The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

As we enter the twenty-first century, human societies are moving towardagreement on many issues that have not been generally accepted even in therelatively short period of time in which we have maintained records of humanhistory. Most nations now consider evil practices which were until recentlywidespread and even sanctioned: slavery, genocide, torture, acting on the belief inthe inherent inferiority of people because of their ethnicity, gender, or social class,or the practice of barring groups of people from learning how to read and obtainknowledge. Vestiges of these beliefs and practices are still within us, and at timesthey erupt with catastrophic results. And there are still many practices which arehotly debated by advocates of one or another perspective, and which we are farfrom agreement on. One wonders whether any of the currently agreed-upon evilswill ever be totally eradicated. One wonders whether humanity will eventuallycome to a general agreement about the many moral dilemmas that face us today.But as we carry on with our day-to-day lives, we continually make choices. Dothese choices contribute to the actualization of the good?In order for the good to be considered worth living for, it must have an effecton one's daily life. Otherwise, it will remain a mere abstraction. For the good tobe perceived as real, it must be felt. It must have an abiding presence in one's life.It must become a recognizable companion, whose absence is noticed.One of the best descriptions of this type of relationship with the good is alittle book called The Practice of the Presence of God by a monk from the middleages named Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence's attempts to develop a closepersonal relationship with his God led him to devise a habit of becoming consciousof what his faith already had taught him, namely, that God was everywhere, andthus, always with him. If God is everywhere, he reasoned, then everything that IHMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 96