Things with Stings

Last night as I arrived home, very late, I casually crushed a cockroach beneath my foot before I entered the house and did my whole evening-routine. This morning I got up at my usual time, did all my usual stuff listening to the gentle sound of rain on the roof, than fairly late in the morning - about eight or so - finally made it outside the front door to look at the world, with no thought of last night's conquest.

It was still there. But not quite where I had put it - it had moved about half a metre west of where it had died, and not under its own volition - it's insides had been smeared everywhere, and it was definitely in no state to move. The culprits? A swarm of small black ants, the very same species that co-pollinate my basil.

I sat down to watch, and to allow my thoughts to drift, a very productive way of thinking that I should indulge a bit more.

None of the smear of innards existed any more. Not only were there streams of ants taking individual bellyfuls of food back home, but there seemed to be a labour gang engaged in dissecting body-parts from the cockroach for easy transport: half-legs and things were wandering off in more or less random directions.

They reminded me, first, of a swarm of military busily at work all over an aircraft carrier. Then I thought no, and staying with the sea I saw them as salvage-divers on a deep-sea wreck somewhere. Then I started thinking of their shared memes, the over-thoughts that seem to inhabit all members of hive-colonies, and on cue my individual honey-bee turned up to pollinate the basil plant directly to the left of where I was sitting, Which took me to bees, and their over-thoughts, and their breeding patterns.

And it occurred to me that while we label their individual hive-matriarch the "queen", like each and every worker in a hive she isn't a queen at all - she is a slave to the oversoul of the hive. Once she starts breeding, she never sees the light of day at all, not unless the beekeeper deliberately opens up the hive. In nature, she is in darkness the rest of her life. Bloated, unable to move much, she even needs to be fed, she cannot feed herself. Hers is a life in chains, based on her productivity.

As long as she keeps pushing out thousands and thousands of eggs, her fellow-slaves will keep on feeding her. Her reproductive organs are subjected to constant over-use and overwork, until they are exhausted and production starts dropping, at which point the workers, her fellow-slaves, designate a few eggs as future queens, and invest some serious effort into nurturing her replacement(s).

No honour is accorded to her, as mother or monarch. She becomes expendable, and as the youngsters take flight in an orgy of sex, the hive pays attention to them, not her. Eventually, the old Queen is ignominiously ejected from the hive, still alive, to die nearby, unable to feed herself or fly. Like her workers' lives, hers is a life of slavery that is brought to an end when her usefulness to the colony runs out. There is no Centrelink to sustain her when she can no longer work, no social security or family or nursing home to feed her until she dies a "natural" death. There is only a brutal rejection at the end of her productive life.

She is not a queen - she is only a slave, a very specialised slave. A sex slave, if you like, certainly a reproductive slave.

So who, amongst ants and bees, is not a slave? As individuals, they are all slaves: slaves to reproduction, to home-building, to food-gathering, to raising young, to defence of the colony, even to air conditioning. There is not a single free ant, there is not a single free bee.

No one ant or bee makes decisions, no one ant or bee thinks, as we know thought. They are all driven by the whip of their community.

So how to bees know to swarm, some of them staying with one queen, the others with another? How do ants work out when and in what direction to move house with rain or animal disturbance threatens their home? Who makes the decisions about directions and distances, about settling down or moving on?

Perhaps each ant or bee is a neurone in a larger brain, linked by chemical or even psychic ties with each other free-standing ant or bee in its colony. Thinking could be done as a group, as an oversoul. This might equate with the sophisticated and co-ordinated flight-thinking done by massed flocks of hundreds of birds, too, or thousands of bats. Why aren't there mid-air collisions? You'd think that some bird somewhere would miss seeing at least someone flying alongside, below or above them; you'd think that some bat somewhere would miss or confuse the echo-traces of fast-moving bats around them. But I have never seen a single collision, even when a flock has been startled in flight by an explosion or a predator and suddenly goes into panic-mode.

Why not?

