24 June 2008
Tuesday Bits: Grief, What Moves Through Us, How Will We Be Remembered?
Some of what moves through us, and how it keeps us moving.
sunlight, air, water, nutrients, blood, instincts, our neurons' electric spark, sensations, perceptions, information, ideas, conceptions, conversations, emotions, communion...
I like it, and I think I like the colours he uses for the words even more.
---
Leroy Sievers (My Cancer) asks how you want people to remember you. My instinctual response is, I don't. Maybe, somehow, in these things Dave Pollard lists, above, that move through us, but without my name attached. Maybe I don't want to be remembered or missed in my absence so much as felt in my presence. Ask me another day and I might respond differently. Sometimes I feel anxious and sad when I think about so much personality and experience (each person's) removed from our midst in an instant, never to be replicated in exactly the same way (or so I believe) ... Of what use was it all, all this striving, all this becoming, all these relationships, all this unique composition of particles, waves, energy, self? Then I answer myself: of no use. That's a calming thought somehow.
I like this aspiration, in the comments: "That I went through my bout with cancer with ... a sick sense of humor." Another one says, "Off to get fresh bread for breakfast. Please remember that I did things like that."
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Addicted to grief ... In the journal 10 May 2008 issue of Neurolmage, UCLA scientists report a study of grief that may help explain why some people "grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can't get over the loss of someone held dear." Grief may be an addiction; thinking about the loss may stimulate the reward region of the brain, which provides the griever with a kind of pleasure in the midst of pain. The reveries about the loved one may not be felt as emotionally satisfying, but they may be craved and re-enacted because of the reward response they trigger in the brain.
The lead author of the study, asst. professor of psychiatry Mary-Frances O'Connor, explains:
"'The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them. ... After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward. Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it.'"
In the study, women whose mothers or sisters had died of breast cancer looked at either a photo of their loved one or a photo of a female stranger while their brains were scanned. They found that while both those with complicated grief (the kind that continues and can be debilitating) and with uncomplicated grief have activity in the pain network of the brain after looking at the photo of the loved one, only those with complicated grief showed significant activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain associated with reward.
What this synopsis of the study doesn't say is whether someone is chemically determined to have complicated grief with every loss or only with some losses.
Abstract and link to full report ($) here.
11:17 Posted in community , death , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , simple living | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 April 2008
What I'm Reading Online - Our Personal Connection To What Is Wrong
>> SACRALISING DRESS
This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).
"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"
She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:
"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.
"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."
As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post, the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."
>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?
"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.
Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:
"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.
"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...
I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.
Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."
The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.
>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:
Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.
Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.
Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes -- from writing bad checks to using drugs -- that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."
Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."
Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:
"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."
Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?
Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).
"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"
>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY?
That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:
Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit."
And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )
"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."
His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this:
"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "
Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'"
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Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its intended damage to humans, other animals, and the Earth, and so on. We can watch reality TV, and it's an almost-but-not-quite successful effort to screen ourselves from Reality, from "our personal connection to what is wrong."
10:50 Posted in community , consumption , crime , earthcare and environment , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
05 April 2008
Money Woes - Profiles of Real People
This series at CNN Money, which presents more than 50 brief, first-person profiles of individuals and families struggling financially with job loss, downsizing, reduced home values, student loans, gas and food prices, etc., is enlightening and disheartening at the same time. I empathised with the stories of many folks; this one really speaks to me.
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19 January 2008
Working for Justice with Compassion
I really like this interview between teacher, writer, and activist bell hooks and Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön in Shamabala Sun (undated ... timeless?). They speak briefly on many topics: suffering, compassion, hatred and aggression, compassion-fatigue and irritability, dying, blame and accountability, poverty, etc.
It seems fitting at this Martin Luther King time of year to shout a few bits from the rooftops, and into my own ears:
Pema: We may long to end suffering but somehow it paralyzes us if we're too goal-oriented. Do you see the balance there? It's like the teaching that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castenada, where he says that you do everything with your whole heart, as if nothing else matters. You do it impeccably and with your whole heart, but all the while knowing that it actually doesn't matter at all.
bell: Yet it seems very hard for people to fight this racism and sexism without hope for an end to it. There is so much despair and apathy because of the feeling that we've struggled and struggled and not enough has changed.
Pema: The main issue is aggression. Often if there's too much hope you begin to have a strong sense of enemy. Then the whole process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds more suffering because of your aggression toward the oppressor.
Pema: Getting stuck in any kind of self-and-other tension seems to cause pain. So if you can keep your heart and your mind open to those people, in other words, work with any tendency to close down towards them, isn't that the way the system of racism and cruelty starts to de-escalate?
bell: Can you talk about the difference between blame and accountability? Because I feel, like you, that blame isn't very useful. But you have said, for instance in reference to men teachers who abuse their powers, that you feel the issue of accountability is real. How does one maneuver between giving up blame and being able to embrace the idea of accountability?
Pema: This is the message of the first noble truth. You are willing to see suffering as suffering.
Obviously the less that you are caught in your own hope and fear, the more you can just see suffering very straightforwardly and without aggression. So accountability seems to mean you can be honest, incredibly honest. You see that harm is being done. You see someone harming a child, an animal, another human being. You see that clearly and your strongest wish is to de-escalate that suffering. Then the question is, how do you proceed so that the person you see as the problem becomes accountable, becomes willing to acknowledge what they're doing?
You realize how hard it is for you to acknowledge what you are doing in your own life. You see what it takes to become accountable yourself, and you begin to try to find the skillful means to communicate so that the barriers come down rather than get reinforced. It has everything to do with communication: how can you communicate so that someone can hear what you're saying and you can also hear what they are saying?
Pema: Accountability, as you're talking about it, is my understanding of the spiritual path. With Trungpa Rinpoche, my feeling was that all he was doing was getting people to take responsibility for themselves, getting them to grow up. He was a master of not confirming. Talking to him was like talking to a huge space where everything bounced back, and you had to be accountable for yourself.
Pema: There is a famous saying that from great suffering comes great compassion. Well, from great suffering can come great compassion, or from great suffering can come great hatred. ... From great suffering can come great openness of heart, a great sense of kinship with others, or from great suffering can come hatred, resentment and despair. ...
