Oneness – IV

ONENESS – IV

Which lesser reality?

Which greater reality?

One need think only a moment before a conflict comes to mind: How does one select the appropriate lesser solution? The reader is reminded at this point that empathy is a tool with which to make the best decision. In the example of the owner of a small business, the owner actually has several options: Layoff? Sell the business? Go into debt? Restructure the business in a way that maximizes short term profit? How does one select a lesser solution that maximizes the opportunity to select a correct greater solution?

This is no easy consideration as any individual will attest. In the example, consideration begins deep in the philosophy of the owner. Is profit, his religion, his character, the definition of who he is? Is his measure of personal worth his obligation to others – if only to his kind or his business? Is his measure compassion? Have we come to a root that solves the dilemma? Is it the act of compassion?

Compassion deserves further investigation. It is not a strong objective in global awareness. The link between lesser and greater realities almost always is a compassionate consideration and suffers mightily from self interest and the predatory nature of the human species.

If one examines prejudicial behavior, particularly racism and religious prejudice, the smaller situation is a matter of conditioning rather than thoughtful consideration. Racist and religious behavior may be inculcated by parents. Perhaps peer pressure is the source of prejudice. It may be that people of color simply are a scapegoat for personal feelings of inadequacy. Confronted with an interracial or religious situation, how does the person find empathy required to select the appropriate lesser reality? Even if they found empathy, could they select the greater reality?

Many years ago, the mariner had a conversation with a racist man. His position was that African Americans, Latinos and Chinese all looked different than he did and, conversely, he looked different to them. This turned out to be a telling point. “What,” he said, “if they became the majority of the population? I would no longer be part of the majority and my normal white privileges would disappear.”

Is this man able to find sympathy or to act with compassion involving nonwhite individuals? If so, it will take a mighty wind of change.

Prejudice is not limited to race or religion. The author knows a number of individuals who are so opposed to smoking that friends and events first must be tobacco free. Then more compassionate behavior may arise. Confronted with a situation involving tobacco, how does the individual select the correct reality which will link to a greater, compassionate reality?

One solution is to ignore that which is offensive. It takes practice to hone one’s mind to accept the person first – despite the automatic rejections of race, alcoholism, smoking, or whether a person is neat and clean, has a job or makes as much money such that the person is a credible member of the human race. The 2012 presidential race caught candidate Romney admitting that forty-seven percent of the US population depended on government handouts. It was spoken with derision and contempt. Where was the seed of empathy that is necessary to link a lesser and greater reality? Without empathy, Romney was unable to perceive the dependency of banks and industries on government handouts, tax breaks and loopholes. The woes of a beaten middle class would not be an element of reconciliation between lesser and greater realities. There is no act of compassion. To Romney and the attendees in that room, people are Matrix batteries.

Science has a theory that all things in the universe are entropic. The mariner suggests that oneness can induce growth, depending on oneness as part of a resolution. In other words, an act of compassion expands orderliness, consciousness, and discovery while negative acts accelerate entropy.

The question: Pick one of the people you know that you have difficulty relating to because of your opinion of that person. Imagine that person without letting your opinion affect you. This takes a lot of practice. You know you are doing the right thing if you can feel a growing empathy. This is an exercise coined in the phrase “walk a mile in his shoes.” What are the good characteristics that you noticed? Can you separate your smaller situation and the person’s larger situation enough to reconcile the difference? What act of compassion will be required?

Ancient Mariner

The Wrong God

The mariner is in the middle of a series suggesting oneness is a tool to help make good decisions. Even as he writes, retail giants and smaller chains alike have decided to extend black Friday back to the morning of Thanksgiving Day. This means workers will not enjoy a moment of celebration of family, a break from the stresses of a capitalist-driven world. Kudos to some corporations who will not intrude on the holiday. These companies deliberately stand for a culture that recognizes a world beyond pursuit of the almighty dollar.

In past posts, the mariner has touched on the subject of slavery as an evolutionary process. Splitting of parents and children is no longer de rigueur – if one doesn’t include immigration policy of the United States. Likewise, it is not legal to prevent employees from leaving their corporate family – or is it? With salaries that have been stagnant since the 1980’s, few families have the resources to move, sustain themselves long enough to find a decent job, or even attend night classes to improve their education.