We are accustomed to thinking as individuals, but we think as groups, too. In Australia, we drive on the left side of the road (which is self-evidently the right side), and consider the right side of the road to be the wrong side. That was decided on by an individual a long time ago in the history of the car, and is followed by concensus, to keep us safe. There is no formal agreement about walking and footpaths, yet if I walk in the right side of a footpath, "oncoming traffic" scowls at me. (Guess who frequently walks in the right side, just to get people to re-evaluate what they do without thinking!)

On those occasions, I am an ant who has gone maverick, not paying attention to the thoughts of the group-mind. I am a bee who is off-course.

In another sense, we can develop lesser, more individual group-minds. I take part in a weekly meditation group. We all know each other, we rarely invite other people in. It happens, but it's occasional. We are all friends: I know I for one have a friendship with the group as a whole, and with each person in the group as individuals. which is somehow separate from our group friendship.

The pattern of the meditation is that one person will talk us all through a guided meditation, then at the end each of us will individually debrief, describing what we experienced and what we did, who we met and where we went. We are all very different people, and we all look at the world differently, but when we spent a few months building a non-physical environment for ourselves, there was a high degree of accord between us as to how it looked, and afterwards, things that hadn't been described by the leader but experienced by us all individually correlated very closely indeed.

So it is possible to develop a group mind. And Things With Stings are far, far better and more practised at doing it than we are.

Feeling Rapturous, Anyone?

Well, it's that time again. Every eight years or so, yet another fool predicts that, based on mistranslations of mistranslations of mistranslations of the Bible or else based on mistranslations of Nostradamus, our world is going to end.

Here is what I wrote elsewhere on the net before the latest so-called Rapture was supposed to happen. It was in response to someone asking whether we were all preparing for the end of the world.

~~~~

Last night at my regular weekly meditation group, we did a tree meditation. Trouble was, for some reason I manifested as a frangipanni tree, and as it is winter here, it/I had no leaves or flowers. My friend was leading the meditation this week so I was free to sink right into it, and as she told us to grow our tree higher and higher, my frangipanni said "Are you kidding?" I'm a frangipanni. Three metres high is about my limit in these soils!" And as she told us to unfurl leaves and flowers, it replied "In winter? I'm deciduous! Who does she think I am?" So I left it bare, and climbed up through the structure of its branches.

Pretty soon I ran out of tree. Now, it just happens that I have bought some lengths of green plastic ivy for a particular purpose and haven't yet set it to work, and when I ran out of tree, the plastic ivy (still very, very plastic!) came up beside me and said "Here - you can climb on me". So I did. Unfortunately, I had only bought three two-metre lengths which isn't very much (a metre is slightly longer than a yard), so when I got up to the stratosphere, I ran out of plastic ivy, too, even though it had been very accommodating.

We were also at my friend's place with a woodfire in the fireplace, and as I ran out of plastic ivy I noticed a tendril of smoke next to me, so I grabbed that, and continued climbing up on the fluid, graceful smoke. In the distance I could still hear my friend leading the meditation, and she asked us to look back at the earth, and really *look* at it, and notice if - and where - it needed healing. Well, I turned around on my tendril of smoke and looked very hard for a painful, discoloured Japan, but all I saw was this glowing blue/white/green/brown jewel swimming contentedly in space, like a cosmic opal. So I kept climbing, and after a while I ran out of smoke.

But now there were stepping-stones beside me, lovely solid round ones, all glittery and swirly, so I stepped onto one of them, and found they were a perfect distance apart for my individual stride, and I kept walking through space on these glittery, white stepping-stones. After a while, I realised they were all spiral galaxies, not with the gorgeous colours you see in Hubble Space Telescope photos, but with an even more beautiful-for-being-simple white-on-white sparkly look. And they were good and solid and safe to walk on.

Now the family whose house this was held at have two dogs, both part-malamute. One of them is considered by everyone to be intelligent and deeply magical, and the other one is considered by everyone but me to be a dumb blonde <grin>. Guess who was keeping me company? Right, the dumb blonde, loping alongside me in spirit-form easily and comfortably, as if I took her on dog-walks through the sky every day of her life. After the meditation she stuck to my side like glue.

Her owner eventually led us back down, so I turned around on the sparkly stepping-stones, then climbed down the smoke, then the ivy, then the tree. We all went inside our trees to receive a gift from the tree-spirit, and once again my frangipanni muttered-and-complained about the season and being inconsiderately woken up in winter, and eventually gave me a tiny parcel of its white sap smaller than a game-playing dice, still liquid and living, and holding the promise of future growth in the spring-to-come, and thus, a commitment that the world would continue to exist. Then my friend led us back to our bodies.

The frangipanni thought it was going to grow, and unfurl leaves and flowers next spring - it didn't think the world was going to end. The planet floating in space felt all beautiful and calm, and wasn't even bothered by the whole Japan thing very much - it certainly doesn't think it's going to end tomorrow. So no, everything will continue.

And everyone else in the goup, although they all had individual journeys, had a sense that the planet didn't really need all that much healing, and that it was here for the long haul.

Humans are such silly creatures - if they are worried about the planet, why don't they just go and look?

