REFLECTIONS ON A TIME FOR CHANGE By Observers If ever there was one, now is the time. The time for us to Change. All of us. Every one of us. Those who can must act. We have to Change our thinking."How sad", writes Arlen Grossman, "that in the 21st century the vast majority - haven't evolved beyond believing in magical and unproved ideas, - - . Without critical and independent thinking, we make it easy for politicians to manipulate us into war, advertisers to persuade us to go broke buying unnecessary things and religious leaders to convince us that they have any more understanding of the truths of the Universe than we do." We need to learn how to think in an updated way that better fits the evolving homo sapien of the twenty-first century. Our thinking has become increasingly outmoded for the evolving world in which we find ourselves now living. Our thinking must catch up with the times.For generations, the aphorism "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he", has floated like a cloud above the mass of humanity. Unfortunately, most of us have not been able to see it as we have been so totally self absorbed and self-preoccupied, like Narcissisians trying to catch a glimpse of ourselves in our own shiny leather shoes. We have ignored our responsibility to think for ourselves, given up in favor of social conformity, of just going along with the crowd. "It is the pressure of the crowd," advises Mathew Adams, "that keeps many men standing erect.""We are being absorbed", exclaims Sharon Faris, "by a 'benign society', which, like indulgent parents, spawns only juvenile delinquents. Prosperous delinquents, whose age bracket is from twelve to ninety-five. The human race is not ready to accommodate prosperity and leisure. Inner development should precede, or certainly accompany, material and scientific progress, but human consciousness has been ignored. We might liken ourselves to the woman sitting in the beauty parlor for hours while her insides are being eaten away by a cancer of which she is happily unaware."" It is all too evident," teaches the Dalai Lama, "that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of knowledge and power." The 'benign society' takes in all irritants that it may control them. A one-dimensional, conforming society eliminates friction through containment. With friction gone, all possibility for the growth and development of our inner spirit is gone and a material, technological, and seemingly benign society can proceed unhampered.A system that absorbs all oppositional persons and movements into itself is the end of civilization as we know it. This would be wonderful, though painful, if it meant the beginning of a new era, but this has not as yet happened, as our efforts have all been focused on the outer world. Experiencing the material world is an unavoidable consequence of living, but it can only be a truly complete experience if it is balanced with the education and growth of the spirit within us. Our inner spirit is that neglected child we have kept locked in the basement. It is getting to large to stay confined and is threatening our enjoyment of the 'great scientific and technological' strides we are making.How can we enjoy all of these wonders with a wild one jumping around inside us? What if a pregnant woman couldn't give birth? What if that child grew within the confines of her body long after it's due date? The child within us, our spirit, the one with the potential for an ever-expanding consciousness, who cries for freedom, what of it? Had we allowed our inner self, our spirit, to grow and develop, had we even consciously recognized it, we would not be pliable though unconscious pawns in the merciless hands of a benign society, with it's relentless domination.A small segment of today's society is concerned at our indifference, but nothing shocks us; no crime is to heinous to be intolerable. The televisions news channels now bring us the horrific details of today's world twenty-four seven. Violence is ever-present in our world today. Here, Rollo May puts it well when he says, "We are going to have upheavals of violence for as long as experiences of significance are denied to people. The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary."Increasing the size of our law enforcement agencies, our courts and jails, passing more laws, or being concerned over unemployment and poor housing or many of the other human conditions won't remedy the ever present possibilities of violence. It goes much deeper. It goes to the very heart of each of us.Here the words of David Powers are apropos when he says, "We seek answers to the meaning of Life by means of acquiring wealth, power, pleasure, popularity and any number of other things. All of these things, so long as they are external, leave us at the mercy of circumstances and in the power of others. If the basis for worth of a man's existence does not lie within him, then the significance of his Life can be destroyed by forces beyond his control." To live our lives only in the outer world, without being grounded in the internal world could only be described as a completely insane way for a human being to chose to live.But this is what happens to us