Today's Considerations
One of the most cited phrases which is used to point toward persons with warped perspectives came into being after
the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912, resulting in the
drowning of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. As the ship was sinking,
certain of the British crew members who exhibited the typical English
rigid, stiff-upper-lip, order-obeying-without-questioning attitude followed the
command to process as if everything is all quite normal. The ship's band members followed the same command.
Therefore, the band continued to play music even as the ship
began to tilt. As the ship began to tilt even more, deck chairs began to slide about.
Crew members hasten to straighten those chairs, trying to keep them in the nice,
neat rows they had been in when first set out on the deck.
That led to the use of the expression “You’re rearranging the deck
chairs” or “They’re all rearranging the deck chairs” whenever a person or a group of persons were exhibiting a totally warped perspective.
More than one hundred
years later, the phrase is still used to describe the actions of persons with
totally skewed and warped perspectives, referring to people who make what they
take to be "well-meaning but negligible adjustments to an endeavor that is
doomed to fail" or referring to person who (a) have a totally warped perspective and
who are focusing on the small picture while missing out completely on seeing the big
picture or who (b) are focusing on minutiae to the exclusion of focusing on what is far more significant, relatively speaking.
It is as if they are looking at events through the wrong end
of a telescope and, therefore, have no proper perspective at all. The wise would
have said to the crew members, “Hello! This ship is sinking! To hell with those
damn deck chairs! There are lifeboats leaving with hundreds of empty seats on
them. Go help people get aboard the lifeboats!”
Now there are no national or international news channels
being subscribed to here or being watched here, but that does not mean that persons are
not forwarding to the inbox here a steady stream of what they are focused on in
the news. Last Friday 14 persons were killed and 21
people were injured in what is being called “an act of terrorism” in California, and the reporting on that event has surely been dominating the news cycle for a week.
Meanwhile,
being ignored are these numbers during the same week: 293 other people were killed by guns in the U.S. during the last seven days and 1,630 were injured, probably with little or no attention at all from national news outlets.
Those numbers include 59% of the women killed annually in
the U.S. by a “Spouse” or “Lover.” The numbers also include children who were killed
in drive-by shootings and include those killed in gang-related shootings. And two
Fridays ago, another 185,000 guns were sold in the U.S. in one day, meaning that one of the
most popular Christmas gifts in the U.S. this year will be . . . a gun.
As noted, others are exhibiting astounding levels of warped perspectives
as they look at their relationships. By the end of this month, over 1,640,000
people will have divorced in 2015. And for at least 820,000 of those, the
announcement that “I’m leaving” likely came as a total surprise, supposedly
“out of the blue.”
Of the 16,000,000 who began 2015 in misery and suffering
related to tobacco use, 480,000 of those will be gone by the end of December.
To those 480,000, one might have suggested: “You’re really focused on the
possibility of being killed by a foreign terrorist? Wake up. See the truth.
Yes, you’re more likely than not to die this year, but it’s going to be by slow
suicide, not a terrorist’s bullet.”
A proper perspective can only come if one is talked to from the perspective of the Universal Consciousness and if one listens to what
is heard from the perspective of the Universal Consciousness. Then they might finally "get it": stop worrying about
straightening the chairs on the deck of your own Titanic (your own relative
existence), and take the steps required to be free of your warped perspectives
(which no one asks for but which all have been given as a result of warped
programming and warped conditioning and warped domestication and warped acculturation and warped brainwashing
and warped indoctrination).
And to watch "the news" is to have one's warped perspective
reinforced by the newscasters’ warped perspectives. A news crew in Houston,
Texas will race past eight houses a day where a mate has just shot a mate because far more reporters and their camera crews will rush to the
scene of that day's car fire to have film for the local evening news report which will show all of the smoke rising into the air and covering parts of the city.
“Smoke and fire”: the essence of news reporting.
“Smoke and mirrors”: the essence of those walking about in
their sleep, talking in their sleep, watching newscasts while in their sleep,
and extending “thoughts and prayers” while in their sleep.
Only “talk from the perspective of the universal
consciousness” can wake a person up, but who that is as soundly asleep as the
masses are will really and truly want to be awakened? Maharaj eventually found the answer to that question: “Few. Very few.”
What about you? What about those you've listened to for much of your existence? Have they been talking to you from the perspective of the universal consciousness? Or were they talking from some other ego-generated, mind-based, warped perspective?
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
[NOTE:
The four most recent posts follow. You may access all of the posts in
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