MAX @ School - Seeking... I Found!

Lines from Brilliant Minds
If you have time to chatter
Read Books
If you have time to read
Walk into Mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot

-Nanao Sakaki, Break the Mirror

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- Buckminster Fuller

On The Relationship With the Is-ness
Moranae to Alex Collier 2/24/95, California
The worship of the Is-ness (God concept) is silent, and solitary, free from all self-seeking. The silence is a necessity, as all speech is feeble and imperfect. Therefore, as with your ancestors and ours, their spirits and consciousness would ascend out of time and space to the Is-ness in wordless adoration (feeling). There are no priests or "saviors" authorized to come between a man (soul) and our maker. Each experience is personal, and different than another, and should not in any way be meddled with or judged. Each soul should become conscious of the divinity that is in itself.
There should be no shrines, no temples among you. Accept nature and the caretaking of nature by mankind. Be a real, natural human being. Your real faith may not be formulated in creeds, as you have been taught, but from a deeper portion of yourself that you have forgotten, or ignore. Temples were built on your planet to honor and worship the extraterrestrial beings believed to be Gods. The Is-ness can be worshipped by honoring yourself and that which is given you. By honoring yourself you honor the Is-ness, because you are truly One and the same.
Look at your Earth, your ocean, your night sky and the galaxy. This is your "church", and you are the "alter" in that "church". So, release yourself from your past limited thinking. It takes only a decision. What anyone else thinks does not matter.
It is important to remember that the Is-ness does not place value upon the material fabric of time. This has only been created so that we as souls could learn more about ourselves and return with our experiences to contribute to the creation of ourselves. The rituals of "offerings", "sacrifice" and other symbolic objects only means something to you (alone). The Is-ness is only interested in your intent, the path of your heart. Look to find your highest happiness and the motive for power in your existence.
Do not look with ill upon those of simplicity or poverty. The goal of one's path, regardless of lifetimes or lifeforms, is not the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of (material) luxury. It is to discover your true self, that which is "apart" from the Is-ness; it is that part of you which chooses to leave the comfort and safety of all eternity, to fall into the concept of time. To become a true human being is the practice and constant embracing of your essential self. And, from that place of eternity, your thoughts, actions and emotions should emanate into the world.
Human beings should be vulnerable, open, focused, strong and flexible. In your world, the three concerns all of you must address personally are Self-Worth, Trust and Expectation. Your Earth not only needs healing, she also needs a responsible and worthy companion. That companion is the masculine.
There is a great need for the men of your world to become intuitive and focused on the development of the soul. Men must cultivate unconditional love on all levels. The men of your world are too aggressive and full of self-imposed loneliness. Please remember that all energy moves in a circle, so everything returns: the love, anger and despair. Please, we ask you to also acknowledge the fact that the love you withhold is the pain you carry. So, let love warm your voice. Let love be the wonder to children's ears. Let imagination create a world of unconditional responsibility. It will also change the order of the old world. Let your emotions give motion to the "hero" that struggles within all of you for the freedom to act, to be, to witness and to apologize.
The responsibility of becoming a human being is great, but it also natural. It is prayer in motion. It is your evolution and free will in action. It is the flow of life in all things. So, love the Earth and make new life, for children are always a new beginning. Most of you have yet to rediscover a world you've "already discovered".

"It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be beautiful. It just has to be true." - said by John Cusack's character, Max Rothman, to the struggling artist Adolf Hitler in the film MAX.

So how can you protect yourself from the vageries and vicissitudes of an economy you can't control? According to the writers in this issue's cover section on money, hoarding a nest egg doesn't work; real security comes not from money but from developing your interests and talents into useful skills and building a network of mutually supportive family, friends, and neighbors. - Utne Reader 1992

What if I said I saw the future:
And the future was a picture in your head?
What if I said to you to paint another picture
And you'd wake up in that you'd painted,
And you did?
- song: Angel / album: Group Therapy / band: Concrete Blonde

We each have the responsibility to continue the growth and evolution of humanity. Be aware that what you do and what you create will have a lasting impression on generations to come. With this awareness, create beauty that will nurture and sustain these future generations and contribute to a more loving and beautiful world for them to live in. Allow yourself to visualize and recognize what you can offer as an unconditional gift for the future of humanity.
-Voice of the Galaxy, by Stacia Alana-leah and Raymond Mardyks

"When we are ready to live a life without fixed ideas or answers, then we are ready to bear witness to every situation no matter how difficult, impossible or painful it is. Out of that process of bearing witness--healing action spontaneously arises." --Roshi Bernie Glassman

