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Probaway – Life Hacks

~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

Category Archives: Kindness

What is your personal responsibility to humanity?

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by probaway in B-47, diary, inventions, Kindness, policy, survival

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humanities survival, Personal responsibility

I don’t remember ever thinking about my responsibility to humanity before becoming responsible for H-bombs. My thoughts while in US Air Force flight school were about attending to what I was required to learn and do. The issues were when on duty to perform as well as possible and to relax when off duty in a way that would improve our performance when on duty. The personal goal was to graduate from flight school, and secondarily to graduate as high as possible within our class because the higher we scored the more choice we had as to the kinds of airplanes we would fly. I graduated at the top of my class in everything and that was seventy percent of our total score. Unfortunately, I didn’t display the kind of military enthusiasm expected of me and was rated poorest on that measured quality, and therefore instead of being at first choice for assignments I was sixth out of the local portion of our entire class. That was about one-hundred graduating pilots.

An aside comment, on our first day introductory at flight school, while still in an auditorium with the whole Air Force Class 1959H, the introductory speaker said, “Look around, half of you won’t make it through flight school!”

Charles Scamahorn - Probaway

Charles Scamahorn in 1959 when jet pilot in USAF.

I did graduate near the top of my class, but as it turned out I lost my bet to become a fighter pilot because there were only five fighter assignments, and I was sixth in my class and pushed into the bottom of the assignment choice list into B-47 bombers. And that is where this story really begins. Because with this assignment, instead of defending our country and our government against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I was to fly around with H-bombs and threaten the whole world with extermination.

For me, the question then became, “What is my personal responsibility to humanity?” My life goal wasn’t, and still isn’t, to destroy humanity; it was to be a law-abiding citizen and defend my country. But the problem was that if I performed my job perfectly, it would bring the end of civilization, and possibly all humanity. My action would precipitate our enemies to retaliate with everything they had, and of course, we would retaliate with everything we had too. That was the United States’ plan and official Air Force policy. It was aptly named Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Here is the current state of MADNESS from Wikipedia, The current list of states with nuclear weapons: “From a high of 70,300 active weapons in 1986, as of 2019, there are approximately 3,750 active nuclear warheads and 13,890 total nuclear warheads in the world. Many of the decommissioned weapons were simply stored or partially dismantled, not destroyed”

This problem came up for me because I began talking about Charles Galton Darwin’s book, “The Next Million Years.”

 

What is humanity’s responsibility to the Universe?

10 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by probaway in diary, inventions, survival, evolution, Kindness, robots

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Humanity's responsibility, Kindness to the Universe

Earlier I presented that question to some friends of mine. The discussion didn’t progress very far because no one had thought about such a grandiose problem. The almost instant response was that we didn’t have any responsibility to the Universe, it just exists totally independent of us. I responded with the obvious statement that we owe absolutely everything to the Universe. That without it continuing to behave in the consistent way that it does, we would cease to exist. Well, they responded there isn’t anything that we can do about the operations of the Universe, so why should we care, much less worry about it.

Helping the Universe isn’t our problem, and we have more important issues to contend with like loving our fellow humans, and animals, and plants, and the whole Earth’s environment, and coping with global warming. I agreed that we must do those things too, but they are transient things, and the Universe will continue for a very long time; it’s permanent. It will outlive us in time and space too, and in all the other qualities that it possesses. But, I contend, we can supply the Universe with something that could fulfill its grander potential. The Universe and its processes of natural evolution can be directed with intelligence.

We can give, and to a tiny amount we already do give, to the Universe a self-awareness of itself. But, independent of the thinking of astronomers and physicists, we could give it the capacity for foreknowledge of what will become of actions it already has the potential to perform. We now do these things on a human scale, but we could do them on a Universal scale.

