According to Wikipedia:
Burma–Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream,
famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems
on small sequential highway roadside signs.
Eve Revere, the late, original Yin Mind blogger,
spent a lot of years in the United States,
where she learned about some interesting incidents.
And this is one of her stories:
During the Vietnam War, troop trains were stopped,
through the clever use of “Burma-Shave” signs, posted
for the railroad workers, alongside the railroad tracks,
warning them of a disruption up ahead.
When the trains were safely stopped, and the railroad workers
were distracted with whatever was on the tracks up front,
some “lovers of peace” would quickly board, distribute flyers,
declare that the war was an illegal war (which it was!),
and inform soldiers that if they exited the trains immediately,
they could abandon the war effort, as conscientious objectors,
through the help of appropriate personnel, without persecution.
Well, this scenario was repeated a number of times,
saving some 400 soldiers, from the horrors of war,
before the railroad workers caught on, and no longer heeded those signs.
I realize now that the “burma-shave” signs story is a metaphor
for how consciousness often works:
the subconscious, the “implementing consciousness”, responds
to directives it is given, but then eventually the consciousness,
the waking or “directing consciousness”, catches on,
disallowing those directives and imparting alternative directives.
In memory of Eve,
J.
