Transcription
As we watch people down through the years, it is astonishing how much energy the average person weighs in defending is all negative attitudes. We are so willing and ready to protect our right to be wrong, and at the same time so slow to advance the cause of our right to be right. Nearly always, life begins and unfolds through a series of negative reactions to circumstances. There's an old saying that we all know is true: that bad news travels more rapidly than good news.
We are more responsive to our instinct to criticize than to commend. We are quicker to condemn than we are to praise, and we are more likely to observe the faults in others than to seek out their good points. All these tendencies seem to rise in deep sources within our natures. We're not even aware of our own critical tendencies in many instances, and when we are reminded of them, we take it for granted that we have a right to them. That we must have the privilege of objection, that we must claim our birthright of individual thinking because of a tendency to analysis, which means simply to take things apart. And by the time we get through taking our friends, neighbors, relatives, and world apart, the collective result results in this kind of a disjointed situation in which we now find ourselves. So many people have taken the word apart, and so few who have attempted to put it together.
But we cannot be surprised if it is not the kind of a world we wish it was. If, then, this tendency to negative attitude lies at the root of our trouble, is there no way in which we can remedy it? One of the things that perhaps points us up more than anything else is our personal reaction to situations beyond our personal control. There is hardly anyone who does not become indignant, dismayed, astonished, offended when he picks up his daily newspaper. Yet it would be difficult to prove that any of these emotions contribute to the solution of the problems with the paper or holes. There is no actual indication that indignation is solution 'el. Down some can say that it can be solution all to this degree, but it can cause persons to unite, to rise above personal opinions and attitudes, and can create a kind of aggressive action in some direction or other. Will it form their valuable criticism by which things can be changed? For most leadership is sensitive to the indication of its following.
Actually, however, it is not the indignation that causes this. A reaction which we hope to achieve because the problem finally settles down to a simple issue: what is right and what is wrong. And the individual attempting to solve this, coming to berried conclusions and clean to that which is right, develops a strong natural defensive and offensive. He will support the things he believes. He will attempt to correct the faults that are around him. He will unite his resources with groups or movements which are accomplishing ends which he regards as right. But none of these things are accomplished actually by fretting, by fussing, by becoming angry or disturbed. The disturbance is merely a loss of energy. The solution is achieved by the individual clearly defining what is necessary and doing it.
Now, one of the reasons I think why we have a tendency to dissolve in conflicts within ourselves and with others is because conflict is all in the outlet. We do not have any clear concept of solution. The individual confronted with a problem does not see how he can solve it. He does not see any pattern through the application of which the problem can be corrected. There pointed only stool he can trust. See confuse it. It can become disturbed in this way, letting off steam, but this is only a manifestation of frustration. It does not lead to the answer. The reason why we do not have more answers, but because we do at all too much steam without purposeful meaning or viewpoint, and also because in most instances we are untrained to find the answer.
There is an answer to every problem. This answer does not lie in excitement. It does not rest in righteous or unrighteous indignation. It lies in skill. It lies in a discipline by which certain ills can be corrected. The application of the proper methodology to a problem must ultimately be solution 'el. But we look around us, we see the problem, and we recognize that we are unfitted to cope with it. Why are we unfitted? Because the sources of our instruction have generally ignored the need for the correction of existing problems. This does not mean that these sources are entirely sterile of constructive ideology. They are no. But like most of our thinking, are our educational and cultural perspective turn over the immediate passes or bypasses the simple thing that is needed now and escapes into generalities, dealing with large issues but failing to meet the challenge of an immediate problem.
Thus, we may have a strong training on what would be the theoretical cause of our political, cultural, or economic life, but we are not trained to meet the day emergencies of our own existence. We are not equipped to do so. We have not given the resources necessary to solve our problems. Nearly everyone who is out trying to solve other people's problems has problems of his own which require immediate attention, but is not able to cope with them, is not able to meet them with necessary resource ability. Is then being frustrated? He sees no other clear course of procedure. We find him settle down into the cultivation of negative, fatalistic, and essentially detrimental personal attitudes. He becomes a puzzle. It becomes a conscientious objector to everything. He becomes disillusioned, silikal, skeptical, and particularly among the intellectual group, he loses faith in the possibility of solutions.
We see this around us every day where the individual is no longer attempting to plan in terms of solution, but is simply allowing himself to live from day to day in a world that is entirely unsatisfactory to him. This also, of course, brings us to one of the most important considerations that we have, namely, is a relative inability of any individual to change the collective pattern of society around him. A few powerful individuals may have considerable spheres of social influence, but even these spheres are strangely circumscribed. The moment an individual in high position attempts M an action contrary to the general opinion of his time, he finds himself almost as limited as the private citizen, but is not supported by the average person. Cannot be attained by his leaders, and the average person today is not supported. He is so much more against what he does not like than he is for what he does like.
