Yet Another Humanitarian Project? [Part 4] Neighborly Love
At any given point in time, the aftermath of a disaster reveals a number of 'good luck' flash points that gladden our hearts.
As the physical walls of separation come tumbling down, disasters tend to bring neighbors and communities together.
For a finite period of time, some of those at the epicentre of any tragedy actualize the real meaning of the exhortation to 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'.
Most recipients, many of which would, ordinarily, 'rather die than accept help from strangers', accept this heartfelt assistance whole-heartedly.
The reward for those who have lent a hand and/or have given of self, the kind 'souls' they showed themselves to be in a particular instance, is that the media glorify them as 'heroes' and, for a few days, they can bask in the glow of the fifteen minutes of fame coined by Andy Warhol.
In our culture, this is as good as it gets when it comes to 'loving' others.
However, in the chapter entitled The Practice of Love, Erik Fromm, in his book, The Art of Loving, explains that our culture is more comfortable with the modern maxim 'to do unto others as you would like them to do unto you' because we are commonly unwilling to 'love' our proverbial neighbor, anyone within our circle of 'energetic' influence.
To love means to feel responsible for someone, to care for that person in an ongoing manner.
Love goes beyond doing.
Love goes beyond problem-solving on anyone's behalf.
Love has nothing to do with saving a life.
'Doing unto others,'says nothing about love and its over-arching exhortation is to simply treat the 'other' fairly.
"But," adds Fromm, "the practice of love must begin with recognizing the difference between fairness and love.
" [1] Indeed, the practice of love must also include a reflection on the limitations of 'lending a helping hand,' which is usually as close as the best of us get to 'loving our neighbor.
' Having said that, the post-Cyclone Sandy coverage has gladdened us with more than a few personal stories of survival against the odds and of neigbhorly 'love'.
These accounts are heart-warmingly similar to those revealed in 2011 in the aftermath of the floods that devastated the state of Queensland, here, in Australia, where 70 towns and over 200,000 people were affected, and 35 persons died.
And these stories were very similar to those that flowed on from our Black Saturday bushfires that killed 175 people in 2009, and those that came in the wakes of Cyclone Tracy, Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 Slave Lake wildfire, in Alberta Canada, and those stemming from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.
Clearly, tragedies and disasters do bring 'us' together for a finite period of time but, with growing awareness, they should be seen as delivering the cosmic message that we are, collectively, indeed, quite able to love our neighbor as ourselves and act selflessly.
The other message these disasters, as every other mere 'incident' bring us is this: if what we had built or bought had to be destroyed or lost, it would then be childish and karmically futile to even dream of rebuilding or resurrecting in the same manner, for the same reasons and following the same pathways as whatever has just been taken away from us.
Everything that happens, does happen for a reason, right? And yet, what most people itch to do, the moment their insurance company gives them their pay out, is to rebuild what was destroyed, often in the same place, usually with the same aspirations and with a feeling of we shall overcome and nothing can stop us.
Very few would be those who, particularly when the insurance company appears to be obstructionist, would intuit that the karmic reason for this 'cruel, compounded, heartbreaking setback' is to give them time and opportunity to realign their geographic location and their priorities with the ubiquitous need to rethink thinking - a bid to reshape from the inside-out an important element on the karmic blue-print of their lives.
The added message from any tragedy or disaster can only be to flag the need to [un]clutter, [un]think, [un]possess, share and cleanse, as is literally done for us by the fires, the tsunamis, the run-of the mill rains and, more spectacularly, by the supercell storms.
Superstorm Sandy killed many more people in Haiti than in the States but, there, not only did it flood a great number of cities, reaching deep into their foundations and weakening them, as floods do, but it further pushed the point for deep-root cleansing by flooding an unprecedented seven subway lines.
Underground tunnels being reputed for their generational layers of dust, grim, debris, sewage, rats, shady deeds and, at night, the potential source of dark primeval fears, the message could not be any clearer for anyone interested in thinking past global warming and past a godly wrath.
As an aside, it has come at great cost to us as a civilisation, that, for all intents and purposes, the focus on materialism has eons ago supplanted the focus on the real purpose and real power beaming down on us from the supernatural realm.
Sadly, the only aspect considered supernatural we like to hear about and invent things about is that of dark occult practices and all that is ghoulish - our immature interest in 'ghosts', astral shells,and 'creepy places' seems to be the sum total of our understandingbar, for a shrinking few, a genuine, old-fashioned faith in any religion.
Yes, it is most unfortunate that the concept of good luck - and its flip side - have become separated in our vernacular - therefore in our consciousness - from the superstitious belief that supernatural and deterministic forces were the one and only ones to dictate the course of events - not random fluke.
When Cyclone Sandy developed into a hybrid storm feeding on differences in temperatures and air pressure, forced by the Arctic air pattern to veer towards heavily populated areas of the Northeast United States, the consensus among many scientists was that it was largely due to bad luck.
Given the accepted general line of thinking, Andrew Cuomo, the Mayor of New York, had nothing more insightful to say than, "We need to make sure that if there is weather like this, we are more prepared and protected than we have been before.
" [2]He is absolutely correct in thinking that better preparation is more necessary now than ever before - at all levels - from the inside-out.
Unfortunately, we, along with our leaders, keep making incorrect links between 'cause and effect'.
We, as them, are as blind to the tremendous collective energies created by personal, group and societal preoccupations world-wide, as we have been, for eons too long, to the more visible pollution we have been tacitly creating together.
- 1.
The Art of Loving, E.
Fromm, 1956, Harper & Row p.
