38 COOPERATIVE CONCORD
By concord I mean all human minds and ultimately all intellects throughout the universe intellating in harmony. By co-operation I mean the mutually agreed empathic activity of humans on Earth, all motivated by humantrue supraconsciousness and co-operating as one. Therefore our own co-operative concord means total human unity, in thought, feeling, and action in the immediate interests of humanity's future.
Up to the present our concept of co-operation has been limited to that within separate self-interested groups within divided nations. For example, the super-commercial state of Japan might seem to be one entity, a good example of high-synergy, an open system, its people united behind its worldly success. In fact what the Japanese people have chiefly in common is maximum subservience to the Machine, which employs them to work co-operatively for particular commercial companies that are in fierce competition with other Japanese companies. This state is not a success of human co-operation but a triumph of the competitive Machine, served by people who are the most automated in the world and furthest removed from their humantrue nature.
It is this intense, unreasoned, but financially efficient autoprogression that makes Japanese products cost-effective elsewhere in the world. In automatic terms, their success means comparative failure for other nations whose counter-success could cause Japanese failure (signs are appearing that this is beginning to happen). The eventual total effect of this escalating activity will be failure of the human race. Co-operative concord is vital to our humantruesuccess.
Agreed total co-operation is the voluntary way of intellect that must bring increasing benefits the more it is practiced and that must appeal to the benign instincts as well as satisfying true reason. Competition is an impulsion that appeals to the instinctive drives. It brings less real human benefit and more conflict the more it is practiced and makes no sense to true reason.
If we are to begin realising humantruth it is essential that we turn away from our present attachment to competitive drives. This is not only for the sake of our well-being, nor only because there is nothing but meaningless autoprogression on the competitive horizon. We should turn to the principle of co-operative concord because it is vital to the living being of any intellectual species, and so is also vital to humantrue reality.
The true basis for willing concord is the understanding that life is a continuous flow, not the limited period of time during which we personally are conscious of it and involved in it. As conscious selves we join that flow when we are born and leave it when we die. Between these times we share individually in the flow and are required to contribute to it. Itis life, and we its temporary manifestations. It was the same flow that went on before our birth, and that continues after our death.
The flow of life is not essentially increased by our arrival nor depleted by our departure, yet its continuation depends upon our being. And for us, an intellectual species, its possible good health and quality depends upon our voluntary humantrue contribution; our false absorption detracts from this but our co-operation would enhance it. The continuing flow has given us individual life but it has also given us a bad society, born of a murky history, because we have always competed to survive. The kind of futurelife it gives us depends on the good effort we now jointly put into changing our ways.
This, then, is why we should co-operate worldwide. By doing so we honour those who went before us and gave us life, cherish the present life we share with all others and make it happy and contented, and care for the future life of all who are to come so that it shall be the same. Just as past humanity affected our present and we shall affect the future, so every individual now living depends on every other. By takingwe enrich ourselves but impoverish others, but by givingwe would all be content. Weare part of one life, past present and future, so whether we are 'dead' or 'alive' or yet 'unborn', its happiness, or misery, is ours; but it is we who are presently alive who shoulder responsibility for the future.
Individual human awareness, concern and emotion were as real a thousand years ago as now and shall be, hopefully the better for our help, a thousand years hence. We should be conscious of this whole, not only of our temporary part in it, for our experience is one ever-present experience, like the baton in a never-ending relay race which we take, carry for a while and then pass on, yet which remains constantly in human hand. It is when we take that baton as our possession - a personal identity cherished above all others as though it alone mattered - not knowing or caring that it represents human hope for the future but, in dread of giving it up, pretending it is ours forever, even after death, it is then that we impoverish and betray life, our own and that of all humanity.
Pt.VII REALISATION
The PRINCIPLES
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