Since I wake up early most mornings — to have time to write and meditate and run — I rarely miss a sunrise. Dawn shimmering across the darkened sky is a stunning sight and a profound symbol — the physical light a reminder of the inner light, the radiance of pure spirit.
That’s why I’m up, after all: for the truth to shimmer in my darkened mind, for some light to shine. But with the world hushed around me, with the day so innocent and bright, I sometimes forget it’s easier to wake up than to stay awake, easier to feel elated by the sunrise, by my cherished solitude and my cherished cup of coffee, than to sustain my elation, to stay conscious through the day.
Soon, the world will wake up; soon, my worries and ambitions will shuffle in for breakfast, wanting to know what I’ve planned for the day. Soon, my busyness will veil the light. But perhaps that’s as it must be. As Carl Jung said, we don’t become enlightened “by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”
In Waking Up Together, Paul Williams parts the curtain on his own life, telling us how he tries to stay awake, letting us in on his doubts and confusions.
Williams is the author of nearly a dozen books (including Remember Your Essence, excerpted in Issue 153, and Das Energi). He started the first rock music magazine, Crawdaddy!, in 1966, and was the editor of The International Bill of Human Rights.
He wrote Waking Up Together in 1983. He was living in northern California with his two sons, lecturing and writing on personal growth, and serving as a volunteer fireman. It’s an intimate and revealing book; Williams is always lucid, and often painstakingly candid. We’re thankful for permission to reprint these excerpts.
— Sy Safransky
My friend Peggy says we’re not here to be spiritual. She says we are spirits, who chose to experience being human.
We are always infinite. What’s special about the moment is that it allows us to forget infinity and discover the joys of limitation.
Everyday, I forget. This makes me a sleepwalker at times; but it also allows me the joys of rediscovering, remembering.
I don’t want to awaken for just a moment. I’ve done that before, and I’m sure it will happen again. It’s wonderful — and it’s not enough. I’m not looking for peak experience — up and then down again. What I want is a new plateau.
I don’t want to be a star. I want to be a better human being happily lost in a world of better human beings — “better” meaning better functioning, more caring, more aware.
Thinking of “awakening” as an enormous, dramatic event might be the biggest barrier to being awake. Instead of quietly opening our eyes and hearts, we sit here waiting for something big to happen.
We live always in pain. Every day, every moment, we must let go of this pain. To let go means to stop holding on to what we don’t have. (I lost an important notebook yesterday; I’m having a hell of a time letting go of it.)
If we won’t let go of our pain day to day and moment to moment, we survive by being overcome with forgetfulness. We go unconscious, fall asleep, pass out.
To stay awake, we need a conscious act of release. We can’t hold on to magic moments; we can’t hold on to all the things we’ve done wrong. We need to remember them but not be attached to them. To stay conscious, we must let go of our pain at every moment.
Letting go is like breathing. It solves no problems, gets rid of nothing. You take one breath; you have to take another. Letting go of pain doesn’t rid us of it; it allows it to be there, and then we have to let go of it again.
The opposite of letting go is holding on. Hold your breath as long as you can. Even with the greatest will power in the world, the best you can do is force yourself into unconsciousness.
Courage is not always romantic. Often it’s the tiniest thing. It takes courage to say you’re afraid. Sometimes it takes courage, when you’re up against an inner obstacle, to wash the dishes or to file some papers instead of playing solitaire or reading a magazine. In choosing to do a small, order-creating task, you are putting yourself in a position where you’ll be able and willing to attack the problem. You’re moving toward action and response rather than ducking the issue altogether. Courage involves taking a small step instead of sitting in confusion and refusing to choose.
Another time, of course, washing the dishes or cleaning your desk could be an avoidance, a way of getting away from (pretending to get away from) what’s bothering you — when the most courageous thing might be to sit quietly with your difficulty and do nothing, allowing yourself to admit its reality.
Contact with other people can be used to keep us asleep, if it isn’t naked, honest. What a lot of us like to do is to pretend to be awake (so no one will bother us and we can go on sleeping). Then, we pretend to be honest, and we get so good at it, we even fool ourselves.
