Writing about the difficulties of communications, the only way for one to know more than what is personally experienced, Walter Lippmann alludes to the aversion for discussion of the larger topics. When to topic changes to something more familiar, “It is like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the plowed field outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a sojourn in the painter’s portrayal of his own emotional response to his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen.” (Public Opinion) That statement make me laugh a lot.
We do the best we can, but it is not often as good as possible. I think there are no human exceptions. That is why we should not create great power. A person has only so much power. It varies some, but not much. But we do not live alone. The complexity of living together may have never been well comprehended, but it has been exploited. We cannot avoid living together and creating great power. We can manage it better, though. If we don’t manage it, someone will, or some will take advantage of it, more likely both.
Look out there. See the world. Can you see that humans have done a lot for a long time? If we had been capable of organizing our efforts as competently as we now can, we would not have done what we did. The world would not have become what we see. It would have long ago exceeded the most beautiful dream of the most wonderful world people can now imagine.
Every moment is a crossroad of life. The path we choose will take us where it goes with infinite crossroads along the way. With love we can choose paths that will take us to that place we only yet “imagine he ought to have seen.”
I wonder all the time about why people do not spend much time trying to comprehend love. All the poetry, song, literature, celebrations, and advice from messiahs and prophets about love have not been enough. “Love one another as I have loved you.” How many have told us the same thing? I think a person has to become capable of love, the love “as I have loved you.”
The love exemplified in a story of someone who could perform miracles and live a life of wonder and bliss but chose instead torture and agonizing death voluntarily to help those loved ones “who know not what they do” is a story designed to teach us a certain love. Love comes in many examples. The number of examples might equal the number of people living and dead. There is a certain love that is magical. If people would spend a small percentage of their thoughts sincerely considering such love, the world would transform faster than an Autobot.
Thinking expands comprehension. Thinking about love expands one’s love. We can attain the magical love by many paths. Since every single person has a unique path in life, it is brilliant that so many paths can lead to the magical love. The school of hard knocks is nothing compared to the school of heartbreak. But heartbreak can lead one to that special capacity or type of love. When Jesus took the cross, the desire to make the path to love easier was made something heartfelt simply in the telling of it. The wisdom of God!
Can you imagine the task God faces? How do you get people to love one another? Send them commandments etched in stone? Send them your son? Order them, punish them, destroy them and start over? What would you do if you wanted everyone to love everyone? I have been trying to answer that question for a long time. You just read my effort to make it happen.