Agenda
- Check in
- Opening Blessing
- Review WWWs
- Weekly event logistics
- Year Plan
- Spring Equinox
- Review Agenda
- Ben's Crisis of Faith
- Tactics Talk
- Evaluations
- Closing Blessing
Next business call
- Tactics Talk (in context of our strategy metaphor, roots, stalk, fruits)
- We Believe
- Year Plan
- Summer Solstice?
- Eclipse
- Trip to Canada
Check-in
- Eric … I'm really happy with how quickly the drywall went up in the first half of the garage
- Brandon … It's snowing! … I've had an extremely stressful couple of weeks, working nights and weekends, but that should be done on Tuesday … looking forward to having more time for my family and SolSeed
- Ben … I have a purring cat in my lap, and I’m looking forward to my date with Rachel on Tuesday, and to the equinox. Good times!
Weekly Events Logistics
Service rotation: Eric, Ben, Brandon, Rico, Shelley
- March 11 Service: 8:00 AM PST / 11:00 EST … Brandon
- March 12 Business Call: 8:00 AM PST / 11:00 EST
Opening Blessing
We gather to do the work. We set aside this time to bring together our disparate efforts and fit them together into a cohesive whole that reaches toward our highest aspirations. May the path become clear. --Blessed Be
WW(W)s from last time
Ongoing
- Brandon … Bedtime at 9:30 every night, wake up with alarm at 5:30
- Brandon … spend 15 minutes every day on Machine Learning
- Brandon … make a daily 1 minute video check-in for Ben and Eric
- Brandon … Meditate regularly with Eric or Ben
- <s>Ben … Send Brandon/Eric a video message each day about what I did and watch theirs
- Ben … meditate regularly with Eric
- Ben … spend at least 15 minutes a day on my story for the Equinox</s>
- Eric … Send Brandon/Ben a video message each day about what I did and watch theirs
- Eric … Work on Buckleberry or Auberge Paradis at least 15 minutes a day
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Ben
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Brandon
Time-specific
- Ben … check if the local Sushi Land has a conveyor belt … by next call
- Brandon … talk with Shelley about the eclipse, Summer solstice, and September trip … by next call
- Brandon … research our legal status as an informal religious organization … by next call
- Brandon … Work on the YouTube ad … by next call
WW(W)s
Ongoing
- Brandon … Bedtime at 9:30 every night, wake up with alarm at 5:30
- Brandon … spend 15 minutes every day on Machine Learning
- Brandon … make a daily 1 minute video check-in for Ben and Eric
- Brandon … Meditate regularly with Eric or Ben
- Ben … Send Brandon/Eric a video message each day about what I did and watch theirs
- Ben … meditate regularly with Eric
- Ben … spend at least 15 minutes a day on my story for the Equinox
- Eric … Send Brandon/Ben a video message each day about what I did and watch theirs
- Eric … Work on Buckleberry or Auberge Paradis at least 15 minutes a day
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Ben
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Brandon
- Eric … Practice viscerally connecting with Gaia at least once a week.
Time-specific
- Ben … check if the local Sushi Land has a conveyor belt … today
- Ben … talk with parents about the revised Equinox date … today
- Ben … buy a new copy of Seeing Nature … today
- Brandon … talk with Shelley about Equinox scheduling
Religious Organizations
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf
Year Plan
Spring Equinox March 20th
- Ben invited his parents for the 18th and they are probably coming to Seattle, although they may not make it in time for the sushi lunch
- The Sanders have a basketball game that day, the last game of the season, 10-11 AM, with Chuck-E-Cheese afterward
- We should probably push the Equinox celebration to Sunday the 19th … Shelley is willing to cancel her race
Eclipse August 21st
- Ben will be in a rented house with relatives near Deschutes National Forest, Thursday the 17th through Tuesday the 22nd
- The Sanders might be able to camp in the backyard, but more likely just drive to the Oregon State Fairgrounds and connect up with the OMSI party
- Eric has an ethical dilemma that he doesn't feel good about traveling to the U.S. this year, and there don't seem to be any cruises, so maybe he'll charter a sailboat (or just miss the eclipse altogether…)
Fall Equinox September 22nd
The Sanders and Ben will travel to visit the Saumurs and Buckleberry somewhere around this time
- Shelley has asked for time off from the 22nd to the 26th or 27th
- Eric would like us to rent a car (or the Saumurs could rent two)
- Things to do
- Be tourists, e.g. visit Parliament Hill
- Go to Buckleberry
- Celebrate the Equinox
- Play Martian Rails
- Hang out
Ben's Crisis of Faith
- Ben: I have a friend who has asked me to dig into my motivations for being an activist and I discovered two things while doing that.
- I want to have a deep sense that all life matters, but what I really have is an intellectual idea of it and I can really only emotionally connect with the value of my own life and that of my close friends and family. Except for brief moments when a charity makes a tear jerker emotional appeal.
