What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

“If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world.” and “The gibbon’s ‘very low sex drive’ is a reminder…[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction.”
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let’s examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived “off the land.” Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn’t afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn’t have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn’t afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it’s clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits–they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away–the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that’s a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don’t know what to teach because most of us don’t even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don’t know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don’t fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is “not the person I married.” It’s usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can’t be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don’t know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it’s that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn’t teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting “families” would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn’t care much for the word monogamy. It likes “pair-bonding.” You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese–most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let’s switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is “unfaithful” (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it’s up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn’t need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn’t work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn’t have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don’t feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don’t want the “needy” partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels “cheated on” who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few “unfaithful” partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can’t get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says “You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can’t be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life” (even though she can’t give what the husband needs sexually)–reverse the gender words if it applies–can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don’t know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That’s hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Living Beyond Your Life Today

It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.
- Lyrics in The Rose, Bette Midler artist, Amanda McBroom composer

As often as my heart has been touched by Bette Midler’s singing of The Rose, and today when I heard composer and American chanteuse Amanda McBroom sing it, I have thought that I must write something about fear dominating people’s lives. But I didn’t write. I was afraid that what I wrote would not be as perfect as the song. Note the irony.

Realization of my own fear and how it has affected my reluctance to write about fear became my motivation to write this.

Fear is much more than an emotion, more than an enhancement of the instinctive caution native to each of us. Fear instructs our lives. It dominates the lives of many of us. It shapes us as individuals, as communities and as nations.

Along with everyone else I have watched business and investment leaders charged, convicted and imprisoned for lying out of fear. True, they embezzled millions of dollars from shareholders and investors. But why? They were afraid to tell the truth, that they had failed. They delayed admitting their failure by lying, which ultimately resulted in their incarceration.

Along with everyone else I watched the American public being hoodwinked by their president so he could finish what his father failed to do, and line the pockets of his benefactors with gold in the process, by taking his country into a second (simultaneous) war, this one in Iraq. The USA will be lucky to avoid the fate of its former rival, the former USSR, that went bankrupt and dissolved into chaos in the 1990s. Why would Americans allow themselves to be lied to, to go into an unwarranted and extraordinarily costly war? They had been taught to be afraid that a dictator who could barely hold onto power in his own country had international connections that would wreak havoc on US soil.

Americans believed they should be afraid, though they had no evidence other than the lies of their president. Fear is on the curriculum in every US school, those it is given various other names.

Having moved to the Miramichi area of New Brunswick, Canada, in 2008, I saw how apparently comfortable my new neighbours were toward the possibilities of losing their jobs and having to start over. In my native Toronto, some people would commit suicide or turn to addictive behaviour–at the least start toking marijuana–at the prospect of losing their job. Not because they knew they couldn’t start over but because of the fear of public recognition of their job loss as a personal failure. Miramichiers expect to lose their jobs at some points in their lives and they accept no stigma about it–and offer none against others–whereas people of Ontario fear the public disgrace.

The fear of losing their reputations as well as their jobs causes many people greater fear than the prospect of finding another job. That fear affects their lives, how they conduct themselves every day of their lives. Collectively, the fear of many people impacts whole communities and countries.

People become afraid to speak to each other on elevators or when passing on the street, likely because they fear ending up on the front pages of newspapers as victims of murder, mugging or rape. They fear letting their children out of their sight because they might be charged with neglect, that fear resulting in children who never grow out of their dependence on mommy or a mommy figure in adulthood.

In every case, fear is unwarranted. In every case, fear is taught by those who have something to gain and learned by those who will provide that gain. Fear is a way for a few to control the behaviour and lives of many others. How many Germans in the 1930s and 1940s followed Hitler, becoming murderers and traitors in the process, because they were afraid of Hitler’s power? How many wars have been fought–virtually every war has some association with religion–because the people of one side were made to fear people of the other?

The cosmetics–and to a large extent the pharmaceutical–industry exists solely because of the fear they have created in people, in individuals, that they are not perfect. The OTC (over the counter) supplement industry is booming because people fear becoming ill and disabled as they get older. Some will overdose and harm themselves in the process of trying to protect themselves.

