The failure of our species to create a sustainable community is the failure to distinguish between our idealistic aspirations and the courage to embody those high-sounding behaviors. In short, we have been good at “blowin’ smoke,” a phrase originating in the practice of giving a person an enema by blowing smoke up the rectum–which worked about as well as our efforts to give life to our Bill of Rights.
In a 1941 speech, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented laudable goals relating to four fundamental freedoms in the constitution: Freedom of speech, Freedom to worship, Freedom from want, Freedom from fear. They became known as the “Four Freedoms.” Unfortunately, these freedoms exist only on paper and in our imagination.
Influenced by the Enlightenment, our Founding Fathers were undoubtedly sincere in their vision for the United States of America but they were putting the cart before the horse. No sustainable community can be built upon the foundation of human freedoms without first laying the foundation for human consciousness.
The rebels of the Revolution would have been well advised to look to the vision of Roger Williams who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. He had a more realistic worldview of what a successful human community might be. “For the Protestant ethics of acquisition he had no understanding. Wealth, success, material prospects, status, power–these things were transient as smoke. His vision was of free men standing under the shadow of ‘eternitie.’”[i]
We’ve discussed the four freedoms which are abstract and constantly threatened. Now we turn to the three concrete distinctions that are enduring and permanent. If adopted by everyone on the planet, these three distinctions would create a sustainable, compassionate Global community. This is the goal of the Simple Reality Project.
- Begin by internalizing the difference between the illusion of a dualistic worldview and the Reality of the worldview of Oneness.
- Having done that, you experience the illusion of your false-self identity fade as your compassionate True self emerges.
- And finally, as your identity changes so does your behavior.
Find the courage to let go of reactive, self-destructive behavior and choose instead to respond to life as it is without resistance to the perfection of Creation.
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Supplemental Readings:
Choice, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
The Great Choice, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#3 The Four Freedoms and the Three Distinctions
[i] Ketchum, Richard M. [ed.] The American Heritage Bool of the Pioneer Spirit. American Heritage Publishing Co.: New York, 1959, p. 63.
