In All’s Well. Where Thou Art Earth and Why, John Lefebvre blends philosophy, metaphysics and ethics into an original, lyrical meditation on our place in the Universe, both the distance we have come and the much longer way before us.
Lefebvre suggests that—at our core—we are the Universe’s vessels of consciousness. That means that we are also it’s vessels of astonishment and of love. With this up-sizing of the human condition, he argues that the United States’ founding principles, as compared to its achievements to date, form the clear basis for establishment of Universal Rights and Responsibilities. These include the Rights to:
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Access to food, clothing and shelter
Access to the tools of self-improvement, to health care, to basic capital, and to justice,
The Right to a Healthy Environment
Our lack of achievement, to date, is that these rights are not, nor have they ever been, universally accorded. These rights, that so many of us take for granted, come with huge responsibility. The Responsibility that comes with Freedom, Lefebvre contends, is to assure all others have every right that we take for granted, as completely.
“The rich moral narrative of this book nudges us toward a sense of awe. If you can stick with the math, it explores the mind-expanding vastness of our universe, looks at our unbounded consciousness and then the interconnectedness of all life. We have an unfulfilled responsibility. John walks with a congregation of our most generous souls. His advice on being nice comes from a place most of us will never experience, so I listen like I listen to the Dalai Lama when he says we need more warmheartedness.”
—Jim Hoggan
Author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming and I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up.
All’s Well Excerpts
America dreamed the right dream, just in an un-stereotypically piddly way. If any of us is entitled to Universal Rights and Freedom, then we All are.
Zen rang a bell for me. I was knocked out by the compelling vastness to be found in every moment of doing absolutely nothing, vigilantly.
Be still, yet still be. You can’t get richer than that. All we need do to get more than we ever dared dream is sweet fuck all.
Still again, I do have a story to tell, and as it turns out, there can be no story more lurid. It is the story of us all.
Just 150 years ago, we didn’t know what germs were. We have been out of caves only 150 generations, and we think we know just about everything. As usual, this is a laugh. A scream, really.
There are at least 10 trillion thoughtful species in the Universe and the chance that we are the most advanced among them is zero.
Ethics, besides being evident to every kid in second grade, embody a branch of philosophy that is, similar to epistemology and jurisprudence, more honored now in the breach, if at all—as opposed to logic, which receives interminable lip service.
But ethicists are not even disregarded. They could walk through the room and it would be like nothing happened. A rabbi, a priest and a minister could walk into the bar with an ethicist and it would still be a normal joke.
John Lefebvre
John Lefebvre, is a musician, composer, entrepreneur, retired lawyer and philanthropist. An author and climate change activist, in 2017 Lefebvre published his first book, All’s Well—Where Thou Art Earth and Why.
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