Sage tip #115, Before you speak think kind thoughts.

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7 Sages of Greece, Love Your Life, Sage tip #115

I have done complete posts on several of the 147 tips from the Seven Sages of Greece. There is a booklet presently in progress titled Love Your Life which discusses various strategies for coping with life. The book is loosely based on those ancient tips, but those tips were at the foundation of Western Civilization and so they do have a record of stimulating success. They are mundane tips but they do convey common-sense to an uncommon degree.

Tip #115, Before you speak think kind thoughts. This is a simple idea but it is helpful in keeping conversations on a path for mutual satisfaction with your friends and in group conversations where there is always a problem with getting the conversational floor. Of course, we usually get involved with what is being discussed and we want to get our ideas infused into the flow of ideas. Typically there will be several people trying to talk at the same time and we are pulled in multiple directions as things progress.

At times when the conversation is bringing forth strong thoughts and emotions, it is important to maintain an appropriate demeanor. Conversations that have unusual and sharp distinctive points of view are the very ones where you can gain the most intellectual development. If everyone you encounter is in perfect agreement with you, there may be mild and friendly interactions but not much fun or personal growth. I attend some groups where there isn’t much agreement, but we usually have a good time exchanging ideas. We make an effort to make our conversations about ideas and try to avoid personal acrimony, and that is where the idea of maintaining kindly thoughts becomes important. When we remember that the other person has a huge backlog of experience that brings them to their worldview and their statements about that worldview are heartfelt and important to them, we should give them respect.

Of course, they are wrong. They are always wrong! Except it is we who are wrong because we are not seeing the depth of experience that is bringing them to their beliefs. If we did see as they see we would be in agreement with them. Of course, that is impossible because we must come to the moment with our huge baggage of history and ingrained habits.

These thoughts could be amplified, but the point must return to the idea of treating others better than we treat ourselves. That means that we must step back just a little bit and give the other person the space they need to be themselves. When we do that tiny thing we are helping these other people to live their lives more fully. The cost to our person is minute and is actually a moment of personal growth when we are able to treat others better than we treat our own self. To gain the benefits of this course of action …

Before you speak think kind thoughts.

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

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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 # 129, Treat yourself with respect and kindness.

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7 Sages of Greece, Contentment, Diary, Epigrams, habits, happiness, Health, inventions, policy, survival, Treat yourself with respect and kindness.

There is much to be said for taking care of one’s self first and then when you have that well secured to use your excess of caring to take care of other’s well being.

A totally self-centered worldview is all that there is for an infant and they are not developed enough to be aware that they even exist outside of their annoying and pleasurable sensations. As a child matures at some point it becomes aware that others exist as separate beings and that to some degree they too must claim rights to maintain their wellbeing. Putting one’s self first is still a reasonable worldview for an adolescent because so much of their real-world interaction is outside of their personal control. This self-centered treatment still makes sense as an operating principle for adults who are making their way in a world which requires their creating and caring for their family. The self-care they previously needed for themselves alone is now transferring to some degree over to their family which is being considered as their extended self. Those people close to them have become part of their self-concept and thus treating those dependents well and supporting their life quests is in a real sense supporting their own life.

Moving on in physical and emotional maturity there comes a time when treating yourself with respect and kindness includes not only your family, and friends, but extends to your whole world. It includes all the people of the world, and the future people too, and thus it includes caring for the whole Earth because that soon becomes one’s self.

Treating one’s self with respect and kindness eventually becomes identical with treating the whole world with respect and kindness. 

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

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

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Defend your friends, Defend your self

The 147 suggestions attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece were published about the year 570 BC. That means about 550 years before Jesus gave his sermons. I have been rendering those sage suggestions into a slightly expanded modern English wording and calling them tips because that term doesn’t generate the negative reactions that God-given commandments tend to do. Even the term suggestions has a pejorative feel, so I have been using the term tips. Thus in the book Love Your Life, Sage tip #105 is currently rendered Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

When it is stated in that way the idea feels like Jesus’s Great Commandment spoken in King James Version of Matthew 22:37-40.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The Sages’ statement “Protect your friend’s life as your own life” (570 BC) is very similar to Jesus’ 27 AD saying, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” In both statements, the idea is to value and protect your friend’s wellbeing as carefully as you do your own wellbeing. 

That is a minimum concern we must have for our friends, and when we have the consciousness and the opportunity we should treat others better than we treat ourselves. This is a greater opportunity for personal growth than treating others the way you would wish to be treated. That weak form of the Universal Golden Rule doesn’t advance your spiritual growth; it only locks you into the level you have already reached. When you intend to treat others better than you treat yourself you must pay attention to their needs, and be aware of your needs too, and then intentionally sacrifice some part of your time, attention and other possessions to help that other person.

The reason for doing so personally expensive a thing is because that is the surest way to cultivate the habits of becoming a happier, healthier, wiser and wealthier person.

To protect your friend’s life as your own life teaches you how to protect your own life better.

Sage tip #133

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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.

The 147 Sage tips are a challenge

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7 Sages 147 suggestions., 7 Sages of Greece, Sage tips for a good life, Seven Sages of Greece

These posts have been discussing some of the 147 maxims given in the Delphi Oracle back in Greece about the time of Homer. They were probably the first document easily readable by the speakers of any language. If a person spoke Greek and began learning the first few tips they would soon learn the Greek alphabet. The letters alpha and beta are the first two letters and there would have been people standing beside the stone documents to help you learn them.

The 7 Sages of Greece found buried at Pompeii in 79 AD

The Seven Sages of Greece are the ones given credit for creating the list of tips on how to live a good life. Nothing like that published list ever existed for learning how to read and write. Other lists were made, such as Hammurabi’s Laws and Moses’ Ten Commandments, but they were not easily read by everyone because the writing was not phonetic.

