Critical Mind Shift
David Lorimer

[Written for the Scientific and Medical Network Journal]

SEVEN WORDS THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD
Joe Simonetta
Hampton Roads, 2001, 90 pp., $14.95 p/b – ISBN 1 57174 295 6

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that he had written a long letter because he did not have time to write a short one. As you can see, this is a short book but one that gets to the heart of the matter and is subtitled ‘a new understanding of sacredness.’ The author’s background is as an architect but he also studied divinity at Harvard and Yale and business at Penn State. In his time he has also been a professional athlete, an army officer, a computer programmer, an environmental activist and twice a nominee for Congress. This short and brilliant book is based on his acclaimed lecture series ‘Astonish the World, Tell the Simple Truth.’

Logically enough, the book is divided into three parts: Introduction, The Problem and The Solution. In fewer than 30 pages he identifies our principal problems as means without goals, an economic system based on short-term profit and power relationships (based on fear and greed), a democracy subject to the institutionalised corruption of lobby groups, and a residue of primitive beliefs in traditional religions that give the words ‘spiritual’ and ‘sacred’ a bad name. As he puts it: ‘we take our pleasures but do not replenish. We deplete and exhaust the land, abuse our bodies, and violate our spirit. We create unsustainable imbalances.’ We are not limited so much by technology as by our outdated thinking and policies based on separateness and self-interest.

The Solution begins with an amazing journey through the cosmos and evolution. Unless you are a cosmologist you may not realise that the Earth orbits the Sun at 65,000 mph and turns on its axis at 1,000 mph. Our solar system orbits the Milky Way galaxy at 600,000 mph while this galaxy is 100,000 light years wide. Simonetta then comes back to earth and our evolutionary story before moving on to interpretations of life proposed by religions. He is not sympathetic here (with some justification) and nowhere focuses on religious experience as an underpinning of religion. His fire is aimed on the inconsistencies and he is right when he says that ‘it is the ultimate irony and complete absurdity that we create these stories to establish examples of exemplary behaviour and proper rules for living, then kill each other over them’.

So how can we understand the sacred in a new way? The basis of his ‘sacred construct’ is that ‘a truth has emerged that informs us that we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole in which all of the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival’. This leads to his ‘foundational relationships’ with self, other and environment based respectively on health, kindness and respect. A spiritual life – and here few would disagree – is based on honouring these three relationships in all their manifestations. Now he is ready to reveal the seven words (and three rules) of the title: Be healthy. Be kind. Respect the environment. Too simple? I don’t think so, but our rational minds prefer complications to keep them busy. All this is critically based on the concepts of The Way (Tao, Dharma, Path) and the Law of One which itself recognises the existence of universal principles as oneness, diversity, interrelatedness, individuality and interdependence, which are brilliantly defined. The ethical implication, spelled out in the Golden Rule is that ‘what we do to others we do to ourselves.’

The book is a wake-up call that will resonate with many readers of Network. It takes less than an evening to read and encourages us to mobilise our resources to help bring about the change we know is necessary if we are to shift to a truly sustainable and participatory world system based on a different understanding of our foundational relationships. For further discussions, see Member Suzanne Taylor’s web site at www.theconversation.org.