I've always been very interested with religion, beliefs, and values. Since learning about factory farms, corporate person-hood, and peak oil, I've been thinking about what value system a person like myself could have to lead a happy and sustainable life.
I've been trying to make a nice list. Life, freedom, happiness, truth, compassion or love, fairness, equality and initiative are a few of the ones common in the United States. From the Indian culture, I understand that ahimsa and satya are some of the valued traits or concepts.
It seems like there are competing concepts... What does the individual need and/or want vs. what need/wants are important to have community vs. what value system works for the future of all life on earth.
I like the thought of having a value system that allows for maximum freedom of all, while fostering happiness through community, and protecting and restoring nature.
So, then, what should be the topmost value? As a means of thinking about this, I think that I will use this space to work out my thoughts. Perhaps you will find the exercise to draw some thoughts our for yourself.
Starting with myself, I have to admit that I am motivated by those things in Maslow's hierarchy, more or less. I guess that isn't too surprising, as all consious beings seem to be driven by these things. For the most part, I'm focuses on providing myself with happiness, meeting basic needs as I feel emotionally driven to then, and trying to gain a feeling of belonging by doing things that are appreciated by others.
At the same time, I love the concept of being immortal; if not in body, at least in the memory of civilization, or better yet, in the memory of the earth, so to speak. Which is to say, if my impact upon the Earth could be such that I caused a lasting change for the good, then even though I may not be consiously remembered, my impact would continue to live on.
To be more specific, I would love my impact on existance to be one of maximizing life and happiness for the most possible.
A few years ago, I was thinking about this a bit and realizing that every bit of matter that is in my body comes from the earth. Every bit of energy in me comes from the earth, with the ultimate source of the sun. To use an analogy, we are like the living cells of a living planet. We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and for a very brief moment in time, we are alive and concious and we even imagine ourselves to stand alone, and apart, and seperate from the earth and sun.
I've heard people talk about this type of thinking as being a result of our seperation from nature, made possible by technology and a super-high energy existence.
So, I do imagine myself apart in a way. I imagine that the concept of the trinity from Christianity has some of its roots in this concept, although I think that it was primarily agriculture that led to this thinking at the time. Even the tendency of humans to be gatherers or hunters might foster this type of thinking. I romantically dream of living for a time as a simple forager, like an animal in nature, but I don't suppose that is a very effective way of making the world of the future a better place.
Extending the analogy, people are like the cells in a very, very complex organism. People are like the white blood cells, in a way. We have the ability to move from place to place and to protect the body from death. At the same time, it seems almost like we humans can be a leukemia for the body. So many are we that we drain the body of its un-renewable resources, and kill other living "cells" in the process.
I do feel this way sometimes, and it drives me to think of ways for us to reclaim our understanding of our connection to the earth and nature.
In my imagination, I dream of the humans working to restore the earth to a more pristine nature... turning back the clock, as it were, to a time when the earth was like an eden. I mentally think of this as the concept of "renew". The idea of restoring to nature that which has been destroyed. For example, the drive and effort to take a vacant lot and cleaning it up and then planting native organisms.
On a recent flight back from Los Angeles, I was noticing out the plane window the size of the city and I imagined how it must have been 200 years ago, before the trees were cut, and when the river found its own path to the sea. Wouldn't it be fantastic to see that beauty as it was. What an amazing challenge to restore that land to such a diverse and incredible condition. Someday, I suppose, such a think could happen of its own accord. Cities always seem to grow and then, eventually, to shrink; even entire civilizations do this.
Wouldn't it be wonderful for the entire LA basin to be a wilderness, with all the people living on the other side of the mountains on the beautiful plain... One very high speed, two-way rail line could deliver people to and from the ocean and a series of other fantastic natural places.
Okay, maybe this is not the dream scenario of most Los Angelinos, but perhaps something inbetween. City living with nature restored to even increasing portions as they grow old and are ready to be renewed.
In a way, I think of "renew" as being an ultimate dream goal for myself: helping humanity to see a way to work towards the renewal of nature, while people thrive at the same time. After all, people are part of nature, no matter what we may think at times.
Okay, so if this is a goal, then, as I like to say, "how do we get there from here"?
It seems like we individually would be able to achieve this if, for the most part, we were working toward this goal. We would need to understand all of the impacts of all of our choices, as some choices that we might imagine to be innocuous cause unseen damage to nature, either near or far from our homes.
This brings my thinking back to the values or desires or perhaps drives for life, freedom, happiness, truth, compassion, fairness, equality and initiative. I put them in that particular order because it seems like, perhaps, that might be the system of ranking that is natural to all consious beings. At the same time, it seems like, perhaps, this is the system that has brought us to this precarious moment in time.
In order to renew the world, what would value system would we need?
First, I think we would need to value all life, not just our own, or that of our family, or community. This selfishness, or valuing of self only, often seems to be described as "evil"... particularly when it is one individual cares so much for his/her own needs that they will directly cause suffering to others.
