Whose fault?

Add a Comment

Comment by Phil Bachmann on April 5, 2011 at 21:06

"What can we learn from this?"

 

I like it.  Short, unambiguous, difficult to evade without putting people on the defensive.

Comment by William Jack Jordan on April 5, 2011 at 14:27

Blaming can be very destructive, especially at an emotional level.

(example:WW! was all the Germans fault and no-one elses.)

 

That aside...

 

One POV is that with say car collisions, the cause is mostly inattentive (or risky, which ultimately comes to the same thing) driving. In those cases, the person responsible was not present, their mind was elsewhere. In a sense there is no-one to blame,because there was no-one there.

 

Eckart Tolle (Power of Now) guy wrote that if all drivers were also present in the now, there would be no collisions.

 

Back to the original question. One approach is to ask

What can we learn from this?

How can we do things in the future so this doesn't happen again?

i.e. turn a negative into a positive

 

With abstract thinking, you can apply the lesson to as many situations as possible.

Comment by Franis on February 14, 2011 at 3:11

Well, everyone hits snags while living their life. Everyone seems to come into life with "issues" that are not of the making of their upbringing. Having thought about this before...Here's a post where I got all pushed out of shape when someone used stereotyping and name-calling to blame others for their inability to draw their own boundaries.  http://franis.blogspot.com/2010/08/scapegoats.html

Comment by Cal on February 13, 2011 at 13:39

Thanks, Franis. Your use of the word "paranoid" in "paranoid women" threw me off. It sounded like it was their paranoia, and him trying to accommodate it in a seeming excessive way - at least excessive to me - that was the key issue.

 

Comfortably fitting one's own skin. We seem to start off okay that way. Then things get screwed up, more for some than others. Whose fault is that.

Comment by Franis on February 13, 2011 at 4:47

My point was that Ray used the complaints of the women he was with to make him behave reasonably without taking responsibility for it himself. He was only doing it because the gal wanted him to do it - and it saved his ass as well as hers. So he didn't really want to leave her behind, because then he had to keep up with the younger guys and take chances he really wasn't able to handle. So - there's a situation where a guy who, left to himself, wants to blame a woman to save face about taking too many stupid chances in a sort of reverse way. Interesting, isn't it?

Comment by Cal on February 12, 2011 at 13:31

Nice story, Franis. I used to ride bikes. It was pretty much my life for 10-12 years. My 'sense' of what was going to happen while riding pretty much came from experience, though, although I did seem to be able to 'read' the road better than many I rode with, and had an idea of what was going to happen as times, based on how people were riding in certain conditions.

 

Following the thread theme of Whose fault, on your comment of "Previously, my traveling partner Ray had teamed up with paranoid women who held him back": I've sometimes wondered about that - who holds who back. Example: Couldn't Ray have just told them that he was getting a bike, and they could either ride or not ride with them? The other day, my best friend's girlfriend emailed a couple pics of him on the Harley V-Rod he just picked up for himself. She doesn't particularly like to ride, so usually stays behind when she doesn't want to go.

 

 

Comment by Franis on February 12, 2011 at 12:14

...ah, cut off again...

....Then if I had a stray thought that there was something wrong, I could go down the list and ask myself if that 'stray" thought had these particular specific characteristics that I knew were common to my own precognitive survival warnings. If the thought actually had these characteristics, then I would be perfectly OK with getting off a plane, etc. and doing no matter what I had to do to act on this intuition.

But I do admire that you acted on your intuition when the price was high! That took courage!

Comment by Franis on February 12, 2011 at 12:13

Yes, my question was, "How does a person identify a significant intuitive or precognitive thought that makes it different from any other thought enough to act on it with certainty?"

Or: "how should you take responsibility for knowing what is going to happen?" It's a very scary thing to know, but It's also handy. Have found that intuition concerning personal safety (and safety of loved ones) is the most common type.

Is it your "fault" if you know what is going to happen and you do not do the right thing to avoid the calamity?

Part of the answer is to "practice" by acting on intuitive thoughts when there is no big issue - and seeing the results of one's actions and whether it plays out to your advantage or not. This helps you to identify your intuitive ability and "test it."

