Title: "The Power of the Folk - Manly P. Hall - FULL LECTURE"
Speaker: Manly P. Hall
Platform: YouTube
Channel: Universal Theosophy
Upload Date: Oct 21, 2020
Video Length: 1:15:34
URL:
Description from YouTube: "Manly P. Hall delivers an insightful lecture on the power of the folk, common sense, and the importance of following natural law. He discusses the problems with modern leadership, education, and societal values, emphasizing the need for individual integrity and a return to basic moral principles."
Manly Palmer Hall (1901-1990) was a Canadian-born author, lecturer, and mystic, best known for his work "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" and his contributions to various philosophical and esoteric subjects.
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Well, as a change from our usual procedures, we're going to open this discussion with a few lines from Rudy Kipling:
We had a teapot and let it leak
Not repairing made it worse
Now we've had no tea for a week
And the bottom's out of the universe
This is more or less the subject of our discussion: what's happened to the bottom of the universe?
Always down to history, minorities have ruled, and today probably 10 percent of mankind, maybe less, is administering the other 90 percent, very seldom having any direct contact with the needs and problems of that vast majority. Therefore, at this time, it is about the proper moment to remind everyone that the greatest of all the world's potential resources is the human being himself. We are the one important factor in the survival of our way of life. We are also, to a large degree, important for the survival of anything else on the Earth and perhaps for the Earth itself. And yet this tremendous common sense majority has little or nothing to say about the causes and procedures of our civilization.
We are completely controlled by a small group of professionals. Now these professionals are not necessarily evil, they are not necessarily foolish, but they are not in direct contact with the world they serve. They have gradually isolated themselves in ivory towers of intellectual superiority, engaged down rather benignly, if at all, upon the world which they are supposed to regulate. They are simply incapable of the job.
In the last 50 years, we've had the greatest advancements in science and education the world has ever known, and we're in the worst condition it has ever been in. It is because our entire attitude towards survival has very little basic contact with the essential humanity which it is supposed to guide, direct, and advance.
There is a new humanism that is coming up which, it seems to me, is well worth consideration, and that is the dignity, right, power, and authority of the folk. The folk is the great mass of people, and in its own natural environment and with reasonable consideration, this folk is nearly always right. There is some basic value there which expresses itself through the simple and natural interests of average persons. The average individual wishes to be a good parent, a good citizen, and a good child. He wants to live in a happy environment. He does not really cherish animosities. He is not addicted to the desire to be killed in war, nor is he intentionally dedicated to an industrialism which gives him no opportunity to be a person.
Through all these situations, means together that the leaders are out of touch with their followings, and the followings, for the most part, have lost sickened acceptances of their leaders. We do not want the temptation to continue as it is, and yet to not allow it to go on, we must search for new resources of solution.
At the present moment, we are depending upon science to develop the nuclear resources of the world, but they have found no way of disposing of the nuclear waste which threatens to destroy us all. Thus, an attitude which can permit this to occur, that exceeds or excels its capacity to dominate the consequences of its context and the contributions, is simply no longer suitable to leadership. There has to be changes, and these changes can only occur when the human being realizes his inalienable right to be human and that he has within himself potentials that are far more real than any of the intellectual superstructure upon which he depends today.
Man internally is part of the universe. He is part of the enormous diffusion of energies. He is as much part of the great plan as a star or a meteor or a comet. He is, if he can go within himself far enough, he can find the laws of his own survival. But he has refused to have the opportunity to have this researching within himself. The moment he arrives in this world, he comes under the influence of this strange leadership of infallible errors with which we have all been afflicted.
He goes to school, but he is not taught to think. He is not taught to excuse his own resources. He is told to accept, to read the textbook, and come to the same answer. If he does not come to that answer, he will not graduate, and if he will not graduate or does not graduate from school, then he cannot enter the institutions of higher learning. And if he doesn't then enter those and become proficient in the beliefs that they hold and become a willing perpetuator of the status quo, if he will not do all these things, he is an outcast. He is then regarded as simply being a mediocre person wandering around in vagueness.
This type of situation is getting to be a little too difficult. We are all sympathetic as we see these great monuments rise to human ingenuity. We realize how young people can become utterly fascinated with computers, how they can also become entranced with the possibility of making a trip someday to the Moon. These things are tremendous inducements and are passed off constantly as indications of progress, but no one is paying any attention to the sewerage.
Out of these predicaments that we are passing through is a vast byproduct of waste, a byproduct of danger, of war, a product of epidemical diseases, of disturbance of Earth's balance, of destruction of crops. All these things are the results of unthought-out programs in which no one is interested in doing anything except landing on the planet somewhere else and has no time or thought to take care of the planet that we live on today.
Now it's very hard to convince people that we should be more thoughtful in these matters, but as press reports after each other, many, many of them show the difficulties and the dangers of all these situations brought home to us almost every day. Something should be done, but the great remote body of the approved professionals does not pay any attention to these rumors at all. They arise from the unenlightened, whereas those have special privileges and special educational dedications go right on adding to the mess.
