A World that Works for Everyone

Yesterday, as I have before, I posted about wanting to build a world that works for everyone. I mean this to be understood as a way of being, of living as an individual and member of a society, community, nation and planet, so that I do as little harm or evil as possible and as much good as possible. Living this way is an ideal which I very much want to actualize. It gives me hope and purpose and a sense of optimism. But when it seems things are not changing and we’re not building a world that works for everyone, but are in fact going in the opposite direction and building a world that works for the few and the wealthy, I get very sad, deeply disappointed, depressed and angry.
Joseph Campbell is optimistic about the world. “It’s great just the way it is,” he says. “And you are not gong to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct and improve it.”

Wow! So doesn’t that lead to a passive attitude in the face of evil?

“You yourself are participating in evil,” he says. “Or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody or something. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.”

And what of the conflict between good and evil, the forces of darkness and of light?

“That is a Zorostrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one, is evil for another. You play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder, a mystery. All life is sorrowful is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way.”

Yet it is “joyful just as it is, too. I don’t believe there was anybody such as God who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ To awake is not to be afraid, but to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous [neutral] power [neither good nor evil] that is all creation.”

So, you wouldn’t fight any battles or strive for any ideals? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from accepting everything as it is?

Yes, it’s logical “but not the necessary conclusion. You could say, ‘I will participate in this life, I will join the army” or the peace corps. I will do the best I can. “I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts. Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions. I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way my ideals want it to be. But affirming it the way it is – that’s the hard thing.”

Rituals help us with that. “Rituals are group participation in the most hideous act, which is the act of life – namely, killing and eating another living thing. We do it together, and this is the way life is. The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge.”

So wanting to build a world that works for everyone is a hero’s journey, fraught with disappointment and joy.

Seeming Evil

I keep on thinking that at some point, I’m going to have to, be forced to, do something I don’t really want to do or believe in. As the situation deteriorates, I’ll have to get a gun and some Krugerands and some survival food. But then I think, what good will that do? It might buy my wife and I some time, a few weeks or daze, but then what? When the amo, gold and food are gone, then what? Where will the drinkable water come from, and the toilet paper?

Our society is incredibly fragile and our ability to survive outside it is practically nill. Think about it: everything comes in by truck. When the trucks stop running, it’s over. And electricity, what would we do without electricity? How many candles have you got? And matches.

This kind of thinking scares me and makes me humble and very grateful for what we’ve got, messed up, destructive, heedless and dangerous as it is. Sure we can do better than we’re doing, but we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’ve got to transition from where we are to where we want to be – transition. Husband, conserve, love and protect and transition as rapidly as we can without making things worse.

It’s easier and more effective to do this if we come from a heart-centered, mindful and holistic place, from inside-out. When I’m thinking at some point, I’m going to have to, be forced to, do something I don’t really want to do or believe in, I’m not thinking from that place. I’m thinking with the ego mind, the carnal mind, the place of fear and doubt. While human reasoning and political decisions by individuals, communities and nations have value and are important, it’s what’s in our hearts that counts.

I find that when I come from a heart-centered, mindful and holistic place, from inside-out, acting in tune with my guidance and surrendering to the mystery, I get better results. Giving it over, letting go of the fear and ego’s shrieking, is the first step. Do I really have to do something? Perhaps. Is getting a gun and Krugerands the thing to do? Probably not. What should I do then? Well, I can’t know as long as I’m fearful and listening to the ego. If I let go of that, allow myself to be guided, accept the mystery of being a spiritual being having an earthly experience, I will know.

Pressures of the world frighten and seem to divide us into separate individuals, communities, religions, political parties, nations. But if we really are spiritual beings having earthly experiences, the seeming divisions are not the truth about us, but merely seeming divisions. “At all times and under all circumstances, overcome evil with good. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you. The cement of a higher humanity will unite all interests in one divinity.” Mary Baker Eddy wrote.

I would add that we do not “overcome” evil, we do not buy guns and vote to take the country back, that this is fearful ego thinking and only serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy to make the evil seem real. We perceive the evil, realizing that if we are perceiving evil we are perceiving with our ego minds, give it over and ask to see things differently in the light of spiritual holistic reality. Doing this will in fact, allow us to see things differently and act from that place; not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but transitioning from a world that works for a few, sometimes, to a world that works for everyone, most of the time.

