Technologies like Kum Nye, knowledge like Kum Nye, once in the public domain, can spread. The speed with which good ideas can propagate in our modern world is astonishing, and this technology or one like it may well save all of us. Our would-be saviors–which is to say the ones who want to enslave the whole world to make it “free”–presumably retain some sense that they are doing good. They have a moral sense. No one who truly opens up their emotional worlds, though, can retain a fundamentally false understanding of themselves or their true purposes. One can hope that somewhere one of these people steps into something truly useful, and comes out truly useful.
In Tibet, as I have mentioned, they spin prayer wheels. They hang prayer flags, and burn prayers in fires (unless that is the Japanese). Mostly, they pray for universal salvation, that all come to a knowledge of how to be truly happy, and how to be truly free of all the psychic constraints that bedevil the ignorant.
But is the spread of knowledge not a LOGISTICAL problem? And is that problem best solved by wishful thinking, even if we do grant some ability to send energy out into the world, and some concreteness to thoughts, which can be transmitted? I think not. The most fervent wish is scarcely a match for a well constructed sales pitch delivered in a tone that is right for the audience. It is direct transmission.
Compassion might in some sense be a feeling–it STARTS as a feeling–but if it is sincere it is interested in abstraction, because it is interested in EFFECTIVENESS. It is interested in treating the problem of enlightening humanity with the same seriousness with which battlefield generals approach an aggressive campaign against their enemies. The tone is different, of course–love can and should be a “weapon”–but surveying the terrain, assessing logistical requirements, taking the tone of situation and place, putting the right people in the right places, and trusting intuition are not that different than the problems Sun Tzu sought to solve several thousand years ago.
In our modern world we have made the manufacture of objects easy. If the banking system had not diluted our wealth twentyfold or more, we would have no material wants of any sort in this or most other countries.
What we have not even come CLOSE to achieving is consistency with regard to spiritual growth. We are not even CLOSE to having methods we can say with relative certainty will always lead down a long road, and carry people where they want to go.
Hell, even asking the QUESTION “what makes people happy” has only been tolerated within the broader field of psychology perhaps a decade, and has only become popular in the last 5 years or so (or so I assume, based on the books I see on the shelves.)
It is much cheaper and easier to seek the ability to easily achieve satisfaction, contentment, satiety, peace first, then work backwards and figure out what you actually NEED materially. You want to help the environment? Let’s not institute a Fascist regime and get Al Gore the uniform and whip he has always wanted. Let’s figure out how to end our obsession with consumption. Let’s figure out how to earn time more easily, and with that time work on being happier and happier with less and less.