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain. Excess is legitimate, even praise-worthy on the grounds that the private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. It's long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principal will destroy itself in time. It will only persist with whatever injustice and suffering it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited-that the world is an infinite resource and the world is an infinite garbage can.
At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of it's own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solitary and sympathy and concern for others or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the communities as a whole, and by now that means the global communities.
The question is rather should privileged elite dominate mass communication and use this power as they tell us they must, mainly to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and to deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is weather democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.
-Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky

Waking Life. A film to experience.
These are a few quotes from it:
The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams; cuz if you can do that you can do anything.
Whatever you do, don't be bored. We are limited by our own confines. The world is an exam.
In hell you sink to the level of your lack of love. In heaven you rise to the level of your fullness of love.
As the pattern becomes more intricate and subtle, being swept along is never enough.
We should never simply write ourselves off, and see ourselves as the victims of various forces. It is always our decision who we are.
We seem to think we are so limited by the world and the confines, but we are really just creating them. You keep trying to figure it out, but it seems like now that you know that what you are doing is dreaming, you can do whatever you want to. You are dreaming but you are awake. You have so many options, and that is what life is about.
The on-going wow is happening right now. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into the direct experience.
No matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible, and given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.
You have begun to find your answers. Although it may seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore secrets of the physical universe, savor the input of your senses. Feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tuck the emotional memory in your travel bag.
Looking back, connecting with all the people is all that really mattered.

The POWER OF NOW, an empowering read by Eckhart Tolle
"When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from my Course in Miracles or other teachings, I do so not in order to compare but to draw attention to the fact that in essence, there is and always has been one spiritual teaching, all that comes in many forms. Some of these forms such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter, that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost."
The interviewer asked, "When you say "being"... are you talking about God? If you are then why don't you say it?"
Eckhart answers: "The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I use it sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about, or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions and egoic delusions such as "my" or "our God" is the only true God," and "your gods is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement, "God is Dead."
"The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered a mental image is created. No longer perhaps of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something. Neither God, nor being, nor any other word can define or explain the inevitable reality behind that word. So the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance enabling you to experience that to what which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transindental reality or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head. That you believe in-- a mental idol.
"The word "being" explains nothing, but nor does "God." Being however has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. No body can claim an exclusive possession of being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence. The realization that "I am" that is prior to "I am this... or I am that." So it is only a small step to the word being to the experience of being."

