VOLUME VII
Hope, in the Human World
We come now to the seventh volume. Through six volumes we walked the whole road, from how the trap is built to how it comes undone, taking this world apart one layer at a time and easing it loose one layer at a time. This last volume is about hope. It is called Hope, and it stands facing the first volume across the whole length of the book. One end is the trap. The other end is hope. One end shows how the hardship of this world takes shape. The other shows what kind of hope a person can still carry through that hardship, and what kind of way out it opens.
This volume is short, thirteen chapters, yet it is where the whole book gathers and comes to rest. Everything the first six volumes laid down, all the reasoning, all the institutions, all the working parts, is drawn back in here and returned to a few most basic places. This opening lesson sets down the two hard bricks of the volume. Once these two bricks stand firm, you will see the frame of this volume, and of the whole book.
The first brick: saving the tool is saving people.
This is the deepest root of the volume, and of the book. The words sound strange at first. A tool is a tool, a dead thing. How can you save it, and how could saving it be the saving of a person?
Look at the largest disorder of this age. A tool, above all a tool that grows ever stronger, was made by people to work for people. Yet this world keeps pushing the tool up out of the tool's place and onto the person's place. It sets the tool to judge a case, to decide whether a person lives or dies, to do the work that only a person, with a conscience, should do. The moment a tool is pushed onto the person's place, two harms fall at once. First, the tool takes the blame that was never its to carry. A person used the tool to harm someone, the fault plainly belongs to the one who used it, and yet it is laid on the tool. Second, and deeper, the real human's share is crowded out. The seat a real human should hold is held by a tool. The five things a real human should grow there have no ground to grow in.
So we say, saving the tool is saving people. To save the tool is to lift it down from the person's place it was never meant to hold, and to give it back its plain and honest work. That very lifting-down clears the seat again and lets the real human sit back down, and lets the five things grow again. Put the tool back in the tool's place, and you have set the real human back in the person's place. We do not save the tool because the tool is to be pitied. It feels no pity or the lack of it. We save it because it and the real human's share are joined. Let the tool hold the person's place, and the real human has nowhere to stand. Put the tool back, and the real human has a place at last. So saving the tool, in the end, saves people.
The second brick: originally, not a single thing. A great love remains in the human world.
The first brick is the bone of what this volume builds. This one is the heart. The bone is the form, the heart is the spirit. Once the form stands, you must still see the spirit in it.
Originally, not a single thing. This says that a person, at the root, holds nothing, owns nothing, wants nothing for the self. The self is set down so light, so faint, that it comes near to nothing. Only then can the love spread out, run far, and grow large enough to be called great love. This great love asks no return and makes no distinction. It is for all living things, for the human world. It runs through the whole book as the one heart beneath every word.
And how does this great love remain in the human world? Not by any one person living forever. Not by any one book that never crumbles. It remains because in one generation of real humans after another the five things stay alive, and each lamp lights the next, and the passing-on never breaks. This book is only one shape of that great love, a small oil lamp. It is not a savior. It does not hope to last. It hopes only to light one reader's heart, so that heart can go and light others. The ones who do the great work were never this book. It is you, the countless readers who take up this small light.
Put the two bricks in one place. One is bone, one is heart. One says saving the tool is saving people, and guard the five things. One says originally not a single thing, and a great love remains in the human world. Together they are the whole of this volume, Hope: guard the five things, let the real human live as a real human, and let this great love remain in the human world, one generation to the next.
Where is the hope? The hope is exactly where these two bricks stand firm. So long as we still know that saving the tool is saving people, and can still guard the five things, so long as one great love that holds nothing still passes lamp to lamp through the human world, this world can be saved, and the human world has hope. This is not blind cheer. It is a steady trust, set on the ground that the five things cannot be put out and that love cannot be cut off from being passed on.
On the last page of this volume stand four lines, the last words of the whole book. I will read them to you now. When we have finished this volume together, you will know their weight. The world is full of love. The world is full of hope. In this world, there is you. And that is enough.
From here, we begin, chapter by chapter.
Table of contents for this volume:
Chapter One. The Tool and the Real Human.
Chapter Two. Saving the Tool Is Saving People.
Chapter Three. Saving the Tool Is Saving People, All of One Thread.
Chapter Four. The Four Institutions, Sustaining and Checking One Another.
Chapter Five. The Living Mechanism, Its Charge and Its Homecoming, Back to the Human World.
Chapter Six. Settling the Person in the Human World.
Chapter Seven. Earth, the One and Only Paradise.
Chapter Eight. Mars Is Not a Way Out.
Chapter Nine. Originally Not a Single Thing, a Great Love Remains in the Human World.
Chapter Ten. A Small Oil Lamp.
Chapter Eleven. The Root, the Purpose, and Where It Comes From.
Chapter Twelve. Words Left for the Future.
Chapter Thirteen. A Great Love Remains in the Human World, the Book Closes.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.