The Power to Save the World |
Henry Guy |
Goodwill is going to save the world. It will bridge the chasm separating enemies, heal ancient wounds, and surmount our insurmountable problems. Through goodwill we will realize our birthright: the human family living in intelligently applied love. This is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise, even though all these things will not happen by then. Given the problems besetting the world today, many are inclined to dismiss these statements as Pollyannaism of the worst kind. Have I not seen the news? Have I not felt the sting of war? Can I not see the institutionalization of hate? Am I insensitive to the injustice and suffering in this world? I watch the news and am well aware of the hate and the suffering. Yet something in me refuses to see our worst triumphing over our best. Deep down, in the sacred core of our being, all of us know that goodness will prevail. Yet it is so easy to fall into a kind of trap in human consciousness that leads us to believe that goodness will not prevail. When human inhumanity travesties what is good and true and beautiful, it is the travesty that consumes our attention, and we tend to forget all else. In forgetting we temporarily lose the very part of ourselves that could right the wrong, and in this state of loss we usually wrong the wrong. In this state of loss, when one is hated, it is reflexive to hate back, and when hurt to hurt back. Then the hate of the offended becomes the catalyst for another’s hate, and on and on it goes as it has since the dawn of humanity. In the light of how long we have fallen into this trap, it becomes easy to think this will never change. But something has changed, something fundamental: love lives. Sure, we get it all mixed up and twisted and diminished, but love does live. We know it lives because we see it living in human compassion and unselfishness; we hear it in sincerity, feel its grace in healing, and are awed by its sacrifice. It is all around us, it is in us, and many of us are beginning to realize that at the core, we are love. To some extent or other, most of us have experienced it and sensed its transformative, divine power. If our core is love, it is buried in matter. Matter is not exactly the opposite of love, but it lacks love. Love attracts, unites, and becomes one; matter repels, disassociates, and becomes many. Wrapped in our individuality, it is easy to lose love. It is even easier when that individuality is attacked. We could say that the story of humanity is the movement of our identity back and forth between the qualities of love and the qualities of matter, between caring for others and a selfish caring for the self, between forgiveness and revenge, benevolence and hate, union and division. Goodwill is the way out of the trap; it is love initiated, strengthened, and made steadfast by the will. In its purest form, goodwill is the will to love, no matter what. During attack the will to love protects the presence of love. It refuses to allow the one attacked to demonize or dehumanize the attacker. It arrests the natural instinct of the attacked to counter attack. It keeps the attacked more whole than the attacker, for all to see. Well known proponents of goodwill like Jesus, Gandhi, and M. L. King, vanquished their enemies—hate and injustice—by loving their attackers. By willing to remain love, they revealed what it is like to live fully from the core, come what may. They may have died in the process, but their accomplishments changed human possibility forever. Most discount the power of goodwill because they equate it with a rather mild feeling of benevolence. While it can generate such a feeling, goodwill is so much more. It is the prime directive (adjusted for our capacities) of the One in Whom we live and move and have our being. We certainly do not know the full intention of this great Being, but we know all we need to know in the phrase “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” This Being intends that good, truth, and beauty happen. When we put ourselves in the flow of this impelling energy, we could say that we “have” or “radiate” goodwill. When out of the flow, we could say we lack goodwill. All of us can tell when we are in and when we are out of the flow, but more importantly, others can too. When goodwill flows through a human being, all the surrounding human beings are affected. They are magnetized to the same intentional goodness, and it becomes easier for each one to get in the flow and become radiating points of goodwill. And this is how goodwill will save the world: tiny human points radiating to and magnetizing others, who then radiate and magnetize others, until humankind is awash in goodwill. This scenario only sounds too good to be true, until one tries it. Consciously directed goodwill has a profound effect one one’s life and relationships. Almost everyone has experienced it to a certain extent, but what few of us have experienced is profound and sustained goodwill. But then, if it is so good why can’t we sustain it? Mostly because we tend to live in the past. By “living in the past” I do not mean simply thinking about past events. To see this past, one only has to see what a human being is: a dynamic agent of creation. The natural process of the human system is to generate thoughts and imbue them with feeling; this