If it’s easy to tell the truth, you probably aren’t being totally honest.
A “belief” is an assumption that is so automatic we don’t know it’s there. Many of our daily actions are controlled or affected by our beliefs. Acting out of a belief (whether it is “right” or “wrong”) is the opposite of being in the moment.
Last night before I fell asleep, I suddenly recognized a very powerful belief — a core belief — that I have about anger. When I’m angry, something inside me automatically and absolutely believes that the other person has done something wrong.
Even when someone points out that there’s no reason to be angry, or that my reaction is out of proportion, I still stay angry. Often I quickly grab at another reason for anger (something saved up for just such an occasion, or perhaps invented on the spot). Sometimes I’ll notice myself doing this, but I still won’t be able to stop it.
The core belief says if I’m angry, I’ve got a reason to be angry. This core belief is untrue, but it doesn’t matter whether a belief is true or not. It becomes impossible for me to respond to what’s actually happening. I respond to my beliefs instead.
The important thing to do with a belief is: know that it’s there. Identifying and being aware of beliefs is the only way to avoid being controlled by them.
As you uncover your basic beliefs, don’t put all your energy into trying to change them. All you’ll get is a new set of problems. Instead, try to maintain awareness of what those beliefs are — and know that, with this knowledge, at any given moment you can choose not to be controlled by them.
When driving around, we encounter both stop lights and stop signs. A stop light says, “Stop until I say go.” We stop; we wait; when it tells us to go, we go. A stop sign says, “Stop, look around, then go when it’s safe to go.”
It seems that a lot of us spend years at stop signs, waiting for them to turn green. We stop and stay stopped, stay stuck in old positions.
We wait for a message that never comes, for someone else to set us free.
Each of us has as much power to influence the fate of the world as the U.S. president or the Soviet premier. We draw our power from being who we are, not from trying to live up to some image of what the exercise of power might look like.
You give up nothing when you choose to exercise your power. On the contrary, you expand, embracing all the aspects of who you are and letting go of your need to pretend to be somebody different. You don’t have to be perfect to have an effect on the universe.
A wholistic doctor looking at a sick patient sees an inherently healthy person with a transient condition. The doctor’s response is determined less by the illness than by the total picture of that person’s natural energy flow. Supporting the flow helps it do its job of correcting the imbalance. Attacking the imbalance directly or in a hostile fashion only strengthens it, feeds its resistance.
The same principles apply to healing the world. The world we live in is essentially, intrinsically healthy. At the same time, it shows evidence of illness and imbalance, which are debilitating and, in fact, life-threatening. Immediate attention is required. Lack of attention may lead to famine, genocide, ecological catastrophe, or nuclear holocaust.
Once we have decided not to deny that the problem exists, how do we proceed?
Most importantly, we must notice, support, and encourage the flow of healing energy from person to person in our immediate environment and all over the planet.
That may not sound like much, but it’s the shortest possible path to the results we want. And it works.
Awakening is painful. Part of my own pain is my difficulty believing my own ideas — for example, that planetary healing is expressed and accomplished through person-to-person healing. I believe this; it is consistent with my vision and my experience. However, at the same time, I notice that I find it hard to accept this concept in practice.
What bothers me is that I seem far more concerned with private issues (relationships, doubts and fears, desire, courage, self-awareness) than public ones (planetary awakening, human rights, reversing the drift toward nuclear holocaust). Sometimes I feel self-indulgent. I’d much rather fall in love with yet another pretty face than march on a protest line. I tell myself that marching is as much an expression of private impulses as any other activity, but I’m not convinced. I’m talking the talk but not walking the walk: I’m not taking action for what I believe in.
If I truly believe planetary healing is accomplished through person-to-person healing, why do I have these anxieties? Private versus public — it’s a phony distinction. I want to build a bridge over this gulf of imagination that falsely separates my own needs from those of the planet. An inner voice of guilt and self-doubt creates this distinction. Yet, even as I say this, I see how denying this voice would block self-examination. I could pretend that any inner voice that tries to wake me up is just trying to lead me astray.