But practically every progressive effort of society runs into argument, discord, and confusion. The individual men being forced to live in a world essentially unsatisfactory to him, for a world which he has not the dynamic to change, a world in which for his own attitudes are minority attitude, and there is not sufficient support from others to make his projects possible. This individual throws back into hopelessness. He falls back into frustration. He gives up and takes various escape mechanisms as the only possible way to adjust to the pressures of living. These defeat isms are evident everywhere today. We find an increasing tendency to ignore a problem, or to regard them as hopeless, or to attempt to adjust to some compromise solution.
We have all been pointed out that if it is true that the individual must be the victim of collective pressures, then there cannot be any basic integrity in the universe. We are also reminded constantly of an increasing number of persons who do not believe that there is any essential integrity in the universe. They do not believe this because they cannot demonstrate it from their own experience. The philosophy of by which we live is derived from our own observation and participation in living. Problem is therefore, we are unable to perceive or and order in the patterns which particularly affect us. We are not likely to acknowledge law and order and order in larger patterns. The more remote. So today, there is an increasing, constantly increasing intensity of negation. The individual dollar, he no longer holds is to be essentially true that there is a parent purpose behind life. If this negation continues to develop, we have found the drift into an almost hopeless skepticism.
But man himself finds his own drifting increasingly uncomfortable. He discovered that actually the kind of a universe he lives in is not nearly as important to him as what he thinks about a kind of universe he lives in. It is his own adjustment. The first to a large measure determine his relationships with life. He learns also, of course, that there is only one essential contribution that he can make as a private citizen, and that is the contribution of a well-ordered conduct of his own. He Timothy of to others, but he does not have. He cannot demand anything from others with an assurance that he will receive it, but he can bestow our bloody tears or a block. He has, according to his old insight, an understanding. If therefore becomes in purple to the average person to enrich his own potential of interpretation and understanding, unless he can do this, he teller hope to maintain a creditable place in the life patterns of which he is a part.
We must admit, and we know it is true from continually increasing evidence, that all negative attitudes are essentially destructive to the person who holds them and to those around that person. Negative attitudes must be compensated for in terms of unhappiness, sickness, and premature death. There can be no possible way in which a negative attitude or a destructive attitude CAIR essentially and directly contribute to our security. The only way that it can contribute is because we ultimately discover the wrongness of it, allow thereby perhaps impel to search a better attitude. Actually, anything that is wrong in our own emotional and mental life will be interpreted ultimately in terms of misery and sickness. We cannot win with negation. We cannot criticize ourselves into ourselves into health, but we can criticize ourselves is a sickness. We kill a hate ourselves into peace of mind, but we can destroy mind and its peace with a every negative attitude, no matter how much we defend our right, whether or how justify it. It seems to me must end in a negation in our own nature. Thus, the person who is a critic gradually destroys his social bridges. He becomes an outcast, and then loneliness and sorrow. What is his life disintegrate? We will insist that is criticisms are valid, that money says is true, but if it is negative, it does not help. And the individual whose discrimination, whose thoughtfulness continually lead-in into negative discovery, or the discovery of error, this individual ultimately becomes habit-ridden with negation and loses the power and the incentives to construct.
Before doing all of our psychological troubles of a rest with unadjusted person who has permitted themselves to develop negative mental and emotional habits, and then it is estimated know that we in the next generation, at least one, how that every five persons born in the United States will it sometimes be an occupant of a mental hospital. It begins to be a run a serious situation, and most of these persons, and I have worked with hundreds and thousands of them who are in these hospitals, are persons who have permitted bad habits of mind the devotion to come in and control their lives. Many of these persons have excellent explanations for why they are as they are, but such explanations do not help. The only explanation that is of any value to us is the explanation of how we stayed sane. The rest of it is not profitable.
These individuals who are mentally and emotionally sickened can prove to our satisfaction, perhaps to their own satisfaction, certainly that they are misunderstood, neglected, afflicted. You will be boiling calamity and misery, and therefore fully entitled to fall pieces. All this, however, does not solve anything, and the perpetuation of a philosophy of this kind can look possibly bring any satisfaction, security, or health to anyone. The answer lies in a positive relationship with life. So, in going back over with many of these horrible characteristic problems, we find that the end of jewel was come to these melancholy and morbid conclusions, actually did not have a particularly difficult life. The individual who breaks under pressure is one of a community of persons, most of whom have had equal printer's with himself. It is not the individual who has gone through the most that falls to pieces. It is the individual with the least resource in himself. It is not compersion who has gone through the greatest tragedy who is tragedy witness. It is the individual perhaps whose only tragedy has been his own selfishness.
But the person who has the wrong basic basic perspective gradually cultivates a philosophy of negation. He rationalizes, developed logical and reasonable sequences to prove to himself that he is a suffering soul, and when his proof is conclusive, he is completely miserable. And this the complete misery has about it a non-static kind of uniqueness, and we have a competitive attitude in which you will beings actually by with each other as to which one can be the most miserable, leading a certain distinction from having suffered tremendously. Years ago, we had a group form a fact. It was created quite a time ago, but became prevalent about twenty, twenty-five years ago. A group dedicated to public confession. These members would rise up the meeting and tell all our sins. It was a little confusing and a bit embarrassing, and they'd lead to a few lawsuits for slander, defamation of character. But the real cause of consternation was, you would think persons would you be reticent to get up and admit the most intimate delinquencies. Instead of this, we found that many of these persons got up and proudly confessed delinquencies which they never had. The only problem came completely competitive instinct to meet more delinquents than the previous testify up news person who got up had to top all with God before it and took a strain while we cried in confessing that he did not possess this tendency.
