Sage tip # 105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

Tags

Categorical imperative, Do lots of tiny good deeds, God is Love, Immanuel Kant, Protect your friends

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece distributed suggestions for personal behavior on stone about the year 570 BC. These were not laws of the land with punishments like Hammurabi’s laws written in stone, nor Commandments with eternal rewards and punishments like Moses’ statements in stone. They were more like suggestions and while trying to make these ideas more readable and palatable to the modern English reader I have softened them into tips. These tips are stated as generalized actions that the reader may ponder, and if found reasonable for their life situation, practiced with mental exercises. There may be no Universal good actions because it seems to be possible to conjure up situations where a seemingly very good act has bad effects. Morality is based on situations and those may be viewed in many different ways. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative,  “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,” is famous and sounds great, but when you try to apply the idea it becomes too nebulous to be useful. In the Old Stone Church here in Bend, Oregon, the statement “God is Love” has hung over my head in stained glass for the last six years. It sounds nice and the sentiment is spiritual, but ask anyone what the terms God or Love mean and both of those terms drift off into a confusion of nebulous, fuzzy vapors. I can appreciate the intent of the statement but those terms and their pleasantly warm feelings, without a positive application to other people’s lives, go into the grave with those people’s bodies.

The Sage tips are action-oriented, and even the ones which are totally mental are intended to put the person thinking them into a positive-action frame of mind. This idea carried to the maximum yields Sage tip #105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life. I have also been stating that idea in a more mundane way for daily use because hopefully the situations that are dangerous to your friends’ lives are rare. The statement for daily life is “Treat others better than you treat yourself.” That action is more compatible with tip #75, Do lots of tiny good deeds and a few big ones.

 

Sage tip # 74, Only obey your own guilt and shame impulses.

Tags

Coping with guilt, Coping with shame., Generating habits., Guilt, habits, Shame

This morning as I was about to depart from my Saturday morning breakfast group one of my friends asked me to leave a bit of wisdom from my book, Love Your Life. I carry a working copy in the breast pocket of my jacket with the title exposed and occasionally people will ask about it.

I pulled the booklet out and randomly opened it and said, “Point at a line and I will read it to you.” Without looking he randomly chose Sage tip #74, Only obey your own guilt and shame impulses. It was strangely apropos to our previous conversation because I had committed a social sin and had criticized something he had said, which was a bit unpleasant for everyone at the table.

My thought, when I amplified the original statement from the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece suggestions for a good life, was that a normally developing individual should hear what other people have to say about various subjects, including moral ones, but they should have enough self-possession and self-control to think for themselves as to what they should be doing and not be doing. They should be the sole arbiter of what their actions should be and how they should feel about those actions because only they would have a complete understanding of what precipitated those actions.

The guilt for an action lies solely with the perpetrator of an action, and therefore that person is the only one to make the judgment or feel the emotion of guilt. Similarly, it is this person who carries the habits within themselves that generated the action, and they are the sole person responsible for creating those habits and therefore they are the one to feel the shame if that action is inappropriate.

If the guilt is judged to be legitimate, it is their responsibility to respond in some compensatory way and to do what is necessary to modify the offending habit in such a way that it doesn’t happen again. If they fail to do that, they are setting themselves up to feel guilty again and to feel shame again and thus it behooves them to attend to doing what is necessary to generate an appropriate response and form it into a functioning habit.

Our self-generated habits are the way we control our future actions.

Sage tip #28, Respect everyone’s point of view.

Tags

Seven Sages of Greece, Tips

The 147 suggestions attributed to the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece are so brief that it seems better to call them tips, so I have been using that word the last few days. It feels like a better word because it isn’t so demanding. Tips sound more like an idea which you might think about for a while and consider using in your daily life, and that sounds about right for what is intended.

Tip #28, Respect everyone’s point of view, seems like a mild enough tip, and yet when one pays attention to what other people say and do it becomes challenging to actually feel respectful. The difficulty arises because people want the world to be a place that caters to their fondest wishes regardless of reality. And, if the present world can’t or won’t live up to those expectations, then these same people easily fall prey to some colorful guru who promises them a lovely fantasy that will deliver their beautiful heaven in some not too distant time.

Saint Augustine stated this lust for wish fulfillment most eloquently about the year 400 AD. “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”  With that concept exploited by charlatans, it becomes possible to convince people of any unknowable and untestable assertion. Propose a beautiful fantasy as an attainable reality, and state it with enthusiasm and conviction, coupled with some fancy physical decorations; and a charlatan’s postulation is halfway to being an honored movement.

