The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
A Meditation
I was just feeling some grief before you came and found me.
Looking out at the water there.
Birds diving for fish.
You know, seals out there.
And...
I just felt like
such sadness that
there are few of them than they're used to be.
And some there may be none.
You know. And I thought
how important is it to me
that there's a future with birds and fish and seals.
It's
It's not
that I'm worried about my future.
It's not that I'm worried about "Will I survive in a planet...
where the biosphere is dead?"
It's because
It's just... It...
It hurts what's happening.
As soon as I am in contact with beauty
the second thing that comes
usually
is pain.
And I think it's almost a conditioned response from having had that
beauty crushed.
When I was younger
the world that surrounded was still very much
the familiar old story that told me how to live a life.
You study hard to get good grades, get a good job, you make wise investments.
And to repudiate that was very audacious.
We live in a very very brutal system.
Not only brutal toward those that we can easily see as victims.
But equally brutal toward the perpetrators.
Otherwise how would they become the perpetrators.
What has to happen to a human being
for them to do the things that people do to each other.
A lot of people look at the state of the planet with despair.
Because the truth has been out there
for decades now about what we're doing to the biosphere
and what's going to happen if we keep doing it.
And it looks like the surveillance state and the military-industrial complex
and the concentration of media and all that stuff is just
stronger than ever.
I think what's happening is that underneath the surface
the ideological core of our civilization is hollowing out.
The elites no longer believe their own ideology.
They're just going through the motions.
Everyone participates but nobody believes.
In order to find your way
you must get lost.
There's a vast territory
between what we're trying to leave behind and where we want to go.
And we don't have any maps for that territory.
People are always talking about how do we create a movement.
How do we turn our organization.
How we transition from an organization to a movement.
This is not something that one can do.
A movement is not something that one creates.
A movement creates us.
What we know how to create
is based on a knowledge of creation.
A knowledge or an understanding of cause and effect that's part of the old story.
We can't limit ourselves to the understandings that we have already.
We have to step into the unknown.
Which really means stepping into service. Stepping into the gift, stepping into...
the thing that can happen that's outside of ourselves that we don't know how to make happen.
Because we have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.
Or, let's say, to the extent that we believe in it we can serve it.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community