Is part of the same pattern that we mentioned before? The idea that we cultivate negation far more enthusiastically than we do virtuous. But this problem of competitive testability of misery makes a certain importance in life because of the individual to feel a kind of significance, and it nearly always arises in our life not adequately occupied with other and more constructive activities. The complainer is nearly always a person whose life is not actively dedicated to some practical purpose. This endless complaining, this constant emphasis upon the evils of things, can be defended. Lots of persons of try defendant making quite an Aurora exhibition for all of these individuals defending or not defending, but clinging to this attitude are less effective as persons than those with other attitudes.
And we must assume in nature that there is a pattern of rewards and punishments which lie within the psychological and biological structure of man. Instead of assuming that he is punished by some arbitrary penalty in the universe, by some God of compensations, we observe that man is constantly rewarded and punished by the chemical consequences of his own conduct. If therefore has to follow that where nature punishes the individual for an attitude, and would seem to me that loneliness, sickness, despair, sorrow, and frustration must be regarded as some kinds of punishments, that they are the consequences of actions which nature does not wish to see perpetuated. We have to assume that nature rewards obedience with security, that is a maximum security under existing conditions, and punishes disobedience with insecurity. As our entire generation is lacking in security, as the average individual is insecure, we must assume that what he is doing, how he is thinking, what he is feeling, these things must be wrong, or they could not be punished by a just natural. And each person must ultimately make an according to his own biology. He must face the result of his thinking and his feelings upon the cell structure of his own body, upon the circulation of the blood, upon the vital organs of his body, and a foreign service system. If these are witnessed by his actions and attitudes, then these actions of attitudes cannot be correct.
Now, underneath all of this, perhaps lies a deeper problem, namely, that biology and physiology may not have been originally conceived or devised for the purposes to which man has dedicated his life. The individual has gradually become a highly complicated mental, emotional creature, and nature apparently regards complication as a ball. Nature does not reward any form of complication. The natural processes are direct and simple, and while we may not understand them all, when we discover a new phase, we are always amazed at its simplicity. Truth is usually overlooked because of its simplicity. The man was created apparently for a rather simple kind of life. Now, this does not mean that it was intended that he should be an agrarian to the end of his days, or that his entire psychology was built for the time when he lived them up the forest. This is not true, but it is a century true that man was not created to sustain the degree of wear and tear which he imposes upon himself. Man was not created with an equipment to maintain him against world wars, atomic bombs, cried waves, and the ambitions of leaders, and the tribulations and antagonisms of nations and states. He was not created for such an intensive negative way of life. Verse is very so-called advancement with it's continuous emphasis upon tension, pressure, and stress. This so-called advancement is resolving in a serious biological complaint which arises out of the bodies of those persons who have exceeded their own resources in their efforts to live.
Thus, the answer must lie and simply simplification and the conservation of resources. The integration of life upon patterns is less intensive, less destructive than those with which we are daily confronted. Now, nature is again telling us that our ways of life are subject to penalty because they are wrong. Now, as a great group of persons arises in a culture such as ours, proudly proclaiming the things we do, telling us that these various activities, useful or useless, are indications of progress. But if it was not for this dynamic with which we are constantly rattling ourselves to pieces, we would not be the permanent progressive up and coming people that we are. But all we travel is progressive and up and coming. As we look around, as it looks more as though we were down and departing in many things. It looks as though we are constantly more concerned as to whether or not our progress can survive. And we wake up with consternation to discover that somebody else discovered the Sputnik, a very grave shock to our Eagles. Are we begin to question whether our present way of life is protecting and preserving the leadership we thought we had? Because in the long run, a world or a generation or a nation or a race of sick people cannot preserve leadership. We cannot rule the world if our own psychic nature's are in a state of constant uproar and disintegration. In our own daily and immediate problems, these same rules hold true.
We live in a constant tension. We live in an intensity almost beyond our conception. We think we're getting used to it. We are firmly convinced, but man can adjust to anything. To a degree, man can adjust to anything that is real. Man can adapt himself to all inevitable, because inevitable so rise in nature. But man cannot always adjust himself to his own stupidity. This has no valid source in nature and is merely an expression of his own ignorance. An individual adjusting self to ignorance will remain ignorant. To adjust ourselves to wrong leaves us where we were, producing no result that is of any tangible value to anyone. If they're thinking about these problems, return and seek resources with which to meet them, to try to understand what constitutes a constructive, active, positive, idealistic pattern for life. How are we going to maintain it against so many difficulties?
