Читать книгу Ultimate Defense - Fredric F. Clair - Страница 10

PERSONAL

PREPARATION

It is so much a conversational commonplace to shrug off the idea of using the precepts as actual rules for everyday living that a person who wishes to practice them is doubly handicapped. He is left in doubt that they will work at all in the atmosphere of tension, anxiety, and even of voracity that seems to surround him. And there is little support for his attempt in any easily available accumulation of experience along such lines, or through any widely circulated analysis of its implications. In part, these conditions obtain because the tenets have been invested with an aura of unnatural remoteness, which insulates them from life, discourages general first-hand familiarity with them, and tends to isolate anyone who aspires to apply them. The precepts are thus placed out of reach, the practitioner out of touch, and an elaborate alibi for failing to follow them is conveniently established in advance (or in the absence) of any general effort to use them. Everyone feels justified who refuses seriously to entertain ideas which are customarily defined at the outset as "unworkable," and of which exemplification is regarded as "abnormal."

Perhaps, also, these principles are often dismissed without real trial because of a partially accurate apprehension that their effectuation would expose person, psyche, and society to unwonted upheaval. Even to contemplate the serious implementation of these truths awakens in many of us an awkward, inarticulate uneasiness—an elemental foreboding of physical assault and material deprivation. Utterly forgetting Who, and what Forces, might provide for and protect us, we scramble back behind the barrier of business-as-usual, covering an inglorious retreat with the querulous complaint that all who accept the tenets are at the mercy of those who do not.

Whatever the reasons, it has been a habit of humans throughout history to hide from themselves the unsophisticated simplicity of their greatest truths under matted layers of dispute and dissension. Not merely a possibility, but a definite promise, of perpetual peace has thus been, in effect, screened away from the basic bulk of mankind. And sporadic efforts to realize upon that promise have soon been smothered. Confronted as we are with an alternative of imminent and utter erasure, our first concern should be to stop weaving new threads into this tangle of wrangling; and our second, to begin unraveling it. Whether the race is to succeed in doing these things, and whether there is to be any general application of the some half-dozen essentials in which the great teachings coincide, must be answered by each individual in his inalienable capacity as a representative of the human race. It is only appropriate for another person, (even though he may be a proponent of applying the recommendations of the Masters as a general remedy for our socio-technical disorders), to suggest the nature of that remedy and to propose a way to use it. It is the consensus of the teachings themselves, however, that each of us must, out of individual initiative, change the way we think, so as to change the way we live, in order to live at all. They tell us how the change may be accomplished; something of its broad outlines; and the result to be expected. Unquestionably, men have tried repeatedly and sincerely to avail themselves of this same remedy; but just as unquestionably, they have each time failed to secure any sure and lasting success. And the common denominator of those failures has been the endeavor to adapt the principles instead of simply adopting them.

The pattern of the precepts is an endless ellipse of mutual corroboration; and they are internally consistent as well as integrally complete. Their implications flow so seamlessly together, and their connotations are so interlocked, that subjective insertions, selective editing, or accommodative alterations become obvious attempts to jeopardize the utility of the whole. For example, it is possible to forego force and violence only if you forswear the desire for position or possession, for the attainment and maintenance of both depend upon potential or actual compulsion. Similarly, the avoidance of anger, or of anxiety, hinges upon relinquishing both avidity for dominance and reliance upon material powers. Like linkages are traceable among all of the tenets, in all permutations.

This means that in order to see the precepts as normal conventions for day-to-day behavior, our vision has to be accommodated to them, rather than the reverse. They must be viewed undistorted and full-focus as literal, plausible, applicable instructions, rather than as shimmering, unattainable mirages with our own intellectual blind spots projected upon them. Indeed, adequate correction of our customary outlook may include altering ideas, modifying major concepts, reshaping ingrained habits, redefining many of our values. A measure of the margin by which man has traditionally misconstrued the message of the tenets is that to regard them as specific social proposals brings us to the brink of thinking so unfamiliar as to be mind-shaking in its strangeness.

