When Mr. Newton articulated The Law of Gravity, he didn’t invent anything. He simply made implicit truth explicit. When he shared his thoughts with other astronomers, he didn’t say; “I have pronounced, therefore believe!” He asked them to consider the concept and compare it to their real life observations and experience and see if they agree that the concept was implicit truth. (If something is implicit truth, it belongs to anyone who can learn to see it directly for themselves.)
I do not ask anyone to simply accept the ideas expressed on this web site as truth. I ask only that they consider the concepts and compare them to their own life experience, and decide for themselves if these concepts seem valid.
“In terms of your experience,” is a vitally important phrase.
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I read in a psychology text book that the four basic emotions of human beings are mad, sad, glad and scared. We cannot feel any of these unless we first of all care. It is the fundamental nature of every living thing to care. It is the desire to be whole, to be healthy and to fully express each creatures implicit potential. Each creature, plant or animal, has a different potential to be discovered through growth.
Human beings are caring (emotional) creatures first and rational only as needed to achieve the things that we care about.
To care is the Spirit of the Universe.
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The people at the top of our economic ladder are people stuck at the learning-to-be-self-effectual level. They have a neurotic fixation on material accumulation and social-image as a means of pacifying their fear of being treated to uncaring. To find true fulfillment they must discover the value of social service as a means of learning to feel valued because they are of real value to the community. To be personally effective, much of this service must be on a person to person level, and not so much as abstractions like donating money to good causes.. As they are more and more successful at this, their need for material wealth and their willingness to share their knowledge and wealth will increase. Bill Gates is an example. I believe he is a much happier and more fulfilled individual now than he was when he was primarily focused on material and professional achievement. One of the difficulties for this group of people is that most of them live in gated communities where acceptance is highly conditional. Probably most of the people in these communities are rather judgmental. Being judgmental is about who is worthy of caring about and who is not. It is an all or nothing point of view.
When I was young I looked up in a dictionary the word moral. I found nothing that I considered useful. Then I looked at the word morale. People who have a high morale have a can-do spirit. They believe that they can succeed and have a lot of hope and are willing to invest in their lives. People who are low in morale believe that others are the primary controllers of their life. They have low expectations of success and feel very ineffectual. They are generaly unwilling tp put out much effort to invest in their lives. "The power of sacrificial (investment) suffering" is about the willingness to invest, suffer whatever it takes, to make a better future.
The word responsibility refers to having the ability to respond. The more knowledgeable (enlightened) I am, the more I understand that I have many choices about the way I chose to respond to my needs. I can see that the specific way I choose to respond, can have a positive or negative effect on the morale of other people; and on my own morale.
Morale responsibility in implicit truth. It's there to be seen if we look for it.
Developing a personal morale discipline requires a lot of serious and sustained work.
Throughout our national history we have never had the capacity, i.e. morale responsibility, to ensure that everyone in the world has the food that they need. It was morally acceptable and responsible to limit our selves to taking care of your own needs and your communitys needs, while assuming that there will always be people out outside your community we cannot help and will always suffer. It is not true that there will always be the suffering poor. I understand that it is now possible to produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, but, we are not currently organized to do so. If it is not true, we can make it a priority and make it so. The super-wealthy people of this nation need to get off their self-indulgent obsessions and, as private citizens, organize to solve this food distribution challenge. They will be far happier people as a result. These individuals, our nation and the world will never know peace until all the people of the world know that they are cared about. There is no other way.
People don’t fight wars unless they feel a threat to an essential need, material or emotional (spiritual?)
One of the reasons that reactionism is increasing is that people see this country and the world changing and they fear that in the coming future no one will care for them. Our country as a whole doesn’t have a clear vision of a future that looks desirable. Many people are afraid of what the future will be. We need to develop a national vision that our country is dedicated to, in due time, insuring that everyone in the world will have the food they need. This will be only the next step in our commitment to eventual world peace, which is not only possible, but the only rational goal. As we are successful at this, there will be less and less war. As the wars lessen the need for arms and war machinery will lessen. These resources can then be invested in peace, thereby accelerating the progress toward peace. The goal well be to invert the Maslow’s needs triangle for the whole world. All nations could commit to this goal.
Outer space will always be there. We need to focus on word peace first, and then explore!
As we reduce the need for national military defense, we can use those resources to improve world community.