One of the things we have to begin to estimate is the nature of difficulty. Most of the difficulties that we are in are directly due to the person we are. Man makes his old difficulties. He doesn't realize this, and to a degree, he appears to be able to escape the implication. He can sit down and prove almost to the satisfaction of anyone's logic that he is not the cause of his trouble, that his neighbors are the cause, that his world is the cause, the high taxes are the cause. But actually, the individual is responsible for his own total degree of integration. Actually, taxes are not the cause of his worries or his fears. The world conditions are not the causes. The real cause is in the bridge of his own worth. The cause of his trouble is his own attitude toward these problems. If he hates them, he is in trouble. Now, he may say that the thing he hates deserves hate. It made theoretically, but he cannot afford to hate. It is too dangerous. Kneeling always hatred rises from shallow, inadequate estimation of facts. It is very difficult to understand things and hate them. We may understand them and regret them. We may understand them and hope that we can change them. We may understand them and realize that they arise from a condition of human collective consciousness which is not adequate. We may observe that too much of our living is from the level of childishness rather than from the level of maturity. These things may become obvious to us, and we may find certain individuals particularly and devastatingly in group. We may also observe that the untutored and untrained person lacks the capacity for judgment and kindness and thoughtfulness. But out of the entire of thoughtfulness which we have used, it comes no over an attitude of hate, but almost a sense of compassion, a great sympathy, a constructive sorrow for the misfortune of another person whose limitations make it impossible for him to see more correctly than he does. We gain from this a desire to help rather than a desire to condemn. At the moment the instinct to criticize is transmuted into the instinct to help, we are beginning to rule on a positive foundation. Anything that deserves criticism needs help. As long as we approach it on the level of criticism, we will not help.
Some people, of course, insist that criticism is out, but less it is essentially constructive approach, unless this criticism is backed by a tremendous depth of understanding and a practical solution to the problem, it mainly cause the dilemma. And to criticize things for which we have no solution cannot be regarded as a good vocational activity. This in the underspending which we develop our tremendous interest, now intensities gradually disappear, and in their places we have a fruitful, perhaps sadness, but most of all, a deep realization. But behind that, through things that appear to be wrong, our motions which are essentially right and which will come to their own in due time. In any way that we can help these motions to come true, we are available. But mostly these constructive motions require a very great degree of personal composure, and when this is lost, the constructive motions are also lost to them.
Approach this problem, we have to build a philosophy of living, a concept of life that relieves us from the need to condemn. We must find a wing of internal adjustment that that permits us to recognize error and regret it, but not to be confused by it. Also, we must reach a degree in which every misfortune that approaches us becomes a challenge to greater adequacy on our own part. So-called reverse is not the lever, it is challenge. It is an opportunity to be bigger than we are in order to meet a problem greater than we are previously known. Every problem is an opportunity for the individual to release solution power from within himself. Locked within each of us is a potential. We go very little about with every faculty that we now know alert. We are using only a small fraction of our potential life availability. We have in hand countless resources which we do not even know exist because we have never directly required them to exhibit themselves. We've never called upon them. If, then, instead of blocking the line with negations, we permit a challenge to release its own solution from ourselves, we shall observe that we have much greater solution power that we are never told once. However, we have admitted a kind of defeatism. The moment we have set ourselves in a crystallized pattern of negation, we lock our lives from the solution. All energies within ourselves. When we once we have closed our minds to good or to optimism or to adjustments, once we have to admitted defeat, once we have become cynical and credible, we are no longer concerned with doing anything well. The only thing we are concerned with is how badly someone else is doing it. We have no sense of being able to step into the situation and solve it. We have perhaps no incentive to. If we happen to dislike the individual in trouble, we hope his trouble gets worse. And when everyone's troubles get worse, the whole world becomes more confused, and our probabilities of happiness are further diminished.
If, then, we are confronted, as each of us is today, with a problem almost involving our own sanity, it is very important that we recognize the possibility of further illusional resource within ourselves. We have to realize that man is equipment to meet any natural emergency. He is able to solve the problem of his own survival if he will cooperate with the patterns of energy and consciousness which exist in his own life. It is only when he refuses to cooperate or fails to do so that the problems continue to grow and the solutions to become less and less obvious. When we speak, then, of an of a positive or active attitude toward life, we do not mean the Pollyanna concept of looking at something that is no good and proclaiming it as beautiful. Such is not the attitude at all. The attitude is one of accepting grow as natural, reasonable, and proper, and also recognizing that the principal instrument of growth is challenged. The individual can never become better Alessi leads to become better, and whenever a problem is bigger than we are, it revealed that me within ourselves to increase or enlarge our own resources. A problem, then, is not as a lever or a disaster until we failed needed, and our own poor adjustment to it, then sets in motion consequences which we term afflictions. A problem is not an affliction until we have misunderstood it, resented it, rejected it, denied it, or perverted the energies involved in it.
