I’ve always been curious about the rules we’ve made up to guide us along the way. I know we believe they came from God, through a couple of tablets carved out on a mountain. Or maybe from information told to disciples and then, second handed, passed on to the scribes who were less than interested and just wanted to get paid for their work. Did any one proof read the scribes? Since most of the purveyors of the message couldn’t read or write themselves, who checked? Have you ever played that telephone game when you were younger where you tell the next person in line something and by the time it gets to the twelfth person it doesn’t sound anything the same? Is that what happened to the rules we thought came from our God?
“…I would like to know how your world views morality.”
Morality was always very important to the human species, understandably. Humans needed plenty of guidance because they were separated from their natural bearing. You have given up most of your instinctual presence and you have only begun developing your intuitive faculties. All you have is the intellect, a rather poor substitute for actual knowing. This has isolated you even more from natural wisdom. As a result of humanity’s isolation, your individuality saw itself as totally alone; it felt justifiably abandoned. It wanted always to join, to group, to be at one—even if this came in the form of masses of people being dominated and manipulated by a few.
The collective unconscious of the species desired fervently to be more than itself, and to find what was missing. This desire drove you to look outside yourselves for solutions, for support and validation, for rules of conduct, as well as for leadership. In this context, most humans wanted to be told what to do. Morality provided the rules.
What was morality for you—an externalized guidance system—is a built-in factor for us; it is innate, not something we even have to think about. Since it is centered in the instinctual level, and thus beyond duality, there is no opposite to it in our world. Without an opposite there is no manifestation of it at all. We intrinsically know how to behave so as to not harm others or ourselves. We know our natural responsibilities within the cultural self.
“But humans also have these qualities. We can look within and see beyond opposites.”
Of course, but you have to work at it, train for it, condition yourselves to it from childhood. And even then, humans can easily let it slip away again. But by your experience, evolution has profited. In my time, so-called morality comes much more easily. In many ways we have become what you aspired to be.
I mention this to point out the marvelous intricacy and balance in evolution’s workings: That which evolved was brought forward from that which preceded it. It is so orderly, in its way, that there are inevitably some who would believe there is a grand plan behind it, a divine design. But, on that score, I will reiterate, there is no plan, no destination or goal of all Life and evolution that is prescribed from some previous time. We, including your God, are just making all this up as we go! “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote. And we are all improvising.
“Saying there is no plan sounds tantamount to saying there is no future. Is that what you mean?”
Yes, in a way. There is no future for ego to achieve the awakening so needed in your world. The self in us that makes-it-up-as-we-go is not the ego or the incarnate mind. It is our deep consciousness. And it has no plan! The fact that there is no plan only means there is no separated Cosmic ego sitting in judgment over what we do. There is no past or prior time when a design was created, no future time when destiny will be fulfilled. Destiny is always now, in the moment.
A plan would imply there is a future condition better than now. There is nothing better than now because there is nothing other than Now. In this eternal moment we have the only hope there is, the evidence of things not seen—that is faith! We are all together in this, as one. What we intend is what we create. It is always Now, even when we think or imagine it’s the future. This would be God’s plan if you insisted on calling it that. Such a plan is really the ever-unfolding, super-conscious Now.
Copyright © 2010 by Robert Lee Potter
Letters From 500 