MAHAYANA:
ECOLOGICAL and SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY.

(The following reflects author’s own understanding of the terms “Mahayana” and “Bodhisattva”).

Mahayana is a view that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all phenomena across all time and space, and that any one’s well-being depends on the well-being of every other being across all time and all space.

A Bodhisattva is one who strives to realize the ideal of Mahayana, and therefore regards the well-being of all other beings as important as one’s own.

To live ecologically and socially sustainably means to acknowledge the need of all other beings to live well also.

The need for living ecologically and socially sustainably is implicit in Mahayana.

Therefore an aspiring Bodhisattva would help all beings to be mentally and physically optimally well, and therefore an aspiring Bodhisattva would promote the way of living ecologically and socially sustainably.

MEDITATION:
Find, or imagine that there is, a mental space in which all the ideas of what anyone might think that their future should look like would be reconciled with each other, so that conflicts in real life would be prevented from occurring.

CREDIT goes to:

Mahayana Philosophy
and
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

More about Robert Fritz’s work is at www.robertfritz.com .

DEDICATED

to the optimal physical and mental well-being of all beings anywhere and anytime.

May all differences that there are among beings in this world resolve harmlessly in meditations, prayers, gedanken experiments, and models, before those differences resolve in real life, not infrequently causing harm to all involved.

!OmManiPadmeHum!

Please dedicate your practice to the optimal benefit of all beings of all three times and ten directions of space, starting here and now on Earth.

Creating Peace: http://www.ModelEarth.Org/peace.html
© – 1999 – present day – “ModelEarth”; re-producing of the above is permitted only without changing of the content.

An Appeal to Academia.

Despite the advances that are being made in amassing of knowledge by humankind, not enough of this knowledge is being used to improve the overall quality of life on Earth, even though, arguably, there is enough knowledge available that would enable humankind to improve the living conditions of all Life on Earth considerably.

That humankind’s knowledge is not fully applied to improving the quality of Life on Earth might be mainly due to the fact that the application of knowledge to the what-so-ever various problems that might exist on Earth rests in the hands of people whose power and wisdom to apply knowledge to solving of our problems is limited at most times.

This creates a situation where on one hand individuals who specialize in creating and enhancing of humankind’s knowledge are free to create and enhance as much knowledge as they can and want, only to see, on the other hand, this knowledge not being applied to its full potential extend.

Humankind’s knowledge has become very specialized–it is impossible for anyone to know enough on most subjects in any of the fields of knowledge. This situation limits our ability to plan our future effectively–it is difficult to achieve an agreement on what the ideal future should be.

This situation might be helped by creating of a model that would present the composite of what each participant creator of the model (ideally any and all humans on Earth) would think an ideal state of affairs on Earth should be, in which any and all knowledge available would be applied to optimally portraying of an ideal Earth.

Creating of such a model would permit a vast co-operation across all the fields of all sciences–the closest thing to unification of sciences there might ever happen. The model would be based on the best reason for the existence of science: an actual application of knowledge for the benefit of life on Earth. The on-going creation of such a model would eventually start presenting a picture of life on Earth as it ideally could be–the model would be an “ombudsman” without any executive powers, however one that would be powerful by the strength of presenting a model of for life on Earth optimal conditions based on the knowledge available, to whose opinions the powers-that-there-might-be could gradually be attuned and subsequently sufficiently educated to apply their powers appropriately to the real needs of life on Earth.

No situation, or a research objective modeled could be too small, nor too large in scale, nor would anyone be prevented from trying to improve on any instance modeled, since the model would be ideally accessible by anyone on Earth. Any solutions to any problems would have to be, beside being consistent with the knowledge available in the database, open to anyone’s critique and to anyone’s improvements.

All the components necessary for the creation of such a model are readily available–potentially all the PC’s in the world linked together by, perhaps, using “distributed computing” (which would enable the model to exist without requiring any particular physical location) and the existing data-bases at all the institutions of learning there are. The labor necessary for running of the model could be gotten by diverting of the effort that goes into research that is being done already on solutions vital to humanity into conducting research within the model, thus reducing unnecessary redundancy and improving the quality of research by enabling more researchers from many more fields of science than is currently possible to work on those research problems together, and so vastly enhance the quality of any such research.

The Earth has only one possible future, a future that is the result of all the individual actions that are meant to improve the lives of all the individual actors and their progeny. By resolving conflicts that are a natural consequence of carrying out the individual actors’ wishes for better conditions of their lives in a model, rather than in real life, a great amount of unnecessary suffering could be avoided.

Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone – ModelEarth.Org .

CREDIT:

Mahayana Philosophy

and
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

More about Robert Fritz’s work is at www.robertfritz.com .

DEDICATED

to the optimal physical and mental well-being of all beings anywhere and anytime.

May all differences that there are among beings in this world resolve harmlessly in meditations, prayers, gedanken experiments, and models, before those differences resolve in real life, not infrequently causing harm to all involved.

!OmManiPadmeHum!

An Appeal to Academia: http://www.ModelEarth.Org/acappeal.html

The Natural Right to Live Sustainably:

Humans Still Have a Chance.

A natural right is such that sustains the community; The non-observance of natural rights results in runaway processes that are destructive to the community and life in general.

Physical bodies, in order to live sustainably, require physical space–a piece of earth surface–to do it on.

Paradoxically, people who wish to live sustainably have to start off by supporting the non-sustainable way of life humanity is leading now. They have to gain a control of a piece of Earth surface to live sustainably on by engaging in activities that in themselves are socially and ecologically non-sustainable.

Living sustainably and the way that humanity is living have to be compared side by side in order to see the advantages for humanity and the whole Earth of the former, and the disadvantages of continuing living the way humanity is living now.

It is the difference between Peace and War.

Living sustainably is the essence of Peace.

The current way humanity is living on Earth is only an extension of warfare that humanity has been engaged in perpetually (even living in “peace” is only a time of preparation for the next war) since time immemorial.

CREDIT goes to:

Mahayana Philosophy
and
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

More about Robert Fritz’s work is at www.robertfritz.com .

DEDICATED

to the optimal physical and mental well-being of all beings anywhere and anytime.

May all differences that there are among beings in this world resolve harmlessly in meditations, prayers, gedanken experiments, and models, before those differences resolve in real life, not infrequently causing harm to all involved.

!OmManiPadmeHum!

Please dedicate your practice to the optimal benefit of all beings of all three times and ten directions of space, starting here and now on Earth.

Creating Peace: http://www.ModelEarth.Org/peace.html
© – 1999 – present day – “ModelEarth”; re-producing of the above is permitted only without changing of the content.

NATURAL HUMAN RIGHTS
and
ECOLOGICAL and SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY.

The attributes of ecological and social sustainability include simplicity and transparency. In simpler situations fewer things can go wrong, and simpler situations are easier to monitor by more members of the society.

The transition to an ecologically and socially sustainable society would be greatly helped by enabling people to live more simply if and whenever they would want to do so. It would not be necessary to further complicate the already existing complexity by creating of yet more laws that would try to regulate the making of our lives “more simple” and more “sustainable”–this could hardly be achieved by such means.

The end of making our human existence more ecologically sustainable and socially sustainable could be helped along by recognizing of some basic “natural human rights” that already exist, that stem from being human, and that are being neglected in our present day society to a great detriment of us all.

“Natural human rights” are rights that enable the fulfillment of the very basic and natural needs that a living entity might have, such as–the need to sleep, to rest, to nourish itself, to rid the body of body wastes, to keep clean, etc.

Since “natural human rights” are not recognized in our society, not only there are people (the “homeless”) who are subjected to living in conditions that would be unacceptable to allow to exist for most animals that people care about, but also that other people who, although still able to manage to maintain conditions suitable for sustaining life, live in a dread of eventually, perhaps, being prevented from doing so. This persistent anxiety is a stress that causes a great number of problems for our society.

Should “natural human rights” be recognized and guaranteed, this fact alone would engender some very basic and lasting benefits for the sanity of the entire society. Honoring of the natural rights would mean in effect that every individual of the society would have a right to a very basic, if only a humble habitat that would exist independent of any considerations of the commodity market. One would not necessarily have to “own” this fundamental, rudimentary, for one’s well-functioning within the society vitally necessary place, but one would “own” the inalienable right to it.

Being able to exercise the “natural human rights” is a foremost condition for the well-being of the whole society and a foundation for establishing of a socially sustainable society. People who are prevented from the exercise of their “natural human rights” become stressed, their physical and mental health suffers, and they are less able to contribute to the common weal of the society meaningfully. They, instead, become liabilities. Most of social ills and many health problems (both–physical and mental) can be directly attributed to the inability of people to exercises their “natural human rights”.

