Women have been fussing over me.

Tags

A day of care., Massage, Reiki

In the previous twenty-four hours, I have had three separate events where I have been treated to special care by women. That was in addition to the wonderful treatment I get on a daily basis from my companion Debbie. Yesterday it was a Reiki session which mellowed me out with soothing words and gentle touching. What a calming effect it has on me to just lie still and be guided into a blissful state of awareness. That treatment is great, but the lasting value for me is that when things happen that disturb my usual tranquil cruise through my life, that is ideal in so many ways, I can intentionally bring into my consciousness a portion of that Reiki calm. And, for a few moments, all my troubles fade away. So, you may ask, how can it get better?

Already scheduled several weeks ago was this last massage treatment for my forty-four radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Those treatments ended five weeks ago, but the overall schedule of treatment includes several Reikis and massages to help with our recovery. It really helped me to feel much better about the whole series of radiation events. Those were not painful, and I very much enjoyed the waiting room encounters with other people facing life-threatening events. Our conversations get through to the really meaningful things in our lives quickly. That massage was this morning and while my physical massage was going on my therapist and I had a very intelligent conversation about the progress of our modern lives.

Debbie and I went to Spork restaurant for lunch, which has some of the most interesting food imaginable and then across the street to my appointment for three small dental fillings. As it turned out two of the minor fillings had deterioration under the old fillings and thus a half-hour event turned into an hour and a half dental marathon. The doctor and the nurse were into me almost the whole time, and they were working fast. As they were working I was constantly amazed at how quickly and accurately everything they were doing proceeded.

That’s how in 24 hours I was carefully fussed over by women trying to please me. I am a very happy guy. Thank you all.

Advertisements

I stepped forward.

Tags

A spontaneous event, Am I a raconteur?, What do you know for sure?, What don't you know?

I have had the habit for many years of stepping forward when others don’t. It seems to happen when it might be embarrassing because it is taking a chance in public in front of friends. The situation is always one of improvisation on an undefined field of what is to be done. It differs a little from stage improvisation, where anything is acceptable and there are no wrong behaviors. On stage, the other actors in the events are there to help you, and to make you look good. The rule of those fellow improvisers is to respond with a hearty “yes and…” to everything you say and do. You can do no wrong because they are there to pick you up if you break a leg and fall on your face.

In other, perhaps more real life-like situations, the other people there are more motivated by attempts to prove that you are wrong. In those more common scenarios, the common polite phrase is, “Yes, but … ” followed by an attempt to make the way you have just said or done something look wrong, or foolish, or absurd, or even stupid. That is much closer to the environment I spent my fifty adult years in Berkeley coffee shops immersed within. Thus, my training isn’t as an improviser, or a debater, or as a psychiatric confidant, but as a raconteur.

What is a raconteur, you may ask? Usually, it is defined as one who is skilled at telling stories, or when not so skilled, as a bullshitter. In my self-chosen environment of trying to reach a little beyond the undefined but bordered-veil of a conversation, in an attempt to find a deeper meaning in those cloudy places, I lose the positive virtues of the raconteur because I break contact with my interlocutors’ visual imagery and then appear to them to be a bullshitter or worse … crazy.

The more willing I am to step forward past the social veil and into the unknown murkiness of the realm just beyond accepted social customs, the more likely it is that I will lose contact with whoever is there to potentially participate.

There was a call today to an audience of over a hundred people for someone to come forward and be a sub-audience for a little story about to be told that might require some participation. I was near the back wall and furthest from the potential action when it became apparent that no one was willing to step forward. So, I did. While I was walking up the aisle I motioned to people in the audience to join in and a few did. We were asked to sit on the rug at the front of the crowd.

While we were sitting there, the whole audience was asked several difficult questions, like “What do you know for sure?” and there were a few answers, “What don’t you know?” and a few answers. Then, of course, the mike was in front of my mouth and I hadn’t had a chance to think, as had the other members of the audience who had raised their hand.

