Agenda
- Check In
- Review WWWs
- Review Agenda
- Weekly Events Logistics
- Ad experiments
- Spiritual experience experiments
- Morality
- Evaluation
Check In
- Brandon ... I feel good ... slow and steady probably does win the race
- Ben ... voted (reading conflicting opinions on minimum wage) ... reading radical pamphlet about how voting is irrelevant and we should all be doing grassroots politics ... plan on speaking to my grandmother on today (my grandfather's birthday) ... and recording a depressing spoken word poem
WWWs from time before last
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- <s>Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Ben ... send out the summer newsletter ... tonight
- Ben ... gather Sol 2013 expenses, contribution rate and balance and send them to Eric ... by next call
- Ben ... send out any revised schedule info ... Tuesday evening
- Ben ... read Eric's suggestions for the opening words ... by next call
- Ben ... think about symbolic actions to go with the 7th-season opening words</s>
WWWs from last time
- Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- <s>Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing</s>
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- <s>Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing</s>
- Eric ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
WWWs
- Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Brandon ... create the rendered wireframe site as a rails app (Landing, OurBeliefs, JoinUs) ... by next week
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
Weekly Events Logistics
Service rotation: Eric, Shelley, Brandon, Ben
- August 10 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Shelley) - Eric out
- August 11 Work-Bee: 1:30 pm PDT 14:30 EDT - Eric out
- August 17 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Brandon)
- August 18 Work-Bee: 1:30 pm PDT 14:30 EDT
- August 24 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Eric) ... sanders out
- August 25 Work-Bee: 1:30 pm PDT 14:30 EDT ... sanders out
- August 31 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Ben)
- September 1 Work-Bee: 1:30 pm PDT 14:30 EDT
- October 20 Seeing Nature Readings and Practices (Ottawa): 13:00 EST
First Ad Experiment
Keyword: Carl Sagan
Ad text: Carl Sagan liked religion the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science
Landing page text: SolSeed ... Embrace Science. Cherish the Earth. Bring Life! The SolSeed Movement - A Community of Practice
The SolSeed movement is a religion which believes that
- science tells the truth, and
- life, all life, is precious and
- the purpose of humanity is to nurture life.
Science has revealed a story about a universe billions of years old which may last forever. This fills us with awe.
We revere the 600 million years of history of complex life on Earth and we are filled with hope by the youth of life when compared to the billions of years of future it will enjoy. We see its story as a story of exuberantly bursting through boundaries to flower and spread.
Humanity is part of this story and we believe that we have a key role to play. The probes that we have sent to explore our solar system have sent back picture after picture of barren lifeless worlds. For every life-rich world like Earth there may be billions of lifeless worlds in the universe.
This creates in us an urge to do two things:
- nurture and care for the precious life here on Earth and
- help life burst through the final boundary and take root and flower amongst the stars; to help the Earth give birth to a family of living worlds.
Bring Life!
Hypotheses:
- imperative headlines will get higher click through rates (not testing on this one, change to Like Carl Sagan Religion)
- "There are people who resonate with our message so strongly that the presentation on our website hardly even matters, and some significant number of people who are searching for 'Carl Sagan' are among them. For our Carl Sagan advertisement, we expect a Click-Through Rate of 15% ... of those who land on our page, we expect at least 15% will click 'Our Beliefs' and that at least 2% will go all the way to submitting their email address on the Join Us page." This results in $2.50 per live email address with a population of 900 emails per month available given the volume of traffic searching for 'Carl Sagan'.
