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Oneness II

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ONENESS II

Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion and other forms of Singularity

Once, there was a woman in her sixties who was good at heart but had often been abused. Her circumstances were that she was financially dependent on her psychologically abusive husband. For several reasons, the only way out of her situation was to obtain a divorce; else her life would never be an enjoyable experience.

Several friends of the woman had sympathy for her circumstances and could feel her unhappiness. One day when they had gathered at a local restaurant for lunch, they decided to do what they could to help the distraught woman. Secretly, so neither the woman nor her husband would learn of the plan, the group began raising the money for a divorce. They sought pro bono legal services, arranged a safe place for the woman to stay, and set in motion a divorce process which, at a certain point, would require the participation of the woman.

The woman met with her friends to learn of their plan. At first, the woman resisted because of her pride and the fact that her untenable situation was public knowledge. It was hard to accept a gift from a position that could not repay them for their kindness and support. Finally, after hours of conversation over several meetings, she consented to let the divorce plans move forward.

The friends took charge of everything including staying close to the woman to sustain her will and cooperation regardless of the influence of the husband. A subpoena was served on the husband. The woman left just before the subpoena was served. She moved into the safe house. The plan ended successfully; the woman received a divorce and a small stipend from her husband. The stipend was mailed to the attorney so that the husband did not know where she lived. The woman began a new life supported by her friends and with a new and strong feeling that she was loved – at no cost.

This story contains all the elements of oneness. It includes sympathy (awareness), empathy (emotional understanding), compassion (the act of giving), and oneness – the joy and unity (oneness) of each person who had a role in the event.

This story quickly displays sympathy, empathy and compassion. But what made it work? We need to look under the hood.

Each of the friends individually had a personal life to manage. They chose to look beyond their own situation to consider how another situation could be reconciled. When the friends began the plan, they modified personal situations by collecting money, looking for a lawyer, and all the other detail that was needed to make the plan work. The friends changed their personal priorities to resolve the larger priority of the woman’s situation. To cite a rule for this behavior, an individual (you) is always the given situation. If a situation occurs where there is conflict or imbalance confronting the individual, the individual uses empathy and compassion to reconcile the difference.

A small business owner has twenty employees. Business has slowed and the owner must decide how to adjust costs to keep the business in the black. Obviously, employee costs are the greatest expense and must be reduced. A typical owner will decide – without outside advice – that there will be a layoff of three people. The owner notifies the affected employees and the job is done.

Oneness requires that the owner seek an outside, larger reality, ethic, situation – pick the word you understand best – to help with the decision. The larger reality is the self respect, service, and financial security of the employees. Using the principal of oneness, the smaller reality of the owner seeks to reconcile the issue with the help of the employees, who are the larger reality. Regardless of the outcome, the employees retain self respect, a sense of oneness with the business and the owner has improved the presence of oneness in his company.

The principle is that no one should ever make a decision based solely on internal judgment. Even for the simplest decisions, there must be reconciliation with a larger reality. Some readers may struggle with the word reality. “Situation” or “ethic” work just as well. Whatever word is used, the solution is reconciliation between a smaller situation and a larger situation. It must be noted again that an individual always is the smaller situation.

The key principle is that no one makes a decision without using empathy to consider what larger value may be affected by that decision. The result is one of reconcilement not with personal objectives but one that includes the objectives of a larger situation, a larger awareness. Acting on this larger awareness with compassion is the path to oneness.

The question: Your car fails to start. You need to find a way to work. Who will you talk to? What arrangement will you make? Now think of another solution, and a third, and a fourth. Every solution must involve other people. Your failed car is the smaller reality. In all your solutions, what turns out to be the larger reality?

Ancient Mariner

Jon Stewart’s Biography

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The mariner was at the library the other day. While he was there, he checked out a copy of Jon Stewart’s biography written by Lisa Rogak, Angry Optimist, the Life and Times of Jon Stewart. St. Martin’s Press, 2014.

Jon was and is an eclectic mind driven by a desire to be good at something. He tried everything, including attending William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, a student body where Jews were a significant minority – likely counted on one hand.

