If one truly knew. Did you hear the question, “To what extent are we as individuals responsible for the eruptions in the world?” If man truly knew the hidden cause of the eruptions, he would set everyone who is erupting free. If man truly knew the hidden cause of the violence in the world, he would set not only the victim [...] free but he’d set the one who seemingly is the cause free. There are such things even in our law as proximate causes. I’ll give you a very vivid story. My daughter on her first trip out, she was only sixteen. She had to wait until she was sixteen to drive a car, and we bought her a second-hand car, a nice little Buick. She took off and she went down Doheny Road coming into Sunset and it’s a very sharp curve. It was recently paved, beautifully paved…it was as black as you could make a road and beautifully marked with a double line because it was a curve like an S. She’s going down slowly when a mad person comes blindly up in this curved road, across the double line, and seems to be coming straight towards her. This is her first trip out, solo trip, and she made a sharp turn to void the impact and ran right into a tree, a palm tree. Smashed the car, smashed her nose, and she came home with the car turned inside out. The tire was torn when she got home because one piece as she turned it over cut into the car. There was not a thing you could do with the car but give it away. I said to her, “Darling, you aren’t hurt too badly are you?” No, she was crying over her car. Here her nose was smashed, blood coming down. Well, at that moment if I could have put my hands on that nut I’d have killed him. I’m looking at my sweetheart, my daughter, and here is this nut the cause of her misfortune. Forget the car. So we paid $550 for it, it was a second-hand car…get another car. But this is her first trip out by herself and naturally she is careful and this fellow comes whirling around at fifty miles per hour, comes across the double line, and he wouldn’t even stop. He heard the impact. Kept on going…didn’t want to be near the accident. Well, that’s a proximate cause. If you came upon the scene, she was the cause of that tree being injured and the car being injured. And the one who seemingly is the innocent one who is the cause of it went on innocently. So that is what is called in law the proximate cause. You drive down the highway and you think this fella is going to hit you, and so you to avoid the blow turn sharply and hit the other fella. Well, you’re responsible because you struck him and he didn’t strike you. Yet you interpreted his actions as an impending accident, and you are now the seeming cause of the accident when the true cause was what he, the innocent bystander, really did. So hidden in the minds of men…for we’re all creating in this world in our Imaginations: Imagination creates reality. Who knows who is treading in the winepress tonight that is the cause of the disturbances in the world? We have an arms industry, with all of the billions that we pour into it. We can’t consume it ourselves, so we have to go out and force countries that can ill-afford to buy it to buy it. So we go all through South America or the Near East, all through the world, selling our battleships and discarded planes and discarded guns that we may keep the industry pouring. Well, these fellas who are selling it, they want to be successful so they can build a bigger home and get not three cars but four cars in the garage, and then live in the finest clubs, and be important people in their little community…selling arms! Then suddenly you read in the paper Peru has done so-and-so, this one does so-and-so. They have no way of making a gun for themselves and so we go out to sell them so that we may keep the wheels turning. So who is the unseen culprit? Well, that’s the world over. For instance, as a friend said to me one day, it was Emmet Fox, he said, “You know, a man came to see me and he wanted his business improved. I said, ‘All right, I’ll pray for you, my good man. I’ll pray the only way I know how to pray, and I’ll pray that your business is simply booming. I’m a little bit curious tell me, what is your business?’” He said, ‘I’m a mortician.’” Good night.551 ¶39