To the Nameless, a relationship
was a “thing,” but to the humans only objects were “things.” Jim
reflected about this difference, since it seemed to require a “different
mind” to live mostly in a land of personalities, where minds thinking in terms
of objects had never been able to find harmony. In practice it meant that in his
home community there were countless subtle personal interactions occurring
daily, filling the mind with enough interest and excitement that the people
could easily be very frugal in their demands on the resources of the planet.
“Possessions are oppression,” was one of the slogans of the Nameless.
Objects are oppressive against friends if you want more than they can have, and
they are generally burdensome for a mind comported for spiritual awareness since
it is a waste of one’s short life keeping track of many objects when there is
obviously no permanent bond with them. It is better that the collection of
objects be handled publicly. That way if you are assigned to maintain or
organize some of them, at least you know your work is creating a definite social
benefit, not like dragging the objects off to a cave to gaze at them by
yourself, no longer relevant to the others. In this way too many items could be
of shared use, but the Nameless did not think of these as shared possessions or
“common goods,” a fact that was difficult to communicate to the world at
large. Seeing what they were doing, the world concluded there was common
ownership; but the minds of the Nameless were comported in a different way,
literally unable to think about possessing objects. With them it was not just a
teaching that possessions are oppression. Instead they seemed to “have it”
from deep within being itself. Some might call it spiritual knowledge, but they
knew and felt that objects are a distraction from the real life in
relationships, not a treasure to be accumulated and perhaps held over the heads
of others.
An encounter with someone from the
world could thus be quite humorous, as the outsider kept presuming that to see
an object in the hand connoted thoughts of possession, but such thoughts were
literally absent from the minds of the Nameless. A large host of consequences
followed from this aspect of their mentalities, in which the very core of
duality by which the egos began their thinking processes, had been rooted out
from them. It turned out the humans were also subject to ideas of possessiveness
governing their relationships too, in a vast web of cause-and-effect differences
that could be interesting to trace, but which were of little interest to the
humans since they had little power over the mind to induce changes in the
being-state, from sentences gathered in their lingual comprehension. That is to
say, in order to “hear” such teachings as possessions are oppression, the
humans listened with a corrupted apparatus, never really seeing the dawn of pure
selfless light. The higher states literally could not be communicated to them by
any means. Seeing these states they became dismissive, sure it could not be
important.
For instance, seeing Jim wielding a
wrench, the human would think, “That is his wrench,” but Jim would be
thinking, “This is a wrench that I am using from the common stores.”
Watching Jim’s behaviors when using the wrench, the human could see no
reflection of the manner in which he would use a tool, with possessiveness in
his heart. Seeing Jim put the wrench back into the common storage area, the
human might say, “Don’t you want your own set of tools?” That was really
hard for Jim to understand. He tried to think what it might mean, to see an
object and call it, “your own,” but he didn’t seem to have that mental
function. For some reason the human was suggesting that if Jim had a pile of
tools and kept them to himself, he would be in a better condition! But from
Jim’s perspective, it was more logical to have a common store since there is
no duplication and his own mind could be less burdened with the objects around
himself, freeing it for ecstatic appreciation and subtle repartee with the other
community people.
The distribution of goods among the
Nameless also baffled the humans. The humans wanted more of everything, but the
Nameless wanted less of everything. It meant far less pressure on manufacturing,
and freed up a lot of time since there was no need to count money in a system of
assigning value to a medium of exchange. At a Nameless store, you walked in and
took what you wanted, but nobody took too much, in fact often people needed to
be encouraged to take a few more things, in order to bring genuine comfort into
their lives. The role of the those working in the store was merely to display
the goods and order more when supplies were low, or perhaps to answer questions
and help people find the right sizes. Human history showed such a system would
fail quickly among egos. Unable to assign value to personality and not caring if
they insulted their friends to be seen grabbing like animals, the humans would
pile their arms high with any “free” things, filling up their houses or else
reselling items to make money. To Jim that looked like animals in the forest,
but the humans seemed to have no substantial inner standard, to know what was
divine behavior and what was mean and ugly, derived from unreflective sense
experience.
One of the hardest things for the
outside world to accept about the Nameless lifestyle, was the form of
government, in which administrators were chosen from among the over-fifty crowd,
all of whom had spent their lives in selfless service and so had a good idea
about society’s real needs. These administrators had great power over the
lives of people, but so far they had proved incorruptible and wise, something
never seen in human history and evidently derived from a secret divine spring.
Since theirs was a needs-based society rather than a desire-based one, the
administrators decided what jobs were required and assigned these to the rest.
Since rebirth is reality, they ordered their decisions by what they would want
to see coming from similar administrators in their own next lives. Then, the
young people coming out of high school were only too happy to be told what their
career was to be. Since it is an obvious principle of embodiment that the young
are the strongest, often the jobs in the twenties were manual labor on farms or
other situations. Then by age thirty another job might be assigned, requiring
additional training. The humans hated these ideas, because they considered it to
be freedom to do what they want, rather than a demonstrated power to conform
one’s life to what society truly requires. As in most differences, the
Nameless rejoiced at what brought the humans sorrow, and vice-versa. In this
case a young person full of physical power also recognizes he hasn’t seen
enough of the world to form sufficient ideas to govern it. Since outdoor manual
labor is readily ecstatic, the role of a farm hand is a coveted one. But the
real joy comes from knowing the work is true service. It is going to benefit the
others, and enable their joys.
