Just after the mega earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, I signed up for my 2nd dolphin watch boat adventure with Captain Khalid in the sea of Oman in the western Indian Ocean. In a huge bay less than 30 minutes by boat from Bandar Al Rowdah there are tens of thousands of dolphins on this calm and inviting morning with the cool breezes brushing our faces.
Omani sea- captain Khalid is a seasoned veteran of the seas and is continuously scanning the horizon looking for our target and hoping to close in on them. As the motors rev-up to about 24 knots, I was hoping to get some dazzling pictures and I was not disappointed. As we cruise into the sunrise following the ancient traditions of the sun worshiping dolphins we see boats, seabirds and dolphins towards the east. It is as if there are a huge mass of dolphins being herded in the general direction of the sunrise and we are heading further out to intersect this gigantic gathering, which we did. It is indeed a feast for our eyes to watch the beautiful Dolphins worshiping the birth of the new sun and another day! It is a celebration. It is an expression of gratitude, love, beingness and oneness with the universe. Dolphins celebrate the sunrise and again they thank the sun for maintaining life on earth during every sunset.
Dolphins are superior beings at every level.
When you are in the middle of the moving and scattered mass of dolphins it is obvious that these dolphins, the descendants of Atlantis, love to travel in packs or pods. They certainly love the company of their family and cousins and other distant relations as they jump, dive and generally frolic and dance around in the sea. There were literally thousands of them there, performing their morning dance of dipping and ducking to honor the sunrise as they have continuously done throughout the ages.
A few jumped clear of the water in splendid athletic displays of pure energy while many of the others, triggered no doubt by some primordial instinctual impulse, dived in pairs and threes as if to satisfy some kind of cosmic rhythm known only to them. Little is known about the Atlantis dolphins except that they are highly evolved mammals and able to communicate with the beings of Atlantis and helped to heal the people at that time. They were an integral part of the healing and higher consciousness healing that took place there during that time.
Photo: crazycreatures.org
Some feel that their consciousness was so advanced that they were able to create pockets of love where genuine spiritual awareness and growth was possible.
In fact, many scientists believe today that the dolphin is the closest in intelligence to human beings and may be even more intelligent that humans. I am confident that there is some truth to this. They are much better than us in the realms of consciousness and higher awareness. They are certainly free in their aqueous environment as they are not chained to the realms and rigid forms of earth.
Mohanji an authentic guru and meditation master, says that if all the beings of earth are categorized according to the level of subtlety and consciousness, then dolphins and whales would be placed above humans because of their advanced level of subtlety. They have chosen a fluid form, flexible and spontaneous. They have chosen the path of greatest fluidity where their form has no rigidity and there is no possibility of resistance because all is supple and fluid in the aqueous environment where there are no rigid forms or substances in the water which is infinitely subtle and flexible.
The fluidity of their forms is an indication of their elevated spirituality and the message is that of an objective acceptance of their situation.
Along with this situational acceptance of things as they are, the unconditional acceptance of all circumstances also signifies egolessness. No matter what the provided situations are, they accept spontaneity, fluidity and generate no attachments or resistance to any situations which allows their unconditional egoless spirituality to manifest in the aqueous environment. That’s why they look like they are loving their environment when you observe them frolicking and swimming around the boat and each other.
They, in fact, do manifest an enduring grace and the spark of God which is an aspect of their very being and their operating level is love but not limited to their own community or species. This is an important message. Universal Love is very important. That is the remedy for all the sorrows of the world. All other levels are community oriented except the whales and dolphins who are more than community oriented because their love is unconditional and to be shared by all other sentient beings. They permeate love wherever they go and help to balance the aggression and ignorance.
When we know karma, why should we resist? But who created it. Mohanji says whales show stability in consciousness and are not as flexible. They represent stability that is established in supreme consciousness. However, whales also manifest the qualities of continuity and support. Earth has emerged out of water, to sustain varieties of life. Whales present themselves as guardian angels to the earth. It is a grand collaboration. Whales help neutralize the mounting negativity of the earth. Whatever the earth undergoes, whales support through their powerful songs, which are like “mantras” aimed to keep earth stable, positive and to help continue its mission of nurturing and sustaining life. This is the collaboration between earth and the whales and there are no conflicts at all. Dolphins, however are more playful and funny and actually give positive vibrations in a therapeutic role where the qualities of freedom, positivity, joy and unbounded love are omnipresent. They are especially therapeutic if someone is depressed as dolphin energy can indubitably and on the nose reduce the feelings of depression.