all. We daily, hourly sell ourselves out, continually basing our lives on the ever-changing outer world. Talk about insane.....All that we hear about escalating violence and the peak of explosions is not just talk. It is a reality and we see it every day. It wouldn't be happening if we didn't refuse Change. But we do. A smooth transition from one era to another has not been recorded by historians. When Change comes walking towards us, we jam on the brakes and hold tight until the Earth explodes beneath us and forces us to Change. Nature always supplies the earthquakes and volcanoes to blast us out of our set, outmoded ways. The violence in our world today, along with increasing mental illness and a climbing suicide rate, are just more blasters we have asked for by refusing to move forward. And this, whether we call it backward or forward, we hum our little dirge, "Turn Backward, Turn Backward, Oh Time In thy Flight." But Nature smacks us on the backside and says, "Hurry Up, It's Late. Get Moving, The Tide Is Coming In!"If we are ever to find a way of achieving a significance for living that cannot be destroyed by forces beyond our own control, we have no choice but to look within ourselves, for we now know that "Nothing avails from without - All is within."The cultivated inner Life is the only method of achieving a sense of significance that cannot be touched, let alone destroyed, by anything of the outer world. The cultivated inner Life is simply maturity at it's highest level, though true maturity is so rare that it seems almost non-existent in our world today. Where are the truly mature people of today? And where are the mature people of tomorrow. Mature in character, that is to say - mature in mind - mature in spirit.....It is time for us to Change ourselves, though most of us now living probably never will.. We get set in our ways. We are slaves to our habits, to our traditions, and to our cultural beliefs. But the Change will happen someday....it only takes a small spark to ignite a large fire - - and just a few generations to Change the world. It is the way of evolution.The 'benign society' will absorb many, maybe even most. But not all. There are people who will become critical and independent thinkers, free thinking people who will Change and allow their inner spirit to emerge and develop. These freethinkers are 'the giants in the Earth' and cannot be controlled unconsciously since they are that rarest of specimens, the 'integrated personalities'. They will carry a tremendous responsibility, for as Carl Jung tells us, "It is unfortunately only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either." If there is a gateway to a future that isn't to hellish it imagine, it will be these individuals who are willing to Change who will light the way. These 'specialists', as Balzac called them, carry the only genuine opposition, the friction that must be retained to carry us through this juvenile period. Fortunately, the perpetual adolescence of humans can be transitional, but only if we chose to Change.In the crazy world we live in today, it appears we really have but just a few choices before us. We can chose to grow up and mature, we can chose to remain the same and grow insane with the rest of the world, or we can just kill ourselves. Some people kill themselves in a single act, say, jumping off a bridge. Others kill themselves over time by smoking, drinking, eating, worrying or drugging themselves to death. We really do have but only these three choices; suicide, insanity, or maturity. In the social chaos of today we see plenty of suicide and insanity, but where is there real maturity? Again Carl Jung tells us with his words, "When the outside world becomes ugly enough we are forced to turn within. This is the beginning of maturity." And then again come those words, "Nothing avails from without. All is within."Someday, hopefully, our schools will have classes that teach children 'how to think' and how to develop their inner selves. Maybe then our society will be able to get on with evolving to one of the next possible steps in our evolution.In the meantime, those who can must immediately start reprogramming their minds to think like humans of the twenty-first century. We have yet to really learn how to make our brains work for us, instead of against us. Nor have we yet learned how to use our ability to consciously direct and control our thoughts. Many years ago Charles Darwin advised, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."It is so basic, you would think that we would have figured it out and be living it by now, but nooooooo, we have to be dragged to it. Here, the words of Richard Carlson seem so fitting when he says, "Imagine writing yourself a mean and nasty letter. Fill it full of insults and criticism. Then, address the letter to yourself, stamp it and put it in the mail. I'm dead serious.A few days later, you open your mailbox and read the letter. Here's the question: would you become upset? Of course not, because you know that it was you who wrote the letter to begin with. When you think a thought, any thought, and then become upset by that thought, it's almost the same thing as becoming upset by that