It is interesting to note that even those who profess no formal faith can accept and apply these principles without compromising or abridging any intellectual position they may have taken. Even when we completely divest these teachings of any aura of magic or mysticism, they remain the time-tested and infinitely sane advice of the wisest and best minds man has ever known. They are real answers for a real world, because they embody the lucid, living truth.
They say that each of us must, among other things, avoid anger, tension, and strife; that we must not feel,—nor arouse in others,—fear, shame, or guilt; that we must become free of avidity, and anxiety; that we must never dominate, nor be dominated by, others. Their principles form a simple consistent pattern which is probably the only cure for the personal and group disorders that are becoming fatal to man.
Now, let us consider how the remedy may be applied.
PERSONAL
PREPARATION
It is so much a conversational commonplace to shrug off the idea of using the precepts as actual rules for everyday living that a person who wishes to practice them is doubly handicapped. He is left in doubt that they will work at all in the atmosphere of tension, anxiety, and even of voracity that seems to surround him. And there is little support for his attempt in any easily available accumulation of experience along such lines, or through any widely circulated analysis of its implications. In part, these conditions obtain because the tenets have been invested with an aura of unnatural remoteness, which insulates them from life, discourages general first-hand familiarity with them, and tends to isolate anyone who aspires to apply them. The precepts are thus placed out of reach, the practitioner out of touch, and an elaborate alibi for failing to follow them is conveniently established in advance (or in the absence) of any general effort to use them. Everyone feels justified who refuses seriously to entertain ideas which are customarily defined at the outset as "unworkable," and of which exemplification is regarded as "abnormal."
Perhaps, also, these principles are often dismissed without real trial because of a partially accurate apprehension that their effectuation would expose person, psyche, and society to unwonted upheaval. Even to contemplate the serious implementation of these truths awakens in many of us an awkward, inarticulate uneasiness—an elemental foreboding of physical assault and material deprivation. Utterly forgetting Who, and what Forces, might provide for and protect us, we scramble back behind the barrier of business-as-usual, covering an inglorious retreat with the querulous complaint that all who accept the tenets are at the mercy of those who do not.
Whatever the reasons, it has been a habit of humans throughout history to hide from themselves the unsophisticated simplicity of their greatest truths under matted layers of dispute and dissension. Not merely a possibility, but a definite promise, of perpetual peace has thus been, in effect, screened away from the basic bulk of mankind. And sporadic efforts to realize upon that promise have soon been smothered. Confronted as we are with an alternative of imminent and utter erasure, our first concern should be to stop weaving new threads into this tangle of wrangling; and our second, to begin unraveling it. Whether the race is to succeed in doing these things, and whether there is to be any general application of the some half-dozen essentials in which the great teachings coincide, must be answered by each individual in his inalienable capacity as a representative of the human race. It is only appropriate for another person, (even though he may be a proponent of applying the recommendations of the Masters as a general remedy for our socio-technical disorders), to suggest the nature of that remedy and to propose a way to use it. It is the consensus of the teachings themselves, however, that each of us must, out of individual initiative, change the way we think, so as to change the way we live, in order to live at all. They tell us how the change may be accomplished; something of its broad outlines; and the result to be expected. Unquestionably, men have tried repeatedly and sincerely to avail themselves of this same remedy; but just as unquestionably, they have each time failed to secure any sure and lasting success. And the common denominator of those failures has been the endeavor to adapt the principles instead of simply adopting them.
The pattern of the precepts is an endless ellipse of mutual corroboration; and they are internally consistent as well as integrally complete. Their implications flow so seamlessly together, and their connotations are so interlocked, that subjective insertions, selective editing, or accommodative alterations become obvious attempts to jeopardize the utility of the whole. For example, it is possible to forego force and violence only if you forswear the desire for position or possession, for the attainment and maintenance of both depend upon potential or actual compulsion. Similarly, the avoidance of anger, or of anxiety, hinges upon relinquishing both avidity for dominance and reliance upon material powers. Like linkages are traceable among all of the tenets, in all permutations.
This means that in order to see the precepts as normal conventions for day-to-day behavior, our vision has to be accommodated to them, rather than the reverse. They must be viewed undistorted and full-focus as literal, plausible, applicable instructions, rather than as shimmering, unattainable mirages with our own intellectual blind spots projected upon them. Indeed, adequate correction of our customary outlook may include altering ideas, modifying major concepts, reshaping ingrained habits, redefining many of our values. A measure of the margin by which man has traditionally misconstrued the message of the tenets is that to regard them as specific social proposals brings us to the brink of thinking so unfamiliar as to be mind-shaking in its strangeness.
There are certain attitudes which participants in a program for implementing the remedy would want to maintain consistently and insistently, sustaining them upon policy alone when reason is exhausted. These are tacit translations of the broad basic themes of the tenets into living realities in every instantaneous relationship. They would form a kind of ambient embodiment of the precepts, with which one would infuse his personal plenum. These patterns of method and manner would form the true dynamics of the program. They could convey its content more loudly than any amount of language; and their absence would give our strongest words the lie. They need not so much be spoken as displayed. The essence of them should pervade every part of the program, and permeate the climate of every contact from its inception. Above all, we should remember our most constant and intimate human relationship: we can best prepare to show these attitudes to others by the silent and private practice of exhibiting them toward ourselves.
The first of these is a calm presumption of inevitable success. This feeling of ultimate assurance would stem from the certainty that there is no force anywhere in the universe capable of preventing pursuit of the program which would do so. A constructive companion-postulate to this conviction would be the stipulation that the strictures of the precepts can be carried out invariably and without exception by anyone, anywhere, at any time and under all conditions, granting the desire to do so, and the willingness to learn how.
Another in this galaxy of new viewpoints might be termed the "good workman" complex. The program would seem to require of participants the quiet competence usually associated with master craftsmen, doing their job well for its own sake without need or thought of approbation. The emphasis would be upon anonymity. Those who seek to further the formula would have a comforting anticipation of ultimate success, the relaxed assurance that openly and easily shares information with others, and a willingness to improve skills. There would be a monumental disinclination to be hurried, or to quit, and an unexcitable thoroughness. There would be no toying with or trivializing of the "tools," these truths.
Many of the basic attitudes of the program are the result of direct, subjective application of the precepts, regarded as specific injunctions that merit unswerving observance. This treatment of them as literal imperatives would permit no temporary suspension, easy rationalization, or neglect, upon weak and specious excuses. They would not