Returning to Amanda McBroom’s lyrics, “it’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.” How many people fail to find love in their lives, or mess it up if they do, because they fear a relationship breaking up? Media reports of marital breakup rates are ceaseless, while education systems never address the problem that people don’t know how to have successful relationships. People who avoid falling in love because they fear breaking up miss an important point about life. Falling in love and breaking up is part of how a person becomes complete, how a person learns to do it better next time. Taking chances is instinctive, while avoiding them is done out of fear of failure. It’s fear that’s not natural.

“It’s the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give.” By not trusting others out of fear that they will fail us or steal from us we become closed up emotionally. We become the kind of people that others don’t want to trust. People don’t want to trust others who don’t trust. Trusting another person with our emotions may be risky, but not trusting anyone with our emotions but ourselves generates much greater risk of poor mental, emotional and even physical health (suppression of the immune system).

“The soul afraid of dying…never learns to live.” The person who fears death becomes afraid of life. Everyone accepts that death is part of life: birth, death and taxes (thanks to G.B. Shaw). However, many fear death because they have no idea what to expect afterwards. They have rejected the obviously fictitious guesses of traditional religions about the hereafter, but have nothing to replace them with.

If you plan to go on a hike into a wilderness area or national park where you haven’t been before, you go prepared. You take a compass or GPS, some form of shelter, you scout topographic and place maps, you take more food and water than you expect to use. You know where you are going, even though you haven’t been there before. Then why not do that with the afterlife: prepare.

Are you afraid of dying and as a consequence you don’t know how to live? Living well is your whole purpose for being here. If you are afraid of dying, you become selfish, as all fearful people become. They think of themselves because they tend to fear what others may introduce into their lives. That’s the complete opposite of what living is about.

Every animal and plant we know has the instinct for survival. We humans have it too. But if we depend on our survival instinct to give us direction for our lives, we live a life no different from that of any other animal or plant. Certainly no greater. And we can expect what happens on our death to be similar to what we expect happens to grass and oak trees, gerbils and frogs when they die.

If you want to live, you must not fear death. Death is simply the end of one phase of your existence before you move on. Prepare yourself for your death by living your life to help others. That is the only way you can be different from any other animal or plant. Only people help their own kind, more than simply to avoid starvation.

You have nothing to fear about death unless you allow yourself to be deceived by those who just don’t “get it.” People who believe that only what may be detected and manoeuvred by the senses really exists have put themselves into a box at which they are the centre. They may lead peaceful and self-fulfilling lives, but they do little to help others because they can’t see outside their box. They are, in effect, intelligent ants with only two legs.

Nothing in nature suggests that life ends with death. In nature, every atom that ever existed still exists today, unless it has been transformed into energy, which is simply another state of existence. Conservation of Energy and Matter is the rule of nature. Why should it not be the rule for life as well.

However, you must live your life outside the box. You must be more than other animals and plants or you can expect only to be reformulated as one of them at death. You must create a persona for yourself that is distinctive from that of any other person, while seeking to work with others for the greater benefit of our kind. Nature conserves what exists, so create yourself into something worth saving on the death of your cellular body.

You should not expect your aches and pains and earthly troubles to pass with you into a future life. Why would you want them? Yet how you deal with them while you are here will determine what kind of persona you create for yourself.

Don’t be afraid. Every other animal and plant on earth is guarded about its safety, about its existence in the future. They expect the end of their lives to be the ends of who or what they are.

You don’t have to be afraid. Fear requires too much selfishness, too much energy and too much life-time.

Live your life as if you want to continue with the next phase of your existence after you die and you will have created something worth conserving after you die. According to everything we know about nature and the “real world” we know now, what you create will continue after your body quits.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children how to live life without fear, but with powerful and effective guidance about how they should live their lives.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

Why You Are Here

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
- Woodrow Wilson, 28th US President (1856-1924)

Many people in Western countries, usually in their quiet moments alone, wonder what the purpose of life is, why we are here. So we are told, just about everyone wonders this.

http://billallin.com

Who Is An Atheist?