The book is entertaining and a light read. All that aside, what caught the mariner’s attention was that Jon followed the works of Eugene Debs when Jon was young. Eugene Debs! The mariner hasn’t thought of him in decades.

Eugene Debs was a labor union organizer in the earlier years of the twentieth century when the union movement was active. Debs was a union organizer extraordinaire; Readers may recall his organization of the American Railway Union and the Pullman strike of 1894 that shut down train traffic in most of the United States. President Cleveland had to call in the US Army to break the strike.

In today’s capitalist environment, Debs would not have been allowed a platform from which to marshal the nation’s labor force. Times were different as the twentieth century began, however, and Debs was the champion of union organizers.

The American culture was more open and diverse in those days. Debs ran for President five times as a Socialist Party Candidate.

The mariner’s mind was refreshed with an awareness of the upheaval of US culture during the turn of the century. It was a time similar to the time we have now. In Deb’s lifetime, the assembly line was invented, automobiles replaced horses, airplanes made it possible to hop from one city to another in one day, and unions had a new major role in the life of the working class.

The upheaval today is every bit as challenging. Robotics, electronics, computers, and a new global awareness test our understanding of who we are and what we stand for.

The last champion of comparable influence that changed standards against the will of government and business is Ralph Nader, who used public opinion to force the auto industry to significantly upgrade safety standards. It is interesting that changes in cultural ideas and practices cannot occur without a champion who launches the new idea. Without the Debs and Naders of the world, our culture would not take for granted workers’ rights and auto safety – an integral part of our life today.

In 2014, we have many inventors and innovative entrepreneurs. What we need is a champion to harness the culture of the 21st century.

It is true that reading enriches the mind. The mariner has a biography of Jon Stewart to thank for today’s pondering.

Ancient Mariner

Oneness I

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ONENESS

Why write this?

The author is in his middle seventies. The culture of his lifespan is collapsing all about him. The decades have marched by. After the war, the forties and fifties saw the end of the quiet, home town culture – the last days of Norman Rockwell and radio. By the time the author was ten, he no longer had to carry ashes from the basement furnace or empty the pan under the icebox. The telephone had five call letters and seldom rang.

Television had little to brag about early on; he did not realize how fine it became before expansion and capitalism began to whittle television down to the nothingness it is today. Today, the “best” shows are the ones that capture audience share – if only for a season or even one event. The unfathomable power of television to heal, educate, provide factual history and improve the human mind has disappeared. Only PBS holds down the fort – and just barely. Under the hands of entrepreneurs, quality is gone but the profits have soared. The TV cow is milked dry, replaced by a mechanical cow with artificial milk. Today, in 2014, broadcast television itself is under attack as entrepreneurs compete for profitable schemes similar to Netflix, ESPN, HULU, HBO and internet channels.

The sixties and seventies foretold the increasing conflict between government, business and citizenry. The Viet Nam War became an icon for an American society that was beginning to shred American gestalt into pieces divided along generational lines. Still, we were a conglomeration of equal, if conflicted, citizens until the Reagan years. Reagan opened the government to big money, corporatism and unbridled capitalism. It was no longer a government that belonged to the citizenry. The author still weeps at the resultant devastation that has made our government a mockery of democracy and a blatant, troublesome oligarchy. The movie that brought it all together was The Matrix. Individuals were nothing more than batteries in coffins – surviving only to make the powerful even more powerful.

What stopped working? How did greed and prejudice in all it manifestations take control? It was because no one is interested in reconciling the best solution with a larger ideal as a guide. The American society has lost its ethic. We are rootless with no means to set a standard for goodness, ethics, and morality – whatever word touches you as something that isn’t around anymore. Would Andy and his son Opie survive today? Or Pogo or Opus? Or Omnibus? What happened to news programs that were not required to be profit centers? No wonder the only news is sensationalist police chases, wars and murders with a bit of schmaltz thrown in for variety. What a different world it would be if government had not caved to the likes of Rupert Murdock.

One expects cultural change but not the slashing, manipulative and greedy bashing the American citizen has experienced in the last fifty years.