The recognition, assurance, and defense of “natural human rights” would make the transition to a true ecological and social sustainability easier–a socially sustainable society would eventually eliminate processes that are harmful to the environment, because such processes are possible to exist generally only in a society where “transparency”, the ability to see the consequences of such harmful-to-the-environment processes is absent–people who lead stressful lives don’t have the leisure to observe the consequences of their actions, they are busy trying to cope with stress; Such “transparency” is possible only in a society that is socially sustainable, where people have more leisure, and therefore they are able to exercise a greater control over their lives. A society that self-abuses itself cannot be expected to take care of its environment in a sustainable way.

Concerns with “social sustainability” started arising only very recently, and the definitions of the term are still very vague. Till the world filled up with humans, social misfits were disposed of, unless those managed to move to still of “civilization” devoid parts of the globe, and thus they spread the very same “civilization” globally. Today’s conditions in the world are without a precedent in human history. Although the the traditional mechanisms of solving social problems are still in effect, social “misfits” have no place to go anymore. We have to find ways how to make our society “socially sustainable”. To recognize and guarantee “natural human rights” would be a good start.

CREDIT goes to:

Mahayana Philosophy
and
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

More about Robert Fritz’s work is at www.robertfritz.com .

DEDICATED

to the optimal physical and mental well-being of all beings anywhere and anytime.

May all differences that there are among beings in this world resolve harmlessly in meditations, prayers, gedanken experiments, and models, before those differences resolve in real life, not infrequently causing harm to all involved.

!OmManiPadmeHum!

Please dedicate your practice to the optimal benefit of all beings of all three times and ten directions of space, starting here and now on Earth.

Creating Peace: http://www.ModelEarth.Org/peace.html
© – 1999 – present day – “ModelEarth”; re-producing of the above is permitted only without changing of the content.

Designing Sustainable Sebastopol.

We all know what we do not want in our ideal world, but do we know what we do want there?

Unless we know what a sustainable anything–from a local community to the entire world–should look like into the least possible detail, we will have a hard time achieving sustainability–we can hardly get something that we don’t know what it is, what it looks like.

What would you like to see in a sustainable Sebastopol?

In what way would a sustainable Sebastopol community obtain the basic necessities for life?

Could all food be obtained in a sustainable way?

Could all materials needed for construction of shelters be also gotten in a sustainable way?

How sustainable would be a sustainable Sebastopol’s social structure?

What would a sustainable Sebastopol’s government look like?

If people pool their ideas of what they think a sustainable Sebastopol should look like, perhaps we could resolve whatever differences there might be among individual ideas and get a rough start of a picture what kind of Sebastopol to strive for.

SustainableSebastopol@yahoogroups.com

Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone – ModelEarth.Org

DESIGNING A LASTING PEACE.

Knowing that every time of peace in human history ended in a war, what should “Peace on Earth” look like, so it would not result in a war again?

Unless we can answer this question, and unless we can unify and the eventual answers in order to prevent any discrepancies in the answers to cause strife in real life all over again, we can never achieve real “Peace on Earth”.

We should learn how to imagine, in as much detail as possible, what would constitute a real “Peace on Earth”, and then, since we each have different concepts of the idea, we should learn how to constructively reconcile all the differences in a model (or any other expedient way, e. g. in “gedanken experiments”, meditations, “think tanks”, etc.) in order to arrive at a unified design of “Peace on Earth”, because the Earth can possibly have only one future.

Unifying of all the different ideas that we might have about the future of the Earth in a model would prevent conflicts from happening in real life, since, after all, wars happen because people go to war so that Peace happens their way.

The idea of modeling the future of the Earth is also presented, in more detail, at
http://www.modelearth.org/modelearth.html

MEDITATION:
Find, or imagine that there is, a mental space in which all the ideas of what anyone might think that their future should look like would be reconciled with each other, so that conflicts in real life would be prevented from occurring.

CREDIT goes to

Mahayana Philosophy
and
The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
Salem, MA, DMA, Inc., 1984, ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

More about Robert Fritz’s work is at www.robertfritz.com .

DEDICATED
to the optimal physical and mental well-being of all beings anywhere and anytime.
May all differences that there are among beings in this world resolve harmlessly in meditations, prayers, gedanken experiments, and models, before those differences resolve in real life, not infrequently causing harm to all involved.

!OmManiPadmeHum!
Please dedicate your practice to the optimal benefit of all beings of all three times and ten directions of space, starting here and now on Earth.

Creating Peace: http://www.ModelEarth.Org/peace.html
© – 1999 – present day – “ModelEarth”; re-producing of the above is permitted only without changing of the content.