VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 5

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 5

You Were Not Laid Off, You Were Let Out

Did you see the road in the last section? There is enough, there is a living road, and someone is already walking it where you can see. Your door shut does not mean every door in the house is welded tight.

If you saw it, then this section is going to tell you something that cuts against everything that was ever drilled into your head. You are afraid of having no job. Afraid to the bone. The two words laid off press down on you like the sky falling. So let me ask you one thing. Have you ever stopped and asked what a job actually is?

I will tell you the truth, and you can turn it over slowly. You have been in prison since you were a child.

At six, you were handed into a place called school. Every morning you went in at a fixed hour and came out at a fixed hour. No wandering off. Someone watching you. A wall around you. A bell deciding when you sat and when you stood. You were in there for more than a dozen years. And when you came out, you thought you were free.

Then you were handed into another prison, called work. Still a fixed hour in, a fixed hour out. Clock in, work late, do as the boss says, do as the supervisor says, do not be late, do not leave early, put in a request to take a day. You stayed in this prison from your twenties until you retired somewhere in your sixties. Forty years.

Your whole life, from six years old to sixty-something, you moved from one prison to the next. School first, then work. And the freedom you thought you had in between was only the breather you caught on the transfer road from the first prison to the second.

Do not think I am laying it on too thick. When I say prison here, I am not cursing your life as wasted. I am trying to make you see clearly something you have never once seen clearly, what that job of yours, the thing you treated as your very lifeline, really is. You packed onto the train, clocked in, read the boss's face, put on a smile just to ask for a day off, and you did it for decades, so used to it that you took it as the natural order, as the way a person is simply meant to live. But sit still a moment and think. A place you enter at a fixed hour and leave at a fixed hour, where someone keeps watch over you, that you cannot walk out of when you want to, what is that if not a prison? It is not that you should not see it. It is that no one ever let you stop and see it. Today I am letting you see it, and I am doing it for the next step, to tell you that you are being let out of this prison right now.

Why lock people up like this, one prison after another? The root reason, and the last section already planted it, is that there was not enough.

Not enough meant people had to work, and no work meant no food, meant starving. But people like to rest, like to slack, do not want to spend every day at dull, grinding labor. So what do you do? You lock them up. Lock them in school first to drill a sit-still nature into them, then lock them in work to drive them to labor day after day. Tie them down with a wage, tie them with a mortgage, tie them with the kids' tuition, so they dare not skip a day, dare not stop.

This state of being tied down, driven, unable to survive if you stop, give it its honest name. This is forced labor. Put plainly, it is slavery. Do not bristle at the word. I am not cursing you. You are not the only one. The whole world, for thousands of years, came up this same way. Your father and mother this way, your grandparents this way, and up and up for thousands of years, all of humanity served the same sentence of labor. No villain forced it. It was shortage. There was no other way. Do not serve and you starve. That was the iron rule for thousands of years.

Now here is that against-the-grain thing I promised you. This rule, iron for thousands of years, in your generation, for the very first time, is coming loose.

Why? Because of what the last section said. For the first time, there is enough. The machines make things day and night, so much it overflows, so much it cannot be sold. And enough means this. The root reason for locking people up and driving them into slavery is gone. People served because there was not enough, because stopping meant starving. Now there is enough. Work or not, you will not starve. And so the reason to lock you into the prison of work and drive you through the labor, at its very root, collapses.

So listen closely. That job you lost was no golden rice bowl. It was a prison. It was a sentence of labor. It was a yoke that thousands of years of shortage forced onto people's necks. And the machine has lifted that yoke off your neck.

You were not laid off. You were let out.

Humanity waited thousands of years, worked itself to death for thousands of years, served that sentence for thousands of years, and for the first time there is a generation that does not have to lock itself in prison just to keep from starving. And that generation might be you. This is an enormous good. A good thousands of years in the waiting. And you have been frightened into treating it like the sky caving in.

Think how unfair that is to you. A yoke no one broke in thousands of years, and in your generation the machine came and undid it for you, and this should be the good fortune that dozens of generations of your ancestors would have envied and begged to trade places for. And yet here you are, not feeling lucky at all, too scared to sleep, sure you have fallen into a pit of fire. Why? Because no one ever told you plainly whether, underneath those two words laid off, there is a catastrophe or a release. The old rulebook, and the people who are hoping you will just accept your fate, would love for you to keep taking it as a catastrophe, would love for you to be frightened enough to scramble back into another prison as fast as you can. Tonight I am poking a hole through that paper for you, to tell you: what you have run into is not a catastrophe. It is a release that comes around once in thousands of years.

