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15. You Wondrous Thing

People don't seem to notice, let alone appreciate, their own wondrous power. They seem to think that they live and die and there's no particular consequence either way, good or bad. They don't seem to understand that everything that they do has an effect.

Did you ever make a sandcastle? Wasn't it fun? I think most people know their lives are a transient sandcastle but they feel sad about it. Some people want to leave a marker, a legacy of some kind but it's really not necessary because they already have a marker. You leave your marker in two ways: one is the actual, technical way by which you make your sandcastle and the other is the effect(s) it produces.

First, the fascinating way that you do anything is in two steps: one is to choose what to do and the other is to get agreement to get it done.

Step one, whatever you choose, is always reflecting your desire to be happy because no one can deliberately choose to be unhappy. You can ignorantly make yourself unhappy by your choices but not deliberately. (And as I've demonstrated elsewhere, if you haven't become aware of your connection with The Supreme Being, you will, time and time again, ignorantly choose to cause yourself unhappiness.)* That's just a fact and you can prove it by trying to do it. Let's say you take a knife and lightly cut your finger. You might do this for the satisfaction of determining your own threshold of pain but the stinging pain occurs because you wanted the satisfaction of knowledge. You didn't choose to be unhappy.

Step two is getting the agreement to do something. Agreements have to be reached by persuasion because you can't force anyone to agree. Now the persuasion can get pretty heavy but anything involving us highly individualistic individuals to teensy particles may cause us to say 'no'. Things that do happen can just slide along (agreement) or slow down (mild disagreement) or not move at all (complete disagreement). Agreeing (or not agreeing) is observably true from the biggest human interaction to the most minute quantum- particle interaction. For anything to actually happen, anything at all, there must be agreement. Agreement is basic to life.

Notice that the most ordinary conversation forces you to agree to stop talking and listen. You must agree to stop something else just to read this. You choose to agree (or not) with others and even yourself (you finger-cutting fool) when you are doing something solo. We are swimming in a worldwide ocean of agreements

Now the effects part. The transience of their lives with all the reality they created seems to fill people with gloomy thoughts. All that delicious contrast of emotions and logic, all that effort, all that achievement, all that happiness and tears, love, ignorance, passion, ennui, the full palette of experience, marvelous and terrible seems to leave them teary-eyed. Why? Don't they know that it all had a profoundly beneficial effect then and still does now? You don't have to discover fire or the wheel (or write pamphlets) to have a lasting beneficial effect on the world. You just have to have fun doing it because that radiates like a mini sun.

You are probably coming back to play in our sand because the chances of you returning are a good deal better than you returning to your childhood beaches. Sooner or later it's pretty certain you'll return, only the next time you will be less low-toned and much more high-toned. Your experiences keep adding to your overall awareness and when you make mistakes the next time around, they will be less likely to be serious ones.

Have you ever noticed that good people are always busy? Yes, I mean you; you wouldn't be reading this if you weren't one of the good guys. This is a wondrous thing. Why? It means that the influence of good people is continually expanding and it's expanding at a much faster rate than bad influences. The faster rate occurs because people do not deliberately choose to be unhappy. Whatever they do, people think their choices will improve them in some way and so people tend to avoid stuff that appears to have unhappy potential.

Therefore, the good deeds of good people billow out, beneficently influencing all but a bad deed just peters out because the stink puts people off, and again, nobody deliberately wants to be unhappy. Many a saint from many a religion has said, just like you and I, 'Well, I just don't do that bad stuff anymore'. My wife's comment, when this happens is, "Ain't that just grand!" and it truly is.

Isn't it nice to know that the effects of all the bad stuff we did has probably petered out long ago and that nobody cares, if they even remember about it now. If we remember it, if we do, it's just as a reminder not to do that again. Did you ever tell someone about what terrible things you did? Unless they're partially funny tales, nobody else is even slightly interested, not even the persons you did it to! They are usually polite about it, seeing you so upset, but honestly, they couldn't care less. They are instinctively avoiding low-toned stuff. And buddy, if you are still remembering bad stuff done to you a long time ago it undoubtedly makes you feel bad now. Listen to your own instinct and avoid it, get over it, forget about it, 'cause you're probably the only one remembering. If you're trying to 'understand' someone else's frame of mind when they did this terrible stuff, forget about that too. All you'll ever understand is that they made a mistake. Take comfort in the fact that people are always trying to choose happiness and they, surprise surprise, sometimes make mistakes.

And all of us know about making mistakes, don't we? You're trying to do something to increase your happiness and oops, a mistake. Forgiveness of mistakes, especially yours, goes a very long way towards your happiness here. If you can understand this instantly, about other peoples' mistakes, you deserve the halo that hovers over you. My halo, by the way, is non-existent and I have to think it through, every time!

Now your good deeds do last. I remember, and so do you, any kindness done to me from a long time ago. I'll probably never forget those kindnesses and like you, try to pass them along, one way or another. That's the billowing, rippling-out mechanism at work

When you put that together with the fact that a-we can only choose what we think is good, b-good stuff persists, c-bad stuff doesn't, and d-all things are getting better all the time you just got to step back and say, "Ain't LIFE just grand!"

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