Yesterday’s coffee with Elisabeth was displaced by her, but Don and I met as planned. He wanted to know about the ‘Liberation Day’ play and its implications for the Dutch and Canadians. Shirley too, who phoned later in the day, was intrigued by my war experience as a child.

After Don and I left the Kingsland market, we both headed for Staple’s, where we met up shortly. I was looking for a way to transfer my Panasonic Voice recorder files to the computer, but my computer will not recognise the device. I did not get the answer I was looking for, but may try again next week.

In the evening I read quite a bit about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but did not find any pointers for formulating a more differentiated set of aspects for the standard distinctions of good and evil.

But, it was interesting to read about their views as they lived in the time that society was restructuring from agricultural to industrial in the nineteenth century. Both these philosophers deal with debasement of values that they were witnessing around themselves and which continued long after their passing.

Last night in my closing meditation of the day, I concluded with the idea that the refinement of good and evil I was looking for might already be found in the ideas of tolerance, respect, value and honour, criteria I have been considering over the last two months or so.

So I decided to explore this further and combine this with the ideas that I have now formulated about tolerance for my up coming talk on this subject. However, rather than writing in full sentences I want capture some recent and related ideas in an unordered list.

To-do list for humankind

1. Human society integrating on this planet at present.
2. Shifting from separate cultural identities to a common one.
3. Utilising the findings of history, archaeology, anthropology and genetics to out-picture a common beginning.
4. The perspective of humanity emerging from the continent of Africa and populating the planet in the span of only sixty thousand years to achieve our present status on this planet, such as that is.
5. Recognition and validation of the religious processes that formed human societies and identities up to this present day and continue to do so.

   Not finding a solution to resolving our ongoing global conflicts in a non-violent manner may result in our end, …

6. Acknowledgement of the mystery of existence as we discover it, knowing the little that we do and the limitedness of our quest for knowing.
7. Recognition of the processes of culture formation as we humans have deployed them willy-nilly so far and now need to take responsibility to give that form and make things work.
8. Seeking ways and allocating resources to finding solutions to the tension and conflicts that bedevil our integrating planetary society.

N.B: Not finding a solution to resolving our ongoing global conflicts in a non-violent manner may result in our end, as the asteroids were to the dinosaurs, which were ignorant of what threatened them. Do we know and understand the threats from our own human nature? <9:09am