So how can we ever think of killing such lovely creatures as whales and eating their meat when their only intention is to provide unconditional love to all. It would be radical to propose a moratorium on the killing of whales and dolphins as was done by the International Whaling Commission in 1987 because the northern countries, especially those with the huge trawlers sucking the fish out of the sea, would ignore it anyway. Are recent Pacific Rim events indicative of mother nature protesting and demonstrating against the callous overfishing and over consuming which results in more resources being wasted and squandered than are utilized, especially with the high seas freezer trawlers which recognize no boundaries?
Photo: Laura Balc
In seeking to make sense of the reasons I mused as to why, with about 60,000 km of the Pacific ring of fire ready for a tectonic event, was the epicenter of the tectonic plate shift so close to both a nuclear power generating facility and a 105 year old whaling factory which were both destroyed by this once in a thousand year/ worst case scenario event? Are there laws of cause and effect, which we know as karma, in effect at some cosmic scale which would be evident and manifesting in the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan? Is there a reason that Japanese whaling boats must annually kill, “for research purposes,” over 500 adult Antarctic Minke whales (with over 50% being pregnant females) every summer? Is there a reason that the Miyagi coastal whaling port in the city of Ishinomaki in the district of Ayukawa on the southern tip of the Oshika Peninsula, which had been in continuous whaling operation for 105 years, was completely annihilated along with 500 of the roughly 1400 residents and 80% of the 700 houses in the recent tsunami? Is there any connection between the needless annual slaughter of hundreds of pregnant female whales known for their nurturing and sustaining qualities and the complete annihilation of this century old coastal Japanese whaling base? The recent Tsunami even threw ashore three large whaling ships far into the land, during its fury. It destroyed the whale processing units completely.
Nevertheless, it does seem to make sense to protect those beings that manifest unconditional love, freedom and positive acceptance of things as they are. For the relatively small amount of whale and dolphin meat that we eat, are we experiencing the cosmic decisions of a wrathful god who has had enough and is teaching us some kind of lesson? Remember that a lesson which is not learned will be repeated over and over again in another way until it is learned. Was the great flood real?
The Japanese situation is indeed devastating but so was the great flood and the extinction of the dinosaurs and the annihilation of Atlantis by a comet with the subsequent tidal wave and flood. You know that the earthquake and tsunami zone is the entire ring of fire which goes on for tens of thousands of miles so this was no more a random incident than the great flood was a random incident. We must learn the lessons here – go back to the earth and conserve our bounteous resources and stop sucking all the fish out of the oceans and polluting the oceans at the same time.
Try to wake up and get off the treadmill of more and more by using vastly less plastic and reducing our carbon footprint.
There have been 5 incidents of mass extinction over the eons and the question here is whether or not are we heading for or at the start of mass extinction # 6??????? Lots to ruminate about during these times! Are we going to learn anything from this Japanese catastrophe?
You are probably asking why Japan still hunts whales. Well, Japan argues that it is a cherished cultural tradition, and they don’t agree with the criticism that killing whales and eating them is barbaric. According to a Humane Society International report,Japan claims that they hunt whales to feed their hungry population, and they started doing this during World War 2 and that this ‘tradition’ will continue because it is their tradition so to do and they apparently do not recognize the 1987 treaty which established a moratorium on the hunting of whales, or they navigate around it by saying they must kill 500 mature whales to complete their research.
Photo: NationalArchief
Some scientists believe that the Japanese rarely eat the whale meat, and you don’t see it on Japanese dinner tables, you can only find it in restaurants and markets. As of one month after the earthquake and tsunami, the continuing series of 6.5-7 range earthquakes are the continuing wake up calls to the Japanese who are again blatantly ignoring these messages. Stick around, these lessons will be repeated in one form or another as the nuclear poison continues to pollute the sea around Japan as of a news report of May 5, 2011.