Though we can say that this is hard to accept, because everything in life is constantly presenting us with loss, of a disturbance, with perhaps irritation, crisis, responsibilities, worry, all of these things are true. We do have these of problem continuously coming in a poem. But these are not the problems. The problems are our own acceptances, our over rejections, and our own available resources. If we are overly selfish, we create a whole circle of problem. If we are vain, we create a circle of problems. If we are in a distinct, another circle, a problem. If we are jealous, we get into further trouble. It is our own attitude primarily which results in a challenge becoming a tragedy. It is only a tragedy when we have misunderstood or confused it, or rejected the lesson which it contains for ourselves.
To say this means nothing except perhaps to stimulate a little thinking along these lines. We may need the saying of it. There has to be a total philosophy to sustain it. Now, that is my philosophy. Is important. It is a way in which we convince ourselves of our own needs. It is a way in which we rationally sell the truth to ourselves. It is not a substitute for conduct, but it can be a tremendous incentive to conduct, and it also can give us the courage to make decisions that are more wise, more practical, more useful to all concerned. Under those conditions, philosophy begins to unfold to us the idea of the universe in which what we call good and bad actually have no existence except in man himself. A universe that is ruled by facts, by truth, by reality. Everything is as it is, and if man will accept everything and it is and understand it and it is, he will find that in this he has a clue to the directing of his own code number.
Though we can take the negative attitude by simply falling into words, the such acceptance will interfere with progress. Man is not supposed to accept these opposed. Will obviously go out and make a considerable amount of excitement, whether it means anything or not. Actually, however, by acceptance, we do not mean to sit back and do nothing. What we really need is a by acceptance. We have knowledge, facts, and work for bones rather than from prejudices. We have to have some kind of a basic acceptance of value. We have to say to ourselves, I'll in this world in which we live is meaningful, or it is not. Either the universe is honest, or it is not. Either there is a basic integrity at the root of life, or there is not. We kill it. Carry water on both shoulders in these matters. We cannot affirm one thing one day and deny it the next. We must either believe that this universe is a planned thing and that behind it is a creating intelligence and consciousness able to administer and administering this vast unfold according to novel beans, or there is not any of these factors, and then is simply a creature of accident, circumstance, and incident.
If we take the second position, then we must live by that, which means that we must live with total purposelessness, because that nothing is important, and nothing is less important than a meaningless universe. Than out of rebellion, so that there is no reason why even the purposeless viewpoint should result in pressure. If nothing means anything anyway, why should we spend all of our time being angry about something, pleased about something else, a miserable in anticipation of a third thing? If nothing is important, then life becomes something so completely ludicrous, ridiculous, that there is no sense in any sense whatever. Evil the other. And there is a purpose existence, then we must begin to accept certain moral values. We must affirm or assume that this world is an unfolding sphere, and that within this unfolding sphere, man is precariously suspended, largely problem and burdened by his own inability to understand the greater values of the world, his inability to grasp the total picture of his own existence, and thereby unable to know with certainty the course is an action that you should pursue. Is therefore under the pressure of a continuous doubt, a lack of available certainty. Lacking available certainty, he turns to the inner part of his old life, supporting it, sustaining and enriching it to the greatest degree possible by recourse to let reference to the great achievements of other times and other ages. He uses the great philosophies and religions of life has died and aids to understanding. He seeks to know better as a lever, according to the teachings of Buddha, or Jesus, or perfuse, allows him because he believes these person to live well. He tries to draw upon the spiritual experience of his race for courage, conviction, for understanding, the cursus taining faith. As gradually out on his conviction, he integrates a constructive attitude which he must then put to work, proving or disproving it.
It's interesting, perhaps, to realize that there is a reason why certain great systems of thinking have lived. They have not lived because the Creator was proud of them. That is the human creator. These systems have not survived because of the main pressure of personality. They have survived only for one reason: that in common experience, they have proven true. That individuals are found in these teachings, religious, philosophical principles, which were applied, are ever true, which well lived produce results which are commendable, constructive, and secure. That these teachings are better than the absence of them, that they have given us a stronger personal way of life, a way of life more likely to produce happiness than a way without these teachings. As this level of understanding, this humanity has created its own saints by recognizing, rewarding those whose ideas have become an imperishable part of human good. And in this way, we begin to sense that man is forever experimenting with value. All of these great teachers are united in certain positive concepts. They have pointed out the importance of a dynamic faith. They have recognized the tremendous importance of a non-aggressive attitude for life, a completely different perspective from ours. We live in an economic and political world, continuously aggressive, and yet we live with religions, churches on every street corner, practically 2/3 of our population normally religious. We live in a tremendous religious atmosphere of renunciation, of unselfishness, of impersonality, of the acceptance of evil, but not the doing of it, and of the tremendous importance of returning good for evil. These things we affirm, we believe, but we cannot operate them in our daily life because they run headlong into the flow of personal prejudices which are more important to us than verticals.