I have been using the basic list of 147 tips to clarify some basic ideas on how to live a good life. Every time I read the whole list it would further clarify to me what was intended by the document. That process fed back on itself and thus the terse sentences were expanded a little to get the words into a more understandable form for a modern reader of the English language. The goal was to make the good sense more available to us so we can apply the good sense implicit in the tips to our own lives.

The Seven Sages of Classical Greece – Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493 AD.

When looking back over some of the expansions I have created for those terse Greek sayings, they feel like the things my grandmother Bertha would be telling me: “Charles, Do your work with skill and diligence” is something I can almost hear her saying. That’s tip #99. I don’t remember her saying #51, “Shun criminals and murderers,” but I suspect that it is my faulty memory rather than her not asserting that bit of wisdom. She would also recommend #73, “Seek and enjoy what is easy and natural,” and perhaps the most important of all the tips, #133 …

Use your life as an opportunity for doing good deeds.

Love Your Life – tips versus suggestions

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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.

 

 

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – line 73

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Notes to a diary, The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece

The Seven Sages found the essence of Stoic thought centuries before it was refined into what we now understand to be stoicism. I like the idea behind line 73, which seems to be to “Enjoy what is easy and natural.” I say seems to be because to put modern words into people’s ideas from 2,500 years ago is presumptuous. And yet, we must proceed in the moment with what we have.

The more famous line from that distant time is “Know thyself.” It seems to be a moving and sensitive thought but it is hard to do and fundamentally unnatural. People have been sitting around for a couple of thousand years now studying every nuance of themselves from their topmost hair through the centermost center of their navel and onto the tippiest of the tip of their toe, and what do they have to report that doesn’t strike the normally sane person as useless nonsense?

However, “Enjoy what is easy and natural” is easy to do and is as natural as eating, pooping, having sex and sleeping. No problem, it’s that easy! And, if you are having a problem with any of those basic natural functions it’s time to reconsider all the time spent on knowing one’s esoteric self and get back to appreciating one’s natural self.

I have interpreted the 147 wisdoms of the Seven Sages as action terms for living a healthy life embedded in a vibrant society which is functioning in harmony with what the world has made available.

It is easy and natural walking along the path to the Way.

Intriguing lines on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic

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Hot spots of the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic, Seven Sages of Greece in Naples museum, Seven Sages of Greece mosaic, The complete set of Seven Sages of Greece mosaic lines

The strange alignments on this mosaic must have been done for a purpose.

Why would an artist go to the trouble of having alignments within the picture with gargoyle eyes in the border? It would be unusual to have five key points in perfect alignment, as was done from the upper right gargoyle as I’ve shown with a bold red line. I’ve left line gaps to show the eyes are aligned perfectly. It is intriguing that the line goes from the gargoyle’s eye to a sage’s eye on to another sage’s eye and yet to another sage’s eye and then to another sage’s hand holding something. A parallel red line goes from the gargoyle’s eye on the left center border through a limb point up to the sundial’s point.

All of the border gargoyle’s eyes have alignments with multiple significant points like eyes, fingers, toes, box corners, tree points, and the sundial point. Furthermore, each of the gargoyle eye-based lines have parallel lines that also have hits on significant points.

I’ve drawn in enough of these hit lines to make it obvious that they were intentionally aligned. The question becomes, “Why would a Roman citizen in the few years just before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD go to the trouble and expense of having this strange mosaic created?”

I made the assumption that since the sages we are discussing are interested in a globe with latitude lines drawn upon it that they would be talking about locations on the Earth. If that were the case then the angle of the lines would indicate the latitude of places significant to the wealthy Roman who paid to have the mosaic created. I then took these lines and sought for parallel lines in the mosaic and they were there in abundance for each of the lines. I then flipped the lines so they would form the same angle but coming from the opposite direction. Whoever created the mosaic had created points of interest at the intersection of these two identical angles. Apparently, the crossing lines were created to assure there was no mistake in their intention to emphasize these lines and points. They set these points on the radiant lines coming from the point of the sundial. The sundial is significant because the sun would have been used to measure the angle above the horizon of the sun on identified days to obtain the latitude of the local site. The places that matched all of these strange criteria were the corners of the Roman Empire in 79 AD. Pompeii, (lat/lon 40.75) where the mosaic was buried until 1899, is marked with a black circle but was not indicated on the mosaic.

This map of The Roman Empire is for 54 AD, 25 years before Mt. Vesuvius erupted with the sites inside of colored coded circles.

1. Kom Ombo latitude 24.5° is marked with red lines on the mosaic and a red circle on the map. It is at the south-eastern corner of the Empire.
2. Alexandria blue circle at 31.2° at the mouth of the Nile River, where the circumference of the Earth was first measured.
3. Antioch magenta circle at 36.2° at the eastern border of the Empire,
4. Apsaros pink circle at 41.6° at the north-eastern edge.
5. Purpuraires purple circle at 31.5° at the south-western border.
6. York yellow circle at 53.8° at the north-western border.
7. Rome green circle at 41.9° at the center of the Roman Empire in 79 AD.

It was the lines above that encouraged me to pursue the vast number of parallel lines to be found between significant points on the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece mosaic.

These are the lines I found on the Seven Sages of Greece to be significant enough to pursue.

 

Here are most of the lines I discovered and drew on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic. Click for bigger image.

These are the hot spots that had multiple crossings for a given site. Some spots are overlapped and relate to several sites.

The lines and hot spots on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic are real, but the sanity of the creators and of my pursuit of them is in doubt.