Inside Out

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. In other words, if I’m unhappy and I want things to be different, I have to be different. Until I adopt a fresh perspective and change my behavior and my thinking, nothing will change. It’s inner work first; from the inside-out. I can blame others: democrats, republicans, jews, born-agains, the media, the tea party, the immigrants, the horrible communist gov’t in Washington all I want until my heart’s content – if blame can really make one’s heart content, or I can take responsibility, look in the mirror and as Pogo said 40 years ago, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

Come on friends, enough already! We have the power, right now, you and I and the person next to you; its always been there within us. We can make things different and fulfill the ideals Joseph Campbell was talking about. But we’ve got to face our fears, claim our power and take responsibility, and that’s difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. In fact as we begin to do that - face our fears, claim our power and take responsibility, not only do we feel better, but the results are instantaneous.

It isn’t a matter of some people being better than others. Rather it requires a willingness to think and act in new terms, to point to spirit’s abundant love and care for each and every one of us, sinners and righteous, black and white, gay and straight, dem and rep. Jesus said God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike. “The true theory of the universe,” Mary Baker Eddy said, “including humanity, is not in material history, but in spiritual development. Inspired thought relinquishes a material, sensual and mortal theory of the universe, and adopts the spiritual and immortal.”

Awareness of our reality as spiritual beings first, having an earthly experience, can help us overcome the fear that keeps us locked into always doing what we always do, and always getting what we always got. Matter can never truly define anyone, because it is blind to spiritual and essential qualities such as honesty, compassion, brotherhood, wisdom, joy and love. These and qualities like them, define our true power. They are the true substance of our being and they enable us to transcend material limitations. No one can be cut off from the light of spirit, it shines 24/7, everywhere and on everyone. Access the light that you are, that everyone is, and the darkness disappears. When you put on a light in a dark room, the darkness does not resist, it simply disappears.

If I’m unhappy and I want things to be different, I have to be different. If I always do what I always did, I’ll always get what I always got.

Joseph Campbell, 5

The fact that most of the Founders were Masons and would have studied ancient Egyptian lore explains many of the symbols on the dollar bill. In Egypt, the pyramid represents the primordial hillock. After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down, the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world. That is what the pyramid on this seal represents.

The pyramid also showed the Founders that one has to distinguish between reason and thinking.

Reason is one kind of thinking. But thinking things out isn’t necessarily reason as the Founders understood it. The mouse that bumps its nose and figures out there’s another way to go, is figuring things out the way we figure things out. But that’s not reason. Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe. When these men talked about the eye of God being reason, they were saying that the ground of our being as a society, culture and people derives from the fundamental character of the universe.

The pyramid myth, with its suggestion that if you’re going to govern correctly, you’ve got to govern from the apex, from the eye, can still inform us today. It can contrast the current state of political ‘discourse’ with our nation’s ideals as envisioned by the Founders. It offers a venerable alternative of compassionate cooperation, inclusion and connectivity. Individually, most of us are now, politically and historically, on one side of the pyramid, one side of the argument, not representing the principle of the eye.

In fact we’ve fallen so near the pyramid’s base that we even distrust and mock those who attempt to pull us up toward reason. We need to get to the top, the eye, individually and collectively. It’s there in our history, our roots, and has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years. We don’t have to invent it, we just have to awaken to it, claim it, and live it.

Joseph Campbell, 4

So what you have here on the dollar bill is the eagle representing this wonderful image of the way in which the transcendent manifests itself in the world. That’s what the United States is founded on. If you’re going to govern properly, you’ve got to govern from the apex of the triangle, in the sense of the world eye at the top.

Washington outlined all of this in his farewell address. “As a result of our revolution,” he said, “we have disengaged ourselves from involvement in the chaos of Europe,” and he warned that we not engage in foreign alliances. We held to his words until WWI, then canceled the Declaration of Independence and rejoined the British conquest of the planet.

So we are now on one side of the pyramid. We’ve moved from one to two and are now politically and historically, a member of one side of an argument. We do not represent that principle of the eye. And all of our concerns are with economics and politics, not with the voice and sound of reason.

What destroys reason is passion, and the principle passion in politics is greed. That’s what pulls us down and why we’re on one side of the pyramid instead of at the top. We’ve ceased the forward motion begun in the great awakening in 500 BC with Buddha, Pythagoras, Confucius and Lao Tzu when humans began the transition to reason from being governed by animal powers, the planted earth and the course of the planets.

