“Oh my god, they’re everywhere!”
Or, The Common Good

Escape by Andrew Trick and Michael Hranica 

Symbols and Color

• Background Image: A field of tulips, all of which are beautiful side-by-side, but hard to pick one out of crowd. Yet, in a bouquet of flowers, each adds something unique, perhaps even special to the arrangement. This image was chosen because of all the color and uplifting feeling that a group of even closely identified individuals can bring to an experience. Like in a choir, chorus, or a team, where one individual may not be noticed if missing, an entire species would be.
• Yang: The Symbol of Masculine Energy
• TAO: Part of the Whole – First of Creation
• Triality: Always able to shift perspective but favors the personal, the immediate, microcosmic perspective, and direct approach.
• Penny: Symbol of Ordinality – Amass enough of these and you have a fortune.
• Border Color: Forest Green. Individual trees look similar and lost in the whole.

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

“United we stand, divided we fall.” One of the most common refrains for unity there is. Together, everyone, indeed every living thing is linked. Symbolizing the interconnectedness of all things, even one cog in the wheel of life may have redundant function, but without it, one never can predict when it fails, the cascading effect might be disastrous. Therefore, what one part adds into the sum of the organism, machine, or society itself, may have but a minute or mundane effect in the moment; but beneath the surface, the “Butterfly Effect” may rippling its consequences out to appear at a time (Card 70) in the future. Anyone ever read The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury? If not, you’ll understand the importance of a single life.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Connectedness

 (continuous, microcosmic, private, ordinary, mundane, commonplace, hoi palloi, serf, personal, responsive)

1. Pay attention to the things that seem second nature. Don’t let a breakdown in your world occur because something is being unseen or taken for granted.
2. Get a microscope and move in close. Examine things spec by spec. You’ll find the problem.
3. Simplify tasks and do them without fanfare.
4. Consider continuity in gradual and unpretentious change. One step at a time!
5. Honor the little people who helped you. They were the stepping stones on your rise. Tread lightly on them.
6. The ‘scope of work’ is a necessary part of a project plan. Your task is simply in need of refinement to how much, how big and how fast you can and will produce. You are on track. Don’t forget the details.
7. One step at a time! Consider continuous, phased, gradual, unadorned, and unpretentious change that you can measure incrementally. This is how you will arrive at your destination.
8. Ordinal energy appears so often and seamlessly, it is often taken for granted. Atoms may be small but their arrangement is vital to cohesion. Occasionally, check on the microscopic elements of your world.
9. Getting close-up and personal is the only way to learn some skills, some lessons and to achieve an intimate contact with someone else. Please don’t think yourself too important or too much in a hurry to make a small connection with others you meet. Details need review in one of these areas.
10. Natural processes are continuous and connected. They are introverted and thus may seem invisible.  Narrow the scope of a task and break it into parts.
11. Consider this situation, personal. Much of what is happening here close your realm of decisions. Gather your wits and focus on what and who might be affected by those choices.
12. Within the Michael Teaching context, Ordinal refers to the scope of interest a person is naturally shaped to consider. Any aspect of your Personality (chosen Overleaf) that has this size orientation suggests you bring your attention closer or more personal or more to the specifics. 

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”  C. S. Lewis
• “Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.”  Jim Rohn
• “Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them. ” Abraham Lincoln
• “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” Lord Elrond, Fellowship of the Ring

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

All just like peas in a pod. The idea that commonality is ordinary or normal is not necessarily true. However, as a primarily visual animal, we look for variation as a way of singling out something different or special. Hence, just like the peas in this image, or the flowers behind them, after awhile, individuality disappears and we become invisible in a figurative sense; because, on the surface at least, there is nothing to set us apart.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Invisibility

(Dispersed, dissolved, disconnected, isolated, blurred, homogonous, average, undifferentiated, minutia)

1. Normalcy is prized by those who desire conformity to avoid the risk of being noticed. Invisibility courts isolation.  Have you allowed mediocrity to be your standard?
2. Have you gotten invisible, or so insignificant, that you are being taken for granted? Do something to shed some light on what you do or who you are.
3. Are you hiding in a crowd? It might be time to stand out. Be aware that mobs have no morals, they just stampede and crush you if you fall.
4. With so many things in the mix, it will be difficult to determine which straw breaks the camel’s back. Clear away the chaff and find the particular bits that are essential know and get to the crux of the issue. With that, it is possible to reset the camel. If a more modern analogy is needed. Think computer programs competing for RAM memory until you get crash! You can still reboot.
5. Something is hiding in plain sight. No one sees it not because it isn’t there, but because they have learned to accept it as part of the norm. It has dissolved into the background. It is like Climate Change, as long as it happens slowly, the temperature change is seen as normal until too late.
6. The “devil is in the details” meaning that something small and relatively unnoticed may be the single grain of sand that grinds the gears of an operation to a halt. You can’t control everything, but if you have a hands-on approach, you can work out any difficulties when the arise.
7. ‘Try not to make a mountain out of a mole hill’, is good advice if you are dealing ONLY with minutia. Check to see that what is happening is not leading or pointing to a larger problem.
8. Clear away the chaff and find the particular bits that are essential to know to get to the crux of the issue. With that, it is possible to reset the kernel.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good. “ Socrates
• “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”  George Orwell
• “There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit.” Stephen Leacock