“Samuel [Champlain] has seen other men of the church become as this one: to them, their own insight becomes dogma. Indeed it seems a perversion common to all leadership…”
- The Order of Good Cheer, Bill Gaston novelist, House of Anansi Press, 2008

An atheist is someone who can’t believe that something exists that is greater than himself and more mysterious than he can understand.

An agnostic is someone who suspects the atheist may be right, but is prepared to reserve judgment until he gets more evidence, though he usually isn’t prepared to look for the evidence himself.

Which is the greater sinner?

Neither. The whole concept of sinning was invented by religions whose main purpose was and is to control the behaviour of their followers. Establishing “superhuman” control over who qualifies as a sinner and who is a devoted follower who toes the line with regard to all rules of behaviour is one of the most effective ways to control the lives of others.

What’s wrong with being an atheist? For one thing, atheists are the objects of scorn and prejudice from those who profess to be religious. For another, atheists have no rules of conduct to break, so they can’t feel guilt at sinning, as religious people do because virtually every one of them breaks their religion’s code of conduct on a regular and frequent basis. The religionists can always console themselves that atheists are worse.

But are atheists terrible people? My experience with atheists is limited and the number of people I have spoken to about their personal experiences with atheists is relatively small, but atheists seem to be among the most spiritually healthy and morally and ethically straight and well balanced of all the people I have met in my life. In short, atheists stand among the most upright and civic minded people among us.

It is as morally wrong to hate or take action against atheists as it is to commit acts or speak prejudicially against people of a different skin colour, nationality or religion. Yet the most bigotted and prejudiced people are those strongly attached to their religion.

Atheist seem to say that “God doesn’t exist.” Yet what they really say is that the God that is portrayed by advocates of every religion ever created could not possibly exist. The God of the Christians, for example, is contradictory, indecisive, prejudicial, favours one group over others, brutal, aggressive and peace loving at once and vindictive, based on the Bible and Christian history. Atheists claim that doesn’t make sense.

Religionists make no attempt to associate what we in the 21st century know about the mystical and miraculous with their explanation (definition) of God. The Church of Rome designates saints, for example, based on events it cannot explain by any other method than as “miracles” after the death of a well known good person. Yet don’t try to find a non-Catholic among the saints, even though events of a miraculous nature occur in association with living and dead people who are not church members. How could the God of the Christians enact miracles through non-Christians if Christianity is the only means to salvation, as the Christians claim?

Religions began in the early days when humans gathered in small bands, then tribes. The religion of each tribe worked because it answered unanswerable questions. That situation in itself should be enough to tell everyone that the religion is or was fictitious. But it didn’t and it doesn’t today. Adherents are asked to “have faith” because the mysterious answers came through someone who claimed to have gotten them directly from God.

If claims such as those made by religions were made in television commercials, about any product or service other than something related to God, the advertisers would be stopped and possibly charged with making false and unsupportable claims. It’s a crime, unless your claim has something to do with God.

The atheist says “This is wrong.” The agnostic cries “Huh?”

While we try to expurgate prejudice from our societies, religions themselves are the sole sources and support systems for prejudice and bigotry. Each religion could easily eliminate prejudice from its teachings, but that would require it to admit that it is not superior to all other religions. Religions, like snake oil salesmen of the past, require their followers to believe that their product is the best, the only true, safe and superior one. This engenders and foments hatred and prejudice.

Religionists never ask atheists why they do not believe the precepts of a particular religion. More importantly, they never ask atheists what they do believe, as that would be risky since the atheists may well have an excellent reply to which the religionists cannot offer a defence or counter argument.

For all the majority of people know, atheists may be the most spiritually upstanding people in the community. Some atheists may even have a better explanation about what God is and the mystery of what we exist than the religions have offered.

But no one will ask an atheist what he or she believes. And if someone does, the religions will make sure that the atheist is socially ostracized and “unfortunately no longer employable.” Historically, that’s how it works. Remember the trials of the “witches” of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692? The evidence, like the charges themselves, were totally fictitious. History abounds with similar and brutal examples.

The followers of every religion can give explanations for the same mysteries. They all believe these explanations equally strongly and fervently. Every religion is built on story upon story, each one created to give the teller power over the listener that he would not have otherwise. Those who make up the stories and those who retell them get paid for repeating them.

