A song from my adolescence has been popping into my mind quite a bit over the past few weeks: Ball of Confusion by the Temptations.
The lyrics that have stayed in my mind since high school are:
Fear in the air, tension ev’rywhere
Unemployment rising fast, the Beatle’s new record’s a gas,
and the only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation,
and the band played on.
Eve of destruction, tax deduction,
City inspectors, bill collectors, mod clothes in demand,
population out of hand, suicide, too many bills,
hippies movin’ to the hills
People all over the world are shouting end the war
and the band played on.
I loved the Temptations when I was growing up and this song really made an impact on me as an angst-filled teenager learning to deal with the crazy world I was living in. Of course, the vibration of the song is pretty much the opposite of Ananda’s music; Ball of Confusion perfectly captures the agitation of modern life, and the musician in me admires the skill with which they did it!
So I find myself thinking about how crazy the world seems now…and then I think about how crazy the world seemed then (after all, this song came out almost fifty years ago!). And I think again about the article by Swami Kriyananda that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, especially the following excerpt:
CAN THE WORLD BE PERFECTED?
The thought that this world can ever be perfected is one of man’s greatest delusions. What this world is, simply, is a school, through which the soul passes on its upward evolution. Perfection is, in other words, an ideal to be sought for the benefit of the students, not of the school. Were this school, our earth, to complete its educative purpose, by means at present unimaginable, it would mean simply that souls still in need of its instruction would have to be enrolled elsewhere.
No outward improvement in the world will ever guarantee a corresponding improvement of the individual. Ultimately, man’s betterment depends always on his own recognition of his need for it.
I don’t say, never try to improve things. Do improve them if you can, always calmly and in support of the good, never with anger. But realize that there are simply too many wrongs in the world for all of them to be improved very much. Your first need, always, is to remain calm and undisturbed in your Self.
Sure, the world is a ball of confusion; but that doesn’t have to be our reality. We can attune ourselves to higher consciousness and live in peace and love and clarity.