120 2.
Outsmarting The Surge by Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, Nov.
12, 2012
As the physical walls of separation come tumbling down, disasters tend to bring neighbors and communities together.
For a finite period of time, some of those at the epicentre of any tragedy actualize the real meaning of the exhortation to 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'.
Most recipients, many of which would, ordinarily, 'rather die than accept help from strangers', accept this heartfelt assistance whole-heartedly.
The reward for those who have lent a hand and/or have given of self, the kind 'souls' they showed themselves to be in a particular instance, is that the media glorify them as 'heroes' and, for a few days, they can bask in the glow of the fifteen minutes of fame coined by Andy Warhol.
In our culture, this is as good as it gets when it comes to 'loving' others.
However, in the chapter entitled The Practice of Love, Erik Fromm, in his book, The Art of Loving, explains that our culture is more comfortable with the modern maxim 'to do unto others as you would like them to do unto you' because we are commonly unwilling to 'love' our proverbial neighbor, anyone within our circle of 'energetic' influence.
To love means to feel responsible for someone, to care for that person in an ongoing manner.
Love goes beyond doing.
Love goes beyond problem-solving on anyone's behalf.
Love has nothing to do with saving a life.
'Doing unto others,'says nothing about love and its over-arching exhortation is to simply treat the 'other' fairly.
"But," adds Fromm, "the practice of love must begin with recognizing the difference between fairness and love.
" [1] Indeed, the practice of love must also include a reflection on the limitations of 'lending a helping hand,' which is usually as close as the best of us get to 'loving our neighbor.
' Having said that, the post-Cyclone Sandy coverage has gladdened us with more than a few personal stories of survival against the odds and of neigbhorly 'love'.
These accounts are heart-warmingly similar to those revealed in 2011 in the aftermath of the floods that devastated the state of Queensland, here, in Australia, where 70 towns and over 200,000 people were affected, and 35 persons died.
And these stories were very similar to those that flowed on from our Black Saturday bushfires that killed 175 people in 2009, and those that came in the wakes of Cyclone Tracy, Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 Slave Lake wildfire, in Alberta Canada, and those stemming from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.
Clearly, tragedies and disasters do bring 'us' together for a finite period of time but, with growing awareness, they should be seen as delivering the cosmic message that we are, collectively, indeed, quite able to love our neighbor as ourselves and act selflessly.
The other message these disasters, as every other mere 'incident' bring us is this: if what we had built or bought had to be destroyed or lost, it would then be childish and karmically futile to even dream of rebuilding or resurrecting in the same manner, for the same reasons and following the same pathways as whatever has just been taken away from us.
Everything that happens, does happen for a reason, right? And yet, what most people itch to do, the moment their insurance company gives them their pay out, is to rebuild what was destroyed, often in the same place, usually with the same aspirations and with a feeling of we shall overcome and nothing can stop us.
Very few would be those who, particularly when the insurance company appears to be obstructionist, would intuit that the karmic reason for this 'cruel, compounded, heartbreaking setback' is to give them time and opportunity to realign their geographic location and their priorities with the ubiquitous need to rethink thinking - a bid to reshape from the inside-out an important element on the karmic blue-print of their lives.
The added message from any tragedy or disaster can only be to flag the need to [un]clutter, [un]think, [un]possess, share and cleanse, as is literally done for us by the fires, the tsunamis, the run-of the mill rains and, more spectacularly, by the supercell storms.
Superstorm Sandy killed many more people in Haiti than in the States but, there, not only did it flood a great number of cities, reaching deep into their foundations and weakening them, as floods do, but it further pushed the point for deep-root cleansing by flooding an unprecedented seven subway lines.
Underground tunnels being reputed for their generational layers of dust, grim, debris, sewage, rats, shady deeds and, at night, the potential source of dark primeval fears, the message could not be any clearer for anyone interested in thinking past global warming and past a godly wrath.
As an aside, it has come at great cost to us as a civilisation, that, for all intents and purposes, the focus on materialism has eons ago supplanted the focus on the real purpose and real power beaming down on us from the supernatural realm.
Sadly, the only aspect considered supernatural we like to hear about and invent things about is that of dark occult practices and all that is ghoulish - our immature interest in 'ghosts', astral shells,and 'creepy places' seems to be the sum total of our understandingbar, for a shrinking few, a genuine, old-fashioned faith in any religion.
Yes, it is most unfortunate that the concept of good luck - and its flip side - have become separated in our vernacular - therefore in our consciousness - from the superstitious belief that supernatural and deterministic forces were the one and only ones to dictate the course of events - not random fluke.
When Cyclone Sandy developed into a hybrid storm feeding on differences in temperatures and air pressure, forced by the Arctic air pattern to veer towards heavily populated areas of the Northeast United States, the consensus among many scientists was that it was largely due to bad luck.
Given the accepted general line of thinking, Andrew Cuomo, the Mayor of New York, had nothing more insightful to say than, "We need to make sure that if there is weather like this, we are more prepared and protected than we have been before.
" [2]He is absolutely correct in thinking that better preparation is more necessary now than ever before - at all levels - from the inside-out.
Unfortunately, we, along with our leaders, keep making incorrect links between 'cause and effect'.
We, as them, are as blind to the tremendous collective energies created by personal, group and societal preoccupations world-wide, as we have been, for eons too long, to the more visible pollution we have been tacitly creating together.
- 1.
The Art of Loving, E.
Fromm, 1956, Harper & Row p.
120 2.
Outsmarting The Surge by Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, Nov.
12, 2012
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