But there is a larger point to be made, and a more difficult one, that is closer to our central concern. Life is good, no matter what it looks like to you. Human life on earth in 2017 is not mostly a failure, no matter how it looks to you. Your political and social and economic and ecological troubles – not to mention the huge spiritual vortex stirring up everything, ramping up the intensity of all conflicts, and not merely in the United States – all of this could tempt you to say, “All is obviously not well. We are doomed. The injustice of the world is suffocating us all.”
Here’s the thing: Can you hold that thought and feeling – which is not wrong – and still realize that all is well because all is always well?
I think people would be glad if you could help them with it.
We can, probably making them angry in the process because it involves associating two lines of thought that they typically are careful to keep separate, even if they shuttle from one to the other several times a minute.
Exaggeration for effect, I take it.
Not much of one. On the one hand, follow the news, with its unending serial of disaster upon problem upon intractable conflict. You mostly do it all the time, scarcely even noticing. Studying it in history isn’t all that much different from allowing it to flow through you via television or computer or gossip. Even sagas of heroism, altruism, even success stories, take place against a background of on-going train wrecks. Or, if you prefer to believe in the existing state of affairs as desirable, you see it as a past record of achievement now being threatened by the forces of (the left, or the right, depending upon your villain of choice). Either way, this half of your mind is pretty firmly mounted in a setting of on-going unfairness, stupidity, incompetence, malice and – in general – a throwing-away of all good possibilities, and unnecessarily.
True enough. That has been my experience since Nov. 22, 1963 [the day the assassination of President John F. Kennedy changed everything].
Certainly. You compare what did happen with what you think might have happened, or should have, could have happened, and it all looks like waste.
It does.
So you understand half of the dilemma, the half that looks around and says all is certainly not well, and anybody who thinks so is blind or stone-hearted. And by nature and on faith you nonetheless hold to the conviction that somehow all is well, regardless.
I hold to it, I feel it, but I certainly can’t explain it or even defend it.
And, unlike many, you are able to hold both incompatibles at the same time. Do you know why?
I do since you just conveyed it. It’s because I got “all is well” not from somebody else, either first-hand or second-hand, but from essence. The guys flowed it through me, telling Rita in 2001, and I never doubted it, even if, as you point out, it is incompatible with everything else I know.
That is where we can go next, then. How can both be true, and what does that tell us about those vast impersonal energies flowing through you, which we remind you is our main focus at the moment.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.