Pondering..

This doesn't have to religious doctrine. If everyone did it...we could have peace.

 

they can and would more gratifyingly come from curiosity, until most people are robbed of it in childhood.
its one of those big lies that keep life twisted, to conflate 'can' with 'can't otherwise'.

not that most people have the slightest idea when they're doing so.

all of those inner conflicts are manufactured by conflicted social values.
many of which come from dominant western religions, who's dominance comes from their appeal to the human ego.
other factors are involved, such as greed, which is promoted by economic feudalism, which, like bigotry, are forms of aggressiveness.
even ideology. all of them.

none of these things are the default conditions people try to insist each other believe that they are,
motivated further by the illusion that nothing they like or want, could exist otherwise.

its a self serving self fulfilling mess, which has humanity well on the road to destroying itself.

not primarily by war, but by negligent harm to the very means of its own existence.
that is, nature's cycles of renewal, without which, even the very air we breathe, would not exist.

now i'm not saying anything against learning from the errors we have statistically inflicted together on our individual selves,
though i would caution against 'learning' and perpetuating the same continual errors over and over again.

and the way to do that, to over come this mess, both individually and as a species,
is by the application of logic, and the practice, of universally mutual and impartial consideration.

 

Hunter gatherers spend less time in actual hunting and gathering than the hours put in by a worker in agriculture or industry - so I've read.

Whatever the case there, I do think that in past times the pace of life was slower and maybe people had more time for just being rather then constant doing. These days people tend to move from one fabricated set of activities into another. Constant activity. And there's a kind of narrative in the media and elsewhere that unless you're doing that, you're not really living.

Clearly, I'm in a Taoist type mood this evening.

 

Definitely a golden rule. And one that was first enunciated as far as I know by Socrates. It's not that Christianity has a monopoly on this principle, even if it is the most familiar source for our contemporary culture.

 

Clearly

 

I think that hits the hammer right on the nail. If we look at cultures/societies that still live like that we can notice it is often exactly so. Yes, less fancy pastimes and less luxury, but they seem very at ease when they just have what it takes to live. After accomplishing those things they have to put an effort to (often things most of us would surely be struggling with ) they can be 'shamelessly' at peace and feeling satisifed about that. And righteously so of course

 

In an interview not long after his wife's death, Paul McCartney said a great line that I have repeated 100's of times - "Happiness is the exception, and not the norm".
How true.

 

we could create a world in which we didn't have to be distracted from being creative, as long as we were considerate. we could create such a world, by enough of us being considerate.
and being creative is the only thing that makes us anything special, if anything does and we even are.

i really see conflict between sapient beings as a needless and self serving distraction.

i don't buy that we couldn't have developed all the things that are useful and gratifying without it.

nor would we be fouling our own nest now, (as indeed we are) if we had never started romanticizing aggressiveness.

there is no useful technology nor art that couldn't have been developed without it.

sure the pace would have been slower then these past couple of centuries,
but the lost thousand years they were making up for,
would never have been lost,
to the fanaticism it was lost to,
in the first place.

there are of course natural challenges, of discovery and technological development, of making/designing it, to BE considerate.
there is the challenge of learning HOW to be non-harmful.
but these are what it is the moral responsibility to pursue.

and yes, THESE CAN be struggles. but a lot of the struggle that we're used to their being, exists ONLY because of indifference to consideration.