A big problem arises for a critical observer because it appears that “everyone” has chosen to believe things which are unknowable and untestable. We are all ready, willing and even eager participants in personal self-delusion. We are all pitiful creatures caught in webs of our own self-delusion, and the best we can do is to respect everyone else’s point of view.

We need habits which protect us from ourselves.

Sage tip # 15, Empower your friends to do good deeds.

Tags

Doing unto others, Empower humanity, Empowering others, Seven Sages of Greece, Treat others better than you treat yourself.

The 147 suggestions attributed to the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece are so brief and so ancient, and so much from an alien culture that they must be interpreted to have a cogent meaning to a modern seeker of a proper relationship with their personal life. Tip #15 – Empower your friends to do good deeds – is in agreement with my latest reach into providing workable methods for creating a better world for oneself, for one’s species, and for all life. In brief that develops from the mild Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Which progresses to a stronger statement, King James Version, “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.” The more demanding word is should which means that you should help others to live and to live more abundantly.

That moves the sought-for goal of improvement beyond the level already achieved by the follower of the weak form. That level only recommends treating people in a way that is comfortable at one’s present level of personal moral development. The stronger form challenges a person to reach beyond their present level. It makes that suggestion in an abstract way and leaves up to the person practicing that idea to make up their own mind how their actions might be applicable to that word should.

When discussing this problem with my friends I have responded several times to the ancient challenge of stating the essence of one’s religion while standing on one foot. Tuesday I stood on one foot in front of thirty people and immediately toppled over. I was wearing Crocs, a very thick-spongy-soled style shoe, and was having so much trouble balancing that a friend immediately came to my rescue and provided a shoulder for support. Whereupon, I said, “Treat others better than you treat yourself.” Everyone had a good laugh.

I wish that event was an example of, “Empowering your friends to do good deeds” because she certainly did one for me, but I hadn’t toppled intentionally so any empowering that occurred was accidental and not a spontaneous action on my part. For a habit to have become effectively part of one’s personality it must be triggered automatically by the situation, like a reflex, only a learned response. That didn’t happen in this example.

It was relatively easy to mentally practice holding out one’s hand toward a pile of grocery store candy to fend it off, but empowering friends to do good deeds requires a spontaneous situation where that other person’s opportunities are seen and a situation brought into being where they can perform some spontaneous good deed. Hmm, this will require some new kind of mental practice to develop the habit. Earlier today I did demonstrate to some friends how to create a habit, and over the course of an hour made that habit spontaneous when an unanticipated prompt happened.

A beginning for training to empowering others is setting up easy tasks before kids arrive.

Sage tip #133

Tags

Life goals, Sage tip #133, Seven Sages of Greece, The meaning of life

It makes sense to comment on the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece suggestions from the Oracle at Delphi published on stone stelae about 570 BC because they were in a profound way the foundation of our Western Civilization. They were widely published and thus the Greek-speaking people learned how to read and write their language. They were the first common people of the world to ever have that opportunity. Fortunately, the Sages chose to publish something that could be easily learned in small dollops of wisdom. Mostly they were word pairs in the form of common-sense suggestions for proper ways to behave. Earlier Hammurabi had published harsh laws on stones that were placed about his kingdom with proscriptive demands coupled with terrible punishments for failure to obey his laws.

The Sages’ ideas were more like moral ideals that ordinary people could think about and apply to their daily lives. They were not coupled with cruel physical punishments like Hammurabi’s laws, but with positive personal rewards. The rewards were in this world and were similar to a karmic feedback for behaving well, but the benefits are to come to the person in this life and in a tangible way. These ideals must have worked well because over the next couple of centuries Greece flourished from a remote rocky peninsula to the intellectual source of the world for the next two millennia.

The Seven Sages of Greece tip #133 is a good example of why these ideas helped these early Indo-European People (PIE) become so well organized and powerful. #133 states “Use your life as an opportunity for good deeds.” Many people throughout history have wondered about the meaning of life in general and their lives in particular, and even to this day a common question is “What is the meaning of life?” Some say to serve the gods, some to serve the church, some to serve your government, some to serve your family and let the rest be damned, and some say to serve your self alone. That last one is very popular these days and many public people will say with a calm assurance that “Greed is good!” They claim that idea, first proclaimed by Adam Smith in 1776 in his book The Wealth of Nations, is the foundation of humanity’s super success at dominating the world. Their proof of success is that the population of humans has grown from less than a billion to almost eight billion people.