~~~~~~

And now, post-rapture, I stand by my comments. The world wants to keep existing, and it will keep existing, It is up to us to exist with and on it. Take responsibility for your own existence or non-existence, people - don't blame an ancient book!

Being Lucky

I was sitting and thinking to myself today: how lucky am I? And the answer is that I am very, very lucky. And just as I was thinking about this, a friend of mine rang up. Now, he lives in a much nicer home than I do, has a larger income than I do, and yet he is still envious of my luck. Why, I wonder?

Well, he wakes up depressed more mornings than he wakes up happy. Me, I see every day I'm alive as a gift, a blessing, so I tend to be thankful as soon as I open my eyes. Little things happen to me: A bill turns up that I'd have trouble paying, and suddenly some unexpected income turns up, too, usually about right to cover the bill. I miss a bus and have to catch the next one: next thing I know the bus I should have been on is on the side of the road broken down, passengers milling around waiting for a substitute bus which hadn't arrived yet and would have got me to my destination much later than the "late" bus. I turn up to the local Farmers Market in the rain, people are cursing and going away, and I find that unique item on a stall that's being packed up, not boxed yet, which will make a perfect birthday present for that difficult family member. 

How lucky am I! But back to my friend. As I suggested, he is materially better-off than I am, yet he considers me lucky. Why? Well, when he drives the two of us anywhere, he's constantly frustrated by other cars on the road. When I drive us anywhere, I'm humming under my breath with the pleasure of driving. His face is blank most of the time: when I'm doing blank-faced stuff like walking down the road or through a shopping centre, I usually have a smile all over my face. What can I say - I am lucky, the sun shines on me or the rain falls on me with equal blessing.

He reads this blog, and at the end of our phone call, he said I could write about being lucky some time. But how do you write about being lucky? I agree with the experts, that luck is not arbitrary, is not something that  "just happens". But while I accept without question that I am luckier than he is and I feel as if I know why, I'm not sure I will be able to describe it in a meaningful way. However, I'm just about to try!

Luck and happiness are sisters - they stroll arm-in-arm through the world, smiling at those around them. It is those who look them in the eye and smile back who are lucky, who are happy. Don't get me wrong: they aren't in a constant state of bliss night and day, they are not protected from every misfortune. It's about general trends, and about how people feel about their lives. Probably my friend has more actual good fortune, materially speaking, than I do - I just happen to be more appreciative of my life than he is of his.

I cannot turn anyone into a happy, lucky person with my words. How each person lives, and the feelings they have about their circumstances, is entirely down to themselves. But I do have a few hints you might try to use in your day-to-day lives, that will have an effect on your perception of your luck.