People need a lot of support for suffering to turn into compassion. What usually happens to people when they don't have teachers and guides and the support of people who care is that great suffering leads to more suffering.
Pema: For me the spiritual path has always been learning how to die. That involves not just death at the end of this particular life, but all the falling apart that happens continually. The fear of death -- which is also the fear of groundlessness, of insecurity, of not having it all together -- seems to be the most fundamental thing that we have to work with. ...
We have so much fear of not being in control, of not being able to hold on to things. Yet the true nature of things is that you're never in control. You're never in control. You can never hold on to anything. That's the nature of how things are. But it's almost like it's in the genes of being born human that you can't accept that. You can buy it intellectually, but moment to moment it brings up a lot of panic and fear. So my own path has been training to relax with groundlessness and the panic that accompanies it. ... to stay in the space of uncertainty without trying to reconstruct a reference point.
06:20 Posted in community , death , other people said it , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
12 January 2008
What I've Learned
Actually, what 50-year-old Eric Zorn, at the Chicago Tribune, has learned in his lifetime. These lists seem hard to write -- first, the expansion bit, i.e., how to recall and bring together a lifetime of lessons, and second, the contraction bit, .i.e., how to sift through it and refine it to a small number? -- so for now I'll just use Zorn's list as a memory jogger and say that these things seem worth saying:
1. It's better to sing off key than not to sing at all.
10. Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act. (q.v. NYT article about lack of empathy among physicians)
17. Don't waste your breath proclaiming what's really important to you. How you spend your time says it all.
23. Grudges are poison. The only antidote is to let them go.
39. All the stuff you have lying around that you'll never want, need, wear or look at again? It just makes it harder to find what you do want, need or intend to wear. File it, donate it or throw it out.
Oh, I did read something today that summarises something important, something I'm not sure I've so much learned as learned to recognise when I read it in someone else's words:
"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow." - E. L. Konigsburg
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05 January 2008
Happiness and Its Factors
Thanks to my new shower bug, I caught a bit of the interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday with Eric Weiner about "the geography of bliss." Weiner has explored factors that seem to be correlated with happy cultures and countries.
Some of the factors and observations:
- Happy societies are ones where things in the society consistently work well. Trains run on time, social agreements are made and kept, people's lives are attenuated -- running along smoothly without intense highs and lows.
- Happy societies are ones where people in the culture have a lot of say about how it's run and what the laws are. They vote a lot. They feel, to some extent, in control of societal happenings.
- People in colder, darker countries (Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark, etc.) are happier -- except for Russia and any society associated with Russia. One theory is that tough climates foster true cooperation among the people (except for Russia).
- Love of the land -- of the geographic place you live, like the Alps in Switzerland -- is an important ingredient in happiness.
- To be happy, you need to set aside a few minutes a day to think about death.
- Happiness isn't personal -- it's relational.
- For most of history, most people didn't aspire to be happy. Now, our expectation that we all should or will be happy actually leads to unhappiness.
Nice Girardian excerpt:
Concerning money, the Swiss (a happy country!) have a "healthy attitude" towards it: "In America, we have this attitude of 'If you've got it, flaunt it,' and the Swiss way is 'If you've got it, hide it. Do not provoke envy in others.' And envy, I do believe, is one of the great enemies of happiness."
14:54 Posted in community , consumption , girardian anthropology , lists , pop culture , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
03 January 2008
Fun Read: Being a Writer
I'm recommending "HOW TO WRITE STORIES... and lose weight, clean up the environment, and make a million dollars," by George Singleton in the current issue of the Oxford American.
As Emily Fisher summarised it at Brijit, "A hysterically deadpan treatise on all the reasons not to be a fiction writer." Hysterically (or rather, hilariously) deadpan, yes, but for me it made writing seem like a more viable task! I live in a state with bottle laws, though, so I'd have to find another money-making, environment-beautifying form of daily exercise.
Favourite lines -- you really have to read the article to appreciate them, though:
^ "Always be optimistic, like I am."
^ "Take the money and invest it in either a CD getting five percent interest, or in a mutual fund that’s not Putnam Voyager B." [Scroll down link. Love Fund Alarm.]
^ "You still live in a trailer, but the countryside is spectacular."
^ "... notice how you don’t have kids with which to bother, or a spouse, seeing as you've been slightly focused on your work..."
18:00 Posted in books and reading , finance and business , silliness and humour , simple living , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02 January 2008
Consumption, Population and Quality of Life
Good article by Jared Diamond in today's NYT ("What's Your Consumption Factor?"), clearly explaining why it's not so much population as consumption that drives resource use (and over-use) worldwide: If "the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up [to America's resource use/standard of living], world [population] rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people" instead of the 9 billion people the world is projected to have by mid-century.
"Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies -- for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy -- they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."
Other points:
Higher consumption (1st-world standard of living) is not tightly correlated with higher quality of life, partly because "[m]uch American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans' wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures." [I agree generally but wonder when he suggests solutions whether he's considering America's expansive geography and Europe's compact one.]
Fishing and timber industries can operate sustainably now but don't. Instead, both are "managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields."
Americans' consumption rates will be reduced, one way or another, because they're unsustainable.
16:53 Posted in community , consumption , earthcare and environment , finance and business , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
18 October 2007
Curiosity Killed the Judge
Zen Habits writes about avoiding being judgmental.
I believe that the simplest -- and surefire -- method is contained in the Whitman quote that leads off the article:
"Be curious, not judgmental." - Walt Whitman
Be curiouser and curiouser .
09:45 Posted in simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
29 September 2007
Vocation and Hunger
Sue at Discombobula posts about vocation, ending with a statement of desire that's my own:
I want to live wastefully.
Actually, I want to live sustainably wastefully. I want to live in a way that's sustainable, for me, and that is not one iota concerned with efficiency, effectiveness, progress, goals, growth, or even learning. (Curiousity, yes; an aim to learn, no.) I think I am well on the way.