letter that you wrote to yourself - because you're the thinker who just produced the thought.You can, like many people, think some more about those words, attach some [negative] significance to them and validate them in your mind. Or, you can recognize them for what they are - harmless thoughts that you have produced, nothing more and nothing less - and simply dismiss them." Geeze, it is hard to believe that most of us don’t know how and have to be taught how to think correctly. Unfortunately, it appears that this is the case as few of us have yet developed our thought contol.We may wish to believe that intellectually we have come a long way from our primitive ancestors, but in reality, how we think today is not that much different from the way people have been thinking for centuries. But times have Changed. "We are living," says Harold Taylor, "in one of those periods in human history which are marked by revolutionary Changes in all of mans ideas and values. It is a time when every one of us must look within himself to find what ideas, what beliefs, and what ideals each of us will live by. And unless we find these ideals, and unless we stand by them firmly, we have no power to overcome the crisis in which we in our world find ourselves."We must move on. Our thinking must catch up with the times. This may begin to happen rapidly, with the coming aid of two new-fledged phenomenon. As the 'Acceleration of Events in Time' gains momentum and we propel ourselves farther into the 'Age of Transience', we are being forced to re-examine many of our old ways of thinking and our views of Life, Itself.The Global Society of today does indeed live in what Alvin Toffler so aptly termed the 'Age of Transience'. From his work, 'Can We Cope With Tomorrow?', Mr Toffler defines 'transience' as "a new "temporariness' in everyday Life". He goes on to advise that, "Change is occurring so rapidly now that things, values, even people, pass through our lives at a faster rate than before. Thus each individual's relationships with the world outside oneself are foreshortened, telescoped in time. They become transient.This process, occurring in every cranny of our existence, introduces into our lives a powerfully upsetting new psychological force. For while we, until now, have been accustomed to long-lasting links with our environment, we are entering a period in which we will be limited increasingly to short-termed relationships. It is this that gives rise to the sense of transience in our lives, the almost tangible feeling that we live, rootless and uncertain, among shifting dunes."The Age of Transience has been brought on by another phenomenal experience, what Sharon Faris dubbed ' The Acceleration of Events in Time". It has been with us from our very beginnings, but is now gaining momentum and must be acknowledged. It is a shockingly simple equation to see. As the world's population expands, (now by approximately one billion every ten to twelve years, according to Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau [1990], our cumulative knowledge and productivity also expand. Increased knowledge and productivity act as the catalyst for faster advancement. This, in turn, due to the boundaries and limitations of our fixed time, creates an increased velocity in the happenings of our existence, much like a ball of snow rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger and going faster and faster. Time doesn't really accelerate as we age, it only seems to because each day contains more and more Change. People who have lived in isolation say time goes by very slowly, but our world seems to be running on fast-forward, not slow motion. We may come to see time as but 'the thing that keeps all things from happening at the same time', or as Carl Sandburg said, "Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in".Thomas Mann put it this way, "To man time is given like a piece of land, as it were, entrusted to him for faithful tilling; a space in which to strive incessantly, achieve self-realization and move onward and upward."We are told by Dr. Nafis Sadik, Under-Secretary of the United Nations, {1990} that though it has taken us centuries to reach our present numbers, (just a little over six billion)[2000], the world's population, expanded at it's present rate of growth, is going to more than double sometime in the twenty-first century. This is a challenging assertion, for as the rate of Change in society accelerates, the feeling of transience will permeate everything everywhere.So now we must Change the way we think. This will not be easy and probably many, maybe even most, of those alive today will either attempt and then abandon, or never even attempt at all, to Change their thinking, but it must be done. It may take a generation, or maybe even two or three generations, but if the human race is to survive, we will eventually discover that we must Change our thinking.To Change our thinking is no small undertaking, but it is one of the next possible steps up in our evolution. To Change our thinking, we must Change our very selves. If only we weren't such creatures of habit we wouldn't be faced with the paradox of Change. Ah yes, the paradox of Change, how