I was reading the textbook for the next class in my hypnosis training. It’s about ethics.
In reading the first chapter, I found it difficult to keep my attention on the page. Not because it was hard to understand or boring, but because practically every sentence took my mind off on a tangent. I would think about examples or the implications of what I had just read. I read each sentence more times than I can count, each time I kept thinking of more connections. My mind wandered so far I frequently forgot what paragraph I was reading.
In this country, people protest abortion, yet don’t lift a finger to save a child dying of hunger, neglect or lack of medical care. We send people off to war to kill others, to die, or worse, come back injured and requiring expensive medical care that we balk at giving them. Even though we promised to take care of them. The same parties that insist that every unborn child has a right to live, are strangely silent when the children they “save” are gunned down in a elementary school.
We consider it reasonable, even necessary, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend the life of a critically ill patient a few weeks or months, when that same money, spent to help poor rural children in, say, West Virginia, would have a much bigger impact on the lives of the children, their community and the state as a whole. It’s hard to look at all this and not think that people are extremely selfish, self-centered and morally blind to anyone and anything outside their small circle.
Consider our views of death. Google “Child death inspires” and see how many laws, programs and life changes there are that would never have happened but for the death of a child. Often it took a death to get anyone to act on a problem that many people knew about, but did nothing about. Children in this country die literally every day, practically every hour. Why does it take one of our own to wake us up?
What would happen if, somehow, we had prevented all these deaths. All those law and a programs would never have happened. Then what? A cynical person would say that everything around us would steadily more dangerous. Food, cars, houses, transportation, medicine, appliances, everything would get worse and worse as companies and individuals cut corners, and continued to cut corners until, finally, someone died and they had to stop.
If you want proof, just look around you: The google search you just did shows you lots of child deaths, more than half of them were preventable. Even with all the laws and safeguards we already have in place, thousands of children die each year from reasons that are well known, and they would not have happened, if laws, regulation and guidelines had been followed. So why do they happen? Why do parents leave their children in hot cars until they die, despite warning and laws. I can’t help but wonder how many mothers attending anti-abortion rallies have left their children, unattended, in their cars. Why is it so easy to point the finger at someone else, rather than in the mirror?
I keep thinking about a case I heard about, probably some years ago, where a mother had a child that had some congenital defect and died around the age of four or five. The child was such a light, such a loving and happy child, despite his condition, that he inspired his mother to dedicate the rest of her life helping other children. What would have happened if science found a way to keep the child alive? Would the mother have spent the rest of her life caring for him alone? What would of happened to all the other children that the mother would have helped? Would they have been left to suffer, fail and die, due to lack of support? But we can’t exchange one life for another, or even many others. Can we? But, don’t we do that all the time, when we send soldiers off to war?
If reincarnation was accepted as possible, how would that change the equation? Would that be a good or a bad thing? For instance, what if the mother above knew that her child volunteered to be born with that disability and short lifespan in order to inspire the resulting expanding ripple of love and support for others. Would that have changed things? Would she have felt manipulated? Decided not to help others?
Would society fall apart if we all knew that death wasn’t “the end?” Look around you, at Ads. You see them everywhere. Take a minute, look, and think: How many of them are about making you afraid of something? Something that the advertised product just happens to be the cure or solution to. Afraid you’re not good looking enough? Makeup, clothes, hair products, skin care products. Worried about your health: Diets, pill, health food, organics, supplements. Afraid you don’t know what’s going on: Magazines, “Best sellers,” Oprah, talk shows, pundits, Twitter, Instagram, etc.. Of being alone: Facebook, dating sights, chat rooms. Of getting old, of being too young, of not having enough money, of too much money, Of being too fat, too thin, too young, too old, being too smart, not smart enough, being too busy, not having anything to do. There’s an old advertising adage: “Create a need and fill it.“ We are so far past real needs that most of us have never known anything but artificial needs created by advertisers to sell products.
What happens to the economy when there is no deadline to “get it now, before it’s too late?” When “You only go around once in life,” is completely false, why should you endanger your health and life for a little excitement? On the other hand, if we all believed that we all have as many chances as we need and we play (and have played) all the parts: rich/poor, smart/dumb, oppressor/oppressed, king/serf, man/woman, black/white, passionate/lazy, inspired/board? What would that do to the lessons we are here to learn?
You could make a case that telling someone about their past could sabotage their current life. They are here to experience something and telling them it’s all a game would ruin it. I don’t buy that. My experience and everything I’ve read points to one inescapable fact in this world: people will only believe what they want to believe. If you’re not ready to deal with reincarnation, if would interfere with your life-plan, then you won’t believe it. You may not even notice it. That’s the ultimate irony of the attempts of leaders to protect their “faith” by shielding followers from “wrong” ideas: If your faith is true, incompatible idea will have absolutely no effect on you. On the other hand, if you find you are open to new ideas, if doubts and alternatives hang out in the back of your mind, then your “faith” is nothing more that dogma with no grounding in any kind of spiritual truth.
That’s my thoughts for today.
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