Sue references Frederick Buechner's much-quoted definition of calling: "the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." She says she has trouble with the first part of that definition (that work could = doing what I love to do), while I have had trouble with the second half, trying to gauge the "world's deep hunger." Intellectually, I think Buechner's definition is accurate, but on every other level, I don't understand it or know what to do with it. I feel that I am not in a position to know the depths or content of the world's hunger, except, perhaps, as I experience my own hunger, my own yearning, what fuels my energy. I'm considering that maybe the world deeply hungers to be prodigal, to be extravagantly wasteful, to squander ... To be both the prodigal child, who hungers after and recklessly explores everything edible in the world, and who comes home wasted, unsated and seeking love and mercy, and at the same time to be the prodigal father, who welcomes that child home with outlandish abundance and feasting. The son and father are both prodigal in their own way, and perhaps their forms of extravagance even derive from the same underlying hunger: an overwhelming capacity to reach out and embrace the particular.
I know I'm sort of rambling. That's where I am today.
12:24 Posted in finance and business , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
11 September 2007
Photo Journal of Woodsy Urban Walk (Boston)
Nice: 9 Miles of Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, thanks to Evan at Life Is Sweet in the Fenway
12:26 Posted in animals , art and photography , community , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
29 August 2007
Peacemaking on the Toast Level
Having to unexpectedly give his toast to someone else made No Impact Man mad:
"Mad for me does not mean that I run around flailing my arms about. It means a grumpy look on my face and silent scorn. But it still makes life unpleasant for the people I love. I got mad because I made up this story in my head that I would end up hungry later in the day and would not be able to work through lunch as I had planned.
"What I want to point out is that having no peace in myself means that there is no peace in the world around me."
He talks about the idea (this time, via Indian philosopher Krishnamurti) that the way to peace is to let go of the will, which doesn't mean 'you are nihilistic and don't care about helping the hungry. Letting go of will just means letting go of internal conflict. It means letting go of the conflict between the way I want things to be and the way things are.'
09:35 Posted in community , food and drink , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
24 August 2007
Part III: Practicing Peace in Times of War - Pema Chödrön
This is the third in a series of (highly personal and biased) notes and commentary on Pema Chödrön's recent public meditation session on "Practicing Peace in Times of War," given at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California, on 13-15 July. The first is here. The second is here.
Pema continued talking about 'working with emotions,' particularly through the practice of 'leaning in,' and she spoke a bit more about natural openness.
First, she reiterated that the 'leaning in' is no big deal. It's like punctuation.
She said the practice of 'leaning in' is based very much on alchemy. That is, it's a transmuting of the energy of confused emotions into mirror-like (very clear) wisdom. But nothing actually changes except how it appears to us. Nothing changes except that we don't split off from the energy but instead give it our full attention.
Another way to speak of 'leaning in' is to talk about having the felt sense of the energy.
Directing our emotions towards an object -- whether we express or repress -- is a way of getting ground under our feet. We act on these emotions in the service of ego. This acting is fed by storyline. Some emotions she spoke of during this talk were anger, rage, hatred, craving, depression, loneliness, resentment, and bitterness.
Instead of directing our emotions towards an object, we can respect the underlying energy of emotions, because that is exactly where mirror-like wisdom is to be found. She gave an analogy: The energy underlying emotions is like fluid, dynamic, living water. When we freeze it or harden it with our thoughts, into beliefs and opinions, it becomes like ice, frozen energy. She described our situation has having a glass of ice cubes in our hands. Someone asks us for water, and we walk around hunting for water while we are holding the ice, perhaps even believing that the ice is in some way keeping us from finding the water. But -- we won't find the water anywhere but in the ice. And we won't find wisdom anywhere but in the energy that underlies the emotions.
My comment: This reminds me of something in Nicholas Birns' paper on ressentiment ('Ressentiment and Counter-Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and the Reaction Against Equality'): "This prudential quality constrains what M.J. Bowles, in 'The Practice of Meaning in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein' (14-15) says of the creative possibilities of ressentiment: 'Far from indicating the collapse of life, ressentiment in fact marks the potentiality of a tremendous energy source. The question, alas, has always been, not how can we save the mouse from running round and round on its treadmill, but how can we harness this raw source of energy? What can we build with it?'"
Most of the talk was a teaching on Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings on the practice of Leaning In. He talked about five steps, though as Pema said, the steps sort of blend together and may happen in an instant.
1. Seeing: This refers primarily to an attitude towards oneself. It's an unconditional acceptance of our own energy, it's being open and receptive to our energy -- whether it's rage, craving, depression, resentment, bitterness, loneliness, etc. The energy wants to resolve itself, and it pulls us in the direction of doing something to resolve it. The practice is to hold our seat and not block openness; to not act by expressing or repressing but to experience the energy. The practice is to have lovingkindness towards energy that feels intolerable to us.
My comments: When Pema said that the energy pulls us in the direction of doing something to resolve it, it led me to think that all emotion may share some aspect of craving or addiction. When we're addicted to something, we want to feed the addiction, in the belief that once fed, the addiction will leave us alone and stop making us feel incomplete, needy, desirous ... unresolved.
That reminds me of C.S. Lewis's comment that "our best havings are wantings." Doubtful that he meant that it feels great to have an uncontrollable and unresolved craving for something, but there is something there that feels true to me. Maybe it's on the flip side, the recognition that having what I thought I wanted can be disappointing, can feel like "not enough," can lead to wanting more, and more, which is an endless cycle. So if we can be satisfied with "wanting," with that unresolved state, then maybe it will come to feel as solid as "having." (And would that be another form of "ground," which would then be dug out from under us?) Or maybe Lewis is simply saying that in the moments of wanting we aren't yet disappointed, while in the moment of having, or the moment after that, we are, and are already moving towards the next "having." This all reminds me of another quote, that you can never get enough of what you don't need. That's a good description, it seems to me, of the addictive cycle.