Thoughts of Mr. Pfeifer at Manchester High - innerview by MAX
"The truth is so big... it is so One. It speaks to you in silence. You know... the silence you encourage the kids to get involved in. I'm always telling them to shut off the TV, clam up... see if you can stand yourself for a half hour without reading, listening to something, or with the head phones on, or with out the computer on. It is in silence that God speaks. You know that. I know you know that. Its on those quiet mountaintops and when the sun is going down... you know that it is better than the natural reality itself. There is stuff beyond the natural reality that makes all the natural reality occur-- moment-by-moment, day in and day out; that is the ultimate discovery. I try to pray for a day in contemplative mystic prayer, beyond thought, beyond imagination; it is the spaces between thoughts. Our heads are like monkey's... just thoughts... a bazillion. And it is getting beyond that where my pure spirit is getting in touch with God's pure spirit... without thought... without imagination... without conscience... and he works on your subconscious even... on your total being. The only way you know you have been in touch with the eternal is by the fruit. You feel the peace, the feel the joy, you feel the wholeness, and you are able to recognize that you are swimming in this reality all day long."
"I just catch glimpse of it." I returned. "I can't say that I have felt that."
"I can feel that..." he answered, "...that you still have not gotten to that spot. Say open to it, because your heart is a mystical heart. Its a heart filled with the possibilities for wild contemplation. Ask for that gift. Not just contemplation that comes from the ability to churn up all of your natural talents or to enjoy all of the natural spiritual realties around you... but it is sheer gift. Its a quantum leap and you cannot get it by any effort or human activity. You can prepare for it."
"How do you prepare?" I asked.
"By quiet. By simplicity. By going inside and recognizing that God... by decision... by preference... dwells in your heart. He is there. And to spend time with your spirit... that has no parts... in touch with his spirit... that has no parts... which means there's no feelings... that is frustrating sometimes... there's no feelings... no emotion... no awareness in a certain sense... when you are in touch at the deepest of levels. It is pure faith. It is marvelous."
"You say, He, as in a separate entity?" I question.
"As God. It is truly the God person... he... she... you really can't speak in terms..."
"Is it a separate entity?" I repeat.
"Oh yes. Yeah, but it is separate but at the same time one... because we are swimming in it. We share in his reality. We are father, son and spirit inside of us. When you read the books of the great mystics, like John of the Cross... their poetry is... they are stumbling over words to describe this inner spiritual experience... a reality. John of the Cross in his magnificent poetry comes closest that I've seen any words come close to being able to describe. Oh yeah, he's a giant of the 14th century. Marvelously stuff. The more you read of the people who have been to this place, the more you know you are called to that place, and it is happening all around, but it's just that you are not aware that it is happening. These kids just aren't aware... like you were saying... but some of them picked it up. I teach Latin, and some of the kids I have are really marvelous kids with beautiful hearts... they will... or did understand what you are saying... beyond words... they feel it... experience it. A lot of the other kids couldn't because we live in a soulless society, truly. These kids are lacking spirit in so many ways, and it needs to be churned up. There is a battle going on for their minds and hearts and we are losing them at a rate that is phenomenal."
"So this battle... do you think that there is a separate entity that is a negative force?"
"Oh absolutely! The society itself provides enough negativity that you don't even have to have it be an extra entity; the society itself is so negative, and the social structure... and we live in a failing culture. So much of that is already a negative force."
"What is a failing culture?"
"We live in a failing culture at the moment. I mean... the kids that we see... "
"You mean people feel hopeless?"
"Yeah, lack of spirit. The only thing that matters is the next physical experience... weather it be eating, drinking, driving or noise... you can't even go to a restaurant... there is always music blaring at you... and someone screaming and yelling. We've taken away all the quietness that is essential. It is an essential environment within which to learn. You can't learn ultimate things without being quiet and silent. I spoke here to the night school last night, two ninety-minute sessions and I take them through a focusing exercise which I do with my kids, having them for twenty minutes concentrate on the place where their hair is meeting their scalp ...to center them. They come out of it feeling like... ahhh... I really am here and I don't have to be involved in all kinds of noise or whatever. They feel that I am alive; that it is the inner life that matters. My wife and I started a retreat center. We started caring for pregnant girls, battered wives and abused children many years ago. I have six kids of my own now. It evolved into a retreat center where I do marriage and family counseling, spiritual direction and that type of thing-- marriage enrichment and so on. But it's all about the spirit-- its all about the spirit. You're on the search. I can feel your heart being drawn to deeper and deeper spiritual realities, a part of which is the mystical relationship with the ultimate, the divine, which is God.
"What do you mean when you say mystical?"
"Mystical is a term that we toss around and you simply need to define it as to be in touch with the ultimate which is God, without thought, without imagination. Pure spirit to pure spirit. That takes some real work to get to that spot, but you are doing all of the preparation stuff. Keep on going. All the wisdom that you have about the corporations and the environment is just true. I've been saying the same stuff for forty years... but no one wants to listen."
"Do you write for the papers?"
"I write about two or three times a year... the local newspaper puts things in that I write about education, life or whatever. I put out a newsletter, in fact I did a couple about education, but the latest one is a reflection on "Affection or sex? Which comes first?" ...not my thoughts, but my experience in dealing with married couples. So once a month I do that, and I share with my class all the time."