Unfortunately, reality is never allow to impinge itself on these stories, on these religions. Too bad, as the truth is so much more glorious and amazing than the religionists could imagine. Truth and reality have no major roles to play in religion. Religions ask their followers to have faith that the old stories are true, no matter how contradictory, how unsensible they are and how much evidence exists to disprove them.

We should not wonder that television has become such a powerful religious medium and its leaders such powerful manipulators of public belief.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who have the knowledge and skills to avoid having their beliefs manipulated by skilled propagandists.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn’t get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can’t see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life–including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives–we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the “bum” may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That’s a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let’s consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It’s not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won’t get involved with someone our friends or family can’t stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The “deeply in love” stage is limited in most long term relationships. It’s known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it’s time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I’m reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn’t meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it’s because we can’t afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it’s hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

The further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and
the fewer and fewer people one likes.
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)

It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.

But first let’s consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.

Mostly it’s debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it’s a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can’t be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.

Just because God or the supernatural can’t be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn’t exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it’s beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial “box” thinking. Anything that does not fall within the “walls” of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.

Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.

What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can’t even grasp the possibility or potential because–whether they realize it or not–they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.

Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.

Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.

A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.

We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein’s famous equation). It’s called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.

Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is “you,” no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.

Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.

Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don’t understand. After all, what they don’t like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It’s beyond understanding, outside the box.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A life that is meaningful, every single day, is rare in this world.
Your life was a gift to you. Make it a gift to the world.
- Elizabeth May, American-born Canadian activist, writer, politician (b.1954 )

What is a meaningful life? What does it mean for a life to be meaningful?

In the final days of your life, as you look back over your many years, will you ask yourself if your life has been meaningful? Likely.

What will be your answer? That depends on what you define as meaningful.

For some people living through the most productive years of their lives, living a meaningful life means having the respect of others. That could mean accumulating as much personal fortune as possible or as many valuable objects as you can. That’s called materialism and it’s prevalent in most large cities today.

This kind of materialism is so common because our industries and education systems teach it. Money rules. He who dies with the most toys wins.The values of needs of industry rule what gets taught in classrooms.

It seems like sheer greed. But it’s more like the leaders of industry indoctrinating their employees in the need to earn progressively greater income, to wear increasingly expensive, fashionable and well tailored clothing, to buy an upscale vehicle each time, to own a house that is bigger than needed, to have a mortgage that would have crushed their parents, to belong to the most exclusive clubs they can.

In turn, the employees teach these values to their own children. The process and value system spread exponentially. Soon everyone in the neighbourhood, the city, all cities in the country believe it. Because “that’s what everyone believes. They all say that.” Comments about the “rat race” go unheeded as whining by losers.

I would like to relate two personal instances to you, from my life. The first has to do with my first wife. We were many years divorced when she was diagnosed with cancer that had metastasized through her body. She spent 15 months at home, alone, thinking about her life.

We separated and divorced because she adopted the feminist propaganda of the day that held that families and husbands prevented women from “reaching their full potential.” Once she left me with our children to raise, she rose from resource teacher to vice principal then to principal within a few years. She was highly respected and recognized in her field, frequently asked to lead special events for teachers, such as college courses.

She made the money. She had the clothes and the car and the house. She never missed a child support payment.

Fifteen months turned out to be a very long time to ruminate over how meaningful her life had been. Especially living alone, with dwindling visits from her own children and her one friend. She had no visits from colleagues who once shared her values. She was no longer of value to them.

She died in hospital, surrounded by medical personnel. But still alone. About six weeks earlier, in a phone conversation, she said “I made some mistakes in my marriage.” She still didn’t get it, that it was “our” marriage. There was no doubt she spent most of her waking hours reviewing her life.

To late to change it then.

Fast forward several years to 2006 when my present wife and I decided to change our place of residence. Knowing we wanted to leave the Canadian province where we lived but not knowing where, we decided to spend the next two years researching and visiting the most likely possibilities.