There are certain attitudes which participants in a program for implementing the remedy would want to maintain consistently and insistently, sustaining them upon policy alone when reason is exhausted. These are tacit translations of the broad basic themes of the tenets into living realities in every instantaneous relationship. They would form a kind of ambient embodiment of the precepts, with which one would infuse his personal plenum. These patterns of method and manner would form the true dynamics of the program. They could convey its content more loudly than any amount of language; and their absence would give our strongest words the lie. They need not so much be spoken as displayed. The essence of them should pervade every part of the program, and permeate the climate of every contact from its inception. Above all, we should remember our most constant and intimate human relationship: we can best prepare to show these attitudes to others by the silent and private practice of exhibiting them toward ourselves.

The first of these is a calm presumption of inevitable success. This feeling of ultimate assurance would stem from the certainty that there is no force anywhere in the universe capable of preventing pursuit of the program which would do so. A constructive companion-postulate to this conviction would be the stipulation that the strictures of the precepts can be carried out invariably and without exception by anyone, anywhere, at any time and under all conditions, granting the desire to do so, and the willingness to learn how.

Another in this galaxy of new viewpoints might be termed the "good workman" complex. The program would seem to require of participants the quiet competence usually associated with master craftsmen, doing their job well for its own sake without need or thought of approbation. The emphasis would be upon anonymity. Those who seek to further the formula would have a comforting anticipation of ultimate success, the relaxed assurance that openly and easily shares information with others, and a willingness to improve skills. There would be a monumental disinclination to be hurried, or to quit, and an unexcitable thoroughness. There would be no toying with or trivializing of the "tools," these truths.

Many of the basic attitudes of the program are the result of direct, subjective application of the precepts, regarded as specific injunctions that merit unswerving observance. This treatment of them as literal imperatives would permit no temporary suspension, easy rationalization, or neglect, upon weak and specious excuses. They would not be relegated to virtual oblivion by reservation to special or convenient occasions. Ingenuity and zest devoted to honoring, rather than evading, them might show us ways to avoid even indirect condonation of breaches, by refusing to benefit therefrom.

The constructive practicality of approach would be carried out to the full reasonable limits of a common-sense interpretation of the plain meaning of the tenets. For instance, the strictures against force and violence clearly extend also to mental and emotional substitutes for the common, overt, physical forms. Consequently, one ought not to quarrel with anyone, about anything, at any time, under any circumstances. But it is just as clear that one should do nothing that can be remotely construed as even approving such activities; and by simple lateral expansion, one should hardly feel free to indulge in pursuits so provocative to conflict as the making of disparaging comments against other persons, their efforts, or their attributes. By the same token, the direction never to steal is a plain prohibition against theft by such obvious indirection as the giving of false information, or the concealment of facts. The most elementary breadth of application would ban every sort of lying, duplicity, and deception. The willing employer would easily understand the stricture to prevent the use or possession of anything secured through means contrary to it; and he would extend it positively to permit only his employment or enjoyment of those things known definitely to be his own, openly earned through honest effort.

It is a bit embarrassing, and may seem absurd, to mention matters of such rudimentary morality before enlightened, modern adults. It is shameful to have any need to do so. But perhaps our general juvenility in this area is explainable (if not excusable) through our traditional pattern of validating codes of conduct in nebulous metaphysical terms, or of basing moral correction upon the suspect psychological grounds of the preferences of self-admitted superiors-in-some-respect. In any case, the confusion is perpetuated in each generation by the prevalent parental response to childrens' inquiries for the objective basis of morality with an evasion of the issue under the smokescreen of guilty and annoyed irrationalities.

The rationale for pursuing this program should be simple personal preference, based on the sheer fact of its superior productivity. We who accept the remedy would do so on the flat ground that we want to, because we want stability, serenity, and peace. We must share these with others to have them undisturbed ourselves. We are convinced that on net balance, violation of the tenets never produces the security or happiness for which they are ostensibly discarded or abridged, but yields only the contrary—pain, strain, insanity and illness, whether for the person or the group. We recognize in cold reality that the hectic, hurrying, hungry hunt for attention and adulation that is pandemic among us only thrusts away affection, which is our real need. We follow the remedy because nothing else works.

