SEVENTEENTH MEETING
Aloofness and Creation
I. Seeing Life as a Spectator, from God’s Point of View:
a. The collective personality:
1. Psychological fact: We are often outside ourselves in tense moments.
2. Getting far away from oneself in self-criticism and judgment.
3. Our reasonableness in crises.
4. All heroism is self-forgetfulness for the sake of the whole.
II. Result in Action and Creative Living:
a. Partnership with whole, or God:
1. We can see and use our personal life as part of whole.
2. We can get above our own sorrow and pain, and use them.
b. This aloofness from self, or being the One, is the root of all morals:
1. Some know this, and make laws; the others are forced to obey.
c. Aloofness is collective experience, or memory, whence we grow toward the good. We live in all time and space.
III. Personal Result of Our Club’s Work:
a. Drawing judgment from the whole.
b. Drawing strength from the whole.
c. Training our lesser desires to serve the whole aim and desire of our life.
d. How shall we attain to fulfilment in our personal life?
1. Money, health, power, etc., as certificates of creative value, to be used for new creation.
Hyphenation and archaic spellings have been retained as in the original. Punctuation and type-setting errors have been corrected without note. Other corrections are as noted below.
Page 37, and he saw that an ==> and [we] saw that an
Page 91, God,” I answered ==> God,” [she] answered
page 93, so; but a word itself ==> so; [work] itself
Page 104, a sense of duty ==> a sense of [unity]
Page 236, different from each one ==> different [for] each one
Page 266, if the operator always ==> is the [spectator] always