Using the internet and telephone, we narrowed our first choice quickly to Miramichi, New Brunswick. About all we knew about Miramichi was that it had lots of water (rivers) flowing through it and nearby in the northern New Brunswick hinterlands. And that its people shared the well known friendliness of Canadian Maritimers.

On our first vacation visit to Miramichi, we were pleased by the settings and value of properties we saw, but shocked by the people. Miramichiers were unlike any people we had ever met in Ontario. They seemed to actually care about strangers. When they asked how you were, they waited to hear an answer because it mattered to them.

We decided to take our second vacation visit in 2006 to Miramichi as well. The shock of meeting people remained the same.

We discovered that people were more important to them than money. Though Miramichi is a relatively poor part of Canada in terms of accumulated wealth, the people respect themselves and each other. Even, as we learned, strangers. No one can look bewildered or lost or to have a problem in The Miramichi (as the region is known) without someone stopping to ask if they can help.

Sometimes, as New Brunswick is officially bilingual English/French, the helper could speak little or no English, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone apparently needed assistance. One stranger outside a library advised us to look at a house for sale he thought we might like nearby–he liked it but wouldn’t put an offer on it if we wanted to buy it.

Another overheard my wife ask a clerk in a big store for postcards, which the store didn’t carry and few stores did. The woman searched a store she thought she remembered had postcards, found the store, then waited in the middle of the mall for us to emerge so she could tell us where to find the cards we sought. These were just two small examples of the many offers of help we received.

In 2008 we bought a property outside of Miramichi. Since moving we have learned that Miramichiers and the Miramichi itself make our new home the best place on earth we could have found to live.

There you have two examples, one of a person who believed that money was the most important thing in life and another of people who believe that people are always more important, the most important thing in life.

The people of the Miramichi make every day meaningful. They live happy. They die fulfilled.

If you decide to move to the Miramichi, please leave your values, your prejudices and your materialist preferences behind. If you don’t, you will be lonely here.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who can lead fulfilling lives without sacrificing themselves to the masters of industry.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Peace begins in the heart of each person — not societies, not countries, not nations. Each person.
- Prem Rawat (http://www.tprf.org/home.html)

The United States has gone to war many times in my lifetime, each time with one of the stated causes being peace.

Two world wars have been fought by dozens of countries, each of whom wanted peace. Some of them wanted power and domination over others along with that peace, but peace was ostensibly the primary objective in the reasons they gave for going to war.

I remember the Dukhobors, a spiritual Christian sect from Russia that wanted nothing more than to be left in peace when they migrated to Canada in the mid-twentieth century after being persecuted for over a century in their native countries. They defied Canadian laws, though their behaviour was in line with their own beliefs. When the police came to arrest them, they protested, often in the nude and sometimes violently. They wanted peace for themselves, not so much for others.

In our past, every society, country and nation has gone to war to exact peace. It hasn’t worked.

The United States issues more and more permits for its citizens to carry handguns to protect themselves, the idea being that they can have peace of mind and their communities will be more peaceful because bad guys won’t risk creating problems for themselves with people who carry guns. Neither the United States as a country nor its citizens as individuals nor its communities feel safer or more at peace. Peace and fear remain, as always, at odds with each other.

The individuals who are really most at peace are those who have created peace within themselves. Unlike those who advocate violence, promote fear and create unrest among their fellow countrymen, those who have peace within them do not advertise or brag of their accomplishments.

We don’t know much about people who live peaceful lives because our media find nothing interesting about them. People who live peace do not proselytize to find others to join them. To do so would be to violate their peaceful existence.

Those of us who want to live lives of peace must find it for ourselves, within ourselves. As Prem Rawat said, “peace begins in the heart of each person.” It cannot be otherwise. Peace doesn’t work that way.

Peace cannot result from fighting. Fighting for peace is a false objective advocated by those who want violence. For them, the promise of peace is a tool for war.

People who want peace want it for themselves. People who want violence want it for others.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are capable of living peaceful lives, who have the knowledge and skills to find peace for themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

 The purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone they become no more than beasts.
- Saint Sophia, 2nd century Rome, whose daughters Faith (Pistis), Hope (Elpis) and Love (Agape) were slaughtered in front of their mother for their devotion to their GodThe Roman emperor Hadrian had Sophia’s daughters slashed, stretched and eventually beheaded and burned to get them to renounce their beliefs, all in front of their mother. As he could think of no worse punishment to Sophia that to live out the rest of her life knowing that her only children had died horrifying deaths, he spared her. She gathered the bodies of her children, buried them and died three days later.

