Wednesday.
Living as if there is a Creator seems to be inseparable from those few great healthy lives throughout history. scholarship I regard indicates that even Jesus was not sure there was a creator to hear what he had to say but he found it indispensible to elevating the goodness within himself to imagine and live as though there is. to my shock I have found the same these last 18 years.
Yesterday I wrote about the saying - you, are a soul, that has a body, and said that from this seed everything we need to know can grow if we ponder it. I think even more surely the path exists for those who value or learn to value goodness above existence itself. As I examine the few lives throughout history that came close to being Paragons of moral emotional mental health this is true of everyone whether or not they articulated it in this way. it is clear from their life path that this is how they were, they valued goodness above all else. It is as though they were as greedy for, lust full for, craving of, more goodness in the world as Donald Trump is greedy for more attention and power and money or as most of us are greedy for more Comfort and intoxication and pleasure and safety and years. This is how I experience myself these last 18 years. At the time of the inexpressibly great Abraham Maslow (NOT his flawed theory hierarchy of needs), in psychology in the 1960s the research indicated that some chickens were better at selecting grain to eat and hence became more healthy then other chickens and hence they were healthier. Maslow said that he could see this among people that only one in 100,000 I think, he said were good at selecting hey way of being conducive to mental health. I think he would agree that what I've just articulated is an advanced expression of this.
Gandhi and James were incorrect, wrong, not the love of a mother FOR her child is the strongest force in the universe but the love of a mother OF her child. The difference being the former has to do with the pulse of the child, the continuation of that pulse. the point is not that that is bad or good but, it is a thing. the love of a mother OF her child's which is extremely rare in this sick culture, but it happens, the love of a mother OF her child is the love of the being of the child the SPIRIT, soul, essence, piece of Creator of the child. It is the love of the soul the spirit which is in essence divine that is the ultimate constructive force in the universe. yes it remains to be seen that it is the ultimate force as the love of the mother for her child, (or her tribe or her church or her nation…. whwhich far reign supreme and is causing the destruction of everything.
Thursday.
Very important ramblings notes to self
Regularly in my adulthood I go from butterfly to caterpillar to butterfly again. The caterpillar literally offers up all of its biological material for a soup, totally disintegrates to become that soup, that then somehow gets organized into the butterfly. I guess the caterpillar is sort of makes of itself a total soup of stem cells and becomes a new thing. I'm going through that faze now as I have many times before.
My current hunch is that for me and those wishing to do good in the world that what we need is to understand this as a mental health mission, that the world is in near total metal disease. I had hoped to find that the words of Jesus and the early Christian ethassists and more recently Leo tolstoy provided the answer. I'm not now very confident of that, I think they pointed us in the correct direction but my current hope is that Abraham maslow in his work in the 60's of the studying the most healthy individuals throughout history catalog for us as best as we needed, is best as we can find, the mental health that we need to build into ourselves and help others achieve. spiritual health might better be a way of understanding this than mental health but I'm guessing that mental health is necessary. Yesthat sets ones efforts up for an avalanche of attack from a very sick industry of psychologists but I think that maybe a risk I'll have to take. The characteristics he found universal among the healthy population were such things as truth goodness beauty wholeness aliveness dichotomy transcendance, playfulness….. ( is famous hierarchy of needs he got wrong but it can be Reformed into an extremely useful tool)
There are substantial benefits to a metal health model including that it is much less likely to become a sect, an organization, a dogma, a club a religion. it's possible but less likely. it is also less likely to become yet one more mechanism of one group to dominate over another although it is still possible. It is more likely to be and remain a soughtafter way of being, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
It continues to be my suspicion as mentioned a few days ago that the Northstar is goodness, one of the several dozen characteristics of healthy people that maslow categorized by the way. although loving tattooed on my face was in the right direction I think it is not sufficient. I think that goodness maybe correct and sufficient and in this the lights of Jesus King Gandhi were also incorrect. God needs to be understood as good and good needs to be understood as God. Gandhi said truth is God no goodness. Teresa Calcutta said it was love life and truth as I recall. no, goodness.
I'm fairly certain that the central hallmark of metal health or the lack thereof is the degree to what which one values goodness even more than the own life or even of the life, pulse, of those they hold most dear life. Crazy unless in fact prevailing goodness is the basis of sustainable pulse which the 2018 world is showing us is the case. This isechoed in the grate Dave Dellinger who said of World War 2, few people chose War, they chose selfishness and the consequence was war.
Jesus seem to have nailed this and surprisingly his followers King and Gandhi got it wrong. it so understandable but goodness not justice is the Northstar and our devotion must be too the metal health of our fellow creatures and not ultimately to their physical well being as difficult is this may be.
Goodness is God. God is goodness. Goodness is God and God must be loved and worshipped above all else. I think this may be it. I think this may be the piece that is been missing.
And it works because without goodness as we are seeing in this 2018 dying world without goodness without the presence and omnipresence of God, of goodness, all life ends.
And a corrilary to this, one must understand that our work, the entire purpose of our life, is to be the seed of metal health, ragingly good, and to act in such a way as to spread that seed and to nurture the few seeds that are already growing or grow as a consequence, understanding that this is a desert wasteland, and that all of the corrilary good we wish to see in the world, the increase of joy, the decrease of suffering, can only happen when there are more people of goodness.
