(Use Participant Cards)

• Proof that there is a predestined path for human conduct, which we are not following, is all around us.  

• It's in the eyes of the hater. 

•  It's in the wars we fight. 

• It's in the tears we shed after school shootings and other tragedies. 

• It's in the help we give to each other after these tragedies. 

• It's in the frustration we all feel in this underperforming society we live in. 

• It's in the shared embarrassment that many of us have for our national politics. 

(All Together):  

•  “It's in the feeling we all have that there must be a better way!” 

Have we ever stopped to consider why so many of us are always saying “This world is so messed up?” but that we can’t put our finger on what it is that holds us back?  

2600 years ago Marcus Tillius Cicero said, “The creator’s order of things is called the Natural Law. A fundamental proposition of the natural law is that man was given a special dispensation for reason… As one in the same Nature holds together and supports the universe, all of whose parts are in harmony with one another, so men are united in Nature; but by reason of their own depravity they quarrel, not realizing that they are of one blood and subject to one and the same protecting power. If this fact were understood, surely man would live the life of the gods!“

Millions of people who have gone before us have told us the same exact things which matter for human health, happiness, and for getting along in a diverse society. These things have not changed in thousands of years.  The framework is known. We have all the knowledge we need to improve things.   But as Cicero said, we don’t listen ….   

The framework is simple: (Participant Cards) 

• When we attend to our duties and obligations to self and others we become strong, thrive personally, and become a force for good. 

• When we focus on our own rights and privileges we become weak, we go to a dark place and bring others down with us. 

• Nothing in the extremes is good for us.  

The world's leading religions have tried for centuries to ground us in these principles. We are told about their transformative value with unbelievable frequency and consistency. The great majority of people on the planet already agree that these ideas are fantastically true. 

Yet we still don’t listen! (Hand out the “What would be so bad” - Participant Cards)

• What would be so bad: if we were to teach and learn how gifted we really are, that we have incredible capacity to be good; not only for ourselves, but others, and that our purpose in this life is to act on these gifts?  What would be so bad? 

• What would be so bad: if we finally wed ourselves formally to these natural laws? We can all believe in different Gods or no God at all if we wish, but we would unite around a simple truth, that human beings share a special role in nature, and that it is in our nature to protect each other, to hold onto our higher gifts, to be a force for good, not bad!  What would be so bad?

• What would be so bad: We would learn that it matters greatly how we treat other people in this life and how to treat each other as equals. To be modest and moderate, and to humble and not arrogant; to live life with awe and wonder for all those things that we will never know, and with a duty and responsibility to a collective higher calling. What would be so bad?

• What would be so bad: A life full of eternal optimism, instead of a life defined by our lowest moments and worst traits! 

• What would be so bad? 

Why do we continue to deprive ourselves of a shared approach of seeing each other and behaving toward one another?

Class exercise:Teacher led. The Ingredients Wheel (Pictured here - The ten main ingredients now written onto the wheel)  Spin the Wheel. 

Notice the faster it spins, we are blinded, we cannot see or comprend the ingredients because of the spinning wheel.  It is the way they all spin together, to blind us and cause us to underestimate, underanalyze, and grow accustomed to these ingredients. We have never been able to slow things down, and to analyze all the ingredients deeply enough or to tie them directly back to a violation of natural laws. 

“We will never live the life intended for us, until we believe as a society that there is a path intended for us” 

Also, for reasons which nobody will ever know; the traits we need most to be happy and successful, personally and collectively, are those hardest for us to maintain. 

Nobody knows why life is so hard. 

Nobody can tell us with certainty that these things are nature's laws, and our destiny, and this is likely why we don’t listen. 

(Pass out  “Hard To Believe” Participant Cards)  The natural laws are packed with "counterintuitive" truths!

• It's hard to believe, what we say matters that much to the lives of people whom we do not even know, or that we have to work so hard as individual citizens to advance humankind or be a cause of its destruction. 

• It’s hard to believe, so many fine people born into the world can have so much capacity for greatness, but yet turn from good to bad, from light to dark, from positive to negative.

• It’s hard to believe, so many of us lose the battle with our divided minds, and become unbalanced, either too far left or too far right, too conservative or too liberal.

•  It’s hard to believe,  the uncaring attitude of so few, becomes the uncaring attitude of so many.

•  It’s hard to believe that it’s our failure to pay attention to how we take the “slide” and lose our “shit”,  that we end up with millions of narcissists running around with too much self-confidence who are walking all over millions of super empaths who have too little. 

