The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – line 45

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7 Sages of Greece, Giving empowerment, The 7 Sages of Greece

The 7 Sages of Greece mosaic found buried at Pompeii

The 45th suggestion given by the Seven Greek Sages at Delphi was …

“Help by giving empowerment.”

“In the 6th century BCE, the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece carved the 147 suggestions, rendered here in English, in stone stelae at Delphi, Greece, and sent them for display in public places throughout the world known to the Greeks. If a person could speak the Greek language and went to a public square and heard lectures about these stelae, they could learn the alphabet and thus learn to read. That permitted almost all Greek speakers to communicate with one another through time and space.” It was an early form of internet.

Earlier this evening I was engaged in a conversation with a group of eight people who were considering calling themselves Humanists. It was a wide-ranging discussion of soul-searching questions, and challenges to the meaning of words such as: soul, being, meaning, the meaning of life, purpose, purposelessness of life, etc., and our relationship to these ideas.

The word Humanist has some associations of meaning that are not exactly what we were seeking to discover. I suggested that we are all interested in the idea of helping other people and that our core idea appeared to be greater than just respecting humans. It was about being kind to all people including ourselves. It was about being kinder to other people than we are to ourselves. It was giving empowerment to others. It was about helping people to move further along the path of their already self-chosen life trajectory.

By giving our thoughts, actions, and habits to this kind of empowerment of other people we would be creating the habits to help our own selves to grow into a higher state of being. We would, by helping other people to fulfill their deeper needs, learn how to fulfill those same kinds of needs that are our own personal needs. It is easier to see in beings external to ourselves, but who are similar to ourselves, our own needs. By helping them we help ourselves.

I seek to help you along your self-chosen path because it will help me find my way along mine.

Sage tip #35, Value other people’s thoughts.

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7 Sages of Greece, Contentment, Diary, Epigrams, habits, happiness, Health, Kindness, policy, Sage tip #35, survival, Value other people's thoughts.

In the book I am presently working on named Love Your Life – A way to approach health and happiness, there is a section on The wisdom of the 7 Sages of Greece. That wisdom consists of 147 brief suggestions published on a stone before about 500 BC at Delphi in Greece. Those precepts are so brief they require some interpretation and expansion to make them useful to a modern English speaker.

I have used the term “respect” in several of the suggestions, which I have been calling tips to make them less demanding and more friendly. Tip #34 is presently stated, “Respect other people’s space and property,” and that usage of the word respect feels appropriate. However, the next one, Tip #35 was written “Respect other people’s thoughts.” That doesn’t feel quite right anymore because it has the connotation of tolerating other people’s thoughts. Tolerating implies there is something wrong with their thoughts, and with their thinking, and with their personal experience. However, if we had lived their lives and had their experiences, we would probably be in much closer alignment with those thoughts and their presentations of them. In that case, we would have greater respect for those thoughts and statements. Our respect might well move over into the more approving connotation implied by the word “value.”

If we value other people’s statements and the thoughts behind those statements and thus the experiences and analysis of those experiences, then that other person’s whole world opens up to us. We have a more intimate relationship with them and their worldview and thus our personal relationship with our own world becomes more expanded. If we value other people instead of tolerating them our lives become better.

However, if we go away from valuing their worldview, away from even tolerating them, we move into intolerance and perhaps into dislike and even hatred, loathing and animadversion. It’s all bad, both for our feelings about life and for our relationship to them.

But, if we are able to see the world as others see it, then we can have a much friendlier and more meaningful relationship with them. If we see as they see we can find common ground on many and probably most mutually overlapping situations. We can probably find situations where we can have a mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. The very places where our lives are most different are the very places where mutual exchanges can be most beneficial to each of us. We can trade those things which each of us has an overabundance of for those things which each has a paucity of.  We can find our greatest friend in those who are most different from us. This mode of relating works for ideas as well as the trading of physical goods.

We will greatly benefit by learning how to value other people’s experiences and thoughts.

 

 

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.

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 # 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. 

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 51

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

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

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

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

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