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ReflectionsFactOnce the hijackers had taken control of their planes they told the passengers that they were going to die and that they should telephone their loved ones. Many doomed passengers took advantage of that. Presumably, many would have prayed as well. Questions1 Why did the hijackers do this? and what does this action tell us about the hijackers? 2 This is a side issue and not part of the discussion here but worth asking anyway: Did the hijackers also call the World Trade Center and warn the authorities there of the imminent loss of life? Reflections (by me)Many think of or describe those who hijacked the planes and killed themselves as "evil and inhuman". But this curious fact, that they asked their passengers to phone home, does not seem to be noticed at all. Nor is there much discussion about the way in which this generosity probably led to the disruption of their plans with the fourth plane. The evidence at the moment points to an active resistance by the passengers once they had been told of their fate or learned by phone of the fates of the other planes. That plane then crashed in Pennsylvania following a presumed attack by the passengers. So here goes: the instruction to "phone your loved ones" was a mark of humanity in the hijackers. It shows that the hijackers had a conception of the difference between good and evil. It might even be understood as a mark of some kind of piety. This tells us that the hijackers, rather than being purely evil, were human beings who had a radically different view of life than most of us. Perhaps they too were husbands, fathers; for certain they all once had mothers and fathers of their own. This leads me to the belief that they genuinely believed that they were doing good for themselves and their society. (I do not agree with what they did but am trying to explain what they might have been thinking and feeling.) You would ask: how could such an evil thing be considered good? A rational response might be: how was the bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, ever considered good? After all, those bombs killed many more than died in New York on September 11th. In warfare, each side does, as a rule, believe that it has the moral right to do what it is doing. What we have in fact is an extreme example of the old adage that there two sides to every coin. Examples at the large scale abound. What the USA sees as a simple necessity: say protection and encouragement of Saudi Arabian oil interests and a friendly government in that country is seen by others as a gross infringement of sovereignty and a religious impurity. In the other direction, what was seen as development of tools to defend oneself, by say Pakistan and India with their nuclear programmes, was seen by the west as a dangerous destabilisation of world peace. In the life of individual families, for every question, there seem to be at least two answers. Do we let our teenage child go to the disco? If yes, she might get ensnared in the drug scene, if no, she will lose an important route to social development. In the life of the nation we have similar dilemmas: capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus enlightened despotism, centralism versus regionalism. We see for instance the Jewish people, suffering an enormous historical burden of prejudice, searching for a homeland and obtaining one. Yet that success leads to the dispossession of another people. These are all genuine problems, because however much we come down in favour of one side or the other, we still must, in our private thoughts at least, acknowledge that the opposing point of view could have some justification. In the life of the individual the big problems are between, mind and body, present desires and working for the future, logic and intuition (common sense and gut feeling), masculine and feminine aspects of personality and ultimately to sum it all up: the differing impulses of heart and mind. Even in heaven we are told the existence of mutually exclusive yet entirely valid opposites continue. An old school friend, Robert G, tells me that our headmaster, George Lyward, talked to him at length on this and gave him a book on it titled "War In Heaven" by Charles Williams. The inescapable truth is that the universe and the world in which we live is a field of duality. There are, quite literally, two (or more) valid and often contradictory sides to every coin, large or small. What is the way out? In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is in a similar position. To fulfil his role in life he has to uphold good yet to do so involves him engaging his uncles and grandparents in battle which in itself is bad. He seeks a way out and is told "be without the three gunas". In short, this is an instruction to go beyond the material world, whose finest levels are the three gunas, to transcend them and find a unified state of wholeness. What does this mean for us? Modern science has in the last twenty or so years come up with a theory that identifies a field of complete unity at the basis of everything in the universe. A unified field of all the laws of nature in which there are no "things" yet which is the basis of all things in creation. This is much better described by Dr John Hagelin here. The theory of the unified field is modern science catching up with Maharishi's Vedic Science. Maharishi's Vedic Science provides techniques to make use of the unified field and all its qualities. TM allows the conscious mind to settle down to its own source, the source of thought. pure consciousness. This is the self same unified field as identified by modern science. When individuals practise this technique they are watering the roots of their own lives and the life of their communities. When Maharishi was asked in a recent interview how all the different tendencies in life could be harmonised he replied: "Just like a gardener. When he finds a plant is becoming unhealthy he first of all waters the roots. He provides nourishment there and all aspects of the plant are simultaneously enlivened. The leaves, stem, flowers are all fed at once." (see a RealVideo of this interview, fast forward to 1Hr19m30s for this quote) In the same way countries, cultures, societies, families and individuals are all simultaneously supported and enlivened when the field of pure consciousnes, the unified field of all the laws of nature, is enlivened in the world. They each grow in strength and harmony.
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