Thanksgiving: Reverence for Life

Three weeks ago, I had a dream.

The Dream Setting:

  • I helped the Fringe Team chase a criminal to the campus of a private college in Minnesota. (Which one? I don’t know…I just knew, for sure, that much.)

The Dream Sequence:

  1. We raced after him.
  2. We lost him.
  3. Suddenly — I knew. The criminal was after a brain, stored on the top floor of a Biology Department: Albert Schweitzer’s brain.
  4. We took a short cut and we got there right as exactly as the bad-guy arrived.
  5. We got him.

Here’s the Supreme Ultimate Part: when I woke I was struck by the clarity of the name Albert Schweitzer, and I’d never consciously heard it. I rose in the pre-dawn darkness and it scratched down.

Later, I looked him up.

I had been in the process of the Reality Series and a quickly ordered a book called Reverence for Life. I hoped this fit the real journey at RealTaiji.com. Sure enough…his philosophy fits: because Taiji offers a chance to develop and strengthen our personal philosophies along the way, and we must, even if by accident…

  • Discover and enrich our reverence for life.

For Thanksgiving Day…consider Dr. Schweitzer’s wisdom (from 1965):

The Highest Rationality

Albert-Schweitzer-Etching-by-Arthur-William-HeintzelmanToday there is an absence of thinking which is characterized by a contempt for life. We waged war for questions which, through reason, might have been solved. No one won.

The war killed millions of people, brought suffering to millions of people, and brought suffering and death to millions of innocent animals. Why? Because we did not possess the highest rationality of reverence for life.

And because we do not yet possess this, every people is afraid of every other, and each causes fear to the others. We are mentally afflicted one for the another because we are lacking in rationality. There is no other remedy than reverence for life, and at that we must arrive (p. 38 Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life, emphasis mine).

Indeed.

Thanks Dr. Schweitzer.