Your therapy lies directly is this level. No one wants to be fixed. Very few people can afford to be favored. Under the existing conditions, and socialized medicine is no solution in the sense that it will not give back to the individual his proper energy. Even if it helps them to pay the bill for his mistakes, in the sense of paying the bill, it does help, but it does not solve the problem. The problems lies not in getting well, but in staying well in the first place. And these great philosophies that we have known as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Muslim ISM, dollars, and Confucianism, Hinduism, these great philosophies have been in common agreement, and millions of human beings, hundreds of million living under them for the last 2,500 years, have discovered as faction experienced within themselves where they have been able to be big enough and strong enough to live these principles, that in the recognition of a non-combative, non-competitive cold lies the health and security of the people. That we are no ever going to attain peace, happiness, serenity, or security by a constant psychic pressure, by constant irritation and agitation. We're going to find the solution to our problems in the integration of our own resources. Assuming for a moment that we will acknowledge with Western man, even though what Eastern man is not entirely of the same opinion, that there are many problems that can be solved with the thinking that real thoughtfulness and real regard, friendship, thoughtfulness, and affection, simple, direct, sincere, these will solve many problems. But how are we going to have any of these qualities, simple and sincere, while really made totally complicated, the victims of pressures from within our own psychic natures, eternally destructive of simplicity and sincerity and affection in regard? How are we going to dislike people often enough, allow them to attain this serenity we talk about? How are we going to complain our way into peace of mind, or how are we going to scandalize our way into security? We kill and to achieve our ends. We have to begin to reintegrate our own basic standards of values. Before we can permit any positive value to grow, we must remain at least escape from the pressure of negative value. If we are going to have a beautiful car, we must pour it first clear in the land, or we leave all the weeds on the scopes. Our flowers will not grow well, and after we've turned in the garden, if we wish it to become a beautiful garden, we must take care of it. We must see that the plants receive nourishment and water, and that they are planted according to their own nature, some in the sun and some in the shade, so that he's just given the opportunity to be itself. If we do is use this care, this thoughtfulness, we have no right to resent the universe if our God does not grow well. And in our own thinking, you know, living, before we can create a constructive philosophy of life, we've got to get the weeds out of our own consciousness. These weeds are fear and doubt and jealousy, suspicion, egotism, over possessiveness, over ambition, envy, and such attitudes as must always reap the whirlwind. All of these actions and attitudes must in trouble. If we want to be out of trouble, therefore, we must prevent a continuance of these attitudes. Though we can't just simply say to ourselves, let's stop being jealous. Unfortunate thing, we have nurse these negative so long that we can no longer control them. They control us. We are the victim of habits, and these habits are those of negation. The only way we can escape from these habits is to understand you them by giving ourselves a point of view or a perspective acceptable to ourselves. We must sell ourselves something better in order to undersell ourselves about something worse. Our new attitude must arise because we have a new and better conviction about value. The moment the conviction is established, that which is inconsistent with it falls away. The only reason we're in trouble is because our conviction is on a level which causes trouble. When this center of conviction changes to another and better level, the trouble falls away. We cannot escape jealousy and fear and all these pressures simply by denying them or by attempting to frustrate them violently in our own natures, but we can gradually become educated. We can gradually find out what two learning needs, and then that learning is really helping to build higher levels of conviction, giving us better instruments with which to estimate values, giving a stronger inducements to sees and think straight, and through the straightening out of our own tricky thoughts, relieving ourselves of the pressure of the convictions that are essentially wrong. Thus, by degrees, we can create a new level of action, and this new level of action must precede any change in our living. As long as we remain the same, our condition will remain the same. No individual simply by wishing without doing will change the pattern of his life.
If, then, we wish to get a truly secure position, we have several possibilities. We all know, for example, the peculiar effect of intelligence upon audacity. It has been observed and noted for a long time that to get a person who is really a man of action, you've got to get a stupid one. Well, you want to get a real world conqueror like a tall Hitler, you must get a little man who has never left home. He was getting individual with a cold mind and the comparative lack of capacity to think. The moment the individual begins to think seriously, he is less sure of himself. Thinking, in other words, does not create egotist primarily. It has a tendency to create fear. The reason being that the more we think, the bigger the world looks, from the smaller we look. The individual who hasn't thought at all has a solution for everything and will never know whether it will work or not, because he has no way of applying it and no instrument suitable to experiment when his own ideas.
But the woman we study humanity, we suddenly realize that the universe panacea is extremely difficult. The more we know about people, the less certainly our what will help them. Thus, we pass intellectually into a kind of uncertainty, an uncertainty which causes the contemplated person to be confused of being non-active. Actually, he may become sole, but not necessarily as the result of contemplation, because contemplation as as it's real and the conservation of energy, its purpose is to recognize that you cannot attack ten thousand problems like the Don Quixote de la Mancha, lancing windmills, that you cannot go out of the knight territory of reforms, simply attacking this evil and that bad evil and finding it for every heads of evil you cut off, seven more grow. As in the Greek myth, the contemplated person is looking to find the loot. He realizes that if he can discover the basic common denominator of trouble and can attack that, that with one clear decision, one clear discovery, he can uproot ten thousand evils. That behind all of the mistakes we make, there is one basic tendency to make mistakes. But behind all of the wrong thoughts, wrong emotions, and wrong actions that exist in the world, there is a fallacy, and that this one fallacy must be attacked in some way. That the only answer lies not in tearing the leaves off of the tree one by one, or they will grow again next year. If the tree is be poisonous or injurious, the only way to get at it is to chop it down at the root. Otherwise, you cannot remove it. You cannot end it. So the contemplative life turns away from a non-valid action that we are all guilty on. This action of trying desperately to fight particulars and causes us to turn to the contemplation of those great general principles which are responsible for all the particulars we do not like. And as we go further and further into these problems, we realize that error, as we know it, stems from a wrong concept, a wrong premise, a wrong attitude, basically toward life. And this wrong attitude, whether we want to admit it enough, is an attitude of aggressiveness based upon ego, by means of which man is attempting to dominate something that he should obey. He is trying to be free from law when his only hope is to be free under law. He is attempting to impose himself upon the world, refusing to recognize the fact that he's totally incapable of wisely administering this world. He is attempting to conquer. He is trying desperately to cause the universe to be under the guidance of his meditation, when up to the present time, he hasn't been unable to demonstrate that with his own mind, he can govern even himself.
