There's a link to the to the youtube video down below.
"There is evidence throughout history that it's possible for people to be enlightened. And you'd think, since enlightenment is viewed as the medication for vulnerability and death, that everybody would be struggling as hard as they possibly could to be enlightened.. if such a state exactly and precisely exists. But if the barrier to enlightenment is the development of self consciousness of the individual humans' infinite capacity for evil, then you can be immediately convinced about why enlightenment is in such short supply.
When I finished my first provisional examination of the sorts of motivations that drove people to set up concentration camps and to torture people terribly in those camps, I came to a terrible conclusion. It was a conclusion that I think in some ways was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.. intellectually and morally. I came to understand why it is that people depend on their group identity and their cultural identification.. Because that helped protect themselves from their own vulnerability. You have to believe things, because you just don't know everything. So you have to believe things. They fill in the gaps. The beliefs fill in the gaps. If the beliefs are stripped from you, then your defenses against the infant are stripped and it's no wonder that people will defend their beliefs. And if you're too involved in defending your beliefs, you're going to be willing to kill other people in their defense.. But we're so technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other people in the defense of our own beliefs because the time for that is passed. But then I realized, well, if you don't stand up for your beliefs you leave yourself bereft. You're open to the depredations of the infinite. That's equally intolerable.. It seems to leave no way out!..
But there is a way out.. you know? and I think it's the way out that genuinely religious people have tried to offer humanity for thousands and thousands of years. And the way out of the conundrum posed to you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the face of the unknown is the development of a truly integrated and powerful character.
And that's an individual development..
And that's an individual development..
And it means constant confrontation with things you don't understand and constant attempts to ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity rather than deceit and to make of yourself something that is built on a rock and not predicated on sand!
And the thing is, it's one thing to tell people that they should take care of themselves.. I don't know if that's enough to tell people. Because they don't take care of themselves that well. But it's a completely other thing to say.." Look! You know? .. Every time you make a pathological moral decision, you move the whole world one step closer to complete annihilation".. And I absolutely believe that! I think the historical evidence is crystal clear.. And I also think that every time you make an appropriate moral decision and you manifest moral courage in the face of your own vulnerability, then you move the world one step farther from the break. And that's the case for every single person!
You know, Solzhenitsyn said, drawing on his Eastern Orthodox Christian background: "Every single person is the center of the world. A center of the world". Now the world is a complicated place.. It can have all sorts of centers. It's hard to believe that you might be one of them.. But EVERYTHING about human existence is hard to believe. The fact that it's here at all is hard to believe. The nature it's hard to believe. Everything that human being does, is so ridiculous and remarkable that it's like a consistently and constantly unfolding miracle .. The idea that each of you might be a center of the cosmos, in that infinite admixture of ridiculousness and absurdities, is hardly more than one more ridiculous thing to swallow.
Well, to summarize I guess.. The tragedy is a precondition for being. Being is the interplay between the finite and the infinite. And in that interplay, there's tragedy and there's no way out of that. Evil is something different. Evil is the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more pathological than they have to be and it's motivated by conscious intent. The motivations arise because people pay a terrible price for their self conscious awareness. And that awareness is their awareness of their vulnerability. And that is a terrible thing to be aware of...
But that vulnerability can be confronted forthrightly, accepted and the appropriate decisions made!..
Alternatively people can retreat into their own rationalistic arrogance and attempt to deceive themselves and everyone else about the nature of their own existence and about the nature of reality. But that pathway leads to nothing but destruction..
I think that there's good reason to assume that it's too late in our development as a species for that path to be acceptable anymore, because we're too powerful. And if too many people stay on that path, we're gonna do ourselves in. And so I would say, as we become more technologically powerful, an increasing moral burden is placed on each of us..
It matters to the destiny of the cosmos whether or not you get your moral act straight!
And I don't mean that in a trivial way! I believe that that's as close to an empirical fact as anything can be demonstrated. I also believe that's as terrifying a thing to consider as anything you could possibly imagine...
And maybe it's too much to ask of people. But you know.. Our great religious traditions do continually remind us that inside every human being there's a spark of divinity. And that idea is a precondition for our entire system of law.. There's always the possibility that it's true..
And if it's true.. It means that there's an infinite avenue of potential that lays open to every single person. And that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration, actually lies within our grasp. And the alternative to that is the continual generation of a kind of hell, that's so incomprehensibly awful that by any reasonable person's standards it has to be regarded as something to avoid.. That's all I have to say about that."
And if it's true.. It means that there's an infinite avenue of potential that lays open to every single person. And that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration, actually lies within our grasp. And the alternative to that is the continual generation of a kind of hell, that's so incomprehensibly awful that by any reasonable person's standards it has to be regarded as something to avoid.. That's all I have to say about that."
The speech at the following link (min 06:05):