The notion of feeling unresolved also reminds me of the Myers Briggs personality typology, based on Carl Jung's work. In that ideology, there are four components to one's type. The last one is "structure": "In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options?" One can either be a J (Judging) or a P (Perceiving). In terms of the Myers-Briggs, Js might tend to have a strong (innate?) pull towards decision-making and coming to a resolution, while Ps might have a tendency to keep collecting information without making a decision, not wanting to pin themselves down. (Caveat: Since the 'structure' aspect describes only to how we deal with the outer world, and not how we might function internally, neither of these suppositions might be true.) Both the urge to come to resolution and the urge to keep options open could be addictive or compulsive, it seems, but I'm wondering how to relate them (if at all) to what Pema says about our energy's urge to resolve -- a P seems to resist coming to resolution -- and about what underlies that urge, which is our reluctance to experience the energy as it is. Does a P, perhaps, also resist experiencing the energy but in a different way than by moving towards resolution? Perhaps persisting in collecting information and maintaining a state of indecision can also be means of evading feeling emotion? Or ?
Finally, a brief comment on the idea of having "lovingkindness towards energy that feels intolerable to us." Lovingkindness towards self and others seems like a good start for peacemaking, and it seems helpful to cultivate an attitude of gentleness and respect towards raging energy. I wonder, however, about the applications of this for all of us -- perhaps when something feels intolerable it's a clue for us to act on it, as when something is physically intolerable we're wired to move away from it? -- and particularly for people who are diagnosed as mentally ill (e.g., with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or bipolar illness), who take mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs that are designed to regulate emotional response. Perhaps one person's sense of intolerable, as in the physical realm, is another person's tolerable, and vice versa, and for someone with a very low level of tolerance to emotional energy (or whose emotional energy is somehow stronger than that of the 'average' person, if that were possible), it might be counterproductive and even dangerous to sit with the naked energy and feel it as it throbs wildly. Maybe the sense of threat is too strong. Do we know that someone who is delusional (more delusional than some of the rest of us, that is ... Or in a different direction, perhaps), for example, will benefit from this practice? It would be reassuring, perhaps, to do this practice and realise that though the energy is powerful and feels like it might overwhelm, it doesn't, and there is something wise at its center. If that were the case.
(None of my questions is rhetorical, by the way. I really am wondering aloud.)
2. Hearing: This refers to an exploration, with curiousity, of the pulsating energy of emotion, of experiencing the waves and waves of energy that feel overwhelming to us.
3. Smelling: Again, this is about an attitude: The energy is workable. The situation is workable. This is what is happening now, and it's workable. Whatever occurs in the confused mind is the path. Everything is workable, not a mistake, not something to get rid of.
My comment: "Whatever occurs in the confused mind IS the path." Is this thought to be true for people with schizophrenia, for sociopaths, for psychopaths? I can see that it might be seen as true, since "all" we're talking about is transmuting energy, but I wonder how?
4. Touching: With this attitude of unconditional acceptance and workability, touch the energy, try to feel its texture. Try to find it and feel it. Actually, though we can find it, we can't really pin it down. All wars, violence, injustice, prejudice, fundamentalism, etc., are based on this energy when it is frozen, and yet, it doesn't exist any more than a rainbow exists. We can see it, but it recedes as we get close to it. It's like a mirage.
My comment: Fundamentalism is a charged word. For many it brings to mind certain groups of people (there go those biases and prejudices again). For me, it describes almost everyone (if not everyone) and so means nothing in this context, except as a shorthand way of saying, "someone else." My experience and observation is that we all have beliefs that we don't seriously question, even Buddhists, even atheists, even small children. (Some of them might even appear, in their obverse form, on this list.) Beliefs that aren't seen as beliefs, or that aren't seriously questioned, are, by definition, fundamental beliefs.
I've also read this definition of fundamentalism: "It is the belief that revealed truth is to be apprehended directly and in an unmediated form by a privileged group." Even based on that definition, most of us seem to me to be fundamentalists, though we don't often admit it. "Privilege" is a very negative word in our culture. I've found an article called Facing Up To Fundamentalism, written by Simon Barrow of ekklesia, helpful in thinking about this. I particularly liked his excerpt from Catherine Madsen: 'To grow up politically is to understand that there are other points of view, and that you cannot erase them; ... that our obligation to our fellow humans is to make our own point of view not unassailable but intelligible." That is my challenge, too, not to defend anything but to say it in a way that is articulate and understandable. Sigh.
5. Transmuting: This is steps 1-4 together, being completely at one with our own energy, without a storyline.
Finally, she clarified her teaching on Natural Openness:
She referenced Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's book The Path is the Goal.
She said that when we pause, natural openness is there. Whatever your experience of the pause, it's good enough. Openness doesn't need to be manufactured; whenever there is a gap, openness enters into us. There's no effort required. An analogy: Openness is like the wind: if the doors and windows are opened, it's bound to come in. Another analogy: openness is like the sun, always there behind the clouds, which are in reality transparent. From our view it sometimes seems that the sun goes away, but it's still there, just obscured by what look like solid clouds. When we pause, we poke a hole in the clouds and feel the sun shine.
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21 August 2007
Being Minimalist
Like most people, I would guess, I am minimalist in some ways and not in others. I came across Zen Habits' list of 10 Odd Little Minimalist Things I Do today and thought I'd make my own list of some of the minimalist things.
His list:
- No watch.
- No wallet.
- No keys.
- No cell.
- No bed.
- No desktop icons.
- No desktop storage.
- No mobile Internet.
- No cable TV.
- No ipod.
My list:
- No watch. Haven't had one for many years because I don't like the way it feels on my arm, and now I use my cell phone as my watch.
- No wallet. I keep my money, ID, credit card, one cheque, and a few other cards in the pocket of whatever I am wearing.
- One key. I keep the housekey (sans any kind of ring) in my pocket, too. (And the cell phone, too.)
- No mobile Internet, and no plans to add it. I spend enough time in front of the computer as it is.
- No iPod. I don't listen to much music and I especially don't want to listen to music while walking around. An iPod would come in handy for long train trips, though.
- No jewelry other than two rings I never take off. No piercings (including ears) and no tattoos.
- No hair dye. I like being grey.
- No office. I use the kitchen counter top as my 'office.'
- No glasses or contacts.
