A Note of Oneness and Gratitude

... And No Live Session this Friday (Happy Holiday!)

I wish to use this opportunity to thank my readers, your participation and the thoughtful discourse you add, not to mention your messages of “sincere gratitude”—for which I am sincerely grateful!

We can remember the wellspring from which gratitude arises, and how that is the source of true strength, life, and positive change—of which all else is a poor imitation. Sometimes, the imitation becomes so frantic and so desperate, it threatens to destroy everything that gets in its way, but none of this will ever create something out of nothing.

One of my readers sent me an old video of creative innovator Buckminster Fuller, or “Bucky”, and the exchange he has with his interviewer is still applicable:

- The world isn’t working for everybody. Why isn’t it?

- Because they’re trying to solve all the world problems with politics.

Then he gives the solution:

- We have the option now to take care of all humanity with the highest standard anybody has ever known. The game is being able to see our whole earth at once.

This is true. We remarkably have the means to solve almost any imaginable problem through the knowledge we already have and the scientific consensus we can achieve. This is how medical conferences work: quandaries and mysteries are discussed until a scientific consensus is reached, including whether or not more research is needed. And, according to the famous German physician, Rudolf Virchow, “politics [is] nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”

We just need to see ourselves as One. The “one-world island and one-world ocean” perspective Bucky describes is indeed an ability to see our whole earth at once, as a “beautiful map without any distortion of relative … parts.” This vision of One World or None, based not on partisanship or political preferences but on science, knowledge, and reverence for life, is the concept on which this Substack series was originally conceived.

The world is already complete and whole. Indeed, meditators may note that all we have to do is to close our eyes, and the growing inner, integrated vision supersedes any divisions and exclusions the outer world tries to impose on us. Indian thinker and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti described meditation as “the movement of love. It isn’t the love of the one or of the many…. it is inexhaustible.” It is the love of One.

Bucky was a personal experiment in this. At age 32, having lost a daughter, his job, and with new financial burdens, he contemplated suicide. This would lead to a profound experience that transformed his life. While in what some may call a hallucinatory state but others would call lucidity, he heard a distinct voice say to him:

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

He proceeded to live a long and illustrious life that inspired many others, but in the year of his death, he described himself as follows:

I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a … search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.

Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead said the same of small groups: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And the Source of this strength, resilience, imagination, and resourcefulness is the same as the Source of gratitude. Life itself derives from it. It is our natural state.

This “movement of love” that is the expression of life is so essential, that those who find themselves outside of it respond with rage and revolt. We see this in those who must attain power and domination over others, so that what they do not have, no one else can have.

This leads to an alternative definition I have of fascism (in addition to “mental pathology in politics”): the inability to let live. When unfit personalities achieve the power positions they have longed for—not to become an instrument for great deeds but to make others the instruments for their great needs—the whole orientation of society changes.

But they misinterpret the origin of their pain and suffering. Its solution, which is that vast Oneness that is the wellspring of such gratitude, joy, and bliss that, when dwelled in, the illusory world that would confuse and complicate no longer matters. And this is the vision that comes from within us, not from without, that is capable of transforming the world as no great nation, no great religion or private enterprise can.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee will resume her live sessions on:

“How to Navigate an Increasingly Dangerous World”

Friday, December 6, 2024, at 12 noon EDT/9 a.m. PDT on Zoom. A paid subscription is required to receive a link the morning before. Thank you!