Is it Time to Give Up?
What if that was the answer we've been seeking?
When do we give up? Usually, when all hope is lost. But stories abound of people who came to the end of their rope, let go, then a miracle happened. Thank you cartoonist Sydney Harris for this:
Legendary other-dimension-researcher Terrence McKenna speculated that most scientists believe something like this (my quote): “Everything operates according to reason and logic… except you have to allow us one miracle - the big bang.” Think that through!
So, the bad news is 24/7 and it looks increasingly like it will take a miracle to deal with all this. Who feels like they can make much of a difference? Why even try? It’s like we’re on the Titanic, sinking fast but busy texting. Or, speeding towards a cliff on a runaway train and ordering lunch in the dining car, requesting a different kind of salad dressing. Distracted. Overwhelmed. Hopeless.
OK. It’s time to give up.
But that term can be interpreted in various ways. True, we can give up when we lose hope and quit trying to do anything further. Or… we can give up, up - in an upwards direction. Sure, this is wordplay but let’s explore what “giving upwards” could mean.
What’s “up?” I’m using that designation to describe something higher… duh. But, what’s higher? God. Universal intelligence. Life itself. Whatever is running the cosmos and keeping our hearts beating.
So, “giving upwards” would describe a giving attitude towards that higher power. Odd. Don’t we usually expect something from “above?” We might pray for help. We might ask for something. But… to give to that higher power? What would that mean?
Gratitude. That’s what I give. I’m grateful to Life for life, for the opportunity to experience life as a human and contribute whatever I can to help others and the world around me. Isn’t that what you’re doing too? It’s what my friends do and it’s why they/you are my friends.
We’re in the same club, the giving club.
My friend, Andrew Harvey, the RUMI scholar (passionate interview with him here), once told me about getting a letter from one of his giving friends, an activist who’d been in Africa for decades helping the indigenous people there. She wrote to say goodbye, deciding to take her own life, because she simply couldn’t tolerate the horror any more. The crimes being committed against her native friends were just too terrible and unrelenting.
She gave up.
How sad. And how understandable. There are many reasons why someone would choose to exit this world but they all involve giving up. I feel heart broken about this and I’d like to offer an alternative to those suffering to that desperate degree.
Give up… but give upwards, as described a moment ago. Give up the fight. Let it go. Acknowledge that we’re not going to “win.” The depth of deceit, the centuries of violence and cover up, the murderous slander of whistle blowers (like nurseerin.org who has been terrorized for reporting on doctors earning $75,000 a week during the pandemic to kill their patients with conscious neglect), the decades of geo-engineering (denied and labelled a conspiracy theory but recently admitted as true) that has ecaxerbated the climate change those same puppeteers want to fix with more manipulation, the revelations in a book like Anatomy of an Epidemic that exposes the homicidal pharmaceutical hoax… on and on it goes. We’re not going to change all that. It’s simply impossible.
Not without a miracle of some kind.
What’s IS possible and within reach right now is to give up … the way I’m describing it, to aim our attention in another direction. I’m not suggesting denial. We can remain aware of the darkness, continue to educate ourselves as we must, without letting what we come to know claim our hearts. Our hearts belong to God.
So, we give upwards. We express our gratitude for this gift of life. We are “in the world but not of it” as the saying goes. We see evil, we feel the suffering, and we respond with loving compassion, even for those perpetrating unspeakable crimes. “Forgive them father, they know not what they do” was the advice from someone we might choose to trust.
How could this possibly make any difference? Well, here’s how and consider this our secret, sacred weapon. My model echoes back to the famous 100th monkey effect where once enough monkeys learned a new habit, a tipping point was reached and they all adopted the habit. What I envision is all of us being like individual Christmas tree lights connected together on specific strings (our personal “soul group”). Remember those, where unless all the lights worked none of them would light up? It was quite a game, to find the one that wasn’t working and fix it so that they all worked… together.
So, let’s start in the first diagram (obviously I’m no artist!) with just a few lights turned on (that’s a few of us lit up with giving).
Not much happening, right?
Now (below) we show that a few more of us have been activated, shining our lights in the darkness. Nothing seems to have changed. Our string isn’t lit up yet. And… that’s the way it is in the world right now. There’s very little news about much that’s bright and hopeful, right? It seems like we’re not making a difference, like voices crying in the wilderness. Going by this measurement, it’s understandable why we’d get discouraged and want to give up.
But, hold on.
As more and more of us get personally activated, enduring how hopeless it seems, we reach our own 100th monkey tipping point. It’s that exact moment when the last individual in our group, the final light in our particular string, turns on. SHAZZAM! Our whole string lights up and radiant energy shines as a powerful entrainment influence in consciousness that supports others suffering in darkness to NOT give up but to give upwards instead. Since, as we like to theorize, we are all connected. Quantum entanglement, remember? Q.E.T. - Quantum Entanglement Transmission in action, that novel concept I introduced last week.
But that’s not all.
There are millions of soul groups, countless strings of us and we are all interconnected. So, it follows that the whole matrix won’t light up until every string is activated. Here’s what that would look like in my crude rendering (good thing I can write!) when this model scales up to the next level.
Here’s our destiny, blazing light into darkness, vanquishing evil without fighting it. So, give up! Quit the good fight. Be grateful and know that you ARE making a difference, even though you can’t see the evidence to prove it. Not yet. Have faith. Keep shining. We thought there were problems to solve; we discover that we are the light that vanishes darkness.
And one day, perhaps sooner than we might think, we’ll get our miracle:
You want to make a real difference in the world? Give up and shine!
And please, please, please, make comments about what you are reading here and tell us about your own experiments. I’ve been wondering what it will take to activate more of you to comment on what I’m sharing with you. This is meant to be a speculative space for creative interacting. I invest hours each week developing these streams and flinging them out into the cosmos. It’s so gratifying when even a couple of you take a few minutes to comment… it’s one of the most important ways that I learn and grow my models!
Yes, thanks for the $ some of you are contributing, much appreciated. It helps grow our foundation.
And, and, your comments are a different kind of currency. Your thinking helps my thinking. Let’s dream these concepts into reality together!








John Hall
Will, this is brilliant stuff and inspired thinking.
All I can say is that I'm giving up (in the right upward way) and trying to be one who helps to illuminate all the light bulbs.
I like your comment about the 100th monkey Will. It makes "giving UP"that much easier. As Soren Kierkegaard has said, the father of Existentialism, life is a Leap of Faith. It is what has propelled me to leave a life of darkness, and turn my light on. I so enjoy your weekly writings. Please forgive me for not commenting more frequently.