combination almost always generates an effect—an event or object. The thought / feeling (being the parent) gives the effect its characteristics; the effect is thus a symbol of the original thought. You might be thinking that this does not apply to you because you are not the creative type. Any of us may or may not be creating artistic or technological events or objects, but all of us are using thought to create our lives. Every thought, to some extent or other, leads to an event or object in our lives. The nature of our relationships, work, health, objects surrounding us—the circumstances of our lives—are drawn to us and created by the thoughts we think. We have two basic avenues from which to generate the thought. One is the future—our possibilities, what could be—and the other is the past—our previous thoughts embodied in the events and objects we find in the present. So if we are looking at what is right in front of us, we are seeing the effect of what we thought in the past. The default state for a human being is to constantly check the circumstances of his or her life and appraise it, and thus the effects of past thoughts (one’s circumstances) inspire one’s new thoughts. It makes a rather closed loop. No wonder new circumstances are almost always identical to the old circumstances; or said another way, we don't seem to have much power to change our circumstances or change the world. A good example of this is war. During a war, the enemies usually hate each other, and the hate causes the terrible inhumanity each side pours forth on the other. We see war and find it terrible. We keep running the same thought around and around in our minds: war is terrible. Even though we all hate war, these thoughts become the basis of an apparently endless supply of war that most of us hate. If we wanted to end war, we would fill our minds with thoughts about something other than war. Watching the news all day does not help. News outlets are in the business of satisfying our natural desire to see what is going wrong. The incessant reporting of war will eventually bring us to the end of a specific war, but the price is a huge backlog of thought about war; that backlog will spawn human creation, most probably another war. There is a saying from the mid-1900’s: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The reason we keep coming is because we have been thinking about war. We would quit coming when we found something better to think about. I am definitely not suggesting that we never listen to the news or attempt to avoid knowing how bad we can be to each other. I am suggesting that we know about it enough to recognize where we do not want to go, but expend most of our thought life on where we do want to go. It is not that hard to see where we want to go. Most of us want to live lives of love applied intelligently in all our relationships. We want to live meaningful lives, and to stand for our highest principles. We want our lives and our world to be fair, just, honest, and beautiful. We want our nations, religions, races, and ideologies to thrive because each receives respect and loving support from the others. We know where we want to go so well the words are platitudinous. Goodwill—the steadfast will that goodness happen—will take us there. Fortunately not every human being has to consciously and intentionally apply goodwill at the same time, but it has to start with the ones who can. Those individuals have two basic tasks. One is to lift up their eyes from the circumstances of their own lives and from the world as it is, and see what the good, the true, and the beautiful would actually be like if humanity lived it. What would the individual life be like? What would the family life be like? What would the community, the nation, and the community of nations, the races, and religions be like? What would they look like? What would they feel like? What would happen? The ones who can see this with some clairity, realism, and practicality will set up the mental framework from which the new life will take form. This sounds easy, but it is not. The tendency is to recognize that this would be a good thing to do, hope someone does it, and immediately return to monitoring and thinking about life as it is. To actually set aside part of one’s life, on a regular basis, to think about what could be, is rare. A great help to the process is to stimulate one’s thinking by those who are already seeing possibilities. Read the works of the great thinkers of the ages and most importantly works of modern visionaries. This stimulates what is desperately needed: fresh, widespread thinking about the good, the true, and the beautiful, and the possibilities this kind of thinking reveals. The other basic task is to apply goodwill in one’s life. Of course this is even more difficult. This is the day-to-day challenge of facing the hate, injustice, corruption, and meanness in this world while not losing the state of goodwill. One has to become adept at aligning one’s own will with the Will of the One in Whom we live and move and have our being. Within that greater Will lies the capacity to live love—divine Love—in any circumstance. We all hope for a better world. Goodwill is the tool we need to bring it to reality. |
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Henry Guy
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