The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, by Thaddeus Golas
*Selected quotes:
Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.
To be enlightened is to be in a state of flexible awareness, an open mind. Enlightenment is the very process of expanding, not arriving at a different set of limits.
When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the ignorance that is other than the knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it.
It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways you can exactly predict. What happens is not important as how you react to what happens.
Also it is important not to judge others for their pleasures of the flesh. What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for yourself, all your words and actions define the world you live in. One of these laws for our relations as equal beings is this: What you say goes--but only for you and those who agree with you. If you say a man should not receive help undeservedly, it may not affect his life much, but it will hold for you: you will not get undeserved help. If you say other people's sexual pleasures are vulgar, it won't change their experiences, but your pleasures will become vulgar. It is precisely your unlimited power to control your experience that hangs you up. How much compassion and forgiveness do you want for yourself? Give it to others. Go to the extreme: forgive all beings for their karmic debts to you. Grant to others the freedom, the love, the consciousness you want for yourself.
Note carefully that when your vibrations are slow, events seem to happen fast, and you will feel that events are happening too fast for you to control them. And you may therefore feel impelled to try to control them. You may try to establish habits of orderly behavior, and you may resent disorderly people. This is the origin of the power trip. You may try to get away from disturbing events by moving to the country, or turning off your consciousness with hard drugs or liquor.
But the faster you are vibrating and the more messages you are getting back from your environment, the slower events will appear to be happening, and the more you will feel in control. The more you love, the faster you vibrate, then the less need you feel to control anything, and you are not fearful or change and variety. You experience everything deeper and slower and more lovingly.
If the world looks beautiful and safe, you are vibrating fast; if it looks gloomy, dull, or frightening, then you are vibrating slow, and you need to love yourself for vibrating too slow.
Inside yourself or outside yourself, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.
No matter what others are doing, you are the only one who is responsible for what happens to you. There is nothing in the external event that in the least way determines your feelings and experiences: your life is entirely governed by your vibrations, what they tell you and how you respond.
The slower your vibrations, the more unpleasant your life: you will contend with more conflict, mass, and pain. Events will happen too fast for control, yet time will seem interminable because you can see no way out.
But when you raise your vibration level, you can neatly sidestep collisions, both psychic and physical, and quite literally change the world for the better. Love is the strongest magic of all.
When you learn to love hell you will be in heaven.
In an unstable relationship, we have basically two ways to go, regardless of the subtleties of the changes: one way is towards stability, reaching a common level of vibration; the other is towards disintegration, getting so far apart in vibration that we are no longer aware of each other at all. Since we are uncomfortable in the presence of vibrations higher or lower than our own, we tend to make certain "natural" responses. If the other person is lower, we will generally try to get him up to our level, to help him and cheer him up. But if the other person is higher, we will often, at first, try to bring him down and get him to lower his vibrations. Note that when you are trying to help someone you are working against his natural, perhaps unconscious effort to bring you down. The lower vibrating person (and this could be any of us depending on the circumstances) will appear to be draining the energy of the higher person, often with the best moral and social motives. This effort can take the form of exaggerated praise, sly pokes with problems, and showing fear and aggression, freaking out, starting an argument, quoting better authorities, and a thousand other forms, all the way down to putting the higher person in prison or killing him.
On the other end, if you are faced with such behavior, the remedy is to keep on out flowing love, to have no resistance in your mind, the lower vibrating person may reach farther and farther to bring you down, but when he finds you will not come down, when he senses that you have no internal resistance to him, he will have to rise to your vibration level to feel stable and comfortable, it is too painful to stay where he is. And he will rise, unless of course he goes the other way, and disintegrates from the relationship; you are not, however, obliged to wait him out: if you sense that he is not going to do anything but try to bring you down, you are free to effect the disintegration when you choose. In current language, just split. Don't dwell on it, and don't feel guilty about it. It's the natural order of things.
Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment.
The principle of equality is a safe guide, both in saving us from foolish condescension to disturbed people, and from self-limiting awe towards superior people.
The solution to all our push-pull tensions is to treat everyone, every being you recognize to be alive, as equal to yourself. Always look deeper than any evidence that you are unequal. If another person displays great wisdom or genius, produces great paintings, or even inflates himself to writing books of advice like this one, just DON'T BELIEVE it is any evidence that his potential is higher than yours. Know that anything he has done you can do--not in the sense of debasing him but of elevating yourself. Don't "admire" him excessively--that separates you. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, enjoy what he produces, treat him as an equal. And whatever you see on a psychedelic trip, just say, "I'm equal to that: we are all equal to that."
On the other side, if a person displays sickness and insanity, degradation and emotional distress, helplessness and despair, just don't believe it is any evidence that his potential is lower than yours, know that anything you are doing, he can do. Don't blindly agree with his game; don't react as though what he is doing is real. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, have compassion for him, treat him as your equal. Begin with the knowledge that he can bring himself out of it. Don't ignore him necessarily, unless you know he is running the same movie over and over and are bored with it. Your attention is always life-giving; it will make him feel stable and loved, and he can go up from there if he wants to. You can even tell him in words that you don't believe his game: do it while you are bandaging his wounds or feeding him or giving him money. Don't act superior to him: you aren't, you're his equal. Ignore the sin and love the sinner.
It is not a personal affront to you when someone is being discordant; it is measure of his pain. He's showing you how much he hurts, and how much compassion he needs. But keep in mind, too, that not all victims are innocent. In a certain karmic sense, no victims are innocent, but that doesn't mean we should help them, for it is our fate to exist in relation to them, and how we behave determines our own karma. But we should give help in a way that does not extend out attachment to low vibrations. That means we should give what we would expect to get, good or bad, in the same circumstance, and begin with the knowledge that all beings are equals.
While we still believe there are people greater or lesser than ourselves, we will tend to hang on all the more tightly to our current vibration level; we will be fastened to the people who make us feel at home. We will be stuck with our ideas, our emotions habits, our jobs, our bodies. We will be afraid to change because we will fear the unstable experiences we have when we try to reach a "higher" level. We will be afraid of falling to a "lower" level if we let go of our current stability.
Once you begin to behave in the knowledge that no being is greater or lesser than you, then you are free to change, because you will feel stable no matter what level you are on. You will feel calm and sure of yourself with or without a body, with or without a job, a brain, a book to read, or a book to write.
Since every being is self-determined, you cannot change anyone else's vibration level against his will, nor are you obliged to. You cannot in reality hurt or help others without their agreement to play the game, nor can anyone hurt or help you without your agreement.
Indeed, your perception of others is colored by your own limited vibrations until you reach the higher levels, so you have no way of knowing exactly what you are trying to change. On the other hand, you do control you own vibration level absolutely, and that's all the freedom you need to govern your own relationships and experiences.
You have an infinite choice of worlds to live in.
Whatever your choice, whatever vibration feels right to you, you will tune in and stabilize with others believing the same thing. On the space level, like usually attracts like.
You can tune your vibrations to Christ Consciousness or Buddha consciousness and experience supernal compassion. You can tune yourself to black magic and live in a world of weird shapes and violent forces. You can tune to Mickey Mouse or Mr. Natural in the comic book. You can become one with the Divine Mother and dwell in incredible sensuous luxury.
You may have all these experiences and more when you meditate or take psychedelics. You may not remember this book then, but you will be able to remember two words: No resistance. These two words apply even more importantly on those levels than on this one, if anything. Remember them especially when you are dying.
Since we aren't going anywhere, with stability, any faster than our love will take us, and we have to love it where we are first, there is something to be said for not getting too ambitious about the infinite possibilities.
But it's nice to know that there is more to it than what you see in front of you now, and that you can experience your present reality on much deeper levels of pleasure and ease.
The state of mind that needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened.
The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners.
What we see is always ourselves.

