Cultural Technology From Meditation to Globalization

Karen Horney and Mindfulness-into-Clarity

2011-12-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

Karen Horney focused a good deal of her psychdynamic theory on interpersonal motivations. She broke things down to three major motivations in relation to others--the movement away from (withdrawal), the movement against (aggression), and the movement towards (compliance). In Buddhism, the trinity is: aversion, attachment/grasping, and ignorance. In more modern, psychological terms, we focus a lot on the dance between approach and withdrawal where the more neutral space can be seen as immobility of some sort--either something along the lines of apathy or, alternately, equanimity.

I'm learning a lot from working with Shinzen. One of the central stages I've listed is Mindful Appreciation. To some extent, I've tried to delineate attentional techniques or practices that are supportive of the particular developmental qualities and opportunities at each stage. Some of the benefits of mindfulness practice include: sensory clarity that comes from experiencing (seeing, hearing, or feeling)"through" the permeability of perceptions and conceptions; increased equanimity; increased strength of concentration; greater chances of recognizing "openings" for gratitude or appreciation in our lives; and an increasingly consistent turn from emotional reactivity to being in touch with our own and others' genuine emotions. Different styles or types of mindfulness practice will have a greater influence on different benefits.

One of the most significant benefits that stands out is that we create a space or fulcrum from which we do not have to unquestioningly or unintentionally "go with" these semi-conscious or semi-intentional psychological movements that Horney mentioned. In other words, we can separate the initial impulse towards withdrawal, aggression, or compliance from the continuation of that impulse which turns impulse into a full-blown and self-sustaining process that we can describe as habitual reactions. We can feel and witness the impulse without allowing it to move us. This becomes a sort of "fourth" psychological movement option--remaining. Remaining with the initial impulse rather than running through a usual process. In Shinzen's phraseology, he describes equanimity as the ability to allow sensory experience to come and go without push (aversion) or pull (grasping).

Beyond the deeper, quicker, or more spiritual aspects of what mindfulness like this can lead to, it allows us to check the previously unquestioned unfolding of the processes by which we have come to know and create a limited sense of self. We could also call this self an "incomplete" self because this self--as primarily a collection of temperament and habits--does not primarily move from the ground of being or a sense of the simultaneity of abundance of/in the universe and ever-spontaneous vitality. Part of the development from Mindful Appreciation involves getting more in touch with the vitality through practicing nonidentification with habitual reactions. It is difficult or impossible to distinguish a sense of self from habitual reactions if we cannot see our habitual reactions and see them for what they are. Without bringing some clarity and equanimity to these reactions, we will tend to identify with those we like and attempt to suppress those we do not. That very movement (identify/suppress or grasping/aversion) feeds the ignorance, allowing that personal, neutral psychological space to remain as apathy or ignorance.

If we can "see through" the habitual psychological processing, we have the option of relating to the world around us through new ways, through unique or spontaneous responses that allow us to "feel" the vitality of each moment. That ends up being a decent description of the inspiration that can be seen as an intentional attentional practice corresponding to the following stage of Clarity. Inspiration can be described as moving from the moment of clear seeing into vitality, appreciation, or spontaneity (including "nurture positive" in Basic Mindfulness terms)--basically, a simple, positive jolt following the moment of equanimity. It looks like we can move from an understanding and experience of these brief sequential movements (or moments) into more consistently noticing this vitality and positivity as flow.

Secondary Traumatization

2011-06-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

I finished my master's degree in counseling in 2006, five years ago. In that education, trauma was not addressed adequately and so, it's not surprising that secondary or vicarious trauma was not addressed well either. Secondary traumatization occurs when one works closely with trauma survivors. It's the stress and stress reactions that we pick up from dealing with traumatic experiences secondhand. A list of the signs and symptoms can be found on pages 3 and 4 here.

As the above linked article suggests, balance in one's own life, physical health and relaxation, and supportive social relationships are very valuable in dealing with secondary stress. But I'd also had the feeling for a long time that there must be some specific concentration/meditation technique that directly addressed the individual experience of this particular type of stress. Well, it's taken five years to find a fitting approach, process, or technique, but I believe I've found it (or, at least, one--since others might find that there are different techniques that work better for them).

In Shinzen Young's work, found on the web at Shinzen.org and basicmindfulness.org, there is a particular technique in his "Focus In" way of knowing yourself as a spiritual being. (This post gets a little technical, but it does not really get into anything too archaic. A familiarity with practicing meditation will help in grasping the value of the techniques listed--and the system overall--but part of what I like about this system is that it is accessible to beginning meditators.)

As one begins to develop the ability to pay attention to different streams of input into perceptions (Shinzen suggests working towards being able to "focus in" on mental talk, mental image, and emotional body-type sensations as three somewhat separate streams or foci), one becomes increasingly able to focus primarily on emotional body-type sensations. In my experience, this is the best place to work with secondary traumatization because of how our bodies carry the stress from traumatization that our thinking minds often want to ignore or turn away from.

As one focuses on emotional body-type sensations, it is possible to differentiate sensations that feel primarily physical (the weight of various body parts as one sits, the temperature in the room, maybe a slight breeze blowing across arm hair or one's face, etc.) and sensations that are both physical and emotional such as a tightness in one's stomach or shoulder muscles that is related to remembering working with trauma. At this point, it's good to realize that the physical body is not necessarily identified with, defined by, tied up in or tied down by, one's psyche. As we distinguish the difference between primarily physical sensations and emotion-laden physical sensations, it's easy enough to see that "I have a body but I am not my body". In other words, physical sensation alone does not define or describe us. ONce this is pretty clear, it is easy to feel a sense of not worrying about the physical body and being able to focus strongly on the emotional-physical sensations that sort of symbolize our experience of psyche, the sensations and feelings that let us know we are human.

If one sits in meditation for 30-60 minutes, simply noting feeling-sensations without trying to do anything other than notice them, one is likely to have moments when one is NOT noticing emotion-laden feeling sensations. We can look at those moments as "rest". (So, another way of approaching what I'm speaking about here is to begin with Shinzen's "way" of focusing on rest. In that case, the distinctions I've listed are still important.) This state of a restful psyche or emotion-body, which we primarily will tend to experience in relatively brief moments initially, alleviates a great deal of acute stress if we become aware of it. Shinzen described this focusing on rest in the emotion-body as "letting your humanity fall away". Speaking from experience, being able to take even a brief rest from one's tortured humanity (when it is so) does not change that one's job may be just as demanding and emotionally challenging the very next day, but it is so important to be able to find any rest. It can be the difference between feeling emotionally challenged and emotionally crippled by an intense profession.

One of the things I like about Shinzen's approach is that he focuses on mindfulness as improving one's ability to concentrate, clarity of senses, and equanimity. As one works on distinguishing different types of sensory phenomena, the exercise itself strengthens the power of one's concentration. Working with concentration in this manner--in distinguishing different input streams or foci--improves the sensory clarity. This is opposed to feeling muddled by incoming stimuli or under a "barrage" of stimuli. And by increasing concentration and clarity, if we include a reasonable understanding of ourselves and mindfulness itself, we improve equanimity along the way.

To the same extent that we improve the likelihood of making a jumpshot the more we practice our intention and ability to make jumpshots, we apply our increased concentration, clarity, and equanimity to familiarizing ourselves with a restful state when we practice resting awareness through intention and mindfulness techniques. THis increases the likelihood of feeling restful and extends the moments of being restful. I believe it was in one of Chogyam Trungpa's books where I read that the Tibetan for "meditation" is familiarization. Rather than having some ridiculously lofty or vague description of why to meditate or how to, we can simply say that it is worth familiarizing oneself with an emotionally restful state. For me, whether that can or needs to tie into anything more idealistic is secondary to the immediate beneficial effects. If couched within a larger framework, this technique can connect to broader meaning or applications but doesn't need to in order to be worthwhile. Thanks, Shinzen.

Differentiation in Vocational Fields

2011-03-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

One of the accepted realities of those who see development, for the most part, as I do, is that there is a consistency in how we move from one major stage of development to the next. In general, we solidify a self-identity and personal experience at one stage, then we begin to differentiate from that stage as we become increasingly aware of the nxt. Following differentiation from one stage and what can look like a fanatical--or at least very focused emphasis on the one following--we reintegrate the earlier stage into our self-identity. A good analogy is when people change religions or move to a new country. You have to put a lot of energy into getting out of the old and into the new. It initially takes a lot of focus to sort of fit into the new place. Then, once you're somewhat settled, you really start to realize just how much of you was shaped by what came before. At that point, there is some chance of integrating history and the present situation.

I've also talked about how this process can be experienced as moving from impulse (the initial dissatisfaction with one's current situation or stage) to effort (the effort to change) to intention (like intentionally integrating the multiple stages or aspects) to grace.

Grace seems rare enough. As we shift our weight from effort to intention, we realize that we can't simply spend our whole lives struggling, and with that realization can come too much of a rejection of struggling. We need to struggle or commit whoeheartedly to necessary effort when it is necessary. But effort alone won't set us up--at least not in this economic environment--for longterm success and wellbeing. Now, if we actually make an attempt to shift our weight from intention to grace, it is possible to reject intention and the ability to hold onto one's intention too much. This may seem obvious in the meditators who want to simply, "Let be and let free."

While we have a reasonable number of role models who have moved from flat-out physical and emotional effort to a basically intentional and thoughtful sense of self-direction, we have fewer successful role models of grace. But there is a real value in "letting go" to a greater extent once one has mastered a general field or specific business. IF we can retain the willingness to put in effort when necessary, and IF we can maintain consistent intention while looking for something more, THEN it is worth relaxing one's focus to take in more of the environment. Taking in more of the environment allows for more flexible, more fitting changes as the environment changes.

