Two Novels, Revisited

TUES., MAR. 19, 1991, 6:35 AM
FARM, STUDY

This is that time of year when you revisit two contrasting cultures, portrayed in two old novels. In each there is almost a disdain for this Christianity, your religion and My favorite. Why, then, should I be offering a Teaching toward these ways of living? Continue to hear Me, o son.

In Brave New World science and technology have carried people beyond what is present reality, in the interests of peace and stability. The human condition was analyzed, and the natural way of creating humans was judged to be part of the problem. Normal differences had to be eliminated. Planned differences could be realized. People could be “made” for a job they would do in life. Health could be guaranteed by pre-planning, but there would be no old age. Each person had an identify, as part of a community… and there was stability. What could be better?

It was a utopia, with the drug soma to get people over times of doubt and bad feeling. There were community “religious” practices, with a similarity to communion. This represented a tacit acceptance of spirit, even in people decanted. Spirit had to be mollified, gently curbed, and not acknowledged. This is not wholly unlike your culture’s dominant attitude in relation to education and to health and medical care.

In public education there must be no official acknowledgment that I am the Source of life… the Creator. Minds and emotions can be acknowledged, but not spirits. Health, also, is essentially body and mind, with legitimate medicine taking, officially, only physical measures to cure. You recognize religion, as the Brave New World did not, but it must not be pervasive.

On the Island there was a contrast. It was not Christianity, but life was permeated with a gentle religion. It did not acknowledge Me, but there was much concern for spirit. The moksha medicine did not counter the human spirit, but abetted it. There was a sense of looking inward and, ultimately, outward toward the Light, which, of course, is I, the Holy Spirit, just not named. Ecology was the major science, with an encouragement to live in balance with nature.

Individual differences were recognized and unplanned. Education prepared young people for a life that each could control. There was no place for a Controller. Each must develop capacities to live her individual life, in gentle community with others.

What are the lessons from this current revisiting of these novel cultures? You are right in seeing the similarities between your present production-consumption culture and that of the Brave New World. Your culture’s economic health is measured by gross national product, and, in a condition worse than the BNW, you expend much time, money, and materials on weapons of war. In that culture, wars were past. That was a “good,” say I. (I do urge you to continue the thought that this last war was not a noble enterprise for your country, but a waste.)

Yet appreciate the freedom you have to teach in ways that criticize your culture and to live in ways more like those of Pala. You do appreciate the privileges of this life, and, importantly, you acknowledge Me as the Ultimate Source of who you are and how you live. You are past the age where, in the Brave New World, you would have gone to the Dying Hospital. You have not yet developed a fatal degenerative disease to test your capacities to tolerate pain and to move on out of your body to a spiritual realm. So, you live on, in maximum freedom… for true freedom does come from Me.