So there are basic errors, and most of these basic errors root in aggressive egoism, root is this concept that we are right, and that we are born to commend. But we are probably actually wrong and are born to command only our own resources, which to us is not a glamorous perspective. Out of this, then, man has to reintegrate his way of life. What he is doing is destroying it, and he goes there boy cannot sustain it, and he cannot defend anymore. He can only tolerate it, and as it becomes more intolerable, he will have more difficulty tolerating it. What he must have is a way of life rooted in nature's purpose, in the universal dynamic itself, not in his concept of things. But he says, I can't do this because I don't know what it is. The reason he doesn't know what it is is because he has done so much agitated of him of himself that he has never been receptive to value. Man possesses, of all creatures, the only group of truly reflective powers that we don't bear Lulu is a contemplative animal. And because he is a contemplative creature, he has a Power greater than any other animal that we know. But he doesn't contemplate. And because in the production of his contemplative nature, certain other faculties and certain other propensities were limited, man finds it is weaker than the animal in many ways, less intuitive than the animal, less able to defend the fun integrity of instinct than the admirable animal, and at the same time, not using the cultivated faculties by means of which his own peculiar existence can be preserved.
To meet this emergency, the individual must reverse certain procedures. One of the things he has got to do somewhere along the line is to break down is this aggressive negation which he occupies himself morning, noon, and night. This endless fall fighting, this endless cycle of trying to impose his own ways upon others, and also this tremendous effort to keep up with the silly Momentum's of his time. If he doesn't do these things, if he doesn't make these changes, he will simply go into oblivion for the rest of a foolish generation. He will not win. He cannot, because the final criterion is in his own body, in his own emotional construction, which is falling to pieces because of abuse. And this abuse will never be acceptable, and will never be the basis of health. And this man tries desperately to adjust to one group of errors, he develops another, keeping an entire structure in an endless state of tension.
So upon constructive, a positive attitude in this situation consists in the individual attaining a detachment from negation, first, a relaxation away from criticism, away from suspicion and doubt. Not the acceptance of things that are wrong, but the recognition that his power to solve what is wrong lies in the active use of his contemplated faculties. Men solutions to his problems must be on the level of man, not on the level of beasts. War is an effort to solve human problems on the level of beasts, and it cannot succeed. Each you would be as within himself, a contemplative power where he besought his problems by arbitration rather than by violence. When he neglects the power to arbitrate, when he neglects the contemplation of solution, he destroys his humanity, destroys the uniqueness by means of which he has a reason and justification for survival. So we say that the person in these problems, it is daily living, must begin to relax away as far as he possibly can from these intensities, recognizing that not as virtuous, but as hidden vices, perhaps we would have a tendency to correct some of these difficulties if we recognize them as false. But we do note. We have grown so accustomed custom to then, we think of them as virtues, as indispensable parts of ourselves. Our right to criticize is a sacred right. All right to contend is something that we will fight and die for. And yet, neither of these, criticism nor condemnation, solve anything. They merely magnify and complicate the problems of living. If we can ease down of this order and give ourselves a
chance to relax and allow the contemplative level to come through. We will find that in a more impersonal attitude, less dominated by destructive intensity, we are in a position to discover workable solutions. Intensity destroys our power to solve. Anger destroys our power to think. Heat destroys our power to love. Fear destroys our power of faith. All things needed to solution are destroyed by their opposites, and the individual who has the negative qualities cannot at the same time sustain the positive ones. He must decide between them.
And the amazing thing that he doesn't realize, has never been able to realize, is that love is a cream layer, happier thing than lead. We have never seemed to find as much satisfaction in the development of our virtues as we have in catering to our vices. Yet, actually, our thoughtfulness, our crane with us, our friendliness—these are the sources of happiness. These are the things which bring us contentment. These are the very conditions we dream about. These are the things men go out from within war and fight and die for. Yet, in decision, we do not choose to cultivate them. The moments of temptation to be unhappy come along; we are perfectly willing to sacrifice our birthright of happiness.
