Simply the Way Life Works
Sustainability
Critical Mind Shift
Religious People
Free Will
Sacredness
Three Simple Rules
Simply the Way Life Works
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
Such a truth has emerged in our lifetime. It informs us that we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole in which all of the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.
Simply put, everything is connected to everything else. We exist, not separately, but in communion with all living things. Life is an interrelated, interdependent phenomenon.
That is the nature of the universe. That is the nature of life.
“So, what.” One might respond, and ask, “What is the practical value of that?” The practical value lies in the realization that there are several relationships that are foundational.
These are the foundational relationships of our lives. These are three relationships out of which all other relationships follow.
The first is our relationship with ourself.
The second is our relationship with others.
The third is our relationship with our environment.
If we chose one word to describe what optimizes each of these relationships, our relationship with our self is about health.
Our relationship with others is about kindness.
Our relationship with our environment is about respect.
The quality of our lives reflects the quality of these relationships. This is a sacred construct that exists as an integral part of reality. This is not a human construct.
Why would I write that this is a “sacred” construct?
This is the nonreligious usage of the word sacred.
It is because these relationships — our health, our relationships with others and our ecosystems — represent that in life which, at our peril, we cannot violate, damage, dishonor, or destroy.
When we violate these relationships, we suffer. And eventually, we perish.
This is simply the way life works.
This is not contrived or fiction. It’s not arbitrary or subject to dismissal. It’s not in any way negotiable.
It has nothing to do with gods, religions, or anything supernatural.
How we take care of ourselves, each other, and our environment determines not only the quality of our lives but whether we will live or die.
These relationships are sacred. They are the wellsprings of life. We emerged from these relationships. We are sustained by them.
We are surrounded by the very sacredness that, historically, we have sought from afar.
The spirit, from the Latin word spiritus for breath, that animates life exists in, expresses itself through, and is sustained by these foundational relationships.
These are the vessels of life.
When we destroy any of these relationships — our health, our relationships with others, or our environment — we extinguish the spirit, the breath, of life.
When we destroy these relationships, there is no place left through which the phenomenon that we call life can express itself, can breathe.
The vitality is gone as it is for anyone who cannot breathe.
To live a spiritual life (if one wishes to call it that), or a better word: a reverent life — to breathe — is to honor these three relationships in all their manifestations.
This is the much sought-after key to the concept of sustainability: the understanding that we must leave this planet as we found it or improve it so those generations that follow us will have the same, or better, opportunities that we have had.
Sustainability
Sustainability is a daunting challenge given that we add in excess of 75 million people a year to our planet.
That is an addition of more than 1,500,000 people each week to feed, clothe, house, educate, employ, transport, govern, protect and keep healthy.
The key to sustainability is to take the word apart.
Make two words of it: sustain ability, i.e., our ability to sustain these three foundational relationships: our health, our relationships with others, and the health of our environment.
How do we do that?
To do it, we have to identify our responsibilities.
So often in life, it’s asked, “What is the purpose or the meaning of life?” These questions send us in circles.
The appropriate question is, “What are the responsibilities of life?”
The answer, again, lies in taking the word apart and making two words of it: response abilities.
We must develop our abilities to respond to life’s challenges and stimuli so as to optimize and sustain our health and our relationships with others and our environment.
This understanding of sacredness does not mandate worship but responsibility.
Right living is about behavior, not worship.
Salvation, saving ourselves from harm or loss, is not delivered by a supreme being, it is earned by us.
The forgiveness of our “sins” lies not in the hands of some external god.
It’s found in our alignment with the uncompromising demands of the reality in which we exist.
At this time in our evolution, this understanding of sacredness is easily within our perception and grasp.
Critical Mind Shift
In his book, The World’s Religions, Houston Smith writes of the two issues most religions have in common.
They all advise adherence to some form of the Golden Rule and avoidance of self-centeredness.
Generally, we do neither one.
Self-centered and shameless, we too often do to others and our environment whatever we can get away with.
We get by with this behavior in the short term.
In time, we find that we are victims of our own exploitation.
For the way of life, the architecture of life, reveals an exquisite intimacy among all phenomena.
Life also broadcasts a riveting truth — the reverse side of the Golden Rule — from which there is no escape.
The Golden Rule commands that we do to others as we would have others do to us.
The reverse side of the Golden Rule does not command anything. It warns that what we do to others we do to ourselves.
In an interconnected world, all exploitation and oppression inevitably returns to its source.
This is a reality that we must understand, and from this under-standing make the critical mind-shift required of us if we are to sustain humanity and advance our civilization.
This mind shift is to understand clearly, unequivocally, that what we do to others we do to ourselves.
This is evident in our foundational relationships.
In each there exists a dynamic between self and other.
Consider our relationship with our environment: If we damage and destroy our environment, we damage and destroy ourselves.
In our relationships with other people, if we mistreat and/or are unkind to others, our actions return to haunt and torment us in one form or another over time.
In our relationship with ourselves, if we abuse ourself, our health, in any one of countless ways, sooner or later, we will suffer the consequences.
When all of this becomes evident and acted upon, our belief system and behavior become fused and aligned, not with some fantasy or fictional story, but with the reality in which we exist.
Our belief system is not just something for one day of the week, or a particular time of the day when we pray or bow to this or that god, or to be celebrated in special places only.