Today, I am impressed with just how easy it is to drift away and forget or simply lean away from effort and intention in teh search for grace.

Ego and Tranquility IV

2011-02-02T09:17:00.000-08:00

For many people, then, the beginnings of realization begins in uneasiness, fear, and the judgment that the way they had been (largely unaware) was no good or at least not good enough. This makes spirituality or personal growth a trial, a difficult journey, or something along those lines. We end up with truisms like the idea that life begins at the edges of your comfort zone, as if a life of awareness begins in uneasiness. But this sort of understanding puts us in a living paradox like the ones Zeno loved to create. And we end up fighting our own egos or trailing uneasiness and dissatisfaction along with a cavalier sense of jumping into God-knows-what as what life is really all about. As if cliffdiving with your eyes open will keep you alive if you jump onto submerged rocks. A cavalier attitude with its attendant thrills and streamers of dissatisfaction may not be what clarity is about even though it is what some people decide that their lives are about.

Clarity has an effect on what that intermediate state, or clutch state, feels like. The belief in cliffdiving with eyes open definitely involves intention, but it may lack some degree of clarity if it includes the superstition that eyes being open rather than closed means you won't hit rocks. So there are many people out there preaching the value of intention, which is great, but very intentional people have set up oppressive empires, unethical corporations, and corrupt governments. Tranquil folks have improved their own lives by learning to develop a sense of serenity within themselves, often without influencing many others around them. No one of these influences is paramount. They come together in the same vehicle, though, if they are intentionally incorporated. If tranquility is practiced, we diminish the influence and the need for apathy. If clarity and awareness are developed, we diminish the influence and the need for being shocked into awareness.

An emphasis on clarity keeps us aware that things are changing. An emphasis on tranquility allows us to feel an ultimately undefined and indefinable sense of consistency. Ego, like using a pronoun to signify many things at different times and in different contexts, is a vehicle that is real enough to feel real yet empty enough to fit in all these influences. The interaction between immediate awareness of this moment, ego, and environment allows for the combination of continuity and change that sets us up for seeing the difference between random change and spastic actions as opposed to progress.

Ego and Tranquility III

2011-01-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Let's come at this from a different angle to see if we can complete the picture. Internal states, moods, and external situations change more rapidly than self-identity tends to. Ego includes self-identity (what we think and experience ourselves to be) as well as habitual patterns of feeling and behavior. In the same way that what we think of ourselves is not all of who we are, patterns of feeling and behavior are also not all of who we are. We can see genetic temperament, rather than something like Freud's "id" as basic to ego.

Once a relatively consistent ego is established in adulthood (as it is with almost all adults), intentional shifts in state, fluidity between states, and openness--especially awareness of openness--become more important to personal development. Intentionally incorporating openness and fluidity into self-identity incorporates openness and fluidity into ego without changing history or the uniqueness of one's individuality. In other words, one begins to wipe the slate of personality clean rather than wiping it blank.

I guess that if I'm going to title this series "Ego and Tranquility", I should probably include something on tranquility. It sort of fits with the blankness. In moderating states, we might start off by simply noticing what sort of state we're in. Once we notice, we might also notice a response to being in that state--either like or dislike. Both like and dislike tend to drive the "logic" of that state. By not wanting to fear snakes, I keep thinking about snakes, and this reminds me that I fear snakes. David Barlow has done great work with anxiety and fear. You can essentially wear out someone's snake phobia by keeping them around snakes for long enough, showing them that snakes are not necessarily dangerous, and eventually getting them to hold snakes.

If you aren't willing to deal with the intense reactions that his process demands, or if dealing with something less tangible (than snakes) like shame, it becomes important to apply a sort of clutch (like in a vehicle with a manual transmission). We do this by regaining some degree of control over our sympathetic nervous response. This ends up being the same as when moms soothe upset children, except we aren't relying on snakes to wear us out or moms to calm us down. We're relying on ego as a transitional object (our vehicle) and using awareness and intention as the clutch. The interesting thing is that ego might seem to drive us wherever any given internal state is directing us if we are unaware and also unable to hit the clutch. Hitting the clutch may leave us pointed in the same direction, moving with some left-over momentum, but we are no longer continuing to speed towards the goal of some state (like anger) rather than driving the bus ourselves.

This can be like waking from a dream or realizing--all of a sudden--that you're behind the wheel but that you've been on autopilot. That moment between when you are impulsively following the logic of whatever state--like when anger is pushing you towards revenge, for example--and when you realize that you are actually driving can have a number of different feelings. It can feel somewhat disappointing and apathetic, it can feel liberated or light (including an "unbearable lightness of being"), and it can also feel tranquil, peaceful, serene. It is the experiential definition (rather than semantic definition) of unawareness to not notice the state you had been in and the feeling of transitioning. Realizing this lack of awareness can be like suddenly realizing that the ground is not solid beneath your feet. Most people prefer denial and unawareness to this realization and the uneasisness and fear it can bring.

Ego and Tranquility II

2011-01-26T08:19:00.001-08:00

The question we're carrying over is: what functions for adults as that supportive field? Is it relationships, community? No. Intention? No. Wisdom, insight? No and no. Tranquility? Also no. Or maybe the answers should all be, "Not only that."

All those things feed in. As usual, I want to turn that question on its side to see what it looks like that way. If we've got a good model of how personal growth can occur (in children), then--given all the differences adults face--HOW does adult growth occur?

Psychodynamics often describes the "primary caregiver" as a transitional object. The kid can explore a little ways, return to Mom and feel reassured that everything is alright, and then explore again. Likewise, then, the space around Mom begins to feel safe. Actual places like one's bedroom, playroom, backyard, or near Mom can then be used as "transitional spaces" where exploration, play, growth, and learning occur. Everywhere else is potentially dangerous and scary. It's not much of a stretch to see that dangerous schools are not really the best "transitional spaces" in psychodynamic terms. And we also grow into professional and romantic relationships where trust is recognized or at least felt to be really important for any meaningful or sustained relationship. So, as we move out of mom's arms and out of the nursery, we can see that the psychological "space" is both real physical space (outside of the nursery) and also sociocultural space (trustworthy relationships).

In essence then, we need the potential, the motivation, the tools, and the space to work in for growth. We need at least one more thing: continuity. Without continuity or coherence, each moment may be intense enough, but there is no way to mark growth as opposed to random change. And, in speaking of personal growth and maintaining the motivation for personal growth as adults, we are speaking in terms of an internal or personal SENSE of continuity. It is this sense that allows us to say that we feel that there has or has not been growth, since personal growth is not as objectively measurable as, say, height.

Here is where ego finds its true value. Ego, like growth, may be made up of many parts without necessarily being any of those parts or influences. As we move beyond the "primary relationship" with Mom, our developing egos become our own transitional objects--that which, in reference to, we either feel growth or the absence of growth. Now, as I mentioned, ego isn't necessarily just one singular thing. Ego is influenced by its own transitional object-space: society. With these three reference points--individual awareness, ego, society--we have what it takes to measure growth.

How does that work out? Well, we create a relatively consistent sense of ego and society even though personal awareness is constantly shifting. The phenomena we pay attention to, shifts in internal brain states, and changes in emotional moods tend to occur more quickly than changes in what we think of ego and society. At some point in our lives, we intentionally attempt to shift our internal state--from anxiety, fear, anger, despite, shame, etc. If we find or are given the tools and stick to the training we can improve at shifting our internal states towards those states we would choose. That's the intention part.

As we repeatedly use our intention to build the attentional skills that allow us to shift our internal states, those intentional choices and intentional states become part of our self-identity (which is part of ego). Those chosen and increasingly familiar states become more consistent traits, more consistent parts of who we are. It's just that, at this point, the "who" in who we are is bigger than a concrete self of who we were, more real and complex than an ideal who that we might have wanted to become. The growth itself changes us. As we move closer to the ideal, the ideal must also change and come closer to the complexity of reality and history and personality, etc. At some point, it becomes very clear that we are trading, piece by piece, a sort of thin and sterilized (yet bright) ideal self for a very real and complex and sometimes still problematic but inspired self. Idealization becomes inspiration as we become intimate and familiar with our own active potential.

Ego and Tranquility

2011-01-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

In the Mahamudra tradition, they sometimes say that anything without tranquility as its base or foundation does not last. It seems to me that, when we begin considering how intention fits with tranquility, we come to an unusual understanding of ego. It helps, probably, to include some understanding of how our self-identities develop.

Think about baby-talk from babies' perspective. It's not that far from when adults hear a foreign language. Under the right circumstances, you can comprehend that the apparent babble conveys intentional, and even understood meanings. Babies will mimic the babble they hear, and we approximate the sounds we want them to make. We help shape their noises into closer approximations of the language(s) we speak around and to them. While adult learning at this early stage of language acquisition may be more formalized, we still start off with some degree of exposure to the new language, babble on our own, and are prompted to improve our babbling.

In order to stick with the process long enough for our babble to become semi-intelligible and for us to understand at least basic words and phrases, we need to stick with the process long enough. For babies, they need someone beyond themselves to "hold" or maintain that intention and the process. Now, if our societies were full of enlightened individuals sharing their personal growth, personal development could go pretty much the same way. And that is happening to some extent. But most of us had mothers and teachers who put a great deal of time into language acquisition support when we were most motivated to learn language. We tend not to get the same one-on-one time with multiple personal growth gurus.

Throw in the challenge that by the time we begin considering personal growth seriously, we've also developed to the point where we have multiple, conflicting intentions to deal with. The average adult has to juggle the importance of paying the bills, maintatining relationships, maybe even teaching their own child to speak, etc. These competing intentions make it very difficult to focus wholeheartedly, to commit to any process 100%, and yet that is often how people learn best. Plus, that guru isn't going to feed and clothe you while spending up to 18-20 hours each day making sure you are happy, secure, and learning. Moms may not bring what gurus can bring, but gurus don't match up to moms in the mom-ing category either.

