HAITI

The tragic loss of life, injuries and destruction in Haiti caused by just a few minutes earth quake should give us all pause for thought. This is especially the case with those politically ambitious people in the world who seem willing to stop at nothing to get their own way: To achieve power over others and impose their own narrow minded bigotry upon everyone, they are willing to corrupt young people with false ideologies and indulge in indiscriminate murder. All because they are so ruled by their overweening egos that they cannot countenance a world in which people agree to differ. However, we all must accept responsibility for creating the conditions in which such people can flourish.

What the tragedy in Haiti should tell us is that there is enough destructive power within nature, without we humans adding to it with our petty squabbles, false assumptions and intolerance. Nature has an uncanny way of forcing us to look closely at ourselves and the world we have created. Here it makes us re-order our priorities so as to provide the wherewithal for the people of this desperately poverty stricken country to receive food, water, clothing, shelter and machinery to help them search for the dead and dying. People in countries all over the world are horror stricken and anxious to do whatever they can to help. Ordinary people know what the priorities should be but one has a sad feeling that once again the help will be too little and too late.

Were we not so preoccupied with ‘defence and security’ and so full of fear we would have arranged for the kind of real help Haiti needed for it’s starving millions long ago and its own leaders over the years would have been prevented from making matters immeasurably worse by their greed and corruption. Then buildings would have been stronger and less susceptible to destruction by earthquakes and people would not have been so crowded together in what were virtually ghettos. We would have so ordered matters that human inventiveness would not have been nullified by the vested interest of, for instance the oil companies. This would have ensured that the internal combustion engine, burning rapidly reducing oil reserves from the earth, was only one of many means of powering individual forms of transportation. Then the wars of recent years, chiefly fought to protect oil supplies, would have been unnecessary.

When those in power throughout our world have little thought except for themselves and their own narrow views; when they are driven entirely by the ego and have buried their spiritual natures under a hard crust of materialism; when established religions pay only lip service to spiritual reality and do all they can to support those in power and obtain temporal advantage for themselves; the world we see and which most right thinking people abhor, is the inevitable result. Once more, nature has given us an opportunity to think again!

When the immediate crisis has been resolved and the thousands of dead have been decently buried; when collapsed and collapsing buildings have been removed and food and water for all is in plentiful supply; when basic communications have been restored and Haitians have hope once more; that is when the real work has to begin. In our present world mind-set, once immediate problems have been resolved, we revert to our old, petty pre-occupations. Take South East Asia for instance, where earthquake and tsunami caused such terrible loss of life and destruction. We are told that hundreds of thousands are still without shelter all this time later. Much of the money provided has been used for anything except what it was intended for. Corruption it seems is rife and takes no account of the human suffering resulting from it. What happens when reports show this to be the case? We shrug our collective shoulders, look the other way and carry on exactly as before.

Mother Nature is once more, this time in Haiti, warning us that unless we change our ways, things will just get worse. If only everyone could see this and spend time discovering their own inner, spiritual, self instead of swelling the numbers in our wasteful, acquisitive societies, what a different world we could create. If instead of fear and mistrust, instead of greed and force, instead of acting as though earth life was all there is, we learned to love one another, to understand that this life is just part of our eternal existence and that we are here to help one another and to ensure the earth will be able to provide as well for future generations as it does for us, everyone’s life could be transformed. We would find that the money spent on armies and armaments could be used to build decent societies everywhere so that no one was without the opportunity to lead a decent life. Personal choice, not the accident of birth, would be the only thing that led to deprivation.

In doing this we would at once automatically open channels between our world and the spiritual world. The spirit people would help us to build and maintain our new way of life and the knowledge of how to use the enormous power of the spirit to further the spiritual and moral advance of people everywhere would be made available to us. What we think of as wonderful in our present societies would appear mundane amid the glories of our new world. The prize is most certainly worth the winning if we just “let go and let God!”