Using this definition, and following logic, I realize that I too am evil... I care much more about myself than others, particularly those I've never met. There are people far from me that are suffering, and I have only to send some money their way and their suffering will be eased... But since I fail to act, I allow their suffering to continue. I also like to shop for the cheapest products... and yet I know that the products are cheap only because somewhere something is being destroyed or someone is being mistreated. I don't find it too difficult to imagine my great-grandchildren thinking of me as one of many evil people of this industrial age.
So, to avoid "evil", and thus be "good", it seems like I must be willing to expand my circle of love and compassion from myself and my family to all. This is the concept of universal love. I believe ahimsa encompases the same thought. This is a love and compassion and kindness not only for humans, but for all living things.
Perhaps this love should also extend to nature in its parts and as a whole. Jesus is just one of the individuals in history that advocated for this being the essential quality that can build happiness in community. In fact, he said that love, compassion and kindness are the ultimate good, or God. To stretch the metaphor... existence, including the earth and the sun, is God. To worship God is to love the earth. Perhaps the this aspect of Christianity has roots in earlier belief systems where the earth was understood to be the source of life.
Ahimsa brings in the concept of loving others so much as to be willing to only say things that are loving and caring, and throught non-action, doing only things that are compassionate. I believe this concept extends to the reality that compassion (or happiness) and suffering are on the same continum, and that to take on suffering is sometimes necessary to be compassionate. The concept of satya introduces more of this. I can't say I'm an expert in ahimsa or satya, but I appreciate that all of these concepts are rolled together into one word. After reading about Ghandi, and some of the writings of Ghandi, I came to appreciate that these concepts have a very long history.
So, where are I am at here? I know that I want to achieve a sort of immortality by helping the world to be a better place in the long term by renewing the earth using the tools of compassion (or love) and truth.
I can't imagine that working in isolation that the same impact could be achieved as working with many, many individuals... or further, communities of people. Communities working with complete compassion and trying to make the world better through extending this compassion and renewing the world have much more effectiveness than one individual.
So then, one aspect of my goal is to work with communities to understand and embrace compassion, while fostering the concept of renew.
How to do this then? Here are the values again... life, freedom, happiness, truth, compassion, fairness, equality and initiative... It takes a deep compassion or love for life to allow many to be happy which is a fair and equal way to live but takes complete honesty or truth as well as initiative , logic, and problem solving... All going back to love and compassion for all life and for the earth as a whole since we are, in reality, simply a temporarily conscious unit of the earth itself.
Okay, and so how does freedom fit into all of this? Well, perhaps freedom is not such a high value and we might think it to be. Not to say that freedom isn't a high value. I believe that living things have the natural freedom to do anything that they can physically do. I tend to believe that the freedoms that a wild animal have should also be enjoyed by humans. The freedom to move whereever one can. The freedom to make any sound one can make. This can be summarized into the freedom to do anything with one's body that one can do. What more is there? Freedom of assembly is simply freedom of movement. Freedom of belief is really the freedom to do anything one can do.
So, if I believe very strongly in all of these, why isn't freedom such a high value? Perhaps because it falls underneath the others and is encompased by them. For example, if an individual is focused on renewing the world through loving action, then there are a finite number of ways to go about that. It is not complete freedom because of the goals of renewing through compassion. Everyone is guided by their beliefs or values in this way. It could be argued, and I'm sure it has, that no one has complete freedom in that the likelyhood of them doing any of the possible choices is never equal. There is one think that is most likely, and after it occurs, it could be said that it was the only thing that was ever possible.
I've often thought that this is a sort of dualism. One can think of having freedom while at the same time there really is no freedom because each action follows as the only logical conclusion of the previous events.
So, how does a person interact with another person so that the second person finds themselves believeing in renew through compassion and love while accepting that they will never choose to do certain things that they currently imagine themselves being able to do? Perhaps this is where truth comes in again... and by truth, I mean the entire truth without any falsehoods, misdirections, or other items that do anything other than enhancing and clarifying the truth. Our court system might call this "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". It often seems to me like "the whole truth" is rarely achieved in court.
Ghandi would mention that satya is the essence of whole truth, complete honesty, and fairness. It is coupled with ahimsa or love and the two are inextricably intertwined. I have to say that it is appealing to me that telling the whole complete truth is a way for others to find renew and compassion or love on their own.
And throught telling whole truth and being loving comes happiness and the fullfillment of all of the needs that Maslow and others have described... most noteably, the need to transcend and achieve maximum sustained happiness by doing exactly what one believes is the best and proper thing to do.
In summary... my goal is to help renew and protect the world with its life and near-infinite complexity by being wholely truthful and honest with all in as many ways as I can to open them to the truth of happiness through compassion and understanding their connection to all.
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I admit to and accept the wisdom within each and every one of us and commit to listen with the goal of better understanding. (Namaste)