty of color to the whole. "Let all associate, therefore, in this great human garden even as flowers grow and blend together side by side without discord or disagreement between them." If we think this way we can appreciate and celebrate human diversity, instead of fearing or disdaining it. All doves get along, no matter their colour. So do cows and other animals. It isn't fitting that people should not be able to do what animals can do. It is beneath human dignity to be lesser than animals in our acceptance of each other.
So let us all start by doing away with strangeness between us based on differences of looks, names, ways of living, stories, cultures, and see each other as a big human family, and our diversity as something interesting and even beautiful.
Morning thoughts from your friend, Mary
