Techniques for Better Living

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  • Techniques for Better Living

    The following is a list of techniques for dealing with common life issues. This page contains the main list, which consists of the title of each technique along with a several sentence summary. Each technique has a clickable link which will take you to another page with a longer description of the technique and a place for users to add comments and ask questions about each one.

    Contributors who have editing privileges should follow the procedures here for creating new entries and adding to existing ones. This is a community-generated effort, and contributions will be marked with the user-name who initiated the particular technique.

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    1. For help with anxiety about your relationship with a higher being.

    1.1. Reflect on Principle Doctrine One To Remember That The Gods Cause No Trouble To Anyone.

    Reflect on Principal Doctrine  One: Principal Doctrine 1 is: "The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself, nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favor. For all such things exist only in the weak." (Added by Cassius)

    1.2. Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    2. For help with anxiety about the death of yourself or of a friend.

    2.1. Reflect on Principal Doctrine Two To Remember That Death is the End of All Troubles

    Reflect on Principal Doctrine Two: Principal Doctrine Two is: "Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us." (Bailey translation) (Added by Cassius)

    2.2. Read Lucretius Book Three, Starting Latin Line ____

    Reflect on the ending section of Lucretius Book three, which contains many observations supporting the view that we should not be concerned about dying.

    3. For help with anxiety that you are trapped by forces beyond your control.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    4. For help with anxiety about your relationships with other people in general.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    5. For help with anxiety about your relationship with friends and family.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    6. For help with generalized anxiety.

    6.1. Title (marked as headline two) followed by a paragraph of which the first phrase is a link and then a several sentence description

    If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.

    6.2. Title (marked as headline two) followed by a paragraph of which the first phrase is a link and then a several sentence description

    If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.


    7. For help with making decision about romantic love / sex issues.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    8. For help with anxiety about "making a difference" in the world

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    9. For help with anxiety that your life is not "meaningful"

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    10. For help with anxiety that nothing makes any difference and that life is a waste of time ("nihilism")

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.


    11. For help with anxiety that you need to be famous and well-known.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.


    12. For help with anxiety about financial issues.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    13. For help with anxiety about political and social power issues.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    14. For help with anxiety about your place in the universe.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    15. For help with anxiety about health issues.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    16. For help with making decisions about career issues.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    17. For help with recovering from worldviews that denounce pleasure.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    18. For help with pursuing pleasure in ways that are most successful for you.

    Technique 1 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

    Technique 2 Summary Title (a link) followed by sentence or two description.

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Comments 10

November 16, 2020 at 1:36 PM

The Lexicon entry for "Techniques for Better Living" is taking shape and is at least now in outline form with a working table of contents. Please feel free to insert your own entries, or if you prefer, post some suggestions as comments to this thread and I will work them in myself. Check out the framework here: Epicurean Techniques for Better Living

For a general example of how the Lexicon feature can work please see this page: https://www.viecode.com/en/products/lexicon/
November 16, 2020 at 2:25 AM

OK now I finally see how the "version" system works. Anyone making an exit should make a "Change comment" which is a separate box at the bottom of the edit box. That comment then serves as a title for the changes in the log of changes, which can be viewed by clicking "changelog" at the bottom of the page.
November 16, 2020 at 2:00 AM

I am thinking to get this started I will just post some general categories to start a general outline. Everyone with write access feel free to add new categories and also fill in approaches to deal with each.
November 15, 2020 at 10:57 AM

PD1

Describe the technique(s)

Link to source material explaining PD1


PD2

Describe the technique(s)

Link to source material explaining PD2


Etc
November 15, 2020 at 2:42 PM

Tim that's an interesting method of organization to do it by PD. And immediately I am on the fence as to what to do! There is NO DOUBT but that we will eventually profit by organizing any list of techniques against the 40 doctrines. However I also think there is NO DOUBT but that we will eventually want to rank them by "order of daily importance" or otherwise by "category." So we'll definitely want a "matrix" where we can organize them from different viewpoints.

The question is probably at the moment "Which format will people find easiest to use?"

I am thinking that Godfrey and Don and Brett and perhaps others already have "lists" that they are ready to "dump" into the hopper for consideration.

I think maybe from a practical viewpoint this: Whoever has a list ready to go to dump into the article should probably go ahead and do it using their form of organization, and then we can rearrange either into "Order of Daily importance" or by PD or by some other as yet undefined category.

So @Don or @Godfrey or @bdws (or anyone) if you are so inclined please feel free to make a first stab. Tim added this as a "comment" but I think each of you can edit the main text directly.
November 15, 2020 at 4:46 PM

Great idea!
We could put the lists in a spreadsheet. And maybe make a database and even an app of some sort.
November 15, 2020 at 5:06 PM

My list consists of a sequence of phrases that I made up to try to both describe the philosophy and contemplate as a practice. That seems different from what we're doing here and I think it's a good idea to have a list of ideas for practice directly from the texts, as we're doing here.

If anyone wants to add to, comment on or modify my list, that would be great! Adding quotes from relevant texts would make it a much more useful resource. But I think that material is best developed in a separate thread/lexicon.
November 15, 2020 at 7:44 PM

Yes Godfrey's comment sounds correct based on what he's posted already.

And definitely Tim this is what I am thinking: "We could put the lists in a spreadsheet. And maybe make a database and even an app of some sort."

Has someone tried yet to edit the main text? I think I'm still not sure that the shared editing is working so hopefully someone will try something , even if short, to be sure this is working.
November 16, 2020 at 5:51 PM

hi all


I had fully intended to spend some time on this this weekend, but life got in the way :-).


giving some thought to organization, it would be great if we could use tags to either sort by ‘issue’ or by source material.


for example, I noted today that several of the PD’s and VS directly address gratitude. If we had a gratitude practice, and used tags, we could tag the practice with the # PD or VS.


I really like the idea, the more I think about it, of organizing like Cassius has above and the either tagging with source or listing the source below.


brett

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