At every moment do the right thing.

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Always be kind., Always do the right thing, Be kind

At every moment in your conscious life to have the intent to do the next indicated right thing is a great way to live. The world is an infinitely complex place and it is impossible to know what will be happening in the next moment, and thus to decide in the moment what the next indicated thing will be can be difficult. But decide we must because the moments inevitably move on and doing nothing is as much an action as is continuing to do what one is already doing as a perceived inertia of the moment. Inaction is an action too. However, doing something totally unique in response to the perceived situation usually requires some kind of preexisting habits that will assert themselves as thoughts in response to what is perceived.

Thus, to successfully do what turns out, on later consideration, to be the next right thing is to some extent dependent upon an accurate perception of the situation presented to one’s consciousness. That perception is itself dependent upon what came before the moment which itself is dependent upon not only the physical reality but the potential ones and it vanishes into complexity. In interpersonal situations, such as typical conversation, this isn’t much of a problem but when we are reacting to professionally produced media, in all its forms, that has been carefully programmed to control our perceptions, their setup becomes critical. Advertising and political presentations are carefully honed to manipulate our perception of reality. Those people want us to react positively to what they present to us and thus to behave at their whim. They intend for us to buy their commercial product or to support and vote for their view of what is a public benefit.

How to do the next indicated right thing isn’t always easy to discern. There is a slight variation on that idea that we have been discussing that attempts to define the right thing. The right thing is a human value judgment that is defined by human values. The right things are themselves infinitely variable. Sometimes we are talking about the Earth environment, and sometimes about the planet Saturn’s environment. That is why the Cassini spacecraft was intentionally collided with Saturn in such a way that it was incinerated. That was to kill any possible transfer of an Earth life form that might be on the spaceship. That was a very remote right thing to do.

Usually, it is in face-to-face interpersonal relationships that we are concerned with the right thing to do. But it is complicated, and perhaps a better thought to cultivate into a habit is when facing a situation to always do the kind thing. That thought will, when cultivated into a habit, automatically take the other person’s needs into account and thus when behaving that way you will be doing the right thing, at least in that person’s reality, and in yours. Perhaps to do the right thing …

Be kind. Always be kind.

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An attempt to be cautious backfires

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Driving for 81 years, Driving in Bend Oregon, Is my luck running out?

A truncated trunk on  a quiet day at South Lake Tahoe

I have been driving cars for eighty-one years since I was one year old and have never had an accident. Three times cars I owned were in accidents but they were legally parked then hit. My first driving experiences would now be considered super illegal but back in 1936 when I was one year old my father let me stand on his lap and steer the family’s model A Ford. During WWII, in 1945 when I was nine years old and my draftable uncles were off to war and only my youngest uncle was left to work, I was driving the family Caterpillar tractor towing equipment thru the orchards while that uncle and my granddad were spraying fruit trees.

Glen Sr. pictured on the Caterpillar which we all drove a lot.

Here in Bend, Oregon, seven decades later I’m still driving but the challenges are getting more pronounced. Perhaps it is because the cars are more reliable and there are many more safety controls on the highways and street corners that there are fewer fatalities per mile. However, the drivers are now much worse in the sense that they disobey the posted speed limits and regulatory signs. Posted at 25 MPH now routinely means 35 and sometimes 45. Stop signs are no longer full stops and not even a rolling 5 MPH and I see people often going maybe 15 MPH through STOP signs.

I mention this because I was driving 25 MPH along a residential street with STOP signs to my sides following at a reasonable two car lengths when a guy in a new car came thru his STOP sign in-between me and that car I was following rather close. I abruptly came to a full stop with my fender about two feet short of his path. Okay, he had now stopped and his fender was about a foot from where mine would have been if I had proceeded normally. I was glad I had stopped because if I hadn’t and he had come another foot forward we would have hit at some 25 MPH. Since I had the right of way I proceeded after about half a second delay. No big deal I thought, but what do you suppose this guy did?

He gets behind me and turns on his high beam lights and follows me for two blocks and then turns off onto another street. What am I supposed to think? Was he off to the hospital and in a super hurry? Or were his high beams a signal that I had somehow violated his space and he was doing some kind of I’ll show you, light-weight revenge. Of course, I will never know but almost every time I drive the mile to downtown I observe some kind of strange and dangerous behavior. Rarely does it involve me, but I see things that other people are doing.

Our modern America seems to be going through a transition.

