Diagram 101

Re Talk: 234

      I have hinted around this before, but now let me tell you directly that there is a great deal to be said about saying very little.  Now in our day, as long as you are out there working and dealing with Life, you have got to talk to some degree.  But you do not have to take it seriously -- it does not have to come from an apparent center of what you are.  There is a difference between the circuits just running your tongue and you having control over it.

     How about frontiers?  I'm going to use as an example the westward expansion of the settlement of America.  There seemed to be at all times during that era a moving frontier.  And it was distinguished, from the viewpoint of the people at that time, as a line of sorts beyond which civilization and order broke down. One went from settled parts that had a certain decorum and order into areas where the feeling was, "Hey, out here I'm on my own -- it's wild; anything can happen."

 You need to see that it was a movable frontier.  At one point in the settlement of the country the Wild West began just outside Jamestown.  At a later date it was outside of Richmond; later still, the frontier was on the eastern edge of the great plains.  It was a cyclical, continuous process of the frontier moving, in this example, westward across the continent.  Civilization would catch up, and the frontier would move again.

     Does any of this sound familiar?  In various ways, many of you are already going through that.  There is a movable frontier in you -- that which at one time was uncivilized in you has been settled and civilized.  But the frontier continues to move.  In the past, before you got involved with This Activity, you might have used religious terms to describe these uncivilized regions in you:  your material, baser self, etc.  You might say, "At some time in my past I had desires to do things that scared me.  I was afraid that I might get drunk enough sometime to actually do them."  And it's as though civilization caught up with you.  But the frontier must move on.  Can anyone see a further connection between this process of moving frontiers and Man's level of consciousness continuing to move up?  Not just in humanity, but in you who have a Real Aim.

 Back to my other example of the frontier of the wild west.  If you went past this frontier, you were in uncivilized, disorganized territory, while on the eastern side of the frontier it was organized, stable -- it was peaceful.  Why did they continually push at the frontier?  Ignore any immediate Line level responses you might have, such as, "Well, there was this influx of immigrants and they needed more land to settle."  Poverty follows peace.

     Let me remind you that I'm not speaking of American history and the definition of poverty in these descriptions is not limited to some commercial or institutional sense.  Let's return to my original question of, "Why do you continue to come here?"  And I mentioned several possibilities such as the desire for fellowship, comfort and peace.  Many of you certainly might feel that peace is a desirable goal.  You very likely feel that in some way you have already become more peaceful having been involved with This.  If I were to present This publicly as a system or method that would make it possible for one to be at peace with Life and with oneself, would not large numbers of people say, "Yeah, where do I sign up?"  And you surely realize that there are many systems and groups apparently offering just that.  Peace would seem to be a worthwhile goal, except for this:  Those kings of old were correct when they said, "Poverty follows peace."

     Taking another angle, consider what all the prominent historical religious leaders had in common.  From a certain viewpoint, they were all trouble makers.  Regardless of what the history books may say, the various times that these guys showed up were, by and large, peaceful times.  (As an aside, I could say that it is always rather peaceful.)  But these famous historical religious figures were born in relatively peaceful surroundings and they rattled the cages of the prevailing powers of their particular time and place.  They apparently persuaded large numbers of their contemporaries to get involved in warfare.  In a certain, peculiar sense, they took large numbers of relatively stable, sane, peaceful people and made them undertake, dare I say it, a useless endeavor -- an irrelevant warfare.  I suggest to you that in their own way those famous religious figures also understood the fact that poverty follows peace. JC talk 234