So, another of the preparatory general attitudes is the predication of the practicality, and the practicability, of the tenets. An easy, tacit acceptance of the remedy as believable and useable, coupled with a matter-of-fact assumption that anyone at all has capacity to understand and practice it, helps to inculcate it in the beholder at a sub-verbal, thus sub-arguable, level. The presumption is that the remedy can be and will be applied in everyday life by ordinary people, in a widening range. Advocation of, and acquiescence to, such a prospect can be most effective if conveyed through constant personal display. By silent demonstration, we can reiterate endlessly and unequivocably, a confident conviction that these are the rules that everyone or anyone can and should obey. The insidious current suggestion that this code of morality is indecipherable by and unattainable to ordinary mortals can be offset and overcome by the indisputable fact of one's own performance. Only an undeniable personal exhibition that this is the proper prescription for human conduct at all times and in all places can dispel the decadent notion that the precepts are the province only of special persons, or are for use only on special occasions. The tenor of every act in the presence of others would be that these rules are easy to learn, the habits of conformity easy to acquire, progress under them self-generating, and the process completely self-rewarding. The tone of one's behavior would be that of a person who plays the game of life strictly by the best available rules, so that it will have the only pleasure any game can afford—that of voluntary participation in an enjoyable, mutual endeavor. The theme of one's thinking would be that here is a fundamental formula for human behavior so explosively simple and so limitlessly beneficial that we ought all to feel somewhat silly for not having tried it, on its own merits and under its own criteria, long since. Knowing that universal acceptance is mandatory, but that application is the peculiar personal problem of each individual, we would acknowledge both necessities by beginning each within ourselves to reconstruct, under this historically old, but operationally nascently new blueprint, our outlooks upon, and functional relationships to, ourselves, our fellow men, and the Creating Cosmos.

An initial emphasis upon unspoken adherence to these principles has still another important reason. For the remedy to have any general effect, it must be widely disseminated and intensively employed. Yet, by the word of the tenets themselves, each individual must on his own unweighted initiative embrace them. Also, we know that after the remedy is discovered by a person, it must either grow through regular use or it will wither and die. Further, we are aware that such growth is possible only through the sharing of its truths with others. It is obligatory to communicate it. Yet merely to expound upon or to extoll the "remedy" to others, seriously risks awakening the very sort of confusion and resentment it seeks to allay; or may lead to the worse defects of posturing, posing and hypocrisy in the very name of teachings which most condemn these. The dilemma is resolved by this method of "portraying" both the principles, and one's adherence to them, primarily through personal performance. The best of words are but labels, and labels can lie. But tacit demonstration, if plainly fruitful, will cause others to seek its source; failure, neglect, or negation will have little effect except upon the single person involved—at least insofar as detracting from "the remedy" itself is concerned; and the conduct of non-users can be brought into most vivid contrast, if there is no attack against persons. In this way, the remedy will appear to the beholder on its own merits as the unique recipe for living as a complete human being. Its gift of the first and finest freedom—the privilege of choosing right for the sake of rightness, knowing it for right—will be sought unceasingly, precisely from those who best exemplify it, and can therefore best communicate it. An effortless certainty which honors and appreciates the individuality and integrity of other persons on the sheer ground of their irradicable humanness, without show or hypocrisy, would seem desirable beyond measure to the very ones who most need security and solace. Those who best applied the remedy would most show the qualities it generates, and would be exactly the most likely to give it openly, freely, and unostentatiously to others, while having the greater capacity properly to do so.

Keeping language always secondary to such communication as is incidental to the observable fact of personal practice, also provides insurance against the sort of assertive, aggressive, and psychologically invasive lapses which could so easily vitiate or invalidate the remedy for both giver and taker. By the standards of the precepts, non-users are relatively un- or dis-oriented. And just such personalities are most vulnerable to a sort of contagion of conduct, whereas admonition will arouse, especially in persons pre-supposedly immature, rejection or outright opposition. Yet they alter themselves easily through unconscious imitation.

