Sunitus - De instelling van de geest

If someone goes the extra mile, a thing is accomplished and the world continues to exist. – The Revolutionary

I would like to take some of your time to explore with you what a possible perfect world might look like. But I am going to look beyond what is right to do, at the preferred consequences of our actions.

There are many scenarios for bad, worse and worst cases, but hardly any for a situation better than the present one, except vain wishes for a world without pain. We do have concepts for a better world beyond this one– the Kingdom of Heaven, Paradise – but we do not seem to have the drive to think out a specific best-case scenario for this specific world, which is physical and therefore embodies also suffering and death.

Why do we not have this drive? I’ll tell you why not – because it is too difficult, too hard on us to act on it. It is of course far easier to wait for a perfect world after death, simply wait out the Earthly life while obeying certain rules, and it is also easier to try to live one’s own life as best as one can. Even though both these moralities may be at the basis of wonderful lives, they are not the highest morality, not the one presenting the greatest challenge. There is one thing for which we still have to take the responsibility as a civilization, and the moment for this is coming closer and closer.

Presently, we hide behind state-conflicts, poverty and terrorism, problems which divide us and draw away our attention from the idea that as technology advances, everything becomes connected – all becomes one. It is easy to draw attention away from this idea, because it is not evidently true to everyone, for many it is even hard to believe. Since I believe it is true, I also believe it is possible to organize the world accordingly, and that to an extent, ‘the world’ must always have been organized like this, as far as ‘the world’ extended at any time for any civilization.

Awareness of unity cannot be taken for granted, as it has to be achieved. Like all science, philosophy and religion, a valuable idea, thought or mind state is the result of diligence and hard work, consistent practice of a certain method. There have been methods by which to understand, organize and interconnect the Roman or the Ottoman Empire, but there is (or so it seems) no method by which we can understand, construct and interconnect the entire world. The technology is there, but not the psychological conception. There are only psychological methods to formulate ideas for a divided world. Every religion and political theory carries inside itself the seed of its own opposition. All except one – holism. The thought that all creatures, as well as all matter and energy are part of one balanced system, which can be approached as a conscious entity.

If we take this worldview there are several consequences, which I cannot all address at this point. I will presently stress only one aspect.

Within a universal entity, where all that lives and moves is interconnected, the only ‘sin’ or violation of the universal law would be to not do anything. To remain still, changeless. Non-activity is the only thing that could possibly disrupt the path of electricity within the cosmic circuitry. This is why the devil is associated with laziness. Collapse of activity indirectly causes violence as it obstructs forces, and forces these forces to break through the obstruction by excessive force: violence. The one law of holism is: act or be destroyed.

There is no other inherent moral law to a holistic universe except the extrapolation of the necessity to act to the entire world, which leads to a second law. The primary and secondary laws are:

We must

1) act

2) not obstruct others to act.

If these two commands are met, we have a society which will certainly not be perfect in the sense of painless, but it will be better than this one nonetheless. It can be done, and if we insist that that it should be done, it will be done. But not all are holists; many choose easier rules to follow.