So out of it, I think we have to find out where we stand in relation to ourselves. We have been given a terrible inferiority complex. The average individual bows hopelessly and helplessly before the wisdom of the elect. He is afraid to express himself because he will open his environment to ridicule. He's not sure of himself because it has been talked down from the time he was old enough to read and write. He is therefore in a confused state and has forgotten that of all the devices that man has developed, he will never develop one as important as that which was bestowed upon him by nature himself.
This is the burden that we have to study more and more carefully these days. If we are looking for solutions to problems, there is no use looking where problems are being made and never solved. If we want to find out how to survive, we must gradually discover what is threatening our survival and do what we can to correct it. Somewhere within the individual, if he digs deeply into himself, there's a mysterious faculty that perhaps we can call common sense. It is, in likelihood, the basic qualities of mind. It is that intellection which has been given to all of us by a power greater than ourselves. The mind is an instrument to be used, not to be abused. Its uses must always solve something. Its abuses must always tear down something.
Now the mind, being a mysterious instrument which no one has been able to accurately define, and our higher professionals do not even attempt it because to do so they would be forced to examine causes and factors they wish to ignore. But the mind remains as the one saving hope in this particular emergency. Somewhere within each individual is a kind of solutional power which should be cultivated instead of inhibited. The moment we find that a child has a mind to think with, we should help it to think with that mind.
Thinking is very different from accepting somebody else's thoughts. Thinking is not to be gained simply by reading a textbook and agreeing with the author or, for that matter, disagreeing with the author. The real fact of the matter is that every effort today is made to prevent the actual active positive use of the mind. It is being cultured to become an instrument. We are trying to make the mind into a robot. We want to have a mind that will serve situations that are essentially false. We want a mind that will agree with the prevailing policy even though that policy is going nowhere.
Actually, therefore, each of us must become capable of using the mind with which we have been endowed by a life greater than our own. Actually, the tendency to break away from the conventional and the conservative is growing every day. We are more and more aware that we are the victims of something that is not right. We realize, as we stand closer and closer to the possible wars of the worlds that have been well dramatized in motion pictures, we know something is wrong, or these conditions would not and could not exist. They do not exist because humanity as a group wants them or that they serve humanity in any way. They have continued because small groups of ambitious persons want to play chess with human destiny. They are not concerned with trying to solve problems. They are inclined only to consider the possibility of further advancements in some highly specialized structure of new national warfare. They are interested only in digging in and finding more abstract theories which they can turn to the advantage of limited groups.
Now these minds have formed a partnership, or they have informed it. It has occurred naturally with other walks of life which feed into this monopoly. These other walks of life, for example, one of them is the psychosis of wealth. They have tried to make every human being subservient to a colossal ignorance simply by offering a reward. They have taken the attitude that if we will follow the leadership of the self-appointed leaders, they will help to make us rich, will help to make us famous, and will help us to become dyspeptics or in one way or another destroy the body in which we live.
Actually, we are told that if we think for ourselves, we will be poor. If we think as we are told to think by the elect, we may retire as vice presidents of some monopoly and have a grandfather's clock presented to us in recognition of 45 years of faithful service. Uncle got one of those clocks. But these years of faithful service, what do they do to him? He destroyed in him the entire structure of individual creativeness. He did what he was told. He went to office every day. He followed the rules exactly. He had a fair living, was able to support his family, and he passed out of this life at the end of 83 years without actually having thought anything through for himself. He had no idea of the kind of world he lived in, and for him, pleasure and success was to be able to take a ride in a sailboat.
Now this is what has been gradually happening. The sailboat has now become a yacht, a long land yacht, and living has now gone into the multiple figures so that the elite can hardly get by on a million dollars a year. But with all this money, what is being solved? Nothing. The individual in his wealth goes down to sickness and death, and the more money he has, the more extravagant his death will be. We are in a bind, and those who are supposed to get us into it, so the problem arises that more and more there are rebellions, revolts, revolutions in which individuals are tired of the way we are mistreated by those who are pretending to be our superiors.
We are not referring now to political superiors. We're not referring to those who become dictators or to those ragged and rugged generals who lead bandits to the hinterland. We are really referring more directly to the type of leadership which, under one guise or another, prevents us from growing out of the disasters which have been created for us. Now they will almost always say, of course, that we made these disasters for ourselves. There was no reason why we couldn't have lived well in spite of the upper crust with its eternal problems.
The answer to the thing is, it doesn't work quite like that. The moment we fail to conform, we are penalized. It is not a case of where we are better off by trying to be ourselves. We are told, and it is proven to us, that if we break the pattern, if we do not follow the mistakes of the ages, we will be in tragic conditions now, and there will be no remedy. In other words, if we want to go out and beg for world peace, this is a kind of treason for which we will be penalized not only by the leaders but by those whom they have indoctrinated, right down to the members of our own families.