Insight is a two-edged sword. But it is better to live with your doubts than to destroy them. It is necessary to live with them. They’re painful. Still, if we let ourselves be aware of doubts without getting locked in combat with them, they won’t interfere with our power.
So here I am writing about how to live with doubts. And I know that in doing so — despite my doubts — I’m making my contribution to planetary awakening.
The argument of the anti-nuclear weapons movement is that this is a true emergency, that nuclear war resulting in total annihilation of all life on this planet could in fact occur at any moment, maybe even by accident.
This is essentially true, I believe. However, it falls into the category of what you could call the standing emergency, which confuses all our normal patterns of response.
If the fire siren goes off in the middle of the night, I get up, throw on some clothes, and drive to the fire station. But the danger of nuclear war is a siren sounding in our ears so constantly that we have no choice but to block it out. Then, once we’ve blocked it out, we often forget about responding. I know I do. Other obligations, needs, interests, take priority.
This new kind of emergency affects us twenty-four hours a day, every day. There are some real opportunities for action, but still no relief in sight. We need a new kind of response. Jumping up and going to the fire station won’t help. Jumping up and going to the local nuclear freeze office might be more useful. But since it’s a permanent, round-the-clock emergency, it makes more sense to be orderly about it — maybe to volunteer in that office one day a week. But such work soon becomes a part of normal life and loses the flavor of emergency; pretty soon going to the kids’ soccer games, earning a living, and keeping your marriage together start to seem more important. And maybe they are. We have to live our lives.
What is the appropriate response?
The appropriate response is to allow ourselves to feel and experience everything that exists in this moment, including the standing emergency. Breathe it in and breathe it out. Be calm. Allow your actions to arise naturally from your experience and your knowledge. Feel what you feel, experience what you experience, know what you know, do what you do. No more, no less.
Feel unconditional love for everything in this universe, and you will know that you have responded appropriately.
I am not suggesting that love take the place of action. I am affirming that love is action, and that our actions can arise spontaneously from our love.
You are doing the right thing. Keep doing it. The only obstacle is hesitation itself. And it’s all right for there to be obstacles. Take your time.
Loving each other is the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced. But it is the appropriate response to the emergency, to our whole situation. We need to love who we are, so that we can allow ourselves to become who we are.
Out of awareness comes responsibility; out of responsibility comes action. To be aware of the suffering of others is to be to some extent responsible for it. No wonder we shut our eyes and cover our ears!
The dilemma of our time is that it is now possible to be aware of so much. The murders of penniless Indian children in the highlands of Guatemala do not escape our attention, here in the cities and suburbs and small towns of electronic civilization.
Limits make service possible. I know well the boundaries of my small-town fire protection district. I am not called to care for the mangled bodies of accident victims on roads outside our district. This allows me to stay with the job, to learn from it, to be of service.
How shall we select the limits that will allow us to serve in this world community where there is so much more need than any one of us could ever respond to?
We need a new concept of response.
The challenge is to be completely in the moment when you touch another person. It doesn’t require (and can’t be achieved through) any kind of effort. All you have to do is not hold on to anything.
Sex is a bridge. In the act, an actual physical bridge is created, across which living genetic information passes from one body to another. At the end of the act, one of the vessels involved contains and intermingles the essential identities of both separate beings. When we kiss with tongues in each other’s mouths, we imitate the form of this bridge, we acknowledge the mystery and excitement of this connection with and into another entity. When we practice birth control, we engage in conscious paradox, striving for and protecting against at the same moment.
The male wants to get in. The female wants to be entered. This is the formula for union. Once the bridge is built, there is the tendency for information to cross over it, and, if the dice roll right, a third entity is formed and nurtured in the receptive vessel. The two become one become three. Isn’t it remarkable how much this simple bit of architecture influences, even dominates, our lives?
No wonder this dumb instinct that fills our lives with so much pleasure, pain, and confusion can be such a vehicle for awakening! Sadly, most of the time sex just puts us to sleep. My sexual desires bring me to life, and cause me to be more of who I am and to take risks I would never consider otherwise; and yet, paradoxically, they also cause me to behave like an idiot, a rat in a cage helplessly pushing the button for pleasure, over and over, trapped by a desire that never satisfies and never seems to go anywhere.
