A strategy
Arrogance, envy, intolerance, greed, fear, anger, vanity -- the goal is to reduce all these 'beautiful' emotions in society -
• to strengthen the cohesion of the society in relation to existing environmental problems and expected technology-related disruptions
• to increase individual quality of life by reducing negative emotions.
Necessary for this are
1.Development and testing of teaching methods and tools to build emotional competence
2.The formation of an awareness regarding the importance of emotional competence in the population.
A transformation in society can be successful if it has a positive impact on the quality of life / well-being of people relatively quickly.
Quality of life is essentially a consequence of one's own emotions; Pride, joy, safety and more on the one hand; Fear, anger, grief, envy, greed and others on the other hand.
Perception -> interpretation + rating -> emotion but ...
Emotional competency - emotional understanding and regulation - allows to reduce the above connection and to get release from negative emotions.
Emotions --
      •     to clearly perceive them (not to try to ignore them)
      •     to question them
      •     to dissolve them.
Eastern philosophy offers (inter alia) the logically comprehensible concept that intellectual abstraction is objectively valuable but emotionally distressing.
Our intellectual ability is based on, among other things, abstraction and valuation. When identified with one's own thinking, however, abstraction and appraisal lead to emotional tensions, which are caused by demarcation, limitation, negative assessments, opposing dependencies, contradictions and conflicts of interest.
A positive assessment of one's own situation results in well-being; however, many people are not in a position to assess their situation as positive by a majority. There is always something missing or insufficient. The theory that humans as a survival strategy pay much more attention to negative assessments than to positive ones, is plausible. In addition, hiding the negative as a 'feel-good strategy' is risky.
A success, consumption or purchase usually results in a positive assessment of one's own situation - but that always remains relative. After a short time, the effect is lost - it leads to a needs-inflation regarding consumption and success. In addition, there are always negative reviews with a corresponding negative emotional impact.
Someone who thinks nothing and forgets himself - for example when listening to music - feels free and happy.
Buddhist philosophy opposes to the 'dividing and defining' the 'all-one'. Without abstraction there is no 'I' that wants to be 'realized' or feel threatened; no visions, no wishes and no limits. Abstract thinking is essential, but it's about to also developing the ability not to differentiate and not to evaluate. For their orientation, humans are habitually almost permanently assessing and generating visions and desires; it is not quite as simple but important to interrupt this occasionally so as not to be dominated by these evaluations and desires. Non-evaluation and non-abstraction not only result in unqualified well-being (without 'if' or 'but' in the background); the experience also leads to a kind of emancipation from the ego; to a looser relationship with your own thoughts.
The goal of a Buddhist monk to free himself completely from the ego is hard to achieve in our normal circumstances. But to see oneself as a permeable part of a civilization and not as a personality to be defended - with the experience of non-abstracting and non-judgmental being - already results in a significantly different quality.
"The bigger the ego, the more vulnerable you are." (Matthieu Ricard, Translator of the Dalai Lama in an interview by a Swiss newspaper)
Of course, this feeling of 'unlimited well-being' can be limited in time - as soon as thoughts abstract and evaluate, negative emotions can re-emerge. The experience and certainty of having a pathway to emotional well-being independent of the external circumstances then has a relativizing, relaxing and liberating effect. If one is aware that one's own thoughts and beliefs are not absolute truths but rather working hypotheses, this reduces their emotional impact.
Over time, one will also discover that it can also be abstracted from the standpoint of 'nothingness' and thus freedom from the 'I' persists.
The logic of 'not-evaluating' and 'not-abstracting':
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not rating results in a situation without conflicts and without defects;
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not differentiate means that there are no limitations - no boundaries - so infinite freedom without limitation is the emotionally perceived reality.
A physical or material limit is then a component in the intellectual assessment of the situation without emotional impact.
If this feeling of unrestricted freedom is available at any time, the many needs are losing their compulsive importance.
This in turn means less selfishness, more willingness to cooperate and more flexibility.
A process leading to the collapse of the emotional identity can be done through meditation or with emotional 'self-exploration' - from reports by Buddhists it can be seen that meditation can lead to the goal, with much will, discipline and time invested. Wolfgang Bernard describes another way in his book 'Going Beyond - With NLP to the deepest believe' (in German, ISBN 3-924077-80-0); an intensive introspection until the implosion of identity to 'nothingness'. Such a process is possible even without NLP; The prerequisite is an experience in controlling emotional attention and clearly perceiving one's own emotions.
The stages are about
- Overcoming the refusal to question anything in the psychic 'I'. Uncertainty in this area seems at best dangerous. Not only the physical condition but also the emotional competence can be improved, resulting in an improvement of the quality of life.
- Learning to consciously control emotional perception and distance.
- Overcoming unconscious emotional distance. Some people have taken aloofness to shield negative emotions. That anger, stress, greed, jealousy, etc. still arise, is attributed to environmental circumstances. However, distance also prevents one's own emotions from being perceived and observed in a differentiated way. Conscious steering of the emotional focus solves the problem.
- Learning to observe one's own thoughts and emotions.
Do I rate the person? How do I rate them? What causes a rating 'unsympathetic person' for a feeling?
- Learn what rating and non-rating has for emotional impact.
How does the rating feel to 'unsympathetic person' - how does 'person' feel without any rating.
- Understanding that quality of life is an emotional quality and that our emotional state of being is not from outward appearance but from our own evaluation-sensation pattern.
Some like a specific furniture, others not. A certain person may be sympathetic to one and unsympathetic to another. Without judgment "ugly furniture" and "unsympathetic persons" remain only emotionally neutral "furniture" and "persons".
- Insight that thoughts are not personal - that a multitude of current and past information as well as inherited abilities work together quite by chance - which we then interpret as 'I'.
- Learn to turn on 'pauses for thought'.
- Experience the abstractionless emotion.
It is also important that such a process meets as much as possible some criterias
- 'Everyday Practicable' - the practice of Zen Buddhism, which provides years of meditation on a koan in the seclusion of a monastery to the deep emotional 'all-one' insight, is not widely practicable in our society. But also occasional meditation on a Koan such. 'is it really true' can help, for example to loosen the belief in one's own assessments, to feel them more as 'working hypotheses' than as 'truths';
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Communicates experiences of success as early as possible and over and over in order to provide the participants with the necessary motivation;
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Contains all relevant aspects - dealing with oneself can cause reinforcement rather than weakening of the ego if the relativity of the 'I' is given too little attention. What is important is the insight that the 'I' is permanently dependent on the environment and influenced by it - and so is a really arbitrary demarcation - intellectually useful, but emotionally negative.
In a first phase, it is now about bringing together interested people, experts and institutions who are interested in the project and want to promote it.
Furthermore, different interactive learning processes with respect to people in different situations will be tested. Here, scientific findings and methods are important in order to work out the facts that are as clear as possible and that are recognizable to society as relevant.
Phase 3 is about bringing the goal and the process to the public by alerting media, politicians and other opinion leaders to the importance of this kind of cultural change.
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