What all that means is that something our brains and environment did for us when we were learning language as children needs to be done by ourselves when learning personal growth as adults. When we are born, our brains are exploration-oriented--ready to learn. Mom, or whoever, works with that potential and a lot of emotional input to help us learn. Our brains respond to all this stimulation by growing lots of brain cells, training many of those brain cells to fire together in cohesive patterns that repeat when we see meaning repeated, and letting many other cells (the ones we hadn't needed to speak our specific language) die. They die because, like a screaming baby bird or an aggressive puppy, fortune in this type of instance favors the bold. The cells that are used get the metabolic energy while others starve.

The same basic process goes for adult attention. If you find it more valuable to sell more cars than to increase your sense of faith and virtue, your attention will predominantly go to what you deem more important (selling cars) while personal growth starves for attention. But this is simple attention economy stuff. What allows a baby to "believe" that there may be some meaning in the babble? Whatever that potential is, it is probably some part genetic predisposition, some part emotional connection with the caregiver, some part neurological surplus, etc. It is not just intention. There is a sort of "field" or environement of things that come together to allow for growth into and through that field.

As adults, we need to find something to function as that supportive background or field. Our brains are not growing at the same rate, mom probably isn't going to spend 18 hours a day with us, and--instead of our whole society pushing us to learn language--we have all of these other demands on our time and attention.

Rhythm, Lucero, Drugs

2010-10-14T00:09:00.000-07:00

In Anatomy of an Epidemic, the author develops the perspective on prescription psychotropic drugs of seeing them primarily--and perhaps only--as simply causing perturbations in brain functioning. At the farthest remove, that can be said of just about anything I suppose, but more specifically, it presents a different starting place than the institutionally-taught perspective that these drugs are primarily "anti-": -psychotic, -anxiety, -depression, etc. There is a basic difference between seeing all effects as perturbations and seeing one effect as a "side effect" and another as a "main effect". As all believers in superstition of whatever stripe, it is not hard for believers in prescribed drugs to find ways to write off and/or justify harmful "side effects" while relying on "main effects" or intended effects. Since these packaged chemicals are considered to be psychotropic, their neurological and psychological effects (main and side effects) are often considered to be more important than primarily "somatic" effects like weight gain or liver dysfunction, etc. And again, in comparison, you can consider how something as simple as ingesting a very salty meal or mustard late at night can effect, can psychotropify, your dreams. The perspective that specific chemicals are more accurately considered for their intended use rather than as chemicals with a whole slew of influences is somewhat limiting and less realistic or straightforward than others. It falls into a normal human bias that over-rates intention while under-rating history.

I'm tired of all these love songs, they won't make you mine. But the songs eat up some of the pain.

The starting point of seeing anything we put into our bodies as primarily perturbations ends up rather rashly or irreverently categorizing Prozac with LCD with table salt. Depending on your overall health, consistent overusage of sodium chloride or sugar might be more dangerous to your longterm health than consistent acid usage. And from a religious viewpoint, depending on how stuck your soul is, anything that supports distance between you and divinity is a stumbling block to the clarity, beauty, and development of your soul. Now, just as I'm ok with considering SSRIs to be just chemicals, I'm ok with seeing souls as an interesting example of human imagination whether they "exist" or not. In some ways, the only koan is the rejection of suchness.

As a psychologist, sometimes to a perverse or fanatical extent, I end up asking myself questions such as, "What could be the point of depression?" And in search of answers that cut straight to the existential bedrock (if that "exists"), I spend time reading Prozac Nation while sitting in the hospital waiting to heal from surgery which, only "hopefully", removes seriously malignant cancer. And other things like that; if you're thinking of better examples of such instances, then good, we're on the right track. Folks like me sometimes need the hard way, hard rain, dark nights, the long way home, the narrow path, wide paths, or as Krishnamurti said, "The Pathless Land." Rumi spoke of circling something like a moth to the flame while Sigmund Freud spoke of "normal unhappiness" and a "death instinct".

Lately, I've been considering how silence seems to connect eternity-as-feeling with the instantly-passing present instant. To the same extent that misery loves company, it loves repetition, too. Kids love dizziness. Perturbations.

If I bring the angle closer than seeing everything as perturbations in consciousness and wider than how much monoamine oxidase inhibitors affect a few synapses in one brain, I find myself in the interactions between a loosely-constructed social reality and consistently different viewpoints on just that. Depression, as a somewhat consistent "place", is not at the center of that constructed reality. But neither is dizziness. By moving in a certain way, through similar steps repeatedly, a sense of rhythm can develop as we learn the dance steps. Some of these rhythms happen at the speed of a single neuron firing, maybe even faster. In our repetitions, a sense arises, passes, returns, and can consolidate.

Something beyond yet not exclusive of a sense of individual self, uhh, grows. Existential roots, or a backdrop, rises. It might eventually feel like sorting through your attic full of boxes full of stuff your parents put aside for you in order to find the one toy or picture or belonging that perfectly carries the feeling you want to share with your kid at some important right-now. Misery loves rhythm, so does joy.

I always like the studies of shamanism that point out that "finding one's power" often comes late in life. We have a lot of sorting to do before then. As some Chinese have said, "The young rush in order not to miss anything; their elders take their time, in order to not miss a thing." It is silly for me to feel like eternity is just that kind of girl, but some things are worth sharing.

Thanks for sharing, Amy. Wade, I lean on you sometimes.

Impulse, Effort, Intention, Grace

2010-05-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to study the Lamrim teachings on Abhidhamma as my next step towards unconstrained awareness. At this point, I'm finding a definite commonality between my own explorations and this Buddhist method of categorization and applications. At the same time, I'm not certain that insisting on the infallibility of Siddartha Gautama's pronouncements and dialogues is a necessary aspect of moving forward. In other words, there are probably some simpler ways of presenting the next step--or next few steps--for many of us (as opposed to in-depth, long-term Abhidhamma study). You can also look at what I'm circling as a way of redeeming/utilizing projection and identification.

Much of what I've been working on is simply a progression of perspectives. The question is: a progression towards what? A better experience of this lifetime. This goal can be seen as relative or small from a religious perspective, but it doesn't exclude religious perspective. One can include either the after-death progression of one's soul or non-self-self in determining how "better" could be defined and experienced.

Part of improving perspectives comes down to condensing information and also to presenting it in ways that are immediately applicable and fruitful. Here's the skinny. We can experience the desire(s) we experience as individuals as including a few different feelings. There is a continuum from nonconscious impulse (like instinct) to conscious effort (which is often tied up in personality disordering and negative habits/addictions) to intention (which can remain consistent even when our pushing/effortful energy wanes for a time) to something like grace (which can be seen as extending beyond individuality).

For anyone who does not simply want to fight against basic impulses and feelings, we can see a path from impulse of biological action potentials towards increasing consciousness and lack of constraints. One of the interesting things that happens when intention is included, though, is that we can feel frustration when we lack: the energy it takes to put in pushing/driven effort; achievement of the results we are looking for; consistency or clarity in intention; the smooth feeling of things working out "simply because".

An integrated perspective allows us to relate to impulse as the basic energy, effort as directing that basic energy, intention as potentially clearer and more consistent than effort (which will cycle with our need for food, sleep, etc.), and grace as a goal that may or may not end up as somewhat defined. These all web together (as something like sattva) if we can maintain that impulse, effort and intention may all lead towards grace while being willing to take care of--behaviorally attend to--whichever lower levels need attention. And it is possible to determine whichever levels need attention by simply moving downwards, checking each one as we go.

It works something like this. We never need to feel undirected because we can always affirm that, whatever more relative goals we may or may not hold, we are always looking for grace. We can always recognize that we may not find grace if we don't line up that intention to find grace (or whatever other intentions) with our ability to maintain effort in that direction. And we maintain effort through consisitency of intention and physical health (the wellness of neurology through psychology--crossover with stress, immune response, blood pressure, digestion, etc.).

The nice thing about this progression is that we don't have to believe that, "A tired man no longer cares." It takes less metabolic energy to maintain intention than it takes to maintain effort. The reality is that a tired man may no longer have the energy it takes to make the necessary efforts while he hasn't changed his intentions. Blaming oneself or others for unclear intentions, imperfect effort, or basic impulses keeps us from achieving grace. If we can maintain a consistent goal (grace), it is possible to change one's "local" intentions while retaining consistency. If we experience ourselves as moving towards grace, it is possible to dispense with the greater part of psychological wastes of energy such as blaming and excessive doubt.

From Grunge to Intersubjectivity

2010-03-09T13:11:00.000-08:00

All of this, for me at least, is some kind of spiralling inward towards a genuine grasp and expression of meditation. Earlier on in my life, there was more sense of ecstasy and perhaps less serenity or what feels like some degree of equanimity. I felt a particular euphoria in focusing on a sense of disembodied love connection that best seemed to fit with Rumi's ecstatic sort of poetry.

Dr. Lorna Smith Benjamin presents the perspective that psychopathology (especially so-called "personality disordering") results from an unrequited gift of love--to our parents, our God(s), our fellow human beings, etc. I find that my own patterns of unhelpful, uncreative habituations seems to follow that sort of blueprint. Although this is a very deep point, it is not necessarily all that subtle if you think about it. How many unhappy people create unhappiness in their own lives and with those around them because they do not feel adequately loved and loving? If you feel loved and loving, do you want more fame/power/money or would you rather sink into that loving as a sensual, intimate, delicate indulgence in and expression of the beauty and wonder of life?