The pursuit of satisfaction (sexual or otherwise) is endless; the more you get, the more you want. If your goal is satisfaction, you will never be satisfied. Lover after lover and still no love. After a while, it isn’t even fun anymore.
This chasing after satisfaction represents an unwillingness to wake up.
The solution to the paradox is to speak that terrible truth: sex is not an end in itself. What really drives us is (take your choice): the desire for awakening; the desire to be more of who we are; the desire to be vulnerable; the desire to have children; the desire to go beyond where we are, and build a bridge to the future; the desire to take a meaningful risk, a real risk; the desire to surrender to the will of God.
Sexual desire is the desire to create or discover something new. The mind loves to pursue that desire, always making sure that what’s at the end of the road will only seem to be new, but will in fact be under the control of the mind. The mind will go to any extreme to avoid surrendering control.
Every now and then, sex takes us out of and beyond our minds. Then, thank God, we find ourselves in trouble, in the terrifying uncertainty and newness that is what we wanted all along.
One of my goals for this year is to be more at home with my power. If the world is going to be transformed into a better place, this is something we all need to do. I don’t think there’s anyone who isn’t in some way pretending not to be powerful. And how can we let our power serve us, serve all of us, if we won’t even acknowledge it?
We think that if we don’t admit it’s there, it won’t burn us. But we get burned anyway, and blame it on God, or another person, or the government, or the general situation. If we’d only admit how powerful we are, maybe we could improve the situation at the source.
Faith in myself means to know that I am here. The instant I do that, and let go of whatever I’m holding on to, I find myself at the center of the universe again. All I need to do for my son is be here with him. Isn’t it funny how we try everything else but that?
Fear does not usually motivate us. It is an instrument by which we manipulate ourselves. “I can’t, because of my fear” is usually not true. The true statement, too naked for us to say most times, is “I won’t.” Why won’t I, if not because of fear?
Because if I do take the next step in my life, someone’s going to expect something of me. And I’m not willing to accept that burden.
I’d rather be unhappy and sick and never get what I want than be tricked into accepting more responsibility.
Fuck you, God.
Like it or not, this is what we are really saying with our lives, most of the time. And it can be a very heroic stance.
It doesn’t offer much comfort to know that the only way to win is to surrender.
Maybe (I’m being serious) we will win by having the nuclear holocaust. That will show God He can’t intimidate us!
Death before dishonor.
When I ask whether we want the world to be saved, it is not an idle question. The last thing I want to do is give the impression that it’s obvious which answer is right and which is wrong.
I say, “Choose life” — and yet the truth is that it’s an ongoing struggle to make this choice. I can’t make it once and get it over with because to get it over with is to choose death. When you choose life, the choices, the struggles, never end. To choose life is to choose to go choosing. Who among us does not get angry, tired, resentful?
Honor the struggle. It is real. It is our fate. There are no easy answers.
I am not on this planet to get something done. That’s a misconception I’ve been laboring under most of my life. At this moment, it seems clear to me that I wasn’t sent here to “do” something. My purpose, anyone’s purpose, cannot be objectified. The things we accomplish (the ones we’re aware of, and remember, and appreciate) are expressions of that purpose. These deeds are always frustratingly incomplete expressions of the vision we see, the spirit that moves us. I don’t limit this to great thinkers, artists, leaders. Every one of us is here for a reason, if anyone is. It’s all or nothing: either there is no purpose to the whole mess, or purpose flows through every grain of sand and every action and every interaction in the known and unknown universe.
My position, for the moment, is that life has meaning and there is a reason why we’re here — “we” collectively and individually.
My purpose is only to be here. Because I’m here, things happen, things get done or undone. But my job is not to “do”; doing is secondary. My job is to be.
