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RE: Beautiful Photos from a day trip in Kent (Deal)
That daughter won't have anything to do with me now. So I treasure my memories of her. She always had a favorite and a best, so allowed herself to pick two things. She ran around barefoot and wondered why everyone didn't. And she was (and still is) a wonderful visual artist, as was her sister.
Sorry to hear that she is not in touch with you. It must be painful. She sounds like an interesting woman.
It is painful. "Honor your parents" is taught for a reason, and is primarily for the benefit of the child, not the parent. I don't fault her. The breakup of my marriage involved anger, yelling, and violence, and this daughter was harmed by it much more than her older sister.
I am an activist because of that experience. "Activist" is an understatement. For me, it is a personal war against selfishness that has become the reason for all that I do. So I have thought deeply about selfishness, what I can personally do about it, and what can be accomplished if others get involved.
Interesting. Selfishness is an outcome of ego driven and fear, which is a problem with most people. I don't know much about "war against", I prefer working on growing up in conciseness and in love. Which probably what you mean. Understanding that working together and helping others is the only way for everyone.
I am extremely "left brain", which means that you need to mix me equal parts with "right brained" people. @cause-no-harm and I have been conversing, and your remark resembles some that he has made.
By "unselfish", I mean "wholesomely connected", which is also my definition of "love" as in the Love Teaching of Jesus (or of Hillel). For me, as well as for @cause-no-harm I think, it is all about connection.
Me speaking of my "war on selfishness" exposes the pattern of my thinking as the thinking of a warrior. My life is the life of a warrior, in the sense that I experience life as a constant battle in which I face enemies who use force to try to destroy me.
But even a warrior cannot sustain himself on a battlefield for more than a few minutes. Without a "village", a warrior has nowhere to retreat in order to rest and recover, and he also has nothing to fight for, no reason to be a warrior.
My thirst for community, for a village, is thus as urgent as is my thirst for "blood". I'm speaking metaphorically here; my activism is not violent, and my fighting occurs with words in a courtroom.
I see. interesting. Are you familiar with Tom Campbell work? If you have time I recommend listening to him on YouTube. - https://www.youtube.com/user/twcjr44
I've done a test once to see if I am left or right brain and the results showed that I am exactly in the middle - which explains my balance between the world of logic and intuition.
Just watched a few minutes into two of the videos I found there. They were very long videos. (4+ hours each.) Perhaps in our conversation I will get a sense of his ideas as you've understood them.
I'm new here and would be pleased to become acquainted with you, your thoughts, whatever you want to share.
Sure, I will be happy to share some of his ideas with you. There are few short videos (2 minutes) there that try to give a description about his theories, maybe you can try them? https://www.youtube.com/user/twcjr44/videos
Thanks. I watched this one:
It's only two minutes long, so the following comment might well fail to comprehend what he has to say.
I have the same skepticism regarding his idea that I have with a similar idea promoted by @cause-no-harm. In a nutshell, in a world that is inherently violent, becoming caring and giving and nonviolent will not bring you peace. It will bring you death. (To see this, imagine a group of monkeys in a jungle all deciding to become nonviolent and caring and giving. Assume that they live in a place where food is plentiful, and there is a second group of monkeys who are starving and violent.)
Humanity has no hope of improving its situation until it UNDERSTANDS its situation. Groping toward an understanding of our situation, an analytical understanding, will require centuries of hard work in various social sciences. Perhaps 200 years from now, humanity will be able to transform its situation through personal transformation. But today, if any individual or group does that, it will merely create a vacuum into which force and violence will flow to exploit the absence of an opposing force.
See my village/hunt metaphore in my blog. The village mode of thinking (empathy giving compassion etc.) is appropriate for the village. It is not appropriate for the hunt or on the battlefield. The village/hunt metaphore isn't really just a metaphore. It remains the way of human society and of Nature, and it will always be so.