This method of procedure, which is probably preferable to verbal exposition and should certainly precede it, operates by a kind of implantation-and-cultivation. The seeds of integration are sought and nurtured in other persons, in such a manner as to stimulate their own unique potentials for growth in vision and maturity, but without dominating them. To help others achieve fruition and recognition in this way would most resemble the wise parent's treatment of a child. Exquisite care is taken never to enslave body or mind, damage emotional equipment, or to stultify the delicate, vulnerable personality. Self-reliance is increasingly inculcated until every vestige of dependency is dissipated. There is positive pleasure when the achievements or endowments of the other person surpass one's own; and extreme pains are taken not to infect the other, vulnerable mind with one's own whims, wants, and warps. Constant vigilance is needed to prevent gains and growth from being attributed to the teacher, which might produce false gratitude leading to some sort of psychological subjugation; each person is allowed to feel responsible for his own progress.

The reciprocity that is characteristic of all human relations (good or bad) will multiply the pleasures of this phase of applying the precepts.

Helping another to gain ease, self-respect, and a sense of importance "echoes" within one's-self. Lending decency and dignity to someone else earns an almost usurious return in the same coin. If the habit of doing these things is caught up and repeated by others, one is repaid again and again. So there can be communicated from one to another of us the mature, peaceful feeling of creative accomplishment we all crave even beyond bread, in a quiet, calming charade of deeds and demeanor. Actually, this method merely asserts control over an already existent and continuous process. All of us are unsuspecting teachers; to be observed is to influence. That ever-changing bundle of opinions, habits, gestures and mannerisms called personality are culled from the culture around us, or are reactions to it. The inimitable self so cherished as exclusively our own is, deflatingly, an accumulation of interplaying responses to innate hungers or pressures commingled with conditionings by our environment. We are each a resultant of social inheritance. Because this essentially communicative process is in continual flux, there is a tremendous possibility of our being able to steer or guide this inevitable modulation of human nature, by directing the preponderance of our own influences toward increasing a general conformity with the tenets. Again, our approach is congruent with a natural and inescapable process, since the sub-verbal predominates in both. So, through society's incessant imitational interaction, we can institute courses conducive to applying the remedy, and impede or deflect those contrary and pernicious. Accidental elements of human intercourse favorable to this program may be reinforced, and those that are harmful restrained, or at least not encouraged. As a minimum, we can consistently deplore the kind of conduct which in extension can kill us all, and give unstinting approbation to all that supplements or parallels our own efforts to keep man alive.

An important preliminary understanding to the prospective proponent of the remedy involves the possible use of physical force by others, whether against himself, or in any manner with his endorsement. The latter is easily disposed of by flatly stating that the remedy forbids it, whatever the reason. But the commonest demurer to any nonviolent ethic—usually implying the speaker would happily forego force, otherwise—is that the practitioner will be left defenseless. The precepts seem to provide no answer, since, as is the case with so many of their truths, it is transparently obvious after fully accepting them, but completely incomprehensible prior to doing so. Actually, a mature adult integrated around the tenets is at no man's mercy. His prime protection consists in placing an infinite valuation upon every other life, and little upon his own. His strength lies in a pig-headed, persistent refusal to do, or contribute to, wrong, and the placing of the requirements of the remedy paramount. Now, no prison can confine a refusal to act, nor can bullets destroy a negation. All human power is helpless against an "I won't" pursued to the ultimate, simply because violence can only, in extension, irreversibly sustain the point. The would-be dominator must destroy his raw material, or be smothered in its supine dead weight. The tenets forbid both fight and flight; for fighting is unthinkable in their terms, and flight invites pursuit or irritates the violent into triumphant excesses. But in reality, few of the persons disposed to use physical force can summon courage to attack anyone who so transcends their own limitations as neither to cower nor resist. Those who "agress" regardless will learn that the gift of fear, refused, remains the giver's still; the ostensible victim has won simply in reiterating-to-finality the superior valuations. Then, too, the possibility of conflict diminishes, if one refrains from insisting that others adopt his ideas; from justifying or defending his acts to other humans; or in short, if one sincerely practices even the superficial requirements of the remedy. Furthermore, force is invariably associated with attempts to gain, or maintain, position and possession. To the extent that both are eschewed (as the tenets command), all likelihood of intentional assault fades away; for if one sets store by nothing another person wants, the normal motives for attack disappear. If one prizes only the "remedy" itself, he is invulnerable; for when a self-constituted opponent succeeds in taking that, his antipathy and antagonism will evaporate. To be so vanquished is victory.