The Great Remembering, by Peter Forbes.
*Selected quotes:
"We know deep in our hearts what is the Great Work. It is a moral cry to declare that we want to live differently, that we want to express our love and our prosperity in terms of the quality of our relationships, not in the amount we acquire and consume."
The American countryside is being transformed by sprawl at 365 acres per hour. Our own federal government tells us that almost 3 millions acres of forests, farms, and open spaces will be developed this year. Maricopa County in Arizona loses seventeen acres of pristine desert to development every twenty-four hours. Atlanta's growth pressures cause clear-cutting at the rate of thirty acres each day, giving Atlanta the distinction of consuming land faster than any settlement in human history. California--already the world's seventh largest economy--is still growing, to the detriment of one of America's largest concentrations of endangered plants and animals. Americans living in the West have watched their beloved mountain backdrops--the Boise foothills, the Rockies, the Wasatch Range, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains--all be developed at levels unprecedented in our land-use history.
The long-term cure for the loss of wilderness is not merely buying and protecting some wildlands but rebuilding a culture of sympathy for and reliance on the land, just as the complete prevention for another heart attack isn't bypass surgery but changing the patient's way of life. It is fundamental to the ultimate success of land conservation that our work changes not only our public life but our private as well. Fighting the loss of wilderness, regreening our cities, saving endangered species, controlling growth and sprawl, and protecting special places, are all critical, but they may not be significantly addressing the source of the problem. And the source of the problem is how we humans live each day. There are no environmental problems that don't start as people problems. The ecological solution is to rethink land conservation as the conservation of culture.
"Nothing can be done without creating a new kind of people." --Aldo Leopold.
"Conservation." wrote Leopold, is defined by "a state of harmony between men and nature," which assumes shared values between the two. Leopold was nervous about a form of conservation that is valueless, that "defines no right and wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the philosophy of values." He saw conservation as a moral argument that might create a healthier, whole-land community that includes people. In this light, the point of land conservation is less about recreation and more about re-creation. Imagine, for a moment, that the purpose of land conservation is to help create a new kind of people.

