Simplicity - and what matters

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.

Reflection given at Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace (ICUJP), February 12, 2016.

Sometimes we just need to take time out, or at least I do. Such times are usually done when things go quiet or I am tired. In a way, you could say ‘sad’.

But I now question sadness in a way I never used to. What is it? I’ve come to see it much more as a choice, and something – like an article of old clothing – I no longer chose or need to wear. But that may only be part of the story. The other part, I dread to think, is that I have never really known sadness. Not yet. But that thinking doesn’t last too long, thank goodness, because my current thought is not to be easily denied.

When I think back to my younger and more vulnerable days, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it so well, nothing sums up more my aspirations and, in a way – or at least, so I like to think – my disposition, as the character of Hamlet. There are so many lines from that play I still vividly recall and continue to “turn over in my mind”, to quote again Fitzgerald in his novel about another boyhood hero, Jay Gatsby. One of them was “this thing’s to do, sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do’t.” I remember applying it early on in my youth when determining that it was time my parents knew I smoked such that I no longer needed to creep out and feign innocence. I remember sitting in my father’s car leaving it for him to come back and catch me. The only trouble was that he was gone for an age such that I needed to keep lighting another one, and another one, and another one. Anyway, it worked, and instead of some kind of scolding, he let me off the hook with an ease I hadn’t quite anticipated.

Logo of The Aetherius Society. © 2022 The Aetherius Society.

Several years later, though still before my youth had fully expired, I took up another, more meaningful cause. It has remained with me ever since – to make known the spiritual and cosmic philosophy of The Aetherius Society. I certainly still carry that cause; my will remains undaunted even if it has somewhat mellowed in keeping with my notions of sadness; my strength is not what it was but remains firm enough; which leaves the means. And for as long as I continue to breathe, the means must always be out there somewhere.

All of which brings me to the question of “what matters?” In an age in which we now all know the term “the 99 and the 1%”, at least when it applies to the “haves” as opposed to the rest of us, I am increasingly convinced that those same percentages can be applied when answering this question of what matters. 99% of our time and effort is spent, so it seems, not on the things that really matter but on what we think matters and our respite from those things.

What really matters, at least as I now think, is simplicity. Each day I don’t try to find so much as I find myself being caught by a thing of natural beauty. Last week a little before dawn, as I rode my bike into the Hollywood Hills, it was the full moon, bright and heavy in the western sky devoid of anything save its ability to just hang there, in the far distance beyond the silhouette of silent buildings and the tops of trees. Just as easily it can be a lone seagull, or a flock of them, it matters not, swirling so high above that one almost has to strain to see them. I am sure we all have our own list of such things, but how refreshing they are. They remind us not just of simplicity or what matters, but of what we have lost in our complicated lives - the ability to see things as they are.

You could say that when we do see these things, just as they are, we see God. We’re reminded of something about ourselves. This perfection that has become so overlooked. Like I say, it defines the term “the 1%”, or perhaps to be even more accurate, the 1% of the 1%.

And do these things, or realizations, merely belong to the aged and the melancholy? Am I becoming old and jaded? It’s not so much my own personal sadness that matters to myself, like I said at the beginning, it doesn’t really – unless, of course, I’ve not yet known that kind of sadness. It’s our collective sadness that so startles me. The madness and the mayhem of the world we have created, where moons, seagulls, and sunrises barely matter anymore. In a word – our loss of beauty.

Which, inevitably, draws me back to my cause. Do we really need a cause? I guess we do. And mine, on the face of it – in a world so far removed from beauty and of truth, at least as I conjure and imagine these things – remains a long-shot; a very long shot. What talk of beings other than ourselves; of subtle, unseen realms harboring not only life but vastly more intelligent and evolved life than that we find down here on Earth can ever find much traction in this crowded, noisy and distracted world? It is to become virtually ignored, unwanted; not even the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.

Well, I can smile at that though at times I hang my head. If only one could see, we could see, the world could see the simplicity of things just as they are, beyond the possession and the obsession of less important and corrupted things; to glance the infinity of life – the deathlessness of life – the immortality of life, and the impudence and the mockery of ever thinking or pretending otherwise is, in re-remembering Hamlet, “a consummation devoutly to be wished” and one which must, at the very least, “give us pause...”

Afterword - Dr. Edgar Mitchell, 17th September 1930 - 4th February 2016 - Sixth man to walk on the moon:

By NASA.

“On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious... You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty.”