4
agenda” political issue into something

issue relevant to a time of simmering
global war?
If a politician of true courage made this



Fluxion
his primary conviction, and if he were
given the power to carry it out, in two
or three generations, the world would
vision
be a very different place. In “Don Juan
in Hell,” Bernard Shaw’s demon tells
us the truth we don’t want to hear: that
we are a race that is not quite complete.
Otherwise we would not keep making
war after war after war in the name of
religion or whatever excuse we make for
ourselves. It’s fantastic! We try and we
try to make peace—which is what we say
we really want—and still the war goes on.
It doesn’t stop, even when there is not a
real reason. We could do very well with
much less oil. Truthfully, we could even
do without oil altogether. But we choose
not to, so we wage a war for oil. There
are dead children in Iraq because we will
not choose to examine our lives, let go of
our fear, and try to make a world based
on love. This is what we say we really
want, but we act in a way that makes our
deepest wish impossible to fulfill!
What you’ve just described is a situation
of profound collective neurosis. What’s
at the bottom of that? is it just a matter
of attention or waking up? Or is there
actually some sort of evolutionary
thing involved?
I don’t know. We have to hope that
it’s just an echo of the violence of the
20th century. I have to hope we learned
something from that history, that we are
truly better than that. But in the end we
just have to accept that this is the way
it is—we have to start at this point. This
goes back to the idea of vivid awareness:
At the very least we have to recognize
what’s going on.
What are you grateful for? i expect the
first thing you’d want to say is the people
around you. What after that?
Nature, flowers, my surroundings. Of
course you have to be grateful to see the
thing and not to kill the thing that you
see! But I also think about the fact that I
have the privilege to be in this place. I’m
not in a dungeon with no air to breathe.
It’s important to remember everything is
really quite beautiful. This place where
we find ourselves—it’s miraculous if you
really to stop to pay attention to it and
see it as it really is.
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