There's a lot of energy or power or whatever you want to call it in that spiritual-disembodied affirmation of love and a lot of the same in the negative feeling and habituation of unrequited love. Depending on what we are able to feel and express, we either project more of a shadow (echoes of unrequited love) or a halo (emanations of affirmation). And other people respond to what we project, what we bring to their lives. Feel the love?

Ajahn Chah gave the metaphor of meditation as being like sitting quietly by a still forest pool at night. If you are quiet and still enough with your mind, animals will come out of the dark forest to refresh themselves at the pool. If you are loud or startle them with crashing around, movements, expressed dissatisfaction, you disturb their "wa"--their inner settledness--and they run away if you even get to see them at all. The same is the case when we are unable or unwilling to leave the the confines of a solid self-identity; we never see what is out there in the rest of that universe. In responding to others, most of us feel the value in the wildness and delicacy of connection with the aspects of ourselves and our universe.

That delicacy challenges the primacy or importance of what we project while responding directly to what we (ourselves) and others both feel and project. Besides the positive or negative feelings, there is a degree of stillness and subtlety that can lend towards serenity. And there is a well of energy in which we can feel stillness running infinitely deep. Things change when we begin to experience ourselves as one (or perhaps as many) of those wild forest animals that returns to this pool. In regards to love, feeling this wildness in your soul can bring us also in touch with intensity from a different direction.

Most folks are used to feeling intensity as pressure or as a rush. For those who can get in touch with their own potent-and-delicate wildness, it's possible to begin feeling that intensity comes from that still pool, that infinite-living reservoir of energy that is life itself. When that happens, we start to register pressure as extra or unnecessary, as karma, samsara, judgement, punishment, whatever. Pressure as pressure pushes us into that shadow which follows each of us always.

Peace or serenity or that pool of stillness-as-intensity, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of relating without pressures. Rather than trying to push towards whatever we might feel as good or--as Ken Kesey said, fighting/leaning against evil--we live (in Rumi's words) "in a field beyond right and wrong", gone beyond, parasamgate. Rather than carving out a space for self-identity, rather than being in this world but not of this world, rather than being spirits in a material world (sure, I grew up listening to the Police), we live in and of and as and with the universe as pluribus and unum. In Zen, it is asked, "If the many return to the One, to what does the One return?" I have described meditation as the willingness to return. It's not that the animals or spirits of the forest live only in and of the still pool, but they return. And you know why they return. I'll sometimes refuse to meet you somewhere other than there. Even when you don't KNOW why, you feel it.

Somewhere, uh, Musically, Beyond Grunge: II

2010-02-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

How do we get unstuck and in touch with our own sense of inspiration? For some people, the first step is to acknowledge feeling stuck. For others, it is to notice the moments when they do feel at least hints or flickers or whispers of inspiration and to follow those hints. If you take my walls and fluidity description, you can be very consistent in looking for cracks in the walls and looking for places where water seeps through. Earlier, I wrote about the process of PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGE. You can take ANY moment, anything you notice and choose, as a sign to begin priming for inspiration. Got despair? That's a sign that you want change. Got hope? Another sign. That sort of perspective leads to priming oneself for the actuality of change rather than letting change or inspiration remain as some idealized thing that doesn't seem to touch your life. When you start thinking of yourself as someone who wants inspiration and therefore takes anything as a sign to look for inspiration, we star flowing through a different form than the form of suffering. That attitude/perspective and the priming it allows is a beginning, but it's not the whole process.

Once you begin seeing your life circumstances and internal reactions as signs that show you as an individual who is looking for inspiration, the question moves to that of how you can begin truly engaging inspiration. There are two major ways that we can engage. The first is to hold onto our walls for as long as possible, to allow "mind" to pile up behind our walls like water piling up behind a dam. The longer we try to stay the same, the more the pressure builds. And eventually the dam breaks. That can be terrifying and exciting. Because the psychological universe is closer to how dreams work than actually facing a real flood, death is not a serious concern even if it is a fear. We--unrealistically--fear that "I" may die when the walls of my self-identity are broken. Think of how often you have felt fear in a dream. How many times has that fear-in-a-dream lead to your actual death? Fear concerning losing our self-identity's walls is like that. It is more likely to lead to us waking up than actual death. Are you curious about what is outside those walls, wondering who might be there with you when you wake up, considering walking out your front door?

So one way is a sort of "forced change" when life breaks something in us. These breaks can lead to breakthroughs or breakdowns. Since I'm not a big fan of breakdown in my own life, I tend to recommend steady change. Let a little water in or out, take the walls down piece by piece until you are certain that change is nothing to fear and can't be avoided anyway. Change is not something that happens to you; it is you. Mind moves; you cannot spiritually be leashed any more than the nature of water can be leashed, although you might pretend to be leashed or imprisoned. There is no way to actually fight the movement of time. Utilizing receptive states or moments of receptivity allows us to take change when we are most open to change--but make no mistake, change is happening to us all when we are aware of it or not. The dam may not be breaking at this moment, but water pressure is building.

Now, some of you are wondering, "In all of this talk of fluidity and universes and change, what about that fountain of youthfulness?" Let's get back to that. Inspiration is the fountain of youthfulness--pure and simple, natural. When we feel inspired, we live; when we don't, we age. Another way of describing it is to say that trying to remain small, trying to remain within the psychological walls of our chosen self-identity, cuts us off from the normal and continual replenishment that comes from exchange and flow within the entire universe of imagination in which we live. Take a moment with that idea: we live in a universe of imagination, our minds are constantly and unavoidably fed by the universe of anything-being-possible. The challenging part of that is that it means if we imagine or idealize God, part of the power in our psychological universe resides in "God". That's okay, but it means that we will want to commune with God in order to feel our power, to feel alive. The catch is that if you can imagine evil, you will have to relate to evil--you won't be able to simply set it outside your walls and keep it there forever. The pressure will build up, and nothing that men can build will last forever. The things we try to set aside are powerful, just as the things we try to draw near are powerful.

Rumi suggested dealing with everything that comes to your door as a guest. That includes external circumstances as well as our internal reactions to circumstances. What sort of mindset does it take to invite God in or accept that invitation to come out? What sort of mindset does it take to admit that evil is not only somewhere outside of my house, to admit that evil is as much within me as without?

It's been very interesting to grow up with Grunge as the most unique and defining musical influence for me, descriptive of my age cohort. (Rap may be as defining of a musical moment, but rap began earlier and seems more lasting.) I'm really enjoying Chris Cornell's solo work lately. Overall, Grunge strikes me as less resilient than the Blues. It's more of a dirge, like singing for one's own funeral. And Curt Cobain is certainly one of the defining characters whose life and music defines Grunge. But if you maintain through that Zeitgeist, if all of what goes into angst and disappointment with life and resignation doesn't break you, you come out the other side changed. And there is something to be said for Dave Grohl and Chris Cornell not only singing about hearts and butterflies. There's something real about Grunge, and something real about making a good life for your self, maybe getting married and living in France, maybe making music somewhere, uh, I guess one could say "beyond Grunge".

Somewhere, uh, Musically, Beyond Grunge

2010-02-24T15:40:00.000-08:00

Creativity is the most fundamental level of subjective development in mammals--including those that walk upright. Isn't that something? Chuang Tzu woke from dreaming that he was a butterfly and wondered if he might not actually be a butterfly dreaming himself a man. We are so fundamentally creative that we can even imagine ourselves to be uncreative, uninterested, and boring. Frankly, I prefer butterfly dreams to L'Estranger, but Camus certainly did have his moments.

For most adults I've met, disinterest is a bigger problem than an excess of wonderment. Most of them rarely ask why it is this way. We're a little TOO certain that we are not the multi-colored living art fluttering by, living on sunshine and kisses. (Luckily for me, I'm dating a butterfly.)

I've addressed in other places why creativity is fundamental to mammalian life. That leaves the questions--if we are fundamentally creative--then how do we come to see ourselves otherwise and what do we do about it all anyway? How we get this way is a sad story and I feel too celebratory today to tell it, although it is a good story. The "what can we do about it" part is a good story too.

WHAT CAN BE DONE? We probably all know people who blithely or beautifully respond, "Dance, sing, love." And many of us tack onto that a, "...for tomorrow we die." (I guess I'm letting some of my internal Eyor show.) There is something to be said about being stuck here, something to be said for being there (dancing, singing, fluttering, etc.), and something to be done about getting unstuck in order to allow our inherent singing out. (You know you like hearing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer".)

One of the first things to realize is that the fountain of youthfulness (because a Fountain of Youth is just a fairy tale) is not a triple espresso, an adrenaline rush, a hot affair, or a vacation away from anything. Youthful creativity--vitality--comes from living, never from avoiding the actual circumstances of one's life. The struggle is only about recognizing creative playfulness as the most fundamental aspect of who we are and being able to touch and express it. I'll leave how you're going to express it to you, and--at the risk of seeming the frotteur--stick, for now, with the touching part. Once we find out how to get in touch with that aspect of ourselves, that aspect becomes more interesting, fun, and convincing than any explanation of why creativity is fundamental. So I like hows, how it happens.

A friend of mine recently sent a link to the Mental Bank self-hypnosis site. In the introductory 2-hour talk, the speaker emphasizes the importance of entering a suggestible state and then utilizing that state by including goal-directed affirmations and structured measurement of progress towards specific goals. The program itself is not really exciting but it may be effective, and if it is, the results can be exciting. Part of this speaker's point is that one naturally enters a relatively suggestible or receptive state in the last half-hour or so before falling asleep. By utilizing this time, we don't need someone else to implant suggestions for us, we don't need to try any extreme cultish groups or techniques, and we can essentially--with no special skills--begin to interact with our ongoing unconscious flow.