I had been thinking about something absolute, like a number, and was mentally going over pi. That is 3 point 14. But, I knew that was wrong … only a rough approximation. Did I know that for sure? Not really, but I had been told many years ago that it was an infinite number. What’s the proof? I don’t know. A web search gives pi = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286 – but what does that mean? It is only an approximation.
So, there I was distracted by the thought of something I simultaneously knew and didn’t know. And, I knew that I knew and didn’t know. My head was slightly turned down when I noticed the mike a few inches in front of my face. I don’t know why I said …

I know that I should treat others better than I treat myself.

 

Responding to good and bad habit triggers.

A web search for habit triggers turned up remarkably few. My terms were combinations of “habit,” “reminders,” “cues for actions,” “mindfulness.” There seemed to be an emphasis on breaking bad habits, like smoking, drinking, snacking, junk food, hoarding, TV, social media, but the search for reminders to do useful things was surprisingly devoid of tips. Back on January 30, 2018, I wrote a post Controlling and creating habits where I used an example of avoiding the pile of candy at a grocery store checkout line. It was a simple method that I have used many times and in many different situations since that post and it proved to be easy to remember, simple to do, and effective. Furthermore, you can practice the procedure right now where you will be one hundred percent effective.

~”What I discovered was so obvious it doesn’t seem like much at first exposure, but it is based on the observation that the face is emotionally connected to the brain. That is, when the brain feels an emotion it is expressed in the face, and secondly, when the conscious mind intentionally places an emotional expression on the face it is felt in the brain.

The importance of that observation is that humans can voluntarily control their facial muscles and thus their emotional expressions and their feelings and thus they can influence their brains to automatically respond to an action and treat it as a reward and therefore a good thing to do again. Thus, the instant one intentionally does a good deed, to smile for two seconds. After encountering those conditions, and responding in a “right way” the behavior becomes automatic.”~ A further lesson to be learned from the grocery store experience, linked to above, is that you can practice that type of response to a stimulus in your mind’s imagination.

What I was hoping to find in the web search were particular situations that would have broader applications. Like the example of the learning to reject proffered candy, as in the grocery store checkout-line example. Practicing that simple sequence of self-control helps one to create an ability to reject any kind of offering that you know isn’t in your best interests to accept. It is as simple as mentally, or physically, putting up your elbow toward the tempting object, taking a few steps away, and looking back with a smile of accomplishment.

Perhaps one could use this same procedure for stopping oneself from doing nonproductive or overly aggressive acts. For example, when driving a car, to intentionally back off just a bit and let the other person take advantage of the space. That could be followed with mentally looking back at the situation and smiling at your intentional courtesy. You can apply this same technique to many social situations, like not breaking in during a conversation. The mental attitude becomes one of smiling to yourself for your social kindness.

When you do a good deed, either for yourself or for another person, make it a point to smile for two seconds.

Bishop Spong demonstrates that Christianity is dead.

Tags

John Shelby Spong, Spong, The Beatitudes revealed, The Sermon on the Mount, Unbelievable

Unbelievable, by Spong, may have put the last nail in the Christian cross, but I wish to resurrect the message that Jesus presented. My message is simple and obvious once you have seen it. However, it will be a personal journey for you, and the reason the organized religions haven’t pursued these simple truths is there is no control, no power, no money to be had by a religious organization outside of the individual.

Allow me to present my simple view on this two-millennia-old observation. Jesus’ basic message was to help living people, including one’s self.

John 10:10 King James Version (KJV)
10 I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

How is that to be accomplished by an individual with the spirit of God within himself?

Mark 12:30-31 King James Version (KJV)
30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

Those are the actions that an individual is encouraged by Jesus to take, and there isn’t much for a structured religion to make use of in these statements to enhance their organization’s gathering of power unto themselves. But our personal question to be answered is how is an individual to help others and to help himself? Those too are well known statements and were clearly spoken and underlined four times by Jesus.

