Only Engage with First-Rate People and Those Beyond the First Rate

When you talk with people who are first-rate or beyond first-rate, and you recognize and respect one another.

Ease, freedom, empowerment, resonance, delightful surprises, mindfulness, tranquility, great courage, great light. It opens up a radiant confidence in humanity and yourself.

Everywhere you feel awkward or struggle, they understand instantly, without your having to say a word. You no longer want to labor at explaining yourself to ten thousand people who do not understand you, just as, once you have found a great river, you no longer squeeze damp sand in the desert for water. Nor do you want to debate ten thousand people who criticize you, just as, standing on a high mountain by the shore and looking down at the waves, you cannot be swallowed by the clamor of the mediocre.

The problems and dark sides you avoid, suppress, and blame yourself for are no longer problems; they become anchors in your life. What crimes could an ordinary person have committed that are too shameful to speak of, too grave to atone for? Even serious crimes such as manslaughter and maliciously injuring others carry fixed prison terms rather than life sentences, while those whose mistaken decisions or deliberate actions kill tens of millions often live to a ripe old age.

Your dark sides and shortcomings, the inner demons and vulnerabilities you struggle to transform, arise from the predicaments of humanity and history that you bear as an ordinary person. These are predicaments that even people beyond first-rate can face only by coming together, let alone resolve.

Your shortcomings and inadequacies are precisely what make you real as a human being. They are the basis on which the other person recognizes and respects you, on which you complement one another and work together. Like the grooves between a gear’s teeth, they are not defects but the source of a gear system’s boundless driving force. Those we call first-rate or beyond first-rate are the fortunate ones among us, and they need to unite with ordinary people, just as large and small gears are all essential to a gear system. Gear systems of the world, unite.

Take yourself as a method. Within an individual’s predicament lies humanity’s predicament: that of an Afghan girl, for example, a Black person in an American slum, or a Vietnamese worker. To resolve your own predicament is to resolve humanity’s predicament. Internet entrepreneurship, too, emphasizes being your own best user.

A predicament is a direction, not a dead end. Human civilization does not advance through mathematical deduction; it advances through generation after generation resolving humanity’s predicaments and suffering.

“Second-rate” is a false category. There are only those beyond first-rate, the first-rate, the nearly first-rate, and those who do not make the grade. There is no second-rate. The awakened / those who have sunk into delusion. Mistaking the “second-rate” for people who also “make the grade,” who also have something to offer, was my mistake in the past, and it is a common one. Misled by so many second-rate people, I remained unable to make the grade for a long time. It was also because my own level of awakening was too low that I struggled to distinguish the nearly first-rate from the second-rate. The key distinctions between the two are their level of awakening, the depth of their karmic obstructions, and how much truth, goodness, and beauty remains in them.