- No clothing variety. Well, a little, but very little. I have 'uniforms' for each season and multiples of the items, so I rarely think about what to wear, except when attending a dressy event (and I have a couple of uniforms for those occasions, too). I look the same almost every day for about 3 months.
21:25 Posted in lists , simple living | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
17 August 2007
Part II: Practicing Peace in Times of War - Pema Chödrön
This is the second in a series of (highly personal and biased) notes and commentary on Pema Chödrön's recent public meditation session on "Practicing Peace in Times of War," given at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California, on 13-15 July. The first is here.
I want to preface this post with two quotes I came across this morning:
"No words or concepts can ever really capture the truth; they can only point beyond themselves. The concepts can be contradictory, illogical, weird, and still fulfill the function of pointing you towards that which cannot be put into words directly. And so the key to being able to use them is to not get hung up on trying to make sense of the concepts on the level of thinking and reason, but rather allowing them to sink in and do their work. In many cases, something you read today that makes no sense to you whatsoever may later hit you in a sudden flash of insight." -- Helgi P. Einarsson, at Everyday Wonderland
This speaks for me as I fumble around in my mind, heart, and body incorporating, or not, Pema's words and presence (and those of the discussion group I'm part of), as I relate what I'm hearing, not hearing, seeing, not seeing, etc., to my prior experience and observations; and it also relates to what Pema and those in my discussion group are saying. Sometimes -- usually -- our words fall short of "truth" while they still point to it and evoke from others perhaps a 'yes,' a yearning, a sense of knowing without being able to articulate the knowing.
The second quote relates to something Pema says about loving-kindness:
"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves." -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
------
So, on with the notes and (not much) commentary!
The topic of this talk was working with emotions. (Not sure what happened to the talk on natural warmth.)
Pema reiterated that the source of a violent culture is individuals like ourselves. We may not have killed someone, be in a gang, own a gun, commit domestic violence, etc., or we may, but we can nonetheless recognise that there is some kind of complicity going on, i.e., we buy into violence. We can observe our own capacity for violence when we strike out or react strongly in other ways when triggered, when we feel a desire to get even (or feel that getting even is right and just).
She made a distinction between taking responsibility for our own complicity vs. being self-accusatory, self-blaming, saying "I'm at fault." The distinction is that taking responsibility is a positive point of view, one that says, "I could be a light in the darkness ... But maybe I'm not quite ready yet. Still, I have the tools I need -- natural intelligence, natural openness, and natural warmth -- and I can work with these in every moment."
She talked more about natural openness. It's the mind and heart before it's divided the world into black and white, good and bad. It's the mind and heart without bias.
So, we can choose to be complicit or we can choose to be a light.
How can we be lights? How can we be peacemakers?
First: Start where we are, with who we are -- with our violence, aggression, negativity, critical nature, with our complete package of 'beauty and grotesqueness' -- and with our current circumstances. The idea is not about getting rid of anything, whether in ourselves or in our circumstances.
Does 'not getting rid of anything' = 'nothing changes'? No. The way things change -- the way we uncover our capacity to love -- is by giving full attention to who we are right now and not looking for alternatives.
Comment:
Paradoxical: The way we change, essentially, is by not trying to change ourselves or our circumstances. How hard this is to do in the Puritan-influenced Western world! The non-fiction bestseller list is full of books about how to change either self or situation, how to 'better' ourselves and our circumstances, how to work to be more productive -- even if the 'product' is love!
I wonder what we think about people who have sought to change themselves -- not necessarily by getting rid of anything or adding anything, but perhaps by consciously entering into a transforming process of their own design or someone else's -- and feel that they have succeeded. If change comes not by trying to change ourselves, yet people who have tried to change themselves feel that they have changed, can they be correct?
I've been part of a church that listed its foundational beliefs at one point, one of which was that "transformation is possible in every moment." That phrase doesn't seem to assume how it occurs, just that it can. I was reminded of that belief, and the difficulty of holding it, later in the talk when Pema observed that we don't let family members, co-workers and people we are close to change ... And every time they open their mouths, it's proof that they haven't! In other words, bias blinds us to reality, and all the more when we think we have none. (Which reminds me of the Christian admonition to remove the log from one's own eye before trying to remove the twig from one's neighbour's.)
I don't quarrel with the idea that change can come through giving full attention to who we are, as we keep our seat in the midst of whatever is going on. It seems likely that change will come as we interrupt any habit or addiction -- in this case, perhaps the habit or addiction of looking persistently for alternatives to who we are and what our circumstances are. It does remind me, though, of the idea I heard recently (as part of a group of people studying money) that we can acquire money only through not having the desire to acquire money. That has not been true for me, though I'm sure it's true for some. That particular suggestion, in a book being used by people who were reading the book with an eye towards having more abundance (including, for most, money), seems almost cruel: Obviously, people reading the suggestion wanted more money, but they are told that you have to not want money in order to have it. Too late! The only way to proceed then is with a pretense that money doesn't matter. In fact, it seems to be a demand to get rid of something -- one's desire for money -- and to hide part of oneself from others and possibly from oneself.
Anyway, that's not a strict parallel to Pema's suggestions, just a sort of shadow thought that surfaced for me as I listened. Pema's suggestion that we can give our full attention to ourselves in the current moment does, actually, seem like making a change. I'm glad (Jungian that I am) that I don't have to get rid of anything, because the darkness often seems the most interesting to my mystical and perhaps naive mind.
Part of paying full attention to who we are is to have loving-kindness with self. It's like having a close friend, someone you know so well that their weaknesses and strengths are obvious to you, as well as their neuroses and their sanity. You love your friend for all she is, not because you think she's flawless but because you know who she is. We can love ourselves this way. Once we know ourselves -- the dark, the light, and all those other oppositions -- we don't need to protect ourselves from the danger of this incipient, suspected knowledge by striking out at anyone who threatens us. (This is where the La Rochefoucauld quote seems relevant.)
