Wanting Versus Seeing

Marshall Vian Summers speaks on Day 2 of the Encampment, October 15, 2018

There’s what I want for a situation and there’s what I see for a situation. Now if you want too much, you’re not going to see the truth. You’re only going to see what you want. If you want to see a world that you want to exist, all you’re going to see is yourself—your values projected onto a world that has its own reality apart from you entirely.

For me, reality is everything that’s happening beyond your thoughts and beliefs, which means you can be entirely divorced from reality in your thoughts and beliefs if that’s where your attention is focused.

Can we see there’s what we want to work towards, and there are very important things to work towards. And then there’s what we see, if we can see without preference.

So the ability to watch and not want is important. Wanting is normal. And I don’t want to say you shouldn’t want anything, because I don’t think that’s real. I don’t think that’s actually accurate either. But it has to be balanced with seeing.

And seeing into the future is difficult because the future’s always changing because the future is being constructed and altered every second of every day with countless decisions that people are making, okay?

So the challenge is to see and not simply to want. And somehow you have to blend those two because they’re both important. The effort to warn people, to bring out awareness is really important. That’s what I’m engaged in.

But we’re in a time of great necessity now. And Knowledge is all about necessity. So to look at the world without constantly being terrified and disheartened is no easy task. But this is the kind of vision we need to develop as we go forward.

If this is a process that every world, homeworld, of sentient life—technologically advancing sentient life in the universe—goes through, we’re going through something that is evolutionary. It’s not just, “Gee, what a mess we’ve made of this world.” This has an evolutionary quality to this. And that doesn’t justify anything, really, just accept that we are in something that’s bigger than we understand.

So to love people, to serve people—absolutely, okay? To try to keep the world looking the way it does today…it’s not going to.

To love people, you have to accept them where they are as a starting point. And to love the world and to know the world is to try to see where it’s really going.

And sometimes you just have to say, “You know, I don’t know what I want for the world because it isn’t going to be what I want.”

What’s going to call humanity out of its pathetic mental state is a great necessity…a great necessity.

You know, we’re not here to keep the world looking the way it looks today because it isn’t going to. But we are here as a force of regeneration and a force of wisdom, I pray, so the people of the world can be alerted and be strengthened, and find that strength that can enable them to change their situation if that becomes necessary, before the storm hits because, you know, it wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark. When you’re waiting for the rain, it’s too late. Or as it said in the teaching, when the wave crests, it’s too late.

So we’ve been given a wisdom about the future—immediate future. It doesn’t predict everything precisely, or anything precisely…except for a few things. But Knowledge can look clearly because it’s unafraid. Even our notions about being loving are largely fear-based—the fear of what would happen if we weren’t loving. But that’s not being loving, okay?

So to be able to serve, we have to see the reality of the situation to the best of our ability from wherever we stand, and it’s an evolving situation. And what does that tell me about how I need to live today? How strong does my foundation have to be?

So many people in this room need to build a strong foundation because when the Great Waves increase, you will not have anything to stand on. And that’s part of our work. Before you can build a building, you have to build a foundation, and the foundation has to be solid and sustainable for what will be put on top of it.

So part of our preparation for this new world reality is to build a strong foundation that can sustain what we see is coming. And because most people aren’t doing that, we have to let that be. We educate when we can to those who are receptive.

But if the New Message is counting on us to be stable and sustainable going forward, then we have to, each of us, have a strong foundation—nothing grandiose, just strong. The beautiful thing about Four Pillars is you cannot be eccentric with the Four Pillars focus because you’ve got to build them all and you’ve got to sustain them all. And there’s no place for being eccentric or being wild. You have to have your feet really on the ground.

So the image here is that we are like bridges. We have to be anchored to the Earth substantially that we can function here in a changing environment. And we have to be anchored in Heaven through Knowledge. And that creates a bridge over which things can pass into this Earth through us that will be of immense value for people.