by Palden Jenkins
I'm not a geomancer - I'm involved in other planetary healing activities; however the issues involved in both fields give rise to similar questions. These questions need continual review, since things are nowadays very much in the balance and small actions can have big effects. It's reasonably safe to assume that none of us intentionally seeks to harm nature, the cosmos or humanity, yet what about unintentions?
It's all very well to assume we're doing good for the world, but in what way does the world feed back its responses - and do we pick them up clearly? Or do we rest on our fantasies and preferences for truth? There is no clear and immediate answer to this - would that there were - however, in responsibly continuing in our work, we must nevertheless answer it, somehow!
We assume that it is good to contribute to stopping wars, alleviating pollution or geopathic stress. In principle this is true. However, consider this. If a war were to be the last war of its kind in human history, by dint of fundamental mass lessons learned from it, is there a risk that by working (and succeeding) to bring peace (no more shooting) we might thereby deprive humanity of a profound learning experience? The 'war to end all wars' of our own century didn't pan out that way: Humanity didn't learn. But what happens if the next war has a dramatically wholesome catalytic effect, through its perversity, on the psyche of humanity? Do we allow it to proceed or attempt to stop it? Answers on a postcard to President Clinton please!
If we look on war as a psychic virus (the aim of a virus being to preserve its life at all costs, no matter who the host is or what damage it wreaks), then stopping one war can precipitate the beginning of another. Bosnia started only months after Lebanon ended, and Ulster and Israel seem inextricably virally connected too.
So what do we do? Do we benignly work to stop a disgusting war, with the possible effect that the war-virus propagates elsewhere? There is an abstruse esoteric argument which says that (for example) Tibetans today suffer extreme oppression in order to stop others suffering, because Tibetans can handle it better. While this argument justifies nothing, it is a potent perspective which admonishes us not to take lightly the issues around 'freeing' Tibet. And would Holiday Inns, Coca-Cola and packaged meditation tours in Lhasa represent an improvement?
In the case of older people, it is sometimes said that healing therapies can unleash the surfacing of a plethora of buried ailments otherwise kept down by a dominant ailment. The same applies to earth-healing. Many are the times I've wondered whether ceremonial invocations atop a holy hill might unblock any containing fields around a nuclear power station, or shift a problem down the line to cause a city crime-wave 200 miles away. And, would a nuclear 'accident' or a spate of mugged grannies be a negative or in the end a positive thing? And what do 'negative' and 'positive' mean anyway?
Or, get this. A friend of mine was a dedicated Greenpeace campaigner in the 70s, specialising in nuclear issues. He realised that homeopathically-potentised plutonium is a remedy for spiritual blockage. Does this mean that releases of radiation into the atmosphere, subsequently diluted and succussed, *might* be a hidden redemptive factor which we nevertheless look on as 'a bad thing'? Where do our judgements lead us?
Or, how about sperm-counts? Declining male sperm counts could be a way by which humanity or the cosmos (or both) is unconsciously fixing the population problem. There's research which shows that men with healthy diet and lifestyle do not suffer declining sperm counts to the same degree as beer-and-burger types. Does this mean that future humanity is eliminating certain kinds of genes from its gene pool? Or are we heading for a boom industry in human studs, artificial insemination or women-led civil war? Choose your preferred nightmare!
Who knows? Whatever is the case, these two examples suggest that our basic ideological assumptions can be questionable, even though our motivations and love for life might be wholesome.
In August 1995, in the Hundredth Monkeying inner aid project, ninety of us spent a full day intensively working with Bosnia - the war was still on. While we were at work, two drunken Serbs bombed a Sarajevo marketplace, killing sixty. This led to NATO intervention within days, followed by Dayton. Were those sixty people, on a soul-level, intentionally sacrificing themselves? Were they hapless victims? Did they themselves benefit? Were they inwardly rescued as they suddenly 'passed over' - or was it all meaningless for them, a stray impact from the hand of fate? We might prefer to believe one thing or another - in honesty we do not know - yet our beliefs reflect our predispositions more than realities before us.
This means it is necessary to look at the specific ways we angle our approaches to healing work. For example, instead of seeking to stop a war or to heal or enhance a piece of damaged land it might be better to take another approach: to intentfully work on the basis of raising humanity's awareness and learning of the total implications of war or the wider effects of poisoned land.
It might be better to dedicate our work to catalysing human consciousness and lesson-learning than to operate directly on limited facets of our total planetary situation - since it is humanity which is the main source of the problem. However, the shorter-term outcomes of such an approach might seem questionable - especially if we're being paid for our services or if public expectations are involved.
This implies an incredibly equanimity-filled, foresightful attitude - and risk-taking and amplified responsibility. It involves trusting in the free-will of humanity and the guiding intelligence of nature to an enormous degree. We might even have to accept that, if necessary, it's okay if humanity and the world go down the tube. After all, partisanly taking sides, even in a 'light-bringing' sense, is perhaps more a part of the problem than the solution - Crusaders and evangelists, to themselves, were/are bringers of light. This means leaving the future very open: Im'sh'allah, que sera sera.
Tricky stuff, huh? What do we do? Such ideas can be confusing and discouraging to folks who prefer simple mapped-out answers to the big questions of our time. Yet the answer is neither to pack up and go home nor to ignore the question - nor to charge forward trying to outmanoeuvre the power of consequence. If anything, the answer implies redoubled effort in framing and understanding our healing work, whatever work we're moved to do.
But who is to say what's correct? Who sets the guidelines and what are they? In the end it's down to *conscience* - that penetratingly insightful part of ourselves which sees beyond judgement, without evaluation or editorial activity.
This is a challenge to continually review our concepts and practices. We can only go forward in faith. If there are unwittingly tarnished edges to our work, we need even then to examine whether and how these shadows might be valuable in the longterm or in indirect ways. We must bear in mind that we *can* innocently exacerbate situations we seek to heal or support. We're thus called upon repeatedly to recommit ourselves to relearning and unlearning notions we live and work by - whether it's comfortable or not.
After all, 'one person's medicine is another's poison' and, at times, the best remedy for a healing client can sometimes be death or drawn-out hardship, not necessarily improvement and alleviation in the commonly- sought way. It's not our prerogative to judge what's best, yet any practitioner *does judge anyway*, implicitly, by entering into a therapeutic agreement with a client - even if the 'client' is the Earth. In matters of death there are perspectives and reasons for death which lie far beyond our mortal ken - there are people who meet death whom we feel shouldn't or don't deserve it, while others live on despite all logic or expectation.
This is a challenge of consciousness. Part of our perceptual equipment deep down does know deeper, wider and future possibilities, even if we know not why or how and even if we not infrequently interpret its messages erroneously. We're challenged to use this equipment in conjunction with our more conscious thoughts, wishes and methods. Speaking for myself at lEast, having got thus far in the world-healing game, one thing has changed - I've become more aware of the bigger picture. And it's not as simple as I'd like it to be. The water is deeper and murkier than I once thought.
Yet that's a challenge to keep moving on - perhaps even to get deeper into the shit. Only time will tell. We can only put up the prayer that our well-meaning work genuinely does bring benefit - and if not, that it brings learning and eventual redemption. We must choose our reality with the wisdom that we have and get on with constructing it - and one day, perhaps even in another life - we'll find out what the true meaning of it all genuinely was!