Were they all martyrs? Were they all stupid to die before their times instead of saying the words Hadrian wanted (albeit blasphemous words because he wanted them to acknowledge him as their god)?

In the 21st century we have come to respect science more than at any time in the past. Science originally was the means by which humans could better understand the works of God. Yet science gained such power and authority over its respective cultures that it now sees itself as a kind of god.

Nothing that cannot be manipulated by humans or that cannot be rationalized as originating according to natural order exists, according to the materialist view. There can be no God because no one can describe God, no one can prove the existence of God, no one can manipulate God. Furthermore, the gods of the popular religions of today can be shown to be human inventions or hand-me-downs from earlier pagan religions.

Yet materialists cannot explain dreams in terms that do not make dreamers seem insane at night. They cannot explain visions that people have, or vision quests that change people’s lives. They cannot explain ESP (extra-sensory perception). They cannot explain how patients who are legally dead on an operating table can have out of body experiences where they can later describe exactly what was going on in the operating theatre until surgeons restarted their hearts, brains and other organs.

Materialists cannot explain self or mind other than in ways that make us seem like advanced forms of dogs or dolphins.

In short, if materialists can’t grasp their minds around a concept in such a way that they can explain it in human terms, they deny it exists. They expect our reality to be limited by the perimeters of their minds. Or I should say brains because they don’t believe in the mind as being separate from the brain.

How does that fit with quantum physics where a particle can be in two places at once, where in fact if you look for it in one of those places it will automatically be in the other? How do they explain that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points only on a global scale, not on a universal scale where time and space bend, can even fold back on each other?

Multiple dimensions, they say. We can only detect four dimensions, but string theory stipulates that all this mysterious stuff makes sense if we accept that reality has eleven dimensions. Science asks us to believe that some day it will show that all the mysteries of physics, of space larger than we can imagine and space smaller than we can imagine, will be explained and proven as truths. It’s called Promissory Science. Science promises that it will prove these mysteries some day.

At the same time science denies that God or any of the other mysteries it cannot explain, phenomena and experiences that you and I may have many times in our lives, will ever be explained because they don’t really exist. Science says we should believe its promises, not the promises of non-scientists.

How does science say we invent these things? It’s all in our minds.

Oh, wait! They don’t believe in the mind. It’s all in our brains.

But apes, dolphins, wolves and many other animals have brains similar to our own, some even larger than ours, yet they don’t seem to have supernatural experiences. If a brain can create fantasies, should a sophisticated brain such as that of a dolphin or a chimpanzee not be able to do the same?

So far, only humans have been shown to have extrasensory experiences. These can easily be explained by the coexistence of both brain and mind. But materialist scientists can’t grasp the concept of mind because it’s too difficult to study. It denies the mind exists, in many cases.

Are they not, despite their protests, what Saint Sophia called “no more than beasts?”

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are well balanced socially and emotionally as well as intellectually and physically.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

No matter what religion people subscribe to, or which ones they steadfastly avoid and ignore, everyone seems to have an opinion about Christmas and its celebration. This article will attempt to shed light on truths about Christmas while steering clear of emotional arguments.

People celebrate Christmas for two fundamental reasons. One, the purely secular reason, has been going on in some form likely since the early days of human civilization thousands of years ago. The winter solstice has just passed in the northern hemisphere, where a large majority of earth’s human population lives. Days will get more hours of sunlight as the weeks pass and the promise of the renewal of plant life and the return of migrating birds sustains people through long, cold and often snowy days of winter weather.

The Romans adopted the earlier celebration of this turning point in the natural year, calling it Saturnalia. While Saturnalia is well known today for its extended periods of sexual promiscuity–early autumn was a good time to give birth, best for both mother and child–and heavy consumption of alcohol, it was also a time for eating heartily, gathering with friends and family, exchanging of gifts and having fun in favourite ways.