But there is protection for the precept-user beyond his stubborn adhesion to principle.

Granting the tenets are extracts of universal truth, then no opposition to them could possibly be; for truth is indivisible. The touchstone of the remedy is ultimate reality. If it is uniquely workable on net balance, any attempt to impede or evade it is foredoomed to frustration and failure. To trust in the precepts is to have in hand the irresistible tools of time and superior information; a person so equipped stands,—by contrast to those trapped in the narrower, circular, superficial modes of thinking outside the remedy,—upon a perspective-giving pinnacle of clear consciousness that makes easy the evasion of a putative attacker. The time, tears, and patience put into learning to follow the precepts creates a pedestal beyond the reach of any threat, about which the emotional environment almost automatically modulates to foil anyone who is so relatively befogged and misguided as to be destructive. By never acquiring power over other persons, we achieve a dispassion that gives enhanced scope to our insight into human situations. Through trying always to heal, and never to hurt, other people, patience becomes a handmaiden; and at the same time, swift certainty of decision is made our servant. All that the despoiler can make one do, is die. We shall all do so, in any case; but unless we apply the remedy, the race dies with us.

For the remedy to operate as promised, evil cannot be considered inevitable among men. Parallel with this thought is the emphasis throughout the tenets upon an unremitting all-encompassing forgiveness toward all other persons, whatever their transgressions. For this to be practical, or even possible, we have somehow to assume that no one does wrong out of an intact volition, and that what we term evil is the product of some hazy mental half-world of doubt, dread, and confusion. One can freely commiserate with the wrong-doer, still not condoning his deeds, by considering him to have been bound in blindness or fear, having no clear choice. Then, too, the burden of blame for an individual act sifts back upon every participant in a culture. So-called civilized behavior is essentially the constraint or channeling of first impulses. A society may be evaluated by its ability to teach its members this rejection or restraint of the primitive; and its instantaneous constituents have both the power and the authority to alter, extend, or amplify it. It surely is the sole vehicle for its own ethic; therefore it must share responsibility for the acts of any member. And every contemporary member must carry his fraction or fragment of the load. When, as in our culture, a deep cleavage splits the entire spiritual, political, economic profile,—in a sort of social schizophrenia,—no clear, cohesive ethic can be conveyed to anyone. One code is paid a halfhearted lip-service, another is shame-facedly reflected in practice; neither one is fully actuated or acknowledged; and they are in extreme antithesis to one another. Private conflicts are so cruelly compounded by this complex dilemma that all creative energy is diluted, every effort to act well or intelligently is divided, and the very cultural covenant that purports to protect the group is the root cause of its major dangers. Only a two-faced society could presume to punish its own membership for aberrations after imposing thereupon a patch-work of codes too muddled for conformity, too full of issues that can neither be confronted nor avoided. One can understand and absolve, if not excuse, the erring individual whose moral life-blood derives from a host that is limping toward undramatic extinction, in a gradual hemorrhage-by-hypocrisy.

It would appear imperative either to understand the sources of what men call evil, or to form some hypothesis that explains human misdeeds, if we are to avoid the condemnation of our fellowmen proscribed by the precepts. Some such insight is indispensable if we are to eliminate tension and stress within ourselves. Above all, our enlightenment must be sufficient to stop our impulses to dominate and punish others. Probably each of us has all of the impulses, drives, and desires to be found in anyone else, at least in embryo. While it may be awkward to admit this equality-in-incipience, in the face of some of the more exaggerated eruptions, it would be incumbent upon us to forgive mere differences in degree of common equipments. We could more easily suppress them, if we supposed that harsh or punitive attitudes are engendered by empathetic guilt at the semi-conscious stirrings of those same urgings, which the other person perhaps merely could not control. Such a rationale can help us both to recognize and to forgive evil in our fellows. It begins by recognizing and forgiving it in ourselves.

