Creating a New World, a World that Works for Everyone
By Steve Beckow
Steve is sick today. Reposted from Jan. 3, 2013
We’re hearing from our sources that the time is now approaching when our lightwork begins on a planetary scale. If that’s the case, we need to discuss the organizing principles behind creating a New World, a world that works for everyone. (1)
I’d like to discuss two organizing principles today, the first being a focus on reducing the world’s unworkability and the second being the motivating attitude of service to others.
I’ve said on a number of occasions that life on the Third Dimension is characterized by unworkability. If we didn’t address certain basic conditions of life, we’d die, death being from a 3D perspective perhaps the ultimate condition of unworkability. These unworkable conditions include hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep, shelter, and adequate medical care.
To the very largest extent, what needs to be done to take our world as it now stands and make it work for everyone is to tackle the areas of the world’s unworkability in ways we’ve been unwilling to do until now because, by and large, we’ve lived our lives in service to self rather than in service to others.
There hasn’t been the motivation to band together and devote significant portions of the world’s wealth to the common good. But that will is now arising and soon we’ll be at work reducing poverty, terraforming Earth, ending the oppression of women, children and other social groups, and ending disease on the planet, much of which has been intentionally caused, as shocking as that news may be.
Service to others is but one of the divine qualities which form the new paradigm of Nova Earth. Love, compassion, kindness, peacefulness, truthfulness … the list is long. The purpose of life, which forms a backdrop to everything we do and which is served by the universal laws (one of many design features of life), organizes the way life works. All life tends towards the fulfilment of the divine purpose, which is to realize our true nature, our essential beingness, which is God.
Rescuing people from poverty, ending oppression and other aspects of the world’s unworkability bring us closer and closer to a world weaned of separativeness, competition, and conflict and wedded to unity, cooperation and harmony. As we become more godlike, the world becomes more divine.
Our Most Pressing Work Addresses Unworkability
Little in our world gets our pressing attention until it becomes unworkable. We can look at any common instruments or accessories around us and see their invisibility until they stop working.
We can measure unworkability in terms of human needs. We need to eat, drink, sleep, shelter ourselves from inclement weather, take care of our young and old, indigent and disabled, etc.
We think of the unworkable as a “problem.” We’re constantly confronted with problems in the Third Dimension by its very nature. We cannot long survive without food, drink, shelter, and so on, whereas we need not eat, drink or seek shelter on the Fifth. Our work in creating a world that works is a constant reduction of problems in our world and the motivation to reduce these problems to workability comes from our desire to serve.
The Barrier to Having Our World Work
What’s the barrier to us addressing the world’s unworkability? If we restrict our attention to ourselves, and leave others out of the picture, the barrier could be summarized in the words “I want.” I don’t say that from a moralistic standpoint, but from an operational standpoint, as I’ll explain in a minute.
The Buddha called “I want” “ignorance, craving and aversion.” The “I” of the ego or the separative self is the product of ignorance; in actuality, of forgetting. There’s actually only one “I” in all of creation and that’s the “I” of the Universal Subject or God. All the rest are products of illusion, of lila or divine play. All the rest are God playing every part for the purpose of God meeting God in a moment of our enlightenment. For God to meet God is God’s purpose in creating life. For us to realize God is our purpose.
Whenever we localize and personalize our “I,” whether for reasons benign or not, we’re consenting to remain ignorant.
What I call our “wants,” the Buddha called “craving and aversion.” We spend our lives eternally trying to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want, trying to get pleasure and avoid pain. This layer of craving and averting sits on top of our basic needs. Responding to our wants causes them to multiply in an endless cycle of desire.
None of our wanting stays satisfied for long. Wanting simply creates more wanting. In fact, not many people realize that only God can satisfy entirely or permanently. Anything else but God is incapable of satisfying and only yields to more desiring. We attempt to fill the chasm of our wanting with everything but God, but to no avail. We are left perpetually unsatisfied, leading the Buddhists to call us “hungry ghosts.”
Worldly craving and aversion lead to attachment. But not every attachment leads to craving and aversion. Sri Krishna identified one desire that doesn’t: “I am all that a man may desire / Without transgressing the law of his nature.” (2) No harmful consequence comes from desiring or attaching to God. We call that attachment “devotion,” which is a pathway to the divine, not something that takes us away from him/her/it. That’s the one and only desire that liberates rather than binds.
Aligning with the Purpose and Design of Life
The basic spiritual movement is to turn from the world to God. For people for whom that language doesn’t work, perhaps I could say that the basic spiritual movement is to discriminate between the Real and the unreal, detach from the unreal, and attach to the Real. The distinctions are the same.
The basic movement serves the purpose of life for us created beings. As long as we’re moving in the direction of the purpose of life, I think things work overall. They only begin not to work, again overall, when we depart from life’s purpose.
The universal laws are there to realign us with that purpose when we forget and go offtrack. The laws of karma and attraction operate to show us the way to the realization of God, usually slowly but always without doubt as to the ultimate conclusion. Everyone is destined to realize God one day. Some simply take a more leisurely route and dally with their desires.
“I want” is an operational barrier to a world that works in that life is designed to encourage us to progressively realize ourselves as God. To do that, one of our pathways is to be godlike, to emulate the divine qualities. But what is God like?
God isn’t selfish, self-centered, or self-serving. God is loving, compassionate, giving. Life is designed, I believe, to wean us from the former ways and align us with the latter.
Competition, separation, and winning at our neighbor’s expense don’t mirror what God is like. They don’t emulate the divine qualities and don’t contribute to our achieving the purpose of life. In fact they create the unworkability of resentment, hatred, greed, etc. Life is designed, I believe, to see that nothing permanently satisfying emerges from a life lived in these ways.
Some lightworkers capture this circumstance by distinguishing between a life lived in service to self from one lived in service to others. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t see to our own basic needs. But we need to set limits on how much of what we do that serves only ourselves. Once past satisfying our needs, the tug becomes ever stronger to turn our attention to service to others and to commit ourselves to reducing the world’s unworkability.
In summary, it’s my view that, as we lightworkers turn our attention to the task of creating a New World that works, what will repeatedly present itself to us are the remaining areas of the world’s unworkability. Primarily these have to do with the needs of Gaia, the human collective and the kingdoms.
In pursuing the transformation of the unworkable to the workable, our efforts bear fruit to the extent that we pursue our work in service to others. The primary barrier to our limited world working, but perhaps to the wider world working as well, is a retention of and fixation on the limiting attitude of exclusive service to self.
The old paradigm of exclusive service to self has little chance of surviving into the New World now before us. The new paradigm of service to others aligns us with the divine qualities and promises to fulfill the purpose of life by seeing us become more godlike, more like what God actually is, which is love, compassion, and giving, while at the same time reducing the world’s unworkability.
For me, living in service to others and addressing the world’s unworkability are the two necessary organizing principles we need to embrace to build a New World that works for everyone.
Footnotes
(1) The phrase “a world that works for everyone” originated with Buckminster Fuller and was popularized by Werner Erhard:
“Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us.” (Werner Erhard, A World That Works, 1980, cited at https://www.worldthatworks.org/.)
“Transformation does not negate what has gone before it; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.” (Werner Erhard – A Shot Heard Round the World: A World that Works for Everyone at https://www.scribd.com/doc/143329822/Werner-Erhard-A-Shot-Heard-Round-the-World-A-World-that-Works-for-Everyone
See also Werner Erhard, The Hunger Project: The End of Starvation. Creating an Idea Whose Time has Come. San Francisco: Hunger Project, n.d., p. 3.
(2) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 71.
