:: March/April 2005 Volume 4/Number 2

SPECIAL SECTION:
Making Sense of a Tsunami

By Bob Belinoff

The media is better suited for some kinds of world events than others.
It loves disaster, especially if it involves fireballs and falling bodies. A giant wave of water is something else entirely.

When the terrorists struck the World Trade Center it meant the end of America as we knew it. It meant the dawn of a new age of terror, close fisted fear and preemptive war. But few public voices have asked what it means when 50 times more lives are lost in a giant wave of water. It is an act of God, so be it. Waves come and waves go, the earth is changing all the time. We have responded with our own wave of compassion, but the story, as they say in the media business, had no legs, so let's get on with our lives.

After 9/11 everything changed, as the attack grew in the media and our minds, it became more than an attack. It became a metaphor for a nation under siege. And the story we were told was one of fear, and that story continues.

The story of course is everything. In Indian culture the story of Arjuna on the battlefield, the Bhagavad Gita, is a metaphor for one's own inner struggles with meaning and the nature of God. The "story" is ultimately what we pay attention to, who we are, how we sustain a culture and build a future - in words, rituals and images down through time. So now that the wave has passed, let's sit back and think a bit about the story and how we pass it on.

9/11 was the perfect media story - bringing down, live in one fell swoop, twin 100 story towers dedicated to capitalism and the material world - crashing it to dust, taking with it 3,000 lives in free fall and fire ball terror. And the storyline was one of "we are under attack, the world is falling apart. Let's make laws, establish control and get everything back in order. The government's job was to batten down the hatches and go on orange alert. And our job was to shop."

The tsunami was a different story completely. And the way the media covered it and the story we told about it helps us understand how the media, as the ultimate reflection of our group consciousness, could be the most powerful force on earth for positive change - if it would simply reflect back to us the widest possible picture of what's really going on.
Though few want to talk about the wave as metaphor or what it might mean, the fact remains there is much to think about in the possible meaning of a wave of tidal magnitude affecting nearly every shoreline on the planet and tipping ever so slightly the very axis on which the earth revolves.

At first, we hardly even noticed the tsunami. The White House, TV journalists, no one, except perhaps the internet bloggers, got it. Even now the tsunami, a magnitude nine earthquake the largest in generations and from which the earth is still vibrating, has left little impact on the way we see the world, or for us in America, the way we live in it.

Despite the fact that this was a wave that swept away 75,000 lives in minutes and twice that in a few hours, as a world event it has gone straight to video in this country. It has been primarily re-captured as reality programming and geography lessons for Discovery Channel, National Geographic specials, Weather Channel tragedologies and cable network news magazines.

Yes, the earth is changing all the time. For the last 40 million years Africa has been inching its way into Europe and slowly shrinking the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, there have been literally millions of earthquakes of this scale over the earth's 4 billion year history, not to mention more recent and reoccurring ice ages, droughts and floods. However the record in the immediate present (in geologic time), of what has been going on from the core of the earth to the farthest fringes of space is worth reflecting on in a way that the mass media would rather not look into.

Author and earth scientist Gregg Braden summed up recent events nicely in his book the “Isiah Effect.” In 1997 astronomers discovered an explosion on the edge of the known universe nearly the size of the primordial big bang. In June of the next year two comets crashed into our sun producing solar flares of unprecedented magnitude, disrupting worldwide satellite communications and national security networks. The same year an international team confirmed that the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had risen higher in one decade than it had in the previous 600 years. In February of 1998 a 124 square mile landmass of the Larsen-B ice shelf broke off from Antarctica reshaping the outline of that continent. In 1997 El Nino, a mysterious but not unknown weather pattern accounted for 16,000 deaths and $50 billion in damage worldwide. In 1991 geologists reported that the Earth's magnetic North pole had wandered more than 5 degree since 1950.

Eminent biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that 20% or more of the earth's species will disappear in the next 30 years because of human action or inaction. And the “human impact from pre-history into the next several decades will initiate the greatest extinction spasm since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago.” Clearly there is something here worth paying attention to.

A month after the tsunami, Australian National University researchers say the earth is still reverberating, perhaps permanently accelerating the earth's rotation, shortening days by a fraction of a second and causing the earth to wobble on its axis.

There is a distinct possibility that so many significant changes in our geography and our environment are more than coincidence. There is certainly more substance to that idea than there was to the White House and media driven conspiracy theories tying Iraq to the 9/11 attack, or weapons of mass destruction to Iraq after the attack, or Osama Bin Laden to the Iraq insurgency after we invaded that country.
For those of us that believe that we are living in interesting and profoundly transitionary times, waves like the recent one that swept over 60% of the earth's surface are worth noting. Some might conclude that these earth changes portend a horrible approaching doom. Others suggest it's just the pains of a new world being born. The new science of quantum physics notes that either outcome is possible, it just depends on the outcome we choose to focus on. But more about that later, let's look for a moment at how the sages of old saw time and change.
Ancient prophets suggested that cycles of time display distinct characteristics reflecting an action like "a great wave" that travels in cycles through an eternity of time. One of those cycles is 26,000 years, the time it takes for our sun to move through all 12 signs of the ancient zodiac. This great cycle is now coming to completion as we leave the age of Pisces and enter the age of Aquarius. Science calls this cycle the precession of the equinox, Plato called it the Great Year, the Vedic culture called it the Yuga. And many, many cultures have long predicted this millennial time as a great transitionary phase for the planet and the evolution of our consciousness.

