H+ (Plus) a New Religion Read online

  It may be that humour was seen as a danger to the solemnity of most religions.

  Yet humour is a key lubricant of life. Humour is a social glue. Humour is the best anti-arrogance device. Humour is the best anti-despair device. Humour is what may separate man from other creatures. So why is humour neglected?

  Whether you offer other people something to laugh at, or whether you laugh at what others offer, it is a form of generosity. You are interacting in a way that is not threatening, not demanding and not serious.

  Lightness of being and lightness of touch are key aspects of H+.

  Humour develops the habit of mind of seeing things in different ways, of exploring possibilities. Humour dilutes the certainty that is the basis of so much emotional anguish. You can learn to laugh at yourself as well as at others.

  Anything that can be threatened by humour deserves to be threatened.

  Humour is not funny.

  Humour is very serious.

  Humour is about not taking the world or ourselves too seriously.

  Our brains like certainty. Perception seeks certainty. We then lock on to that certainty with rigidity, arrogance and intensity.

  Humour is all about the possibility of looking at things in a different way. Humour is all about the possibility of changing perceptions.

  In humour we change perceptions and suddenly see that the new perception makes logical sense.

  Humour is about lightness. This is the opposite of intensity, seriousness and anguish, that lock us into negativity.

  Humour is a social lubricant because it is a way of interacting generously with people. In humour we share the possibility of a new perception with others. With humour we give to others and yet lose nothing ourselves.

  What was the evolutionary benefit of humour? Why does a supposedly superior species have a sense of humour? How did that help with survival?

  Research by David Perkins at Harvard showed that 90 per cent of the errors in ordinary thinking (not high tech) were errors of perception. Perception was limited, egocentric, short term, etc.

  The ability to change perceptions and to look at things differently probably had a high survival value. Humour itself was a by-product of that ability.

  Attitude

  Humour is an attitude, not just the ability to tell jokes.

  If someone sets out to insult you and you shrug and do not feel insulted, then you are not insulted.

  Humour is a way of cutting the puppet strings that sometimes make us hostage to the world around us.

  Humour replaces certainty with ‘maybe’ and possibility. Maybe we could look at this differently.

  When there are things that need to be taken seriously, we choose to take them seriously – but can retain the lightness of humour.

  Humour builds self-esteem. You are not at the mercy of the world around you because you can laugh at it.

  Instead of asking someone to ‘lighten up’, we can get into the habit of asking a person to ‘press your humour button’.

  Humour is central to H+ because that is the only way we can take it seriously.

  HELP+

  THIS IS THE fundamental principle of H+.

  Why?

  Research in the USA showed that 94 per cent of young people rated ‘achievement’ as the most important thing in their lives.

  How do you get achievement?

  You may be a great sports star. You may be excellent at exams. You may set up a successful business. You may become a rock star.

  All these are possible and provide a great sense of achievement.

  But what about day-to-day achievement?

  What about those who are not going to be sports stars or successful entrepreneurs?

  Most religions have sins of one sort or another. Sins are all about the bad things you should not do. But is it enough not to do bad things? With H+ there are ‘positive sins’. These are things you should do. They are positive actions (‘pons’, see here) of help to others and to the world – daily acts of help or contribution that provide the opportunity for multiple small achievements. You set yourself an agenda of pons, no matter how small they may be, and you get a sense of achievement through doing them. From achievement comes self-esteem and a belief in yourself.

  You help yourself very directly by helping others.

  The importance of these small acts of help, or pons, is that they have a clear objective. If you help an old lady across the road, it is clear that you have done this. Achievement is visible. If you preach to a group of people, you can only hope that you have helped them.

  HOPE+

  THERE ARE FEW things sadder than the suicide of a young person. In Australia the most common cause of death in people under the age of 24 is suicide. This may be because Australia keeps better suicide statistics than other countries, where suicides may be hidden for religious reasons.

  The suicide of an elderly person is no less tragic but is more understandable. A person may have tired of the world or run out of the will to live. The person may be in pain from a terminal illness. But for young people there are no such reasons.

  A quarrel with a boyfriend or girlfriend, failure at an exam, low self-esteem can all lead young people to believe that the future has nothing to offer.

  Hope is key. During the Second World War, prisoners in concentration camps faced appalling conditions. Many of them kept up their hope over years until they were finally liberated.

  There is hope that appalling conditions will pass, no matter how black and permanent they may seem at the moment.

  There is hope that you will adjust yourself to the conditions and no longer be bullied by them.

  There is hope that, through your own efforts, things will get better.

  Even when hope is completely deluded, it is always worth having hope. That is not to say that you neglect to indulge in daily work because one day you may win the lottery.