Presently we have the capacity to create thinking beings that would be independent of our organic bodies, and of our bodies’ demise. We humans, in order to think, require most of what is created and supplied by a whole planet of organic life to support us. But a non-organic being, similar to a computer, can subsist indefinitely without energy and can be brought back to thinking with a modest supply of one easily created thing. Electricity! The needed electricity can be created by thermal gradients, by light falling on solar cells, by radioactivity, and other ways also. In a protected capsule everything could be created to do the thinking and radio broadcast it to the local universe populated with similar beings and different beings. It could do these things, forever, or perhaps billions of years with only one energy input, electricity.

If the necessary components could be brought together to make these beings capable of reproducing themselves, they could propagate across the accessible time and space. Because they can see the effects of their actions on into the future, they can make beings similar to themselves to perform the tasks seen as necessary. Because time, space, matter and energy are no longer a limit to what can be accomplished, the value of these beings to the Universe would be beyond current human speculations.

I suggested that our human responsibility for creating this next form of thinking beings depends on thinking and acting high-technology humans like those populating our current society. My friends didn’t concur, but I think we should consider if …

Our human responsibility to the Universe is to give it the ability to think.

 

 

Acts of kindness are always right now.

22 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by probaway in diary, Kindness, survival

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Be kind right now., Kindness, Kindness is right now., Practicing kindness

Am I capable of doing a kind act right now?

Is anything preventing me from doing something kind?

What can I do right now to move past everything that is preventing me from doing a kind act right now?

At this moment I paused to think of something kind that I might do right now and immediately did it! I did a kind act! It was some little things, but I physically did them with the motivation of helping another person accomplish something they wanted to be done.

A basic kind act is helping another person to accomplish something positive. It is especially kind if this second person’s act is also helpful for other people. The ideal kind act would be to do something so memorable and so easy to do that there would be a ripple effect that would last as long as people have the ability to communicate with one another. The Good Samaritan helping an injured stranger is a memorable story that has had a ripple effect. Over the years there must have been people who saw an injured person and thought of the story, perhaps reflexively, and then helped a person in need.

A kind act is always in the moment but the effects may be felt at some time in the future. Perhaps those future people being helped will include you.

A prayer to the Universe

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by probaway in Contentment, diary, evolution, Kindness, survival

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A prayer to the Universe

The Universe probably doesn’t hear my words of gratitude for its existence but it probably does have the potential to hear them. The potentials for the Universe to exist in its present form, and that includes me typing this, began at the Big Bang. From einstein.stanford.edu:

“Experiments continue to show that there is no ‘space’ that stands apart from space-time itself…no arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity. General relativity tells us that what we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe, so space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. This is not speculation, but sound observation.”

The history of our world in 18 minutes | David Christian

At the beginning of this post my goal was to praise the basic processes of the Universe: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and the weak nuclear forces, which we perceive in our daily lives as gravity, matter, energy, time, and space.

Here from the Kahn Academy is The Four Fundamental Forces video:

The Four Fundamental Forces of the Universe to which I intentionally offer my whole being. Of course, I am already part of the Universe and always will be, I have no choice, but I wish to offer my agreement with all of these things which it is. It’s potential for new things at every stage was totally incomprehensible before they came into being. Probably there are many more and whatever there is that I can help with I offer my support.

Most prayers are

Blessing and Adoration – I offer everything within my influence to the Universe. It has brought everything that exists into being, and my experiences with these things have been of consistent reliability.

Petition – If there is anything to my influence let me ask it to continue on its self-chosen path.

Intercession – I ask for no intercession other than to continue letting our creatures continue to live as has already been provided by the bounty of the Universe.

Thanksgiving – To the past, present, and future Universe, Thank You for being what you are and doing what you do.

A Brief Encounter with Algernon Black

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by probaway in psychology, automobile, diary, survival, Travel, Kindness

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A brief encounter, Algernon Black, Coney Island, Encampment for Citizenship, Ethical Culture Societies, New York city, Pullman Washington

I hitchhiked from Pullman, Washington, to New York City the summer of 1958 to attend the Ethical Culture Societies‘ Encampment for Citizenship, where I experienced several of the most important events of my life. One was with Algernon Black, one of the leaders who every summer created this amazing opportunity for about eighty kids. We were given the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the most important people in New York, some of the most important people in the world. That was a fantastic adventure and it shaped the rest of my life.