The Mayans also recognized recurrent cycles, and their calendar, the most accurate record of time known before modern times, says that the current great cycle is predicted to end around the year 2012.
There is a lot more going on right now than waves of water and war.

To the media trained eye the force moving across the country right now seems to be coming from the religious right and moral might. For many it is as though we have entered a kind of medium dark age. But look a little closer at what the media does not cover, soften your gaze and you'll see another story. The spiritual movement is the main wave moving in this country right now.

The National Science Foundation in a 2002 survey reports that 60% of the population believe people are capable of possessing psychic powers - that is seeing into the future or the past or moving objects with their minds. These are not, by the way, the superstitious under masses, the report reveals that the more educated the respondent the higher the level of belief.

Forty percent of the U.S. population practices yoga, meditates or is involved in some other spiritual practice. 70% pray in one form or another. Self-help books, conferences and seminars that deal with the power of mind represent the fastest growing segment of the publishing sector.

Powers of mind are a theme running through some of the most successful movies, like the Matrix trilogy, a whole new segment in the world of the documentary has emerged around this theme, and an entire body of science - Quantum Physics - which deals with the unity of all things - mind and matter - is beginning to grab a foothold in popular culture and the public mind.

The tenants of quantum physics - and this is science not even scientific theory, say many interesting things. They tell us that one thing can exist in two states at the same time. They that an atom, for example, can be a particle when we look at it, and a wave when we look away. They also say that there are many outcomes for an existing moment in time. They suggest that these outcomes already exist. It's not like "anything could happen" it's more like everything has already happened - which outcome would you like to look at now? The one we get will be the one we focus on. And in this day of all pervasive mass media the outcome most people will focus on will be the one the media reflects back to us.

Unfortunately the discoveries in Quantum Physics, the "coincidental" geologic events and the little noticed NSF survey results are like a wave, they do not lend themselves to fiery exposition. They are gentle even as they reshape the landscape and the coastline mimicking in certain ways a shift in consciousness and the state of the subtle body itself.

The U.S. media is often criticized for giving only one side of the story. If you want to know what's really going in Iraq, for example, it's a good idea to watch the BBC or other foreign news service. The question is why won't the mass media cover the subtle body of events, because clearly there is a lot going on at this level to report.

There are several answers to this question; here are three. 1.) The mass media is controlled by corporations whose only reality is the old mechanical, material world and the entrenched interests that support it. 2.) The vast majority of people really don't want to know much about either the hard science or the soft mystery. They simply want to be entertained. 3.) The media doesn't like stories about edgy thinking or new science.
Dean Radin who studies and writes about consciousness reports that A Pew Research Survey says that only about 2% of "the most closely followed news stories over the past 15 years were about scientific breakthroughs...despite the fact that 90% of adults consistently report being very or moderately interested in new scientific discoveries."

The media is in many respects both our conscience and our consciousness. It is as much the big screen for us as the night-time sky was the big screen for ancient civilizations. And just as these ancient people created their stories out of the star dots they connected in the night sky, we are creating our stories out of the digits, news bits and images we see on the all pervasive television screen.

So the old and boring argument of media responsibility has a new and compelling twist. The media is not just reporting the news and creating our popular culture, it's creating our most likely future.

The reason this discussion is important is because if we do not recognize that we are in the midst of a sea change in consciousness then we are not in fact there yet. Awareness is, after all, the only reality.
Focus on the data, the statistics and the recent U.S. elections and we learn two things. Most people believe in miracles and most people in America right now are afraid. How can these two outcomes exist at the same time in the same place? Quantum Physics tells us this is possible of course. It's just a matter of where we choose to focus. Tighten your gaze and you see the particles, solid as a terrorist attack. Soften your gaze and you can feel the movement and it's spiritual and it's coming in a wave.

We often can't recognize an event, it's been said, until there is a context - a language for describing the event. Just as psychiatry helped us get used to dealing with lower levels of consciousness - guilt, fear, jealousy, anger and other neuroses ...we are now shifting into an age where we need a comfort level and a common language for dealing with higher levels of consciousness.

We live by metaphor, the media loves metaphor but it has taken this giant wave as a sign of, well, a tsunami, when there could be so much more to the discussion. Waves have always been a more or less invisible force and the way they change the landscape is not always easy to see.

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