Another basic position that ought to be taken on policy, even in the face of apparent contradiction, is that of individual responsibility for at least the tonus if not the minutiae of community behavior. This responsibility must of course be accompanied by the assumption of commensurate authority to contribute to the determination of group mores, as an independent individual. Both the tenets respecting the rejection of dominative patterns and the normal, modern notions of government impel us to this view. We are constrained to postulate, and to act under the presumption, that all activity, including reform, in our social, political, legal, or ethical group modalities will proceed effectively only by working from the broad base of individual initiative upward. To think otherwise is to abdicate even a semblance of voice in all of the areas which affect us most intimately and yet most basically. The lasting, wholeheartedly-supported social movements may be thought of as leavening the group laterally rather than imposed upon, or handed down to, the constituent. By our each acting as though this were so, it will be increasingly made so; and the indolent habit of passive response to leader-follower modes, with its invariable concomitants of uncritical imitativeness, demeaning presupposition of superiorities, slavish dependency, toadying, catering, and kowtowing—all so foreign to the mood of the remedy—will be gradually supplanted by mores more tolerable to the democratic ethic. Yet, the premium upon independent individualism will help uncover and cultivate the uncommon, gifted persons among us in a direct way impossible to systems of demagogic treatment of grouped individuals as a commonality.

The stress upon the base-upward-and-sideways spread of ideas brings the whole inertia of the society to bear in the service of right courses, helps to perpetuate and solidify gains, and ensures the ennobling of the many. It would accelerate participation in mutual affairs, with an increased probability of uncovering new solutions to problems. And it would tend to replace with mature flexibility and adaptability the fantastic immobility demanded by follower-ship, with its mandate toward emotional rigidity and its end product of fanaticism.

Freedom can be frightening, full of unexpected crises, precisely because it demands repeated decisions and requires unwonted degrees of consciousness, as well as continual self-education. The implication of utter individualism of the tenets may be a prime reason for their customary dismissal as Utopian. But of course, it is the ultimate of utopianism, meaning unrealism, to cling to codes that are a constant, unsteady straddle of irreconcilables, that repeatedly produce intolerable human situations or circumstances, and that assure moral bankruptcy by making vacillation indispensable to sanity. But the new, great and common danger of race extinction is, in intension, the threat of imminent personal destruction. If death cannot be delegated, neither can its avoidance in this instance. If the "remedy" must be diffused to every individual, and each must accept it of personal initiative, then the specific individual must. And there remains only the idiotic evasion that we may continue this uneasy flirtation with permanent human erasure on the ground that it hasn't occurred before. But we hadn't embarked on an irreversible program of self-elimination before either. So, in a cosmic symmetry of justice, the universal threat that comes to climax in the individual can only be relieved by starkly individual acts that will culminate in a new universality.

For each of us who dare to embrace the remedy wholeheartedly, learning, and learning to apply, the tenets—by repeated self-inspection and re-evaluation—our lingering reluctance will in time be replaced by an eager acceptance of the new paths they offer to personal expansion and expression. For these truths, pursued properly, promise to act in a perpetual ferment that leavens one's whole life. They seem to brighten before one limitlessly even from the first tentative inspection, illuminating every crevice of unknowns formerly terrifying, and irradiating every waking instant with proud new purpose and awareness. If we forget that we undertook, and after we no longer need, "the remedy" on the faintly shameful grounds of personal preservation, it can continue to unfold new areas of endeavor, dissolve barriers to human potential, and extend infinitely in an expanding inner universe of dynamic individual contentment. Meantime, it may, while answering the major and immediate threat, cause quietly to evaporate a host of perennial problems that have plagued the human race. Yet it may be obtained by anyone at all, simply by making a private, definite decision to adopt it—a decision that is easy, attractive, and an indescribable relief once made.