Once upon a time long ago I determined that society was so corrupt and so below my own ideals that I should just drop out and seek the isolation of some commune or monastery or some other utopian venture…Stephen Gaskin’s Farm in Tennessee certainly appealed to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gaskin
Try Stephens book Monday Night Class for a hippie’s counter culture perspective:
“Monday Night Class-a weekly event in San Francisco conducted by Stephen Gaskin during the heyday of the hippies-attracted over 2,000 people each week. This new edition is a collection of the original transcripts from these historic meetings, with new commentary by Stephen from today’s perspective.
In these transcripts Stephen explores the laws that govern the spiritual plane, drawing on sources as varied as the Bible, Zen Buddhism, and the daily newspapers, interpreting the visions of the ’60s generation with humor and affection. Includes photographs from Monday Night Class in San Francisco.”
I left home at age 19 to hitchhike thousands of miles to join a Gurdjiefian community in Northern California. I wrote them to announce my intentions and had already departed home prior to their gentle suggestion to study and grow in-place for a season came back to me. When I arrived at the community unexpectedly I was warmly welcomed, well fed, and gently redirected …hahaha …or sweetly rejected!
Actually…I was advised to go to a nearby town/village and secure employment and housing and return every weekend to work in the gardens and fields of the community and fellowship. I protested as to the difficulty and time commitment required. After all, I was here for enlightenment, not settling into a arduous and demanding lifestyle of toil and subsistence.
The leader smiled and kindly said to me – “Making one’s place and way in the world is not easy, but it is infinitely easier than enlightenment!!” What a wise and gentle soul. The culture of becoming, the counter culture of being (Be Here Now) are not for the feint hearted or lazy. I was faced with the reality that what I wanted was to drop out of a system and culture I objected to …but now, apparently, hoped merely to become a parasite, feeding off the system I despised. My so called escape from social hypocrisy was itself hypocritical.
There are many aspects of the counter culture of my generation that are positive and wise and idealistic and pragmatic too. But some of us, like me, were unworthy pretenders, too young perhaps still, impatient and naive and lazy and foolish pleasure seekers and responsibility avoiders!!
Social evolution and the new world order require effort and strength and an idealism that leads to action and commitment and ambitious collaborations. Enlightenment is not something one finds or has given or loaned. The discovery of truth is more like hard rock mining…lots of pick and shovel work to extract ore from earth, followed by arduous sifting and washing to glean gold from stone. Real truth seekers soon discover there’s lots of rubble in which the gold hides itself from plain view and easy pickings!
But sincere and honest effort is rewarded…eventually! I found out I must put my own shoulder to the wheel of social evolution and strive to demonstrate my ideals within my tribe and community, rather than run away from the disappointments and failures and uncertainties which beset all who likewise give voice and muscle to making a better world…most of us in small ways but all who find and share truth, beauty, and goodness do create the New World Order which the Most Highs and the Angels also work to create. We become their tools and hands and agents of change if we attach our branch to the vine of love and change comes…sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. The best and fastest way to change the world, we are taught, is to change ourselves first!!
I found it was my own reality perspective and philosophy of living that needed attention and attenuation. My disappointment and impatience was more about my own immaturity than anyone else’s failures. I slowly learned to see and appreciate the backtrail of my fellows and their own struggles to stay true to idealism and dreams of a better world.
My suffering was not due to anything anyone else had or had not done, but instead resulted from my own misguided motives, intentions, priorities, and choices. The new world order I perceived eventually was a result of reordering and realigning my perception of the world and its evolutionary trajectory.
The UB teaches that our time unit perspective of reality determines our reality perception and reflects either our own immaturity and impatience and blind disappointment… or it reveals our emerging objectivity and recognition of evolutionary progress. Experiential wisdom is the prize of personal growth and maturity.
19:1.6 (215.3) Even in the study of man’s biologic evolution on Urantia, there are grave objections to the exclusive historic approach to his present-day status and his current problems. The true perspective of any reality problem—human or divine, terrestrial or cosmic—can be had only by the full and unprejudiced study and correlation of three phases of universe reality: origin, history, and destiny. The proper understanding of these three experiential realities affords the basis for a wise estimate of the current status.
99:7.2 (1092.6) Political science must effect the reconstruction of economics and industry by the techniques it learns from the social sciences and by the insights and motives supplied by religious living. In all social reconstruction religion provides a stabilizing loyalty to a transcendent object, a steadying goal beyond and above the immediate and temporal objective. In the midst of the confusions of a rapidly changing environment mortal man needs the sustenance of a far-flung cosmic perspective.
99:7.3 (1093.1) Religion inspires man to live courageously and joyfully on the face of the earth; it joins patience with passion, insight to zeal, sympathy with power, and ideals with energy.
99:7.4 (1093.2) Man can never wisely decide temporal issues or transcend the selfishness of personal interests unless he meditates in the presence of the sovereignty of God and reckons with the realities of divine meanings and spiritual values.
99:7.5 (1093.3) Economic interdependence and social fraternity will ultimately conduce to brotherhood. Man is naturally a dreamer, but science is sobering him so that religion can presently activate him with far less danger of precipitating fanatical reactions. Economic necessities tie man up with reality, and personal religious experience brings this same man face to face with the eternal realities of an ever-expanding and progressing cosmic citizenship.
118:1.4 (1295.4) Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
118:1.5 (1295.5) In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.
118:1.6 (1295.6) Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.
118:1.7 (1295.7) To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.
118:1.8 (1295.8) The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
A little Zen: Things are not as they appear… and neither are they different.
If things are disappointing to you, is that due to things or others …or you? To change the world, change yourself first we are taught. The appearance of things is not determined by the things or even by others but by ourselves.
Things are different than they appear to us and their appearance is determined by our maturity and wisdom or by their lack. Objectivity is a result of wisdom and subjectivity is the lack of wisdom. But things are only different than they appear by us changing how they appear to us! Which requires changing us.
This paradox is profoundly important… we change things and the appearance of things by changing ourselves, not by changing things. Or so I understand the teachings of the UB.
Shall we change the world? Begin within…and express the Divine connection found there!
195:7.4 (2078.7) Paradise values of eternity and infinity, of truth, beauty, and goodness, are concealed within the facts of the phenomena of the universes of time and space. But it requires the eye of faith in a spirit-born mortal to detect and discern these spiritual values.
195:7.5 (2078.8) The realities and values of spiritual progress are not a “psychologic projection”—a mere glorified daydream of the material mind. Such things are the spiritual forecasts of the indwelling Adjuster, the spirit of God living in the mind of man. And let not your dabblings with the faintly glimpsed findings of “relativity” disturb your concepts of the eternity and infinity of God. And in all your solicitation concerning the necessity for self-expression do not make the mistake of failing to provide for Adjuster-expression, the manifestation of your real and better self.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
