The rules I try to follow

For whatever it might be worth to anybody else, here are some rules I try to implement in my own life:

• Don't obsess over what you can not change.
  
• Judge ideas and actions, not people and personalities.
• Rather than "good" and "evil", try to use more nuanced metrics, such as "more or less useful", "more or less harmful".
• Try to see both sides.
  
• Be mindful.
• Breathe deep.
• Synchronize movements to the breath.
  
• Be open to bliss.

As a meta-rule, I try to see these "rules" as practices, rather than precepts.

This meta-rule is probably the most important of them all, because it helps me not measure myself against an ideal that is impossible to reach.

They are general guidelines for a life that makes myself and those around me happy. Needless to say, I don't always adhere to them - I try to get better.

Please, do not claim healing

Whenever you are tempted to write a blog posting or a reddit comment, or just claim in casual conversation, that your spiritual, mystical, "alternative" method has healing properties, I urge you to stop right there.

You might have a few personal experiences, and if that works for you, fine, great, go on and do whatever you do. As long as you claim general good feelings, improved vitality, you got no debate from me. Thousands of factors go into that, your method might very well be one of them, at least for you, and maybe a few others as well.

All of that changes once we talk about real physical or mental issues, be it the flu or cancer or depression.

The fact is, you do not have a clue whether your method works or not, and chances are it doesn't.

The fact is, you are very likely falling prey to your own biases. You are likely a victim of confirmation and selection bias, probably of loss aversion too. You have not accounted for a possible placebo effect. You are probably not a medical doctor. You do not know all the factors that might play a role, nor do you have any idea how to deal with those in your assessment.

Assuming that what you describe even is a real effect, which is highly doubtful, you do not know the mechanism behind it, and "quantum consciousness" or "qi" probably ain't it.

We all have read about an astounding quantity of bullshit methods: prayer, crystals, reiki, semen retention, invocations of literally thousands of gods and demons. The list is nearly endless.

They cannot all be right.

They can indeed all be wrong.

Your method, in all likelihood, is just as wrong as all the others.

When you claim physical healing, and you do so with the right tone, some assumed authority, and maybe some quote-mining, there is a good chance that you lead people astray. People who are in dire need of real treatment. People who suffer. You give them false hope, and in the worst case, this will lead to their death.

What you are doing is unethical.

Stop it.

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On this blog, I have tried my best to avoid any claims of that sort. I avoid words like "healing" in general, because I think it insinuates more than it should. However, we all slip up, so if you still find something like that, please drop me a note (betlamed@gmail.com), and I will review the posting in question.

Betlamed's wager

You may hear that meditation makes people more calm and happy. You may also hear that it opens the gateway to a demonic dimension and turns people into hell-bound zombies.

Say you rather believe the first one of those claims. So you try it out for yourself. You meditate for a few weeks, every day, and you find it helpful.

Do you know from this that the second claim, the one about hell-hounds, was not true? No, you don't. You place a bet on it. You use your own experience, your intuition, the feedback from your friends, and whatever information you find online and in books, to evaluate your chances.

So, now you feel like you might be about to really, truly, ultimately let go of your ego. Let's assume for a bit that this is actually correct (which it usually tends not to be). So you might turn into an amoral evil being, or into a vegetable, because you lost whatever it was that kept you sane. Or you might walk into the light and become a buddha.

All your experience might tell you that you should do that final step. You might have meditated all your life. You know stuff. You've... seeeen things.... us people wouldn't believe... You might be close to death, so it probably doesn't matter anyway.

But this is still a bet. There is still a chance that you are wrong. The christians might be right, or who knows, maybe the scientologists. You do not know that.

All you can do, is trust your experience, and train your intellect to reject superstition and irrationality, and give things a try if you think that they might be worthwhile.

Above all, know that you could be wrong.

Acceptance, not Passivity!

Every once in a while someone in a thread about buddhism and all that, ahem, stuff, mentions the importance of acceptance. Predictably, someone points out that we cannot simply accept ISIS, Trump, the Republicans, climate change, whatever.

They always get downvoted into oblivion. But... Isn't this the most obvious objection?

It certainly is one of my first thoughts, every time I hear or see a comment like that.

We all have stuff that we simply cannot accept. And that very fact is, in my view at least, the most important thing to accept. Political matters, relationship matters, family matters. Very important stuff. Stuff that needs to be addressed.

To me, currently, it's mostly about family, about the way my mother and sister treat my father after his stroke. The point cannot be to simply "let it go" and do nothing to help my own father. To revel in my own helplessness and dress it up as spiritual enlightenment. No siree, sorry.

The point is not that. That is moronic ideology, pop psychology, newey agey happy deppy thinkie pinkie winkey horsecrap. I wholeheartedly reject that, with no acceptance at all.

BUT.

I do challenge myself to really feel my own resistance. To first find out what this has to do with me, what it does to me, what exactly it is that makes me so angry, and what my intention truly is. I try to get to a point where I don't have to react to my own anger, where I don't have to blindly lash out against them -- against the persons involved, as opposed to the problems we're facing together. I want to reach a point where I can react to the issue itself, in the most effective and helpful way possible. This simply cannot be done if I am a slave to my own rejection.

In an odd way, I am at a good place for that practice. I tried reason, I tried anger, I tried lashing out, I tried interventions with people who I thought might have an influence... all to no avail. So the only place left to change is indeed myself.

To do that, I first have to set up my own limits. That part is extremely important. I cannot get there if I constantly feel like I'm under immediate threat. I have to realize that, right now, I am not there, and there is a chance that I never will be. So there have to be defences. For some situations, that might mean moving out, limiting contact, in some cases legal action. (Possibly even war? I honestly don't know.)

Those defences might come down in the long run, of course, but I have to be compassionate to myself first, if I want to enable myself to be compassionate to others.

And then... well... lots and lots of mindfulness, practice, training, meditation, I guess. Not become a poser in the process. Not try to project that I am sooo enlightened and accepting when deep down I'm the opposite.

This is a huge challenge. To me, to you, to everyone.

Please let's never lose sight of the fact that, for the most part, we are not there yet, and acting as if we were, won't do at all.

Obligatory link to my reddit comment on that matter.

People like to confuse ethical "rights" and legal rights

It is amazing how people think that they have "freedom of speech" on some internet site like Quora or youtube.

I won't go on about how this is a false interpretation of the whole right to freedom of speech. That's a separate, albeit important issue.

I think that people often misunderstand the difference between their "rights" in an ethical sense, and "rights" in the sense of written laws.

This misunderstanding goes back to some vagueness in the English (as well as the German) language, at least to some degree. Being / having a "right" denotes logical, ethical and/or legal correctness, depending on grammatical usage and context.

I think we should make an effort to clarify which sense of the word we talk about. Failing to do so just makes a lot of debates, which are already emotionally charged, even less productive.

Coming back to that "freedom of speech" issue, yes it displays a certain relation to other people's opinions when people such as, for example, Robert Barron's team on youtube will block you for having a different opinion. They are perfectly within their legal rights to do so, and youtube as the site owner grants them that right as well as the technical means for its implementation. I still think it's ethically flawed, and it probably suggests a lack of good counter-arguments on their part. I have a certain ethical "right" to speak my mind, and we should voice it as such whenever someone cuts us off for no good reason. But we should not conflate that with a constitutional right.

It simply is a different thing.