Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.
With God as our father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Sometimes people try to imagine how the world will look in a hundred years. But what about a thousand years? And have you ever wondered how people living a hundred years from now might look back at us? Or what about people living a thousand years from now? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how this moment is going to look in hindsight, when viewed from a thousand years from today?

Someone who was interviewing me about Seek Reality Online just this past week asked me what I hoped it might achieve over the next five years. And I miffed that question. Five years isn’t much time. But a thousand years is a whole different matter!

It has lately been estimated, based upon surveys, that close to ninety percent of all the people on earth are still afraid to die. To Craig Hogan and me, that is a horrifying statistic! If only the mainstream scientific community had listened to the illustrious Max Planck when he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Just think how the world could have changed back then, if the scientific community had listened to him! Dr. Planck knew that the matrix of matter is consciousness. And at some point in the next thousand years, whether it happens sooner or it happens later, that fact will be seen to be incontrovertible. But meanwhile, as Dr. Planck also said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But we have already had three generations of scientists grow up since he said those words! And still, even today, more than three quarters of all the people in the world are so ignorant of the fact that their minds are eternal that, tragically, they remain terrified of death. The consequences of their fear are manifold. And they are tragic beyond words, as you will shortly see.

So Craig Hogan and I and our significant others are giving up our dreams of retiring in Tahiti. Instead, we have resolved to work until we take our final earthly breaths, and to knock down that awful ignorance-of-death statistic by using our Seek Reality Online platform to teach as many people as possible the glorious certainty that our minds are eternal, and that the life beyond this life truly is wonderful beyond their fondest imaginings. We don’t want to go home ourselves until we can leave behind a world where at least five percent more of the people on earth are as certain as we are that their lives are eternal!

But, what good will that do?

Well, first let’s look back from a thousand years from now at the world as it is today. I know that doing this is hard to get your mind around! But let’s be as frank as we can. Let’s look at all the political battling, at the wars here and there that cause so much pain, at the vast disparities between poverty and wealth, and at the places in the world where a few hold power and put multitudes in such desperate straits. Let’s notice the soulless power of transnational mega-corporations, although – true – in some parts of the west there is a healthier sense of middle-class ease. Some worry, though, that our middle-class lifestyle carries a risk of causing global warming. My particular gripe is that we are gradually choking the seas with plastic bits. And over us all hovers the minute-by-minute threat of nuclear annihilation! One way or another or in some combination, it seems impossible to imagine that this world and the human species that inhabits it can survive for another hundred years, and never mind another thousand years!

There is one word that describes what unites every one of these problems. From the wars to the multinational corporations carelessly spewing their carbon and plastics, and the plutocrats and dictators seizing power, and frankly every other mess in the world that we despair of ever solving. No matter what is wrong, FEAR is at its base! We know that, of course, because fear is the lowest consciousness vibration. It is fear that drives people and nations to seize and accumulate their money and their power, and yet they never have enough to ever really feel safe enough. Fear is at the root of jealousy, anger, avarice, and every other negative emotion you can name!

So we wallow in all the emotional filth that fear produces, not realizing until in some much more enlightened age it will be pointed out to us that:

  • All of these problems are loosely related, and they all stem from our existential fears; and
  • All of them have at their core our nameless terror of death and extinction.

Those looking back at us from a thousand years from now will understand all of this perfectly well. They will diagnose all of our current problems, trace them to their singular source, and justifiably blame the culprit, which is a shortsighted scientific community that barely a century prior to this benighted moment turned itself into a dogma-based belief-system in order to avoid the remote possibility that it might discover a Christian God.

So, no Tahitian bungalows for us! When I explained all of this to the reporter who had asked me that question about where I hoped to be in the next five years, I told him that once we teach as few as five percent more of the world’s population that they will live eternally, then since all human minds are connected, we will raise the consciousness vibration of the population of all humanity enough to stop all wars and immensely reduce the political problems and the oligarchic oppression worldwide. He calculated then that we were going to have to reach and teach more than three hundred million more people. So we had better get busy!

Of course, all we can do is the best that we can do. But apparently wise souls as diverse as Confucius and Eleanor Roosevelt have been quoted as having said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness! So our candle is lit. And since all that we will have to do is to educate what amounts to the entire population of the United States, we plan to concentrate our efforts here.

Where Roman Christianity is concerned, however, the view from a thousand years from now begins to look increasingly dark. The religion’s stubborn insistence on clinging to its Roman version rather than returning to its roots in the teachings of Jesus seems to be cutting itself off from those roots together, and at a rapid rate: since 1944, when 92% of Americans still believed in God, the percentage of Americans believing in God has now dipped to an appalling 81%. I plan to build a companion website for SRO that will teach the Way of Jesus, but that likely won’t be nearly enough to stop what is an increasingly rapid decline.

It does feel ironic to think that when historians look back a thousand years from now, perhaps the greatest gift that Roman Christianity is likely to be thought to have given to the world during its so often benighted reign will have been its truly remarkable attempts at an open-minded science. Of course, they did it with a motive in mind. In trying to prove that this or that complex biological phenomenon could not have arisen without an active Mind involved, the Christian scientists that will be lauded then for their farsightedness were trying to prove the existence of the Christian God. But nevertheless, while heavily funded twenty-first-century materialist scientists were wasting billions of dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, some really brilliant contemporary scientists with very little funding were doing groundbreaking work in abundantly proving that phenomena like DNA required a Designer.           
I admire some of these unsung geniuses more than I can say!            

And it amuses me to imagine what a laugh those future scientists are going to have when they study these years. Think of it! The supposedly serious scientists of today will look like Luddite knuckleheads, seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain, when it will long since have become self-evident that consciousness is the base creative force. Consciousness is who we are. It also is the water in which we swim. And the Christians, by contrast, will look like heroes, doing their pioneering work with almost no funding. I have attended a couple of their conferences, and have been blown away by the joyous pioneering scholarship of people who are free to do their science without the burden of that heavy hand of their own self-imposed dogmas.

And so we press on. But it gives you a new perspective on your own life and culture when you imagine the distant future watching you making your decisions, doesn’t it? I can’t think of any generation, with the exception perhaps of the American Founders, who lived with the conscious thought that people a thousand years hence were actively watching them going about their work!

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment and live each moment
With peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)