We must learn how to pursue oneness. We must learn how to build a positive gestalt just as a bricklayer lays brick – one at a time; one opportunity at a time; one commitment at a time – to oneness.

The question is this: Technology has obliterated the cultural foundation that began in 1890. What does the new foundation, including its ethical standards, look like? What will be right or wrong? What will be the standard for fairness?

Ancient Mariner

Oneness

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Throughout the winter months, there will be a series of posts on oneness. The focus of the series is an investigation into how we can improve our decisions with the use of oneness as a problem solving tool. Other topics may be posted as well but the series can be identified by the title: Oneness I, Oneness II, Oneness III, etc.

The format presents the outline first, and then follows with an expansion of the outline in paragraph form. At the end of each post, a general question will be offered for your perusal. The mariner will not answer this question.

The first series is the Preface. It begins below. No question follows.

  • –

 

PREFACE

Oneness has a bad reputation. It suffers from association with many religions, is perceived to be weakness in business, a phenomenon in mystic pseudo-sciences, misinterpreted as togetherness, and is associated with cuddliness and romance. Truth be told, you and I would not exist except for our dependence on oneness. Mammals would not exist except for oneness. Oneness is not a social term subject to romance or derision. It is a genetically embedded requirement for survival of Homo sapiens.

Language and writing would not have emerged were it not for oneness. Human skills like invention and discovery would not have emerged without oneness. Families, tribes and nations would not exist without oneness. Fairness, truth, justice, and morality would not exist without oneness. If humans existed otherwise, life would be barbaric at best and murderous violence would have no restraint. Under these conditions, it would not be long before humans were extinct.

Even cattle have a sense of oneness. It is an instinctual oneness but the herd instinct has enabled cattle to survive millions of years. Except that an unnatural predator wiped out the American Bison to make hats and coats, the bison would have survived into the ages. The presence of seven billion humans, soon to grow to twelve billion, is in itself destructive and stupid. The author will leave the issues of excessive humans to another author, Elizabeth Kolbert, in her book The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History. The book is a necessary volume in every individual’s library.

In his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Dacher Keltner makes the case that empathy is a firmly placed factor in mammalian genes (see post ‘Evolution of Faith’, May 2013). It takes empathy to nurture offspring until the young one can deal with the world on its own. Empathy is a critical element of oneness. The flip side, the action verb, is compassion. While empathy helps the species survive, it is acts of compassion that enable the world to survive as a healthy, nurturing environment. Kindness creates a powerful enhancement to manifest the destiny of a moral, thinking species like Homo sapiens. Yet, the power to be compassionate, to generate oneness, is a perpetual battle against those who choose not to be compassionate. Given knowledge of passing time and self awareness, the power to choose separates humans from other mammals. The power to choose oneness or pejorative abuse is the soap opera of human history. This discussion is presented in the hope that soap opera will diminish and oneness will increase.

Ancient Mariner

 

Voting is Your Only True Right

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Two days from now, Americans have the opportunity to vote. The mariner’s advice up front for every reader in any country that has an opportunity to elect its representatives is to vote.

US citizens do not do this very well and they pay the price. Professional politicians and corporate lobbyists now control the essential concepts that determine democracy; neither is interested in the wellbeing of citizens, democracy, fairness, effective administration, not even the American work ethic. A normal work year contains 260 days for most folks. Congress worked 97 days before the election and will be a lame duck congress for the remaining 15 days.

The House of Representatives is on track to produce the lowest number of legislative proposals since the Clinton administration. During their two-year term, there are a number of House representatives who have not introduced one bill in behalf of their constituency.

US citizens, those few that do vote, are bound to a party rather than to a candidate who possibly may do a better job of repairing federal, state and local government. This causes gridlock because 71% of the general public does not participate in the voting process.

There are other ways to change election processes. For example, 27 states permit direct referendums on ballots without challenge or contradiction. If a referendum passes, the government must abide by the language of the referendum. Many think the referendum is the only way the citizenry can force gerrymandering out of elected officials’ hands and have it run by a neutral agency. The way gerrymandering works now, the ten-year census allows politicians to redefine districts. This doesn’t work, of course, because the majority party draws silly districts that virtually eliminate the opposite party a chance to win in an election.