The whole situation is out of hand, but inside of us, there is still this humanity. There is a power inside of the person which is the only possible solution to the problem. Each child coming into the world should regard it as an inalienable right that he has the privilege and the right and the inalienable need to become a person, to think, to use the faculties that he has gained fresh in other previous embodiments. Certainly, he comes into the world capable of a contribution, but in order to make that contribution, he must now go through an elaborate process of having his individuality killed, and we're being forced to recognize that individuality is dangerous to all of the material advantages which he hopes to gain from life.
There was one comforting thought, however, and that is that these advantages that he is suffering so much to maintain are themselves failing, and by degrees, every advantage is being wiped out by a corresponding disadvantage which threatens the survival of the race.
Back somewhere in the old days, we wonder sometimes how civilization started, how did we begin this strange, curious, and complicated journey down through time? Who started it off, and where in the world did the great foundations of our knowledge come from? Who were the first scholars? Who painted the first picture? Who wrote the first piece of music? Who was the first to find means of healing the sick or of creating a code of laws for the benefit of humanity?
We're not quite sure, but we know that these things did not come from some privileged overclass. They came through the recognition of the necessities of survival. When Hammurabi created the great code of Babylon, which was to become the basis of every moral and ethical code that ever followed, he was not able to simply copy it from something earlier. It came out of the ordinary practices of the day. He lived in a world that we, as we live in it, much more restricted, but still, and there were the token symbols of everything that was going to come.
So he found out that people shouted their goods, that they cheated each other. Then when they built a house, they did not put in the materials they had promised. When they said they would do something, they did not keep their word. When no one was looking, they stole something. When someone else was not looking, somebody stole the man's wife. All the way along, there were injustices. So to meet the injustice, Hammurabi created a code of ethics. He said very simply, if you stole, you have to put it back and be punished. If the house doesn't stand up, the man who built it will be penalized, and if he does not make a good correction, we'll toss him in prison.
Little by little, these common errors were smoked out, not because some one individual was greatly concerned in solving the problems, but because most people couldn't live with the problems until something was done about them.
In the Spartan system, Lycurgus became a very prominent figure. He found that the Spartans were rich and powerful and given to luxury, that they were now trotting about as though they owned the Earth, that their morals were getting worse as their prosperity grew greater. So he decided to put the whole thing back into its old pattern, the way it was, and he created a system so strict in Sparta that he cut crime down to virtually nothing. And it was very simple. When difficulties arose, they were looked over carefully, and whoever was blamed had the book thrown at him, probably a rock at that time, and he was punished properly. He couldn't hire a lawyer to get out of it. He couldn't talk himself out of it. He had to face the consequence of his own actions.
And also, Lycurgus made self-discipline and the curtailment of luxuries the basis of national strength. Now we don't particularly want to follow his example, but it doesn't seem that luxury today is improving us much. In fact, we are now suffering from all the ailments that Lycurgus decided he was going to cure, and for 500 years, he did cure them. And after he was gone, the process was continued, and for a long time, Sparta was more or less a well-disciplined, orderly, low-crime country. But of course, that was long ago. We are supposed to forget these things and not to realize how our forebears solved problems.
The great intellectuals tell us, "Oh, don't worry about the past. We've outgrown all those homely laws. Look to the future." And now people are beginning to look toward the future. They don't like what they see because the future doesn't look very attractive. If, however, we realize that back in those days when the tribal chieftain made the rules, when some oracle spoke the decisions of state, and where all the legislators bowed before the altars of their gods and depended upon divine support for the perpetuation of their priestly and princely activities, things were quite a bit different. They were never perfect, but there were things that were happening all the way along that could have helped.
In the midst of all of this, we also had the Mosaic code. Now Moses was not a graduate with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Moses was a wandering shepherd. Jesus never went to the university, but his rules, laws, and principles were greater and more noble and more enduring than all of the accumulated intellectualism of the last two thousand years. And out of it all has come a tremendous moral influence on mankind. Between Moses and Jesus, the foundations of the morality of the West were established. Both of these were simple persons, comparatively unknown in their own time, not leaders of any particular branch, but persons who had discovered the power of the individual to be right and what that power could do in the long run of human destiny.
So we have these codes, but as they interfere with our present programs of progress, we have a tendency to deny them. It is easy for the intellectual to refer to the mythologies of religion. It is very possible for the physicist to assume that the idea of God is an escape mechanism I t is very possible for the physicist to assume that the idea of God is an escape mechanism of the unintelligent. But at the same time, this escape mechanism was an escape, and the situation we're setting up doesn't seem to have an escape. We do not find the answers. We do not find something better to take the place of that which has been gradually run down by sophistry. We are not solving these problems.
There are trends, however, showing up, and I think perhaps our international situation is going to contribute somewhat to them, in which the facts are becoming undeniable and where we are no longer going to listen to the type of thing that we have been hearing for so long. We're not going to allow education to simply prepare us to be animated robots, that we are not going to fall into the old patterns and stay there forever. Even 50 years ago, we had mental freedoms that we do not have today, and our debts were much slower than they are now.