I would rather live in a world where people’s life goal was:

Use your life as an opportunity for good deeds.

Accept random luck as random luck.

Tags

Random luck., Relating to our life

Love Your Life has a multitude of little problems that need to be worked out before the big problems can be exposed and grappled with. Fortunately, there are lots of opportunities for working with little problems and these are the training episodes for the occasional big ones. Much of life is just things happening that we must cope with and usually that is just routine stuff, but occasionally some things are more challenging. It is obvious that nearly everything about our lives involves a large dollop of luck. We didn’t have anything to do with the time or place where we were born and wish as we might we didn’t choose our parents or the material things or social values they brought to us.

Most of what we have was the gift of the Universe and the evolutionary processes of life itself. When you start studying even the simplest life forms it is astonishing how complex they are, and yet as complex as they are they lack what we like to call spirit. It requires that we have a verbal language to even have the slightest idea what the concept of spirit might be. All living things have their life force but without language and a developed culture, it is unlikely that anyone would fuss over invisible problems. But we humans do develop ideas out of our hopes and fears that have little basis in the physical reality that we are immersed within.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece knew and stated it succinctly with their tip #77. Accept random luck as random luck. When either unexpected good luck or bad luck comes along we tend to impute a causal relationship linking what we have done to that fortuitous event. But the illustrations above about our great general luck that lets us come into existence are equally applicable to our mundane existence. Thus, it is easier on our emotional development to …

Accept random luck as random luck.

 

Love Your Life – tips versus suggestions

Tags

10 Commandments, 7 Sages of Greece, A quiet life, Suggestions, Tips

My new book Love Your Life is moving slowly ahead. It is being impeded by my effort to get its tone just right so it will be helpful for the readers to get voluntary control over their life. The goal is to provide people with options that are likely to be helpful to them. It isn’t telling anyone what to do; it isn’t even suggesting that they do anything in particular; it is giving tips on what has helped a geriatric stay happy and healthy.

Obviously, to be healthy, it is important to live a low-stress life, or is it? I chose a low-stress career as a combat pilot in the US Air Force. That ended unfortunately for all involved because I was given the job of hauling H-bombs around. I insisted that that specific activity was a really stupid thing to do, so they kicked me out for having a bad attitude. After I relaxed by traveling around for a couple of months on a motorcycle trying to convince people that I was right about the use of H-bombs, I ended up in Berkeley, California.

There, in Berkeley, I spent fifty years mixing personally with many famous and infamous people who spent time there.  I worked off and on in various capacities in and around the university, but mostly I spent my evenings on Telegraph Avenue doing my small part to make the world a more moral place. All of this was, of course, a comfortable low-stress lifestyle which would inevitably lead to a long, healthy, and happy life. As things worked out I have known fifteen people who were struck by bullets from various guns, and was present at a few shots fired. My chosen venue, the Mediterraneum Cafe (middle of the Earth), on the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue, was the dead-center of considerable turmoil. I lived there, as in the eye of a hurricane, in the quiet calm, among infamous murderers and founders of major corporations, creators of newspapers, abductors and abductees, shooters and shootees. Some of the people who are followers of these people’s actions you will still see regularly on the news. 

What I am implying with all of this is that it is possible to live a long and tranquil life in the midst of what people on the outside would call chaos. Happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean leading a boring existence. Thus, with Love Your Life, I am not encouraging monotony when I present the 147 suggestions that have been derived from the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. These are not like the Ten COMMANDMENTS, which you must do perfectly or else you will burn in Hell forevermore. In the drafts of this book, I have been using the term suggestions, but even that softer word has some of the feelings of “you better do this, or else problems will come your way.”

When I first used the word tips it felt too weak, because some of the 147 are very strong statements. After a few days of thinking tips instead of suggestions, or suggestions instead of commandments, tips began to feel right. I am not intending to stand on a high mountain and tell anyone what to do; quite the opposite, I seek only to expose people to the possibility of options that they might consider, and if that activity seems applicable to their life situation to encourage them to practice it until they become skillful at doing it automatically. The need for a trait to become habitual is that when things happen there is rarely time to think. When the moment for action is upon us we must act appropriately and immediately.

Find tips that will work in your future and practice them until you are skillful.

