Samples from Pictures Out There:

+ Spirituality, Religion, & God

On the matter of spirituality, religion and God, what if…

Our global community is so different now, on the matter of Spirituality, Religion, and God.
As a global community, we now have global norms that the two most important parts of our individual spiritual expression are:

1. To understand our own beliefs and faiths, and share them with other people
2. To openly support other people expressing their beliefs and faiths, and let them share those beliefs and faiths with us

We have stopped using religion as a weapon and as a wall between us. We now regularly hold shared worship services. We now actively participate in the spiritual expression of others. An important movement that happened as part of this change, this connection, was the Love First movement.

This movement sprang from the desire of many to connect all people around the world who believe that Love is the most important part of their faith and beliefs.

Individuals, churches, groups, denominations. They made a choice about identifying themselves as Love First believers, as part of the Love First movement.
They became Love Christians.
They became Love Muslims.
They became Love Jews.
They became Love Hindus.
They became Love Buddhists.
They became Love Agnostics.
They became Love Atheists.
And so on.
Love First has now spread across a world whose primary belief system is in a global community of Love.

+ Minimize Violence

Okay, here's a vision for you, a Picture of the future on ending violence.

What a wonderful world it is! And what a better world it is now than it was before. No wars. A minimal amount of unintentional violence that we do to each other as individuals. People are happier! They also feel less stress, even though they do as much work as they ever did.

And isn’t it amazing what got the ball rolling? We went back to the basics. The real basics. We finally understood the incredible power of small, everyday things like…

Kindness.
Courtesy.
Empathy.
Forgiveness.
Listening.
Transparency.
Honesty.
Authenticity.
Sincerity.

We committed to have the courage to display those in our everyday interactions with people…
As any big change in society must do, we turned to our children to make that new pattern of social behavior permanent. We parented differently. We stopped modeling unkindness. We held ourselves to higher standards. We stopped letting our children bully other children. We stopped letting them be mean, cruel, or insensitive. When that would happen, we would absolutely stop it right there. Right there. No exceptions. We would help them work through what they had done. Help them understand why their behavior wasn’t the best choice. Then help them create a better choice. And help them to apologize. Then we would let them know that they were forgiven, but with some consequences that would lovingly help them to firm up new behavior patterns.

We became aware of all of the violent acts that we were doing to each other every day. The favoritism we had been showing to those “like us." The tiny or huge acts of violence we had perpetrated on those who are different or who we don’t understand, or who we didn’t want to really listen to.

Social violence.
Economic violence.
Relationship violence.
Physical violence.
And on.

We now recognize violent acts when they are committed within our systems. We go to their root cause and work to eliminate them. We understand that these are the seeds that ultimately turn into crimes, murders, and wars. We must begin much sooner, in those first smaller actions, when the seeds of violence are first planted.

+ AI

AI, known today as Artificial Intelligence. Hopefully known in the future as Advanced Intelligence. Humanity has often self-forgiven our own flaws by falling back on our supposed supreme intelligence over other species that also inhabit the planet. No matter what damage we did to each other, or to other species, or to other life forms, or to the planet itself, we would justify it to some degree by our presumed superiority of intellect. Whatever we would choose to do would be validated by our presumed superior intelligence.

Well, that era has come to an end. There already are, and will be in the future at exponentially increasing numbers, other new intelligences with superior intellect when compared to us humans. And it is just beginning…

We need to establish a new and updated Golden Rule:
“Do unto other people, animals, and the planet as we would wish intellectually superior intelligences to do unto us.”

We need to incent these new intelligences to treat us in a way that we would want to be treated. So, as a result, we need to model a new world.
No killing.
Everyone fed.
Health care fully supported by society and law.
Everyone sheltered.

+ To Connect or Not To Connect…

That is the Question.

We make life choices about who we connect with and who we include in our community. We choose who to care about, and we choose when to care about them.

Typically, we each have an Ongoing Community of Caring. These are people we care deeply and actively about at any point in time. For some of us, the people in our Community of Caring may be the only people we care about. For some of us, we may care about everyone on the globe. For some of us, we may care about those outside our Community of Caring to different degrees, based on any number of factors.

So how do we make these choices for who is included in our Ongoing Community of Caring?

It may be influenced by any number of factors, such as…
Our background. Our family of origin.
Adult role models.
Where we grew up.
Who we grew up with.
What we grew up with.
What we were taught about who should be included in our Community.
What we were taught about who should not be included in our Community.
What we were taught about how big the world is. Or how small we should make it.
What we were taught about the benefits of meeting new and different people. Or whether new and different people were to be avoided.
What we were taught about the value of competition with others. Or the value of cooperation or collaboration with others, both within our community and outside of our community.
What we were taught about what makes us worthy, successful, and valued. Or what makes us unworthy, unsuccessful, or less valued.

We have the Perspectives we have, at any point in time. But we can always make choices that, over time, will grow and evolve our Perspectives.

We always have the choice to evolve our Perspectives. They are never set in stone.

+ Widening and Narrowing

Widening is being curious, with a thirst for new knowledge, skill and experiences, seeking the unknown, new adventure, new people, new wisdom, new insights, and new beliefs.

Narrowing is wanting to stay within the confines of already acquired knowledge and experience, with the comfort and security of experiences and people already known, in concert with wisdom and beliefs already acquired.

There are two distinct stages of life during which we make ongoing choices about where we land on the Widening to Narrowing spectrum.

The first stage is Growing Up, when a large degree of widening is inevitably caused by new knowledge, new perspectives and new experiences that occur and that we typically require during childhood…

I call those active decisions to continually widen one’s knowledge and experiences in this second stage of life, Growing Out.

Along the path of adult life, individuals make frequent and ongoing decisions about whether they will continue to Grow Out and Widen their life, or whether they will Pull Back and Narrow their acquisition of new knowledge and experiences.

How do our choices for our Ongoing Community of Caring align to our choices for learning new things about other people? Other types of people who we don’t already know well?

If we are curious about each other, interested in each other, listen well to each other, ask questions about each other, are open-minded, are open-hearted, it is virtually certain that hearing someone else’s story will make us care about them.

+ We’re the Same and We’re Unique

…It's about a beautiful balance we can strike with loving our Commonality and similarities with all human beings, and at the same time...loving our Individual Uniqueness and differences as human beings.

Equally. At the same time. Balanced. Let's call it “Common Uniqueness.” Or “We’re The Same and We’re Unique.” And hooray for that!

So, in-between these two important constant realities of our Commonality and Uniqueness, our day-to-day focus often tends to be on our unique Ongoing Communities of Caring that we discussed earlier in the book.

These smaller communities are important in how we connect with other people and how we develop our individual identities. At any point in time we have a personal identity. It is naturally human to reinforce that identity through identifying with others.

These smaller communities may be family members, a set of friends, a team or organization we belong to or work with, or a group of people with common interests… These communities are an important part of being human. We are social animals. These group affiliations can be good and do good things.

They have the potential to be a supportive engine for our Unique Individual expression, our sense of Commonality with all humanity, and can support inclusion and connection with all people. If they do, then they are a positive reinforcement of the Common Uniqueness Ideal.

However, if our communities dilute our sense of our individual uniqueness, or influence exclusion and disconnection with other people, then they are a negative reinforcement of the Common Uniqueness Ideal. That negative reinforcement can lead to problems for all of us.