Matthew 7:12 King James Version (KJV)
12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

What is it that men should do to you? (As above,) it is to help you to live and live more abundantly. How is that to be accomplished? (As above,) to love them as thyself because it rebounds on ones self because you spend most of your time with your self.

Specifically, what can one do is to ascend the staircase to heaven as it is presented in Jesus’ opening words in the New Testament. The passage has been called the Beatitudes because each step begins with a blessing. It becomes obvious, when one is told, that each step is on a staircase to a better life. That better life is that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

Another obvious thing, once stated, is that when a person is capable of sustaining their life on a higher step of the Beatitudes then they are capable of helping more people.

Matthew 5:3-11 King James Version (KJV)
3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

When these statements are split into their respective emotional conditions, the ascending emotional state of the person becomes obvious. Poor in Spirit … mourning … meek … hungering and thirsting after righteousness … merciful … pure in heart … peacemakers … persecuted for righteousness’ sake … when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

When you are on a higher step of the Beatitude staircase you are capable of helping all of those below you, including your own self.

God is Love

Tags

Feeling of God, God is Love, My feeling of Love, The God experience

I was in a group earlier where the subject intended to be discussed was God. We have been reading John Shelby Spong’s book, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. The dozen of us have discussed the first three parts – 1. Setting the Stage, 2. Stating the Problem, and for the last two sessions 3. Thesis 1: GOD.

I recommend this book to everyone because it makes clear why Christianity of the various churches is in decline. Spong makes a clear case of why it has been failing for the last five hundred years because of the revelations of secular society and the findings of science. The group members are mostly of Protestant backgrounds but one is a Quaker. They are all open to new views, but being older it is unlikely that any of us can change our basic views significantly. However, we all claim we enjoy the conversation and hearing what other people’s views are. This is a modern world and there is obviously a blizzard of new ideas being blasted about. What can we believe, and what should we do, and is there anything that we can do?

Several of the men basically agreed that the quote “God is Love” pulls it all together. That it is the grounding in the feeling of love in their hearts that makes their religion meaningful to them. I proposed the question that we define what that feeling is. What does it feel like?

I said there is one feeling I have occasionally that feels like an intense warmth in my chest. One of the occasions where it happens is when I see a young mother proudly and carefully hand her baby over to a close friend to hold. They both appear to feel a rush of emotional warmth during this exchange. It looks like an intense trusting in the other person to treat this infant as the most important thing in the whole universe. Trust and love and acceptance of the fragility of life.

I have seen this happen several times during the eight years I’ve been here in Bend, Oregon, so it is easy to recall the specific events. Each time it was memorable because I, a stranger across the room, had a rush of warmth in my chest.

I told this story to these guys and asked if that is the feeling they are talking about when they talk of the experience of God’s presence.

We will be talking about Jesus next week. That is a subject upon which I have some ideas I doubt they have heard before.

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 26

Tags

How to cope with personal false beliefs., Quietly walk away from problems.

One of my chief characteristics for the last seventy years is my willingness to listen to and interact with almost everyone. I am now suspecting that my ability to hear what everyone has to say and to filter out the nonsense is a false belief.

The problem arises from the fact that you must listen carefully to another person to understand what they have to say. To understand what they mean by what they say you must put yourself into their shoes and have a close empathy with what they are experiencing. Okay, I can do that and do that much of the time, especially when the overall environment is otherwise quiet enough that I can devote my full attention to the other person and their worldview.

The problem arises when the other person’s worldview has been corrupted by what is known as adverse childhood experiences. This becomes a problem because those experiences are the foundation for their later adaptations to life. Each moment of a person’s life is influenced by their former experiences and even more by their interpretation of those experiences and even more by their personal responses to them. One’s childhood habits carry through in our habitual responses to our surroundings for the rest of our lives. When we are children we haven’t any experience in choosing adaptations that will guide us through the rest of our adult lives. We are dependent upon our parents, caretakers, and peers, and the environments they put us into for influencing us in the habits that form our childhood character and our adult character, too.