• It's hard to believe that people becoming extreme in one direction or the other is the cause of all dysfunction in human affairs.

•  It's hard to believe that if we cut off extremism we will cut off hate.

•  It’s hard to believe that there are powers that be, and that our destiny has been determined by nature.

•  It's hard to believe the unknown creator of all things would pack our lives full of so many obstacles, and would make the traits we need to be successful the hardest ones to build and maintain!

•  It’s hard to believe that our purpose is to carry out our creator's intentions. 

(Together Card)  

It is hard to believe that the guy who created this course simply pulled together all of the world's most practical wisdom, and delivered it to us on a silver platter. 

Yet it's all true. 

Millions of people believe in the natural laws, and are willing to make the sacrifices required of the framework!  Most people are out there right now behaving according to the rules, and trying hard to hold onto their higher gifts in the face of great trauma and great odds.  But they need our help. It will require more of us to stay on the path and to see through the ingredients. 

The ingredients are nasty!  We’ve done a very poor job of this in the last few years of teaching the things that hold a society together. The ingredients have overwhelmed and overtaken us, and have stolen our reality from us.  (Spin the wheel again) We’ve been pulled away from the essential teachings. 

Doing the right thing and maintaining a strong character required of citizenship often requires the type of courage, and sacrifice, that is too much for “ordinary” people to handle: and this has kept us locked in our chains of “ordinariness” forever.  

Our world of “ordinary and unremarkable” has been a very weird place, but that doesn't mean that we are doomed forever. Our new normal may present the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes!

Natural laws give us the road map to changing the way we evolve. There have been incredible breakthroughs in our understanding of what causes our minds to close; what causes our anger, excessive self-righteousness, and the moral outrage to form toward people who are not like us, or who have differing opinions than us.  We can place much more emphasis on the fact that we are born good, and we can learn how to retain our goodness, hold back our known temptations, and to slowly reduce our flaws.  Today, there are many more practical and accessible tools that can help us prevent unregulated thinking, loss of faith and hope. Understanding our own human nature has always been at the forefront of our advancement, and if we look in the mirror and stop blaming each other, we can learn how to overcome our faults together,  improve our brain chemistry, and move from negative to positive thinkers!  We can break free from the chains of our own “ordinariness”!

There will always be naysayers, and people who do NOT go along with the fantastic truths. There will always be people who tell you that widespread peace is not possible among such complicated animals. Therefore, we can expect to continue to struggle with pockets of hate and violence which reflect primitive behaviors, for some time. Progress may not be linear. However, this doesn’t change the most important fact - that you have a choice! 

These natural laws; these fantastic truths are not going anywhere. They will always be there for you, for your children, or a future generation. When enough people amass the collective fortitude to follow it - It will work.  We can improve our human nature. You deserve to know that it’s possible. It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when. 

You are now armed with the perspective that would allow you to transform the world into a better place. You could actually end terrible disagreement and hate forever based on your actions, your beliefs and your courage, the sky is the limit!  

So in closing: of course another final few statements of fact for you to challenge.

If and when a future generation were to decide to research the power of the great unknown and to research the power of the middle, and to research the power of humility over arrogance, you will see clearly the path, and you will stop doubting the path.

Cheat sheet: 

• Attend to the proven framework

• Believe in your goodness, and the capacity in the people around you; even when they disappoint you. (see carnegie Page 19 as a handout for this statement)

• Stay remarkable,  use your higher gifts or you will lose them

• Stay humble, never arrogant, 

• Stay moderate, never extreme. 

• Have empathy for yourself and others.

Only our fighting against a force as powerful as nature could produce the endless chaos that we partake of in our society, and for the terrible division, war and conflict across the globe. Hopefully, the totally nonsensical, illogical, and divided times that we’ve been living through, are the best and last proof that we need to finally rally around the laws of nature, and to convince you to make the massive commitment that you must make.

The commitment we need to make is a societal one, it must be multifaceted.it will require courage, determination and sacrifice that we’ve never quite been able to make: until now. 

What choice will you make? What systems will we need to put into place.?  Final question: Who is to decide what the middle looks like? Or what normal looks like? 

Quotations: 

• “For neither wilt thou do anything well as it pertains to man without at the same time having a reference for things divine.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3-13.

• “The foundation stone of national life, is and will forever be, the individual character of the average citizen.” Franklin Roosevelt

• “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure…” Abraham Lincoln, 1863

• “Red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries …with two different versions of American history.” Jon Haidt (article, Atlantic, on web site)

• “There is nothing so wrong with America, that cannot be fixed by what is right with America”