I had spoken to Algernon personally a couple of times but this is a story, a Brief Encounter, that shocked me into personal responsibility for other people’s lives. It is meaningful because he gave me a personal task, a responsibility that I was capable of doing, that amazes me to this day. He asked me to do something that I would be very hesitant to ask any teenager to do because it would have been so easy to go wrong and end in disaster.

He drove a group of five of us kids out to Coney Island amusement park for a day at the beach and a swim in the Atlantic and to do whatever else we could get into and out of. I remember the ride on the then scariest roller coaster in the world. It really banged us around and I felt bruised. It was enough for me not to take another ride on that thing. After an hour of this kind of nonsense entertainment, Algernon took me aside and asked me if I knew how to drive a car. I said I had had a ’41 Chevy back in Pullman since I was sixteen with no accidents or even tickets.

He said that he had some important business to attend to and asked me to drive his car back from Coney Island (40.5728, -73.9850) to the Encampment for Citizenship (40.8897, -73.9063). That’s about 25 miles through a lot of Brooklyn, the full length of Manhattan, and some of the Bronx.

Algernon was asking me to drive the five of us teenagers through a major city I didn’t know, in a car I had never driven, to a place that might be hard to find, without a map. The possibilities for me and us kids going astray were real, but he trusted me to do it. And I did.

What an honor! Thank you, Algernon Black!

 

 

 

 

A brief encounter with Ray Kurzweil

09 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by probaway in diary, inventions, Kindness, psychology, robots

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Ray Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil thinks, Robot convention, Using time wisely

“I was in the audience for this symposium, April 1, 2000: Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100? – On YouTube – Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, Douglas Hofstadter, John Holland, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Panel Discussion part 1,  part 2.”

My brief encounter with Ray Kurzweil twenty years ago was during one of several breaks in the conference. Because of his great productivity, I want to help Ray Kurzweil in any way I can and I had a chance to do that.

During the hourly break, I was standing in line for use of a urinal and noticed that Ray was standing behind me in the line. How can I help this man who doesn’t know me? I intentionally stepped out of my line and went over to the sink and washed my hands and face. Then I went to the end of another line, the currently shortest line. I lost a minute before I got to pee but I made available to Ray Kurzweil one more minute to be creative. Here is a recent YouTube video of what Ray Kurzweil has done with his time.

No man has greater respect for another man than to let that other man pee first!

 

A prayer to the Universe

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by probaway in Condensed thoughts, Contentment, diary, evolution, habits, happiness, Health, Kindness, psychology, survival

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A Universal Prayer

Matthew 6:9-13, King James Version (KJV), has a path to proper living:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: 
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.


Mohammed’s Opening prayer has a similar path concept within it:

In the name of Allah, the merciful the compassionate.
Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds,
The compassionate the merciful,
The master of every judgment.
You alone we seek to please, and
You alone we ask for help,
Direct us along the proper paths,
Along those paths that you do favor,
Away from those that you dislike,
Away from those that will lead us astray.


(Based on My Unbounded Hopes #28) August 11, 2019

My prayer to the Universe

I respect the Universe as the source of everything.
I seek what it will reveal to me of the ways it supports, and
Warn me of the ways that will lead to my failure.
I request that it grant me the freedom to seek and choose the ways that feel best to my wishes.


(Based on Our Unbounded Hopes #27) August 11, 2019

Humanity’s prayer to the Universe

We respect the Universe as the source of everything.
We seek what it will reveal to us of the ways it supports, and
Warn us of the ways that will lead to failure.
We pursue the freedoms needed to seek and choose our ways.
We intend that all beings live along the Universe’s provided paths.
Let us constantly seek the best way to live.


October 30,2019

Psalm 23 (KJV) – Rendered by Probaway as

A Universal Prayer

The Universe gives me everything I need!
There are beautiful places for me to find rest;
Where everything is given to restore my strength, and
I am shown the ways of finding the Universe’s beauty.
Even when confronted with oblivion I am comfortable. Yes.
Everything is provided by the Universe and it is given freely.
Surely its goodness shall continue to provide for my fulfillment,
And I will continue to be an integral part of the Universe. Forever.