ironic it is! If everything didn't Change, we would not be where we are today. And just where are we today? With what balance do we weigh ourselves ?Well now, on the one hand, today we have machines that do almost everything for us. We have evolved to become almost automatons, having to do very little to survive but feed ourselves, (at least this is true of most people living in the un-oppressed middle-classed societies.) Human-made devices are now available which, for most, all but eliminate the need for much of the human energy that was formerly necessary for us to survive and this enticing void leaves us with little energetic responsibility but that of controlling our mechanical clones, the machines.On the other hand, today the Earth's atmosphere is quite polluted. Places to safely dispose of solid waste are nearly nonexistent. Our water supply is being poisoned and toxic chemicals are turning up in our own backyards. We have the problems of acid rain, deforestation, nuclear waste, depleted ozone, drought and famine, just to name a few. One of our more serious challenges is the reality of global warming."Our civilization", says Chan Thomas, " - grew steadily at a reasonable rate until just a few centuries ago, when it started an upward turn in the reproduction rate which is now rampant, uncontrolled, and with no concern for any responsibilities or consequences whatsoever. - - We are witnessing an assault on our planet on a scale incomparable to any other time in known history. Pollutants dumped into the ocean are destroying the oceanographic ecology worldwide. Pollutants dumped into the atmosphere from burning organic matter are destroying our air purity worldwide. Pollutants dumped into rivers are destroying those rivers, but further destroying the oceans into which the rivers flow. The rain forests of the world are being destroyed and burned at a rate which is staggering. Timber forests are being harvested and destroyed at an unprecedented rate. - - natural resources are being depleted to where ends of supplies in nature can be foreseen. - - Greed has so invaded civilization that it has caused severe degradation of both the government and the finance industry - and so degraded industry that disregard of both laws and common sense is practiced concerning the infusion of terrible pollutants into and onto our planet - practiced in the interest of profit. - - Behavioral, moral, social and religious standards are deteriorating at a rate never seen before in written history."Any intelligent, thinking person, looking toward the future of our species, will not only imagine the incredible advances coming in the times ahead, but shudder at the premonitions of the chaotic nimiety which we are facing. A handful of intelligent activists have often forewarned us of this impending doom, but our industrialized society has paid little heed. We have become, as Karl Shapiro tells us, "a society of 'all rights and no obligations, of deliberate wreckage and waste." But then again, we must also know that 'everything Changes' so we humans will Change or lose what little sanity we have left as we destroy ourselves and Life on Earth as we know it.Here, the words of Alvin Toffler are apropos when he tells us that "Sanity, after all, depends upon the comprehension of one's surroundings. Yet the degree of transience in our world is already such that by the time most people come to understand the underlying order of their own corner of society, that order has already Changed into something else.It is as if the entire human race were sitting in a darkened movie theater. On the screen one scene after another slides by. We laugh, we cry, we throb in response to the filmed action.But imperceptibly the pace quickens. Scenes begin to swim by so swiftly that we can barely comprehend what is happening. Soon the screen is just a blur of racing images and all meaning is lost.This is a close analogy with reality, except that in the real world we are not mere observers. Despite confusion, we must act. The more rapid the Change and the more intense the transience, the more difficult it becomes to remain oriented. To much of this transience may affect our ability to understand, and hence cope with our own environment. - An environment convulsing with Change bombards the individual with signals, as it were, jamming a busy switchboard. This progressive inability to comprehend, the disorientation produced by too rapid change is what I have elsewhere called 'future shock'. It is as if the individual is plunged into a state of shock by the premature arrival of the future.'Future shock' is more than a figure of speech. - For as the rate of transience around us increases, more and more people will be driven either to vegetable like passivity or to irrational violence by the frustration of their attempts to cope with an environment they can no longer keep up with.The only way to cushion individuals against future shock is to prepare them for the future, to offer them in advance some idea of what they may expect as tomorrow unrolls. We need to teach the 'habit of anticipation'."We must get used to the idea that nothing is fixed or permanent, that everything is transient. This idea