As slaves were given minimal rations and poor housing, it is no better today. There are vast neighborhoods in American cities where joblessness is around 25% – 30%, the homes are in disrepair and, as in Detroit, utilities are shut off because the Detroit and Michigan governments have failed to represent these oppressed neighborhoods. The likely fault lies in racism, elitism, and especially gerrymandering. These neighborhoods are full of slaves, are mistreated like slaves and, ironically, even today separate parents and children because a whole family cannot live on food stamps or a meager income by the father which forces him to leave his family so that the family can qualify for welfare.

Still, there was an opportunity to glean even more from those who had poor paying jobs. Banks and mortgage companies misrepresented the cost of buying a home – such a basic need for the lower working class – knowing that later balloon payments would be beyond the income of the borrowers. This resulted in the economic collapse of 2008 and the ruin of financial security for millions of families. Still, the banks made billions of dollars and walked away from this crime on humanity without one prison sentence, not even one trial.

And now corporate greed is taking away the most sacrosanct holiday for families: Thanksgiving.

Is this the work of God?

Is this the work of greed?

Certainly oneness was not used to make decisions about the wellbeing of the greater reality – the need of millions of workers to be normal, family-based human beings.

Ancient Mariner

 

Oneness III

ONENESS III

Oneness is overwhelmed

All religions have language that relates to morality and godliness. These words have been a mainstay for billions of people since the Egyptian pyramids were built. Slowly, exceptional writings were gathered to capture the wisdom of good works – works that improved a situation for all concerned but also improved reality in general, works that over time would sustain an ameliorative society. Ritual and theological differences aside, these works are the foundation of oneness. Often, however, these works lack the nature of a how-to book; how to get from slot A to Tab A may not be clear.

Throughout history, there are times when society suffers a wrenching change in values. These changes are caused by dramatic transitions in population, invention, and discovery that turn society topsy-turvy. Quick examples are gunpowder, the wheel, the sail, automobiles, airplanes, steam, nationalist conflict, television, financial opportunism, and the Internet. Today, the pressures of change erupt in every quarter from what to eat, to communications, to starving masses, to obsolete national boundaries to oligarchy – both governmental and corporate and exposure to unending wars around the globe.

Unlike the past, however, the eruption is world-wide. No country is exempt from global opportunism, global warming, global population growth and shrinking global resources of which physical space is one. Many countries still live by cultures created many centuries ago. Many countries are artificial – carved by war and politics instead of natural social development. Many still live primitively in deep jungles or on distant islands. All will feel the eruption of the twenty-first century. Our technological capabilities expose us to global awareness that overwhelms our personal, every day values.

Increasingly visible is the global reorganization of super powers and global economic contests – if not wars. The challenge is to find something that will work on any scale. By nature, oneness is personal. Can oneness become global?

Oneness is at the mercy of circumstance. One cannot mandate that selfishness is not permitted; one cannot use force to reduce forceful behavior; one cannot deny greed by redistribution of ill-gotten gains.

Alexander McCall Smith has written a series of books centered on the character Isabel Dalhousie. Dalhousie is a detective prone to philosophical thoughts. In The Careful Use of Compliments[1], there is a passage related to the examination of community oneness:

“Cat went off to prepare Isabel’s lunch, leaving her with The Guardian. She was reading an article on the Middle East and the prospects for peace, which were slim. What acres of newsprint, she thought, what lakes of ink, had been expended on that topic; and always it came back to the same thing, the sense of difference between people, the erection of barriers of religion, clothing, culture. And yet there were differences and it was naïve to imagine that people were all the same – they weren’t. And everybody needed space, physical space, to live their lives amongst those with whom they shared an outlook and values; which led to the depressing conclusion that the recipe for social justice was keeping people separate from one another, each in his own territory, each in the safety of fellows….The problem was that we could no longer have our own cultural spaces; everybody was now too mixed up for that and we had to share.”

Dalhousie makes the case for geographical space, common cultural values and common future and laments that, in the Middle East and across the planet that neighborhoods, geographical and economic groupings of people largely has collapsed as a natural environment. This makes it more difficult for oneness to flourish because of the clash of values and the competition for space and assets.

