Importance
The nature of man is good
I’ve got a dim memory of having spoken about this, or having told this anecdote in some other episode of you’re listening to radio revel, perhaps way back in Season One when my audience was mainly Japanese people looking for English as a Second Language teachers. I was confined, as many were, my job was non-essential, I simply sat at my desk or enjoyed my patio while the world simmered in a surreal reality of death and fear and uncertainty. Ah, good old spring of 2020.
But well, doesn’t matter, as we get older we end up doing a Grandpa Simpson from time to time, repeat things we’ve already said, tell stories we’ve already relived, bore the following generations with what we think is hard-earned wisdom but is actually synapses firing off because some stimulus has caught our eye. So, here goes.
When I was living in New York City in the eighties I was pretty much an untethered soul. I already had a massive ego, I was never one to be told what to do or what not to do, and I was particularly sensitive to anything that might be heard as criticism. I guess I’ve always been that way, but arriving in NYC in June of 1984, taking a Path Train from Jersey City into Manhattan, seeing my first pride parade, moving into Manhattan a year later, Upper East Side, then moving down to Tenth Avenue, nearly Lower West Side, I pretended I knew what I was doing along with almost every other New Yorker I encountered in my day-to-day life.
New York City was the perfect place for me to be as I grew from my late twenties into the gateway of my thirties. I shared a flat with an Literature grad student the first couple of years and his collection of books were there to be read. Too much Virginia Wolf. A bit of Mishima. Proust I tried but wisely gave up on after only a paragraph or two. And somehow Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged fell into my hands. I remember reading that, feeling the untethered egoism of the heroes, the stupidity of the antagonists. I remember when I lent the paperback that I had rebound to a friend, I added a note on the flyleaf: This book changed my life. I really believed that.
That roommate also lent me a copy of The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts. Now that book was the one that actually did changed my life. I spent decades rehashing the simple message of not only that book but all of the others that Ms Roberts produced. I think I have a cheat sheet somewhere I can quote here from those days, hang on….
The self is not limited.
There are no boundaries or separations of the self.
Those [boundaries] that you experience are the result of false beliefs.
What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. You must be aware of the contents of your own reasoning mind.
You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions causes all experience.
To change your experience or any portion of it….you must change your ideas.
You must learn to believe in the goodness of your being. Hatred of war will not bring peace….only love of peace will bring about those conditions.
You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.
It was that last one, “you make your own reality” or perhaps the expanded version, “you make your own reality through your beliefs” that I found to be the core message of Jane Roberts. If you believe something to be true, then for you it will be true, to question a personal belief is to question your integrity, at least until you change that belief. I continue to believe this.
The next to the last one, though, “you must learn to believe in the goodness of your being”, that one is closest to the source of this anecdote.
I spent one year writing a simple message in the upper margin of every $1 bill that came into my possession. This message did not come from Jane Roberts, it came from something else I had read, but I still liked the exercise. The message was: “Every dollar that I spend enriches the economy and returns to me multiplied.” This idea was closely tied to the habit, which I used in When Herb met Mable, of always carrying a dollar bill in my pocket and, when nervous, putting my hand in that pocket and folding the bill down to the smallest I could (is the limit seven folds? I think so….).
Along the same time, it began to feel that the world around me was shifting. Mr Reagan was still President, the Central Park Five incident occurred, I myself was mugged by a small group of pre-teens on Fifth Avenue, my personal relationship was on the rocks, my work relationship as well, I was not far from my first visit to Europe which would change my outlook and the decision just two years later to move out of the United States. I needed to assert to myself that things were not as bad as they seemed, my guru Ms Roberts had written: “You will do this by concentrating upon what you want, but feeling no conflict between that and what you have, because one will not contradict the other; each will be seen as a reflection of belief in daily life. As it took some time to build up your present image with its unhealthy aspects, so it may take time to change that picture. But concentration upon the present unhealthy situation will only prolong it. Period.”
A couple of years earlier I had tried to get some extra work by offering healthy cooking classes. ESL lessons were more or less paying my way, but I wanted to begin saving and thought that it would be cool to share my knowledge of vegetarian cooking and make some money from it. To advertise, I had a little rubber stamp made up with the words “Healthy Cooking Lessons” and my phone number. I would stamp this message onto little lime-green post-it notes and then leave these notes stuck all over New York City as I walked from here to there. My place of choice was actually in phone booths. You all remember phone booths? There was pretty much one on ever other corner in Manhattan, not necessarily the closed-in ones, mostly the ones on a pedestal.
So, a couple of years later (and not ever having gotten the cooking classes up and running) just before I left the States for the second time, I got the wild idea that I could spread a particular message that would not be based upon my ego, that would be totally selfless and could only do good. I had another little stamp made up, this one a self-inking stamp, with the simple message: “The nature of man is good.” As I walked from here to there throughout the city I would have this stamp on hand and I would stamp this simple message, in a tiny font, on all payphones on my route, right next to the coin slot where it would be seen.
The anecdote comes to mind because I turned to my mate this morning and said “I haven’t got an episode for next Monday! The one I was going to do isn’t going where I want it to and I’ve only got a couple of days this week to get an episode written and produced.” Basing his reply on our chat during our morning walk, a recurring theme of “the world is poor and man’s a shit and that is all there is to it” (The Threepenny Opera), my mate suggested that I concentrate on the simple message of accepting that there is evil out there but that we are basically good people who can still operate for the good of just being good.
I mean, it is certainly frustrating to see people with the power of power behave in such evil ways that do so much harm to other people who are probably not evil at all. Those evil men (and some women, but mostly men) just seem hell-bent on doing as much harm to their fellow humans as they can. It’s no use my bitching about that evil, it’s not even of any use my feeling frustrated with them. If Karma is a thing, I’m grateful I am not in those people’s shoes right now.
What I want to do, what I want to suggest, what my mate seemed to be saying as well, what we both try to keep in the forefront as we switch the TV from the images of rubble and smoke and blood and stupidity and just down-right evil to The Simpsons or Southpark or Forensic Files, is that we can only do what we can do in our world and hope that it extends out a bit and then gets paid forward by the other good people who have seen our actions. Mine is current, it is these words, “The nature of man is good.”
That doesn’t mean that man isn’t be capable of being evil. That’s pretty evident. But we needn’t be evil if we don’t want to be. If I can hold those two ideas in my mind at the same time, that man is good but some men behave in an evil fashion despite their nature, against the nature of man, then I can tamp down the feeling of frustration, I can leave my mind free for those good things I can do, like write my stories, write my essays, play the guitar, listen to music from my youth, remember who I saw that movie with and what we discussed over coffee after the movie. I can think about getting in touch with that person I’ve not seen for decades or I can pick up that book I’ve started reading or do some drawings.
I may not be doing anything remarkable. I may not save a life or prevent an injury. But I am doing to harm, I am being good and as I also believe in the whole “energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another”, (Albert Einstein) I hope my good energy continues to be good as it makes that transition from one form to another.
You get what you give, multiplied. I don’t know if that sentence, which I have repeated thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of times since I became an adult, has its roots in Jane Roberts or Constantine Stanislavsky (and I tend to think it was the latter), but I do know that it has been true in my lifetime. That may be because I firmly believe in its truth. It’s a kind of karmic idea, yeah. But I like it. You can steal it if you like, it’s a pretty good keystone for building the arches of your own belief system.
Okay, that’s about it. This episode is actually the fill-in between the second story of Fictional Interlude and the third. Next week you can hear the first part of the third story, The city of towers. Not a coincidence, my going on about New York City this week just before that story becomes part of you’re listening to radio revel. Hope you return to hear it.
Cheers,
revel.