The Shadows of POWER - The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline, by James Perloff
(The following are a few pages from Chapter 10, "Carter and Trilateralism")
The CFR's little brother is born:
With None Dare Call It Conspiracy putting the heat on the CFR, David Rockefeller moved to form a new internationalist organization - the Trilateral Commission. For some three decades, CFR members had pushed for "Atlantic Union," a bilateral federation of America and Eruope. The trilateral Commission broadened this objective to include an Asiatic leg.
How did the TC begin? "The Trilateral commission," wrote Christopher Lydon in the July 1977 Atlantic, "was David Rockefeller's brainchild." George Franklin, North American Secretary of the Trilateral Commission, stated that it "was entirely David Rockefeller's idea origionally." Helping the CFR Chairmen develop the concept was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who laid the first stone in Foreign Affairs in 1970:
A new and broader approach is needed - creation of a community of the developed nations which can effectively address itself to the larger concerns confronting mankind. In addition to the United States and Western Europe, Japan ought to be included�A council representing the United States, Western Europe and Japan, with regular meetings of the heads of government as well as some small standing machinery, would be a good start.
That same year, Brzezinski elaborated these thoughts in his book Between Two Ages. It showed Brzezinski to be a classic CFR man -a globalist more than lenient toward Communism. He declared that "National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept," and that "Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man's universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously is a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief�" The Trilateral Commission was formally established in 1973 and consisted of leaders in business, banking, government, and mass media from North America, Western Europe and Japan. David Rockefeller was founding chairman and Brzezinski founding director of the North American Branch, most of whose members were also in the CFR. In the Wall Street Journal, David Rockefeller explained that "the Trilateral Commission is, in reality, a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."
But it was not so innocent according to Jeremiah Novak, who wrote in the Atlantic (July 1977):
The Trilateralists' emphasis on international economics is not entirely disinterested, for the oil crisis forced many developing nations, with doubtful repayment abilities, to borrow excessively. All told, private multinational banks, particularly Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, have loaned nearly $52 billion to developing countries. An overhauled IMF would provide another source of credit for these nations, and would take the private banks off the hook. This proposal is the corner stone of the Trilateral plan."
Senator Barry Goldwater put it less mercifully. In his book With No Apologies, he terned the Commission "David Rockefeller's newest international cabal," and said "It is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States."
Zbigniew Brzezinski showed how serious TC ambitions were in the July 1973 Foreign Affairs, stating that "without closer American-European-Japanese cooperation the major problems of today cannot be effectively tackled, and �.the active promotion of such trilateral cooperation must now become the central priority of U.S. policy."
The best way to effect this would be for a Trilateral to soon become President. One did.
Jimmy Carter Goes to Washington
After Watergate tainted the Republican Party's image, it became probable that a Democrat would win the 1976 Presidential election. Canididate James Earl Carter was depicted by the press - and himself - as the consummate outsider to the Washington Establishment. He was, as the story went, a good ol' boy from Georgia, na�ve to the ways of the cigar-puffing, city-slicker polititians. People magazine even showed him shoveling peanuts in demins.
Typical of the press comment at the time were the words of columnist Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor, who asserted that Carter "Has that nomination without benefit of any single kingmaker, or of any power group or power lobby, or of any single segment of the American people. He truly is indebted to no one man and no group interest."
But Harsch belonged to the CFR, whose members are loath to disclose the power of the group, or of its kingmaker, David Rockefeller.
In 1973, Carter dined with the CFR chairman at the latter's Tarrytown, New York estate. Present was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was helping Rockefeller screen prospects for the Trileral Commission. Brzezinski later told Peter Pringle of the London Sunday Times that "we were impressed that Carter had opened up trade offices for the state of Georgia in Brussels and Tokyo. That seemed to fit perfectly into the concept of the Trilateral."Carter became a founding member of the Commission - and hid destiny became calculable.
Senator Goldwater wrote: David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be their ideal canidate. They helped him win the nomination and the presidency. To accomplish this purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street Bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient to the wealth of the great tax-free foundations - the media controllers represented in the membership of the CFR and the Trilateral.
Seven months before the Democratic nomination convention, the Gallup Poll found less than four percent of Democrats favoring Jimmy Carter for President. But almost overnight - like Willkie and Eisenhower before him - he became the candidate. By the time of the convention, his picture had appeared on Time's cover three times and Newsweek's twice. Time's cover artists were even instructed to make Carter resemble John F. Kennedy as much as possible.
Carter's Elitist Regime
The Trilateral Commission's predominance in the Carter administration has been pointed out by critics as disparate as Ronald Reagan and Penthouse Magazine. (The latter ran an article entitled "The Making of a President: How David Rockefeller Created Jimmy Carter.") During the campaign, however, only a few conservative sources seemed to spot the connection.
One hint that Carter was more than a peanut-chomping hayseed came in June of 1976, when the Los Angeles Times described a "task force" that helped the candidate prepare his first major foreign policy speech (which began: "The time h come for us to seek a partnership between North America, Western Europe, and Japan"). The Carter advisors enumerated by the Times were: Brzezinski, Richard Cooper, Richard Gardener, Henry Owen, Edwin O. Reischauer, Averell Harriman, Anthony Lake, Robert Bowie, Milton Katz, Abram Chayes, George Ball, and Cyrus Vance. There was one problem with the above list. Every man on it was a member of the CFR. We alluded earlier to Cooper's Forgeign Affiars article proposing an international currency, and Gardner's piece calling for "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece."
In a speech in Boston, candidate Carter said: "The people of this country know from bitter experience that we are not going to get�. Changes merely by shifting around the same group of insiders� The insiders have had their chance and they have not delived." After the election, top Carteraide Hamilton Jordan remarked: "If, after the inauguration, you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit. But that is not going to happen." But it did happen and Jordan did not quit. Carter simply shifted around "the same group of insiders" turning, like his predecessors, to the institutions built by Wall Street and the international banking establishment.
The new President appointed more than seventy men from the CFR, and over twenty members of the much smaller Trilateral Commission. Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledges in his White hOuse memoirs: "Moreover, all the key foregeign policy decision makers of the cater administration had previously served in the Trilateral Commission�" (Carter is considerably less candid in his own memoirs: he does not even mention the Commission.)
Brzezinski, of course, became National Security Advisor, the same position Kissinger had held. Victor Lasky observed in Jimmy Carter: The Man and the Myth: "The Polish-born Brzezinski was to David Rockefeller what the German-born Kissinger was to Nelson Rockefeller."
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (CFR - Trilateral Commission) was the nephew of John W Davis (founding president of the CFR). Vance, who had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has been called "a product of the inner sanctums of Yale and Wall Street." Robert Moskin commented on the CFR makeup of his departmental staff: " When Cyrus Vance was called up to Washington to Secretary of State in 1977, he took along member of Council's staff as well as of a study group on nuclear weapons. He explains: "We work with people at the Council, and know they are good."

