Solidarity
Principle 10 Solidarity – Week 4 – 2024
October 17, 2024
Principle 10. Solidarity. Week 4
When You Treat Others As You Would Have Them Treat You, You Liberate Yourself.
Last time: The Other.
This time: Others, and Even Other Critters Too?
Here’s a few things to consider this week. Besides the opportunity to participate in the various experiences, our next weekly 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.
Last time: The Other.
This time: Others, and Even Other Critters Too?
In previous weeks we have looked at the structure of the principle, and how it was, or could have been applied in the past, and the present. This week we’ll focus on how we might apply this principle in the future, to our pending situations.
Can’t think of anything to say about the future?
Perhaps Start Here:
We may not know what the future holds but we can recognize our anxieties and misgivings. We may not know what will happen but we can know what we hope for and what we fear.
This week to help gain some new perspectives on this principle we will consider not only how it might apply in the future, but we will also play the game of
Explain It!
The Game of the Week:
Feeling Playful?
This week’s game is simple: explain your basic understanding of the principle. Maybe, you slip it into a conversation. Maybe, you announce your intention, e.g. “We are studying these principles of behaviour, let me tell you my take on one we have been discussing this week”.
Of course, you might find it more interesting to engage another player (or players). So, if you can manage to talk to someone that’s great but if you can’t, maybe write down your understanding in an email and send it to me, or to another friend, or to yourself - or don’t ever send it. The point is to put your thoughts, and intuitions into a form that is suitable for sharing.
Of course, not having anyone at hand to play the game with might get you thinking about why that is. Perhaps, it is best seen as an opportunity to reflect on what that absence implies, and perhaps even take measures in enrich your social environment.
Another thing this game has in common with the game of Ask About It! is that it’s a game! In this game our interest is on engaging and communicating. Convincing, preening, recruiting, etc. are outside of the goals of the game. Rather, you are simply sharing your interpretation of something you find interesting.
Thoughts From Me
What follows are my reflections. I make no greater claim for them but offer them in the spirit of exchange and dialogue.
I hope you find these of some use in your own meditations.
We can spend a lot of time thinking about the other: how they see us, and how they treat us, even how we should treat them. We can even meditate on that difficult question of how we want to be treated.
However, all that assumes we know where the dividing line between me and you is drawn. We rarely consider that we may be mistaken about the, seemingly obvious, division between oneself and others. Even more rarely we have experiences that change that topography.
What would happens if for a moment I experience what is human in you and the other as the same.
Some Thoughts on the Roots of the Golden Rule
I have written previously a few times about the biological roots of our behaviour, and ethics. I think it’s an interesting and important topic that certainly has given me important insights into myself and others. For example, we may be more than our other primate cousins but we’re not less. We share a lot in common, including 98+ percent of our DNA. Those old roots are complex and have shaped us in ways that are far from universally negative. All this is what I have at other times referred to as “monkey business”
For a sense of my understanding (I think) delightful, and revealing phrase check out the entry monkey business in my personal Glossary https://www.dzuckerbrot.com/my-life/glossary/m-is-for. It’s a term I use for all those biologically based behaviours, and cultural values, that we sometimes refer to as “mechanical” or “automatisms”. Gotta love that monkey biz!
It seems that other animals have their own versions of these “ethical” behavioural and “moral” values. That is not to say these are as elaborate or complex as those of humans. No one should be surprised to find similarities — or differences — between species. Just as there are important differences between monkeys and chimps (as we will see), there are important differences between chimps and human beings. However, our similarities to our cousins, should not be ignored.
Here’s a couple of minutes of video of a presentation by Dr. Frans de Waal of Emory University. It shows an interesting experiment about fairness they did with monkeys. I have presented this video clip before. If you have seen it you know how cool it is, if not, it’s well worth checking out: http://tinyurl.com/pz98orq
In any case, as the short video makes clear, the monkey’s seem to have something like a sense of fairness. Dr. Waal says the same thing has been found with many (social) animals from certain birds, and other creatures, not surprisingly dogs. He also told me when I interviewed him years ago that while the “underpaid” monkey will protest its own treatment, something different happens with Chimpanzees. Along with Bonobo apes, chimps are our closest non-human relatives. If you do the same experiment but replace the monkeys with chimps who know each other, the “higher paid” one will not only protest any unfairness to itself, but also to its companion. That seems to me to be a step beyond the monkey’s awareness of unfairness to itself. This is a situation where the chimp not only recognizes what is fair, it wants the other treated fairly as well. That certainly feels like it’s a step closer to the Golden Rule!
And so as not to be too primate-centric check out this article about compassion among birds.
Remember:
“Here the worldly is not opposed to the eternal”.
The Inner Look 1:4
Consider:
A few minutes of reflection at the beginning and end of each day is about as simple a procedure as there could be, but it can produce wonderful and unexpected results.
And here’s an even simpler expedient:
A Gift:
In some moment of the day or night inhale a breath of air and imagine that you carry this air to your heart. Then, ask with strength for yourself and for your loved ones. Ask with strength to move away from all that brings you contradiction; ask for your life to have unity. Don't take a lot of time with this brief prayer, this brief asking, because it is enough that you interrupt for one brief moment what is happening in your life for this contact with your interior to give clarity to your feelings and your ideas.
Silo_ La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005
Worth Repeating:
“Here the worldly is not opposed to the eternal”.
The Inner Look 1:4
Coming up:
Next week we will take some time to reflect on the course of our lives so far, and how things have been going with us over the last months.
Note:
Flavio will be our host next week.
These notes have been posted on our Facebook page (Community of Silo’s Message Toronto Annex), sent to our email list, and are also on my webpage at www.dzuckerbrot.com
Until Next Time …