I address you on this important and joyous day on the Nature of Unreality.
Unreality I define as the world in which we consider that we live. And I explain.
It is a recent development in human understanding to accept that our Earth is roughly spherical. Not so long ago, most people believed it to be FLAT.
Indeed, the Flat Earth Society had a considerable membership - until the Russian satellite Sputnik went aloft.
What is the cosmic situation today?
Let's look at the heavens.
Surely that is the real universe out there, with the Constellation Orion (one of the two that I can recognize) marching across the sky.
But consider:
The night sky looks to us like a snapshot - a simultaneous presence of reality. In fact, what we see represents a slice through time.
The Universe out there is absolutely not as it appears - never was - never will be. It is manifest unreality. That is, if you can ever find it.
Let the record show how many hands are pointing to the ceiling!
We just agreed that the Earth is not flat.
The stars are in whatever direction that anyone cares to point. But...
We are stuck with an acceptable illusion of an unrecognized unreality. Let's bring that - literally -down to Earth.
- the insight
- the courage
- the ability
- the zeal
to question and confront it.
We do not allow ourselves to dwell on facts of war, of famine, of torture. It is not conceivable, in our Unreality, that forty-thousand children are actually dying every day. As Buddhists know, there are burdens of common suffering that not everyone is able to bear. We live in Unreality instead.
The facts of acid rain are clear enough, but the unreality of practical politics has firm hold.
So: the maple sugar industry in this Province is dying now, and soon it will be dead -
before the problem is addressed to scale on the unreal calendars that politicians use.
So how can each of us take responsibility for the models of unreality in which we live?
They are prisons from which we can burst.
I'm afraid that the first of these prisons is the education that we have received. It will be rough on brand new graduates - and on their worthy teachers! - to hear that said.
But not only technology is changing fast; so too are its validating sciences.
We are subject not only to amazing socio-political change, but to underlying philosophic change as well.
- in liason with a fast-evolving physics,
- and an adolescent neurocybernetics,I expect a phenomenal breakthrough on the philosophic front by the turn of the century. Look especially for revelations on the epistemology of the SELF-AWARE.
So I want to congratulate you all on gown and hood - not because of past achievements that they represent, but because you have earned the rights and duties of updating the models that are the best that we can teach today.
Now what about the problems that this responsibility unfolds? Why should it be so difficult to "update models" (as I put it) - which sounds like simply "keeping abreast of your field"?
Oh no, it is not just a question of models of Unreality. It is a question of paradigm. I define a paradigm as a model that exhibits a closed logic. It means that our attempts to break out of a fixed pattern of thinking are constantly defeated - by running headlong into our own premises.
Here is a delicate example:
"Were you in Noah's Ark?"
I repudiated the suggestion.
"Then", he said, "why weren't you drowned?"
I have worked in eighteen countries now. If you do that, watch out for cultural distinctions - for different models of society, for difficult techniques of political adroitness.
But look out the more for PARADIGMS that RESIST CHANGE. They are common to all humanity.
After you have heard this eighteen times, you come to realise that all societies are corrupt - including those who feel free to lecture the others. They are constitutional liars and hypocrites as well. The universal paradigm this represents is one which says:
It is the Noah's Ark Syndrome.
IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.
Dangerous work.
Out of my eighteen countries, I choose my homeland Britain to make what I am saying exact.
The Unreality in which people live is a newly prosperous, booming economy. The reality is that since 1979 the numbers living below the Poverty Line have increased by 85%.
So today one third of British people subsist below Poverty.
What then has been done about that?
Money has been taken out of social welfare at a catastrophic rate, and dispensed to the rich in tax rebates.
I am often asked why this has not yet led to revolution. Well: two thirds of the people are not in poverty, and the top half are doing very well indeed. All that's left is to find a way to sustain belief, at home and abroad, in the Unreality of Success.
Easy:
Let us celebrate the fact that the vital place in which to initiate change, to break the prison walls, to destroy paradigms, and question models, is a private place where it can certainly be done.
Withdraw from the Unreality we live, and find reality itself. If you can find it within, then you have a chance to project it to others and the world. Not otherwise. That has been said by every great spiritual teacher....
But to renew that quest, consciously, every day, and to question paradigms at every turn, is a peculiarly modern need.
And to embrace that challenge is perhaps more difficult for the older among us than for the young.
First, you have to resign publicly from the Flat Earth Society.
That might mean resigning, as it has for me on several occassions, from some prestigious and lucrative affiliations.
Yes: qualifications are fine, even if they need to be updated.
But you cannot sit for a degree called CONTRAPARADIGM. There are no qualifications in Insight, Courage, Ability or Zeal. And you, and I, are going to need all four.
The acronym for Insight, Courage, Ability and Zeal is ICAZ. And I wish it were more memorable! I have tried to steer you instead towards ICAZ and the inner strength. It's all you've got in the end.
I said at the start that we deal in Unreality, that we are stuck with Illusions.
In his book of that name Richard Bach says this:
"The simplest questions are the most profound.
Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change."
Thank you.
Notes
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