Principle 10 Solidarity – Week 3 – 2022

 October 18, 2022 

 “When You Treat Others As You Would Have Them Treat You, You Liberate Yourself.”.

Here’s some things to consider this week. Besides the opportunity to participate in the weekly experiences, our next meeting will be a chance for an interchange about your thoughts, insights, examples and questions. 

You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting. We hope you can join us. 

As always: if you no longer wish to receive these mailings or if you know people who would like to be included in them just let me know.

Last time: The Social Dimension
This time: Discovering Ourselves

Principle of Valid Action 10. The Principle of Solidarity. Week 3

This Week:
In the last two weeks we looked at the principle’s structure and general meaning as well as how it applied, or could have applied in our past.

This week's focus is on the present and how we might apply the principle of solidarity in current situations.

An Invitation

Each week we propose considering a principle in light of its  general meaning, and its application in our past, present, or future. Setting aside a minute or so every day to try and find one or two concrete examples in my life is a simple and powerful tool that can dramatically increase my understanding of the principles. In that brief work I make an effort to see, recall or imagine the impact of applying (or not applying) the principle in question. Interestingly the crucial thing isn’t whether I find clear examples or not. Like many of others, I have discovered that the effort itself is well rewarded by the new intuitions and understandings that arise over the next days.

Personal Reflections:

Last week I sent out something Roberto wrote a year earlier about the broad social dimension of the principles. I had some things planned for this email but at tonight’s meeting Mark mentioned a talk Silo gave about “the Golden Rule” that had been incorporated into the Manual for Messengers (a short book worth a lot of study). So I’ve decided to post part of that text here. Before doing that here’s something I mentioned  at the meeting, it’s something from a 1989 talk Silo gave in Potrerillos, Argentina: 

Some say we have to “treat the other as the other wants to be treated”. But we don’t know what the other really wants, or how they feel. And we certainly can’t tell them what they should do. For us the emphasis is placed on my action, leaving me with a memory of having acted with unity. 

I recognize in the other an intentionality like mine, and a field of freedom that places limits on me.  We are not alone, isolated in our own consciousness. On the contrary we are inter-connected, we influence others and they influence us. From this point of view it is not indifferent to your evolution, what you do, or how you treat others.

And…. taken from  the Manual for Messengers: Excerpted from a talk by Silo, Las Palmas, Canary Islands 

September 29, 1978 

Revised by the author, October 10, 1996

In very general principles we have indicated the registers of valid action, and highest among these principles is the one known as the “golden rule.” This principle says, “When you treat others as you want them to treat you, you liberate yourself.” This is not a new principle – it is thousands of years old, and in many parts of the world, in many cultures, it has withstood the test of time. It is a universally accepted and valid principle that has been formulated in various ways – sometimes in the negative, as in “Do nothing to others that you do not want them to do to you.” That is simply another approach to the same idea, as is the formulation, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Of course, it is not exactly the same as saying, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” But that’s all right; however they may have phrased it, since ancient times people have invoked this, the highest of all moral principles, the highest of all principles of valid action. 

But how do I want others to treat me? Even if we take it as given that it is good to treat others as I want them to treat me, exactly how is it that I want to be treated? I will have to answer this question by saying that if other people treat me in certain ways they are treating me badly, and if they treat me in other ways they are treating me well. I will have to answer this in terms of good and bad. Once again, I will have to return to the eternal wheel of defining valid action according to one theory or another or one religion or another. For me, a certain thing is good, but another person may see this differently. And there will never fail to be people who treat others very badly, while still claiming to be applying the same principle, because supposedly these people like to be treated badly. 

This principle that speaks of treating others according to how I want them to treat me, according to what would be good for me, is all very well. But it would be even better if I knew what would be good for me. So that’s how things stand, and we’re interested in turning now to the basis of valid action, and the basis of valid action lies in the register that one obtains from this action. 

If I say that I should treat others as I want them to treat me, immediately I find myself asking, Why should I? But it’s as if there is some internal process or some way in which the mind functions that creates problems inside me when I treat others badly. But what type of function could this be? If I see someone in a very bad state, if I see someone suddenly cut or injured in some way, something resonates inside of me. But how can something that is happening to another person echo inside of me? It seems almost magical! It happens that when someone is in an accident, somehow I experience, almost physically, the register of the accident in that other person. 

As students of these phenomena, you know that to every perception there corresponds an image, and you understand that there are images that can cause certain points in one’s body to tense up, just as other images can cause them to release tension. If every perception is linked to a representation, and that representation in turn has its register – that is, a new sensation – then it is not so hard to understand how when I perceive a phenomenon there is an internal image that corresponds to that phenomenon. And when that image is mobilized, certain parts of my body or intra-body can experience a corresponding sensation, since they have been modified by the action of that image. I feel “identified” when someone is injured, because the visual perception of that phenomenon is accompanied by the triggering of a visual image and, correlatively, an unleashing of coenesthetic and tactile images. In addition, these images carry with them a new sensation that ends up provoking in me a register of the other’s injury. So it cannot be good for me to treat other people badly, because when I do I have a corresponding register in myself. 

Let’s look at this almost technically. In order to do that, we’ll simulate the functioning of the mental circuits, step by step, even though we know that the structure of the consciousness works as a whole. But for the sake of illustration, we can separate out a “first circuit” that is comprised of the initial perception and its representation, then a re-taking of the representation, and finally an internal sensation. And we can separate out a “second circuit” that has to do with action, whose results might be described as follows: For every action that I launch into the world, I also have an internal register. That feedback is what allows me, for example, to learn things through doing them. If there were no such feedback from the actions I take, I could never perfect them. I learn to type, for example, by repetition; that is to say, it is through trial and error that I record these actions. But I can record actions only through performing them. It is through the doing of actions that I have a register of them…

…It is not, then, a matter of indifference which actions one carries out in the world. There are actions that give one a register of unity, and there are other actions that give one a register of contradiction and dis-integration. If we study this carefully, in light of what we know about cathartic and transferential phenomena, the matter of one’s actions in the world with respect to the effect of those actions on the integration and development of one’s contents, will be much clearer. And, of course, all this simulation of circuits we have gone through in order to understand the meaning of valid action is part of this complicated subject. 

Meanwhile, our friend keeps asking us, “What should I do?” Even if we have only a minimal knowledge of these things, we register it as unifying and worthwhile when, through simple words and deeds, we offer what we know to that disoriented person, who is without references in his or her life. Even if no one else offers help to this person, we make what we have available – as we offer so many other things that allow people to overcome pain and suffering. And in doing so, we will also be working for ourselves. 

Remember:

Meditation isn’t Only for When You Close Your Eyes.

It is here amid all the little joys and daily crap that we can actually create a discipline that can be practiced at every moment and in every circumstance. This is a dynamic meditation, requiring neither particular postures, nor special conditions. With time and application these efforts give all my activities a particular tone, mood, and mental direction.  

 Worth Repeating:

“Learn to treat others in the way that you want to be treated.” 

From: The Path — Silo

Coming up:

Next week we will continue with our considerations of The Principle of Solidarity, in relation to future situations.