Now at a geriatric age, my willingness to put myself into the environment of people with longstanding problems is counterproductive to my own psychological well-being. I am not going to be able to help those people, even if I knew how, and they don’t want to be helped because they have based their lives on what works for them. Even a positive suggestion, which might lead to better outcomes for them, is threatening to their worldview, so is better left unsaid.

But my even entering into their worldview, which I have been willing to do in the past, is counterproductive for my own well-being. I am probably just as resistant to change as they are, and for the very same reasons; I have based my life on what works for me. What they expect from me is threatening to my worldview so I will automatically try to reject it, just as they would reject my views.

So, assuming that this analysis makes sense what should I do? Probably, my best action is to follow Seneca’s suggestion and

Just quietly walk away from people and situations that will create problems and stress.

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 17

Tags

My responsibility and yours, Self actualizing a sentient Universe, The ultimate kindness

Humanity’s goal must be to grab the Universe by its bootstraps and pull it into a full consciousness of itself so it can self-actualize its potentials. It is my belief that we are now at the moment in time when we must commit to helping our Universe to become conscious. We have been hanging our toes over the edge of oblivion ever since the creation of H-bombs in the 1950s, and a tiny miscalculation would put all of us into a thin geologic layer of dirt already forming and labeled the Anthropocene. We can and must take our society to the next level of responsibility for  helping the Universe to evolve from a vast amount of random matter into an equally vast amount of coherent matter being organized to an ultimate purpose. The current random natural trend seems to be toward a cold dark place where ultimately nothing will be happening. And yet, before that time comes it would be possible for our universe to be unified into a thinking being to do magnificent things. 

Humanity now has the infrastructure for taking raw natural materials and converting them into thinking matter that could form a society that could propagate to stars and planets within our Milky Way galaxy. In the time that it would take to accomplish that grand scheme there might be ways to move on to other galaxies that are now only dim glows in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) photo.

How can I eliminate my false belief that this is a worthy goal and that I can help to get it started when I believe this is what the whole Universe needs you and me to do?

It’s a big job helping the Universe to self-actualize and we must get started while we can.

Now is the time for humanity to become immortal.

Tags

We can become Gods., We can become immortal

A request to the Universe in the form of a prayer.

Humanity with its current technological expertise is in a rare position where it is capable of helping the Universe to transition into its next potential level of existence. We have already built most of the infrastructure necessary to build self-sustaining robotic life forms. Organic life forms were only capable of evolution once the first organic chemicals formed chains that could replicate themselves. Once that process happened that form could fill the local environmental niche with as many of its copies as could be sustained. Some of these copies would be on the periphery of the livable zone and those in that new location that survived best would fill that niche. That process, repeated many times, produced sentient human beings who created a technological society capable of inventing sentient robots. We have arrived at that level and we have the choice to proceed onto the next stage of the Universe approaching its potential for self-actualization. The robot society once functioning could evolve and exist until the Universe ran out of energy, but at the beginning, the robots are too complex to form naturally. We are capable of helping them come into existence and therefore to project our human presence into the distant future. And we can choose to get this new sub-species of humans off onto a positive relationship with their environment, as it appears that we humans are not capable of doing. We are capable of living for a hundred years, our species for perhaps a million years, but the robot species we can create could live for hundreds of billions of years. What we create now could live for a billion times longer than we as individuals could expect for ourselves.

We can choose to become immortal or in our present form to be extinct very soon.

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 4

Tags

Eliminating false beliefs, Identifying false beliefs, Seneca, trustworthiness

There is possibly a way to approach my false beliefs by using the Trustworthiness of Information chart which I created back in 2007. Click here for a big and printable view. It is easier to view this chart if you print it out, as it is unreadable at a usual screen size. Or to have that bigger version on a separate window.