Austin, Texas is a liberal island in the midst of a very conservative state. Yet Austin never seems to have a liberal representative in Congress. In fact, it has five very conservative representatives. Look at the Austin District map below. The colored districts encompass Austin.

Austin Districts copy

In order to assure no democrat is elected in Austin, its districts have been gerrymandered so far that they reach Fort Worth 173 miles to the north, Houston, 150 miles to the east, San Antonio 71 miles to the south, and 181 miles to the southwest – almost to Mexico. In all this vast space, the population density is low. That’s the reason the districts have to be so large to maintain a republican majority in any election.

This solution required 35,000 square miles to offset 272 square miles that constitute Austin. There are similar examples in every state – some defy imagination. Gerrymandering is the primary cause of dysfunctional government. Vote for individuals who want districts to represent balanced population sectors without regard for party, color, wealth, or corporate zoning without public vote.

The second damaging cause is that (a) the citizenry has a blasé attitude toward voting (b) states, especially conservative states, have written voting rights laws that prevent people of color, college students, lower class people and others from voting without great difficulty or impossibility.

What if elections were held on a weekend instead of a workday? What if voting could be by mail where every individual received a ballot? What if voting could last a week?

Something must be done to give the government back to the people. For now, do your level best to vote for the best candidate. Vote November 4.

Ancient Mariner

The Judge

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Having just seen the movie “The Judge” with Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., the mariner felt more like Robert Duvall than Robert Downey, Jr. In other words, he felt old. Like Robert Duvall, the frontal lobes were intact and contained a lifelong establishment of reason, morality and a command of human behavior. Still, the body was finished; the brain confused by drugs and memory lapses. The shower scene “done me in,” as a Broadway play once complained; it was the last straw – the mariner, too, had outlasted his biological lifespan.

To make matters worse, the mariner came home to read a frightful edition of Smithsonian, describing the bright ideas that will shape the future. The mariner has always considered he was an agent of change. Indeed, his career was just that, bringing large corporations into new worlds of automated business management.

But technology has caught up and passed him by. Not so much the technical engineering but the changes in what human beings will be subject to in a world where reality and automated fantasy are combined in a smudged and inseparable pseudo-reality. One article in the magazine claimed to implant false history in a mouse brain. The mouse believed it had been severely shocked while standing on a steel plate. Placed in a box with an easy way to escape, the mouse stood frozen in fear that it would be shocked and would not move toward the exit. Yet the mouse actually had never received such a shock.

Translate this ability to alter reality to humans. The claim is a cure for Alzheimer’s, dementia, psychological disorders and other ailments of modern life. If one is paranoid of government and corporate prerogatives, one can see manipulation driven by foolish laws and corporate procedures – a capability that can be used for cure or curse.

In any case, one’s knowledge of one’s self may not be real. One’s history that has built an identity of self may be artificial – the self being lost among artificial memories and erased traumas and confrontations that make us who we are.

The mariner longs for that sailboat that will take him away from the modern world and travel among the shores of places that still are behind the technological curve – where real is real.

There are two concepts that dominate international culture today: We do it because we can – and the individual is not the solution. This mixture reminds the mariner of the early industrial age, where human rights were trampled in the name of progress.

Inept governments around the world are not interested in protecting human rights. Profits account for much more than personal freedoms.

Change is always traumatic as new processes displace old ones. The world will change under our feet even as we try to stand upon solid ground.

In the movie, Robert Duvall passed away due to advanced cancer. One could not help but share his release.

Ancient Mariner

Life Force

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The mariner was standing on a street corner the other day when a woman with a little furry thing in her arm (It couldn’t have been a wolf, maybe one of those toys that cries and wets itself. He saw one like it tucked into the abundant cleavage of a movie star. It looked like it belonged there – sort of like a soul patch but lower). The woman had a very large pocketbook hanging off her other arm, perhaps a distraction because the strap implied that it belonged on her shoulder. The woman had unkempt hair (do not judge her for that; my wife often says that it is a hair style and not “unkempt”) She wore black one size fits all pants, and a Detroit Lions sweatshirt under a light blue jacket.