The only way I tested and determined the truth of my intuitive precognition was after the fact of having been injured. Fortunately, the injuries that taught me about my intuition were not anywhere near as serious as the accident on the motorcycle in Baja, (where the price of guessing wrong is death; in Baja hospitals do not exist that can give blood to accident victims.) While I was learning about my intuition, I experienced mistakes that were not serious calamities. They were little accidents that made me say to myself, "So that's what a precognitive warning looks like!"

Once I had a few of these experiences, I merely collected the characteristics that made those warnings distinct from any stray worry or over-concerned paranoid thought. (Having had this conversation with many people, have learned that each set of identifiers are unique for different people's "early warning system." So my set of identifiers won't work for anyone else.) Then if I had a stray thought that there was something wrong, I could go down the list and ask myself if that 'stray" thought had these particular specific characteristics that I knew were common to my own precognitive surv

Comment by Franis on February 12, 2011 at 11:06

...continued, as the post was cut off: 

...I described it minute detail to him; on a fast 50 mph curve, a mysterious force pushes us off the road that involves again, another two trucks coming at us, but they never leaving their own lane. Ray thinks it's just processing of the previous narrow escape, so he ignores me. I feel like Cassandra.

So, not long after Ray puts his helmet on, here's the reality of the scene of my dream in front of us! It's a fast curve, I give our signal as I see the identical scene as in my dream - Ray responds a bit to that signal to slow down, but not enough to avoid trouble. The two trucks are in their lane, and the wind that is blowing from our right is what the force of the truck are pushing against us that cuts off and then pushes us off the road. Ray has no conscious idea that to turn a bike you must steer outward before you can steer inward, and loses control. As the back tire of the bike drops off the six inch road into soft dirt, I stand on the pegs and jump over the top of the handlebars that are flipping up toward me. I roll using my Aikido training and escape with surface road burn. Later the front handlebars are pretzel shaped. I shudder today to imagine myself so narrowly avoiding being tangled in them.

Fault? The wind's fault. Ray's fault, for not knowing enough to figure out we had overloaded the bike and he didn't really know how to ride it. Perhaps it was Ray's fault for not believing me, given my track record of precognition concerning my personal safety. Perhaps my fault for not using another excuse to stay put another day, given the dream. I knew it was a precognitive dream from experience. It had all the idiosyncratic markers that I had noted were characteristics that made a dream an important dream. For me that was: a disembodied film clip of the scene previous to the accident but with no sound or sensation that played multiple times; a dispassionate narrator who understated the serious

Comment by Franis on February 12, 2011 at 11:00

Adonis asked: Did you have a dream ... about a crash ... but you ignored it anyway?

Had a dream of the scene immediately preceding a crash that was completely precognitive. In retrospect, had no idea of my contribution to the chaos; was a passenger on an overloaded motorcycle with an inexperienced rider. Previously, my traveling partner Ray had teamed up with paranoid women who held him back. Since I had never been on a road trip on the back of a motorcycle before, had no gauge of what might be dangerous or not.

My skills at prediction had been proven the day before we had settled in for a few days off of riding. With an improvisational moment of appreciating the beauty of the scenery, I had been overwhelmed with the desire to just hear the silence of the desert without the roar of engines beneath me. I'd given our signal to stop immediately, patting Ray's lower back. As the engine cut, we began to pull off into the narrow road with no shoulder, finding a safe drop off onto a harder area of dirt. As we slowed, we both looked up to see two trucks, one in each lane of the two lane road, passing each other coming over the rise where we would have been had I not signaled to pull over. Ray turned to me then and said, "Any time you want to stop, just let me know." Later he told me he considered it was a coincidental but life-saving "accident." He never realized it was a sign of precognitive ability. Or course, Ray should have taken my dream a few days later more seriously. But he was so used to having paranoid women complain and whine that my warnings fell on deaf ears, despite my having saved our lives once already.

In my dream, Ray had his helmet on. As he donned his helmet purely to keep warm when we got back on the road, (he had never worn it the entire trip,) I reminded him of my dream. He scoffed. I suggested that when I saw the exact scene that my dream had presented me, I'd give him a signal. I described it minute detail to him