Seeing the Wood for the Trees
There are some advantages of getting old. When you are caught up in a situation you can’t see it in perspective. The emotional effect of what you are going through clouds the picture. The distance of time is like seeing a view from height; you can see the big picture. You can see the wood, not just the trees.
Dannion Brinkley was one day talking on the phone when a bolt of lightning hit him. He died for 28 minutes and during that period had what is usually referred to as a near-death experience. He saw visions of a future world, or rather a possible future and was given direction on how he could influence it.
Later in life he went on to work in a hospice with terminally ill people and
spent time with dying people going back over their lives. Many people don't
take the time to look back. They go blundering through life without learning
from their experience. I read about someone in prison who had had a life of
crime. He first attacked someone when he was a teenager and went to prison.
On his release he murdered someone and then in prison again he attacked a fellow
prisoner. He was later interviewed and said that he never regretted anything
he had done in his life. He obviously hadn't looked back over his life and seen
it in terms of cause and effect.
The fact is, we take actions and these result in consequences that may, in some cases, change the course of our lives. I would say we make decisions but this is rarely the case. Usually, we act automatically. Even when told that a certain course of action would be foolhardy, people still take it. They are not driven by rational decision-making but by automatic behaviour patterns. Intelligent observers can often predict what they will do because their habits are obvious. Their minds run through a groove and the direction they take is practically pre-ordained. They have the potential to take a different course of action, but few do.
In the same way as this is true on an individual basis, it is also true collectively. When Dannion Brinkley had his
near-death experiences he had visions of a future filled with war, natural disasters and famines. There have been many such visions from the Bible onwards. These visions have the same basis as the predictions of individuals. Because people run through grooves, the future appears obvious. What is obvious is one future – the one where people stay in the groove.
We can, as individuals and collectively, get out of the groove and change the apparent inevitability of the future direction by self-observation. To see the groove from above, as it were. I discussed this in ‘The Creation and the Devil’.