Comment: For me, this was the key thing Pema said tonight: We strike out in order to protect ourselves from knowing ourselves as we truly, really, wholly are. This accords directly with Girardian thought: the 'other' threatens our very sense of being because it's from the other that we derive our being, but we don't want to know that. Envy, jealousy, rivalry, violence, etc., are all symptoms of not wanting to know that.
Loving-kindness is an open receptivity in all circumstances. For example: There's someone walking towards you. It might be a friend, or it might be a big hulking stranger. A completely open, receptive person will have no preconception about the person. This openness means that we don't overlay our concepts on them. It's being able to perceive without prejudice or bias, without labels. She also spoke of this in the context of "right intention," which is to stay open and not jump to conclusions. Openness is perception before it freezes the person who's approaching us into "friend" or "foe."
Comment: How does this apply not just to individuals but to political entities, groups, organisations, corporations, governments? When we see George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden (fill in your own name) approach, can we be open, without bias, maintaining a curious, receptive attitude? When we tune into a news story on FOX news or read one in the Guardian newspaper (again, fill in arch-media of your choice), are we similarly receptive in each instance? Is that where this practice leads?
So, the training is to be open and receptive to self and to others. She suggested that one sign that we're moving along that path is that our capacity to listen to someone with whom we don't agree will increase.
She went on to talk in some detail about shenpa. I think she said that shenpa is the charge behind the emotion that's behind views and opinions. She said it's not the emotion itself. It's that reactive sensation of being hooked, of being triggered. One quality of it is that it's very hard to let go of. We might know we've been triggered and that it would be better not to escalate. But instead, the habit is to feed the reaction with our thoughts.
Shenpa, she said, comes with an undertow. If I understood correctly, this undertow means that although in the moment of triggering we might recognise that we've been triggered, and step back, there is still an urge, a craving, to go ahead and take the bait anyway. And if we step back from that, there is another moment when we might get sucked under. And so on. It sounds like, as with an actual undertow, we can eventually become weary of fighting it and so just give in.
Thoughts, or storyline, feed the undertow, which makes it hard to remain open and receptive. An example of this dynamic might be two people who want to work on their relationship and have moments when they can do so, and other moments when they can't seem to resist blaming, accusing, "but you did this bad thing to me," and more subtle forms of the same. We might wish to lay down the storyline, but it's also the thread that we hang onto.
Eventually, we might see the storyline as transparent, but the first step, as in meditation, is to interrupt the storyline. Even for a second.
She spoke of Buddha's temptations at the end of his life, suggesting that as we practice, the number of things that trigger us may become fewer and fewer, and their intensity less and less, but that we will still feel the temptation to take the bait. We will still have temptations that tug at us, but we will respond differently. (Of course, this reminded me of Jesus's temptations at the beginning of his ministry. He also seemed to feel the temptations as temptations.)
Pema then spoke of craving: the craving to react, to stick to the bias, to continue criticising. We do these things to get something to hold onto. It takes great courage and dignity to not take the hook and not feed the storyline, to be fully present with the underlying experience, over and over, still.
Ultimately, she said, we can each trust only our own wisdom and intelligence. (Which is a tricky thing when it's mostly covered up!) Natural intelligence, e.g., tells us that biting the hook and getting swept away have consequences: we can strengthen the habit or addiction we already have, and perhaps cause a habituated chain reaction, or we can do something different, which is difficult, because doing something different will likely have unknown consequences. We already know that the habitual reaction brings us momentary pleasure, or at least forestalls pain. Not resorting to that resaction might actually lead us to a more painful place for a while.
Emotional reactivity is energy, and like all energy, it's not solid; but we freeze that energy into fixed concepts that feel solid. They feel like ground. They feel real. We have another choice, and that's to be naked with the raw energy and make friends with it.
Pema then went back to one of the goals of the session, which is to offer practices for peacemakers. She warned (I guess it's a warning) that when we set out to disentangle ourselves, the first thing we're aware of is our entanglement. When we set out to rejoice in the well-being of others, we are immediately confronted with our envy. Etc.!
She's already presented two practices: 1. sitting meditation, which is the practice of being present; and 2. pausing, which interrupts our unconsciousness for a moment and can be done throughout the day, any time.
The next practice (3) is leaning in; it's done in the moment of feeling shenpa, of feeling triggered. The steps are:
- Acknowledge that you've been triggered
- Pause (as previous practice), taking 1-3 conscious breaths
- Lean in. I.e., become one with your own energy. Feel it.
- Go on with your life -- no big deal. 'Disown' the moment -- let it go.
When we give up any addictive habit, it's not comfortable. It leaves us in the room with our own restless energy, which we will usually do anything to avoid.
Her parting words were: The peacemaker works now, not later.
18:10 Posted in community , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
16 August 2007
Thoughts, Reading, Doing
This week I seem to be trying to do too much at once, and not getting much done. Today I'd planned to work most of the day on my new library booklists site -- moving, reformatting, and link-checking a bunch of booklists to a new website -- and study French.
Instead, I added a new feature to that new website and added new content to that feature; I've read a lot of interesting articles online (more on that below); I pruned the wisteria to within an inch of its life, cut back the bleeding hearts which are finally yellowing, cut out some dying raspberry canes, and cut new arrangements for inside the house -- mostly hosta leaves and other foliage, as my garden is primarily shade and the local groundhog eats most of what flowers; swept the house and porch and did some spot-cleaning; took photos of a small beige-coloured frog that was clutching onto the wisteria; played with the dog; did some library blogging; made some phone calls; and updated the checkbook.
Some days I seem more able to stick to a to-do list (even if it's only in my head) than others. Lately, I have been on a de-cluttering adventure that seems to trump all other work and play. Yesterday, after going to Eucharist and having lunch with a friend, I cleaned out the kitchen pantry, tossing perishable food items (like flours and vitamins) brought with us to this house in 2002; cleaned up and re-defined the kitchen junk drawers and cubby holes; moved items off the countertops; and tossed old OTC and prescription medications -- some for the previous canine members of the family, who died in 2003 and 2004. Later, I enjoyed spending time with a college friend's son and his girlfriend who were driving through town. And I did cover a whole French lesson ("Entertainment') before hitting the hay last night.