This idea of utilizing more receptive states holds a lot of promise. Dream yoga is a somewhat more intense or radical way of interacting with one's streaming subconscious. We find something similar in being part of a crowd that we are moved by, aroused physical states (in which the arousal is above average but not so intense as to overcome intention and memory), relaxed states, novel situations in which we don't feel threatened, etc. Basically, if we aren't just acting habitually within our comfort zone, something interesting happens; we let the wonder in. Rhythm can set us up to be receptive, narrative, art, you name it.

Part of what amazes me is that anything that you can imagine is part of your subconscious subjective universe. That's a lot of stuff. Based on personal choices and social pressures, we create a sense of how we want to be and try to carve out part of that universe as "who we are". And then, in order to maintain that construction/facade/self-image, we have to build psychological resistance-walls against all of the material in our imaginative universes that is "not me". Is the man "not-Chuang-Tzu" or is the butterfly "not-him"? In this conscious construction, every thing or form has its foil, its opposite. When we identify with our conscious constructions to the exclusion of the rest of our imaginative universe, we give up our psychological power, we decide that all of that creativity is "not me". Interesting, neh?

The trouble with that set-up is that the conscious construction is only a small part of the bigger universe. The more exclusive our psychological walls are, the less fluid can we be, the more we have painted our selves into a corner. We might, then, invest a great deal of energy in maintaining our walls. There is a very interesting psychological law that is similar to time. Time always moves; you can never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus put it. Dreams are a great example of how this psychological fluidity works. Timothy Leary got high on LSD's ability to open up conscious access to this "fluidity". Artists search for moments in which they can bring a degree of fluidity to their craft and mix it with some sort of excellence. So what happens when we believe in solid walls? Napoleon comes along and kicks our ass or Hitler blows through the Maginot line; life moves beyond our walls and eventually moves US beyond our walls. We end up investing increasing amounts of energy into maintaining certain forms and denying others, and since it is the nature of mind to move, any form that we want to maintain takes a great deal of effort. Like trying to fight the flow of a river. Only you are trying to fight the flow of your own mind, of your psychological universe. Then we look around and wonder why we feel tired, why we don't feel creative. It's mostly because we've decided to keep investing in stability when that is an interesting idea that has little bearing on the way minds actually work. Mind moves.

Psychological Correlates to Stages in Therapy

2009-12-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

When I was finishing my master's program in counseling psychology, I was shocked at how few therapists felt solid with their ability to address traumatization. The state and nonprofit agencies that hire counseling and social work masters tend to focus on addictions and family treatments. These lend themselves to operational systematization to some extent. But even though we were encouraged to choose--drugs or families--it seemed to me that traumatization was fundamental to both types of problems as well as depression and anxiety (the most common complaints seen at outpatient clinics). While interning at the local Veteran's Administration hospital, I asked my supervisor what percentage of therapists he'd guess were capable of addressing trauma. He estimated 1:7.

Wow. An entire field devoted to the study of human psychology yet avoidant (the other 6:7) of the most basic problem in human psychology. What's more, as inexperienced interns, most of us were thrown into crisis situations we were not prepared for--situations that were difficult enough that our elders in the field generally avoided whenever they could. They didn't teach much crisis management in our program because that was just case management--social work--not insight therapy per se. Clients in crisis were deemed not appropriate for insight therapy (because they were struggling with intense day-to-days). What's more, many clients were deemed "resistant" to conversation about feelings when they tried to insist on addressing more external issues like paying the rent and coming up with enough gas money to get their kids to school. Inappropriate and resistant because of crisis.

Anyway, it seems helpful to me to see a few different stages in therapy and recognize psychological responses that seem appropriate to the varying situations. The stage that is often most intense and potentially harmful is crisis management. This occurs when people are concerned about making it through the night, through the weekend, through the next encounter with their spouse. When I'm in crisis mode, it's back-to-the-wall time. You're basically in a fragile situation where desperate times may call for desperate measures. Desperate thinking in these situations may not be most helpful, but it is certainly normal. Crises can make people feel crazy or fragmented even though they aren't necessarily crazy. Crisis management was most lacking in my education and traumatization during crises often results when they are not handled well. (Our field has struggled to come up with an agreed-upon definition of "resilience" partially due to not differentiating some of these stages and psychological responses clearly.) If you survive crisis, that is all that can really be expected. Insight therapy is generally inappropriate to crises.

At the next stage, we are dealing with case management--making sure that the physical needs can be met on a regular basis. So in crisis management, you may be trying to find some place to sleep tonight. With case management, you are looking for finding a place to sleep on a consistent basis. Desperation is not called for at this point (but can result from unrealistic expectations or prior traumatization). This is part of where Americans are generally spoiled rather than tough. We think of these situations as crises when they are not. Durability is called for, mental toughness, grit, persistence, whatever you want to call it. This grit is the same thing that many therapists consider to be resistance in insight therapy. Low income-clients (myself included in this economic class) are often deemed inappropriate or resistant because they tend to be insistent that what they need more than a focus on their emotional state is a consistent job, place to live, source of income and therefore food, etc. Farmers and blue-collar workers need to make grit part of their personalities, something they bring to work every day, and it is inappropriate to consider that grit to be inappropriately resistant or antisocial. At this stage, we are not even dealing with emotional resilience yet. We are hammering in mental toughness, tempering one's will and character for difficulty.

Between these two stages, we begin to differentiate between definitions of resilience. One common definition focuses on the ability to handle adversity without being traumatized. Another common definition focuses on the ability to handle adversity and come out stronger, better, healthy, whole, etc. Because this differentiation already exists, I'll call the first durability and the second resilience. By this definition of resilience, there is a certain "spring" to one's emotional response, a healthy tension and room for healthy shifts in emotions as one's situation changes. This is different from--but may coincide with--a consistent toughness that may have little "spring" to it. Some people are tough but not optimistic, and I'll call them durable; they may or may not be "resilient" as it is often meant in psychology circles. We can see where an attitude of opportunism may look like resilience from one angle and it may look like idealism from a more "realistic" angle, depending on circumstances. Looking for opportunity often goes with a positive affective tone, so opportunism may be mistaken for resilience, and a lack of opportunism may be mistaken for "resistance" or lack of resilience. Generally, then, opportunism and apparent resilience will correlate, but caution should not be mistaken for a lack of resilience.

Beyond case management, once clients are in a stable economic and relatively stable emotional setting, we can start talking about therapy with a focus on insight. There is a shift away from survival and continuity towards optimization of experience. Many therapists would like to ignore the first two stages, and while it is fine for many to focus on insight therapy, it would be helpful to interns and clients in case management or crisis management situation for those in the field to learn the whole continuum. With insight therapy, we're mostly focused on sensitization of emotional awareness, reducing reactivity, improving communications and connection, and enriching experience. Mindfulness will be helpful for achieving some of these goals, but most clients do not take up consistent meditation at this point.

When we speak of optimization of psychological experience, regardless of whether one is more internally or externally focused, we are talking about moving from competence to expertise in being able to structure one's life and psyche so as to achieve consistent flow. Affluence and professional expertise help set the context for optimization, but adversity will also bring out the best in some individuals. This is another class that helps define another unique definition of resilience. There are a rare number of individuals who are something like "adversity superstars". These folks need more pressure than most to perform at their peak. We recognize them when they grow up in, or find for themselves, situations that are demanding enough to draw out their best. They are analogous to athletes who perform best in the big games in that they may do very well under great duress; they may also be under-stimulated and perform poorly without it.

But other than the adversity superstars, most of us will look our best (feel it too) within a supportive context. We will want enough challenge but not too much. And besides challenge, we will mostly look for physical, emotional, and social comfort. The right physical and social situations will support that pursuit of optimization or flow. (And flow is the general point of most of the rest of this blog.)

So rather than having some definition of resilience that lacks contextualization, we can say that there are different types of contexts that make wildly varying psychological responses "reasonable". At worst, it is a do-whatever-it-takes mentality during crises; this can look crazy to outsiders. Up one step, durability can look like stubborness, cynicism, antisocial behavior, and an avoidance of emotionality. It is--evolutionarily--a luxury to get to the point of economic and emotional stability and resilience. And beyond that, optimization of experience takes a different type of expertise than simple emotional awareness and normal communicational effectiveness. Trying to introduce emotional resilience in a crisis may not be effective, just as trying to introduce optimization to a couple that just wants to be able to communicate with one another may not take hold.

Going Clear

2009-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

In his book THE WISDOM PARADOX, Elkhonon Goldberg states that sometimes you have to make things more complicated before finding the simple way through, before finding the inherent simplicity. For me, life has been about finding some simple, apparently irreducible something. And while Joseph Campbell talked about "following your bliss", i would say I have more followed my silence.

Life, people, and all the confused motivational stirrings have tended to strike me as unnecessarily noisy. Psychologically, and socially, people most often strike me as murky. And experiencing one's critique of life, people, oneself as primarily aesthetic, ethics and any moral sort of high ground have seemed less unreachable and more irrelevant to me. When one looks for simplicity, the complications that come from acting unethically most often make those options seem about as palatable as eating your own refuse, which is essentially what is happening in such a case. Many people feel like they get strong by feeding themselves on their own shit, and they do in a certain way, but it also maintains unhappiness...seemingly categorically. Consumerism of planned obsolescent "goods" is an obvious example of eating our own shit; for a while, we had the strongest economy that could be built on shit and we are starting to face the effects. Garbage in, garbage out as they say.

