What to do: a mustard seed.

Recently I was confronted with a cloud of ideas that had to do with solving this or that problem in the world. This came in the form of a letter by e-mail from someone concerned with the world situation. This was my reply:

I have considered this matter for years, since my childhood. At first I took it personally, as in dealing with "my" problem. How could I do otherwise? A child learns to make do in his own environment. But as I grew up, I saw that there were others who were having the same problems as I was. I started to postulate the problem as one that "we" had, or as the problem of a bigger "I." A lot of "us" who are part of a "we" make a larger "I." Later, I found out some astonishing properties of this "I." There is even a book now, by a doctor, called The I that is we.

To make a long story short, I realized that we make our problem(s) worse by labeling them as specific to a group. In other words, names divide. I saw clearly that we disipate our energies and fight our like minded brethren by calling a problem as having specifically to do with a group o other person. We call it a problem with American teens, or with immigrants to our country, or of the illiterate in our cities, or the homeless in Chicago. We call it the terrorists, the Mafia, or the government, or the corporations o the banks. We even call it religion and the love of God. We manifest it as a race by acting like animals that defacate in the space that they live without cleaning it up.

What we fail to notice is that in dividing it up like that and not cleaning up our mess, we are missing the core perception of the problem, which is the only level at which we can do any good or effect any real change other than cosmetic. Without naming all the links in the chain, we can go directly to the piece that anchors the problem in our experience. That piece is Identity.

All problems are expressions of the activity of defining identity. Fear is the feeling of threatened identity, love is the feeling of validated identity. Fear is the threat of being a solitary entity against a hostile environment, Love is the feeling of being so One with it all that any threat of the perceived environment is trivial.

What we might need to address is how the human system of conscious awareness, which has now been proved to stem from an identical source in Africa, can globally function at every level of organization with the result of promoting and fostering the feeling of Unity with all his fellow humans, but especially with that "I" that is we.

The Human Idea is of a piece. We now know that at many levels, from the genetic to the cosmic. What we don't know is how to install a pattern of behavior in our children that is big enough to accommodate growth into a cooperative global economy. Now remember, that "economy" stems from a word that means "household management." I cannot think of a more appropriate word to encompass the enormity of all the levels of human experience from internal physiopsycospiritual health to the finding of pied a terre's sin the stars.

In the same way that my Mentor stated that "Consciousness is the Light to the Awareness of Ideas and thoughts" we can and must, if we wish to continue as a productive growing species, proceed in our relations with each other from the most fundamental of ideas. This idea has to be rooted in the muscles so deeply that we cannot harm another. and that brings it back to Identity. If I am established in the feeling that the other person is myself wearing another suit, how could I do harm? Would I harm myself? The Bhagevad Gita says "Established in Unity, act." The two forms of the golden rule say "do unto others as you would have done unto you." and "Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you." It also o says "Know ThySelf." Could this last have a greater fruit that an experiential knowledge of the "I" that is we? Who would not want to help themselves?

This alone may be our only fundamental problem, and our only task might be to see the fundamental unity of all the seemingly seperate systems that constitutes our world. The most basic system is the human pattern and we share it, each an every single an plural one of us. We carry within us, as our own conscious awareness, the solution to all our ills. It is the recognition that WE ARE ONE is not platitude, it is a Way, but as GK Chesterton said about Christianity, "it's not that (it) doesn't work, it just hasn't been tried yet."