Again this morning death called me out of bed and slapped me in the face. The fire siren went off at 7 and we responded to an “injury accident” on the country road that winds out of town. When we got to the scene there was nothing to do. The car had flown through the air, severed a tree, and landed near the creek, where it had stayed for hours, waiting for the sun to come up and someone to notice the wreckage. A young father and his six-year-old son were dead in the car.
I cried at the scene and I’m crying now. It’s a release, a way for the body to let out emotions that otherwise turn to poison. I only wish I could cry louder and longer. Yesterday, a commercial airliner with hundreds of people aboard was shot down for violating another country’s air space, and the smell of war was in the air for a moment. We sit here passively and hear the news, and how are we to release what we feel?
Men and women are an extraordinary challenge to each other, because of the vulnerability we create in each other. Whether it’s love or sex or children or the pragmatic details of sharing lives, money, space, time — the fact is that the intimate nature of our interactions puts us in touch with each other’s weaknesses as well as strengths. Indeed, one of the reasons we get together is to be able to share those weaknesses, those vulnerable places. There is a real and beautiful impulse to open up and be naked with another person. Alas, there is also the instinct of self-protection, self-preservation, which causes us to quietly stockpile our knowledge of the other person to use as a defensive or offensive weapon — just in case they ever start “misusing” what they know about us. Balance of power. Balance of terror.
With our lovers, with our mates, we are stronger and weaker than we are with anyone else. For that reason, this tends to be the part of our lives where we are most blind to what we are doing and who we are being.
Our human experience of awakening is that we must do it again each morning. We go to sleep. We wake up.
Even when we’ve found a person to stay with and be with and live with, we have to rediscover and re-create intimacy with that person again and again, and each time we have to take a terrible risk to do so. It doesn’t get any easier. It doesn’t get any safer.
Waking up together is what we do each day. We wake up and find other people and other creatures here with us. We can reach over and embrace them or we can turn our backs. And we can’t decide the night before. We have to choose anew at each moment, or else our embrace becomes an automatic response, not an embrace at all. If your position is that there’s a right choice, and you’re trying to get to a state of consciousness in which you’ll make the right choice every time, forget it. That’s death.
Preconceptions about which choice is right can lead to having no choice at all. We always have preconceptions, but we can let go of them (not destroy them, just let go of them) at the moment of choosing.
My marriage died for me when I’d been embraced so many times out of duty that I couldn’t believe the real thing anymore.
Men and women not trusting each other is like Americans and Russians not trusting each other. It’s not irrational. Each party has excellent reasons not to trust the other, based on personal experience. The challenge for our era is to find the means by which we can choose to trust, despite the conscious knowledge that we have been betrayed and will be betrayed again. What a surrender such trust would take!
We have to go beyond “trust,” because trust can be defined as the conviction that one will not be betrayed. In place of trust we need love, love that is not conditional and not affected by anything in the past or the future.
Is there such a thing? Is it possible?
Yes. God’s love is not conditional.
The challenge of waking up together at this time in human history is that, for our own survival as individual nations and individual men and women, we must learn unconditional love.
Can you imagine how foolish it would be for Americans and Russians to choose to love each other unconditionally — particularly after both sides have humiliated each other publicly so many times?
Let’s face it, we’d rather destroy the planet than act like fools. Or maybe we wouldn’t. While we breathe, we are still free to choose, and choose again.
What are the limits on my power to love? Am I willing to take the risk of discovering that there are no limits?
A lot of us think we’re practicing creative visualization when in fact we practiced it only once. Ever since, we’ve been holding tight to the images we saw that one time. It is only the act itself — the moment when we are seeing — that is powerful. Holding on to the image just delays the moment when we will see again.
What we can see we can have. If we want to live in a world with freedom and justice for all, if we want our children to grow up in a world free from the threat of nuclear holocaust, we can’t just say it; we have to see such a world in our minds.
If we see clearly enough and persevere in creating the images from nothing over and over again, getting there will take care of itself. The world we envision will come to us, because we have made space for it to exist.
