O.K., so on Tuesday I saw Tiff and she said, "We need to empower Mr. Y (the new principal)." I said, "That sounds sensible. How can we do that?" She said, "Well, what I'm doing is going to him first with any information and putting things in his mailbox instead of putting them in the vice principal's mailbox." All right. This sounds like it's something that would happen automatically, but believe me, I am leaving out 99.9 % of the story and just relating the part I want. So - you empower someone by assigning responsibilites to that person that had formerly been considered the bailiwick of another person. It's a mental switch in part.
Fast forward to today. I'm in jin shin and there's a constant noise outside that Frank jokingly refers to as "killer bees." I said, "It sounds like those Tibetan instruments - " And he said, "Oh! Right! Those long horns!" I said said, "Yes, it sounds exactly like that... ...maybe it is." Frank said, "Maybe the Dalai Lama is visiting!" It sounded EXACTLY like that, to me, until the noisemakers grew closer and it resolved into leaf blowers, something I have an aversion to. As a child I imagined that people from medieval times would see oil refineries as fantastic castles, so part of it is how you regard things. Anyway, I spent a pleasant hour listening to Tibetan horns.
This ties together. I started thinking about how we can have a better world, which I think about all the time. I realised that the terrible tragedies around the world are pointing up that no longer can we hide behind national borders. The things we do for good and evil affect the world. We need to empower some other entity than the national governments because we are having the tragedy of the commons on a global scale. I thought about all individuals, each empowered. I admit, that fused on me, so I started thinking about the Dalai Lama's address to something or other (UN? Nobel Ceremony? I don't remember) when he was talking about his hope of Tibet, in the future, becoming a wellspring of peace to refresh and strengthen the world. I see the Dalai Lama as a reflecting entity, reflecting back to individual people how they might live a better way. He was talking about that same concept only using Tibet itself. I think I would trust him to be an overseer for the earth, to empower all people to strive for good. Clearly there needs to be something or someone to promote the concept of wholeness, as our old separated-into-states way of doing things doesn't work anymore. Empower the Earth, which means the power would be reflected back on each individual. And to empower we need to make a mental shift, and take that authority away from those who have destroyed so much.