Creating an idea

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A new form of meditation, Creating an idea, Making meditations the work, Meditations beyond good feelings

The Love Our Life book project is going along well. There are several major motifs blending together that are being derived from the 3,591 existing blog posts. One of the sets of ideas that came percolating up was from the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. I’ve worked with that set from two different orientations. The Pompey mosaic of the group and the list of 147 sayings slightly worked up then into action statements. For this usage in the book, I have expanded my interpretations of the basic ideas to where I can only call what I have done a derivative rendition. The new version is aimed at being workable as starting points for practice meditations. They are positive statements to be thought about for a few moments and then applied in the meditation to a hypothetical situation. When this is done as group event there can be additional prompts to move the individual’s meditation through 1. Think of a person you might have an encounter with, 2. Think of a specific situation, 3. Think of how you feel about that person, 4. Think about what would be a helpful greeting to say to them, 5. Think of a goal you both have a similar overlapping interest in, 6. Think of a second problem you both can cooperate on working with, 7. Having established a working relationship on two particular things, introduce a third thing where you have an aspect that is in opposition, 8. Find and explore how you might work to some mutually beneficial end result, 9. Set up a goal toward which you can both work toward. 10. Set a small but significant thing that you can do now to move toward that goal, 11. Bring the meditation to an end by emotionally praising yourself for a job well done.

A meditation conducted in that way should have positive results when the individual is confronted with the actual situation. Each of the 147 ideas could be approached with a similar set of prompts to guide one through to workable goals. And, an important part of this procedure is to conclude it with a self-acknowledgment of successfully completing the meditation. Another part of the meditation would be to have the individuals do something to get them physically involved. Perhaps have some blank business cards and pens available on which they could write down a simple action they will perform. Perhaps these things are too complicated to remember how to do when one is meditating alone, but when they are directed by a person following program notes it might be very effective in generating good behaviors in the person’s daily life.

Those are ideas I have been considering how to effectively implement.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – line 51

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7 Sages of Greece, Contentment, Diary, Epigrams, habits, happiness, Health, policy, psychology, research, Shun criminals and murderers, survival

I had a conversation this morning with my friend R about the Wisdom of the 7 Sages of Ancient Greece. He was bothered by line # 51, Shun criminals and murderers.  He was asserting that I was going to get a lot of blowback on all the brief precepts on the list. But he felt that #51 was the most repugnant. Those people don’t want to be put into a negative category and shunned. They are already under a social black cloud and their lives have already been made so difficult they were driven to acts that society considers so offensive they were punished. That punishment he considered enough and too much in most cases. Those criminals and murderers have suffered enough and should now be treated as well as other people.

My idea was to go back to the first suggestions. # 1 Seek and pursue goodness and # 2 Obey all laws. The basic idea running through the 147 suggestions is similar to the very first, # 1 Seek and pursue goodness. Thus, when a person is as good as we wise and sentient beings should be, then we would treat them according to # 15 Empower your friends for good deeds. That would include criminals and murderers if they were friends, but if we followed # 51 we would Shun criminals and murderers, and they would not be our friends. R would assert that everyone deserves to be treated well and everyone should be considered a friend. I would agree and say in line # 97 Give friendly greetings to everyone. And yet, if a person was a convicted criminal and murderer it would seem fair to apply # 116 Walk quietly away from hatred, and it would seem that a murderer had hatred going at some level to have committed so heinous an act. The same could be said for any crime that resulted in a criminal conviction.

The word shun is also used in line # 136 Be happy and shun debauchery. In that case, it is an excessive personal action that is to be shunned, not a person. In our personal actions, we are encouraged to # 12 Behave with discretion, #13 Bring honor to your family, # 14 Avoid improper actions. Debauchery is an excess of some sort and easily leads to difficulties. In every way # 17 Avoid all unnecessary risks. There are plenty of necessary risks in life but we can avoid some of the unnecessary ones, such as debauchery, known criminals, and murderers.

In the end, #91 Be kind to everyone, they have troubles too.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – line 54

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Challenge yourself to kind actions., The creation of a civilization

The 7 Sages of Greece mosaic found buried at Pompeii

“Challenge yourself to kind actions” is line 54 from my rendition of the maxims of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. Those sayings are being reworked for Love Our Life. Those ancient sayings from about 550 BC Greece are seemingly simple and commonplace but the list of 147 is readable in a couple of minutes and will create a feeling of purpose and control in the reader. Furthermore, when seen on a daily basis chiseled in stone in the public square they will influence the whole community to relate in a more helpful way with one another. Part of the power of having those sometimes strange ideas before the public eye and attention is that the people will see when one of their members is being successful in practicing the precepts. That will give them a role model upon which to pattern their own behavior. Everyone will grow to greater maturity.

If those stone stelae were in fact placed in Greek towns throughout their world they would have been read often and responded to at a community level. Also, they would be a route to every person becoming literate and a member of the whole Greek civilization. Each individual could memorize a line every few days and thus learn the words and letters of their language. After a year or so a person would know the whole stelae’s precepts and also how to read and form letters and thus have a basic access to the wisdom of the philosophers who were coming into existence.

