Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §9 : Sales to Service
Context: The thought system that dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money and prestige. Now all of a sudden we’ve learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don’t know where to search for motivation anymore. If we’re not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch TV?
Not at all, but thinking so is a temporary phase many people go through — when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don’t yet grab your soul. They will. There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance, begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation. The news isn’t how bad things are. The news is how good they could be. And our own activity could be part of the unfolding of Heaven on earth. There is no more powerful motivation than to feel we’re being used in the creation of a world where love has healed all wounds.
We are no longer ambitious for ourselves, but are rather inspired by the vision of a healed world. Inspiration rearranges our energies. It sources within us a new power and direction. We no longer feel like we’re trying to carry a football to the finish line, clutching it to our chest and surrounded by hostile forces. We feel instead as though angels are pushing us from behind and making straight our path as we go.
Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992), Ch. 7 : Work, §9 : Sales to Service
A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: We are indebted for all our miseries to our distrust of that guide, which Providence thought sufficient for our condition, our own natural reason, which rejecting both in human and Divine things, we have given our necks to the yoke of political and theological slavery. We have renounced the prerogative of man, and it is no wonder that we should be treated like beasts. But our misery is much greater than theirs, as the crime we commit in rejecting the lawful dominion of our reason is greater than any which they can commit. If, after all, you should confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force, concerning the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in your argument, you add a strength to mine. So that if we are resolved to submit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgar notions which are connected with this, and take up the theology of the vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we should renounce their dreams of society, together with their visions of religion, and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty.
"To American Aims," http://books.google.com/books?id=7U4EAAAAMBAJ&q=%22With+the+supermarket+as+our+temple+and+the+singing+commercial+as+our+litany+are+we+likely+to+fire+the+world+with+an+irresistible+vision+of+America's+exalted+purposes+and+inspiring+way+of+life%22&pg=PA97#v=onepage Life magazine (30 May 1960)
2008, Mass with the Clergy (18 July 2008)
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: We no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives.
“Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision?”
Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopia and the Minimal State, p. 333
Context: Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision?
The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front
“We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them.”
Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: !-- 30m21s -->We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe– because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family.<!-- 31m22s