Then too, among the Nameless there is
no prestige or special benefit associated with any job unless it is an unusually
demanding one, in which case the person might not be asked to work too many
years at that job, or otherwise find a compensation in terms of his overall life
circumstance that is not a new burden on the rest. The main society had gotten
many things right about technology, but it had no heart or sustainability. Jim
was an electrician, and his role on the surface seemed similar to that of an
electrician in the “other world.” But there were many important differences.
Since the Nameless never thought about money except when interacting with the
outside world, he was always assigned where the need was greatest, without money
being a factor. Many small jobs that would have been neglected by private
consumers in the other system were given a priority, and the numbers of
electricians was always in flux, as the needs swelled or decreased and the
administrators were able to direct a response. Most of the Nameless communities
were large enough to have their own electrician, but Jim’s role was to travel
to many of the smaller communities on an as-needed basis. He had stated travel
as a preference in the early job-screening from high school, and the
administrators had been able to accommodate him in this way. If they could not
have done so, he’d have demonstrated the power to adapt his life work
according to the real needs of society. There are negatives to constant travel,
and positives to staying mostly in one location, and a powerful mind can easily
balance these out in response to what the world really requires. The Nameless
drew their motivation from the joy of the whole, to which they contributed as
part of the divine cosmic project. It was their ability to “see” the
channels of living joy to spirit, that seemed to separate them from the egos.
They got a thrill to see another joyful, whereas the egos were made unhappy by
that, and happy by others’ misery.
Then, knowledge among the Nameless
was not used as a form of domination. Unlike in the world, the people loved
spending time together in groups large and small. This was allowed because each
had the “perfectly inoffensive personality,” that in the world resulted in
their exploitation and abuse at the hands of the domineering egos. But if Jim
was out on a job, usually ten or twenty interested persons would accompany him,
and he’d take it upon himself to share his knowledge freely. Some in the group
had received similar training, and they were usually of great help to him. It
usually took the Nameless longer to finish a given job than it would in the
world, but in the world they were always scampering off to the family and other
pleasures, where to the Nameless, work was very nearly a form of recreation in
itself. If there was work to be done, there were always many sets of hands ready
to help. The Nameless considered that life was boring, without such meaningful
tasks, and they rejoiced to show the power of intense cooperation, which to them
was like a thrilling sport. But in the world of egos, if there was work to be
done all you found was excuses in every direction, as far as the eye could see.
The egos didn’t like one another, and none of them was especially likable. The
Nameless, due to the perfectly inoffensive personality (which to the egos looked
like the death of domination), were very likable individuals at a root level.
From there, they learned to like one another from the noble attributes of
personality they could begin to see, after long association.
By sharing his knowledge with many,
Jim was working himself out of a job. The numbers of electricians required was
slowly decreasing, as that type of knowledge became more widespread, and the
role of an electrician was increasingly to direct others who had some training,
in specific tasks where a greater knowledge of electricity and wiring was
required. But he wasn’t worried. If the need for electricians waned, he’d be
reassigned naturally and easily to another role, never having to worry over the
five essentials of life, which are good clothes, housing and food, and medical
and dental care. Among the Nameless there was no unemployment and no
homelessness. A person was valued for his or her desire to contribute by work to
the whole. Anyone who had that desire was considered as worthy of the five
essentials as anyone else, and it was the role of society to see to education
and to assign a job. The system required immense flexibility on the part of the
workers, and also something of the desireless condition, so that they didn’t
have a private selfish project going on, but were able to have a vision of the
whole, to find their joys as part of a large collection of people made joyful in
the real situation of planetary embodiment. If you wanted something that was
different from the happiness of everyone, or exclusive of their happiness as
something irrelevant to your project, then you must have an ego. That is to say,
the egos try to take joy even if it harms the whole or renders others unhappy
from unfairness or oppression.
The Nameless had this property, that
they never took more than they needed, and what they considered they needed was
very small by comparison with the large desire-spheres of the egos. If
possessions are a burden, you don’t want a lot of them, and it is very
unfriendly to take something that the others in your community cannot also have.
By Golden Rule Thinking, if they do that to you, you’d be unhappy since they
are obviously pursuing private pleasure and ignoring the status of the whole.
You cannot enter a friendly condition with such a one, since they have separated
themselves from you materially, and are thus not responding in a living fashion
to spirit. By and by, the Nameless had what they considered to be a quite high
standard of living, but any step taken was taken as a whole unit, with attention
to the resource picture and awareness that what was taken for today’s greed
might steal from tomorrow’s need. A private automobile today means a tractor
that cannot be built, say, ten million years down the corridors of history.