Our belief system becomes our lifestyle, and our lifestyle becomes aligned with and honors the larger reality in which we exist.
Religious People
Often, we are confronted by well-meaning “religious” people who read, quote from, and thump their “holy” books.
These people are everywhere: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, and billboards.
They even knock on our doors to evangelize and proselytize to get us to join their tribe.
In interacting with these people it often becomes evident that many don’t know how to take of care of their health, how to get along with their neighbors, or understand our fragile relationship with our environment.
One feels like saying to them, “Some of what you have in your book is fine, but what is going on in the rest of your life?”
It’s like walking down the aisle of a supermarket and seeing a sign that says, “Health Foods.” We think to ourselves, “If these are the health foods in this aisle, what’s going on in the rest of the store?”
Free Will
Many of us have been taught that a creator has “endowed” us with something called “free will.”
This ingenious bit of theological inventiveness, among countless others, was designed to relieve gods of the responsibility for having created the dark side of life.
Gods get the credit for all the good things. We, because of “free will,” get the blame for all the bad.
This is a very clever construction. That aside, do we really have free will?
Yes, of course.
Like all other creatures, we can do whatever we like.
We can lead unhealthy lifestyles.
We can mistreat and exploit others.
We can pollute our air, water, and soil and deplete and destroy our resources.
In other words, we can and do destroy the foundational relationships of our lives.
We have free will.
But we do not have free will over the consequences.
In an interrelated, interdependent world, the consequences, like the outcome of a mathematical equation, are fixed.
Our only choice, in fact, is to honor the way of life as it really is and prosper or violate the way of life and suffer needlessly.
Sacredness
Sacredness is not a complex, difficult, and esoteric thing to understand.
It is found in real life relationships here and now, not “out there” somewhere.
Sacredness is not about a Supreme Being. It’s about a way of being.
The focus of our beliefs must shift from what was imagined to exist and be sacred in some “heavenly” realm to what does exist and is sacred here and now.
It is time to find our comfort not in the worship of distant mythological gods, but in present, real-life relationships with each other, with our extraordinary environment, and in our own unique individuality.
These “commandments” are not issued by a god, but by the undeniable reality of our existence.
Certainly, the fictional gods of our historical religions would approve of this shift of emphasis. When we take care of ourselves and each other and leave our environment as we found it or improve it, we are living a sacred life.
One would think that if there exists anything benevolent in dimensions beyond our perception — call it a god, creator, supreme being, the force, universal intelligence, divine consciousness, or whatever — that it, she, him, or them would cheer us wildly when the focus of our lives is on health for ourselves, kindness toward each other, and respect for our environment.
For what more could any god of any belief system anywhere ask of us?
Three Simple Rules
Many of us are familiar with the Ten Commandments that appear in Exodus, the second book of the Bible, written some thirty-three hundred years ago. What do these commandments say?
The first four have to do with a god and the Sabbath. The remaining six are about behavior.
We are told to honor our parents and to not murder, steal, lie, commit adultery, or covet.
We would all agree that we have learned a few things in the last thirty-three hundred years.
It may be that instead of the Ten Commandments, we require just three simple rules for living that say and do more than these ten.
If we followed these three simple rules — seven words — we would eliminate the majority of problems and suffering in our world, problems that the Ten Commandments don’t address.
None of these three rules appear in the Ten Commandments.
The first is be healthy.
Each of us is like a cell in the body of humanity. The health of all of us taken together determines the health of humanity and our civilization.
The bodies and minds that we occupy may be the most exquisite “machines” on the planet.
The abuse to which we subject them, we wouldn’t dream of doing to our material possessions like our cars, computers, or homes.
Yet, our bodies and minds are our homes.
Perhaps the reason that we don’t value them more is that we get them for free. We are given this most prized possession at birth.
By the time we realize their value it is very late. For many people, it’s too late.
When we are healthy, it is easier to follow the second simple rule: Be kind.
The Ten Commandments tell us to honor our parents, which is fine. Aside from that, they tell us not what to do but what not to do: not to murder, steal, lie, commit adultery, or covet.
In all our relationships, what we need to do is simply be kind. We need to treat each other, our friends and neighbors, better. We must stop exploiting each other.
It does not matter how much money we have or earn, what size home we live in, what kind of car we drive, how many academic degrees we may have accumulated, what accomplishments we may have achieved, or what our title or position is.
Nor does it matter what our gender, race, religion, age, appearance, national origin, sexual orientation, or political affiliation is.
What matters is whether or not we are kind to one another.
The third simple rule is respect the environment.
In every way, we are linked to our environment. We evolved from it. Everything comes from our environment.
If we destroy our environment, we destroy ourselves.
In time, our damaged environment and ecological systems will regenerate, but we will be gone.
Nature, which could not care less about humanity, will have eliminated us.
Let me repeat that: Nature, which is the way of life and could not care less about any particular lifeform conforming to it, will eliminate us.
It’s that simple.
Three rules, seven interrelated words.
When we follow them, our lives change.
As many of our lives change, our world changes.
Be healthy. Be kind. Respect the environment.
If you wish to astonish the whole world, tell people that — the simple truth.
End of Response, Part 3 of 5
PART 4 OF 5 TOMORROW
Our Competing Sets of Survival Instincts
Politics
Business
Social Interaction
Religion