Eleven Eleven

I think we've all had a little fun with numbers since the commencement of the new millennium. Every year there is a special date that runs the same across the board: 01/01/01, 02/02/02, and so on. Yippee, looks like I might make it all the way to 11/11/11! And then it will be 12/12/12 the following year. Subsequent fun will depend on adding extra months to 2013 and beyond. After 2030 or 2031 (depending on how long the extra months are), days would have to be added to the months to continue the merriment.

But back to "eleven eleven"...

The combination of the numbers 11 & 11 seems to have taken on some kind of mystical, superstitious importance over the past few years. George Noory, the conspiracist believe-anything-that's-loony talk radio host of late night's Coast-to-Coast AM, has repeatedly hammered home his experiences of impulsively looking at clocks when it is 11:11, as if this carried some kind of supernatural or paranormal significance. As for me, this phenomenon happens a lot, too. But truth but told, I never noticed it until I had heard Noory and others refer to it. Then my mind programmed itself to respond at the appropriate moment, in the same way that I have an uncanny ability, after sleeping for hours, to suddenly jump out of bed wide awake seconds before my wake-up alarm goes off. So there's nothing unusual about this for me. And since others are human like me and share similar physiologies, they probably also have allowed themselves to be conditioned by others to look out for this time of day, at least subconsciously. Nothing mysterious or supernatural about that...

But this apparently won't stop some from trying to capitalize on 11-11, or I should say, 11/11/11. A group calling itself "One Breath One World" is staging on that date, apparently in Orlando, a stadium event grouping together 20,000 like-minded believers in this kind of numerology to try to create a miracle, for the sake of the planet, world peace, enlightenment, and all of those other cozy-sounding new age ideals. And how are they to accomplish this? At the signal, everyone is to breathe in unison! And that will change everything. But first, these miracle workers need to get online and purchase their tickets...

I'm not sure this won't possibly come back to bite these gullible do-gooders in the ass, though. I remember a science fiction short story by Orson Scott Card titled Deep Breathing Exercises. The premise expressed in this interesting tale was that, when people were grouped together in a setting in which they were about to collectively perish due to a calamity, they inexplicably began inhaling and exhaling in total unison. So maybe if you're of the gullible type who believes, as George Noory claims to believe, that there are no such things as coincidences, then you just might consider NOT hanging around Orlando on "miracle day" 11/11/11!

I don't believe in either scenario. But if people are looking for miracles, they need to look within themselves and recognize their amazing human capacity for change. These 20,000 will already be interested in miraculous change: now if they can only see that, by taking each day they live and treating the people they encounter with more compassion and respect than they did the previous day, there is the possibility of a miracle of sorts coming about after all. For human behavior is infectious: others copy successful models of behavior that they observe and internalize them to become a new part of their own personalities. A truly "kinder, gentler" society (without the political overtones) would be a miracle, and one accomplished without the need for pretense about supernatural forces causing it.

And without the need to buy a ticket!