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What creature dared spend its energies on this tiny and beautiful work of art? And at the bottom of the sea? (for scale, the background is my fingerprint pressed in clay) You will grow more fingernail today than all the substance of this creature's entire existance. Do you see the message? It is time to participate in making a better world! See? Do!
My Spirit Guide, See Do, also talked that night about life and the worlds within. How this energy of life is always in motion within us and within all the creatures of the planet. He talked about disease and health and the responsibility to be healthy. To eat and live in ways to prolong life and resist disease. To find peace and to live in a certain harmony with everything around you. And with everything within us.
He said our energies should become full of life and love. They should be steady and clearly glowing. That nothing is better for the health of our life force within.
He said that in the life of the planet, that disease can take hold and move. That many can die. He said we should be ready and able to resist. We should be aware of our health and be living in health.
Everything we do can contribute to what effect these life-movements of the planet can have. Against this infinitely interconnected system we are small and we must be prepared for larger events driven by these forces.
These events and their consequences are all part of living inside this dynamic system of this temporal reality. There are complex forces, large and small, unfolding and refolding. Forces that drive events, with great consequences.
We create our world and it moves around us and through us. We narrowly focus our energies on the tumbling mists in front of us. We try and make out shapes and assemble a life for ourselves. But the greater world is also of our making. It moves on energies that we put in motion. And it moves with force and conviction, with power that interacts and sways everything in our reach. It all comes to us and through us.
The mistake we make it to sit and watch. We can move our energies to create a new resonance of humanity to save each other from suffering.
Here is the new message: Life is not just for our entertainment. It is for our participation. And it is the ordinary as much as the masses that we are responsible to.
And it must start with our own individual ordinary life.
We must take what we have and act according to what we see. Inside ourselves and outside. We operate from inside an illusory construct that paints our temporal reality on a mono-dimensional canvas of Time. Our senses are narrow and mostly limited to measuring environmental contrast, with the exception of color and temperature. But the purpose of life is clear: Using a small tool, we must build a great castle.
You can reach out with a simple idea of what you want and it can come to you. But only if you are freely loving the being within you. If you are honoring your highest ideals and moving to honor your inner passions. We can build with each other, but only with each other, a greater reality to our wishes. A greater reality to a greater good. We now have to create and build a resonance to rock the planet. A combined humanity can stop any suffering.
On our own we can help a few. And mostly after the fact. And we must see farther. We must look as one into the maelstrom of energies and create a resonance to bouy us all. It will take time, but every new hope is a new joy. And when your inner source is true and loving, this new joy instantly fans out into the consciousness between us.
But let us look at what is happening in the aftermath of a disaster like hurricane Katrina. The number of lives lost was more than eighteen hundred. With over seven hundred missing. People dislocated. Families separated. People lost. Lives utterly disrupted. But look inside and take note of what moves the emotional outpouring. Why do we see the number as significant? Why is suffering invisible until is reaches some imaginary critical mass? These events happen all around us.
All around us the numbers of humanity intersect. What can we make of them? How can we not feel confused and helpless? Where can our energies go?
After Katrina, fuel prices rose toward 4 dollars a gallon. People began driving less. If people drive just ten percent less, that could mean that ten percent fewer people may be killed in auto accidents. That would be over four thousand people in one year. Saved. How do we reconcile such knowledge?
Cigarettes kill hundreds of thousands every year. How do we not see the suffering in front of us. Aren’t car crashes and smoking deaths a calamity to overwhelm Katrina? Even a large earthquake?
We may say that one set is innocent victims and the other set is aware of the risks. But what about those left behind? Families separated. People lost. Children lost. Lives utterly disrupted. It is very much the same.
See Do deftly built his case. The world we create is a living and dynamic place. Connected to all things, our place in it is more than mere spectator. Making a better world will take participation. And your most powerful tool is there inside you.
— continued (Next: See Do’s summation answering my question about big disasters. Please help in sharing See Do’s message.)
This is ordinary beach sand under a microscope. The crystal gems are silica, the most common mineral in the Earth's crust. Can you imagine the origins of each grain? The forces that broke them down? That moved them to your feet? Try and see your place in this living sphere. And try to see it all connected. There is only one thing. And it is all connected to you. Take a breath, it's just beginning.
All through that single night, See Do’s lesson continued. Now he wanted me to better see the planet we ride on.
The Earth is a moving and dynamic system. It is incredibly vibrant and powerful. It only works to support life so well because it has a wealth of natural processes that cleanse and balance and re-nourish it.
We must respect these processes and know that there are countless untold benefits that cascade from their actions.
The Earth moves beneath our feet. The continents collide and subduct. Mountains are thrust up. Basins sink under their own accumulated weight. Water is pushed through solid rock. Minerals coalesce in veins. We find coal and gold and ores. We walk beaches of bleached silica. The planet is kind and helpful beyond any measure of our apparent deserving. Not only is everything here that any industrious and clever being might ever need, it’s all been neatly arranged. There are places where diamonds actually shoot out of holes in the ground to be found by anyone wandering by.
Ores find their way together. Uranium yellowcake appears deep in the Earth as chalky fossils of ancient tree limbs, having replaced the decayed plant long ago.
Water tumbles over the surface and carries away dirt and whatever else is lying loose. This sediment is dropped off again when the water slows. This changes the faces of mountains and moves huge masses of land to new places. This shifting weight can tilt huge pieces of real estate. And suddenly. Mountains rise. Basins sink.