The more insensitive we are, the more suffering we can expect. The nuclear reactors are still out of control and a 20 mile zone around non-functioning nuclear power station has been evacuated. It took the Japanese over thirty days to publicly admit that the situation is still out of control and the extent of the nuclear incident consequences are continuing to unfold. Along with royal weddings, a Canadian majority government, continuing massive unrest in the Middle East, especially in Syria, and Yemen, let’s not forget that the nuclear radiation continues to unabatedly poison an increasingly larger portion of the Pacific Ocean with who knows what ultimate consequences to mankind. Now it will only cost about 12 billion or so dollars and take 30 years to shut the whole crippled nuclear facility down. Of course that work will go to the same companies that built the nuclear facility by cutting corners to preserve the bottom line in the first place. Are we really learning anything here? Let’s see if some of the other northern nations that are also killing whales for ‘research purposes’ will lend them their boats so the Japanese can make the journey to Antarctica this summer and continue their ‘tradition’ of indiscriminate slaughtering and selling of the whale meat thinly veiled as research. This time the rationale can be that they genuinely need the food to feed their people in a genuine catch-22 situation.
This newspaper report is provided as background information to my story on dolphins and whales.
Japanese killed pregnant whales
More than half the whales killed by Japanese whalers in the Antarctic last summer were pregnant females, the Humane Society International said today.
The group said that of the 505 Antarctic minke whales killed, 262 of them were pregnant females, while one of the three giant fin whales killed was also pregnant.
The findings came from a review of Japanese reports from their most recent 2006-07 whale hunt in Antarctic waters and were released ahead of the resumption of a Federal Court case the HSI is taking against Japanese whaling company Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd.
“These are gruesome statistics that the Japanese government dresses up as science”, HSI spokeswoman Nicola Beynon said in a statement.
The official reason that Japan gives for whale hunting is “scientific research”. They say the only way to determine the whale’s age is to kill it. The purpose of the “research” is to prove that whale populations have improved enough to allow commercial whaling which was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986. However, the whale meat is sold as a delicacy. It is likely this is the real reason for the whale hunting.
In recent years activists have disrupted whale hunting in the arctic.
Whaling in the world is now banned. Whales were considered threatened in 1950, then endangered in 1963 and their hunting was banned in 1986. That’s 25 years ago. There are some countries that still continue to harpoon whales. Japan has a long history of harpooning whales, and is currently aiming to hunt a total of 1035 whales (which will be one of their biggest catches in 2 decades). Some of their whaling is in the near Antarctic Ocean, and a few boats near the Australian Border. Australians are trying to stop them, but the Japanese say that they are doing this for scientific research. People are certain that they are using this for their medicine, using the Whale’s oil, and the rest are used for their sushi, which is a popular dish in their country, and other dishes as well.
The whales that they target are the hump-back whales, which have a lot of oil in them. Once they are cut open, Japanese scientists check their diet to see if they are eating right. If not, they throw it back it into the Sea!!!!!. The White Hump-back whale isn’t the only whale they are aiming for; they are also targeting grey whales & Minke Whales, which can be found in the Antarctic Ocean.
The Green Peace group in Australia is protesting that Australia should help other organizations to stop Japan’s whaling; Kevin Rudd is currently setting a plan to spy on the Japanese whalers. The countries that are currently opposing Japanese whaling are the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Kevin Rudd has sent out planes and boats to where he knows Japan is whaling in Antarctica to collect evidence that they are not using them for scientific reasons, but to use them for their own use.
Also, there is a boat called the “Sea Shepard” a boat that will chase, block and harass if they see any attempts to harpoon the hump-backs, they already have destroyed a fleet in the Antarctic Ocean.
You are still probably asking why Japan hunts whales. Well, Japan also argues it is a cherished cultural tradition, and they don’t agree with the criticism that killing whales and eating them is barbaric.
Japan also said that they hunt whales to feed their hungry population, and they started doing this during World War 2!
Some scientists believe that the Japanese rarely eat the whale meat, and you don’t see it on Japanese dinner tables, you can only find it in restaurants and markets. As of one month after the earthquake and tsunami, the continuing series of 6.5-7 range earthquakes are the continuing wake up calls to the Japanese who are again blatantly ignoring them. Stick around, these lessons will be repeated in one form or another.
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Peter Mohammed Langille was one of the first native Nova Scotians to be accepted into the Kalapa Shambhala Society in 1994. He left Nova Scotia in 2005 and now resides in the great eastern sunny Sultanate of Oman where he writes, teaches academic writing at Sultan Qaboos University and conducts workshops in the Middle East area on paraphrasing in the English Foreign Language context. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Malaya and, as part of this research, he is writing the definitive e-book on paraphrasing.as a tribute to his mother who ,although she has left her body, inspires him in spirit to continue writing and studying English.
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