To be in service is the cure for materialism. To know that we are self-effectual and know that we are valued because we help others to become self-effectual is the way to lose the obsession with material success and find a much greater joy. We can enjoy our own success and the joy of others succeeding. Materialism is an attempt-to-solve that can never adequately fulfill the underlying need.
Nature – getting it done with less.
With time and effort Maslow’s triangle turns upside down.
The first lesson we learn in life, at birth, is that none of our needs will be met unless others care about us. I picture a plain in the mid-west. From the trail in the prairie grass you can see that a wagon train has just been through. You can see the last wagon disappearing on the far horizon. In the foreground is a child left behind, alone. Our worst fear is to feel that nobody cares and that there is nothing we can do about it. This is the feeling of shame. Our amygdala will see this lack of caring as a threat to our survival.
So much of our culture is about outside appearances and images. We try to project images that we hope will protect us from that feeling of being kicked out into the prairie grass. When I try to work on my self-esteem, I only become more narcissistic and self-evolved. Friends told me that I should get into service, that if I learned to do things that are of value to others, I would soon start feeling like a valued person. I have learned the value of service, being in service helps me feel safely a member of the community. I think that the mental health field doesn't place enough, if any, value on service for clients. This could give them the immediate experience of feeling valued as people and of feeling like being constructive members of the community. For me to feel more and more a valued person is absolutely essential for me to more fully develop my implicit potential as constructive member of society.
The self-esteem movement has pointed in the wrong direction. It has promoted the notion that the purpose of life is to feel good.
I found the following meditation on the web.
Meditation for the Day
Life is not a search for happiness. Happiness is a by-product of living the right kind of a life, of doing the right thing. Do not search for happiness; search for right living and happiness will be your reward. Life is sometimes a march of duty during dull, dark days. But happiness will come again, as God's smile of recognition of your faithfulness. True happiness is always the by-product of a life well lived.
If you prefer: God = caring and truth.
It seems that schools so that, if they tell Johnny that he is failing and that he wouldn’t learn math unless he does his homework, it makes him feel bad. (That is not a nice thing to do.) They support his social standing by promoting him along with his classmates so he will feel better. They would do him far more good by helping him to learn that you have to WORK at education in order to accumulate knowledge. There is an underlying current in current American culture that says, any criticism is bad and meant to hurt people’s feelings and lower their self-esteem. I think that when I see young men wearing their pants so low that they might fall off, their intended message is; “You should be caring about me as a person, and not criticizing the way I dress.” We have a long way to go. We have to be sure that people KNOW that they are cared about, before we can teach them the importance of hard work, even suffering, in order to achieve their important and valuable goals.
The concept of sacrifice is widely misunderstood. In the game of chess, if I lose my queen capturing one of your minor pieces and gain no advantage from that, it is not a sacrifice, it is a waste. If I trade my queen for one of your minor pieces and in doing so put myself in a position to force a checkmate, that is a sacrifice. A sacrifice is a wise investment to make a greater gain.
In 1965, I spent three weeks in Selma, Alabama, including the march to Montgomery. I met a large group of people who believed, deep down, that they had to be willing to suffer whatever it took to achieve their clearly stated goals. I heard people say, “To suffer for no good reason is misery; to willingly suffer for a worthy cause can make you strong.” They became immensely powerful and changed a nation and greatly influenced the world.
(If I decide to make others suffer to achieve my goal, that is terrorism.)
The word nonviolence is an unfortunate term. It points away, not toward. Mohandas Gandhi used the word Satyagraha which includes the concepts of insistence on truth and moral force. It’s about tapping into deep, deep caring. If you truly care, you want to deal only with truth.
There is another area that is absolutely essential to wellness, which is the area often referred to as confession. Removing feelings of shame is absolutely necessary for access to truth to and the free development of personality. We have to believe that the people around us are caring. And, we have to believe that we are worth caring about. These are two sides of one coin and not spreadable. The more we feel that others are conditional in their caring, the more we condemn ourselves for not meeting those conditions. The more we feel that others are unconditional in their caring, the more we feel that we are worth caring about and we can more freely search for truth. I believe that our self-images and our world-images are a matched set and not separable.
