If we don’t change direction, we’re liable to end up where we’re headed
I’d like to pick up the thread again of discussing at a conceptual level creating Nova Earth.
What’s becoming apparent to me, as the awareness dawns and the insights arise one by one in my consciousness, is that building Nova Earth is an activity that proceeds entirely newly, entirely from scratch, as the saying goes. I don’t know anyone incarnate who knows the whole of the Divine Plan as it relates to building Nova Earth. I don’t think we’re supposed to.
I think this is an opportunity for us to learn to fly, so to speak, while repaying the kindness of our Mother Gaia … in not throwing us off her surface for the way we’ve treated her for eons. We learn to fly by stepping out and learning from each success and failure.
Now that we see that Nova Earth will be created newly – by us – where do we go from here?
Several teachings arise in my mind that illustrate possible ways to proceed, hints at what to do next. Of course all of this is at the highest levels of abstraction. You’ll need to apply them to the situation of unworkability you agree to address.
Est trainer Dennis Percy used to say that the path starts at the trailing edge of your leading foot.
Think of that. Take a step or two and see that the next step you take begins at the trailing edge of your leading foot. Each step begins at the same place. That’s how we walk.
What Dennis is really saying is that we create “the path” with each step we take.
So, here, with building Nova Earth, it may simply turn out to be a question of “What’s Next?” “What’s Next?” “What’s Next?”
No one will know beforehand what lies very far down the road. All of us will be making our best possible guesses, and as long as we acknowledge that they’re guesses, they may prove beneficial.
Moreover, we’re always creating the path. We’re never following one, though we may think we are. We’re always creating. Nothing could stop us doing that, in this life or the next.
So Dennis advises us just to begin and stop looking for a template or another person’s vision of “the path.” The path will be created by the steps we take.
Besides Dennis’ teaching, there’s another that’s germane here, from his boss, Werner Erhard, which I’ve cited many times before. If a train is headed for disaster, it won’t make a difference to matters if the passengers all go to the right side of the train or to the left side. The train will continue on to disaster.
What the passengers need to do if they don’t want to end up in disaster is to stop the train, get off, and lay new track.
And that is what we need to do here too: lay new track.
At this moment these are the only two clues I have about what to do next in building Nova Earth.
We create the path with each step we take.
If we want to avoid ending up in disaster in a train that’s headed for it, we must stop the train, get out in front and lay new track.
The next question is: Where shall we goi next?
Where do we want to go?
How do we even think about these subjects? No one has gone here before.
Here a circular argument develops, beyond which few ideas develop. This is the point at which resolve dies away; flash-in-the-pan interest subsides and the real work begins.
It’s at this point that we hear a second voice from inside saying that we have to be careful; we have to proceed cautiously because no one has ever been here before. This is new territory and we’d better watch ourselves. Caution sets in and with it fear.
Meanwhile the first voice repeats that the path we need to create will be created with each new step we take. We may want it to be the best step, time after time.
And it’ll have to be a different path than the one we’ve been taking because that one was headed for disaster.
This first voice of resolve confronts the voice of fear and conflict ensues.
Back and forth the argument goes between fear and resolve, fear and resolve, until we drop our forward motion.
All our job in all of this is simply to see, acknowledge and let go of matters. We’ll need to do this constantly in the weeks ahead as change gradually or swiftly ramps up in intensity.
All of this knowledge is impressing itself upon me. Just as the path starts from the trailing edge of the leading foot, so also I know what I’m about to say in a what’s-next narrative sort of manner. And I only know the very next thought as it comes hot off the press – no other thought or step in the process.