  With the hope in H+ you seek to make things better. You also learn to ‘shrug’ and become less of a hostage to the world around.

  In many religions, prayer is a form of hope. You pray to God to make things better and believe that in his wisdom God may do so.

  There is passive hope and there is active hope where you seek to take action to make things better.

  You can also contribute to making things better for others.

  I wrote a book – Tactics: the art and science of success – based on interviews with successful people in various walks of life, from entrepreneurs to sports people. There were huge differences in style and personality between the people interviewed. Some were impulsive, others were careful planners. Some were bold, others were timid. The one thing that was common to all was the expectation of ultimate success. Problems on the way were just obstacles to be overcome. That is a very powerful form of hope.

  HEALTH+

  HEALTH IS ALSO a key component of H+. With health you may be concerned, sensible, obsessional or even fanatical. That is entirely up to you.

  The main point is that you pay heed to health as an aspect of your being a human being (Human+).

  Health is a baseline on which everything else is built. If you are not healthy you are not able to help others and may absorb help that could be better used elsewhere.

  If you owned a motor car you would bother to put fuel in the tank. You would bother to put air in the tyres. If you are capable of being healthy, it seems careless not to try to be healthy.

  So a concern for health is as basic to H+ as a concern for happiness.

  COOL

  IN A PRIMARY school in England, the day before Guy Fawkes Day, a six-year-old had drawn a picture of Guy Fawkes about to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was labelled as being ‘cool’.

  Guy Fawkes was about to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill many people. This behaviour was not very moral. But the apparent style of what he was doing led to the young girl calling him cool. This separation between the nature of the action and the style in which it is done is t
he basis of cool. There is an obvious danger in the approval of the style and the ignoring of the nature of the action.

  In schools all over the world, children want to be cool. It is claimed that cool came from American slave culture. The only form of power available to slaves was personality power. This meant being disdainful, your own person, confident and unflustered by the world around you. Through jazz and other means, cool entered our culture.

  Cool has no moral aspect at all. As long as you do something with style, that is cool. Films and television programmes depict cool gangsters.

  In school, cool means stylish: wearing the right clothes and belonging to the right clique. It means being confident and being your own person. In general it means ‘good’. Surprisingly, there is no other term for ‘good’. No one wants to be a ‘goody-goody’ so cool has a clear field.

  Warm form

  The coolest person around is a corpse. The corpse is independent and untroubled by the world around. The corpse is actually very cool. The corpse contributes nothing.

  As a style, cool is defensive and contributes nothing. It is very ego-centric. It is a detachment from the world.

  ‘Warm form’ is the opposite. Warm form means that you are so confident that you can afford to be outgoing and generous. You smile whether people smile back or not.

  Waffo

  This is the usable term for warm form. If you are ‘waffo’, it means that you are generous, warm and human. You contribute to others and the world around. Unlike the cool corpse, you are up and about.

  Will waffo replace cool? Probably not. But it can provide an alternative idiom – which at the moment is lacking.

  Waffo and H+

  There is no direct connection between waffo and H+. Waffo exists in its own right, separately from H+. Waffo is used here as an illustration of the attitude underlying H+. It is an outgoing, contributing attitude rather than a cold, self-centred one. With H+, you help yourself by helping others.

  It is not a ‘bargain’. You help others because you want to. You do not help others only if they help you. The sun shines even if no one worships the sun any more.

  It is important that the background attitude of H+ be fully understood. H+ is not a ‘belief and worship’ structure. You do not behave in a certain way because you fear punishment if you do not behave in that way. H+ is directly a behaviour structure. You come to want to behave in a certain way. This is first. You then change as a result of the behaviour.

  H+ is all about doing.

  There is a famous quote from the French philosopher René Descartes:

  Cogito ergo sum.

  (I think therefore I am.)

  There is another quote from Edward de Bono:

  Ago ergo erigo.

  (I act therefore I construct.)

  H+ is about action.

  ‘PONS’

  H+ IS BASED on action and contribution. A ‘pon’ is a positive action. You may help an old lady across the road. You may teach a child to read. You may clear up rubbish in your neighbourhood. You may intervene to help a mugging victim.

  H+ is more than thinking good thoughts and having good intentions. H+ requires positive action that makes a positive difference in the world around you – or the world at large. For this reason, pons are central to H+.

  A pon is a real action designed to help other people. This would usually be in the immediate local surroundings, but a wider area is not excluded.

  A pon is simply a ‘positive sin’. Just as a sin is something you are not supposed to do, and about which you are encouraged to feel guilty, so a pon is something you are supposed to do and about which you are encouraged to feel proud.

  You can boast of your pons to yourself and to others. They are achievements.