* When you feel unhappy, depressed or worried, take a moment to think about people worse-off than you are. There are people who are in jail. There are people who are paralysed. There are homeless people. There are people in a coma with little or no realistic chance of recovery. There are people with no limbs. There are people who belong in more than one of these groups. If you wake up in the morning and you are still breathing and thinking, you are ahead of the game compared to other people - start your day appreciating that, and smiling. It will make a big difference to the rest of your day, if you recognise and acknowledge that piece of luck. Luck chases luck.

* Live in the moment. Forget about that past bad luck you have had - it's gone, it no longer exists. And stop comparing the present to some golden era in your past when you felt luckier - that's gone, too.  And why worry about that future problem? Events may never play out the way you imagine. In fact, imagining how they will play out, you make yourself behave in a way more likely to let misfortune into your life. It's like the ex-criminals I saw interviewed once, who said they selected people that used the body-language of victims, and would never go near anyone walking tall and with no hesitation, even if they were tiny and it was night-time. Your attitude shapes your future to a great extent. All you have is the now, so live in it, don't whicker it away worrying about what is not the now.

* Allow the world to be a friendly place. People who think the world, and strangers in it, are out to get them, coincidentally have lives full of bad-luck stories. People who think the world will support them if they support it, and that every strange face is a potential friend, have lives peppered with frequent bits of good luck. Your environment is only full of danger if you expect it to be. So don't expect it to be! Ah, but what about all the grim stuff that happens in the news, I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you something about the news. For something to become newsworthy, it has to be vanishingly rare. If it happened commonly, it wouldn't be reported. In Australia, for example, you have one-thousandth the chance of being murdered than you have of dying of pancreatic cancer. They don't throw front-page items about pancreatic cancer deaths. Don't be afraid of night-time or empty streets: at night many of the bad guys are home, too, and in an empty street there is no one to harm you. Trust your environment and you will be lucky.

* Be awake, be aware. If you take a lively and a friendly interest in the people, places and things around you, you will be more likely to see opportunity. You cannot take an opportunity if you are blind to it, nor can you take it if you are fearful. So be engaged: be engaged in the moment, in the world around you, in your community, even in your family. Paying attention will bring benefits as various as noticing a business opportunity or a job that needs doing in your employer's company leading to financial advancement, to putting your foot on the brake a split-second earlier, avoiding that "unavoidable" accident at a corner or a traffic light. Lucky people are curious and open-eyed.

* Listen to your intuition, your gut-feeling. We have two sources of information in our lives: reason or intellect, which is informed by our five primary senses, and the intuition, which has no logical source and is linked into subliminal perceptions that cannot be measured but our current level of scientific technology. Over the decades there have been two really big, major business decisions I've had to make at times when my intellect was saying one thing, and my gut feeling was saying another. The first was in 1987 when I had been a hypnotherapist for a fairly short time: I had the opportunity to rent a room in an inner-city clinic. On paper, even the fine-print looked fine. My intuition was disturbed and uncomfortable, so I went over everything with a fine toothed comb, and still the paperwork looked okay. I went into the clinic against my gut-feeling, and I and two other practitioners there were driven out of business within six or seven months. In my case I was lucky - I was able to set up somewhere else. The second occasion was twenty years later, and involved the acceptance of an interstate job-offer. My life was at a standstill at the time, so I accepted, even though I had misgivings I couldn't account for. The offer of work turned out to be not real - the person had a track record of dragging people from all over Australia to her town just to make her feel important, to make her feel as if he wasn't totally powerless. Again I salvaged the situation: I found other work in the town, and ended up being very happy there. But the position I was "hired" for just didn't exist, and I would have avoided losing thousands of dollars worth of furniture and so forth if I followed my instinct and hadn't moved. Trust your intuition - it is on your side.