The woman had two daughters along with her and was lecturing them. The littlest girl looked to be about five and the taller one looked to be about nine. They were dressed almost identically: red sneakers, jeans, each had a different t-shirt; both wore school jackets. The nine year old stared ahead indifferently while slowly chewing gum, hands in her jacket pockets. The little one had her head turned to look over her shoulder at something that caught her attention.

The mariner watched as the three continued down the block. The woman never stopped lecturing; the little one never stopped looking across the street and the tall one still chewed, hands in pockets.

Martin Wolf says the entire world is headed for a global financial crisis. The Indians clamor to remove the name “Redskins” from the football team. Every day there is a shooting somewhere that occupies air time on the tv news (The mariner often wonders if the news journalists station themselves in places where shootings may occur – sort of like hunting and waiting for deer to come down the path). ISIL seems a looming threat to the US – at least according to military analysts, military advisers, and military contract lobbyists. 2014 is the warmest year on record and 2015 will be even warmer. Is there enough water in the Ogallala aquifer to grow grain?

The three went into a small restaurant featuring Mexican cuisine.

The mariner wondered what the mother had to say for such a long time. It probably didn’t matter; the girls weren’t listening. There seemed to be some disarray in their lives. Apparently the girls had adopted ways to normalize their lives and the mother must carry burden in her life. It is odd how life can encase one’s existence completely, creating a reality only visible to those encased – like the woman and the daughters. They have a life that no one else lives.

As do you and the mariner. We are encased in our separate lives – unique to ourselves.

Turkey stands by while innocent people are being killed less than a mile away. Russia annexed Crimea and intends to make Ukraine Russian-dependent. Ebola kills 4,600 in Africa.

The mariner walks back home, just a few blocks. The grass on the lawns is still green and neatly clipped. That’s a trademark in this town. A man is washing his car in the driveway. In another block, three men are cutting down an old tree. As the mariner walks up his driveway, a red squirrel twenty feet away watches with a cautious stare.

Life envelopes everyone. It seems a force unto itself tied somehow to history and the journey everyone takes. Yet our journeys are unique and so different. Nevertheless, each of us, living a life unknown to others, is part of the daily history of the earth.

What is the life that envelopes an ISIS fighter? A US Senator? Bill Gates? A barefooted starving child in Africa? A software engineer at Monsanto? A prison guard? Your neighbor? Your child? We share this singular phenomenon called “life.” Yet each of us lives it alone.

Ancient Mariner

 

Survival of the Single Soul in a Turbulent World

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The mariner has been tossed about by the trying times of our culture, our economy, our information invasion, our ignorance of science, and the prevalence of greed in all life’s endeavors. The mariner has languished in the knowledge that there is little in our lives that is as it was yesterday or how it will be tomorrow.

Some of the languish stems from his age. He no longer is mainstream in his interaction with commerce, raising families or sporting events. Still, the mariner feels there is something amiss – something that can improve the life experience of each of us individually even in the midst of a massive paradigm shift moving toward macro-marketing, cultural dependency beyond nationalism, and instantaneous awareness of every event occurring around the entire planet.

Fatalism is not the answer, of course. One eventually lashes out at the confusion; retreat from the conflagration is necessary but only temporary. Each of us lives on this planet and must therefore be part of the planet’s history, ecology, and future.

The mariner will retreat to his study and keyboard to discern how you and he, meager single souls in a sea of thrashing whales, tsunamis, rogue waves, hurricanes and monsoons, will keep our ship seaworthy even without a charted course.

It seems, at first thought, that seaworthiness is how individual souls interact rather than being part of a larger organism swept by the tides. Consider the Cesium atom that keeps our time so accurately that only one second of error occurs every billion years. Cesium ignores corporate piracy and suppression of the masses. It abides only by the rules of Cesium atoms. We must search within rather than attempt to race ahead to divert the storms.

