The Understandings: The First Understanding – Reverence for Life
Reverence for Life is the divine gift of belongingness inherited pure and perfect at birth. Belongingness implies reverence for life. When reverence for life is the first and foremost guiding principle of living, human beings’ most creative energies are expended upon conducting the affairs of the world in such a way as to preserve life. The taking of life, or speciel killing, is not a function of being human. It is a scientifically untenable position to include speciel killing as a function of humanity.
A woman knows this as part of her womb’s inheritance. Men have to learn it from her example. This is the great understanding that has not yet been grasped on the pulses of the male in toto. Many males know it but not yet enough to tip the scale of understanding. This understanding that aversion to speciel killing is not only innate but also of primary importance in the affairs of the world presents the greatest challenge to the relationship between the female and the male. The male view that speciel killing or killing of one’s own kind is condonable under special man-made conditions is the unscientific assumption which has kept humanity on the path of self-destruction from the dawn of this civilization, for to kill another is to kill the self.
This is part one in a six-part series.
The Understandings were published in ANZAC to Understanding, Authorhouse, 2008. Find out more, HERE.
Rev. Mary A. Mann, Ph.D., was born in Australia and is descended from early Queensland pioneers. Her father was an original ANZAC, a member of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps who fought on the Gallipoli Peninsular in 1915. Mary is a graduate of the University of Sydney, the University of California in Berkeley and the University of Southern California where she secured her Ph.D. in Communications and Theatre.
Her working career was in accounting where she became a Qualified Accountant in Australia and was the first Controller of the Pacifica Foundation in the 1970s.
Her academic career centered around her passion for finding out ‘why war’. Her first book on this topic, Anzac to Understanding included her father’s war letters and a social commentary on the global situation from the beginning of the First World War through the 20th century and it included the epic play ANZAC. The philosophy culminated in the book There Are No Enemies, a practical philosophy of life, which includes The Right of the Womb. Her theatre studies culminated in The Construction of Tragedy, Aristotle today in the theatre and she edited two editions of The Los Angeles Theatre Book, 1978 and 1984.
Mary has been a member of Unity- and- Diversity since 1989 where she is now the Board Chair and co-edited the book Science and Spirituality with the founder of that organization. Rev. Leland Stewart.
She joined the Synthaxis Theatre Company in 1979. Her creative work includes Poems of Woman, editor of Mentoring Poems, four centuries of selected poetry, Tortoise Shell, taken from a journal of her great-grandfather documenting life in the early days of the State of Queensland, Australia, and under the aegis of Synthaxis, plays for youth and family audiences, Maria and the Comet and The Round Table, published as TWO FAMILY PLAYSand ThuGun and Natasha, a drama with rap, moving beyond guns and violence .
In North Hollywood, she is the co-host of Unbuckled No-Ho Poetry, a monthly poetry reading series since 2010, which you can view here:youtube.com/unbucklednohopoetry
Mary has been presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who