In this interest of finding silence or simplicity, meditation once seemed like a fruitful path. After years of studying all kinds of methods, techniques, and research, I have found myself wanting to divest myself of the excess cultural baggage that can come along with the pursuit of meditation, silence, simplicity, personal peacefulness. I think it is possible, and perhaps valuable for someone else as well, to strip away the majority of accoutrements. The medium is the message. It looks to me that there are two ideas that are helpful and necessary in finding clarity. Everyone's path, and therefore method, of finding clarity is unique; whatever anyone might do with clarity is also unique. Having too much extra baggage seems to only slow us down in getting there.

The first idea is that meditation is the willingness to return. No one can tell you what it is a willingness to return to and have the telling be an actual return. So if you think of meditation as balance, you can always ask yourself what would return you to balance. Sometimes rest returns me to balance, sometimes humor, etc. When we get used to the idea that it can be almost anything, depending on the situation and our current state of mind, we can begin to look for what that thing is in any given moment. And of course, we can learn from and share with others. (Sometimes communion is what returns me to balance.)

The second idea is one that describes balance. I find that it is helpful to think of six points, each one connected to one other, making a sort of line. The front/back directions/line involve whatever might be seen/felt as going forward or going back. So one part of balance involves moving forward enough, moving back enough, and being able to be still enough. When we're off-balance forward, we're too aggressive or needy of something. When we're off-balance backward, we're fearful or depressed, feeling victimized rather than competent. The second pair of points involves the up/down directional. At the base lies play and creativity, abiding consciousness is at the top, and there is a full range in between. Many theorists, teachers, and systems have presented this sort of spectrum. When, in any given moment, I'm responding from too low on the spectrum, I will be missing the big picture in some way, acting too immaturely or too impulsively or too bluntly. When I'm responding from too high, I'll seem to be stretching, seem preachy, come across as too conceptual or irrelevant by showing up with something that may be subtle but not effective. And the left/right points involve tight focus (like self-focus) or open awareness. When I'm too focused on one thing, I'll have trouble appreciating the overall situation. When I'm too focused on many things, I'll be distracted and uncertain, finding it hard to make decisions that seem to work.

The actual "point" of psychological balance is so small it isn't there; it's precise as a needle that reaches a point of nothingness. Because my mind and my situation always move, the point is always somewhere but never fixed. The more I intend to find that point and move to as well as "from" that point rather than something noisier or murkier, the more affinity or resonance I have with it, the more balanced I feel and act. When I am willing to do what it takes to return, whether I am moving or relatively still, the more I feel balanced, the more life seems clear, the more meditation seems to arise on its own. I stop feeding the imbalance that feeds on itself.

Two ideas. Balance and the willingness to return to balance.

Koans and the Matrix

2009-11-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

In continuing to work on descriptions of balance and Clarity, an interesting thought experiment developed in an imagined conversation. Also playing in was a koan that I've carried around for a few years. With koans like this one, the ones that have struck a chord without bringing any more particular response from me, I have often circled around them, coming to different interpretations and points of insight. The more you get to know certain koans, the more you get out of them.

The one I'm speaking of struck me as fairly brief, as if there were one point to it, although that single point seems to mean different things depending on how you relate to it. "Standing at the top of a hundred-foot pole, what is your next step?" It is something like that. In relation to trying to describe six points of psychological balance, my next conceptual step with this koan is to remove the pole. This sort of process is like following the trajectory of an arrow. First there is a hundred-foot pole and the impossibility of taking a next step. Then there is no pole. Next, no you. So no one, and what's more, standing at the top of nothing.

This begs the question, is there a next step? (And I'm assuming that, if you could actually focus in on the koan enough to include only the pole, the hundred feet, and your next step, then the world around your predicament is already out of focus enough to consider it so insignificant that it was already as if the world wasn't there back when you were facing the dilemma of which next step to take. And, since there are lots of ways to relate to this koan, feel free to pick it up and see what happens for you that might be different than this description from me.)

Everything that you could possibly bring up around/within this spaciousness is your associational matrix. Being able to return to or rest in this spaciousness is what I would consider to be the quintessential experience at the level of Clarity. Being unencumbered by anything and yet taking some step gives rise to the feelings of inspiration and engagement. There being no need for "you" here opens one's self to the experience/reality of anatta. And this place or point may help one see what Dogen might have meant at times by "thinking nonthinking" or imagining nonimagining. Everything other than this spaciousness involves imagining, and imagining this spaciousness without adding more content from one's associational matrix is imagining nonimagining.

From right here where nothing is excluded a priori because no a priori thinking exists here, what step is not possible? While that question may be interesting in some way, the full-bodied answer to, "What is your next step?," is so much more fascinating. While we don't always think of this sort of spaciousness, it is as if this question is constantly posed and as if everything we do is our answer. Whether you ask yourself the question or not, we are watching and interacting with how you answer. Because everything comes "through" this no-self spaciousness, nothing that any of us do is not our true selves.

There is one single quality-feeling that encompasses all of what is written here, and that quality is exemplary of Clarity, included in inspiration. (With whom was the conversation that sparked this in me?)

Social Aspects: Back to the Depths III

2009-10-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

In Buddhism, the "someone" as well as the "taking away" (see last post) has something to do with seeing into the nature of things as they are (rather than as how I might want to frame them). While the metaphors may differ culture to culture, some of the common positive outcomes are similar from brain to brain and from person to person. When we fulfill drives (like hunger), we are content in relationship to that drive (feeling full enough). But there is also the possibility of rising above, beyond, or through drives. That is generally what I talk about in terms of actualization from Clarity through Abiding. But sometimes we don't fulfill a drive and we don't transcend it either--we deny, avoid, and ignore it. Freud talked about this in terms of repression. A lot of what he said made good sense and a lot of what he said was crackers, so I prefer to to talk about submerged expectations. These submerged expectations are often misinterpreted as "assumptions". Just as Freud wasn't necessarily wrong but wasn't necessarily precise and clear on this stuff, calling submerged expectations assumptions is politically loaded--and I'd generally prefer to set aside politically loaded language when trying to actually get somewhere.

Submerged expectations may be "expectations" that people are aware of or not. Essentially, because our cortexes (conceptual part of brain) are connected to our limbic systems (more emotional part of brain), emotional drives activate psychological energy or momentum. This energy happens at a cellular level and is part of what I call action potentials. Once the emotional drive is stoked, we may look to understand, explain, and justify our emotional feeling and the actions driven by that feeling. When we can consistently connect the energy, the feeling, and a particular set of actions, I'll call this a "drive". A drive is motivation (physical/emotional action potential) and the ideas that may or may not accompany motivation. Those ideas, when paired with motivations may be used to explain and justify actions to oneself or others. I don't care whether people like to say the ideas cause the emotions or vice versa; with the idea of distributed processing, identifying cause can be a secondary pursuit. Often, once we get a clear sense of what we're dealing with in terms of psychological motivation and relationships, cause becomes irrelevant. (Think of the last time you argued with your boyfriend or girlfriend and couldn't agree on the cause of the argument but you still wanted to win in some way. We can sometimes work on how people disagree while trying to dig out the causes of conflict can be an unending and degenerative spiral.)

Okay. One of the most basic "drives" is for comfort. We experience psychological comfort in relationship, when it is caused by another person as soothing. (This whole line of thinking is causing me to re-evaluate my steps of actualization and attentional abilities; I may have to add one lower step so I can separate receptivity to being soothed as one ability and creative/communal play as another.) I recently found a kitten by the side of the road and brought her home. She was distressed at being alone and soothed by being taken in. Sometimes soothing feels more like what we conventionally call comfort (I'm comfortable around my friends), and sometimes it is more like love and what psychologists romanticize as "attachment". I'm becoming somewhat attached to this kitten.

In a healthy family, there is allowance/space/relationship that causes--nurtures at least--attachment and some degree of comfort. If you feel wary of your family, that is common but not healthy. Either way, for psychological well-being, we need to be able to rest. Since we are almost constantly surrounded by people, we need to feel a degree of distance or comfort with those people. Think of trying to sleep in a prison where they left cell doors open at night. Not soothing.

Since we have a drive towards rest and feeling soothed, that drive ends up "being there" in the same way that hunger is always potentially "there". Blood sugar levels need refreshing and we similarly need sleep. People who don't feel comfortable when they're awake tend to sleep too much or too little. And people who sleep too little tend to feel even more uncomfortable and socially anxious than they would if they could get decent sleep. This feeds the same sort of cycle that eating poorly can create. You can't admit weakness to dangerous people who threaten your safety and status, so you eventually try to convince even yourself that you're not really that tired, that you don't actually need more sleep, and you spend your life trying to convince yourself that you can be satisfied without ever being genuinely happy. That sort of trying rules out happiness categorically.

So soothing and relaxation are basic. When we don't get them, we may realize it's not someone else's job to provide them to us, but we may be in such a situation that we feel like we have to take on the denial of needing them in reasonable amounts. The denial creates a chronic lack, and because the drive never goes away and is denied, it can never be fulfilled OR transcended. It becomes a constant companion, a perverse lover twisted by our refusal to attend to it like a marriage gone bad. We have to relate to our drives: "Capacities are needs."

When a drive is purposefully ignored, avoided, and denied like this, it may become mostly submerged--mostly unnoticed by conscious functioning. When that happens, it is as if some part of us ("inner child" is popular here) expects that other people should provide some degree of comfort. The drive exists, the denial of the drive is enforced, but the drive pops up inevitably like a cork in water. Push it down, it pops up somewhere else. Addictions work as one way of supporting denial or avoidance of what we lack socially. Because the drive is never met and can't disappear any more than a cat can stop being catty, the addiction will keep popping up when the drive pops up. Physical dependence is often added (as another motivator) to that psychological reality.

