The Pono Way
Doing the right thing in 2024
Here’s a brief New Year’s Transmission with a meditation to bring more love into our world in 2024; listen on headphones. Every little bit helps, right?
And, here in print, a different message:
The turning of the year is always an invitation to start over, but New Year’s Resolutions rarely last more than three weeks. That’s because we try to do what we think we should, rather than what we actually want to do.
Here in Maui, the word “pono” is used to describe doing the right thing, the assumption being that most people do.
On the other hand, there also exists a consensus fear that if everybody just did what they wanted to do chaos would ensue. No one would go to work, we’d eat chocolate and drink Margaritas all day, maybe play video games, binge watch, etc. And, that’s probably true for many people.
This widespread belief contributes to excessive regulations put in place to make us behave. This succeeds in maintaining an enforced order, but obscures the real problem, namely that most of us are poorly guided in life. This seems proven when something disruptive suspends those control systems and the feared chaos erupts. Looting, vandalism, crimes of all kinds happens - which suggests that these urges are always lurking under the surface and must be tamed by outside control.
So, the official response is more and more control. Apparently there are shadowy figures busy developing schemes like 15 minute cities, abolishing cash, enacting carbon credit scores, closing down farms to replace real food with synthetic products, etc. The agenda is global control and A.I. is central to this strategy. And, I just learned, much of it will be orchestrated from space, via networks organized between satellites.
Something to look forward to!
But….. the vast majority of us usually choose to do the right thing. We pay our bills. We return the lost wallet we find, without stealing the money. We honor our commitments. And when disasters happen we pull together to help each other.
At the same time, there are a slim minority of bad actors, scam artists and criminals of all stripes. Their deviations mean that we all must labor under the regulations put in place to control them.
Meanwhile, life itself seems to be functioning pretty well without externally imposed regulations. Plants and animals seem to intuitively know what to do and the only significant problems in nature are caused by humans.
What can we learn from this?
That there’s an already existing control system we’ve been oblivious to. Life guides its forms, without imposing regulated control. There are no speed signs in the forests. Plants don’t need permits to grow. And most species live cooperatively, even though they depend on each other for survival. There are no wars in nature.
What if we resolved to learn how to align ourselves with what’s already working in the natural world, instead of being controlled by substitute systems? This doesn’t require rebelling against the status quo, in fact, it’s an inside job.
How does the wind know when to blow? What prompts flowers to blossom? How do tuna find their way thousands of miles back to their migratory home base? They all rely on guidance from life.
That same guidance is available to us. It’s already beating our hearts, growing hair and fingernails, digesting every meal. But that’s all unconscious. It’s when choice becomes conscious that challenges appear.
A friend’s niece drank one too many beers before driving home, drifted into the wrong lane, and crashed headlong into a van, killing two mothers and injuring herself for life. She sits in jail now, devastated by guilt. She’d give anything to travel back to that moment and say “No, thank you.” Or, take a taxi home.
She was guided, not by life but by a human urge for pleasure. We’ve all experienced this, mostly without the horrible consequences that poor girl created. But we’ve also been well guided, sometimes mysteriously. I interviewed 17 survivors of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack who told me about hearing/sensing an inner voice, like: “Don’t go down to the Business Center,” and learning later that this is where two masked gunmen entered their hotel. They would have died there; instead, they stayed safe in their rooms, because they obeyed that inner guidance.
Life’s guidance can save our lives. It can also keep our lives running smoothly, day to day. Most importantly, it can help us navigate pivotal moments, to choose the right direction forward into meaning and happiness and contribution.
Obviously, learning how to be guided by life should be the number one course in school!
Instead, we are groomed to become well behaved workers. Whatever life guidance we get is picked it up from parents, teachers, and peers, which means that we often end up repeating their mistakes because we adopt their programming. This means that before we can improve our ability to sense what the right thing to do is - not according to their human values or our own - we need to shed that programming and replace it with the developed ability to receive guidance from a different source.
This is the focus of my work with the OpenMind Fitness Foundation. In 2024 we will be rolling out our first Mind Yoga program, a simple practice for developing a baseline of mental health, developed by increasing our connection with life’s guidance. I’m actively seeking volunteers to test the program (it’s self-study, just a few minutes every day).
If you are interested, email info@openmindfitnessfoundation.org.
There’s no charge and no requirements for participation other then reading a one-page document, listening to a short audio, then practicing our first meditative process for a few minutes whenever you choose.
It’s an experiment and you’ll be joining me in a virtual lab, helping me tweak the process for maximum effectiveness. It’s my contribution towards a better 2024.
And here’s a magazine article I wrote for Inner Self magazine for their New Year’s Eve edition. If you enjoy this post, please spread the good word.
Happy New Year!