 

 

People don’t make decisions based on facts

I have been working on a new book presently titled Love Our Life, and as some of that love concerns our food diet I have been reading The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and his son Thomas Campbell. That is an excellent book loaded with powerful science and insider information on both the scientific community and the political process on how to get things done. Campbell is a convincing writer telling a profoundly important story of humanity’s medical crisis and what to do to fix it. I am now reading the 2016 edition and had already read the 2006 edition which already had the major suggestions.

My problem and humanity’s problem too is that there are now about 1.6 billion overweight and obese people and two-thirds of Americans are overweight. My problem with that problem is that Campbell’s book gives scientific evidence for exactly what needs to be done to correct obesity and other diseases of affluence and that book is being ignored. Much of the problem comes from the bottom line of business and especially corporate business. Their goal is to make money and to press the legal institutions to their limits to satisfy that goal. The foods that will make the most profit on the monetary bottom line are addictive and unhealthy. It is a replay of the smoking tobacco controversy, but it’s more difficult to define what is unhealthy about food because almost anything that can be digested is healthy in small amounts. Who’s to say liter-size sugar drinks are unhealthy? Let the consumer decide.

Consumer choice is risky enough, but they must include in their decision making the influences of a huge advertising industry supporting extravagant claims for the health of foods that should be consumed in small amounts. The public, which is billions of people, buys millions of tons of promoted stuff that will make them obese and sick. Campbell shows that anything beyond tiny amounts of animal protein bring on the problems of affluence which include obesity and early death. The business world has convinced us that eating the maximum amount of animal protein at every meal is a good thing to do. Campbell proves it’s deadly.

If Campbell, with perfect credentials and awards for excellence and perfect presentation of perfectly performed science and two million books sold proving his methods for correcting this multi-dimensional epidemic, has failed to even slow the obesity epidemic, what can I, with none of those qualities, hope to do? The present introduction to my book speaks of using control of one’s personal diet as an illustration of learning how to control one’s whole life. But billions of people have proven that they cannot control their diet, so how can I expect them to control these other less tangible qualities of their lives? In Love Our Life there isn’t a direct reference to diet in the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece’s 147 list of suggestions for good behavior.

Perhaps # 136 – Live modestly and shun excesses includes diet.

Creating an idea

Tags

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.

My cure for the common cold worked yet again.

Tags

common cold, Ponderosa pine trees fall on me, Surviving roofing noise.

Eight days ago I admitted to myself that I probably had a cold and began my hot bath routine for getting rid of it. Just an hour ago I took my last hot bath and even it was just a precautionary one because I haven’t coughed up more than a teaspoonful of phlegm total today. That phlegm is the residue of the infection being cleared out by the body, and the total amount coughed up during the whole cold episode is a good measure of how sick you have been. I haven’t coughed a single time for several hours so I am declaring myself cured. I was never sick enough for anyone to notice, and after I began taking the hot baths I don’t think I was breathing out any germs. I did avoid shaking hands with everyone or sharing cups and other intimate things like that.

I did have a stressful week, however! Four full-grown Ponderosa trees fell within striking distance of my house, but only one hit it. The damage wasn’t enough to make our house uninhabitable, and today two roofer guys were up there tearing it apart. That made a lot of noise, but a week from now things should be upgraded to modern standards and be even better than they were last week.

One of our backyard Ponderosa trees fell into our neighbor’s backyard; fortunately, it missed everything except the fences so the only major expense is removing that huge tree lying there. It may be there for a week more because many trees fell here in Bend during the storm, and this one isn’t causing much inconvenience so it is low on the arborist’s removal list.

Fortunately, we are required to have homeowner’s insurance so much of the expense will be picked up by the insurance company. How much they actually cover remains to be seen, and we may need to make an initial payment before the reconstruction begins.  Then there will be the deductible. Ultimately, there could be a substantial out-of-pocket expense and it may be months before we know just how much that will be.

All of this is within our ability to cope, but it is stressful. I like to get my stress in the form of solving weird problems. And these last several weeks it has been creating a presentable argument for the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece mosaic buried in Pompeii in 79 AD being about the geometry of the Roman Empire. Once I publish that analysis here on this blog everyone will gasp at my spending so much time on something so long buried and so trivial. It’s rather like the Case of Who Murdered Otzi the Iceman – who cares? I just hope I can maintain my enthusiasm for my coming book (?) The Laugh Out Loud Diet. That will take at least a month to write up and may create an even deeper yawn in the public’s mind than my previous efforts. Who cares?

The cure for the common cold and beyond into the long dead Roman Empire.