The efforts to pass on a sophisticated theory of life have dismally failed. This fact was clearly proven in the recent effort of the People's Republic of China to make the Great Leap into futurity. They made the leap and fell flat on their faces. It was a complete, dismal failure. They had decided to cut off forever all relations to the past. They were not going to listen to the sages of old anymore. They were going to become completely emancipated. They were going to live only for the future under the dictate of a small group of politicians. The thing was so tragic that it'll probably never be repeated again because no one will have the nerve to go through it. And so in the end of the great leap into future, Confucius returned and became one of the most powerful forces in the development of modern Chinese Communist policy.
The same happened in the Tibetan misery. The Chinese themselves are now apologizing for it. All of these great moves, these tremendous upsurges of power, this determination to conquer somebody or destroy them, this willingness to sacrifice men, women, and children for the advancement of some kind of political theory, this type of life is not productive of anything except distress.
Now we're not at the moment likely to have a grand emancipation from all this, but we can and do sense the need for an approach that is more basically sound. If as individuals enough of us can live this better approach, it will certainly affect the survival of the whole race. Because if a small group can get the firm establishment of realities, they can create a tremendous influence because these realities are what everybody hopes for, everybody longs for, and everybody believes in, even if they have been told not to believe.
So we take each person, we say now inside of us there is a governing power, a governing power that if we give it a chance will carry us with reasonable security through the days of our years. This is something that we are born with, and if by some circumstance our previous karma does not make this very obvious, then we must find the fact that an embodiment or an incarnation in which we are unable to control negative factors in our lives, this incarnation bears witness to unsolved problems of the past.
It means the person who has a disposition that is difficult, unpleasant, or unstable must work harder because it is the evidence of previous mistakes. It is the evidence that this individual has lived by compromise for a number of embodiments, and finally cash karma has caught up with him, and he has to, for his own survival, work that much harder to prove that he can conquer his own mistakes. He did not conquer them in the past, so they now appear sometimes as though unreasonable and unjust, but he must face them.
Normally speaking, however, wherever a person is faced with a problem, a natural problem, he is also inwardly aware of the natural solution. He may not want that solution - he probably doesn't - but it's there. If this person is properly trained in childhood, then we may hope for better things. But the new generation, if it is not to be created into a team of robots, will have to start early to become aware of its own self-individuation.
So in childhood, in early childhood, the child must receive the inspiration of constructive thought. We must all learn, whether we want to or not, that the little despotisms on this planet have no permanent significance. The mistakes that we are making are just evidences of failure, and they will never win, and the wrong views will never succeed. That the actual problem will always be the same: truth must survive and must finally conquer. All forms of untruth must ultimately become the basis of an enduring way of life.
Nearly all nations were created by an effort to escape from the tyranny of some preceding power. After a while, the new nation becomes a tyrant in its own right, and so the miseries go on until we begin to search for the cause within people.
Now in the last 60-some odd years, I've known a lot of people, and I've worked with a good many of them in one way or another to try to help them to straighten out the problems of internal living. Most of these persons are in a daze. They do not know why they are suffering. They do not know what they have done that was wrong because all they have done is what everyone else is doing, and this in itself makes it right, although everyone is in the same trouble.
People do not like to realize that when they live badly simply because others do, they must sometimes face the sorrows that those others must likewise face. The person has to gradually work for an individual integrity. Now we may say that most people today are not strong enough or enlightened enough to work out an elaborate plan of personal salvation. This was known and has always been known, and it's because of this that sages and prophets have come to mankind.
The most important thing for the individual, whether it be an electronic physicist, whether it be an astronaut in space, or whether he be down on Earth building a house or working in a store, each individual must realize that regardless of anything, Nature's rules will not be broken. And the most important of these rules that we can recognize today are the Ten Commandments. That there is no way of breaking them successfully, that no scientist has ever been able to create something to take their place. He can ignore them, he can deny them, he can write violently against them, and yet they operate and he fails.
Therefore, we have these Commandments which have more or less come down to us as family truisms. They're available to everyone, and so are the teachings of Christ, the teachings of Buddha, the teachings of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Lao Tzu. All of these teachings are basic. There is not one of them that came from an academic source. They all came from a dedication of an individual internally enlightened to the service of his fellow men in trouble.
Therefore, it is not - there is no evidence that great scientific achievements will ever take the place of the Ten Commandments or can deny them or can create a civilization that can endure without them. Yet today, for the most part, religion, which has become associated with these problems, has difficulty in surviving the pressure of science. The only way in which it has been accomplished at all is that religion itself has highly modified its own beliefs and goes very lightly on the subjects of the Ten Commandments, allowing more and more freedom of the individual and the greater hope of vicarious attainment, that the individual will ultimately be saved not because of his virtues but because of his memberships.
As long as this continues, we're not going to have much progress in that field. But the great intellectual group is well satisfied now with the problem of trying to find out what to do. We find people, I found them, with very strange complexes as to what to do. One will tell you, "Yes, I do believe in the Ten Commandments. I believe in the Sermon on the Mount. I believe in the teachings of these great people, and I'd like to live them. But if I live them, I'm likely to be poor." That's bad. Instead of being worrying about being poor in spirit, they are worried about being poor in worldly goods.