I’m not suggesting that those who merely sit and daydream are superior to or are somehow accomplishing more than those who toil in the fields. This seeing is rigorous, demanding work. Anyone can do it, and each of us is ready to do it now with no further preparation. But it’s not the sort of thing that can be completed in an afternoon of good intentions, or an intensive weekend workshop. It’s not the sort of thing that can be completed at all. Seeing the world as whole and healthy is a lifetime commitment and undertaking.
Those who sit and daydream, claiming that the world will transform as soon as other people change, are not seers at all. They are only pretenders, waiters; and though they don’t know it, they are waiting for their own awakening, not someone else’s. To see is to see ourselves as part of the world, as moving and interacting with the whole, each of us acknowledging our own power to do what we are here to do. So that the true dreamer, the true visionary, is always toiling in some field or other. We know what we are creating, even when we don’t know how we do it. We see the whole, and our work proceeds in that direction as we modestly and confidently transform reality together.
Remember, you are doing this already. I am reminding you only to reaffirm your vision. All the doubts, confusions, terrors, awkward beginnings, and repeated stumblings are simply proof that we are not hiding from this process; we are allowing it to take place.
Many of the most wonderful prophets never open their mouths. They transform the world with their presence, simply by having a vision and letting it show in their lives.
I believe there are people who are consciously practicing the silent, invisible transformation of the world around them by conceiving of a space and allowing it to be filled with love. One visual image is “surrounding it with white light.” They act like pumps, like hearts, constantly circulating the energy throughout the system they serve, allowing it to return and be renewed and flow out again in a great, healing circle.
I realize that, when I’m with other people, my presence may have more impact on them than anything I say. It is as though an invisible power were radiating from me. I suppose in the past I could have imagined this being true of certain people, but never myself. I could perhaps imagine that such powers existed, but it would have seemed ridiculous to think of myself as having such power — not someday in the future, but now.
We’ve all had experiences of the power of physical attraction. An attractive person comes into a room and totally captures your attention. Yet this person has said and done very little, except maybe to indicate by a word or a look that she or he is aware of and could conceivably be interested in your existence. That’s enough, sometimes, to throw your whole life into turmoil. But it was not the word or the little act of flirtation that had the impact on you. (Imagine them coming from another person.) It was the presence of that particular man or woman, and the fact that that person chose, however briefly, to put his or her attention on you.
Sexual attraction is one very common manifestation of the power in us that exists apart from anything we do. There are many others. The ways we habitually use our personal power, the forms we let it take, are called our “personality.” You may use the personality of others as a clue to their personal power, and to the limitations they place on that power.
What I wish to emphasize is that there is a power in each of us that cannot be touched, not by others, not by ourselves. Our ability to work with it, to choose the effects of this power, depends on our willingness to choose where we put our attention.
Noticing that where I put my attention has more impact than what I do has made the world a much bigger and richer place for me. I have a lot more choices, and much greater willingness to choose.
I’m willing to take the next step. That’s all one has to do in this world. It may be a very small step, but the willingness to take it is the willingness to keep going, and that’s our salvation, and the source of all future creation. The apostles said to Jesus, “Increase our faith.” Jesus said, “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you might say to this sycamore tree, ‘be plucked up by the root and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” In other words, if you have any faith at all, you have enough. Use it, and there is no limit to your power.
The great opportunity that has been given us is that we are alive. If we wish to complain about the state of the world or the circumstances of our personal lives, we must first find a way to forget this extraordinary gift we’ve been given. To forget, we must dim our awareness. In doing so, we lose touch with God, with ourselves, with the miracle of being here and the power we have as a result of being here. We choose to go to sleep; we choose to see ourselves as powerless.
Yet every one of us is a fulcrum from which the world can be moved. “Argue for your limitations and they are yours.” You and I can exert tremendous influence on what happens by using our power. The less attention we put on our own alleged powerlessness, the more powerful and effective our intention becomes, without our actually doing anything. We have to notice that we’re here, and what’s going on around us and inside us. This is called being awake in the moment.
There is nothing more sexy than a pretty face. Why? Is this a conditioned response? Are we looking for archetypes? That’s not my experience. None of the women I’ve known in my life have looked like each other. So what do I see when I see beauty? I think it’s something so personal that it’s not only unique to my eyes, it’s unique to my eyes when I’m looking at you. Other people don’t see what I see, and I don’t even see it except when I’m looking at your face.
