The Golden Rule

I grew up frequently hearing the adage “treat others the way you want to be treated.” The Golden Rule. With a little lived experience and dare I say, wisdom, I realize that this “rule” is flawed. I propose an alternative. How about, “treat yourself the way you want to be treated.”

You will inevitably continue to treat others the way you think you deserve to be treated until you’ve done some soul searching and intentional manifestation.  

My parents were careful not to include too much religiosity in their teachings. But that didn’t mean that Christian guilt didn’t permeate, as well as the false teaching that selflessness was the same thing as righteousness. I was taught that to be selfish was bad. The word “selfish” was said with a sneer. Being self-centered was dubbed immoral. But how can we not be “self-centered” when our experience in this world is inevitably going to be framed by what we see looking out of our own two eyeballs. It’s bound by our mental experience. It’s impossible to remove the bias, all we can do is acknowledge the limitation. We are inevitably bound by the bias of our own “selfish” experience. No fault of our own, it’s just the way this whole thing is set up.

On good days, I really do buy into the selflessness of the Buddhist teachings. The Buddha taught that there really is no separate “self,” that we are all an interconnected “self.” I was moved by Thich Nhat Han’s teachings of no death (see book: No Death, No Fear), and how we continue to live on in all the ripple effects of our behavior, our interactions with nature, with people, in memory.

Even if there is no self, there is certainly a self-centered experience. There’s only one individual experiencing this incarnation, in your body, in you, right now. And that’s just reality, it’s not a moral failing.

If there’s a self-centered experience, and each conscious individual is the only one who can witness that experience, then each individual self is responsible for communicating personal needs and moderating own behavior within that experience. Our experience is interconnected with others, with the world, with nature. If we were to act selfishly, we would be focused on how to tend to our own wants and needs. Self-kindess will be mirrored by kindness from external sources. Because without the illusion of self, we see that it’s all connected. To treat ourselves the way that we would hope a loved one might treat us, how a loved one might care for us. When we are in need of extra care, extra love, extra rest, extra medicine, we should give it. We should treat ourselves with extra kindness, extra love. Why not learn how to care for others, to care for the world, by learning to care for ourselves first? Isn’t that the best place to start?? It seems much easier to teach a child to ask for food when they’re hungry, to say they are tired and need a nap, to say that they need to stomp around because they’re upset, to say they’re confused and ask for help in managing their feelings… than to live in a world with children who were told to smile and say cheese, say they’re fine, never show weakness, suck it up, rub some dirt on it, and get back to work. I believe that we can teach our children how to care for themselves more effectively, more compassionately, and more consistently. In so doing, I believe we will teach these children how to care for others in a way that’s far kinder than my generation learned. To treat themselves the way they wish others would treat them.