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"Oh, the answer is simple," Steve replied. "Tell your friends, what they feel at the beach is a reflection of the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders."
"Oh, you!" I scolded him. "That will be a great help to them."
He grinned; I could hear it. He always makes that faint wheezing sound when he does.
"Pete, I'm glad that at least you recognize the value of it," his voice came back. "That makes you a genius. It took me nine years to formulate that sentence. If it's a definition you want, this is it! But tell it to them word for word. And when you have figured out what it means, call me back."
I could hear him grinning again.
He asked me if I wanted to write it down. He said that I probably should. So he gave it to me once more.
"Unfortunately, the project you told me about won't work," he added.
"Why not Steve? It better work. I've spent 93,000 dollars on it. I committed everything I own."
"I wish I didn't have to say this, but you aren't exempt from the effects of what you want to cure. Fragmentation affects you as anyone else. The burlesque business will see you as an enemy and put roadblocks in your way. The church will see you as a threat and will condemn you. The legal system will be against you, too. You'll be in for a high-wire act such as you've never dreamed of. Remember what I told you about habits of perception? You'll be up to your armpits in it as if it were quicksand. And if you try to fight it by force, remember you will be working from the same platform as those that fight you. If you fight them on their home ground they have you in their claws. And so, my friend, you would cement the divisions more firmly that you want to cure. Obviously, that's not the way to go."
"What then, can prevent a nuclear war?" I asked disappointed.
"Nothing will, Pete, nothing at all! Nothing will cure that until society has unraveled the monumental mistakes that have crept into its consciousness over the centuries. You may help perhaps by testing the doors, to see if any are unlocked, but not by knocking them down. If you push, people will push back and you'll get squashed. If you shout ignorance, they will kick you. If you preach to the masses, you will be courting coercion and brainwashing, and be starting another religion that merely adds more confusion where intelligence ought to prevail."
"There's no hope then, Steve, is there?"
"Certainly there is hope," he said, except this hope lies not with a crash program. "The problem is very, very deep, Pete. You have to reach down to the absolute bottom of the barrel to understand what's going on. Then you will start to work with that, and work with universal principles at the grassroots level. Nuclear war is only a small facet of the problem. And being a facet, you can't deal with it in isolation through a crash program. You can't even understand it in isolation."
"So, you mean there will be war, Steve?"
"There might be, not will be," said Steve. "War might break out if people can't respond to the demands of the hour. But first you must respond to the Principle of Universal Love. You must accept that you don't stand apart from humanity, as you insist by telling yourself that you are the only person in the world who is interested in advancing the unity of all mankind. That is what you are telling yourself with your insistence that you must finance the entire project yourself. In fact, it can't work the way you are going about it. You can't create a sea change in civilization without society itself taking part in the process, at least to some degree, driving the project. You can offer your idea, but society must move itself, and it will, out of the depth of its resources as human beings. The project that you want to start can be an enticing project if you go about it the right way."
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