Good Vibrations Travel Far - So do Bad Ones

An Alien's Report on Planet Earth

I’m not from around here. Not even close.

I’m a reporter on assignment from another galaxy, reporting home on the emotional condition of the inhabitants of your planet.

The publication I work for is called - how do I say this in Earth language? - The Daily Mental. It contains the equivalent of your newspapers, your radios, and your television, all rolled into one, which is then transported electronically to the mini-chip in each of our frontal lobes. Got that?

Each of our citizens receives a complete resume of all of our galaxy’s daily activities, in a nano-second, which, in your tongue would be, "faster than the blink of an eye."

With us being so far away, you might wonder why the emotions of your populations are important to us and how we would go about measuring them. Both good questions.

As to the why: You might be surprised to note that along with our advanced technology, our citizens are possessed of highly attuned emotional sensors, both inbound and outbound. That's why we are concerned about what you are doing so far away. The discontent of your people is very disconcerting to ours. Our bio-rhythms are delicately balanced and require constant maintenance to sustain the quality of life we have enjoyed for more millennia than your civilization has existed.

As for the how: You folks have invented Seismometers, those instruments that measure the dimension of what you call Earth quakes, AFTER they occur. [Don’t ask me how odd we think that is.] Of course we've long had many measuring devices, including ones that can detect both the emotional and intellectual energy being generated on your planet. The former runs high most of the time and the latter rarely exceeds a blip, but that's another story.

Our guardians are always on high alert when your planet heats up. We tend to know about it very quickly. Bad news travels far and fast.

For thousands of what you call "years," our sensors have constantly registered large amounts of emotional energy emanating from various hot spots on your globe. We can usually correlate the larger outbursts to events that seem to affect many of your people. The obvious examples are sad events like the death of loved ones, and wars and natural disasters, which produce very observable emotional reactions. Plus, in the past century, we have observed the result of the almost constant occurrence of a strange thing you call "divorce."  Each one of those seems to create its own little energy burst off your planet, like the bright spots emanating from your sun. The idea of divorce is alien to us, but then again, so is much of what you do.

One recent observation made our central pumping stations [the thing you call the "heart"] slow down in sadness. It was the report of the annual loss of life related to obesity, which is estimated to be running at a rate of 300,000 per year. When we studied this phenomenon, we could reach only one conclusion -that those deaths were an example of how many of your citizens do not always deal effectively and directly with their emotional responses to sad events.

Our scientists determined that your people tend to push their feelings down with food and other substances, rather than tele-communicate them outwards [oops, that should read "tell them to others"]. We also discovered a direct correlation to the increased use of substance substitution in the aftermath of the deaths and divorces that our sensors were monitoring for emotional content.

We desperately wanted to tell you that we had come to grips with the matter of emotional energy many millennia ago. We wanted to tell your people that we had discovered that when the body - I think that's what you call your skin package - is used to store emotional energy within itself, bad things happen. It is only when the body is used as a processing plant, rather than a storage tank, that emotional energy is disposed of properly.

But it was only a recent technical break-through that finally allows us to communicate with you. We certainly hope we're not too late.

Lately, we have observed an inordinate build up of emotional energy coming from Earth. We know there is unrest at many levels. We also know that most of your citizens tend to store energy about emotional events, especially sad ones, for years and years. We know that they are constantly being told that they shouldn't feel bad even when they do.

Although in our universe we each know that we are responsible for our individual feelings, we also know that we are all in it together, and can be affected, to some degree, by what others say, think, feel, and do.

Maybe there’s hope for your civilization. Maybe it's your time to figure out a new and better way.

We hope so. The emotional well-being of our society does not need to be linked to what you would call "bad vibes."

By Russell Friedman

John W. James and Russell Friedman are co-founders of The Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation, and co-authors of The Grief Recovery Handbook and When Children Grieve, both from HarperCollins. The Institute and thousands of affiliates throughout the United States and Canada offer a variety of programs for grievers.

Additional information is available by calling 888-773-2683 or on the web at www.grief.net. 

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