Out of the recognition of this situation, we do have the right, if we wish to apply it, of choosing positive and constructive attitudes. We can choose not to gossip. We can choose not to criticize. And we can choose to seek the good in things, realizing always that there is something of good. Furthermore, that the acceptance of the fact of good is the greatest stimulation called the growth of good. And reformed crude and his work with ex-convicts, that we have a faith in a man, you have a greater probability of that man maintaining his own self-respect than when you suspect him. The moment you doubt him, you destroy his faith in himself. The moment we suspect, we create suspicion.
Whereas, if we have a strong and constructive attitude, we are the greatest and most powerful defense against betrayal. But someone will say, "I did have that attitude once, twice, three times, and I was betrayed." Now, hopefully skeptic, I have done things for people; they turned around and stab me in the back. There are a large number of cliches bad bearing on this point, but we don't need to repeat them all. But the answer again lies in man's ability to detach himself from the things he does. Almost always, when we are so called betrayed, we are offended first because we feel that our own judgment has been wrong. That's an intolerable situation in itself. We can never forgive the individual who has proved that we are wrong, if it is only by failing us in some emergency.
Furthermore, we become attached to the things we are doing. We expect results. We demand results. But we live within so small a reference frame that the only results that we can see must be almost immediate ones. It is difficult for us to imagine that something the results of which we cannot see has results. Nor can we be satisfied with the belief that those results may only reach their harvest long after we have gone. We must have the proof of it right now. All of this again being the imposing of our own mind and our own attitudes upon things. We do not do things well, generously, lovingly, and finally because we expect reward. We do these things because they are the law, and we either keep the law or die from breaking it.
The other person's reaction to what we do is according to his own understanding. We are not responsible for his understanding, but we are responsible, totally, for our own. And if five thousand persons famous every day of our lives, that is no excuse for any human being to become cynical. Let's face it, because we must live with ourselves. And if we do not believe in cynicism, then the failure of other persons cannot make us do that which we know is not right. The moment we permit ourselves to fall into this error, this era of being discouraged, it means that our faith in value is not great enough.
On the this evidence, by the way, is not so remarkable as we might first assume. There are very few persons who have not been given indications of gratitude. There are very few persons who have done great things over a continuous period of time without recognition. There are very few persons whose kind deeds have always gone awry. What we generally again do is promptly forget the kindnesses that have it done to us, the gentleness is which have returned to us. And when fifty persons are grateful and one is not, that one is the only one we remember.
If we look back over our lives, we will realize that we have not been the continuous victims are in writing. We have become, we have been the continuous victims of our own attitude toward it. We have willingly and willfully reject it the kindnesses which we should have appreciated in order to nurse the grudges we should have forgotten. This regardless of how we approach it. As I recall it, found out with his again, with his criminal, as with a criminal, Eckstrom knows that he took on parole and employed and placed in positions of responsibility. Every one of them did not live up to it, but the majority did. And it would be quite possible to build a philosophy, a bubble of life, upon the one who didn't, but that philosophy of life would be wrong because it will forget the dozens and hundreds who proved themselves trustworthy in every way.
The same way, if we are negative and recognize and remember only vacation, we can prove it. But the proof is not valid because it is a proof based upon a minority incident. It is the magnification of a particular, whereas the medal did respond, that did come through, represented a generality, a larger group, and their testimony, 99 to one perhaps, is the more valid. And in life, the hundreds of good things that have come to us are more valid than the few unpleasant remembrances that we cannot get out of our systems.
So, if we take our attitudes and examine light thoroughly, we will discover grounds for optimism. We will find that this world is not nearly as bad as we are forced it to be by our own thinking. And building a more generous, contemplative relationship with life, we will begin to see that they have been wonderfully blessed and protected through countless emergencies. And that also, if we could maintain and preserve the gentleness of spirit which is our birthright as human beings, we could live victoriously through this span of life, creating good for others and strengthening the Integrity's in ourselves.
So our positive attitudes must arise from a total picture of our living. When we shall discover that actually we have enjoyed much more than we have suffered. And if we have suffered, it is usually been because we were not big enough and not deep enough to find the value, the basic beauty, the deep meaning, the important instruction in certain experiences. These we have resented. We've resented them because we rejected them, and in so doing have created negation. If we understand these things, we can begin to build a more constructive attitude of the benefi lhasa fee, and we will find that the proof of it will lie in its effect upon our total economy as persons.
When the facial expression begins to relax, when the tightness leaves the corners of the mouth, for the nervous angular motions of the bunny begin to solve, when we can begin to enjoy the good that comes to others, when we can actually feel a little better when we get up, a little better through the day as the result of trying, of striving, we will realize that a good attitude is our only protection in life. But without it, we cannot survive. Nature tells us this, and if we are wise, we will obey nature. And watch in nature's way, we will probably discover that we can save ourselves many sorrowful hours, many years of reverse, and many misunderstandings which are due only to our own lack of perspective.
For beginning to take responsibility for our own condition and living according to it, we can slowly integrate a really purposeful to the point of view, one that will help us and strengthen us and give us courage to face the future. Well, time is up.