Two thousand years ago the term "sin" was an archery term. It meant "to miss the mark." Jesus said that we should get together with trusted, caring friends and confess our screw-ups to one another, then we could feel safe or and free from caring abandonment. I.e. stop pretending that we always have all our ducks in a row, and instead talk about our misses. We must test these waters over and over again. We must continually share with our loving friends all those things about which we might feel shame. When we do we learn that they will not withhold their caring, thus freeing us from shame, though not necessarily from guilt. When we do share these things, we often find that others feel safe enough to share their feelings of shame. In this way we turn what we feel as our liability of shame into an asset to benifit other. Confess your shame to one another and you will begin to feel safe. There is a saying: “you are only as sick as your secrets.”
In the early days of AA most of the program was person to person dialogue carried out in the living rooms and around kitchen tables. The "meetings" were a formal, structured process referred to as "coming to terms with life." Someone would pick a term or topic (conceptual) and then individuals would talk as honestly as possible about the topic "in terms of their own experience" (actual.) These were all monologues and everyone was expected to talk only on the topic. A typical topic might be “honesty.” Participants might talk about their experiences of being dishonest and what that was like and about their experiences of being honest and what that was like. In this very non-judgmental environment, repeatedly oscillating between the abstract and the concrete with as much honesty as they can, people can become more and more free of shame. This lessens the need for a ridged self-image and lessens fear of revelation of truth. People learn to live principled lives. They learn that the end is the inescapable result of the means; this is both the bad news and the good news.
Many churches have adopted the early style process, calling it Small Group Ministry or Covenant Groups. Groups of 8 to 10 people are formed which meet every week or two. They pick a topic and work to talk about that subject "in terms of their own experience." They work to understand life both in terms of the abstract and the concrete. Many of these groups also take on a group service project in the general community.
I would like to see some kind of "Coming to terms with life", or "Wisdom" groups" developed in the mental health field. These groups would not be oriented toward solving immediate problems, as therapy groups generally are. These group meetings would simply be the ongoing work of trying to understand our life experience in terms of broad concepts. The necessary guidelines and facilitator training could be developed. These groups could be facilitated in such way that the participants could gradually feel safe enough to reveal things that they fear that they might be shamed for. Eventually they could feel safe enough be able to describe their experiences with somewhat the detachment of a reporter, with very little judgment or shame, just the quest for truth.
I believe that there two fundamental requirements to good mental health: 1. to acquire frequent experiences of actually being valued by others, and 2. to be freed from the fear of shame, the fear of being kicked out into the prairie grass.
Human beings are caring, or emotional creatures, first, and rational only as necessary to achieve the things we care about. If we wish to understand people, we must first find out what it is that they care about. When we are born, the first thing we learn from experience is that our needs are met only when others care for us. This is the most powerful imprinting in our psyche. Our most strongly felt survival need is to feel that we are among people who care for us.
The part of our brain that first responds to perceived threats to our survival is called the Amidala, a part of the Limbic System. It creates glandular responses to help us respond to a perceived threat to our survival. The most important fact to understand about the Amygdala is that it responds not to external objects or perceptions, but to images in our head. Perceived external objects or situation have no meaning to us until we ascribe meaning to an image in our head of that situation or object.
The Amygdala is constantly, 24x7 & sec.by sec., scanning our brain for perceived threats to our survival. The absence of the feeling that there are people around us who care for us is deemed to be a threat to our survival. If an infant is ignored or abandoned for too long, it will start sending our locater signals. “Hey, I’m over here, I need to be cared for.”
If, as we grow up in an unconditional-caring environment, our self-image can change according to whatever we are doing at the time. Changes in these images will not trigger worry about our survival. (Unconditional caring is not the same as uncritical caring. If we care about someone, we will offer them critical information.) When we grow up in a highly conditional-caring environment, we learn that, if we don’t project images of meeting those conditions, we will not receive the caring that we need to survive. This fear-based feeling that we must project a certain self-image in order to survive is mistakenly called “pride.” People often use words that that they don’t really understand. Ego is one of those words. I think that when many psychologists use the work, they are referring to that part of us that cares. I think that when many people use the work, they are referring to excess defenses of a ridged self-image or perceived self-interest.
Have you ever had the experience of doing something in front of a group, feeling certain that you are doing a great job, and certain to be receiving praise, then suddenly feel that you have made a complete ass of yourself? The physical sensations that you feel are the Limbic system fear response.
People are irrational only when they don’t clearly understand their emotions and motives.
