7. ON HOW WE CAN LIVE WITH THE FRIGHTENING APPEARANCES OF TRANSCENDENCY

7.1. Don’t be angry dear reader, that I need so many words for something that since long may be clear to you. Maybe differently. Indeed, I needed your attention for myself. To achieve, by trying to formulate my reflections, some more clarity. Because meanwhile I believe I have succeeded for a great part, I am inclined to finish with some conclusions and recommendations. Again in the first place on my own behalf. But possibly also on behalf of yourself or your beloved ones. To encourage and stimulate ourselves for the task we have to perform. But before that, I owe supplementary explanation for the intuition that tells me we must think in terms of guilt and responsibility of each one of us individually. And not in terms of shared guilt, shared responsibility. As most express themselves in the latter terms.

7.2. In short, this supplementary explanation consists of the fact that shared responsibility and shared guilt, though in itself true also, though in itself bringing some results, do not have the effects our world needs now. But let me be clear. Compare a drowning or a large fire: each one of a group of witnesses, individually, is shocked. The case is not that each one of them says: “I only feel a shock partly, because we are with many”. The same in cases of feeling oneself guilty. And that is what witnesses often feel. Then, paradoxically, many of them, just because they were with so many, feel more doubt, more guilt. Especially in respect of each one’s own decision that intervention was not possible. Of course this is more evident in cases of sincere regret for participating in group crime. No criminal who regrets will say: “I am only a little bit guilty, because he too, and he, and she too, also took part”. None of them will say: “it is that little bit of guilt we share”.

7.3. The same holds for the pain of the world. At least as far as this pain is related to the negative repercussions of large-scale karma as the result of human action or non-action. The same as far as this pain is the result of neither giving help nor intervening where necessary. The same with insufficiently correcting the unjust sharing of resources of the earth, fundamental well-being and wealth. Since all of us, all over the world, together are one body. Since we depend on each other so intensely. Since we are interrelated to each other’s thinking and acting, and its consequences, so intensely. It is because of all of that that each one of us is guilty of the pain of the world.

7.4. But let me calm you down. Of course I do hear your protest. Indeed, it is not necessary to agree with me about the guilt of each one of us. Without that you feel mercy with the pain of the world also. Now that the pain of the world is simultaneously and in detail visible everywhere in the world, now each one of us is like arjuna, krishna’s friend. To arjuna lord krishna revealed himself in his cosmic, frightening form (bhagavad gita, chapter 11). Of all men, only to arjuna. Because he asked for it so compassionately. Fortunately arjuna, at that time, could pray to krishna to take his peaceful human form again. Since arjuna could not stand it. For us, nowadays, this is not possible any longer.

7.5. What I want to say is: in the pain of the world nowadays for all of us, transcendency - god, if you prefere to speak in terms of god - appears also in his cosmic-frightening form. In volcanoes, storms and hurricanes, in warmwater-ocean-currents, in earthquakes, in terrible tsunami’s, in forest fires and river floods, in draught, followed by never-ending rain, in famines, in epidemics: In how we ourselves mismanage and abuse the earth, without learning from ecological and virological disasters which we call upon us. In how populations, nations, religious groups, are eager to kill each other. In capitalistic monstrosities, in fundamentalist tyranny, in untraceable acts of terror… In short: in the pain of the world … in the pain, caused by all of that. Time is over now to live in illusion any longer. As if our world does merely exist of the rosary half. Time is over now to manipulate our environment, our world, as well as ourselves and our perceivings on behalf of defence of these former illusions.

7.6. What we need in order to keep our standing upright now we know better, what we need in order to prevent eroding our compassion into a superficial and obligatory sentiment, in order not to be seduced into powerlessness and despair and to go on with offering help, what we need for all of that is a heart as great as jesus’. As buddha’s. As ghandi’s. As great as whoever of the great holy heroes in the history of mankind. Were they before maybe only few, who by their devotion, their holy lives, turned their heart, their prayers, to the well-being of the world, at present such a lifegoal is everybody's standard-mission. Moreover, there is no other way. Even to whom who do resist. Since the world nowadays enters our hearts. No doubt, sooner or later the pain of the world will awaken us, all of us, to follow the path of the few. To enlarge our heart until it becomes so great as to embrace the whole world. Only then we are capable of bearing our witnessing-pain, and by that, to help with enduring the many times more acute and more direct pain of the victims and their actual aid workers.