Engineering change

I was standing in a spot of forest in the warm spring sunshine today, just taking in the natural beauty surrounding me. There were so many shades of green and gold and brown among the trees and hillside that it was dazzling. It's very hard to imagine that all of that could simply be chance and happenstance.

Of course, to me it isn't.

As introduced in my last post, I believe that reality as we know it is the result of our collective consciousness designing and creating an environment in which our physical bodies can survive and thrive. The myriad of climates, land masses, ocean, flora and fauna provide us with as many landscapes to inhabit as we can create lifetimes.

People have and do live in not only the lush and comfortable climates, but in the cold, dry or otherwise inhospitable ones as well. They migrate to an area and begin adapting to what it provides. They learn to exist on whatever food is available and build their villages and towns out of whatever natural materials are available. In short, throughout the ages and through numerous lives, they gain layers and layers of experience individually and collectively by inhabiting different areas and focusing on different types of society.

We know from studying history that many powerful civilizations have risen, only to fall and disappear into the shadows of some new and even more powerful system. Sometimes they fall to conquerors, sometimes to disease, sometimes to climate change, earthquake, volcanic action or other catastrophic natural disaster. But whatever the cause of a society's downfall, the reason is still the same - it happens because that experiment has gone as far as the inhabitants wish to take it, so they collectively set in motion some happening, or series of events to end that particular line of history so that a new direction and focus can take over.

In a nutshell, the point I'm making and want to leave you with, is that no natural disaster that changes any society is some freak accident. It is always planned and executed by the collective consciousness of the entities who are impacted by it.

Creation

When discussing the concepts of reincarnation, it's easy to describe what happens to us individually because we can see and touch and feel our experiences - at least on this physical level. We've all dreamed, experienced deja vu, felt the instant liking or disliking that sometimes occurs when we meet someone new, had telepathic episodes when we think of someone we haven't seen in ages and then run into them the next day. We can easily identify with the reincarnational concepts and examples discussed in prior posts because we live them physically every day.

Not as easily understood is how we collectively create our environment. How together we design and engineer the physical world we live in. Perhaps it's more easily understood if we look at it as a further extension of our subconscious abilities. If we can plan and execute our individual roles and lessons within the core circle of our family and friends in each lifetime - is it such a huge step further to realize that we all, as a larger group, create the physical world?

How better to execute our reincarnational plan than to do it in a place that we create - a location that is perfectly suited to the physical form we have assumed for a short time? In order to accept this concept, one must set aside the creationist theory - that the earth and everything in it was created by a supreme being and the evolutionary theory - that we began as single cell life forms and evolved to our current state. We have to accept a new theory - that we created our environment and everything in it and we continue to create and refine it every moment.

If you can believe that your ka is immortal, that you have lived dozens of lives throughout history and that you are an integral part of the All That Is, then you are not that far from understanding how you have contributed to the physical world as well.

Reconciling our differences

There has never been peaceful coexistence among humans in all of recorded history, so there is little reason to believe there ever was. The reasons for this are many, but we can speculate that in the beginning, violence between people was driven by hunger, a need for shelter and sometimes simply greed. In later times, when people came together in larger groups and began cooperating so that everyone in the group had shelter and enough to eat, the only way to perpetuate and protect that society was to create a set of rules (or religion) that applied to all. That way, everyone knew what was acceptable and what was not. Enforcing the rules and ensuring the religion was followed, lead to the evolution of a hierarchy (or government) in each society. By various means, including fear tactics and especially by limiting education to a select few, these enforcers could ensure that everyone conformed.

Unfortunately, if one society encountered another that had a different set of rules (or religion), their absolute belief and conviction that theirs was the "right" one, could, and often would, lead to war.

Of course this description is very basic and simple. There are many complex dynamics that contribute to the strife we still see among differing sects and societies; the point or question that I really want you to consider in this post, is how can we reconcile our societal differences in a peaceful way, when all of the participants believe passionately that theirs is the right way and everyone else is wrong?

The answer is education, not subjugation. If we can educate the populations of those societies that are in need of more food, or better living conditions, or that have oppresive governments, we will have given them the tools to build strong, healthy, more peaceful societies. The problem lies with the enforcers - they don't want to lose their positions of power, so they will resist any attempt to educate the general population.

Because we live in the age of instant communication and we have the ability to know immediately what is happening anywhere on the earth, for the first time in our history we are a position to reach all people. It is not our religious beliefs we need to be sharing; instead we need to be educating those subjugated or poorer societies. We need to be building schools and spreading our knowledge of medicine, agriculture, industry, history and the arts. This will take a few generations to come to fruition, but eventually, through education and interaction with the rest of the world, we can adopt and adapt to each others' best traits and begin to think as one society instead of the sadly fragmented and secular groups we have been historically and still are today.

Societies

We're drawn not only to our physical environment, but also to the society that inhabits it. There are a number of complicated mixes of environments and societies available for us to choose from. At any given time, any combination imaginable is possible.

We not only choose the society we inhabit, we contribute to it as well. While we're living our 'focus' life, our psyche is helping with the development and construction of its societal mores. For example, if you live in a democratic society, you help maintain it physically by casting your votes and mentally by following your society's rules. By supporting and believing in your society, you enable your ka and those of your inner circle of family and friends to perform the specific functions they have decided upon, while at the same time holding together a societal structure for other core groups to work within as well.

While we may think that some societies other than our own are unfair, or wrong, or misguided, the fact is that they wouldn't exist if they weren't required by the people who live within them. Throughout mankind's history, our societal and phyiscal differences have often resulted in violence and bloodshed. We build models, try them on for a while and then leave them behind to try other experiments. This is how we learn and grow.

In each current life, we are passionate about our beliefs. So much so that we may strive to force them upon others, without understanding that those complex structures have been built by 'other' societies to fill their specific requirements. Yet it is also true that if we contribute to the destruction of another society, it is still within the realms of ending one experiment to move on to another.

The conundrum is that whether we participate in the building or destruction of a society - we're still working within the overall plan. Where this gets tricky, from an insructional point of view, is that it appears to be permission to be violent or destructive towards a different segment of society. This is not the case. Remember earlier postings that emphasized karma and the fact that any act performed in one lifetime will come back to you in another. We should always be working to end violence - especially violence committed in the name of a religion or societal belief system. There are many peaceful, loving ways to deal with our differences and that is where our focus should always be.