Man Can Do Nothing
"But no one will
ever believe you if you tell him he can do nothing. This is the most
offensive and the most unpleasant thing you can tell people. It is
particularly unpleasant and offensive because it is the truth, and
nobody wants to know the truth.
"When you understand this, it will be easier for us to talk. But it
is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel
it with one's "whole mass,' to be really convinced that it is so and
never forget it.
"With this question of DOING" (G. emphasized the word), "yet another
thing is connected. It always seems to people that others invariably
do things wrongly, not in the way they should be done. Everybody
always thinks he could do it better. They do not understand, and do
not want to understand, that what is being done, and particularly
what has already been done in one way, cannot be, and could not have
been, done in another way. Have you noticed how everyone now is
talking about the war? Everyone has his own plan, his own theory.
Everyone finds that nothing is being done in the way it ought to be
done. Actually everything is being done in the only way it can be
done. If one thing could be different everything could be different.
And then perhaps there would have been no war.
"Try to understand what I am saying: everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate.
Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are,
so everything is as it is.