Truth
The core of my humanist practice is my interior truth. In my opinion, the point of meditation and mindfulness exercise is the discovery and ongoing awareness of personal truth in life's moments. My personal truth, I strongly believe, is rooted in a desire to promote the greater good. My sense of personal truth led me to reject a career in dentistry when I was twenty. I knew I would be no good to anyone if I forced myself to continue in a career path dictated to me by well-meaning-but-narcissistic parents. The subsequent poverty and struggle to find a place in the world was filled with joy after that liberation from living a life on the conditions of others. Like Siddhartha, who left his prison-palace and experienced the world for what is was, I was suddenly open-eyed to the world, my world, where I needed to find a path which would help to alleviate the shared human suffering around me.
My focus has become sharper with age. While outright economic survival shared my attention with my desire to do good in my early years, I managed to merge my livelihood with my desire to focus on improving the human condition personally and directly with the work of my hands. I learned to live without those things which many of my peers craved. Funky apartments, furnished with things salvaged from the streets, suited me fine. Trips abroad were beyond my means, so I consciously sought the company of foreign visitors in my own environment to learn about their cultures, their countries, from them. My daily work, tending to the educational needs of students, the security needs of psychiatric patients, the physical needs of medical patients, was filled with satisfaction which balanced its grueling energy requirements and poor monetary compensation.
My discovery of my personal truth also fueled my self-discovery as a gay man unwilling to be treated as a second-class human being. As I lived and worked among society's poor and disenfranchised, as I advocated daily for them, I also advocated for my own civil and human rights. I did not seek to lead. I sought to do. I was an openly gay nurse in the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health at a time when there were still gay men imprisoned in locked mental hospitals, where the state and their families had consigned them to hide "the shame" of their homosexuality. I came out to my family. I came out in every social and vocational situation. My personal truth told me that this was the way to be free and to do good for others, gay and straight. When faced with living with HIV and AIDS, I did the same, where it was relevant. When faced with living with cancer, I did the same, where it was relevant.
The leaders of movements can deal with The Truth. They can package it in books or films. They can sell it. They can run banquets and galas to line their pockets by peddling The Truth. This has never been my personal truth. I have not sought to lead or be a poster-child for any cause. Most of those who have, in my experience, have done so for their own cause above the cause of the greater good. I have simply done my work to the best of my ability for the greater good of whatever community I have served. I have done it to serve my personal truth. This is my practice. When I have been asked to lead within organizations, my adherence to my personal truth has often put me in conflict with those in authority whose ethics were inconsistent with my own.
When I speak here or anywhere, I am trying to speak as best I can from my personal truth. I do not ask for agreement. I do not mind criticism of what I write, as long as the critic seems to understand that I am only speaking from my personal truth. I am not trying to convert. I am trying to encourage personal humanist practice in anyone interested. I have nothing to gain from this process other than the progressive development of my own humanist practice with the daily effort.
My focus has become sharper with age. While outright economic survival shared my attention with my desire to do good in my early years, I managed to merge my livelihood with my desire to focus on improving the human condition personally and directly with the work of my hands. I learned to live without those things which many of my peers craved. Funky apartments, furnished with things salvaged from the streets, suited me fine. Trips abroad were beyond my means, so I consciously sought the company of foreign visitors in my own environment to learn about their cultures, their countries, from them. My daily work, tending to the educational needs of students, the security needs of psychiatric patients, the physical needs of medical patients, was filled with satisfaction which balanced its grueling energy requirements and poor monetary compensation. My discovery of my personal truth also fueled my self-discovery as a gay man unwilling to be treated as a second-class human being. As I lived and worked among society's poor and disenfranchised, as I advocated daily for them, I also advocated for my own civil and human rights. I did not seek to lead. I sought to do. I was an openly gay nurse in the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health at a time when there were still gay men imprisoned in locked mental hospitals, where the state and their families had consigned them to hide "the shame" of their homosexuality. I came out to my family. I came out in every social and vocational situation. My personal truth told me that this was the way to be free and to do good for others, gay and straight. When faced with living with HIV and AIDS, I did the same, where it was relevant. When faced with living with cancer, I did the same, where it was relevant.
The leaders of movements can deal with The Truth. They can package it in books or films. They can sell it. They can run banquets and galas to line their pockets by peddling The Truth. This has never been my personal truth. I have not sought to lead or be a poster-child for any cause. Most of those who have, in my experience, have done so for their own cause above the cause of the greater good. I have simply done my work to the best of my ability for the greater good of whatever community I have served. I have done it to serve my personal truth. This is my practice. When I have been asked to lead within organizations, my adherence to my personal truth has often put me in conflict with those in authority whose ethics were inconsistent with my own.
When I speak here or anywhere, I am trying to speak as best I can from my personal truth. I do not ask for agreement. I do not mind criticism of what I write, as long as the critic seems to understand that I am only speaking from my personal truth. I am not trying to convert. I am trying to encourage personal humanist practice in anyone interested. I have nothing to gain from this process other than the progressive development of my own humanist practice with the daily effort.
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