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

The idea of Ordinality as discussed in the Original Michael Teachings, was conveyed as those “most responsive” to the world. Personal interaction, rather than say, philosophical or detached analysis is the native impulse of Ordinal Overleaves. These narrow the focus and ground us into the tangible reality of the immediate. That whatever is to be done (made manifest) only does so because someone does the actual work to make it so.

Ordinal things are measured in lots, and seen as commonplace.  The “salt of the earth” is made up by billions of grains, yet each as the microscope reveals, shows an intricate uniqueness that is virtually undetectable unless given specific attention.

Conceptual Examples

Utility, Peasantry, Spirituality, Labor, Ordinary, Gatherer, Small, Do, Present, Community, Exclusive, Mundane and Tangible

Cultural Meaning

The Greeks called the average people, the Hoi Polloi. There is no special negative connotation but their was no exceptional quality to them either.  The idea is merely counting the general group as if they were indistinguishable from one another. Humans, as a species, have many more shared characteristics than they have “special” ones. To appreciate such things is to embrace the concept of ordinary as condition of life, not a flaw or failure.

In the 1980’s, Server Bob Geldorf,  put his mouth and money to work marshaling the forces of thousands of musicians worldwide and tens of millions of individuals attending or watching the multi-venue, music-marathon that he called Live Aid: Benefit for African Famine Relief.

The most inspirational movies are those in which, as Gandalf said in the Lord of the Rings “even the smallest person can make a difference.” It was also true of George Bailey’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Being common, is not the same a being average. Simplicity of character makes one more straightforward and identifiable. Such personalities often seem relatable as the regular guy or gal who becomes the hero. Rather than a person who somehow is cast in a certain light. Old Warrior Nelson Mandela became a symbol for his people because he appeared a person who transcended personal hardship. Contrast this to how an iconic, Exalted Role like Jesus of Nazareth got labeled as “Christ” the Messiah. The man, was lost to his image. Man became God. That would be an example of how individuals cast their inner Cardinal aspects and project them symbolically onto a figurehead. These figureheads may possess dubious qualities of character when assessed along some objective or specific moral structure, but to the Ego self of the an allied subordinate, they will imbue all that they themselves desire but feel powerless to achieve on their own, onto the Exalted symbol.

Applied Michael Commentary…

What is an Ordinal perspective within each person? To begin, it is the personal responsibilities, the needs of the body to attend to. As Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield examines in his book, “After the Ecstasy, The Laundry”, the expansionary embrace of enlightenment may give you that Cardinal/Exalted feeling of Beingness from a sense of liberation from Self, but still, here you live; with obligations, duties, chores, and the tedium of daily tasks to maintain that existence.

We are all here not to escape the Physical Plane or the Mundane, but to realize that it is the Dharma (Life Task, Karma, and Maya, we are here to interact with and experience thereof. Thus, doing our own laundry, or dishes, or personal grooming, are parts of the meditation which have little glamour but still deep significance that accumulates with each grain of sand that passes through the hourglass of our allotted time of life.

Appropriately, no matter how grandiose the vision, it still resides within the imaginings of a Homo Sapien animal Ego, which is here bridging its awareness between the holographic dimensions of potential and the limits and struggles of material manifestation into form. Each is a valid experience had by individuals, the Ordinal Self. Thus, the inner nature or scope of a person may have a vista of the microscopic, specific, narrow, or limited (Ordinal). But it is equally possible for those of the Exalted/Cardinal perspective to possess sight, interest, and concern far beyond the Self and into the impersonal world of larger units of imagining and extending into the shared cosmos of other beings.

Hint as to your scope…

Your perspective might be Ordinal if your primary method of assessment is to look at the specifics.  You might stop there or extrapolate. Almost innately, your style is begin with small examples and assemble those things into a strategy that is more for the short run solution based than long run or continuous operations.

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com