The
Golden Rule
“Treat
those who are good with goodness, and also threat those who are not
good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who
are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus
honesty is attained.”
Lao
Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
The
golden rule according to Christianity states, “Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you.” (Luke 6:31) Think about that for
a minute. Notice that there are no exclusions—“others” is a
collective pronoun meaning everyone. The golden rule makes no
exceptions for differences in skin color or ethnicity, political
leaning, gender, non-gender or sexual orientation, religious
affiliation or non-affiliation, competence or incompetence, social
status or lack thereof, etc. We are to treat everyone the same—the
way we want to be treated, with dignity and respect. This
instruction from the mouth of Jesus, simple as it seems, may be the
hardest one to live by.
In
my experience, we talk up to people whom we perceive to have wealth
and power, and we talk down to people who are poor or ethnically
different from us. We change our personality, even our manner of
speech, for different people in any given situation. We feel free to
be curt, even dismissive, to people who are serving us, and we kowtow to
bosses and other authority figures.
Too
often we are harsh—at least, too often I am harsh. Most of us are
simply unaware that we treat people differently. Because it's all
about self-monitoring, isn't it? We can get away with these social
conventions of up and down treatment, because they are
socially accepted. No one is going to throw us in jail for being rude
to a sales person, or pin a ribbon on us for apple polishing with a
teacher or boss. So, the monitoring is on us. If we want to be a good
Christian, or a good Taoist, or just a decent human being, we must
put this form of equality into action.
Today,
let's monitor ourselves for up and down communication. Not for the
purpose of criticizing ourselves, but just to keep track of how we
change our manner depending upon our perception of the status of the
other person. The key to change is awareness. If we are striving for
consciousness, if we want to become a better person, we begin with
self-awareness.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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