The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help AnimalsI’m very grateful for the comments posted to my last Equinox entry. They’re so thought-provoking and full of wisdom. One of them has inspired today’s entry: Freeman wrote, “we must address issues and actions from a place of selflessness and love for all involved. We should not ask ourselves ‘what is best for us?’ (for the answer to this will come unbidden), but instead, ‘what is best for all beings and the environment, including those who will be here generations after us?’”
How can we challenge ourselves to choose what is best for others even if doing so means sacrificing the satisfaction of some of our desires? I think one of the answers to this question is both simple and wonderfully positive: doing good for others is, itself, satisfying. This is hardly news, but in our materialistic culture, where we are bombarded by countless messages that things will satisfy not only our deepest desires but also our deepest needs, it is easy to forget that things don’t bring joy, but generosity and kindness often do.
The truth is that living a life in which MOGO is a guiding principle often offers the deepest satisfaction and the most profound happiness. When we forsake a desire for a thing or action that causes harm in order to satisfy a desire to live peacefully and joyfully, we may find that the challenge of choosing what is best for others turns out to be the greatest opportunity for ourselves.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Altruism, Choosing what's best, Doing Good, Generosity, Joy, Joyful living, Kindness, Peaceful living, Satisfaction
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Thinking of others can not only bring satisfaction, but also bring other direct benefits. For example, after spending some time looking for a new office chair, today I found a used chair that looked like it was a good choice. Knowing I didn’t have too many other obvious outlets for used chairs, my desire not to purcahse something new made it easy to decide. I saved time and energy not looking at more chairs. Even if I didn’t get exactly what I wanted aesthetically, I still come out ahead on balance as my time and energy are a lot more important to me than the exact fabric of the desk chair.
This type of benefit comes in other ways. Every new thing I bring home needs to be stored, may have instructions to master, may need to be fixed at some point and finally will need to be disposed of, preferably in an environmentally considerate manner, of course. By thinking about my impact on the planet of additional purchases, I buy less and also simplify my life, making it better.
When we ask ourselves, “What is best for all species and the environment” and do our best to live accordingly to the answer, we will find that we are inevitabely doing also what is best for ourselves. We too will benefit from living with love and compassion in our hearts for everyone, we do will benefit when the air is clean and the waters are pure, we too will benefit when the wild animals are roaming freely, because we are all connected.
“No one is free, when others are oppressed”. When we learn to live in a way that we find ways to benefit, while everyone else benefits, instead of benefitting off the suffering of others, we will truly be free, and have a life full of happiness and deep love.
Ok, so how does an individual go about determining:
‘what is best for all beings and the environment, including those who will be here generations after us?’
or,
“To choose what is best for the distant future” and “To choose what is best for the near future”?
I find it personally daunting to consider what is “best” in day to day life – I still try but can be overwhelmed.
I feel that my decision processes are analogous to the problem with present day computer chess programs. They are effective largely because they rapidly consider a vast number of possible moves no matter how poor many of the moves might be. Chess masters, on the other hand consciously consider many fewer moves helped by some pre-selection process, which appears to be unconscious even to the master, that weeds out the junk moves. This skill is in part innate but also requires an enormous amount of practice (makes perfect…)
We are always making choices which like the chess master involve a conscious decision and also some sort of unconscious pre-selection.
Clearly we are unable to use the chess program method of brute force consideration of all options in our search for MOGO. How do we, if we can, “program” our pre-selection filter so that our daily decisions are easier? Is it automatically shaped by what we are exposed to? Is this in part what IHE’s mission is?
the desk chairs that our mom use are always leather based instead of using cloth covers~-~