Trustworthiness of Information

When I compare where my personal influences are coming from using this chart I realize that most of it is at the TST~7/14 level of trustworthiness. — The typical providers of the information are friends during conversational interaction about well-known subjects or about personal relationships. The information comes from a plausible knowledge spun out among friends based on mutually accepted facts to enhance local knowledge. The synonyms for this quality of information are, Satisfying, acceptable, feasible, attainable, believable, credible, probable, reasonable. — What generalizations about my personal reality I derive from these interactions are fine for social interactions, but they are not the mental stuff of the profound philosophers.

On that philosophical score, I have been reading and rereading Seneca, the Roman stoic (c. 4 BC-AD 65), who seems to have more advice for living a good life than our modern pop psychology magazines. He deals with more complex issues and openly discusses the negative aspects of various people, sometimes using horrifying illustrations of bad characteristics. Seneca seems to be writing at his time at a TST~11 level of trustworthiness and verifiability of the information that he is presenting. Being two thousand years old it obviously is difficult to verify at this time, but where the documentation is available it is considered accurate. — He gives a formal presentation using accountable informed and correct knowledge, where he is using verifiable chains of custody of the documents and of the sources of the contested or changeable information. It is information of the type that the old Encyclopedia Britannica would have considered valid.  Systematic, practical, documented, trustworthy, expected, useful, necessary, pragmatic, profitable. — I find myself pondering over Seneca more than I do over my personal conversations, although I enjoy my personal coffee-shop encounters more.

The human interactivity of conversation can be more satisfying than the great sages even if it isn’t as profound.

Happiness minus suffering equals flourishing

Tags

Annihilation, Eudaimonia, Eudeimonia, happiness, Suffering

Why would we want to define happiness or suffering or flourishing?  Wikipedia’s take is a starting point – Happiness … Suffering … Flourishing (Eudaimonia). The goal of the last few blog posts is to maximize humanity’s flourishing and to do that, in the long run, means to have a large number of humans. By the long run I mean until the very last biological creature we could define as human-derived has gone extinct. Perhaps that will be a million years, or perhaps it will be tomorrow, and because I don’t want it to be tomorrow I have done what I could to prevent World War Three. It is impossible to know, but perhaps I was successful in that last one.

Humanity has always had a problem with excess population because it is part of the Darwinian natural selection process to maximize population and occupy all possible niches. That process creates too many members of a species to survive and thus the best adapted to a local environment are the healthiest and survive the most often and get to reproduce while their less fortunate species members die and don’t get to reproduce. Humanity has been astoundingly successful since the development of agriculture and incredibly successful since the industrial revolution and even more successful with the development of the Haber ammonia fixation process. Without the creation of agricultural ammonia, the human population would have crashed because plants need it to thrive and ultimately even if we live on meat, we eat plants.

  World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

It is impossible for any biological species to live without eating, and thus at some point in the future that near vertical curve must change. However, a robot society can live forever because their energy consumption can drop to zero for long periods of time, and they would only be revived when the environment is propitious.

To maximize human flourishing, which I support because it is my species, we need to survive. The longer we survive, the more people ultimately can live, and we need large numbers of people in the long run, for the living human base population from which happiness can arise and be expressed. The problem becomes, do we want a short-lived humanity with eight billion people at constant risk of a major war, famine, and giga-deaths? Or would we prefer a population that the Earth can support on an ongoing basis for millions of years? A billion people living for a hundred years each times a million years equals a trillion times more opportunities for happiness minus suffering to equal lives of eudaimonia. The math is weird and exceedingly speculative, but the general improvement by moving to a robot-associated society is vast.

If we decide we would prefer the Earth with a long-term sustainable population we can do that either by killing almost everyone, with the survivors living as primitive apes, or we can choose to create a robot-based civilization that will provide an abundance of desirable goods to a smaller population and work out ways of fair treatment for everyone in that smaller group. It is difficult to guess what people living in Eudaimonia would choose for a fair society, but it almost certainly would be better than having 14,185 A-bombs instantly ready to kill every human many times over like we have at present.

Robots can offer us a safe, eudaimonic society if we make them our friends.