Knowing without seeing

Now, the moment I write this is important. Being someone in the now is something that we only understand more and more difficult. Just this morning an acquaintance published an article about this and mentioned the books of Ram Dass. But that's not what I want to talk about today.

I always try to make my world clear to others and sometimes this is very easy for me and sometimes very difficult. The way the world is. But I also approach these issues quite naively. In some moments it feels as if I want to explain something whose clarity has not yet been determined. It's like seeing the destination, but with blurry eyes.

We enter unknown territory where we have glimpsed a beautiful destination but don't know how to get there. It is inaccessible according to what we understand of causality. Things have to happen that we don't know how to make happen. If you don't "make it happen" and it happens, how does it happen? Obviously, it happens as a gift. You may have noticed that very generous people attract more gifts themselves. So if we put our lives in service, we will experience more of these fortuitous events. These are the key to creative potency beyond the old notion of causality.

Anything worth dedicating a life to today requires some of these miracles, these things that we don't and can't do that come as gifts. So when you follow your heart's guidance toward one of these worthwhile goals, your choices will seem a little crazy to many (and sometimes to yourself).

Our situation is like this: We see the destination, but we don't know how to get there. That is the case with everything that is truly new. To dare to try anyway is always an act of courage, at once arrogant and humble: arrogant because our confidence is unwarranted; humble because we surrender ourselves to the unknown. Limited by what we know how to do, what we have experienced, we achieve only what we have already achieved. Look at the planet. What we have achieved is not enough. With all the effort, it feels lost.

In my newsletter, I call for a kind of naiveté that, ironically, is one of the main criticisms of my work. Perhaps I should embrace that title and call for more of the same. To be naive is to trust in the goodness of others even though there is little evidence to support it, or to trust that something might happen even though you don't know how it might happen. In my life, I trust people very quickly, it's my way, even when I feel I shouldn't and then I get disappointed too. I do it again and again. Of course, naivety is a curse when it clouds practical actions, but I am talking about a situation where the practice is insufficient. That is the situation the planet is in right now. And that is also where many individuals are who are discovering that they no longer want the things they know how to get.

Paradoxically, the way to achieve the impossible consists of many practical steps, each of which is possible. Many pragmatic steps, each of which we know how to take, lead to something we didn't want. We know how to go; we just don't have a map. So I'm not suggesting that we abandon the practical, the doable. The point is that the practice is not enough unless it is put at the service of the impractical.

Similarly, we cannot abandon the material and cognitive tools that defined the age of separation. We will not abandon reason in favor of emotion, telecommunications in favor of embrace, symbolic language in favor of song, and money in favor of the gift. In each case, however, the former has transcended its proper domain and usurped the latter. The new history contains the old; to seek the erasure of the old is itself a thought-form of the old history.

The Old Order is Coming to an End

Goodbye,

Malte