Now, I will be honest with you. Being let out does not mean you sprout wings and soar off into some wide-open, do-whatever-you-please freedom. There is no deal that cheap. Let me be straight with you. A person does not, in this whole life, ever escape prison.

You do not believe me. You say, I will retire, I will have money, I will travel the world, ride a luxury cruise, and surely that is freedom. Let me tell you, that is a prison too. You are stuck in the tour-bus seat, unable to get out for hours. You are stuck in the crush of the crowd at the scenic spot, hemmed in by railings, by the set route, by the little flag the guide waves. You are stuck on that luxury ship, and however luxurious it is, it is still a boat ringed by sea that you cannot step off of. You go home, shut the door, and think, now this is my own turf, and you are still stuck inside those four walls.

Go bigger. You fought your way out of a single egg in your mother, then you were stuck in the womb for ten months, then you were born into this great prison called the human world, you live a lifetime, and at the end you are packed into a small box called a coffin. From start to finish, you never once escaped prison. That is the plain truth. I am not going to lie to you that being let out means being free. Prison, you do not escape.

But one prison is not the same as another.

The prison of work is one that others forced you into, one you had no choice but to stay in, one you could not leave even when you wanted to. That is a cell. But after you are let out, the prisons you can settle into are ones you choose yourself, ones you are glad to be in, ones you can walk into and out of as you please. That is not doing time. That is finding a spot that suits you and settling in.

Let me put it more plainly still. Once you are let out and have time on your hands, you will probably start to panic. People cannot sit idle. You will feel useless, restless, like you have to find something to do. So go do it. You want to work, who is stopping you? Go somewhere with good scenery and find some small trade. Sell bottles of water, carry bags, set up a little stall, point tourists the right way. Whether you make big money does not matter, because you will not starve, that keep is something the world-with-enough will provide. And you are doing this small thing not because you are forced to, not to keep from starving, but because you feel like it, because you want to move, because you cannot stand being idle. Same act of working. Before, you were driven to it, worked or you died, and that was slavery, plain and simple. Now you work if you want and rest if you do not, and that is freedom, that is you being your own person. So settle yourself, easy and content, into some small thing you enjoy. Sell your water, carry your bags, watch your scenery. Stuck there, this time, because you chose to be.

And then, quietly, the most important line of all. Once you settle in like that, you will not come out to grab and fight.

Look back at the second chapter of the first volume. The first three times, the machine roared, and a great mass of people fell idle, with no food, nowhere to go, and they panicked, and they burned, and they came out to grab from the ones nearby who still had money. And the grabbing brought chaos. And the chaos frightened the ones who feared being robbed, and they found ways to ship this mass of idle people off to war, to burn each other up on the battlefield until there were too few left to grab anymore. Three rounds of it, and about a hundred and forty million poor people went down that way.

This time is different. This time there is enough. You are let out, and you will not starve, and you find a scenic spot to sell water and carry bags, content in yourself, your heart calm, not panicked, not burning, and so you do not come out to grab. You do not grab, your neighbor does not grab, and everyone settles peaceably into a little corner of their own, and there is peace under heaven.

No one needs to be shipped off to war. No one needs to fall. That old script, the one where a hundred and forty million people go down, this time around, does not have to be performed.

And that is the four words this whole book, from the first page to the last, wants more than anything. Peace under heaven. It does not lean on anyone's charity, or anyone rising to some higher consciousness. It leans on one plain thing. There is enough, so people no longer have to serve out the sentence of labor, so people are let out, and they settle into a small place they are glad to be in, and they do not grab, and they do not riot, and they are content.

See how plain the reasoning is. For thousands of years, idle people grabbed, grabbing brought chaos, chaos got them shipped off to die, and at root it was never because people are bad. It was because there was not enough, and idle meant no food. Pull out that one root, shortage, and the idle no longer starve, so they no longer grab. They do not grab, and the old script of shipping people off to burn each other up loses its reason to exist. Peace under heaven does not come from anyone pressing people down, managing them, watching over them. It comes from this one plain root: there is enough, so people no longer have to grab.

So for tonight, hold onto this. You are not laid off. You are among the first generation in thousands of years that can be let out of that prison called work, out from under that yoke called slavery. The prison you cannot escape, but from here on you can pick one you are glad to be in, walk in and out of it, content in yourself. Straighten your back, and let that panicked breath out. You have been let out. This is a good thing.

The next section is the last one of this chapter. It sends you out the door. It tells you where to go from here, and how the chapters that follow pave this road, inch by inch, all the way to your feet.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.