Those few people living at Delphi who created these stelae and sent them around the Greek world may have been doing some of the kindest deeds ever done. They founded a society of literate people, filled them with reasonable methods for coping with their real world and set the stage for a civilization that resounds to this day. As most ideas come into being in a single individual’s mind it seems probable that a single person set the creation of these stone stelae into motion. It created a world civilization. At the beginning, it may have been a simple task by a single person.

Challenge yourself to a kind action. Create a list of good suggestions.

Love Your Life – diary

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Evolution of an idea, Love Your Life diary thoughts

My “Love Your Life” book is still in an evolutionary flux. I created a beautiful cover, 58 saves so far, and the first few pages of spreads that looked great and were proofread to be correct. I was happy with every one of them while making up the final-looking presentation for my critics but after I had shown a finished copy to them for review, I saw obvious things that need reworking. Each of the presentations looked better on the bookstore shelf than any book there, at least to my eye. My goals are a little different because this book is being designed to reach millions of people. It must, therefore, be distinctive and easily remembered.

When I put it on the bookstore wall with hundreds of other books facing out, this one is more visible and visually memorable. When it is lying on a coffee-shop table, it begs for a passerby to ask about the owner’s progress with the program. When it is opened to any two-page spread it presents a problem in a clear and positive way on the left-side page and a way of coping with that problem on the right-side page.

There are challenges in describing problems in a positive way, and writing in negative terms may sound stronger but it forms a bad mood for presenting the new positive way of coping. Probably every problem has positive qualities about it and when the negative aspects are discussed it brings out the combativeness in the reader. That might be a successful approach when making a movie because it stimulates emotions,  but it seems to be counterproductive when writing a book intended to help billions of people with actual problems.

I am intending to be kinder to other people than I am to myself. That intention doesn’t always maintain its prominence in my actions when I am distracted by the natural flow of things. But, when writing a book and having it critiqued by several friends, there is enough time and the opportunity to stand back and be more in control of myself and my reactions. When a person frowns or stumbles while reading a word in the text, I pay close attention and try, with them, to figure out what it was at the core of their problem.

It is said that successful products are the result of market testing and it would appear that is what I am doing by showing this book to different people. Artists generally dislike showing unfinished works to people, but in this case the process has helped me get the core ideas that will be beneficial to the readers.

Evolution is a messy process, but it continues to make things that work.

What our emotions are really saying about what’s happening.

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Emotions of the moment

The conversation this morning was about emotions. Where do they come from, what do they mean, what do they tell us, how do we control them, and should we even attempt to control them. Several of the participants are or have been professional people helpers of one sort or another so the conversation proceeded with some degree of profundity. It was generally agreed that the emotion of fear locks people into a narrower band of usually defensive and hostile responses and that the emotions associated with love bring on more open and mutually constructive actions. It was also said that these emotions were coming from within the person and their bundles of past experiences which influenced how individuals responded to the situations confronting them. A stoic would agree with these statements so far but would continue that the responsibility of the individual ends with their ability to influence the situation. If they have no influence they have no responsibility and must only control their emotions and their internal responses to the ongoing situation.

Perhaps an emotion isn’t what our conscious mind is thinking and feeling, but rather what that vastly larger entity our subconscious mind is “thinking.” It seems appropriate to put the word thinking in quotes because it would appear that our subconscious mind isn’t really thinking, it is a summing up and flowing together of everything that seems relevant to the moment. That probably is a vast array of subconscious habits. That is, habits that are never seen in the form of external behaviors but nonetheless interact with the multitude of other subconscious habits and create a unified action. There must be a technical term for what so obviously must be happening within the brain. If the brain is doing anything, which obviously it is, then there must be large numbers of routines and subroutines interacting with one another.

When an emotion percolates to the fore as a felt thing, it must be coming from an interaction of all these inner things. However, there are probably compelling habits that underlie emotions of fear and the other basic emotions.

The emotions focus our attention on what is important at the moment.

I walked a neighbor’s dog today.

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A visit with a local dog, I have a goggie companion, Jack Russell Terrier named Maggie

A dog named Maggie needs a home for a few days in September and her human friend suggested that she stay with Debbie and me for about five days while they are away. Today we went over to Maggie’s home for a visit and walked her over to ours to see how comfortable that would be for her. The hope was that we would find the whole experience acceptable to everyone concerned.