There are scant few efforts to create “whole town” cultures. Whole towns would be like the old days when a town had everything it needed including retail, medical, recreational and job opportunities. One notable example of trying to build an integrated town culture is the environment at Microsoft Corporation where there are facilities for babysitting, a fitness center, recreation, opportunity to bring the family for a day or two, a 24-hour restaurant and a work schedule that allows for frequent free time on the Microsoft campus. Microsoft has listened to sociologists who suggest Microsoft will experience more creativity, team effort and commitment to Microsoft if a town atmosphere were maintained.

A developer in Florida has designed neighborhoods with all the facilities a town would need and automobiles must be left at an external parking lot. Everything in the town is within walking or bicycle distance.

How do we recreate a town experience based on common geography, culture and viable economy? Any positive social changes made throughout man’s long history were made by only three processes that are effective.

The first is cause and effect. There is a direct correlation between behavior and a directly related outcome. The Microsoft solution is an example of cause and effect. The Ukrainian conflict also is an example of cause and effect. The second is crisis. Survival of the participants at hand can only survive if everyone survives. The Katrina Hurricane threatened tens of thousands of citizens and required a national response. The third is persuasion. Enough influence is applied to alter behavior.

Unfortunately, many issues cover all three, global warming among them. Allowed to continue with uncontrolled fossil fuel consumption, it is a race to see whether fossil fuels are depleted first or Earth becomes uninhabitable. It is likely that the world will approach a crisis that cannot be reversed and damage will be permanent. If the oceans rise nine feet as predicted, Florida will be a much smaller state. Persuasion will never be more tested as a process than when it disrupts global industries and shifts political power between nations.

Cause and effect can be mitigated by regulations and new profit models. When President Eisenhower authorized the Interstate highway system, trains lost their lock on interstate shipping. Trucking and especially big oil evolved quickly. Can regulations be created to move entrepreneurs to non fossil fuel solutions? Many palms in many governments may need to be greased. Many new international obligations must take place.

Crisis is not a deliberate circumstance. It is an act of nature similar to a plague or disruptive weather; it is a byproduct of war; it is an unintended collapse of an economy; a crisis can be personal as well when health and finances suddenly change. A crisis is so invasive that survival becomes the primary motivation and disrupts existing processes.

Persuasion has many forms: cajoling, payoff, rebellion and voting are examples. Each of these processes requires participation of a substantial population to affect culture. Persuasion can be as small as a sentence or two. As today’s American citizens look back in history, it is hard to believe that women could not vote until 1920 – and only then because of a persuasion that began in 1854!

There is one persuasion not mentioned that is important. It is persuasion by example. In the Christian New Testament, there is a popular story told by Jesus about a Samaritan. Samaritans were Jewish in faith but were considered outcasts by the Hebrew nation because Samaritans had mixed blood with Arabs. Nevertheless, a Samaritan comes across a beaten and robbed Jew. Despite the Samaritan’s awareness that the Jew holds him in disdain, he puts the Jew on his donkey, takes him to an inn and pays his expenses. By example, the Samaritan set a standard for oneness. Each reader easily can find moments where they can set an example that increases oneness.

War and forceful incursion do not lead to oneness; they do not consider the greater reality that affects the lives and cultural stability of the enemy. Similarly, corporations can disrupt stable communities by locating large operations without considering the greater situation of the community. Examples are coal mines, Walmart, and other numerous vertical corporations that eliminate community economies, for example Monsanto and hoof-to-store livestock operations.

Typically, oneness is not a goal in decision making today. Profit seems to be the goal in decision making. Profit is not intrinsically bad unless it forgets to reconcile with the greater reality of community.

The question: Relive a moment when you did something that made you feel you had helped someone in a direct way. Relive a moment when you felt you were at great risk along with other people but together the risk was reduced. Relive a moment when you persuaded someone to change their judgment about something. Did these experiences involve an act of compassion? Was oneness accomplished in each situation?

Ancient Mariner

1The Careful Use of Compliments, Alexander McCall Smith, Pantheon Books 2007, ISBN 978-0-375-42301-7

Oneness II

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

Oneness I

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

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