Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.Robert Louis Stevenson

Inner Life Directions

Expanding Reality

July 2019

  • Abortion and the Language We Use

    The Guardian newspaper recently made a style guide change in relation to how it is and will cover stories about abortion. This was in response to several anti-abortion bills which were either introduced or passed recently and which were called “heartbeat bills”.   Fetal development is seen as a continuum and the president of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology said that “What’s interpreted as a heartbeat in these bills is actually electrically induced flickering of a portion of fetal tissue that will become the heart as the embryo develops.”  The Guardian wants to only use terms that can be medically defensible, so they will use the phrase “6-week abortion ban” instead of “fetal heartbeat bill”. Similarly for clarity they will use “anti-abortion” instead of “pro-life.” We may remember when those opposing third trimester abortion called it “partial birth abortion”. Some and many articles call it late term abortion, but that too is not technically a medical term.

    We too must be careful about our language when we speak about abortion. We too ought to adhere to terminology and phrases which are medically sound and clear,  avoid language which The Guardian says is motivated by politics and not science.

  • Dropped Wallets and the Good Within People

    I first saw the story in the NYT and then on NPR and The Verge and other publications. I am sure you saw or heard it somewhere because it was one of these stories the media feels it has to cover. Originally published in the journal Science it dealt with an experiment that over 200 economists thought would go contrary than it did, would not reveal people’s capacity for honesty. Some 17000 wallets usually with money in them were dropped in places like banks and post offices in over 40 countries by people posing as tourists. What they found is that people did try to return the wallets, in much larger percentages than imagined. The name and email of the purported owners were included and efforts were obviously made to contact the owners.  To note was that the names were changed according to the country. What’s more the greater the amount of money in the wallet the more likely the wallets were returned.

    We have come to have a negative, if not cynical view of human nature, which of course can at least in part be substantiated by the amount of violence, greed, cruelty and meanness in the world.  But to someone like me, someone thoroughly steeped in the existence and potential for good of our inner transcendent self, this finding only confirms what I’ve long known.  I as so many have witnessed the manifestations of this good, this part of us that goes by many names, including spirit or Maslow’s positive instinctual core.

    It’s time we change our view of human nature, not with naiveté but with the knowledge that given certain circumstances, the good does prevail.

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