- I was thinking about how if I stopped being an activist I would no longer be contributing to anything that feels really meaningful. That points to the fact that on a deep level I view the Great Birthing as a nice sci-fi story that doesn’t seem real or like it ever even could be real. Even if we stood an excellent chance of civilization surviving for the next millennium, I would still not feel much less sure that spreading life to other worlds is not a meaningful thing for me at least to try to work on. Because it is too implausible that I could help make that happen.
- Still Ben: I’m not sure how much this matters, because I still feel like it is good for me to spend time with you, my close friends. And to work together on things that fit with our values, regardless of whether it's going anywhere or is all just a game. I like games.
- Eric: Well, let's actually do this exercise of questioning whether it's worth having SolSeed.
- Brandon: I want to connect with the emotional content of what Ben is saying first.
- It's hard to emotionally connect with the long term and hard to believe that we could influence it. It doesn't seem like we are right now, so why are we doing it?
- Ben: It feels like you’re projecting a bit. It’s a little overgeneralized, because there are more Earthly things that people could do that would affect the long term other than spreading life beyond Earth. Also it is important to me to re-iterate that I also want to find ways to viscerally believe that all Life is precious but that I don’t know how.
- Eric: So you’re saying that intellectually you believe that all life is precious but that you’re having trouble viscerally connecting with that.
- Ben: Yeah.
- Brandon: This is almost the whole purpose of SolSeed, to create a story and a community in which these things are alive, not just abstract concepts. If we're not doing this, then we're failing. If we could make this alive for a significant group of people, would that be a good thing?
- Ben: Yes.
- Eric: So. How far apart is an “intellectual” belief that something would be beautiful and your elephant actually feeling that it is beautiful?
- Ben: The question is just whether it seems possible. My elephant can’t connect strongly to things that feel like fiction. Or in the case of empathizing with All Life there is too much distance. Not knowing about most life.
- Eric: It sounds like maybe your attachment to scientific rigor interferes with your ability to viscerally connect. The only things that I can viscerally connect with feel like fiction. I viscerally connect better to Puff the magic dragon that I connect to a historical fact, kind of thing.
- Ben: But you’re not going to spend a significant chunk of your life on projects related to Puff the magic dragon, are you?
- Eric: Well that isn’t an aspirational fiction about what the future could be like, it’s totally sideways. That said, if I get upset enough about the way a story ends, I’ll keep rewriting the ending in my head, and because it doesn’t change the way it was actually written, I end up motivated to spend a lot of my emotional energy fixing that wrong. How many times have I imagined intervening in some part of Lord of the Rings with the right magic spell to stop the whole war from happening and all those people from dying … and it’s *Lord of the Rings for God’s sake … it’s not real.
- Ben: I have experienced what you’re talking about once. In high school we read a tragic play called *The Visit.'' In the middle, the guy who dies had a chance to escape on a train but doesn’t take that chance. But apart from that I don’t spend much mental energy trying to fix stories (other than ones I’m writing). Of course when I’m in a theater watching a movie I feel emotionally invested in it (ditto for novel or web comic). But this doesn’t feel at all the same as the question “How invested am I in making the Great Birthing happen?”
- Brandon: Can we stop typing for a minute?
Solutions
- Ben: Maybe we should find our kindred who are already doing a great job with viscerally connecting people to All Life is Precious, support them, learn from them, and benefit from what they’ve done.
- Ben: We could have a practice of looking at pictures of biological and ecological experiments on the ISS to remind ourselves that we have brought life (other than human life) beyond Earth.
- Brandon: The practice that I find most effective with this comes from Paul Krafel and it is called Seeing Nature. The meditative practice that Paul teaches where you follow a bug on the ground until it crosses paths with a smaller bug, then repeat until you have a moment of enlightenment that gets you to see the awesome scale of nature.
- Eric: Things that connect the intellectual to the visceral, e.g. leaning against a tree and feeling how special and beautiful it is to me while simultaneously picturing how it shares a common ancestor with me.
Evaluation
- Brandon: On yesterday‘s service I expressed how the readings I brought didn’t challenge me. Ben, you challenged me. I feel very uncomfortable. You made this religion dangerous. Well done.
- Ben: Huh, I thought I just described how this religion isn't powerful enough to change me.
- Eric: I was thinking very much along the same lines as Brandon. It’s easy for me to sit here and go “I’m good at SolSeed, I always see it viscerally all the time, what’s wrong with Ben?” But the more you described it the more I saw that I’m not that far from where you are. That there is some sort of complacency in me that says “I’ve arrived and I just have to do the work” and you’ve awoken a realization in me that I will always need to start again every so often. Because whatever you’re doing will just become habit and won’t challenge you eventually.
- Ben: I thank you for taking my existential status more seriously than I take it myself. It makes me feel valued. And I look forward to working with you to make our religion just dangerous enough.
Closing Blessing
It is deeply upsetting to realize that our religion is not upsetting enough. May we tap into the power to change ourselves and the world. May we walk that line between chaos and complacency, between suffering and comfort, between the world of ideas and the world of feeling. May we Bring Life. -- Blessed Be