So we do the best we can, considering the situations in which we find ourselves. Now there are problems that you have to face in these fields, and where life has become a series of accepted responsibilities, these cannot be ignored. But there can be a series of improvements over long periods of time that can not only influence the person but his descendants and those in the community in which he lives.
The problem of the person not being able to keep all of the Commandments does not justify him in trying to break all of them. He has the right to improve what he can and the best he can. He can have the right to prove that he is conscious of the needs of the society to which he belongs. He can prove that he recognizes the importance of quiet living, that he does not consciously or intentionally break the rules simply to gain luxuries that he does not need and which in likelihood will turn against him.
And nature, in working with luxuries, has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. And the luxurious individual with more money than he knows what to do with and very little thought about how to do anything, this individual with more money is in a condition to destroy himself more quickly and more effectively than if he had less means. Money can become the basis of the complete degeneration of character. It can afford all the dissipations which are no good for it. It can overlook all the natural social responsibilities which people of less means share.
So wealth becomes a punishment unless those who possess it are able definitely and completely to dedicate it to the common good of all mankind. Anything else is going to simply make life difficult for themselves. So wealth is not a reward for wisdom. It is usually a reward for selfishness, and nature does not agree to this. And so in one way or another, it is forever penalizing those who break the rules.
Another type of thing that we could use perhaps with advantage is the idea of living in honor with family. Honor the father and the mother. This is, of course, practically ceased in a highly intellectual civilization. No one has time to honor anything, only time enough to remove all possible obligations and responsibilities and to live as free as they can. Therefore, family - for lack of that, for lack of the little horseshoe nail, the nation was lost. Because as Confucius points out, when the family fails, the entire Empire is ready to collapse.
So as more and more homes fail today, more and more troubles accumulate. Juvenile delinquency, crimes of all kinds, vicious misuse of funds, all these things, unreasonable fees for various services, all represent the failure of ethics to control. When ethics fails, evil moves in, and everything that is corrupted ethically will ultimately corrupt the society to which it belongs and fall in dismal failure amidst its own corruptions.
So the old rules were tested by the trial of ages. They were not brought down by some small group of superior persons. They were part of the human experience. Now we have built ourselves now one of the most intimate human experience situations that it is possible to imagine. It is becoming obvious that human experience is telling us that we're in serious difficulties.
Now this does not mean that every individual is going to be destroyed by the common troubles of his day. As the scripture also tells us, that though thousands can fall on the right hand and thousands on the left hand, the just man shall not be moved. If we are right, we are protected by the one armament that will hold - rightness. If we are right, we will achieve what is necessary, and we will arrange or set the foundation upon which our future embodiments will function.
Now if we could hope, as the materialist does hope with very little scientific proof to support him, that when this world ends as far as we are concerned, when we come to the end of this small span of life, that we shall cease to exist forever, that no one will ever know or care what we did, and we will never know what happens to the world we leave behind because there won't be any more of us - this is comforting to the individual who believes that in this way, a bad conscience can be absorbed into oblivion.
But we are sure this is not fact. It is becoming more and more reasonable to assume that the human being here is a reincarnating creature, that he has lived before and in the living before made some progress and some mistakes, and he will live again to make some more progress and correct a few mistakes. The whole situation, therefore, rests upon a different foundation. The individual is never going to escape the weaknesses of his own nature except by correcting them.
Now the philosophical insights do not warn the person that a terrible perdition awaits him. He is not going down to some horrible inferno to be tortured to death forever while glorious Christians on the bridge of love wish him luck. The situation is not this at all. The individual will have to face the consequences of what he's doing now, and death is not going to end any part of his inner life. His inner life is a stream flowing from embodiment to embodiment, and to the degree he unfolds and strengthens it now, he will have a better time. And the improvement will begin now but will not end now, and the achievements that we make in the terms of dedication and integrity will be with us forever.
Because we have lived better and because we are better people, that better world will slowly emerge from this confusion - a world which depends for its survival not upon scientific juggling of natural laws, but upon the integrities of people coming into birth with a firm resolution to get along with each other. The average form of intemperance, of intolerance, must be corrected in the individual.
Now if we suppose that we had some terrible catastrophe, a large part of humanity should be wiped out, well, the real answer to that is that nothing is wiped out. That the individuals who apparently leave here will be somewhere and will be back in due time, and they will live then according to what they did to cause the trouble or what they sacrificed in the hope of curing the trouble. The individual's integrity is his only security. It is the only thing that can surpass and take strength and significance from the small laws of security which we have in this world.
So I like to think that in the new idea of humanism that we will have one humanity functioning forever, or at least for all available, reportable time. Nothing is forever except forever in itself, but for ages to come, humanity can be a great unfolding motion through space in which a divine creation gradually becoming inwardly enlightened can build for itself a future in harmony with the will of God.