I have been thinking intermittently about prayers since the 1960s and remember going to the Graduate Theological Seminary Library in Berkeley, California, in search of a Universal prayer. Perhaps my search strategy was flawed but I didn’t find one. What I have written here as “A Universal Prayer” would have served me well for those intervening fifty-five years.

Real estate explosion here in Bend brings problems

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by probaway in Contentment, diary, Kindness, policy, psychology, survival

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bend Oregon traffic, Real estate in Bend

Perhaps its the ongoing fires in California that are driving people to buy homes here in Bend, Oregon. We are currently rated as the third fastest-growing city in the United States and that is driving the home values up. The growth is so fast that the auto traffic is visibly growing every day. When I moved here eight years ago this was a quiet town where people were astonishingly courteous drivers, compared to back in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it is stressful driving because the way people drive is extremely variable. Some are very slow to go at a four-way STOP, and others don’t even slow down.

Yesterday, when I was a pedestrian downtown and had a green light to walk, the driver to my right chose to go through a solid red light, more than four seconds red, and in front of oncoming cars. It was a safe maneuver because there was physical space to go, but it was in absolute violation of the traffic laws. I don’t know if that’s the way it is back in California these days, but it was shocking to me, here in Oregon. Actually, someone ran a STOP sign in front of me last week, when I did have to slow down a bit to avoid colliding with them.

In my inner thoughts I wonder if this is a local change of attitude because of the rapid growth, or is it a national response to the leadership of this country being such a bad example of personal behavior. Are Americans everywhere now flagrantly ignoring laws we have willingly obeyed ever since I can remember?  I refer to things I can easily see when driving. I’ve been driving since 1951, and I’ve seen more violations here in this beautiful small city of Bend in the last few months than I had seen in my entire life. Is our town being overrun with people desperately fleeing from the big city and bringing their desperation and aggressive habits to get ahead, at any cost, with them?

Or is it me just getting old and seeking to live a quieter life.

I was challenged to rewrite the 23 Psalm

28 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by probaway in Contentment, diary, Kindness

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A challenge, A Universal Prayer, Rewrite the 23 Psalm, Universal kindness

Psalm 23 King James Version (KJV)

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.


Psalm 23 (KJV) – Rendered by Probaway as a Universal Prayer

The Universe gives me everything I need!
There are beautiful places for me to find rest;
Where everything is given to restore my strength, and
I am shown the ways of finding the Universe’s beauty.
Even when confronted with oblivion I am comfortable. Yes,
Everything is provided by the Universe and it is given freely.
Surely its goodness shall continue to provide for my fulfillment,
And I will continue to be an integral part of the Universe forever.

What’s the kindest thing you can do?

18 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by probaway in diary, Kindness, survival

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human survival, Kindness

The kindest thing I have ever done is to refuse to participate in threatening people with the massive destruction of the H-bomb. If you or the human species don’t survive, the only continuing kindness possible would be to give other species the gift of survival and normal life. But they wouldn’t be aware of any human act of kindness,  only that they were living with their personal problems. It takes a human consciousness of past, present, and future and the relationships of various actions to recognize a kind act. Animals can recognize friendly behavior but it seems unlikely that they recognize intentional kindness.

To grant continuing life to a living being is an act of kindness and that is why I don’t kill flies in my house, but instead, I catch them and put them outside. “It helps one develop the habit of kindness towards others, even flies, and toward yourself. When you are intentionally kind to flies you will be kinder to your own self and be a happier person. It is easier to practice being kind to flies than to people because people are more distracting, and we forget what we are trying to do.” Tiny acts of kindness are readily available, like putting flies outside, and doing them lets you practice frequently until a great opportunity comes along and you can do a kind thing that is needed right now, instantly, reflexively.

In daily life, people come along and one of the kindest acts is to hear what they say, and the proof of that is to respond appropriately to what they actually say.

 

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