The problem is not emotional vs. rational. To care is the most important thing we can do. The fundamental need is to rationally understand our emotions. The moment we are born we begin the most powerful imprinting we will ever receive. We discover our total incompetence. We discover that, if someone else doesn’t care for us, we won’t survive. Throughout our lives, our most fundamental need is to feel that other people are caring and that we are worthy of being cared about. To openly admit this need to others is to expose our complete vulnerability. If this need is not adequately met in childhood, most of the things we think we want are actually disguised efforts to meet our primary need, to feel cared about.
It is impossible to feel mad, sad, glad or scared unless first of all we care. To care is our most deeply felt and fundamental emotion. There is nothing wrong with caring about our own success at living. Actually, it’s necessary for our mental and physical health. The problem occurs when we are ineffective at recognizing our fundamental need to feel cared about and can’t work directly to meet this need. When we try to meet this need indirectly, which can’t be fully effective, we see failure to achieving our false goals as a threat to our most fundamental need. If I can’t find out how to fulfill my own needs, how can I possibly help someone else fulfill their needs?
Because we often don’t clearly and rationally understand actual our motives, we will often pursue our false goal at the expense of other people’s wellbeing. We misuse our rationality to explain our efforts. Our most often used tool to convince ourselves and others that we are care-worthy is to try to maintain a particular self-image that we think attractive. (We can be quite wrong about that.) If anyone threatens that image, we may see it as survival threat. “The man dissed me, so I shot him.” There is no deeper fear that to feel that no one cares and there is nothing I can do about it.
The section of our brain that, 24-7, second by second, keeps track of whether or not we feel safely cared about is called the Amygdala. Its primary function is to warn us of any perceived threat to our survival or wellbeing. I think it also recognizes to things that enhance our survival. The field of psychology does not seem to yet fully understand this 24-7, second by second function of this section of the brain. To try to understand human behavior without fully understanding the Amygdala’s interpretation of symbolic images, is as foolish as trying to understanding astronomy without understanding the Law of Gravity.
Accomplishing more with less is a natural universal trend.
A law of physics states that a system will give off free energy until it has no more free energy to give off. After it gives off this energy, it remains a fully functional system, using the minimum required energy. The energy given off is not lost or destroyed; it is made available to other systems. I believe that this is a fundamental pattern in the universe. At one time we human beings spent most of our time worrying about physical safety and hunting and gathering for food. As we became more efficient at this, we had time to contemplate our experience and learned about agriculture. As we became more efficient at this we began to learn about tinkering and small manufacturing. As time passed by, we had time available for heavy manufacturing, then on to service industry. As time goes by we become more and efficient at meeting our survival needs; we accomplish more and more with our full measure of energy.
Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of our needs. Some are more fundamentally necessary than others. He used a triangle, with a wide base and a point at the top, to organize this idea. The vertical position is to indicating the most necessary at the bottom and the least important at the top. As we become more efficient at the base level, we have more time to devote to the next level up. For a fully mature, actualizing person the triangle becomes inverted. We spend less and less time thinking about ourselves and more time thinking about others and the community as a whole. This is not because we don’t care about ourselves, it is because we have learned to clearly understand our actual needs and learned to effectively take care of those needs. Such people find live vastly rewarding lives because they successfully care about so much and so many, including themselves.
I was recently talking with a friend who has a Ph.D. in psychology. When I stated that I think that one of our survival needs is to learn how to take care of ourselves, he reacted strongly against the idea. He seemed to assume that I meant that we take care of ourselves at the expense of others. In order to maintain our own morale, we must always consider the morale of others. We can do that while effectively taking care of our legitimate needs.
If a person is unable to adequately fill their need for food, they might pretend to be moving up the hierarchy to the level of socializing. The will socialize with the people who they hope can help them fulfill their need for food. As a conscious strategy this might be a good survival move. People get in trouble when they don’t understand their actual motivation. The more accurately we can understand our actual needs, the more effectively we can fulfill them. When we try to use a narcissistic self-image as a tool to get others to care about us, we will never feel truly cared about.
What is most responsible for our difficulties is when we do not understand our real motivation, when we think we are pursuing one need, when we are actually indirectly pursuing a more fundamental need. Some people, mostly guys, invest huge sums of money to customize their cars. They do this because they want to be seen as someone that people might care about. If they more clearly understood the underlying motive, they could achieve it much more directly and efficiently.