is extraordinarily difficult for us to accept as we so ardently admire the solid, safe, and secure and so automatically despise and mistrust Change.So we listen and learn about the Evolution of Change from Sharon Faris when she says, "Our world is being tortured by Change. Your world and mine. We are involved in a social revolution of worldwide proportions and it reaches into every person's Life, everywhere. We are all involved. None of us are immune nor removed from the internal revolution that is taking place within the center of mankind. We are all in this one together, like it or not. Fortunately for us, the convulsions have only begun to show the extent of their furor, so we may still have time to Change. Years ago, Albert Einstein said, "With the splitting of the atom, everything changed but man's thinking, hence we travel towards ultimate disaster", but science continues to parade it's daring discoveries before a populace unchanged.Our lives are becoming so cushioned and padded that we are almost paralyzed, but we are coming into the day when we shall have to obey that command,"Physician, heal thyself". Again, inner development should precede, or at the very least accompany, material and scientific progress."There will be rapid Changes", advises Margaret Mead, "and there are no precedents." Now is the time when we have to learn for ourselves. The scientists, psychiatrists, religionists and politicians don't happen to have the answers. No one does. So we have to learn to cope with our problems ourselves. The experts only have what they have learned from others, but what those others knew is past; it is already obsolete for today's world. Our computers can make predictions, often fairly accurate ones, but these predictions are based on past experience, on yesterday's knowledge and therefore, may or may not be reliable for today's world either.We are living in a day when yesterday's knowledge, as far as the outer world is concerned, is of little or no value. This is terrifying to accept because Change is terrifying and to live in a world of Constant Change, with no guideposts, is the last thing we would choose, yet accept we must, for this is the way it is. We will grow to see and accept the Acceleration of Events in time as we Change.Change is the blaster back of everything that has taken us out of our cave dwellings. It is responsible for the lives we live. It is the merciless master of the lives we shall live, yet we give it little or no thought. We have no power over Change, but it has tremendous power over us. As Marcel Proust said, "We believe that according to our desire we are able to Change things around us, we believe this because otherwise we can see no favorable solution. We forget the solution that generally comes to pass and is also favorable; 'we do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes' - - we have not managed to surmount the obstacle as we were absolutely determined to do, but Life has taken us around it, led us past it, and then, if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become." Change molds us to it's pattern, - - we do not mold it.Here again, Sharon Faris puts it well when she so rightly tells us, "We have refused to go thru the necessary mental and emotional Changes that would enable us to close the gaps between our words and our deeds. We talk big, but act little. We have refused to grow up.The psychologists tell us the minutest Change causes internal disturbances whether we sense it or not. We are informed that a Change which involves a pleasure trip of great anticipation also involves emotional stress. We pay dearly as children of Change and now it peppers us with such rapidity that we are assaulted twenty-four hours a day. The Acceleration of Events in Time stampedes the emotions with violent Change, and trauma becomes a way of Life or, as Marcus Aurelius said, "The Universe is Change."Our native resistance against Change demands considerable emotional and physical energy. Nothing is more fatiguing than the battle against Change, for it is a battle with no time outs - - no coffee breaks.It is our resistance and determination to avoid this maker of internal earthquakes at any cost that sets up the launching pad for Change to do it's blasting. We think we are working against the enemy and all the while we are playing into it hands. Our resistance forces us into a newness we would avoid if possible. We hear Dostoevsky speak our minds when he says, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most", so we accept or lose our minds trying to fight the inevitable. *Only those who learn to accept Change and co-operate with it can move out beyond the periphery of the teenage oriented society in which we now live. " *Repeat the last sentence a couple of times before going on.Brock Chisholm paints a clear picture of our present situation when he says, "It is a plain fact that we of the human race who happen to be alive at this moment are in a new kind of world. A world of which none of our ancestors had any experience. - - Where the human race is now up against a situation that might be compared to one of the great ice ages that destroyed many forms of Life in the Earth. Those forms