Is your "inner child" actually a selfish, evil little ego for wanting "attachment" with other people? I think it is perverse--though understandable as a disordered type of thinking--to think so. In this way, even spiritual traditions take what is best in us (our desire to love and be loved) and turn it against us. But this frustrated desire to be cared for, to be soothed, is a very passive and fundamental expression of who we are. At the next level up the scale, we have purpose, power, and status. When we can't feel an abundance of a basic need (like love) we sometimes direct our energy (that action potential that will cycle until the cycle is satisfied) to the next best thing. In this case, if we can't feel safe and accepted, it is best to feel powerful and glorified. The conceit of our own power allows us to psychologically defend ourselves while glory allows the conceit that others will also rally to us once they see the light. In this way, purpose and concentration are healthy versions of this level of psychological states. They are most likely to be healthy when the lower level (soothing and social play) are met. Otherwise, we take our psychological disturbances upwards in such a way that even the attempt at transcendence can be a form of disordering. For the majority of us, we have a mix of healthy motives and unhealthy denials.

So soothing is basic. Power and glory are second. At the level of Understanding, we want to be treated as at least equals. If our power and status expectations aren't met well enough (and if we aren't loved and loving, they are never enough), we may try to be extra intellectual or abuse positions of social power. Think of going to the DMV. If the person behind the desk smugly tells you that you'll have to fill out a form again--correctly this time--and go to the back of the line, when they could just fix the form right there, it is different than a toddler or bully trying to physically enforce his will. But it is the same drive for power and status in a slightly different form. Using your intelligence or education to put others down is similar. When we're loved and have some valuable place in society, all that struggle becomes less significant. Not insignificant, but less troubled, less of a loaded situation.

At the level of mindful Appreciation, we want awareness of differences and appreciation of our individuality as well as of the unique situation of the moment. At this level, you have people sometimes trying to show off how "spiritual" or "aware" or calm they are. "It's very Zen of you." In Zen circles, they talk about still having the "stink of Zen" on you if you haven't gotten over yourself. This holier-than-thou attitude tend to be patronizing/matronizing and offensive to anyone who has reached the level of Understanding. We all want to be equal, and you shouldn't be holier than me. For those who have actually achieved the level of Appreciation, one's own faults are in obvious evidence, so the whole competition over who is holier falls away in the face of one's own fallibilities. When we try to only show that we aren't patronizing and offensive, this is some form of modesty--the social presentation. When we actually keep our own imperfections in mind (and if we are loved, valuable, equal, and appreciated, those imperfections aren't horrible to face), humility is the only reasonable response. Humility allows me to accept and affirm actual inequalities without employing the one-up/one-down positioning that it instinctually comes with. In other words, I can say and be okay with someone else being smarter, nicer, holier, etc. without putting myself down in comparison to their excellence. When that happens, I can actually accept my own genetically given temperament (I'm okay, but not naturally the nicest person) and work on my weaknesses by leaning on my strengths. (I have to put more effort than some into being nice but can relax about being intelligent. Others may have to put more effort into getting equal grades, but they might be able to relax into and enjoy their sociability.)

At the level of Clarity, if humility and precise awareness of one's own fallibilities is not established (or if one feels under-appreciated), extra energy goes into the ecstatic aspects of flow-states. This increases the intensity of the feeling of clarity but diminishes one's actual clarity concerning wisdom. In other words, you can then be beautiful and famous but you may feel the need to always perform. That makes sense if you are lacking in humility and appreciation of others, a sense of equality, value of self and others, and loving acceptance. If you are not lacking in those things, the ecstatic aspects are simply icing on a layered cake. You don't mistake the icing for the substantive food, and because you offer substance, you don't have to convince others that sugar fluff is substantive. There may still be effort then, but you don't spend your life chasing or stretching for one more star.

When clarity, ecstasy, and inspiration are part of your spiritual life, you end up enjoying life too much to have a world-denying or human-denying spirituality. You know things can be good because you live well. You become the example you want to be while living within your own means psychologically. Rather than trying to leave people and situations better than when you found them, the feeling that we remain connected grows. We feed other people by our own psychological health, and we get from them what we want in exchange as equals-in-potential: love, value, equality as persons, appreciation, clarity and inspiration lead to harmony. We treat others as the best that is actually in them because that best is real. And we do so in a way that "lands" with where they are at in the moment because we aren't idealizing some spiritual vision of how things should be or embracing some reductionistic denial of our real potential.

But if these drives aren't expressed and affirmed in society, the energy or action potential that could be directed towards joy, harmony, and perhaps peace turn in upon itself in a cannibalistic manner. If the drive is not fed what it wants, it eats itself. When we cannot express our love for life and people and have that love affirmed, it turns in and eats itself like a nest of rats that can't escape a confined space. We have the action potential and it will out. When we deny the drives, they come across as expectations. When we see other people as denying our reasonable expectations and as having unreasonable expectations of their own, we turn on one another and on ourselves. That's a different manner of going back to the depths.

Social Aspects: Back to the Depths II

2009-10-10T01:16:00.000-07:00

One of the most basic drives is discomfort-avoidance. Babies gretz and cry when they're uncomfortable without necessarily knowing what causes their discomfort or how to stop it. Before they have a clear goal, they have a basic drive--something pushing them towards something even if they don't know what. We have a basic drive for life to be interesting and wonder-filled but we don't necessarily speak of it as such. But comfort, wonder, and love/acceptance are huge motivators we don't always recognize. Many adults aren't any better than infants at recognizing what they actually want. The research is actually conclusive on this point, and we say this more colloquially when we call people "stupid". People are stupid.

Part of what happens in our lives is that we encounter/create conflict between drives, identity, and our situation. Originally, in response to that conflict/chafing, we want only to be soothed or distracted. Between the ages of 2 and 10, let's say, we should learn the lesson that some other people actually don't see it as their purpose in life to soothe or appease us. But that lesson doesn't make the desire go away. It teaches us to express that desire in moderated ("appropriate") ways. Some folks believe that we can learn to not express that desire, and they're wrong. When desires can't be expressed in a straightforward manner, they twist. This is part of what I mean by action potentials. Action potentials are expressed. That's how it is. Drives are action potentials. Let's say you try to not verbalize a desire for food when you're hungry. You've learned to not simply scream endlessly until someone feeds you, and that's all to the good. But if you don't get food, blood-sugar levels drop. Does the desire for comfort disappear? No. But your ability to concentrate and the likelihood that you'll feel in a good mood rather than grumpy ("Does someone need a nap?", "It's that time of the month again") does diminish. Will your decreasing energy, mood, and ability to concentrate come out (be expressed) in some way? Of course.

There is a difference, then, between verbalizing and expressing. There is also a difference between verbalizing the desire for food and having an expectation that someone else should provide for an expressed desire. So your blood-sugar is dropping, mood and concentration are waning. Since we're taught not to expect everyone else to parent us, and because we often conflate expression with expectation, we try to not even verbalize that we're hungry. We even know that if we continue to obsess on our hunger, it will seem worse, so we might deny even to ourselves that we are hungry. And this is considered socially acceptable and relatively mature. Our society actually takes it as a sign of maturity that someone deny something as basic and simple as hunger. And most people do not question this on a daily basis! We create, then, a "social reality"--a socially accepted representation of reality--that is horribly skewed. It is skewed against your happiness when it is skewed against reality. You may not believe me yet, but it's true.

And everything that we do to deny reality goes directly against human happiness.

We can sometimes act as if this is not the case because it happens in a distributed manner.

If you are sharp or clear, this is not anywhere close to being open to question.

So, in the moment your mood is waning, you may try harder to "stay focused". This extra focus takes up more energy (brains use about 25% of our metabolic energy) and wears you out even faster, using up your diminishing internal resources on simply not getting worse. Getting better now is nowhere in sight. Getting food has been given up on, and the goal is to not lose focus. Of course, in your diminished capacity, almost anything can distract you. When it happens, you are prepared for blaming because you're primed with: diminished resources, the frustrated goal of staying focused, and an internal milieu that sets you up for petty expressions of the negative mood that might have been avoided by a sandwich. Once this happens a few times, you can see it coming, so you prepare yourself by keeping coffee around. That spins the stress/insomnia cycle, making it harder to get going and harder to keep going. Your discomfort increases while your ability to address discomfort decreases and you are left with little besides the myth that it is worth denying what you want because you are clearly unable to get what you want (rest, recuperation, and the potential for consistent happiness) by the methods you know. You are now on your way to completely trying to deny your lack of happiness. As I said, this is a poor recipe for happiness--trying for the denial of the desire itself since the actual thing is unattainable to you by this way of being.

Your desire for comfort and wonder have come up from the depths, so to speak, and has been sent back from whence it came. We end up saying about the desire that could point us to happiness, "Get that shit out of here--we're all stocked up!" And it's true. When your warehouse is stocked full of shit, everything begins to smell like shit to you, and there is no room for any more shit.

Rumi said anyone can bring gifts; I want for someone who will take things away.

Sometimes we have to take our focus away from "that shit" in order to apply our minimal resources for focusing on the housekeeping (clearing the warehouse) involved with getting rid of "this shit". We own it, accept what is, before we can address what is. Or we spend our lives trying to get shit "out of my face" while trying to pretend to not be unhappy. No one wants to spend their life pushing shit out of their face. Ewww. I want for someone who will take away. (No, it's not Calgon I'm missing.)

Social Aspects: Back to the Depths

2009-10-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

Besides connecting the dots in new and interesting ways, along with things rising up out of murky depths or becoming clearer as they emerge from a fog, stuff also returns from whence it came. Things that we stop thinking about and working with don't disappear--no energy or mass is lost--rather, they fade or submerge.