There’s a leap my heart takes when I see something that looks pretty to me. And I do see beauty everywhere. So my experiences of beauty are connected for me by the way it feels, the excitement. I can look at different faces and have relatively similar experiences. But the content of what I see is never the same. That, to me, is the mystery. What is it I’m seeing each time? I think I’m recognizing a part of myself, or a part of what I love in the world, in each person I’m attracted to — and every time it’s a different part. I am large. I contain multitudes. Your beauty somehow puts me in touch with a part of the universe that is very important to me. It awakens parts of me I’d forgotten I missed. It’s as if, the first time I see you, I remember all the moments we will have spent together before our lives are over. My longing for you is a memory of the future.
We chose to come here to experience being human. What have we got to complain about? Have we been deprived of that experience? Is there anyone out there who’s been cheated out of his or her appropriate portion of pain or joy?
Time does heal wounds, if you let it. It helps not to pick at the scabs every day.
I am alive. I love being alive, and I love it in a way that makes me realize it’s not appropriate to think of life and death as opposites. The rabbit runs fast, and loves to run fast; but the rabbit wouldn’t need to run — would never even have developed the ability — if there were no fox, no deadly pursuer. Even the rabbit’s sexual appetite is a function of its vulnerability. The fecundity of the species is a response to the permanent danger that is a rabbit’s life, a response to the standing emergency.
Sometimes when we say we want peace, we mean we want sleep, rest, lack of stimulus. Exhausted by our struggle against fear and uncertainty, we believe the only alternative to the struggle is defeat. But Christ, and the I Ching, and all great teachers teach us that it is wise not to struggle, even against evil; that by not struggling, while continuing to bear in mind what we know to be right, we plant the seeds of ultimate victory.
Peace does not mean the absence of war. I don’t believe we want a world without conflict, any more than we want friendships or love relationships in which there is no conflict. The rabbit does not really want a world in which there is no need to run or raise large families, in which there is no purpose in being built like a rabbit.
Peace is a temporary absence of agitation. When we say we want peace, we mean we want to believe again that our children’s children will have a planet to live on. We are not saying we want an end to all danger, but rather that we want a danger we can live with — not a danger so horrible that we must either block our awareness of it at every moment or go mad.
This sort of peace is within our reach. It requires a willingness to know how bad things are, in terms of the physical danger we have created — and how good things are, in terms of the intelligence and adaptability of us as individuals and as a species. We must believe that we can set a goal and achieve it.
Our goal, I think, is agreement. We need to achieve unanimous agreement that we want to go on living, that we want to continue the human experiment, and that there are no conditions on this — no terms which, if not met, would cause us to renounce the agreement.
I am not talking about something that “looks like” agreement: your representative and my representative get together and sign a sheet of paper. I am talking about real agreement, real consensus — consensus that requires no enforcement, because true consensus easily and naturally enforces itself.
We ask too much if we ask an end to all danger, or an end to all suffering; indeed, we ask for something we don’t really want. That sort of paradox sets our power against itself.
I’m suggesting that we reach consciously for the minimum possible agreement that can unite us all: the agreement that nothing is more important than our survival.
If successful, we would become conscious beings united in a single intention, all of our power working together to achieve the daily miracle of continued survival. I have confidence that, once we’ve experienced the power of human agreement, we’ll find ourselves choosing life again and again.
Indeed, it may be that this agreement has already been reached, and that we need only to become conscious of it. The possibility that we are already using our collective power to avoid species and planetary death must not become a source of complacency. We can no more afford complacency than the rabbit can. We are vulnerable. We have chosen to be vulnerable; we love being vulnerable; we love this temporary existence. It is demanding, and we like having demands made of us. We like to be awake.
A hardcover edition of Waking Up Together is available for $14 postpaid from Entwhistle Books, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442. Williams is looking for a publisher interested in putting out a paperback.
Copyright © 1984 by Paul Williams
