Could There Be A Pala?

SAT., AUG. 28, 1999, 7:12 AM
FARM, STUDY

I approve of you re-reading books and stories that you have read as a younger person, particularly those with marginal indications of your “being there.” This story, centered on the Island of Pala, is Edenic, but with a population of people, “governed,” actually, by Buddhist principles, rather than Christian. You haven’t finished it yet, this time, and you’re not sure you remember the ending, though you have a sense that it is not a happy one.

For the strong premise is that “the outside world” – the world of oil, armaments, and “progress” – just can’t allow this utopic culture to be as it is. You are not unhappy with your culture, for it allows much freedom, for persons like you. Yet you recognize that your culture seems (to you, at least) unsustainable, with its drive for more and more “production,” use of resources, and desire for “the new.” You recognize this, but you still accept the “benefits.” You are, in some ways, a hypocrite.

Yet you could counter that I am “one,” also. I allow all of this activity to happen, with a clear view (yes, I do have such) that such cannot be sustained much longer, for your culture, let alone in other larger ones, who take American perspectives and actions as a model. I seem to want this earth to continue as a unique site for spiritual development, but I allow the continuation, and increase, of unsustainable motivations and behaviors. Pala, today, would be “under siege,” as it was in the story, by those who would exploit (or just use?) its resources and plant the seeds of desire for “a better life” – with more conveniences and more competition.

Now of course there are Palas in the earth today, but, typically, they have nothing, like oil, that your culture wants. Even on this continent there are “pocket Palas,” where folk there stive to lead a simpler, gentler, less competitive life. And then I’ll say tat your culture is competitive, and even in a spirit of freedom to be different, it, like Murugan, wants these Palas to want more, to “progress.”

For, again in the spirit of freedom, in any modern Pala there would be some who would want change and “progress”… “look what they have that we don’t.” You wonder if I am purposely allowing the conditions for a “crash”… for, yes, it would be a true test of the human spirit, in Americans, to experience the apparent collapse of “whatever” keeps your culture going, today. Would the spirit be one of rebuilding toward even greater “glory,” or could there be acceptance of the need for a simpler, less aggressive, life style?

With the perspectives I’ve helped you develop you don’t see most publicized “tragedies” as such, particularly in terms of loss of human lives. But, of course, such a perspective would be sorely challenged if one of the current hurricanes should hit Charleston hard, with loss of some of your family there. You see that it is not easy to hold firmly to the ecological principle that there is too much human life to be sustainable and then want no harm to “your own.” You have lost two, of five, sons, but there soon will be 14 of the next generation. Should any of these be “lost” prematurely?

In some ways, a few, at least, this Farm is a form of Pala… small scale. Oh, you are not without “conveniences,” but, symbolically, you are not “on line”… and if the economy depended on your desire for new and better “things” it would be in real trouble. You don’t encourage the earth to produce all that it could, but this is mostly a result of your age… and reluctant acceptance of the value of serenity over neatness, order, and “production” (even as you “hope to do better next year”).