An Invitation to Make a Decision
The distress patterns continue to be imposed. Oppression continues to take place. The very existence of complex life is threatened. “Somebody ought to do something.”
On the one hand, we have the vista of a delicious world where everyone is nice, and everyone is safe, and everyone is well fed and eager, and learning is progressing and exciting. On the other hand, there is the vista of a burned-up wasteland of a planet.
Someone ought to make the decision to go the right way. I invite this quite marvelous collection of people that are assembled here in this World Conference to make that decision. I do not ask you to do it as a group. That is awkward and cumbersome and unworkable. I invite each one of you to decide to be the one that sees that humanity takes this road.
We have ample theoretical reasons to think that doing this is possible. We have reached this clarity about our freedom of decision. Where it has been applied, counseling begins to walk on tall legs. Counseling and re-emergence begin to work very well.
The advanced theoretical insights we have about our total freedom of decision can be applied eagerly. The slow process of re-emergence, which for many of us has gone on for years—the talking about our distresses until somehow we could cry a little bit about them while the great pile was slowly dissipated—can be turned into a wholesale, rapid onslaught.
Reprinted from pages 235 to 236 of “Taking Our Bearings,” in The Longer View
(Present Time 211, April 2023)