Principle 10 Solidarity – Week 1 – 2025

October 2, 2025

Principle 10. Solidarity. Week 1 

When You Treat Others As You Would Have Them Treat You, You Liberate Yourself.

Last time: The Future and What is it that I Want?

This Time: The Key (and another photo of Houdini)

This Week:

 We are starting a new principle, and this first week we’ll focus on its structure and meaning in general. Like all the principles, this one provokes its own questions. Why would treating others this particular way allow me to liberate myself? When I treat them another way, am I enchaining myself? Why would that be? What am I liberated from? Who am I? And who are the others? And that’s just to get started. 

Along with our effort to delve deeply into this principle we are always trying to turn the principles as a whole into a dynamic and permanent meditation. That is to say, into a practice applicable at every moment of our lives. In that way we go on shaping a style of, or way of, engaging with life.

To help gain some new perspectives we will also play  

The Game of the Week.

Find It!

The rules for week’s game are simple, and summed up in the name of the game, Find it! We are always looking for examples of the principles in our daily life and personal experience. In the game of Find It! we extend that to the cultural environment around us. 

This week’s story, quotes, images might be considered as examples of what someone playing this game found. During this week keep your eyes and ears (and memory and imagination) open for things around you that illustrate the principle.  

This week we offer examples from Silo’s writings and from ancient Asia, but don’t let that limit you. Your example can be drawn from contemporary culture, and can include jokes, songs, movies, etc. The point is that the thing you have found casts light on some aspect of this month’s principle. 

Personal Reflections:

What follows are my reflections. I make no greater claim for them but offer them in the spirit of exchange and dialogue.     

Our principle isn’t quite what you might think at first. It doesn’t suggest that you treat others as they want to be treated. Nor does it say treat them well so they will be nice to you. Though some may disagree, or take offence, it seems to me that neither of those things are oversights. Why our principle of solidarity is formulated as it is might prove a question well worth investigating. 

There also arise questions about how it relates to that other principle about liberty which we studied last month. Though any of the twelve principles of valid action might be applied to our relationships with other people, these are the only two that specifically reference others. While the first one is called Liberty and hopefully opens the field to unitive or coherent action, this principle is named Solidarity and points to how we might extend that coherence to the treatment of everyone else (i.e. valid action).

 This principle has obvious similarities with the so-called “Golden Rule” which we find at the centre of many moral traditions. However, that “rule” is something that we have heard so many times, and in so many variations, that we don’t usually pay attention to what it might really mean — let alone how we might try to apply it. 

It’s easy enough to prove to yourself that the sustained and honest attempt to apply this principle has important consequences. Among them, that it leads to a certain openness, a more positive emotional climate, and an increased tendency to connect with others. We know that isolation, selfishness, and self-absorption can cause serious problems for people. This principle encourages us to open ourselves to others, and to approach them in a positive manner. 

There are great differences between this principle and the one we considered last week which spoke of not harming anyone. But they complement each other in important ways. And that is also a useful reminder that the principles can be understood, and more importantly transformed into a lifestyle, by interpreting each principle within the context of the other ones.

In the third of Silo’s Letters to My Friends, he gives us reason to believe that he saw this principle as the key to all of them. In fact, he says it is: “the true morality.” He makes similar assertions of its centrality to his thought in various other points in his writings. In his public talks in 1981 he framed it as our freely chosen moral act. Last month’s principle casts light on why he called it freely chosen.

However, important as it may be, there is no doubt that like all principles it can be misapplied and distorted. There are situations where it is, more or less, intentionally reduced to a slogan, an excuse, or a banner under which I can cause suffering to another by claiming for example that, it’s for their own good, or that’s how I would want to be treated. Leaving those cases aside, there is still a lot of room for misunderstandings about what the principle is suggesting. 

Our version of the famous moral edict makes it very clear that the idea is not: "treat others well so that they will reciprocate and treat you well". Though perhaps there is nothing wrong with that approach here something else is being proposed. And that difference is a big deal. We say that by acting in this way “you liberate yourself.” This is a result that has little to do with the others’ response to my actions, and at the very least liberates me from dependence on their actions or reactions. This point may raise new questions when it comes to the issues around harming others that were raised in discussions of the previous principle. Of course, both those principles leave us a lot to consider regarding why, and from what, I wish to free myself.

Versions of, and commentaries on, the “golden rule” can be found in the most ancient teachings and in every part of the world. You’d think that fact alone might have got our attention already!

Here’s some comments on the theme. 

In the Mahabhrata, the great epic of India it says: 

Vyasa says: Do not to others what you do not wish done to yourself; and wish for others too what you desire and long for for yourself–this is the whole of Dharma; heed it well

— Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113.8

One of Silo’s many comments on this topic taken from a talk he gave in the Canary Islands in 1978. I’ve taken excerpts from The

Manual for Messengers. I’ll include the following parts over the next weeks.

Part I

In very general principles we have indicated the registers of valid action, and highest among these principles is the one known as the “golden rule.” This principle says, “When you treat others as you want them to treat you, you liberate yourself.” This is not a new principle – it is thousands of years old, and in many parts of the world, in many cultures, it has withstood the test of time. It is a universally accepted and valid principle that has been formulated in various ways – sometimes in the negative, as in “Do nothing to others that you do not want them to do to you.” That is simply another approach to the same idea, as is the formulation, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Of course, it is not exactly the same as saying, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” But that’s all right; however they may have phrased it, since ancient times people have invoked this, the highest of all moral principles, the highest of all principles of valid action. 

But how do I want others to treat me? Even if we take it as given that it is good to treat others as I want them to treat me, exactly how is it that I want to be treated? I will have to answer this question by saying that if other people treat me in certain ways they are treating me badly, and if they treat me in other ways they are treating me well. I will have to answer this in terms of good and bad. Once again, I will have to return to the eternal wheel of defining valid action according to one theory or another or one religion or another. For me, a certain thing is good, but another person may see this differently. And there will never fail to be people who treat others very badly, while still claiming to be applying the same principle, because supposedly these people like to be treated badly. 

I look forward to hearing about your reflections on this key principle. 

Remember:

- Reflect on your basic understanding of the principle, it’s general meaning and implications. 

-Play the game of Find It! 

Someone else found us this quotes from Silo and the Mahabharata, what examples can you find in the world around you?

Coming up:

Next week we will continue with our considerations of Principle Solidarity, in relation to our past situations. 

Consider:

“If my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions are in agreement, if they all go in the same direction, if my actions do not create contradiction with what I feel, then I can say that my life has coherence. But though I am true to myself, this does not necessarily mean I am being true to those in my immediate environment. I still need to achieve this same coherence in my relationships with others, treating them the way I would like to be treated”.

Silo_ Letters to My Friends 

Note:

Mark L was our host (guide) at our last meeting. X  has offered to be our host for the next one. We hope you can join us. You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting. 

These notes have been posted on our Facebook page (Community of Silo’s Message Toronto Annex), sent to our email list, and are also on my webpage at  www.dzuckerbrot.com

A Gift for You: 

In some moment of the day or night inhale a breath of air and imagine that you carry this air to your heart. Then, ask with strength for yourself and for your loved ones. Ask with strength to move away from all that brings you contradiction; ask for your life to have unity. Don't take a lot of time with this brief prayer, this brief asking, because it is enough that you interrupt for one brief moment what is happening in your life for this contact with your interior to give clarity to your feelings and your ideas.

Silo_ La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005