  Most religions encourage meritorious acts. Here contributing actions are the very basis of the religion. That is how you build up belief in yourself.

  Agenda

  A pon is a positive sin. That means an action that is helpful, constructive and contributing.

  If you pick up a piece of waste paper and put it into a dustbin, that is a pon.

  If you help someone who is confused and lost at an airport, that is a pon.

  The agenda is the number of pons you set yourself as a target for the day. This could also be described as your quota.

  Pontoon

  A pontoon is a series of boats placed across a river so that you can get across the river. Here a ‘pontoon’ is the series of pons you place to carry you through the day.

  You need to keep the same number of pons for every day. You may choose to change the number occasionally, but in general you stay with the chosen number.

  You should never have fewer than two pons in your agenda. You may have as many as you like, but realistically four would be a reasonable limit.

  Pons are usually not planned in advance. You may, however, choose to place yourself where there are more opportunities for pons. There are times when it would be appropriate to plan a pon in advance.

  Beggars

  If you give money to a beggar, is that a pon? If you have an agenda of four pons and you give money to four beggars, are you achieving your quota of pons?

  The answer is no for two reasons. The first reason is that it is too easy. There is no sense of achievement. You are just fulfilling an obligation in the easiest possible way. This will have little effect on yourself.

  The second reason is that it may be antisocial behaviour to encourage begging by providing beggars with an unearned source of income.

  Charities and good works

  There are people who are already involved in charities and good works. How does this fit in with pons and constructive behaviour?

  Ongoing good work is worthwhile and to be recommended, but it is not the same as individual, spontaneous pons.

  The point about pons is that they are separate acts of help and contribution. This means that there will always be an attitude of readiness to help and to contribute. The habit develops, encourages and reinforces such an attitude. If you are engaged in a worthwhile programme, that is of immense value, but it is not the same thing.

  So being involved in charities and good works and giving money to beggars are not pons.

  Pons are small, spontaneous acts of help and contribution.

  H+ recruitment

  If you let others know about H+ by talking to them or by sending them a copy of H+ (Plus) A New Religion?, is that a pon?

  Yes, this would indeed be a pon. But this sort of pon should never make up more than half of the pons on your agenda. So if you have an agenda of four pons a day and you recruit three people, that only accounts for two pons out of your agenda of four.

  The reason is that behaviour, no matter how worthwhile, should not remove the need for spontaneous acts of help – and the readiness and attitude that goes with these.

  What is important about pons is the immediate sense of accomplishment and achievement. It is not enough to be on the right road. You must be able to pick individual daisies from the roadside as you travel.

  It is not just a matter of being a good person. You must be a person doing good things.

  It is very important that this fundamental aspect of H+ be fully understood.

  It is not the usual approach, that says that a good person does good things.

  It is almost the opposite: you discipline yourself to do good things and so make yourself a good person.

  Being asked for help

  Once it becomes known that you are willing to help, people may start coming to you for help. This would be the case in a small community and less so in a larger one.

  How should you react?

  Does responding to a request for help constitute a pon?

  How you react is very much a matter for individual judgement. How you respond to requests for help depends on your assessment of your time and commitments and whether the requests are genuine or just using your generosity.

  What is important is that r
esponding to such requests does not constitute a pon. This may seem unfair and contradictory, because responding to requests may actually be more helpful than thinking up your own pons.

  Just as giving money to a beggar is too easy a form of contribution, so may be responding to requests. There is none of that proactive readiness to contribute that is the basis of H+. Reactive responding is highly valuable but is not the same as proactive initiatives and actions. There may be no difference to the person receiving the help, but there is a big difference to the person offering the help. It is the difference between being passive and being active.

  THINKING UP PONS

  THIS IS MORE difficult than it may seem.

  Once you have the right attitude, you will come to see more easily and more often opportunities for pons.

  In time, individuals may build up a repertoire of types of pons and will see those opportunities in places where others may not see them.

  Boasting sessions may also suggest new pons that others have used.

  Over time, a catalogue of pon suggestions will develop on the Internet. You can then access this catalogue if you are completely out of ideas.

  The most important part is to develop a readiness to help, a readiness to see opportunities for pons. This readiness is as important as the actual carrying out of the pon. It is more important than the mechanical carrying out of a pon that has been suggested on the Internet.

  You can set your mind to designing pons for future use. They can be as imaginative as you like. Always keep in mind that pons are small and separate acts of help. They are not a single major task. That may be worth doing, but the separateness of the pons, each from the other, is important to give repeated small achievements and to keep open the readiness of mind to contribute and help. Major projects are very worthwhile but are not substitutes for individual pons.

  BOASTING AND SHOWING-OFF

  THERE IS NOTHING in H+ to stop you being proud of your achievements.