Principle 10 Solidarity – Week 2 – 2025

October 8, 2025

Principle 10. Solidarity. Week 2 

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

Last time: The Key (and Houdini enchained)

This time: The Social Dimension, Parrots, and the game of Ask About It!

Warning!

The principles are simply platitudes if you don’t make the effort to transform them into something more. They are important not because they are commanded by some deity, sanctioned by other people, or by respected institutions.  They are important if they can help you build a more coherent life filled with growing Peace in yourself, and around you, internal Force to face life’s difficulties, and the Joy of an open future.

This Week:

Last week we focused on the principle’s structure and general meaning. This week we will be thinking about how we applied, or could have applied, the principle of solidarity in our past.

Try This:

1. Recall a situation in the recent, or distant past where you treated someone as you want to be treated. 

2. Think of a situation where you didn’t follow this principle. 

3. What was the result in each case? 

4. Try to identify the circumstances that encouraged one behaviour or the other?

To help gain some new perspectives we will also play  

The Game of the Week.

Ask About It!

The basic idea is simple: turn to someone and ask them what they understand this principle to mean.  Asking them may involve the difficult task of taking a little risk, and overcoming any initial self-censorship. But, why the hesitation and inhibitions? You’re only asking someone’s opinion. 

Try it out. Simply ask a friend, your neighbour, family member, or some stranger on the street. The point is to solicit their opinion, and then the hard part; you need to listen.

Perhaps, you like it when others to ask your opinion. Is it possible also in this regard to treat others like we would like to be treated.

Personal Reflections:

As we’ve talked about before, variations of the “Golden Rule” appear in many religions, philosophies, and ethical systems. However, if we asked the representatives of these schools “why” we should we follow this rule their answers might differ considerably. Obviously, for some it might be because their god said so. For others perhaps that it promotes social harmony. In the context of our principles, the motive is both explicit and very specific — the principle itself tells as that when we act in this particular way we liberate ourselves. We see once again how the principles are rooted in the register produced in us by our actions. 

Here’s some thoughts from Silo on the question of guiding ourselves by our internal registers. I’ll start my reflections this week by thinking about chapter II from the Internal Landscape.

Chapter II (The Inner Reality) 

1. What is it that you want? If you answer that it is love or security that is most important, then you are speaking of moods—of things that you cannot see.

 2. If you reply that it is money, power, social recognition, a just cause, God, or eternity that is most important, then you are speaking of something that you see or you imagine.

3. We will be in agreement when you say, “I choose this just cause because I reject suffering! I want this because it brings me tranquillity, and I reject that because it disturbs me or makes me violent.” 

4. Is your mood, then, at the center of all aspiration, all intention, all affirmation, and all denial? You might reply that whether you are sad or joyful, a number remains the same, and that the sun would be the sun even if human beings did not exist. 

5. I will tell you that the same number differs depending on whether it is something that you have to give or to receive, and that the sun fills greater space within the human being than in the heavens.

6. The radiance of a spark or of a star dances for your eye. And though there is no light without the eye, on other eyes this radiance would fall with different effect.

7. Therefore let your heart affirm, “I love this radiance I see!” But may it never say, “Neither sun, nor spark, nor star have anything to do with me.”

8. Of what reality do you speak to fish or reptile; to gigantic animal, tiny insect, or bird; to a child or an old person; to one who sleeps or one who keeps watch in cold calculation or feverish terror?

9. I say that the echo of the real murmurs or resounds according to the ear that hears, and that for other ears what you call “reality” would play a different song. 

10. Therefore let your heart affirm, “I love the reality that I build!”

And if you need more inspiration check out these parrots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEvO5SBiv6k

For the last few years, I included here a writing by Roberto V about this principle. If you’d like to read it (something I strongly recommend) you can find it on my website dzuckerbrot.com under Visiting Authors.

Remember:

Meditation isn’t Only for When You Close Your Eyes.

It is here amid all the little joys and daily crap that we can actually create a practice that can be practiced at every moment and in every circumstance. This is a dynamic meditation, requiring neither particular postures, or wardrobe, nor any special conditions. With time and application these efforts give all my activities a particular tone, mood, and mental direction.  

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 

Worth Repeating:

“Learn to treat others in the way that you want to be treated.” 

Silo_ The Path 

Coming up:

Next week we will continue with our considerations of The Principle of Solidarity, in relation to our current situation. 

Note:

Marie Claire was our host for our last meeting. Peter J. 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: 

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