These things can happen, but we have to use whatever means we have to make them happen. We know, for instance, that most people have a tendency to be good-natured, and that the majority of them assassinate this tendency every day. They do something that is not pleasant, not kindly, not charitable. In this quiet charity of ours, jealousy pops up, and we're sorry afterwards, but we said a lot of mean things. And as one told me, "I'm sorry I said them, but I'm glad the other person heard them." This is not what might be termed the true Christian spirit.
Then somebody else doesn't approve of something. Someone always approves or disapproves of things we do. We have the wrong job, we wear the wrong clothes, we go to the wrong church, and somebody has to save us from this deadliness of our own inadequacy. So someone who doesn't know a thing about it will become a violent reformer. If by any chance we prefer our way to the recommendations that this other person makes, then the other person is righteously indignant. They have been denied the right to save us, and so another few starts. Everywhere people get all worried about something.
They're worried about the church that friends belong to. They're worrying about the race that children marry into. They are worried about the job they have. They're worried about the politicians they have. I would like to vote for someone else. Whether they do, they'll keep right on worrying. So people are all upset, and the natural kindness of the soul has no chance to express itself.
This is the reason, probably, why monastic orders sprang up in different religions, and those who wish to live the good life simply separated themselves from society, retired into a convent or a monastery, and remained there spending their lives in prayer meditation. This sounded as though it might be a pretty good idea, but it was actually a failure for the simple reason that these people gradually became useless. They did nothing for anybody except try to save their own souls, which was a mistake.
The whole of humanity is built upon an idea of cooperative comradeship, everybody helping everyone else to fulfill their proper, reasonable, and honorable desires. So in true with the idea of a true humanity, modern humanity is a cooperative process in which the problems that arise are solved by the people who have them.
Imagine what it would save in the terms of money if we could all solve our own problems rather than spend elaborate sums in order to have professionals try to solve them for us. If we could take care of the little differences that come up so that we have no longer lasting grievances, we would have better dispositions. There would be fewer heart transplants and things of this kind because we are destroying our own dispositions and our health by our attitudes.
So if we want to try and get into this better world of the future, we all have the right to be right. We have the right to do the thing as it should be done regardless of how other people do it. We have a right to be kind even when others are unkind to us. We have a right to be honest while we are being cheated. We have a right to be patient while things go into confusion. We have a right to become bigger than circumstances. Until we are, circumstances will continue to press down on us with an almost irresistible force.
So we have the right at all times to a strength beyond anything that the world can confer. The strength of a dedicated will is beyond human earthly attack. We can do it. Now the dedicated will in ancient times sometimes led to the state torture and those kind of problems. Fortunately, those days have more or less disappeared, although some of it seems to linger in the outskirts. But we are now largely safe physically.
The main thing is we are ridiculed, and we are penalized if our attitudes are not in harmony with the times we live in. This type of penalization, however, is becoming so general that there is a tendency for those so penalized to unite, organize, and stand for their rights. Little by little, the policies of entrenched minorities are being broken down by the people who may have failed to protect, and little by little, the great power of the many is being restored.
The main problem now is that the many will have something constructive to offer. The only way in which the many can really solve the problem is to release native intelligence, to become capable of common sense. If a mysterious faculty which is in short supply and in eternal demand, the common sense tells us the facts of things unvarnished and free from all the promotion, public relations, and salesmanship that is afflicting our society.
Common sense tells us that we should not spend more than we make. Common sense prevents us from splurging in times when economy is indicated. Common sense tells us that if we live fully, as Ben Franklin pointed out, we will not have the penalties that we will suffer if we live richly and lose everything we have.
All of these points come into common sense. The fact that a person knows that when he's cruel, he's wrong. He knows when he steals, he's wrong. He knows when he hurts other people, he shouldn't, and knows that when he was wrong, he will apologize, and that he will live within his means, and that he will bring to his family or their families all of the ideals and integrities that will help to build them into a closer unity.
All of this also demands, whether we know it or not, that each individual shall have some kind of a religious life. A religious life is not a superstition. Materialism is a superstition. The individual who believes that those who have never done it are suddenly going to do it are superstitious.
Actually, the great strength and security of humanity is in the inward realization that there is a power that man cannot perverse, and that this power has never been revengeful, that this power has never tried to hurt anybody. This power is a kind of a universal law, benevolent in every aspect, working constantly for the improvement and salvation of all that lives.
But this law is real. Those who break it feel it in the form of punishment. They feel this law suddenly standing against them and injuring their private projects and their personal wishes. But if we have one great divine benevolent principle as the source of life, if we can realize this and if we can survive the skepticism of persons who know nothing about it, we can have a great strength.
In Japan, one of the Buddhist sects is given to just making pilgrimages of various kinds, and in pilgrimage, the pilgrim walks from one shrine of his sect to another wearing his broad-brim straw hat. And on the straw hat is a monogram which says that he is never walking alone, that he is making this journey with another, and that other is Buddha. That wherever he goes, whatever he does, the other is with him, the other meaning truth, meaning integrity, meaning righteousness is with him and always will be.