of Life in many cases flourished for hundreds of thousands, or millions of years. - - And then, because they were not able to make a new adjustment to changed circumstances they disappeared because they could not Change their ways satisfactorily to adjust to changing circumstances.Man is in very real danger from exactly that same situation now. He has developed to the point where there is real danger from man himself to the whole human race and all of the Earth.We are now up against new situations, in dealing with which we can learn very little from our ancestors - - which puts us to the painful necessity of doing our own thinking. And we're not used to it. - - We find it very uncomfortable indeed and we'll go to extreme lengths to avoid it whenever we can."As the human race continues multiplying itself, we are told that, though it has taken us centuries to reach our present numbers, our population may well double within the next few decades. This is a challenging assertion. We had best prepare ourselves for the Constant Change of a Changing Total Environment, for with more people, we will also have more knowledge and greater productivity, which in turn will create the technology for even faster advancement.Even faster advancement ? Yes, as Vaclav Havel observed, "History has accelerated" It seems as though we are running on fast forward already and the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. But the world isn't really getting smaller, we humans are just getting closer. But closer to what? If we look, we may see. "It's getting hard to see,"declared Charles Kuralt, "there are so many of us. Think about this. It took twenty thousand years or so, from the dawn of human history, for the population of the world to reach two and half billion. That happened in about 1950 -.Today {1990} world population is about five billion, double what it was then, the extra two and a half billion people came along, not in twenty thousand years (20,000), but in forty (40). We humans beings are adding up fast. Adding up, it may be, to disaster."But we do still have Time to Change, though it won't be easy, because as Sharon Faris so aptly puts it, "We are all maladjusted where Change is concerned. Very few are mature enough to operate as partners of Change, though this is one of the qualities we must acquire. The insane obsession for security must be denied into oblivion and we must learn to tolerate insecurity without unnecessary panic or fear. We can't control Change and Constant Change upsets all hope of what we've called security. We shall either ride the waves or we will surely drown,." to which we can add Erich Fromm's words, "The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to tolerate insecurity without panic and undue fear. Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.""With the splitting of the atom, everything Changed but man's thinking, hence we travel towards ultimate disaster." With whatever remedial steps we have to take in the outer world must also come the Change in our thinking of which Mr. Einstein speaks or we shall indeed find ourselves arriving at the very ultimate of disasters. The mass of humanity is unprepared to accept constant Change and ill-equipped to handle or understand the magnitude or our responsibilities for ourselves, and to others. We have refused to close the gap between our words and our deeds. We talk real big, but act really little. We means us - me and you.We have become submerged in the outer world to such a degree that some of us are hopelessly lost and cannot even begin to find our innermost selves..As Creation Continues, Evolution means Change, and so we must. Painful though it is we go along or perish. We cannot hold back the river of Change. Its mighty currents sweep us along flowing waters we cannot control.But Change how ? And into what?To see the answer, we need only to look, for in the sixteenth century words of Giovanni, "There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see, and to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!" There is no place to look but to Nature (Life), the names we give to Creation and the evolving Universe.The observation of Nature (Life) answers any and all questions of the conscious observer. Nature (Life) is the Creative Force, the Supreme Intelligence - It is the sum and order of causes and effects in time and space which carries on the processes of Creation, the creative act of continuing existence which spawns Change. Nature includes everything everywhere, that is to say that Nature is the designer of the Universe and that there is an all-pervading Unity in the Universe. All that exists is part of one Universe, therefore everything, including us, is connected to everything else. Everything in the Universe Changes and we are part of It, so we will Change, one way or the other. To re-iterate, Nature (Life) is the Creative Force. It is the all-pervading, active power of Life which hastens maturity through Change, the natural succession or substitution of one thing in the place of another. Or more simply, to paraphrase Anne Rambo, 'Running through all nature and the universe is the principle of Life. This principle - animates everything