About This Site

Comments and Contact: We will have a discussion system for public comments and personal connections, but it's not ready yet. (If you have ideas of what works well for this kind of community building, let us know. We are exploring possibilities from Bluesky, to Facebook groups, to Tiktok, to Discord, to Telegram, to bulletin boards, and more.)

Meanwhile, you can reach me: jj at this domain (.org).

Privacy: We use AWSTATS for cumulative reports from the ISP's log files - how many visitors from each country for example. We don't use web beacons or other trackers. We make no effort to identify individual users, and do not share any user's information unless required by law.

Author: John S. James founded AIDS Treatment News in 1986 and published it in San Francisco and then Philadelphia for 20 years; see New York Times archive search for AIDS Treatment News, "Underground Press Leads Way on AIDS Advice" (scroll down for the article and full text). Before that, he programmed computers for 20 years, working for organizations including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Montgomery College, American Airlines, and Stanford Medical Center. He later published articles about the programming language Forth.

He has always been interested in a better world - especially in practical ways to get there.

He was in Timothy Leary's psychology class at Harvard, two years before Leary was famous.

On July 4th, 1965, he marched in an early gay rights demonstration: the first Reminder Day, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

He currently lives in Philadelphia.

History: This project developed from a lifelong interest that started with hearing Aldous Huxley's public talk, "Human Potentialities," 1961 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. In a short section at the end, Huxley suggested collecting effective training methods from cultures throughout history, for spiritual development. I caught the importance of training methods, but was more interested in using them for practical skills for personal and community survival and success, in an often-hostile world. There is a saying that by skillful means it is possible to live at ease even in hell.

Money: This site is a personal project of the author. No one else is funding it.

We collect practices that cost no money at all, for several reasons:

• Charging even a penny excludes most people. They could afford the penny but may not have the right currency and an account to pay online. And charging significant money creates class distinctions right away.
• Typically a movement does not use money; an organization does (and may be affiliated with a movement). Our interest here is building a movement. Organizations can come later.
• A movement that doesn't use money does not go away because funding is cut off.
• Money causes endless problems worldwide. Just see the news. Almost always there are haves and have-nots, even in the midst of plenty. The resulting crime and violence degrade the quality of human life for rich and poor alike.
• Hopefully a movement focused on relationship training won't need money. Website expenses are minimal. In the U.S., a (small) majority of even homeless people have smartphones. For references to books, articles, and other sources, we try to find those that are free, online or otherwise. If the best reference we know is behind a paywall, we include it but keep looking for alternatives. (Also, try Reader mode in Firefox.)

Today money is everything and the world keeps getting worse. What might be possible without money? Not solving all problems but finding new ways forward on some important problems and opportunities.

Tech: This site should work well on any computer, phone, or other device that can view the web. If there are exceptions, we want to know about them.

In the Practices page,the word 'top' which is always near the top left of your window (regardless of scrolling) is a link to the top of the page - mainly for the convenience of phone users.

If you have a wide screen and want more white space to the left and right of the text, just expand your window. The text remains centered, with a maximum line length of about 74 characters.

While this site is empathy7.ORG, .COM also works; it automatically redirects to .org, so you don't need to remember which it is.

Why is this site named Empathy7? A good domain name is short, memorable, and indicates what the site is about. That's hard to find these days. We were lucky that both "empathy7.org" and"empathy7.com" were available (capitalization doesn't matter). Seven is often considered a lucky number, with roots in both Eastern (7 chakras) and Western (7 days of creation, 7th heaven) spiritual and religious philosophies. We don't care about the numerology, but a story makes the number easier to remember; meanwhile, domain-name "brokers" who buy hundreds of useful names to sell some for thousands of dollars are taught to avoid numbers because they make the names harder to remember.

Empathy, the ability to understand the feelings of another person, is necessary but not sufficient; it does not necessarily include compassion. So empathy is not all we need for workable communities. A short domain name can't say everything.

Next Steps: Try some of the practices.

And check back here as we expand this project into an online community where interested people can meet each other.