Ideas can matter more than armaments
Here are demonstrations that we-the-people aren’t helpless. They contribute to my case that we-the-people should be proactive in looking for what to do to get us going in a better direction.
You can share with me any ideas you have -- I’m collecting and advocating.
My SUE Speaks website is being transformed from featuring my podcast and my Delight a Day mailings, to featuring these Substack mailings and the ideas that get generated. There’s some easy organizing people can do with clever ideas that thanks to the web can make a difference, and we should be looking for what would contribute to TURNING THE WORLD AROUND: a Focal Point for Ideas. I’ll house it on SUE Speaks for now. It’s a track that even the progressive political world isn’t on. It’s all gadflies now, and this could be where we come together.
These are new things I just found that we-the-people could do to change the ambiance of humanity. They are just good ideas that got organized to get them into play:
Building Bridges: These Dutch Students Live in Nursing Homes
They offer free rent to young people studying at university; all the young people have to do in return is dedicate 30 hours each month to socialize with elderly residents. This includes showing them how to use email and social media, playing games and simply talking.
Dutch Supermarket Adds “Slow Checkout Lanes” for Senior Citizens Who Could Use a Chat
https://mymodernmet.com/dutch-supermarket-slow-lanes-kletskassa/
Jumbo, a Netherlands-based supermarket chain with over 700 stores, introduced a Kletskassa, which translates to “chat checkout”…Jumbo introduced these “slow lanes” back in summer 2019 as part of a wider initiative called One Against Loneliness, launched by the Dutch government…1.3 million people in the Netherlands are over 75, and 33% have reported feeling at least moderately lonely.
Maybe living in that part of the world clears heads because Norway has an astonishing demonstration of how an enlightened society would act. Their justice system, focused on rehabilitation and not punishment, comes from a mentality so different that maybe that’s why, as is the case, by and large we don’t even recognize it’s going on. When I asked on a chat with sophisticated English people, hardly anybody knew anything about Norway. Michael Moore even featured a story about it in one of his movies but still we ignore a recidivism rate of about 20% compared to ours that’s over 70%. Here’s a blog post I did about it: https://suespeaks.org/enlightened-imprisonment/. I think of this as something quintessential, where we get our pounds of flesh and they get a society that works. Coming to understand that could give rise to that vital upleveling of consciousness we need to become an altruistic world instead of a self-serving one.
Meet me in the comments to give me your ideas and talk about mine.
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Clearly, to me and many others, the problems we now face in the world have existential roots. They stem from an increasing loss of meaning in life along with the assumption that meaning can be found only in organized religion and that existential thinking must necessarily begin with a belief in God and, concomitantly, a worship of that God, whatever He, She, or It might be. The belief that Science has impeached Religion has encouraged an abandonment of such thinking and led to a nihilistic mindset among many people, resulting in a loss of hope and lives of melancholy or despair based on fears of eternal extinction. Such fears are generally subconscious but they constantly seep into the conscious mind and significantly influence our behavior and mental state.
Those who live more hopeful and positive lives fall into two basic categories: 1) those who have succeeded in embracing life through basically meaningless activities grounded in escapism while blocking out any attempts by the subconscious mind directed at existential thought; 2) those who have succeeded in open-mindedly recognizing that the evidence strongly suggesting that this life is part of a larger life, one not necessarily requiring the God of religions or worship of that Being. That is, those who have developed a conviction that consciousness survives death in a greater reality that is beyond human comprehension but is not the humdrum heaven and horrific hell of orthodoxy. However, humanism ultimately fails in this regard.
The basic paradox here is that finding or identifying God is not a prerequisite to accepting the greater reality, but that in accepting the evidence for consciousness surviving death does lead to a Creator or Supreme Being of some kind, not necessarily an anthropomorphic one. That Creative Force or Supreme Being need not be worshipped in the normal sense of the word.
The evidence comes to us through Science, though inexact, in such fields as near-death studies, credible mediumship, past-life studies, instrumental trans-communication, deathbed phenomena, and other paranormal phenomena. No one study or case will provide absolute certainty, but the cumulative evidence, closely examined, will provide a strong conviction for the open-minded examiner. Some doubt is necessary for the "Divine Plan" to effectively work.
Unfortunately, few are those who can separate religious thinking from the metaphysical or existential thinking, and therefore a Wisdom Council would likely fail. The only person who comes to mind as a candidate for this council is Robert Bigelow of the Bigelow Institute in Las Vegas.
Right on for how good Jeffrey is. He's is a longtime ally of mine. He won half a million dollars in that Bigelow essay contest!!! He has been putting out interviews, as New Thinking Allowed, for decades: https://www.newthinkingallowed.org. That's his gig and he wouldn't be an employee of anyone's.
He's not so available right now for thinking about anything except the writing he's doing for entering another contest!!!!