and is like a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere'.In observing the natural order of Nature, we may discover that the answer to the question of 'how to Change', replacing one value with another and evolving from one level to the next, is indeed the paradox of Change. We must Change to survive. But to survive, we must accept Change and the only way to accept Change is by way of co-operation, or 'participatory Change', if you will. This is how Nature works and what we must do. We must learn to participate with Change.Looking to Nature for examples of Change we will find that most Change is participatory. Even when there is strong resistance, for Change to occur, there must be at the least the co-operation of a yielding to a stronger power. The process of incubation and hatching, egg to bird, the processes of all gestation and birth, as well as the natural Earth processes are all examples of the 'roll-over' of participatory Change that can be personally witnessed by anyone willing to fill a bucket with water through a hose.If you take a water hose and place one end in the bottom of a bucket and then slowly fill the bucket with water through the hose, you will see that when the bucket is full, the water will literally rise above the top of the buckets rim. If you stop the incoming flow at just the right moment, the bucket may actually appear to be overfull, yet not overflowing - but add one more drop, then another and another - at some point, no longer being able to contain the increasing volume of water, the lowest point on the buckets rim will make itself a point of 'roll-over' allowing the water to siphon itself out to a level equal to or just below the buckets top edge.This simple example illustrates how, even in the natural, inanimate world, Change is often the result of extreme measure. However, once Change begins, it is apt to happen just as quickly as the swollen excess removes itself from the top of an overfull bucket.The study of other natural phenomena, such as earthquakes and volcanoes exemplifies the tremendous pressures that sometimes precipitate Change. It could be noted here that undoubtably there is a lot of Change occurring in the Universe that is the perpetual Metamorphosis of Life, of which we as yet have very little knowledge or understanding, (along with a whole lot of other stuff we haven't discovered as yet and don't know anything about either}.The term 'roll-over' brings to mind a time in my youth when I always laid down to sleep on my back. On my back was how I wanted to sleep. Well, I could want all I wanted to, it did not matter, for sleep would not come. I could not go completely to sleep until I would give up and 'roll-over' There was an unknown power that forced me to substitute one position for another, no matter what I wanted. As I recall, it took some time, but I finally learned to co-operate with Nature and 'roll-over' with anticipation. This Changed my experience from one of 'trying to go to sleep' to one of simply 'falling asleep'.In our human experience, we must learn to operate as 'partners of Change', practicing the arts of anticipation, co-operation, and active participation. The secret to the mastery of any art is that there must not be anything more important than the art, so to succeed we have to prioritize our energies.We learn to make things happen by letting them happen and we learn to let things happen by making them happen. Quite simply, we learn to 'roll-over' with Change, moving with energetic anticipation through the moments of Life, ready to 'do whatever thing it is that comes next'. And the knowledge that if we don't Change, as with standing water, we will stagnate, prompts us to encourage the 'habit of anticipation', the constant desire to learn and understand. "Man must learn more about himself than he already knows. Perhaps the greatest impediment to the advancement of knowledge about man has been the fact that we assumed we [already] know [everything]. - Our acceptance that we do not know and must seek to learn cannot wait," forewarns Lewis Hershey.Here the words of Gary Baynes are apropos when he tells us, "It is the need of understanding himself in terms of Change and renewal which most grips the imagination of modern man. Having seen the world of matter disappear before his scientific eye and reappear as a world of energy, he comes to ask himself a bold question; Does he not contain within his psyche a store of unexplored forces, which if rightly understood, would give him a new vision of himself and help safeguard the future for him?'If we are to continue to evolve, and it is now quite clear that if we do not evolve, we will not survive, we must now begin to survey this 'store of unexplored forces', so that we may understand ourselves anew. And at the same time, we must begin to re-examine our present ideals for as Charles Kuralt advised us, "Whatever has been is now open to serious reconsideration."If we are to truly understand ourselves, we will have to Change. We will have to exchange our effort to find outer security for an inner attitude of gratitude, knowing that, "Nothing that is good, personal or social, can begin to occur so long as there is any