Ancient Mariner

How We Arrived Here

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October 15, PBS started a new series called “How We Got to Now.” It is a series about how simple but extremely important ideas made our current society possible. The premier researched the idea of ‘clean’ as in the need for clean streets, clean drinking water and many other comforts and technologies dependent on clean environments.

As regular readers may know, the mariner is vacillating about maintaining his blog. In his last post (What should we care about?), the mariner cashed his chips and turned the fate of the world over to the gods. That fate remains with them; the mariner has donned a fatalist’s cloak. Somehow Doris Day made fatalism appear attractive when she sang Que Sera Sera. In reality, the cloak is a drab color. Nevertheless, there are no questions to answer and no expectations.

How the mariner got to fatalism is the question in this post.

In the last 170 years we have sailed a course worthy of Jason and his Argonauts. While every discipline imaginable shared in the shape and direction of our course, the mariner believes communication has had the greatest influence.

Just a few quick touchstones: Ignorance is bliss. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. We do it because we can. Nothing in life is free. America; home of the free. The war to end all wars. Google. Yahoo. Microsoft. Netflix. Cable tv. Satellites. Hulu. Cell Phones. In a category all to itself, Internet.

Throw in day-to-day accounting of people losing their homes by the millions. Ineffective, greedy government. Beheaded journalists. A nonexistent recovery for anyone making less than $75,000 annually. Every fire of any size anywhere in the world along with every drought, every flood, every hurricane. Being forced to watch news programs showing how everyone except the top 10% of citizens grows poorer every year.

Dying ash trees. Increasingly colder winters and hotter summers. Crop status. Blood test results. Overstated scares about Ebola. Football concussions. We must evaluate the foreign policy of every country in the world whether we want to or not. Crazy news journalists with no regard for truth, taste or moral obligation to the viewer.

Had enough? Not only must you handle too much information, everyone else knows your information as well. Now, cloud technology will take from you the last bastion of privacy – your information will not reside on your computer but in a commercial, for profit data base.

I fear the demise of crocheting, reading paper newspapers, substantive education that enforces higher moral values for all citizens – including the knowledge to activate those moral values.

These touchstones are merely the foundation of a new age that goes far beyond the book 1984 except that uniforms will not be required. Jeans will suffice. Still, modern forms of slavery will become entrenched. There is nothing that can stop this nonsense and still we must be reminded of all of it from television, papers, cable, and, of all things, as if deliberately paradoxical, we will be able to view only information that data controllers want us to know.

The mariner gives up. Only the gods can right the ship. He feels his single ballot is useless to stem the tide. His age and energy prevent him from stirring the blood that was present when he was a young activist.

Sailing away to visit information-deficient places in the world sounds very healing to the mariner. And to put up his feet under a palm tree in some underdeveloped country (read minimal information capability) may heal wounds.

“Live in Donnellson,” my learned wife says. “It would not be hard to be an isolationist as well as a fatalist.” Ah, if there were only palm trees and open water….

Ancient Mariner

What Should We Care About?

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The mariner has experienced the hopelessness of righting the mighty wrongs of this world. Henceforth, he will trust in the vengeance of God as Armageddon is smote upon us.

He will abide the future ordained by the imminent asteroid.

He will bask in the warmth of whatever it is that is getting warmer but doesn’t exist.

He will ignore the burdens loosed by Pandora.

He will trust the horsemen to deliver the Apocalypse.

He will leave our resolve to the Sun.

 

The mariner will focus on matters of the mundane, inquisitive, whimsical and oddly irrelevant, all things considered:

Puppy farms persist in Iowa.

Cricket invasion in home town.

Mentioned to some readers, the mariner still is intrigued by unintended phenomena from genome manipulation.

Will Robert Downey Jr. find honor in “The Judge?”

Is the Catalina 22 sailboat a sporting model for the Gulf?

Why is coffee so important to the liver?

On World News Now, what happened to Reena Ninan?

It was mentioned recently that diabetes will kill someone before smoking does. Does this mean diabetics have nothing to lose if they smoke?

 

We’ll see how it goes…

 

Ancient Mariner