* Decide what you want, and go for it! Every millionaire I know, every person who is "lucky in love" and quite possibly every person who is generally lucky in other ways, works at it. Make up your mind what kind of industry you want to involve yourself in, or what qualities you expect in a life-partner, and go out and look for it. Once you have found it, work day and night, work hard and work long - and your luck will come to you. When my daughter reached the minimum legal age when children can have paid work in Australia, she went out looking for a job, I told her my philosophy of work. I told her that the employer she signed up with was not well-thought-of and wasn't paying her a huge hourly wage, but if she wanted to do well, she was well-advised to work harder than her workmates, far harder than she needed to work to avoid being fired, learn everything she could about the business and the industry, and be strictly honest. I said she wouldn't get paid a higher hourly rate than her peers, but as her employers recognised her abilities, they would give her more and more hours, and she would end up a lot richer than the other kids working there because of it. She put that philosophy into action enthusiastically, and both in that first job and the subsequent one she left to go to university recently, she was very highly valued indeed. In fact, her most recent employer told me that in thirty years of running businesses, she had had only one other employee as good as my daughter. Now, there's a young person who is always lucky at work and lucky in her bosses. She makes her own luck by working at it - so can you. If she can, anyone can.

As you can see from these points, there are definite techniques and approaches to the world which result in luck. I'd like to make one last point about luck. As an expectant parent, would you feel lucky if you gave birth to a happy, healthy baby boy? Okay, would you feel lucky if that baby boy, though healthy, had no arms or legs - would you feel lucky then? And what if you had been a baby just like him, born without arms or legs, if you were an adult now, and never had arms or legs? Couldn't walk, dress yourself, feed yourself? Would you feel lucky? Well, Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. And yet, he comes across as an emotionally healthy, life-affirming, happy and above-all appreciative person, who honours the luck he has in life. Watch this video of him talking to people with the normal number of arms and legs, and decide for yourself how unlucky you really are. If you are physically better-off than Nick, you really have no right to allow yourself to be unlucky. Watch the video, and do something about your own luck now!

As a qualified hypnotherapist, I can offer meditation/self hypnosis recordings, tailored to the specific issues and needs of individuals. These are much more effective and life-changing than the one-size-fits-all mass-produced recordings that you can buy on the market for a few dollars, designed for a non-existent "average" person. Contact me to discuss your individual needs, the areas of your life where your luck needs tuning up, and I will get back to you with a quote for your individual recording.

Moving House, and other noises

Well, after enjoying my blogging time at Wordpress, I've decided for reasons of my own to "move house", as it were, to Blogger instead.

Old posts prior to the move can still be seen at http://nisaba000.wordpress.com, and I'd recommend if you haven't seen my blog before, that you go and pay a visit - we had some outrageous fun at times, and the memories are very enjoyable.

So what's new? Well, I'm finally on skype, and I've finally mastered the art of high-quality sound recordings, so now I can produce audio tracks for meditations or hypnosis. Over time I'll be looking at producing a simple range of recordings like that for sale. 

The main reason, though, was so that when putting people through my "Become a Non-Smoker" programme, I can give them a recorded meditation to do to support the work we've done together in the session, that is tailored to them and their particular issues individually, rather than being like the many "one size fits all" quit smoking hypnosis CDs that have become very popular sellers recently. Something that is set up for you personally is always going to be more useful to you than something set up to match "the average person".

So yes, I'm excited about this, and I've made myself a recording that I've used a few times to help me with an issue of my own. It's very strange listening to a good-quality version of your own voice: I'm used to poor quality versions like telephone answering machines or voicemail, and I'm extremely used to hearing my voice through the sounding board of my own head, where the voice reverberates through my skull as a sounding-board before reaching the ears.

The recordings I have made tell me my voice is higher and clearer - and very much younger - than it sounds to me: to me, my voice sounds deeper and just ordinary. A friend of mine who still works at the radio station where I used to work many years ago and has a pleasant, mid-range male voice, claims he doesn't like hearing good-quality audio of his own voice although sometimes it is unavoidable: he thinks his voice as others hear it sounds "too deep", which implies that to him, his voice sounds higher-pitched. I think he has quite a pleasant voice and not too deep at all. So listening to his voice through his ears makes his voice sound higher, and listening to my voice through my ears makes my voice sound deeper. I am surprised by this - I would have thought there would have been a standard deviation.

How many of you have had a chance to listen to a really good-quality recording of your own voice? What do you think?