We continue a similar tradition of celebrating the Christmas period today, with less emphasis on sex. The secular component of the event lives today as much as it has for thousands of years. The “over commercialization” of Christmas is nothing more than businesses meeting well expressed and traditional needs of people to have a festive period during the days of few hours of daylight, too much cold weather and too much snow.

Those who believe that Christmas has been taken over by industries to peddle their wares believe more in a religious celebration of Christmas. Christians may consider Christmas a somber time when they should consider the birth of Jesus of Nazareth some 2012 years ago. They consider Jesus to have been the founder of their religion.

He wasn’t, and therein lies a cause for confusion.

Jesus was a Jew. He never claimed to be anything but a Jew. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which seem to reflect the teachings of Jesus–in many cases word for word as recorded in the Bible–have recently been proven to be the work of a group of Jewish monks known as Essenes. If Jesus could quote Essene works so accurately, it’s likely he spent at least some of his “missing years’ in an Essene monastery. In his time, the Essenes were ascetics, living simply and sparsely. Considering how Jesus lived during his years of teaching, his life too was simple and sparse.

Jesus never claimed to be THE Son of God. He wouldn’t because he believed that every man and woman has the potential to join the Kingdom of God, whose members are each a child of God. In fact, whose members are each a part of the universal whole of existence, thus part of God. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught, is here and now, not after death. He taught that God is within each of us–not up in some mysterious heaven–and may be found by searching within. He told people to follow his ways, which meant to do as he did to achieve the mystical experiences he had. He wanted people to find God today, not live for some promised reward later.

Jesus never spoke a word to suggest that he intended to found a church. In the fourth century C.E. several religious books were rewritten to then form what Christians know as their Bible and that version called Peter the founder and first leader of a new church. In fact, we now know that the real Peter was a rough and coarse fisherman who was unlikely to be either a leader or a good speaker. James the brother of Jesus was more likely to be the one to continue the work of Jesus after the crucifixion. And Mary of Magdala, whose work was buried by the Christian church in the fourth century and whose reputation was disparaged in the sixth century when the pope called her the unnamed whore in one of the Bible stories, but whose real work and value are recorded in the Nag Hamadi’s so-called Gnostic Gospels.

Judaism considers Jesus of Nazareth to have been one of its prophets. Islam mentions both Jesus and his mother, Mary, in the Qu’ran and considers Jesus one of the prophets in the history of its religion. In fact, Islam does not downplay the significance of Jesus at all, it only values the words of Mohammed (570-632 C.E.) higher because he was the most recent prophet.

Jesus was a man of peace and love. His teachings were all about both peace and love. Didn’t he destroy the tables of the merchants outside the temple in Jerusalem, suggesting that he had hidden violence within him? Unlikely. That story is almost certainly a tale added well after the death of Jesus to make him look more powerful in the world of his time. Can you even imagine someone wreaking the destruction Jesus supposedly did outside the temple and not being punished for it? According to the story, he was neither arrested nor imprisoned for this blatant act against his own church. Supposedly he just walked away and the incident forgotten. Not likely.

“Love they neighbour as thyself” and “Peace on earth” are the two statements most often attributed directly to Jesus. Few other words are associated with Jesus as his words are only recorded in some 24 instances in the Bible. Everything else is hearsay and folk tales invented after his death to make him seem greater than a normal man..

The non-commercial celebration of Christmas is, in fact, more a celebration of the words of Jesus than about the birthday of the founder of Christianity. As calculations based on words of the Bible would put his actual birth date around September 24, December 25 is more symbolic than actual.

December 25 is a day set aside to recognize the dual messages of Jesus–peace on earth and love thy neighbour–not to recognize the birth of a man we know precious little about. Other than what has been invented about him by Christianity and other religions.

Those who value the concepts and want to see the coming to pass of peace on earth and love of others will set aside some time around the Christmas season to give them some thought. We remember the words of Jesus, that are now over two millennia old. They won’t die. However, they can only come to fruition when more of us practise them in our lives.

Christmas is about gift giving. It’s also about peace and love. We’re big enough to be able to give them all.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children all the lessons of life, not just the ones in school curriculum.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com