Why The World Doesn'T Work Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

1. When a person for the first time becomes able to see how the world doesn't work, it's always a big surprise.
2. It maybe shouldn't be a surprise, because complaints are made about it all the time.
3. It is, however, because of all the complaints that are possible, that it is assumed that the world should work.
4. People see most failure in their lives as an indication of a lacking in themselves.
5. If we find something that's wrong in the world we think it's a result of something people have done.
6. However, the belief that the world works, is not because it has been observed to work. Rather, everything we see that does work in anyway, is a part of what's in the world.
7. We've come to accept, that for us to get better, requires that we improve, but for the world to get better requires that it be protected from becoming worse.
8. The dominating belief is that the world works right and we do not.
9. With the world's rightness accepted as a given and our rightness accepted as something to be worked out, life for the world is nature, while life for us is a job to do.
10. But even though we don't work right, being part of this world, and this world being assumed as right, since the world works with us in it, there must be a possibility for our perfection.
11. There seems to be evidence for this. We seem to know parts of a larger plan. We've found out what can kill us, and what helps us grow.
12. We don't know all of it, but from consistencies we've discovered, a larger plan is assumed.
13. A larger principle has to exist that explains everything, whether or not what that principle is knowable.
14. The possibility and real existence of such a larger plan as this, has been accepted by all of us, but with no universal agreement on what it is or how to approach it. But we all believe it must be there
15. For as long as we think the world really does works while we don't work, the plan we imagine and seek will continue to be perpetually beyond us.
16. If it were ever discovered that any plan we believe in is wrong, we'd have to continue to use it anyway. We'd have to adapt its errors and make it fit, until we could find something better.
17. If we did not or could not believe in a plan, we would be imprisoned in the unknown. Not only could there be no religion, there could be no science either. There would in fact be nothing to think about, because there would be nothing that any expectation could be based on.
18. Believe in God or do not. To think at all is to be deriving a usable plan, whether or not you personally care about fully knowing or describing what the plan is.
19. But thinking seems to work more than it seems to fail. Most of what we expect we usually get. (And thus we observe that the “world works”, and when we don't get what we want, we fail.)
20. But what we're into with what we're saying here, for most people, is just a discussion topic. It's not the roots to a big life changing idea. The dysfunctionality of the world is possible, but not really very significant to us.
21. We've found the ways that things repeat, because we've had to. When do we plant? Where do we hunt? Where is it safe, and where risky? The more we can answer, the more the world works... or the better we can work in it.
22. The big question truly is, might it be possible that though we think and figure out things, that the 'reality' in our minds is completely delusional to each of us individually, and there really is no plan?
23. If this were the case, would experiencing such a thing directly, improve our thinking, improve us, improve the world itself or improve all of it? Or would it change nothing?
24. What we are able to know in our minds forms into an order. That's how we know it. This is what a mind does and must do. Yet anything we experience, is experienced because of its newness, and this finding of newness is a consistent exception to the mind's order to which all experience reports.
25. From the whole vast ground of consistency there are variations, which are of infinite number.
26. Every thing-type that repeats, forms something different each time: fingerprints, snowflakes, wood grains, clouds, ocean waves, human thoughts and feelings and new moments of life happening again in the same place.
27. Everything we expect to come, when it does, comes with a specific novelty.
28. A favorite fast food sandwich always taste the same, but each time we taste it, it's always a brand new thing.
29. If there is a true plan that runs this world that is always working, then its most real consistency is its repeated deviation from consistency.
30. The knowledge we have of life is built through our discovery of relationships, but the reality of life that we know about is built through a multiplying of its deviations.
31. Our minds are completely familiar with what's around us, but our journey is always moving through a constantly and continually undefined event.
32. The essence of the present moment is its continual readiness to manifest a 'something next' that we can't for sure expect.
33. The upcoming next thing, which, although it is not now, has our expectation of it, right here within this nowness.
34. The moment we're always about to emerge into is always unpredictable, but this unpredictability will always and continually escape our direct notice, because....
35. We miss it, due to the fact that what we expect is endlessly not here. When anything appears it's no longer the next thing. Some other new next thing has become the soon to be but not now here.
36. But although it's forever not here, it's still always about to be here, so it's possibility is both always eternally here and always eternally imaginary.
37. Although the unrealized nextness ahead of this moment is not known, we completely sense it continually and interact with it as well.
38. The life we are thinking our world through, is an always continually imaginary thing, we must always treat as being true, even though in our moment of its anticipation it is not true yet.
39. Yet any plan we may ever come to know, like this world that we do know... will be known as an already demonstrated conclusion: a result in our thinking. That's what knowing is.
40. What we know in our thinking, works only because we know it. Or how we could we think about it?
41. But the world we live in, is in an unalterable condition of asking, trying and discovering. Our knowing is the oldness in the experience of the newness we are facing.
42. Our overarching need to make an obvious world into a manifestation of factuality is actually what is making it dysfunctional.
43. An imaginary world that each person has to and does make up, becomes as much of a real world as the real world itself.
44. Each imaginary world is the completely obvious one, but obvious only to one.
45. The world does not work, because the story is a story and the world is a world.
46. The ultimate end product of God's creation is not the created world, it is the story that the world finally finishes, in us, made by us and by the world and by God the creator of all... once the story becomes right and true. The kingdom of God is not something we know; it's something we must believe in.
47. What is wrong in our minds becomes right as we come to understand all of its wrongness.
48. Mount Rainier is not that magnificent mammoth of bolder and ice towering over the others around Puget Sound, it is rather the anchor of memory in a number growing close to a billion minds, now and including all since the beginning of time.
49. Every single solitary mind made in His image and by His hand, from day eight after the first seven up to right now, is the end product for which everything waits.
50. How are you doing out there? What do you think?