This lack of isolation seems to be very important in some religions, and in many Christian sects, the idea that truth is not distant, the love of God is not something saved. They have fought off in space for the members of one denomination, but that always and everything we do, deity is present because it is the root of ourselves. No one can be alive without deity being there, and when life here ceases, deity goes on with the deceased into another dimension of life.
So always having with us the power of infinite good and the power of infinite love, we should be able to do a little better in meeting the daily problems which may cause irritation or dissension. We are all we have to do is keep the rules. We have to keep the ethics, keep the integrities. We have to be kind. We have to represent our understanding of compassion. We have to be slow to criticize the acts of others because of the mysterious limitations within ourselves.
But little by little, we can gradually get to a point where some of the common mistakes that are not only making us trouble but through us the whole world, we can't escape from this net of our own compromises. But we do not have to compromise. We can do it right in the first place if we really want to.
Now people who do not understand these things do not really want to change. I know people whose great joy in life is nagging someone. Nothing else seems to really supply them. But if you took those persons and analyzed them, you would find there's something wrong inside. And here psychology comes into the situation, but mostly in a half-baked manner.
The individual who doesn't like anyone goes to an analyst to find out why, and he gets a definition which is probably essentially true - that he is that way because of incidents in his own previous life which he have been submerged and which are now fighting their way to the surface at the expense of his present disposition. This is probably unreasonably true, but what do we get as a real solution for this? How is this individual suddenly not going to do it?
They, the idea is that if he finds out the cause, he will correct it himself. This is optimism. He does generally, doesn't do anything of the kind. He finally had an excuse for his present condition, and he works it for all it's worth. This I've seen happen many, many times.
But theoretically, a person with problems has to face problems. Sometimes he discovers his memory is a very useful thing. One of the things we have warned about by materialists is that we shouldn't trust memory unless it has been schooled at Harvard. But at the same time, if we don't trust memory, we're going to miss a number of things.
We can remember back to the situations of early life that could very well have caused the difficulties that we have, and these difficulties will keep right on bothering us. And we will say it's not my fault at all. It is my uncle who is to blame. He's the one who caused it all. Or it was my family breakup that set me onto the wrong path.
But realizing this, the individual can stop and begin to use an alchemistical transmutation of his own remembrances. And if you can clean the mysterious stables of his own memories, he can do a great deal to improve his present disposition. No matter what happened to him anywhere along the line, he can get over it if he really wants to.
So he can say to himself, "Yes, this was my cause of trouble. Now what is it that happened at that time that in the divine plan of things had to happen to me? Why did I have to go through that? Why does a neighbor have children that are happy and are living together in comparative tranquility and my family went on the rocks? Why did this happen?"
Well, there are all kinds of answers, but the substance of the matter is, as we look at it today, that the condition that has been caused is wrong and that this condition has been allowed to control life and make trouble for the individual maybe for 60 or 70 years. He's never got over his grievance. He was here to get over the grievance, and philosophy, religion, science should teach him that there is a grievance to be recovered from and that it is only his own integrity that will do it.
And when it comes to leaning on science for this type of recovery, it can only go so far. It can help to clarify the problem, but no individual can solve it without the use of his own willpower, common sense, and integrity.
So we have all these problems that are here to make us learn. We are here to realize that this schooling we're going through is an educational process. Life in this world is not a vacation. It is a period of schooling. It is something in which we have lots of opportunities to be happy. We can occasionally take a nice ripe apple to the teacher if we want to. We can have good friends in school. We can have interesting lessons to learn. But we are here to learn, and then by learning to accomplish the one thing that learning can do, and that is help us to correct our own mistakes.
We are going to have to be individuals. We're going to have to be elements in a new type of humanistic society, one in which each individual assumes a responsibility for his own conduct and will keep on assuming that responsibility until his life is devoid of any of the intemperances that cause him to be in trouble.
The alcoholic, the drug addict, all of these types of people are simply flunked in examination. They have had an opportunity to do something with their life, and some disappointment, some disillusionment destroyed it.
I know one case in which a family was ruined for an entire generation because one of their children didn't do what the parents wanted. Well, what the child wanted to do was not essentially wrong. He simply wished with integrity to think for himself, and the family decided that if he did not think their way, he was a heretic. So they consequently got it, took him, threw him out of the house, and that man did not see his parents for 30 years simply because he did not want to think their way. And what he wanted to think was not in any way wrong. It was simply the right to live his own life as constructively as possible, whereas the parental viewpoint was that he could never live a constructive life without complete obedience to the instruction of his ancestors.
All of these problems come back time and time again, and as they all go along one way or another, they cause a certain obscuration that is rather important at a time when the whole world is in trouble, where no one seems to be quite certain what should happen next.
Why is it not possible for the private citizens to at least gain certain securities from world conditions? If we really understand life, we can learn from this situation. We can gain new strength for proper integrities. If we have been a little intolerant in our religion, we can look around and see today what happens with intolerance in religion, what it is doing to millions of people who are murdering each other in the name of divine love.
If we want to know what's wrong with our economic system, we can find out. We can see how a complete addiction to the profit concept with no consideration for values of immoralities or ethics, that money being the only suitable reward for anything, we are all moving inevitably towards bankruptcy. This we can see, and we take what little funds we have and use them wisely, kindly, and graciously, and not in the desperate effort to make more from them than they are worthy.