And deep below us is a far greater energy. We and our continents float on an inner planet of blazing liquid rock that oozes under pressures and at temperatures we can scarcely imagine. Vast, slow moving plumes of heat energy, not unlike the columns of warm air driving the hurricane, roil and swirl beneath us. We’re all actually riding atop slow-motion storm clouds of molten rock.
This energy moves pieces of earth and rock as large as continents. Driven on these plumes, these plates collide and crash. They side swipe and crumble. One dives under another, to disappear into the molten muck miles below.
Occasionally, this liquid, this magma, does reach the surface in volcanic fury. Mountains have been turned to dust before the eye. Islands have exploded and sank into eternity. And new islands have been born.
Deeper still, twirls a ball off crystalline iron that anchors our place in the heavens. This spinning egg is a dynamo of energy. It is the mother of the magnetic fields that envelop us, reaching out into space many tens of thousands of miles. This shield of invisible electromagnetic current protects all life on Earth from a bombardment of high energy rays and ionizing particles streaming through the cosmos. Without it, Earth would be continually baked by the biting radiation of the stars.
So there is a price to pay for being on a living planet in motion. She organizes, refreshes and creates a landscape of magnificent beauty. But the ground will move. There will be earthquakes. We are at a point where we know the earthquake zones and can accurately map the fault lines that have quivered in the past. And the good news is that these are, geologically, very quite times. The Earth has within it the obvious power to shake us all to our knees. But she doesn’t often do that. She is good to her charges. Things are in good balance.
And despite the headlines, an earthquake is a hard thing to be killed by. Standing alone, even a large thrust may knock you off your feet, but unless the ground splits beneath your feet and you fall to your death, it is very unlikely that you might suffer serious injury. What kills people in earthquakes are falling buildings. The works of man crumble against this power and topple onto the trusting souls within. Globally, people resist the need to build structures that can withstand the shocks they know are coming.
It’s expensive. Who will pay? People and their families pay the price of a planet in motion.
Four years ago, on October 7th, 2005, over 30,000 people were killed in Pakistan and Kashmir in a single quake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Most were crushed under collapsing human structures. Many of these buildings made of mud and rock. Against the force driving out of the ground they crumbled, killing scores without warning. Others were trapped inside, bleeding, dying of heat, shock, dehydration and untold injuries.
California knows. Many people of the world know. Someday a large earthquake will strike. Maybe today. Maybe not for a hundred years. Maybe both.
More hurricanes will sweep the east coast and gulf states. But every day more people move into these areas. It is easy to see that it would be very difficult for emergency services to keep pace with the potential need. Everyone knows, but still they come. We love the warm. We love the water. And the hurricanes will come too.
All these foldings and unfoldings create an infinite mix. A perfect soup from which life arose and continues to nourish itself. Sometimes, from our living point of view the movements of the planet can seem unjust and indifferent. And sometimes it is very hard to take a wider view. But, See Do asked, please try and see.
– continued (Next: Part V: Looking at life within us and seeing a big message. Then later this week See Do sums it up in Part VI. You won’t want to miss it!)
A fairly typical USGS earthquake map of California-Nevada
After a short time, I came to see another way that I could communicate with See Do. This was when I was doing my cardio exercise at the gym. Apparently, when I was fully engaged in the exercise on the orbital cardio machine I was reaching a semi-meditative state, and from this state I found that I could contact him. It was in one of these sessions that See Do made an unusual effort to explain the dimensions of his, or our, power.
These sessions were much more casual, and our discourse was more conversational than anything like formal teaching. He was explaining that I could do anything, or make anything I want happen. I expressed some skepticism and he offered a demonstration.
As background I need to explain that at this time I was interested in the science of geology and earthquakes. So over a couple of weeks I had been keeping tabs on an online earthquake map of California. As part of my usual morning online news and email ritual I’d click a button on a news site that showed a map of recent California-Nevada earthquakes. Out of habit, I was checking the map daily. The map shows quakes that have happened over the last week, the last day, and the last hour. And that morning, I had checked the map just minutes before going down to the gym.
See Do knew this obviously, and calmly asked if I wanted to make an earthquake happen. He was in an oddly light, if not quite flip, tone. I was surprised and initially said with a chuckle “No, I don’t think so,” as this seemed just a little extreme. Then I reconsidered and thought, “Wait, okay, how about this, how about a small earthquake, maybe a two magnitude or even less.” That meant it would be enough to show up on the map but to do no damage. “And I’ll tell you where.” I remembered specifically that when I checked the map that morning there had been no recent quakes at the junction of the San Andreas and the Garlock faults near a place known as Tejon Pass at the southern end of the San Jacquin Valley.
If you look at a fault map of California, this junction of faults stands out as unusual. Most of the fault lines snake along running roughly parallel to each other. Sometimes they cross or split, but even a casual observer will notice that the intersection at Tejon Pass is unusual. Here the faults cross at nearly 60 degrees. And I knew there hadn’t been any activity at all around there in at least a week.
I said “Okay, let’s make a small earthquake right there.”
And See Do simply said “Okay.”
After a bit more conversation, which I’ll cover later, I ended my cardio session and went back up the elevator to my apartment on the forty-fifth floor. It had been an hour since I was there and I went right to the computer and pulled up the most recent USGS California earthquake map.
There, at Tejon Pass, at the junction of the San Andreas and Garlock faults were indicated two small magnitude-one quakes. They were each marked by a small red square. The red meaning that they had occurred within the last hour. Each being one-magnitude, if you were there that morning, in those foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, you very well might not have even noticed them.
Had we, I, he, done this? I can’t dare to answer that for you. To say that what I was looking at gave me chills is an understatement. What are the odds? That over the course of maybe a week that within a random hour one might pick right? I found it pretty remarkable.
– continued