In 1998, when The Shadows of Power was published, it said maybe only one in 500 Americans had heard of the Council on Foreign Relations. I've started my own little survey and have yet to find a single person who knows the name. The book says, "According to the CRF itself, as of June 1987, 318 of its members were current US government Officials. According to Admiral Ward, the CFR has as a goal "submergence of US sovereignty and national independence into a all-powerful one-world government."
I'd like to share the whole book with you, but I'm sure the publisher would rather you go buy it for yourself. Here is a little more to give a clearer picture:

An "international" banker is one who, among other things, loans money to the governments of nations. Lending to governments can be particularly profitable for several reasons. First, a government borrows far more than an individual or business; second, a government has unique tools with which it can guarantee repayment - such as the levying of taxes; third, a government may requite its debt through a medium more desirable than cash-by granting the banker certain privileges, for example, or giving him a say in policy.
No turn of events is more lucrative for an international banker than war-because nothing generates more government borrowing faster.
International banking was probably best epitomized by the Rothschilds, Europe's most famous financial dynasty. Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) retained one of his five sons at the home bank in Germany and dispatched the other four to run offices in England, France, Austria and Italy. The Rothschilds harvested great riches during the nineteenth century by loaning to these and other countries. Sometimes they, or their agents, financed both sides of armed conflicts -such as the Franco-Prussian War and the War between the States. As national creditors, they earned tremendous political influence.
The Rothschilds, as the foremost "power behind the throne" of Europe's central banks, savored the thought of a similar arrangement in the United States. According to Gustavus Myers in his History of the Great American Fortunes: "Under the surface, the Rothschilds long had a powerful influence in dictating American financial laws. The law records show that they were the power in the old Bank of the United States.
However, the Bank of the United States (1816-1836), an early attempt to saddle the nation with a privately controlled central bank, was abolished by President Andrew Jackson. He declared: "The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced .�are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
America heeded Jackson's warning for the remainder of the century. The tide began to turn, however, with the linking of European and US banking interests, and the growth in power of America's money barons, such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Bernard Baruch.
After a commission spent almost two years studying central banking in Europe, Senator Aldrich met secretly with Paul Warburg (an associate of the Rothschilds) and top representatives of the Morgan and Rockefeller interests. This took place at Morgan's hunting club on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. There the plan was formulated for America's central Bank: what would come to be known as the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve became law in December 1913. Ostensibly, the system was to act as a guardian of the reserves for banks; it was granted control over interest rates and the size of the national money supply. The public was induced to accept the Fed by claims that, given these powers, it would stabilize the economy, prevent further panics and bank runs. It did nothing of the kind. Not only has our country suffered through the Great Depression and numerous recessions, but inflation and federal debt-negligible problems before the fed came into existence - have plagued America ever since.
Later, Congressman Louis McFadden, who chaired the House committee on Banking and Currency from 1920 to 1931, would declare: "When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A sper-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its power but the truth is-the Fed has usurped the government."
The average American probably does not know - or even think - very much about the Federal Reserve System, but a few things should be noted about it:
Although it is called "Federal," it is privately owned.
It has never received a meaningful audit from an independent source.
It makes its own policies and is not subject to the President or the Congress. Private backs within the system select two-thirds of the directors of the twelve Federal Reserve banks; the Federal Reserve Board chooses the rest.
As to the Federal Reserve Board itself, its members are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, but, once in office, they serve fourteen year terms. Fed chairmen have routinely come from the New York Banking community, on its recommendations, and the great majority have been members of the CFR.
How did the Federal Reserve benefit the financiers who secretly designed it? First in its capacity as overseer and supplier of reserves, it gave their banks access to public funds in the US Treasury, enhancing their capacity to lend and collect interest.
Furthermore, by staffing the Federal Reserve's management with themselves or their associates, the international bankers gained effective control over the nation's money supply and interest rates - and thus over its economic life. Indeed, the Fed is authorized to create money -and thus inflate -at will. According to the Constitution, only Congress may issue money or regulate its value. The Federal Reserve Act, however, placed these functions in the hands of private bankers - to their perpetual profit. Congressman Lindbergh explained: ""The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. It may not do so immediately, the trusts want a period of inflation, because all the stocks they hold have gone down� Now if the trusts can get another period of inflation, they figure they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed."