And the same is true of health. Our health problems are largely controlled from within ourselves. Most ailments begin through a corruption of natural law. Something goes amiss. We do nothing about it. We keep on breaking the rules until finally the body gives up in despair. A good disposition is invaluable to the health of the body. The nagger, the critic, the individual constantly on the ragged edge of unhappiness or antagonism who is bound to suffer physically as a result.
In many cases, the mental breakdowns of advancing years are simply due to the fact that the individual never used his mind properly when he had it in full supply. Everything has to work out. We have to get the things that are needed, and we have to do them.
So our courts of law are buried in cases, most of which are in one way or another a monument to ulterior motives. The hospitals are bulging with patients who are paying exorbitant fees for failure to have used common sense in the first place. All our industries are in trouble. Competition is destroying one corporation after another, and the great struggle to control goes on. And the great leaders of our lives, the great educators do nothing about this. They keep right on when the laboratory trying to decide what is smaller than a neutron atom.
We are told that if we can merely get into communication with the Milky Way, it's going to be pretty big stuff. And actually, in the meantime, the Earth is neglected. We are gradually failing in most scientific projects to recognize the importance of sewerage. We have to have some way to get rid of what we don't want.
Now in its mental and emotional sewerage, we have trouble with it in ourselves. It causes all kinds of stoppages and all kinds of ailments, and the individual's digestion ruined by a disposition continues to damage his health. While we're building the great skyscrapers and we are building the great neutron machineries, we are forgetting what to do with the nuclear waste. No one is even thinking of stopping doing it. We're fouling everything in sight. We don't know where to go next.
We are liable to fill the ocean up one of these days. Then we put it in tin cans and put it in the bottom of the ocean, knowing that in a certain number of years, the tin cans will disintegrate and it'll all come out. And we call the people who think these things this way pretty big people, really great minds, and we honor them and build statues for them on the campuses. These people just do not function right, and we've got to overcome this before we can really function correctly.
Now we're going to leave the world not only not to this end future. Most of us, and it's not going to be all just up to us to live in the new world that's to come, we may come back to it. But the main problem is to try to make a reasonable improvement of ourselves so that we will not waste the four score years or whatever it is that have been allotted to us in this world.
The only successful solution is that we will leave this world a little wiser and a little better than when we came in. If this achievement is not there, then the real purpose of embodiment has not been achieved. We've got to try constantly to leave this world better ourselves and leave behind us a better world than what we came into. Now this is against political ambitions. It is against all this great power play that we are living with, and we look around us. How about the simple process of taking some of this vast amount of money that we are spending in all kinds of weird projects and seeing if we can't, instead of putting a man on Mars, make life safe for a man on Earth? Why can't we begin to use our research facilities to clean up our own dirt? Why should we spend all our time wandering about in space where we're having nothing but trouble here? This is something we all have to work on.
But it calls for common sense, and it has always been the same. After a certain period of the misapplication of authority, the people rise to solve their own problem. And today there are more and more who are concerned with these problems and who are determined to do something about them. The purpose apparently of human existence is to make this world safe for humanity.
The great science of humanism is the science of how it's done. How can we make sure the poverty, crime, unemployment, and corruption of basic elements and materials, the exploitations of natural resources - how can we be sure that these mistakes are corrected? What kind of a level of intelligence do we have to establish to make sure that life here is saved from the corruptions of selfishness, superstition, and fear? If we do not accomplish this, science has not done too much for us.
But if science can now turn and devote itself to the explanation of the reason for humanity, the aims for which we were intended, the plan to which we belong, and will give us a working schedule of self-improvement and cooperation and integrity and gradually weed out dishonesty, we will all have a much better chance to live. And this is the problem.
There is a lot of potential genius in the human being. Most of this is now killed out. The individual is not permitted to become the great scholar, the great philosopher, the great - really great - scientist as was the case in ancient times. He is not permitted to be a great artist. You can only think now painting something that someone will buy, and because of the low level of the customers, his art is becoming more and more deteriorated, and so is his music. All of these things show the decline of values, and at the seat of it all is a great educational institution, the primary purpose of which should be to perpetuate values, to make them real, to give the individual a trestle board of achievements and plans and programs and projects by means of which each individual in his own ways will have the opportunity to live his life constructively and in conformity with natural law.
Until these things are achieved, until this is accomplished, we're just going to have trouble. But this new system is arising everywhere, and our people are becoming more and more conscious that the first problem must be solved is humanity, and that when that is solved and we are all safe and sound, then we can speculate. But until that has been achieved, the attention being directed to other things almost exclusively is dangerous. We have to solve the human problem first, and the only way we can do it is to bring it into harmony with natural law. For nature knows how we should solve it and always has. When we departed from natural law, we got into trouble, and we can go back again and find out where the mistakes were and get the ship of state back on the proper course of life. We will find that things will work out reasonably well.
Well, that's it.