effort to pursue security. True security is, " Bayard Pustrin reminds us, "a by-product of the ability to face utter insecurity in the pursuit of something beyond our self; and the effort to find security is itself death."So now we are forced to see the true reflection of our self - we don't want to Change because we misunderstand ourselves. Fritz Kunkel says it clearly, "In many cases we ascribe our predicament to blind fate or to the devil, or to a cruel divine judge, who punishes us for our sins - we misunderstand the dynamics of Evolution and therefore regress into childish complaints, instead of learning our lesson, discovering the deeper meaning of Life and progressing to the next level of Reality."In other words, we must learn not to rebel against Life and the circumstances it presents to us, rather we must learn to use all of the circumstances we face as aids to more rapid growth. "There is no sense", advises Nelson Glueck, "attempting to flee from circumstances and conditions which cannot be avoided but which I might bravely meet and frequently mend and often turn to good account." It is imperative that we learn to face the future as it happens, which is moment by moment, hour by hour, and day by day and persevere. We must, as Edward Carpenter suggests, "endure in patience until the season of our liberation."Many, many lives ago, in the sixth century B.C., Lao Tsu offered this enlightening advice, "Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is. Study the natural order of things and work with it rather than against it, for to try to Change what is, only sets up resistance."So we force our ears to listen when Robert Allman tells us that, "Life asks a continuous series of adjustments to Reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes." This means that we have to accept Change and work with it so that we can become consciously willing co-operators, able to say with Michael de Montaigne, "Not being able to govern events, I govern myself and adapt myself to them if they do not adapt themselves to me." And Richard McFeely's mom reminds us that, "We can Change any situation by changing our own attitudes toward it." Even when we get caught off guard, unprepared for some unexpected Change, we must be ready to, at the least, yield to the stronger power. And who knows what will happen when? " 'We are all at the mercy of a falling (roof) tile', Julius Caesar reminds us in Thorton Wilder's 'Ides of March'. "None of us knows," writes Carroll Binder, "at what hour something we may love may suffer some terrible blow by a force we can neither anticipate nor control. - - The best hope of standing up to falling tiles is through developing a sustaining philosophy and state of mind all through Life. - - One of the best ways I know of fortifying oneself to withstand the many vicissitudes of this insecure and unpredictable era is to school oneself to require relatively little in the way of material possessions, physical satisfactions or the praise of others. The less one requires of such things, the better situated one is to stand up to the Changes of fortune.""Birth and death, happiness and sorrow, illness and good health, love and loss - these I find are no respecters of persons," reflects Richard McFeely. "They come alike to all. But not all respond alike.Some go to pieces, dissolve into self-pity, become a burden to others, perhaps even take their own lives in their despair and hopelessness. - Others have something in them that, in spite of ill fortune, enables them to live constructively and creatively. What Life does to us will depend on what Life finds in us. Life does not consist in holding a good hand, but in playing a bad hand well." And of this Norman Cousins advises, "The hand that is dealt to us represents determinism. The way you play your hand represents your free will."Whatever we do, we must remember that, as Thomas Powers tells us, "The effort is what counts." He goes even further to say that, "Progress comes from patiently trying," and "The secret is to keep trying."Here again, Sharon Faris has such wonderful insight when she says, "There are great Changes that come about in the darkest hours where there is no hope and the encircling gloom is terrifying to the heart, and it is difficult for the human to understand the power at that moment." At these times, though we may not understand, we must simply accept Change and move onward, for as Katherine Mansfield advised us, "Everything in Life that we really accept undergoes a Change." If human Life in the twenty-first century is to Evolve into what we have the potential to become, emerging on the other side as complete human beings, then now is the time for us to Change our thinking, for in this Age of Common Sense and Incredible Change, procrastination is a luxury we can no longer afford. Perhaps, just "Perhaps," as Anne Phipps declared, "I am in a stage of metamorphosis which will one day have me emerging complete." Next Forward to; REFLECTIONS ON THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HUMAN LIFE at http://mysticwizardmusings2.blogspot.com/ or Back to; REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE at http://mysticwizardmusings.blogspot.com/