May I govern my passions with absolute sway.
Benjamin Franklin
A previous essay (Clockwork Mechanism) revealed insights into the megastructure of Simple Reality, but how does the Truth look when it shows up in the behavior of an individual? If designing a viable megastructure when creating the institutions in our community involves choosing to live in a friendly Universe with a worldview of Oneness, then expressing our True personal identity involves choosing to love ourselves, our neighbor and Creation. Montaigne said, “Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being.”[i]
The American colonists began to realize that England was trying to make them dependent on trade goods and hence dependent on the Mother country. A portion of the poem found in the Massachusetts Gazette of October 31, 1765 reveals that the increasingly independent entrepreneurs were onto that game. Although they had cravings for material goods, they prized freedom even more. Freedom to choose compassion over avarice is the only way to build a sustainable community grounded in simplicity. Perhaps we should read these lines of poetry and meditate on how well we have learned to “repose.”
With us of the woods
Lay aside your fine goods.
Contentment depends not on clothes;
We hear, smell and see,
Taste and feel, with high glee,
And in winter have huts to repose.[ii]
Benjamin Franklin may be the American who best understood that service to others (“love thy neighbor”) was the most rewarding and meaningful way to express ones moment-to-moment existence. When Congress voted unanimously to appoint Franklin to be the commissioner to France he said: “I am old and good for nothing; but, as the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, ‘I am but a fag end, and you have me for what you please,’ just so, my country may command my services in any way they choose.’”[iii]
Franklin seemed to realize, as did Montaigne, that self-love was the foundation for self-transformation. Whereas John Adams was among the intellectual faction of the leaders of the revolution, Franklin was not a well-educated analyst, well-versed in political systems. “Yet Benjamin Franklin was a philosopher; he absolutely knew himself, never feared to face himself, and without self-guilt or self-righteousness set about improving himself.”[iv]
If we immerse ourselves in the paradigm of Simple Reality, we will find all the support we need to experience the kingdom of Heaven, here and now, as Franklin seemed to do. As his biographer, Catherine Drinker Bowen said: “I suppose to catch glimpses of Franklin as he streaks, steams, boils by, borne along by a smoking cataract, yet himself as cool as an apple in storage.”[v]
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Supplemental Reading: Reality, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#72 “I Am But a Fag End”
[i] Bowen, Catherine Drinker. “Last Footnotes.” American Heritage. October 1974, p. 63.
[ii] Austin, Frederic. Builders of the Republic. London: Oxford University Press, 1927, p. 48.
[iii] Bowen, op. cit., p. 62.
[iv] Ibid., p. 63.
[v] Ibid.