That day of reckoning, of course, came in 1929, and the Federal Reserve has since created an endless series of booms and busts by the strategic tightening and relaxation of money and credit.
Finally, the Fed was empowered to buy and sell government securities, and to loan to member banks so that they might themselves purchase such securities, they greatly multiplying the potential for government indebtedness to the banking community.
However, if Washington was to incur debts, it had to have some means of paying them off. The solution was income tax. Prior to 1913, there was no income tax in America (except during the war between the States and early Reconstruction period). The US government survived on other sources, such as terriffs and excise taxes. As a result, it could neither spend nor borrow heavily.
Because income tax had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895, it had to be instituted by constitutional amendment. The man who brought forward the amendment in congress was the same senator who proposed the plan for the Federal Reserve - Nelson Aldrich.
One of the leading devices by which the wealthy dodge taxes is the channeling of their fortunes into tax-free foundations. The major foundations, though commonly regarded as charitable institutions, often use their grant-making powers to advance the interests of their founders. The Rockefeller foundation, for example, has poured millions into the CFR, which in turn serves as the Establishment's main bridge of influence to the US government. By the time the income tax became law in 1913, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations were already operating.
Income tax didn't soak the rich, it soaked the middle class. Because it was a graduated tax, it tended to prevent anyone from raising into affluence. Thus it acted to consolidate the wealth of the entrenched interest, and protect them from new competition.
The year 1913 was an ominous one-there now existed the means to loan the government colossal sums (the Fed) and the means to exact repayment (income tax). All that was needed now was a good reason for Washington to borrow.
In 1914, World War I erupted on the European continent. America eventually participated, and as a result her national debt soared from $1 billion to $25 billion. Many historians would have us believe that this tro of events-the income tax, the Fed, and the war-was a coincidence. But too often history has been written by authors financed by foundations, in books manufactured by Establishment publishing houses. Many more "coincidences" were yet to trouble the American people in this century.
To help pay off the harsh reparations forced on it by the Versailles Treaty, Germany printed outrageous quanties of paper money, leading to one of the most disastrous inflations in history. It was so severe that 100 million marks could not buy a box of matches. The Dawes Plan (1924) and the abortive Young Plan (1930) were international measures adopted to solve Germany's payment troubles. J.P. Morgan had a heavy hand in both. The plans were named after the two American bankers who headed the committees that originated them. How much the CFR contributed to the plans conceptually is arguable, but it should be noted that both Charles Dawes and Owen Young were Council members. Not surprisingly, the Dawes Plan called for massive loans to Germany. Dr. Carroll Quigley said of the undertaking: "It is worthy to note that this system was set up by the international bankers and that the subsequent leading of other peoples money to Germany was very profitable to these bankers."
David Lloyd George, who had been British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, stated: "The international bankers dictated the Dawes reparation settlement� they swept statesmen, politicians and journalists to one side and issued their orders with the imperviousness of absolute monarchs who know that there was no appeal from their ruthless decrees.'
Profit and arrogance, however, were overshadowed by a far more sinister aspect to the new reparations program. Three German cartels in particular were beneficiaries of credit under the Dawes Plan. This trio became the industrial backbone of the Nazi war machine, and the financial backbone of Adolph Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
Of the three cartels, the chemical enterprise I.G. Farben stands out. The Farben company received significant assistance under the Dawes Plan, including a flotation of $30 million from the Rockefellers' National City Bank. I.G. Farben grew to be the largest chemical concern in the world.
After World War II, an investigation by the US War Department noted: "Without I.G.'s immense productive facilities, its intense research and vast international affiliations, Germany's prosecution of the war would have been unthinkable and impossible�"

Ralph Waldo Emerson's entire essay, Self-Reliance, can be read here, but these are some great quotes:

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he tries.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, - the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; - and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, - means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, - one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, - painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, - but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. - But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, - how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, - came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it."
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Please enlighten us with brilliance you've found. Email: solomax(at)gmail.com