So here's what I'm reading online and thinking about today:
>> Scott's blog entry on victims, another look at resentment (though he doesn't use the word)
>> An article in the WSJ, Waiting for the End: When Loved Ones Are Lost in Limbo by Jeff Zaslow. Apropos, as a friend's friend is in day 20 of a coma due to a hemorrhage.
"'We're prolonging life, but we're also prolonging dying,' says Mercedes Bern-Klug, an end-of-life researcher at the University of Iowa, who studies what she terms 'ambiguous dying syndrome.' Hundreds of thousands of people are surviving longer with advanced dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or in coma states. For their loved ones, 'coping with the ambiguity creates a unique type of stress,' says Dr. Bern-Klug. 'It's a form of angst we don't even have a name for in our culture.'"
>> Things I Talk Too Much About: 6 Annoying Fetishes at ZenHabits: "Here are 6 things I obsess over and am way too proud of and talk way too much about, annoyingly." His are coffee, Macs, Gmail, Firefox, Veganism, and Simplicity. Mine, off the top of my head, are Girardian ideas, dogs, Flickr, Google, and blogging. Others?
>> A Sense of Proportion at Everyday Wonderland:
"When there is something on the horizon in your life situation that you either want desperately to avoid or to acquire, in essence if there is a possibility of a future event with high stakes of some kind, a situation of gain or loss, the mind goes hyper with trying to do something about it. If there is something you want to avoid, the mind will either focus on it almost constantly, reasoning that remembering it gives you a certain level of control over the situation; or the mind will resort to boredom, which is little more than a tactic to cover up thoughts you want to avoid rising to the surface. Behind the stream of compulsive thinking that goes on in most people’s minds, day in and day out, is a deep seated belief that the thinking is a way of staying in control."
>> In Defense of Dangerous Ideas by Steven Pinker at Edge, reprinted in the Chicago Sun-Times. He asks questions that tend to appall, anger, shock, disgust, and incite people. He asks questions that get at "dangerous ideas" -- "ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order." These are "statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age." First I wondered why he didn't present these as statements rather than questions, but I think it's because even to ask the question and broach a conversation about it is too unthinkable for many people.
Examples:
- Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?
- Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
- Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?
- Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?
- Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?
- Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
- Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?
>> A couple of Readers' Advisory articles, which I micro-blogged at librarybooklists.
14:30 Posted in booklists , health and medicine , pop culture , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
10 August 2007
Part I: Practicing Peace in Times of War - Pema Chödrön
Last night, I attended a showing of the first part of Pema Chödrön's recent public meditation session on "Practicing Peace in Times of War," given at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California, on 13-15 July.
In an online invitation to a similar talk (being given now through 15 Aug. at the Shambhala Center at Red Feather Lakes, CO), Pema offers these very sage words:
"War begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily -- in minor ways and then in quite serious, major ways, such as hatred and prejudice -- whenever we feel uncomfortable. It's so sad, really, because our motivation in hardening our hearts is to find some kind of ease, some kind of freedom from the distress that we're feeling.
"Someone once gave me a poem with a line in it that offers a good definition of peace: 'Softening what is rigid in our hearts.' We can talk about ending war and we can march for ending war, we can do everything in our power, but war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other. "
My notes, and comments (indented), from last night's viewing follow. I apologise in advance for my shallow, incomplete, and uninformed view of complex dynamics and concepts in Buddhist teaching; I'm reporting here what I heard, how I heard it (given my lack of deep Buddhist grounding, and given my views, experience and other filters), and how it seems related to other things I ponder, observe, and experience.
Pema started out by talking about the idea of 'settling a score' or 'getting even.' She said, doesn't it sound like those things should result in harmony, in evenness, in a balance restored? In actuality, they don't, but we continue to think that they will. We have a misunderstanding about revenge, wanting someone else to feel as bad as we feel.
Actually, aggression breeds aggression, violence breeds violence, and neither brings the relief we hope for. We take our pain and give it to someone else, thinking we will be rid of the pain and they will understand; instead, over the long term, we still have the pain and so do they, and they will pass it along to someone else in the same way, and so on.
Pema says that the Dalai Lama was asked why he keeps advocating non-violence in Tibet when every year things get worse and worse for the Tibetans. His answer: "The use of violence is bound to create long-term resentment in others, and that is a source of future conflict."
My comment: I agree whole-heartedly with the belief but the logic seems shaky: Lots of things create -- or perhaps more accurately, uncover -- resentment in others, e.g., being more skilled at something, being seen as better-looking, having more friends, getting better grades, having a child or not having one, etc. Should we forgo those things, too, because others will be resentful and there will be conflict? Jesus was very resented by some of those around him, for his claim to divinity, his healing powers, his flouting of their rules, and so on. Should he have behaved differently? To what extent are we responsible for the resentment of those around us?
Girardian thought parses this idea of resentment in detail, seeing mimetic entanglement and rivalry as the crux of resentment, which is very helpful for me. Girardian Paul Nuechterlein says that "Resentment is a state which has one always pondering evil against one's rivals." Put this way, it's obvious that resentment is aggressive in nature. Sometimes it's overtly aggressive, as when I lash out physically or verbally at someone who has insulted or disappointed me, and sometimes it's so subtle, so that I may be privately wishing that someone I otherwise seem to love falls from grace or gets his come-uppance. There's a similar mixture of spirits in the case of mentors and celebrities -- whom generative anthropologist Eric Gans says in our culture "play the structural role of sacred figures, with all the ambivalence that attends that status" -- whom we on the one hand idolize and imitate, and on the other, respond to reports of their downfall or besmirching with a frisson of schadenfreude (pleasure at another's misfortune), the classic Girardian 'mentor as obstacle' dynamic.
Nuechterlein also says: "To live trapped in the world of debts is to live in a world of constantly building resentment, ... a world that thus is in constant need of the release of resentment through the victimage mechanism." Resentment leads to the creation of ever more victims. More on merit and debt below.
Later, Pema will say something that makes all of this clearer for me in a Buddhist context, concerning our attitude and spirit when we act.