But the Founders were learned men and carried on the tradition of the great awakening. They opposed religious intolerance and rejected the idea of the Fall. For them, as it ought to be for us, all human beings are competent to know the mind of God and there is no revelation special to any people. They used Masonic symbols and other ancient symbols probably available in Thomas Jefferson’s library, to embody their eighteenth century Enlightenment ideals. We haven’t had men of that quality in politics very much. It’s an enormous good fortune for our nation that that cluster of gentlemen had the power and were in a position to influence events at that time.

Joseph Campbell, 3

If you look behind the pyramid, you see a desert. If you look before it, you see plants growing. The desert, the tumult in Europe, wars and wars and wars – we have pulled ourselves out of it and created a state in the name of reason, not in the name of power, and out of that will come the flowerings of the new life. That’s the sense of that part of the pyramid.

Now look at the right side of the dollar bill. Here’s the eagle, the bird of Zeus. The eagle is the downcoming of the god into the field of time. The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity. This is the bald eagle, the American eagle. This is the American counterpart of the eagle of the highest god, Zeus.

He comes down, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, the field of action. One mode of action is war and the other is peace. So in one of his feet the eagle holds thirteen arrows – that’s the principle of war. In the other he holds a laurel leaf with thirteen leaves, the principle of peaceful conversation. That’s the way the idealists who founded our country would wish us to looking – diplomatic relationships and so forth. But thank God he’s got the arrows in the other foot, in case this doesn’t work.

Now, what does the eagle represent? What is in the radiant sign above his head – thirteen stars arranged in the form of a Star of David. There are nine feathers in the eagle’s tail, the number of the descent of the divine power into the world. When the Angelus rings, it rings nine times.

The Star of David is also known as Solomon’s Seal because he used it to seal monsters and giants and things into jars, the way genies were sealed into jars in the Arabian Nights. Each of the triangles in the star is a Pythagorean tetrakys; a triangle composed of ten points, one in the middle and four to each side, adding up to nine, the primary symbol of Pythagorean philosophy, susceptible of a number of interrelated mythological, cosmological, psychological, and sociological interpretations, one of which is the dot at the apex represents the creative center out of which the universe and all things have come.

The initial sound, the big bang, or the Word as a Christian might say, the pouring of the transcendent energy into and expanding through the field of time, breaking into pairs of opposites as soon as it enters, the one becoming two. With two, there are just three ways they can relate to one another: one is dominant, the other is dominant, the two are in balanced accord. Lao-tzu says out of the Tao, the transcendent comes one, out of one comes two, out of two three, and from the three all things in the four corners of space derive.

The arrangement of the triangles in the Great Seal suggest that from above or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative word might be heard, which is the great thesis of democracy. Democracy assumes that anybody from any quarter can speak, and speak truth, because their mind is not cut off from the truth. All they have to do is clear out their passions and then speak.

Joseph Campbell, 2

The Great Seal of the United States suggests the kind of new myth we need. Its on the dollar bill, a statement of the ideals that brought about the formation of the United States. Look at a dollar bill. There is the Great Seal. Look at the pyramid on the left. This pyramid has four sides, for the four points of the compass. When you’re down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you’re either on one side or the other. But when you get to the top, the points come together, and there the eye of God opens. And to the Founders, it was the god of reason.

This is the first nation in the world that was ever established on the basis of reason instead of warfare. The Founders were eighteenth century deists. It also says, “In God We Trust.” But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation in the Bible or anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

All the symbols the Founders used are mythological but arise from a non-biblical mythology that rejects the idea of the Fall in the Garden, and the idea that human beings are cut off from their source, must be redeemed and need a special revelation. For the deist Founders, human beings are not cut off from their source, need not be redeemed and need no special revelation.

Back to the Great Seal. When you count the number of ranges of the pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom, there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one, which is the age of reason. It was 1776 when the thirteen declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent. Similarly, twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun. The Founders were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of resurrection and rebirth and new life, and the played it up here, in the dollar bill, all the way through.

Of course as a practical matter there were thirteen colonies, and that’s symbolic and not simply a coincidental. That’s why it says, Novus Ordo Seclorum,” a new order of the world, and “Annuit Coeptis,” he has smiled on our accomplishments or activities. “He” being what is represented by the eye – Reason. In Latin you would not say “He” you would say “It.” So the divine power has smiled on our doings; and this new world has been built in the sense of God’s original creation, and the reflection of God’s original creation, through reason, has brought this about.