Betterment overlaps with its opposite Acceptance and is characterized by:
- Thanking God for your duty to improve his unfinished work, i.e. creation.
- Accepting self (soul) endures after death.
- Accepting good and evil in the world.
- Accepting duty to "leave the world a better place than you found it"
- Accepting heaven and hell and judgement whether good-evil or belief.
- Accepting future as time for improvement of the world, if not the soul.
- Accepting senses give reliable representation of reality.
- Accepting imagination (mind) as best representation of reality. (the light outside Plato's cave)
- Go against the flow (e.g. Frank Sinatra's "My Way")
Similar phrases are used in Acceptance to facilitate comparisons to its opposite.
The poem "Strive On" sums up my take on "betterment", i.e. constantly seeking future
improvement of NOW based on learning from the past; similar to Bellah's (citing Maslow)
D-cognition for "Deficiency", always seeing deficiencies in the world rather than accepting
the world "Being" as it is here and now (B-cognition, see Acceptance).
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