I believe that when we are born into the world, the first thing we learn from experience is that none of our needs are met unless someone else cares for us. This need to feel that we are in a caring environment is imprinted into our psyche, the Amygdala, as our most fundamental and powerful survival need. It will affect us all during the entire rest of our lives.
It is impossible to feel any emotion, mad, sad, glad or scared unless we care. Human beings are caring, or emotional, creatures first, and rational only as needed to achieve the things that we care about. Relating is the process of discovering and clarifying what we and others care about.
The art of successful dialogue is a disciplined form of relating, and the most important tool of a truly civilized human being. We cannot truly engage in dialogue until we overcome our fear of revelation of truth.
Morale - noun: a state of individual psychological well-being based upon a sense of confidence and usefulness and purpose
noun: the spirit of a group that makes the members want the group to succeed
noun: The state of the spirits of a person or group as exhibited by confidence, cheerfulness, discipline, and willingness to perform assigned tasks.
We spend most of our lives entertaining ourselves in front of the mirror in our mind’s eye, the Amygdala.
The amygdala is the part of the brain that first receives input from our senses. It has the first opportunity to warn us of threats to our survival. When stimulus enters our brain, an image is formed. That image is immediately compared to known images stored in our brain to see what meaning has been assigned to that image. If there is an implied threat to our survival or wellbeing, the limbic system initiates hormonal secretions to heighten our awareness and prepare us to meet that threat.
It is vitally important to understand that the Amygdala does not respond to what is outside of us. It responds to meaning attached to images INSIDE our head. Things outside of us have no meaning. Images inside our head, is where meaning is stored. The Amygdala is constantly scanning the images in our head for threats or enhancements to our survival or wellbeing. When we think we are “looking good,” that people will care about us, the limbic system is at peace. If we feel we have greatly blundered, that people will not care about us, the limbic system will be alarmed, stressed. Sometimes we handle this stress by engaging g in fantasy. Fantasizing ourselves as someone that others would value can keep the Limbic System calmed down. These fantasy images of being self-effectual and cared about pacify the Amygdala and reduce stress.
Sometimes we cling to an unrealistic self-image that we think are vital to having others caring about us. If someone tries to devalue that image, we may become deeply frightened and rigidly adhere to that false image. As in: “The fool dissed me so I shot him.” This is what is often called egotism.
Among people who study psychology there is a common fallacy that the Limbic System is obsolete. I have read test that state it is no longer relevant to modern life. They observe people having what is clearly a limbic system fear response, but they don’t understand why it is happening. They don’t see a danger and don’t understand why the reaction is happening. They say dumb things like, “There is no bear in the room.” They reason that the system is reaction to things that are no longer there, like Saber Tooth Tigers. They are looking outside the person to identify the source of the threat. They don’t understand that the threat is an image inside the person’s mind.
In a freshman psychology class, the text described an experiment performed in class rooms. An image would be flashed on a screen for a very, very short time. The picture show was of a banana with the center one third removed. If the time was short enough all the students swore they had seen a whole banana. If I were walking in the woods, heard a pine cone fall and as I turn my head and see something the same color and approximate shape as a mountain lion, I may react as if I actually saw a real mountain lion. This is only because I have a previously stored image of a mountain lion and have attached a feeling of danger to that image.
We hide the need inside.
(The following is an idea that I am quite sure that someone else could write far more effectively.)
I picture an ancient city-state, a small mountain surrounded by a wall. The rich and powerful live on the hill and the poor and needy live on the flat land closer to the wall. Being kicked outside the wall greatly increases the chances of losing your life. The people at the top appear to have material abundance and very little need. Those at the bottom seem to have nothing but need. People in the meddle want to present the image of having material success and little need. They want to associate with those above, because they might share their materials and their knowledge of being successful, self-effectual. This helps those above to feel that they are cared about. The people in the middle avoid associating with people below them. They fear that this would make them appear to also be poor and needy; having nothing to give.
In many social settings, such as high school and college, the guy who has money many girlfriends is the one all the girls want. (It is socially acceptable to want him.) The guy who is needy is to be avoided. He must have nothing to offer. In a world where people have matured to the level of wanting to be of service, seeing some who has a need shows them an opportunity to be of service and valued.
