The Goal

S

peaking the truth can sometimes feel like self-abuse, but I will share with you one thought, one vision that keeps me going, when the path is darkest.

In my mind’s eye, I see a world where people can be honest

without fear – where the desperate terror that truth tellers feel now will only be felt by a few liars and cheats.

I see a world where relaxed and benevolent intimacy is the natural state of human relations.

I see a world without masters – not without a hierarchy, since ambitions and talents vary – but without coercive, exploitive and destructive monopolies like church, state and the cult of the family.

I desperately want to live in that world, but I know that I cannot, since what we are talking about here is a multi-generational project at best.

I desperately want to live in that world, but since I cannot, the best that I can hope for is to do my part to help create that world for the future.

I cannot live in a free world. I can barely see it from where I am. I squint at it though, like a man at the bottom of a well searching for a star in the distant circle of night sky above him.

I wish with all my heart that I lived in that world – and, if I did live in that world, I would feel such enormous gratitude for the brave souls who did everything they could to bring that wonderful world into being. I would admire their courage, to sacrifice immediate personal comfort for the sake of creating this wondrous world.

I feel that gratitude flowing down the steps of time from the future.

I feel the joy of those who live in a free world that we can only begin to create.

I feel them looking back in time to we poor struggling courageous souls, and thanking us for making their world so beautiful.

It is

their

gratitude that picks me up when I fall.

It is also the near-infinite sorrow that I would feel if I knew that such a world were to never come into being.

Imagining an eternity of human experience that is little better than what we have today – where good people cower like beaten dogs, while evil braggarts strut and rule – would make the story of our species an infinite tragedy – especially given our wondrous potential for truth and beauty.

Evil

will

fade from this world, if we act with integrity now.

Evil

will

fade from this world, but we must give up many seemingly-pleasant things in order to end it.

Surely we are glad that the early pioneers of science

did not bow to the difficulties of their struggle, but persevered against torture and oppression, giving us a world of technology, medicine and wonder that they did not live to see.

We do not live in their world of medieval ignorance only because they were willing to imagine our world of science

and knowledge, and work to create it.

The world

we

will create will be as wondrous to those who live in it as ours would be to the medieval mind.

I just wanted to remind you of the world we are in fact creating, because the beauty

of the goal – even though we shall never live to see it – makes the difficulties of the journey all worthwhile.


 

Real-Time Relationships: The Theory


Let us now turn to the task of putting all that we have learned and discussed in the previous pages into action.

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

  1. Thoughts precede emotions

.

  1. Honesty

requires that we communicate our

thoughts

and

feelings

, not our

conclusions

.