Many years ago I was involved in left wing politics and I remember having a lot of arguments on street corners with people who used to say that there couldn’t be a society where people shared things because greed was human nature. For some reason this came back to be a couple of days ago, probably because I had been reading some stuff about Buddha (The Marvelous Compainion), and I have recently been to the oral transmission of a prayer called The King of Aspiration Prayer (it has other titles too). A great part of this prayer is saying that one will not stop striving to liberate all sentient beings and all of the usual things a bodhisatva has taken an oath to do.
So what then is human nature? The self sacrificing of the christian saints – is this human nature? Having doctors cut you open to feed demons, like Buddha did, is this human nature?
Yes. There are an infinite number of sides to the coin of human nature, kindness and meanness are both there. You should choose kindness, which comes from the root of kin, where you treat everybody like they were your family. All meanness does is hurt you as much as you hurt others.
Personality types
Just did a survey looking at the different kinds of personality, based on Aristotle’s groupings:
Sanguine : Happy go lucky, fun loving
Phlegmatic : Easy going, takes things as they come
Melancholy : Introverted, detail person
Choleric : Control freak, gets things done.
Guess what? My scores weren’t biassed strongly toward any one but I came out sanguine. This was a surprise to me as I see myself as an introvert. Rosie pointed out that I am the one who is the troll for the Billy Goats Gruff under the bed while she reads the story, or the sea monster at the swimming pool.
Weird.
Illness
Had my first cold in nearly a year and have taken a couple of days off, will drive to Nottingham tonight to avoid getting up early. Still not 100% and I have a phone interview tomorrow. Ho hum.
Love to all.