Pema describes how aggression comes about: We are triggered emotionally by something -- anything: an insult, a disappointment, a slight, a criticism, a loss, etc. -- and we react to it emotionally. The more timid or conflict-avoidant among us might react by repressing the emotions and letting them fester inside us (for a time; and anything 'inside' us is unavoidably also essentially part of our 'outside' interactions and relationships), while the more daring might immediately strike back at the perceived perpetrator.
In all cases, the underlying desire is for us to feel better. Aggression, Pema says, rarely comes from evil nature [she didn't use the world 'evil' but I can't recall the word she did use] but rather from a desire to feel better when we feel any sort of pain and vulnerability.
In that moment, when the emotions begin to rise in reaction, we can think about how we might do something different.
She brings in the apparently traditional Buddhist teaching on 'settling the score', which is that when we are triggered, when we don't like or want what's happening, we can recognise that "karma has just ripened." Rather than point the finger at someone or something external to us, the one or thing that we feel is making us suffer, we can see it simply as karma ripening. The idea is this: 'I am feeling deep discomfort, and at some point I caused this same discomfort in another, and now I can pay that karmic debt by letting the aggression stop or I can get deeper in debt karmically, and strengthen my own habits of aggression, greed, fear, etc. I can choose to act for my own happiness and the well-being of the planet, or not.'
My comment: This idea falls flat for me. To look on my discomfort as what I am owed because I caused discomfort seems another way of engaging in blame and accusation, and making that the focus, and it keeps us in the realm of quid pro quo, of merit and debt, of reward and punishment, which is radically different from the view of God I currently hold. :-) I think this idea of reward and punishment in Buddhism is seen more as natural consequence than as punishment -- similar to the way I interpret much of what has been traditionally taught as 'reward and punishment' in Christianity -- but in this formulation it sounds less like consequence and more like punishment, i.e., you did this and now it will be done to you. Which is not the same as 'You did this and therefore it is now being done to you,' but it's a very fine line.
There is also in Buddhism the "Dedication of Merit," where after a class or other meritorious activity, we give away the merit we've earned to all sentient beings, and we wish to free all beings from "the ocean of samsara," which seems to a Buddhist beginner like me to be a kind of karmic purgatory. It's seen as a generous impulse to give away the merit one has earned, and yet I wonder why there is a persistent need to believe in merit, earning, debt, owing, accrual, and so on. And from where is the merit earned? And why is the universe keeping track, like some omniscient accountant? I tend to agree with Nuechterlein that living within the barren imagination of this kind of tit-for-tat system increases resentment.
Back to Pema. She goes on to say that in any case, from someone else getting 'your' parking space or cutting you off in traffic, to someone gossiping about you so that your spouse leaves you and you lose your job, to someone murdering your child or killing your dog -- from an ambiguously malicious/ignorant action to one that is clearly malicious towards you -- the buck has to stop here. No matter how unspeakable your own pain, reacting to it aggressively will only cause more pain and conflict.
There are practices we can do to work with our own reactivity. These are related to Uncovering Three Innate Qualities of Mind.
The three innate qualities of mind are natural intelligence, natural openness, and natural warmth. She says later that working with openness in particular helps to uncover intelligence and warmth.
1. Natural intelligence: We know that aggression generally leads to aggression. A five-year-old can predict that if someone feels thwarted or attacked, s/he will be resentful and angry and likely as not, will be aggressive in return. (By the way, if this isn't already clear, aggression doesn't necessarily mean striking out physically or verbally; it can also be a hateful quality of spirit, a slow simmering strategy to get even, a deep festering resentment that colours future perception and action, etc. It's anything, it seems, that's not about softening our hearts' rigidness.) We have this natural intelligence within us, but our emotional reactivity is so strong in the moment of triggering that our intelligence is clouded.
This natural intelligence knows what will churn us up and make us suffer (e.g., with resentful mind, even if we don't act on it then), and it knows what will soothe and heal us and lead to long-term happiness.
She asked the audience at this point if anyone wasn't buying the idea that aggression leads to aggression. A man stood up and said that striking back out of revenge is different from striking out in self-defense or for a higher purpose. He posited that in the case of Tibet, if that country had an effective army, it might well be worth fighting off the Chinese. He also mentioned as a worthy enterprise that nations went to war against Hitler when he invaded Poland.
Pema's response was low-key. She deferred most of her response, and conversation about this, but did say that there are times when it may be intelligent (i.e., in keeping with natural intelligence) to protect the self or strike out, but that generally that action comes along with a spirit of hatred. My own observation is that even if an aggressive spirit isn't present at the outset, often hatred, anger, resentment, and so on form and harden in the process of striking out or in its aftermath.
2. Natural Openness: As mentioned before, Pema feels that intelligence and warmth flow from an open mind and an open heart. That is, a mind and heart free from bias.
She instructed the audience: "Listen as if someone were gong to ask you what you just heard." There was silence, and then ten seconds later, she said, "that's it." That's openness: attentive, paying attention, not knowing what comes next, not caught in our own thoughts, just opened outward to whatever comes. Again, from my own experience I'd say that curiosity is a part of this openness, too.
She suggested we do this throughout the day -- pause and look outside our own bubble. Take three conscious breaths, or look at your hand, or just listen for a couple of moments to what's in your environment. Don't make it a big deal; there is nothing special to experience. The point is that it offers a contrast to being all caught up, like we usually are. It offers consciousness in the midst of mindlessness and habit. The larger point is: This is always available. This spaciousness is always available.
Part of what really soothes and heals us is recognising how much space there is, space for natural intelligence and warmth to arise. She likened it to the 'space' provided when we write a venting email or letter, in the heat of emotion and self-justification, and then we wait a few hours or a few days before sending it (likely as not, not sending it or re-writing it). Natural intelligence, which tells us that striking back in reaction won't lead to harmony and all good things, is clouded by emotional reactivity -- and it's nurtured by space.
My comment: Thinking about aggression and resentment, openness and a spirit of compassion, reminds me so of the writing of James Alison (Girardian, gay man, Catholic priest), who speaks of the deeply felt experience of love and forgiveness (similar, perhaps, to the Buddhist idea of maitri