Forum Post: Friends Have Asked Me Back And So, With Your Indulgence, I Will Have My Say

I would like to thank those friends who asked me to remain a contributer here; you know who you are, and so again I say thank you.

I have been going through a period of soul-searching and have found that all I really have to further contribute here is a bit of what I have learned in a precarious half-century on this strange, spinning earth.

There is a passage in The Bible which says: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

This seems most clearly to reflect my expierence of life, and I believe it accounts for much of human conflict. We live very different lives here based, no matter what many people may say, mostly upon fate - upon random chance. The things we often take most pride in are the result of nothing more than simple fate: our looks, our intelligence, our social position and so forth, and yet these are among the primary things that come to make up our identity.

We see the world from our own particular point of view, and with time this vantage point hardens until it becomes difficult to impossible to see the world from the perspective of others, and this essential myopia gives us the impression that our unique point of view is right. This sense of disconnection, and untimately of alienation is mostly, I think, responsible for conflict.

Yet there is a deeper truth here, a deeper reality that sees all life as interconnected and mutually responsible. That was the understanding Einstein was pointing towards when he said . . . "nuclear weapons have changed everything but the way people think."

I believe it is no longer possible for us to see life primarily from the viewpoint of the single individual: that is, that to live in a way that brings any real happiness and satisfaction, or to even simply save ourselves and life on this planet from destruction, given the terribly perilous state we are now in, what is called for is nothing less than a change in our perspective regarding the fundamental meaning, the essential nature, and the value of the life expierence.

One of the contributors here whom I most respect told me he thought I was fixated on non-violence, and that in a grass roots, bottom-up, rather than top-down structure, with no leaders, who is there to "enforce" such a commitment anyway?

Of course he is right. There is no one but us. But in the final anaysis you see, there is no one but us. That is the fundamental truth that we must at last face. No one will save us, but us. It starts and ends with us - each of us as individuals must become aware of and act on the collective good.

That represents nothing less than a sea change of consciousness, but it is our only hope.

And so when I said that I will only remain part of this movement if it is commited to non-violence, what I am really saying is that I will only be committed to this movement as long as it represents hope - our only hope being a recognition of transcendent being as a basis for wisdom and moral behavior, and a recongnition of the interconnectedness of life.

In other words, for this revolution to work, it cannot be like the revolutions of the past, and so the squabbles of those revolutionaries are no longer relevent.

The truth is that there is now an accumulation of thought through the ages that really can begin to answer the questions worth asking: questions like "What is the meaning of life?" Questions like, "Is there a transcendent soul?"

Humanity is on the cusp of vast spiritual realization, but first we must answer the question of whether we care enough about existance, under present circumstances, to go forward and grasp those answers.

Living each waking day under the pain and uncertainty of mass self-dellusion we may very well answer that question in the negative. But if we shift our perception just a fraction, say to the left, suddenly an entirely new vista opens before us, and we realize that we were never lost in the first place, that in fact we are found. Yet to do this we must allow our egos to fall away, and the ego is nothing less than the identity we have founded through dillusion.

This is not metaphysical speculation. It is hard reality. It is the ancient choice, and we all know it. It was what Jesus asked of us, and we answered him by nailing him to the cross. We can no longer run from the question, there is nowhere left to run.

Well, I have had my say, and I thank you for allowing me the opportunity to say it. I wish all of you the best in this journey be the outcome what it may, and I feel I have made friends here whom I may someday get to know if real life, even a few of the "trolls" who are also just struggling through this perilous valley with the rest of us, the best that they know how.