Checklist:
- Select keywords
- Create landing page text
- Create advertisement text
- Create the rendered wireframe site as a rails app (Landing, OurBeliefs, JoinUs)
- Create the models to track visitors
- Create the models/flow to capture email signups to mailchimp
- Run the first experiment
- Evaluate results ... distill insights ... plan next few experiments
Spiritual experience experiments
Ben ... added experiences to test here: http://solseed.org/Direct_experiences_that_lead_to_religiousness if we figure out a way to test them
Possible tools to use
Weekly Survey
- Describe practices/experiences from the week that seem to qualify as potentially transcendent
- Describe your emotional state
- Describe specific examples of actions/activities that represent virtuous fruits
After Experience Inventory
- Describe the experience
- Describe your emotional state
Practices and Outcomes Journal
- Keep a log of practices/experiences that seem to qualify as potentially transcendent, as they happen or shortly thereafter
- Keep a log of your emotional state throughout the week
- Keep a log of moral victories (examples of virtuous fruits in action)
Fruits we are looking for from religious experiences
Immediate visceral effects
- cosmic religious feeling (experiencing the cosmos as a single significant whole)
- wonder/awe
- apprehension of and appreciation for the nature of life
Virtues (Good Character) ... internalized and thereby acted upon
- better ethics/morality (knowing right from wrong and doing the right)
- more kindness for others
- compassion for those we don't naturally empathize with
- empathy for strangers in other parts of the world
- empathy for future generations
- empathy for the body of all life
- more generosity
- more loyalty (faithfulness)
- more gentleness
- more self-control
- more courage (less inhibited in a desirable dimension)
- more patience (forebearance)
- more love for others ... and returned to us
- more wisdom
- more knowledge
- more intentionality (planfulness, proactivity ... not just reacting, but creating)
- more presence (mindfulness, aware of the moment and space you are in ... not just worrying about the future or suffering over the past)
Emotional benefits
- experience that gives lasting emotional benefit (makes people happier)
- more joy
- more peace
- life satisfaction
- sense of purpose
- feeling connected to something larger than ourselves
- feeling of kinship/solidarity with SolSeed members in particular (?)
Motivation ... felt, not necessarily acted upon
- excitement about bringing life to other worlds (enhancing what people already feel?)
- excitement about bringing life here on Earth
- unique experience that attracts people (keeps them engaged)
- desire to repeat experience
- desire to share experience
- comfort sharing experience
- actual contributions to causes that align with our highest aspirations
- movement in an area/areas of aspiration that were stuck
- purposeful work taking up its share of our resources
- less wanting (less consumerism)
- ability to feel good about working for long-term goals, including goals that may not be realized in your own lifetime
Morality
- Ben: at Sol 2013 Brandon talked about how holding people accountable for bad actions is a form of otherizing and that there are more effective means of shaping people's behaviors ... and about how we should see things as "good but could be better" rather than "wrong and needs to change"
- So what does Brandon mean by the word "wrong?"
- Non-dualistic perspective (key to Buddhist enlightenment): "It's all good" ... no morality
- Dualistic perspective: "Right and wrong, us and them"
- Both perspectives have failings, so one of our opportunities is to switch to the appropriate perspective for each situation we encounter
- Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono) is about the same idea (adopting different perspectives and avoiding getting stuck in any one perspective ... but from a functional "group process" perspective rather than a metaphysical/spiritual perspective)
- Positive (Yellow), Negative (Black), and Emotional evaluation (Red), Just the facts (White), Brainstorming (Green), Process (Blue)
- Brandon: This is why I can say things that seem paradoxical and contradictory, because things are paradoxical and contradictory
- Ben is worried that when Brandon talks this way, people who don't know him well will write him off as a crackpot
- Brandon: Some people aren't ready for this type of message
- Ben: More concerned about people who will actively try and harm us, if we not only say that we are some new "scientific religion" but also that we sometimes don't think in terms of right and wrong
- Brandon: I don't think we need to worry about people physically attacking us over morality
- Ben: You're right that people basically don't do that in our current cultural environment, but it's been common in the past, is still common in many parts of the world, and could become common again here as a result of some of the massive changes that characterize this period of history
- Brandon: Part of the arete of humanity is working out what is the better or worse thing to do, but a lot of bad things happen when people take their concepts of right and wrong too seriously
- Ben: The glib answer is "our morality is different, we want to do what's best for all life" ... but then again, what happens when the interests of two living things are pitted against each other?
- Brandon: Under our morality, being animals (who must consume other beings to survive) is fraught with moral difficulty
Evaluation
- Ben ... doing this always makes me feel better (almost always) because ... for all the obvious reasons (friends that think like I do, getting to talk about things that matter on a regular basis, progress on interesting projects)
- Brandon ... enjoyed the time today