做你自己最好的画家

?本文选自《个人与群体事件的本质》第873节

不妨说，如果你想长期坚持做一个真正的理想主义者，就必须是一个脚踏实地的理想主义者。往往，当你更想跨出一大步时，必须只迈实际的一小步——但你必须通过行动，朝着理想的方向前进。否则，你就会感到幻灭、无力，或认定只有采取非常不理想的极端手段才能达成理想的状态或形势。

生命在所有的活动层面都被推动着去追求理想，不论是生物性还是精神性的理想。那种追求自动赋予生命热情及自然的兴奋与戏剧感。发展你自己的能力——无论什么能力——探索并扩大自我经验，这些都会赋予生活一种目的、意义和创造的兴奋，同时也会增益社会及人类的认知和发展。

冥想，或在脑海中想象达成了某些想要的目标是不够的——如果你害怕对冥想和想象产生的冲动采取行动的话。当你不为理想目标采取任何步骤时，你的人生真的会缺乏激情。你会变得沮丧。你可能会变成一个反面的理想主义者，以至于期待发生地震等自然灾害，并从中找到某种兴奋感。你也许开始把注意力集中在这类活动上。你也许会期待世界末日，但无论哪种情况，你都会被一种个人挫败感所驱策，并在脑海中看到一个远远低于理想预期的世界被毁灭。

不过，如果你了解事件并不是自行存在的话，那么本书讨论的所有不幸情况都无法控制你。所有的事件与情况皆先存于心，在沟通的最深层面，没有消息是秘密的——无论那些消息能否通过你们的技术设备接收到。

你的思想、信念及愿望形成了你在电视上看到的事件。如果你想改变世界，首先必须改变你的思想、期望及信念。如果本书的每个读者都改变了态度，那么，纵使没有一条法律被重写，明天这个世界仍会变得更好。新法律会随之而来。任何新法律都永远跟随着信念的变化，而非相反。

没有哪个文明、科学、艺术或哲学系统不是起源于心智的。当你口是心非地赞同那些你并不同意的理念时，你就是在背叛自己的理想，这样做或多或少损害了自己，也损害了社会，因为你拒绝用你的认知来帮助自己和社会。每个人都是理想主义者，我只是想帮助你在日常行为里实践你的理想主义。

用你们的话说，不论在任何时期，每个活着的人都参与描绘了文明的生动画卷。做你自己最好的画家。你的思想、情感与期望就像是鲜活的笔触，画出了生命风景中属于你自己的角落。如果你在自己的生活中全力以赴，你就真的是在帮助提升所有生命的品质。你的思想就像雪花、雨点或云朵一样真实。它们与其他人的思想混合、交融，形成了人类的生活风貌，提供了孕育实质事件的广大精神元素。

In a manner of speaking, you must be a practicing idealist if you are to remain a true idealist for long. You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones — but you must move in the direction of your ideals through action. Otherwise you will feel disillusioned, or powerless, or sure, again, that only drastic, highly unideal methods will ever bring about the achievement of a given ideal state or situation.

Life at all levels of activity is propelled to seek ideals, whether of a biological or mental nature. That pursuit automatically gives life its zest and natural sense of excitement and drama. Developing your own abilities, whatever they may be, exploring and expanding your experience of selfhood, gives life a sense of purpose, meaning, and creative excitement — and also adds to the understanding and development of the society and the species.

It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise. When you do not take any steps toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement. You become depressed. You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes. You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities. You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.

None of the unfortunate situations discussed in this book have any power over you, however, if you understand that events do not exist by themselves. All events and situations exist first within the mind. At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.

Your thoughts and beliefs and desires form the events that you view on television. If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better. The new laws would follow. Any new law always follows the change in belief. It is not the other way around.

There is no civilization, no system of science, art, or philosophy, that did not originate in the mind. When you give lip service to ideas with which you do not agree, you are betraying your own ideals, harming yourself to some extent, and society as well, insofar as you are denying yourself and society the benefit of your own understanding. Each person is an idealist. I simply want to help you practice your idealism in the acts of your daily life.

Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilization as it exists at any given time, in your terms. Be your own best artist. Your thoughts, feelings and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life's landscape. If you do your best in your own life, then you are indeed helping to improve the quality of all life. Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds. They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man's livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.