Maggie is a Jack Russell Terrier which is a breed I have no experience with, but she is very dog-like and responded well to my leash inputs and physical actions. It was about four blocks from her house to mine by a round-the-block route so we had some time for personal interaction. At first she tended to pull hard on the leash and my tugs were met with a firmer pulling on her part. I tried intermittent short pulls and she responded briefly, but soon was back to strong pulling. I began showing interest in various things along our route like trees, bushes, rocks and other things that I thought might interest her too. I would stop and inspect those things for about ten seconds and then move on to another one. She respected my stopping and demonstrating interest and would not pull away while I was still. When I started walking again she would begin pulling again but after several cycles of stopping and starting at those points of interest, she was beginning to walk with me instead of pulling me.

When we got to my house we entered the front door and went directly to the back door and out into the fully fenced in back yard. While still on the leash I let her lead me and inspect the entire periphery at her own pace of interest, but more or less I led the procedure by walking from one point of interest to the next one. One of the events was our neighbor’s dog Jade coming over to the wooden fence where they could sniff each other’s noses through the gaps between the vertical boards with about a two-inch gap. That was surprisingly brief, about ten seconds total. We had inspected the whole yard by the time her owner arrived.

Maggie and my whole private encounter was about ten minutes but she seemed perfectly comfortable being with me and I with her. I am looking forward to her visit with Debbie and me.

How to get along with people who disagree with us

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Getting along with others, Getting along with strangeness, Seeing an alternative reality, Seeing the unseen but seeable

Everyone is going to disagree with us about something. Some people are going to disagree with us so profoundly that they will have strong negative emotions toward us simply because they perceive that we belong to some particular category they hate. As soon as any defining label can be attached to us there will be someone who hates us. For example, politicians simply by choosing to be associated with a party, which is necessary to gain enough support to be effective, will automatically be a competitor to members of the other party and therefore be hated by the black-and-white thinkers of that other party.

Some people become so filled with resentment at perceived mistreatment from some other group or situation that they will refuse to even tolerate listening to objective facts being presented about that subject. Ideas that are not in absolute accord with their position are automatically hated. These days, with easy access to the propaganda that agrees with us, it becomes easy to fill one’s mind with highly sifted facts that prove we are right and everyone else is wrong and hates us. Therefore, it becomes legitimate for us to automatically hate them. This attitude comes from a personal history of bad treatment and resultant pain. Some people have been so subjected to chronic pain since their infancy that they have never experienced anything pleasant coming from some category of people. Thus it becomes easy for them to totally reject anything coming from that category and very easy to accept all information that makes them evil. Even direct observation of simple reality presented by those evil ones will be rejected because it will be seen as manipulated. Any carefully presented argument that includes a trifle of suspect information will be seen as coming from an evil place and rejected.

Everyone has their point of view, and we can assume that everyone has some things that we would agree with. Therefore, it makes sense to find those things we hold as true and value in common and continue our conversations on those points of agreement. Even people who hold us in contempt and disgust may have personal property that they would trade for personal property we possess. On that we can begin to form a bond of mutual interest.

Some people may choose to find personal satisfaction in holding unrealistic ideas because it gives their life a point of personal meaning. It feels better to them to cling to false hopes than to have no hope at all. Perhaps it is more effective when attempting to communicate with these people, perhaps everyone, to always totally accept them exactly as they are without any hesitancy, totally without reservation. To assume that I have the capacity to place my point of view anywhere in the universe, at least temporarily and therefore …

I accept you exactly as you are! I totally accept you and your opinions.

I seek to treat people better.

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Diary, I seek to treat people better., I walked the labyrinth twice today

Today I attended the memorial service for David and Judy Paulsmeyer at the UU Fellowship Church. I didn’t know them well, and our Sunday conversations had always been short and very pleasant. Generally, I spend my time there at the UU finding things to do. Easy little things like greeting people at the door, filling the dog watering bowl, wiping the dust of the benches, opening and closing the huge sanctuary doors, and picking up the collection. Also, I almost always bring a rock for the labyrinth and place it near the front door and pick up an earlier rock left there and take it to the labyrinth and place it in an appropriate location. My ten-minute walk in the labyrinth is a simple pleasure and gives me a bit of time to think in a noncommittal way about life in general.

Today was a special service for the Paulsmeyers who both died in a driving accident while coming back from visiting their grandchildren in Colorado. The service made clear what wonderful people they had been and the kindly service they had provided to their various local clubs, friends, and relatives. They were the salt of the earth in the kindness that they spread everywhere they went. True peacemakers.

I had parked my car a distance from our building but near the labyrinth and so I walked it both before and after the service. I needed the extra time to think about how I can be nicer, kinder and more helpful to those whom I encounter. Actually, I’m pretty good about that already, but I want to be much better, much kinder, and more accepting of people for who they are. I do post this blog with those thoughts in mind for the public to potentially benefit from, and I do lots of tiny things for the public benefit but when I heard today about David and Judy’s life I realized I can do much more.

I seek to treat people better.