Certain things that are easy to mentally hold onto, concrete things like the lesson to be careful around hot stuff, fade when we don't re-member it or work with it. In other words, cooks aren't more aware in a oogley-googley meaning of awareness, but they consistently work with the lesson to be careful around hot stuff so they tend to more practiced with being aware of hot stuff. Any of us who aren't primed for that awareness when we should be--BAM!--we are immediately reminded when skin comes in contact with a hot pan. That involves priming and engagement more than subtle awareness. If you're cooking, you re-mind yourself (you put into your active mind again) to be careful when you're around hot stuff. This is fitting when you're around hot stuff.

Not remembering or reminding oneself is different from what happens with those things that do not completely solidify in our consciousness and understanding of the world. For instance, physical balance never completely "solidifies" because it must constantly move as we constantly move. Emotions should generally change throughout the day unless we get stuck in personality-disordered habits that lock in moods to too great a degree. So some things are not necessarily "solid" even though they are salient and apparent. Balance is always about the present, and the present is in motion; emotions are fitting for "moments" in our lives but should not determine our personalities. (If you see yourself as an "angry person" or a "happy person", you're probably avoiding some of your emotions and getting "stuck" in others.)

For some people algebra never really solidifies, never becomes obvious, apparent, and familiar to work with. For others, things like racism seem to be clear at one moment but confusing at another. What is racism really? These sorts of topics are often also context-dependent. Just as we remind ourselves about heat in the kitchen but not necessarily in other places, we remind ourselves of the relevance and meaning of racism in mixed crowds, exploitative or bigoted groups, exploited groups, and racially mixed groups. Social items, like racism, fit into a different category than physical items and forces like hotel pans and heat. Psychological phenomena may have a physical basis, but these can generally be categorized as similar to social phenomena in the sense that you can touch a hotel pan but not your racism or joy.

Think of your fight-or-flight response. It remains "there" as only potential most of the time. It is a physical potential and involves instincts that fit extreme situations. Ostracism is "there" potentially in social groups. It is fitting in extreme situations--the old eskimo that wanders off into the cold in order to allow enough food for the young (historically), rapists and murderers are often ostracized, the diseased may be quarantined, etc. When we're at war, we want to find out who is definitely on our side and who is not. When we take these potentials that are fitting for extreme situations and prompt for those responses too often, the effects are psychologically and socially deleterious. Post-traumatic stress, hypervigilance, exhaustion, and insomnia can result from physical overstimulation. When we take ostracization as an ideology--racism, sexism, age-ism, whatever--we tend to wear out and/or ignore our ability to remain alert to and balanced in the present. We pre-judge then--give up our judgement in the present in favor of stable abstractions. Eternal vigilance may be the price of freedom, but the costs of eternal vigilance include paranoia, prejudice, poor judgement, and exhaustion.

But let's say that we don't idealize and abstract or over-utilize these sorts of potentials. There will still be stuff that comes to mind at certain times but is otherwise "out of sight, out of mind". Affection can be like that. If you're not completely infatuated with your dog, you may not think about Sparky much while you're at work. Out of sight, out of mind. But when you walk out the door at the end of the day and think about getting home, you may smile in anticipation of the mutual excitement and affection that meets you at the front door of your house. If someone said it was your job to always think about how much you love your dog, you'd probably get worn out trying to do it. Just ask a parent! Besides, your wife or husband might feel undervalued if you were always and only going on and on about your four-legged, best friend. So we are psychologically built for things like emotions, wakefulness, and attention to come and go. Rest is good, vacations are good.

All this means that relevance counts and so do our attentional limits. It doesn't make you a bad parent to need time away from your kids. It doesn't make you racist or gender-biased to need time away from groups that feel diverse or not intimate. Enjoying deep sleep or moments of solitude doesn't mean you're antisocial. We all have limits that are expressed in terms of political awareness, social boundaries, and psychological tolerances. In order to keep those boundaries, types of awareness, and tolerances all in the same head, we shift focus as well as shifting some things in and out of focus. Lots of ins and outs, man, a lot of what-have-yous. Some psychological drives are prevalent at times but then mostly fade back into the depths. The ways they come out and what we do with them fascinates me.

Social Aspects: Psyche is Distributed

2009-10-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

In the same way that dreams can be meaningful, we can see our "selves" as coherent wholes or as collections of different influences. To the same extent that dreams, ideals, and imaginings are real, it can be helpful to shift from one perspective on self to the other. Let me just be clear that it makes no difference to me whether we focus on this meaning (whatever we might see as meaningful) as coming from God or collective social archetypes or whether we say we create it. If we can see it and affirm it, I am curious about how it works and Jesus can have all the credit for all the good that might come out of the curiosity and abundance.

When I say psyche is distributed, I am referring back to my essay on Self-Identity and Globalization. In this case, the distributed part means a few different things. The first is that the influences from the four "collections" which bombard, support, and/or direct us do not come pre-packaged as coherent and integrated. Sometimes our genetic temperament is helpful and sometimes not; sometimes our family histories and roles are helpful and sometimes not; sometimes our national cultures and stupidities are helpful and sometimes not; sometimes our beliefs and experiences with ultimate meanings or spirituality are helpful and sometimes not. What's more, most of the time these different influences push and pull us in a variety of directions. By putting together what we know of each of these four collections, we can say that they have a certain shape. And while maybe no one know exactly all of what goes into genetic code or American culture, for example, we can say that some things are a significant part of American culture at any given time (road trips, NYC, and big sky country) and some things are not (enlightened--or even respectful--political debate).

The various influences will sometimes lend themselves to counteracting influences from other levels. (The customs that fit with being trained as a therapist do not jive with the vitriollic nature of political talk radio shows.) And at other times or other instances, the influences will potentiate one another. (The customs that fit with being trained as a therapist align with a general emphasis on global equality over 16th century nationalism and racism.)

Naturally, we find that a distributed description tends to fit societies as well as individual people. My people are American, but I don't provide southern comfort or an educated New England liberal emphasis on history and debate. Nor would I expect them to cook me a shoo-fly pie should I visit. The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are interesting in and of themselves. That's distribution. Not all the wonder goes to the overall picture or one of the parts.

Social Aspects: Up from the Depths

2009-10-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

I like that science tends to be an attempt to go from one dot to the next, checking something that is obviously there and then seeing if and perhaps how it connects. Another type of distributed processing is more like seeing some dark mass rise up form the depths of the ocean or someone walk out of the fog. In this way, we don't begin with concrete points. We begin more with a somewhat vague shape and that shape solidifies, becoming clearer as we come closer to it. Just to be clear, I like applying each method to the other. Science helps us throw out a lot of bullshit and dealing in a more diffuse sort of distribution of things helps forward science by encouraging imaginative hypotheses. (Keep in mind that most hypotheses come up false or unproven and those also tend not to get published. In other words, most of science is lost--even to the scientific community that doesn't see fit to publish the things that even they have found that they do not understand.)

So this type of distributed processing is less like learning algebra--which actually does make sense once you can connect the dots--and more like dreaming or imagination. This fits with what Eugene Gendlin calls FOCUSING--noticing the changes in one's felt sense of body, mind, and world. This may bring us into murky areas that genuine scientists are fascinated by and pretenders deny out of hand. Shamans are at home here, but they too often seem to deny science or accountability. Well then, I guess it is up to reasonable and intelligent folks to figure it out.

Most simple this sort of distributed processing begins with hints, glimmers, tracks. We start with some hair on a treebranch, a track on the ground, but not the animal itself. We see something that our imagination tells us could be the Lock Ness monster but is probably not and we are left wondering about ripples. Every intelligent mammal is interested by these things that they recognize as signs--the only exception being humans who have been taught to be reductionists and animals so exhausted as to have no energy to sustain their curiosity.

If we apply the mammal intelligence given us by God, Charles Darwin, and Mother Earth (a fascinating menage a trois as ever there was), we pay attention. Now, the sort of attention that tends to lead to discovery in these types of cases is more like that song lyric, "Hold on loosely...but don't let go," than it is like the sort of focus we need in order to cram for that freshman-year physics final. It is more like the long-term focus it takes to parent than the short-term lazer-focus of the lion about to pounce. In the moment, we recognize that if we try to crush the potential butterfly in a bear trap, we may get nothing more than an indistinct smudge. Hopes are often like that butterfly, dreams for the future, ideals, the visions we have of what might be best within ourselves. I tend to prefer the people who use a net (not a bear-trap) and go after actual butterflies to those who only imagine butterflies and fairies and whatnot, but we need some of all types I'm sure. I'm also sure that I was stabbed by a vampire assassin last night in my dream; while I eventually killed him because he was too slow, the knife he used infected me in some way; it was a very fun dream, and I woke wondering if it meant anything useful or if it was "just a dream".

In the same way that I might be prompted by the energy and imagery of that dream to add some meaning to it, we can be prompted socially to move towards something like racial and gender equality by dreaming of the possibility and feeling energized by that hope. So there is this sort of distributed processing in response to psychological glimmers and also some sort of fumbling forwards due to idealization. Fumbling forwards when we can't really plan what will happen at Kent St., for example, is also distributed processing. This type of movement encompasses the sorts of questions like, "But did the Vietnam protesters really act in solidarity with the civil rights movement?" The answer, as often as not with this sort of process, is, "Sort of." To the same extent that dreams might motivate people if those people ascribe meaning to them, social acts are interpreted from different angles and propagandized by different sides. Sometimes it works out to be David or Vietnam, but Goliath usually wins. The bear trap is less likely to end as a smudge than the butterfly. The question is, if you are Goliath, do you want to be the villain? If you are not Goliath, you will most likely finds that imagination counts.

Social Aspects: Connect-the-Dots

2009-10-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Distributed processes are all about connecting the dots. If you'll remember back to first grade or kindergarten (or earlier), opening one of those new coloring books with a rough newspaper sort of paper, smelling the paper and ink, and tracing the connections between dots to form an image, you understand what I mean.

The dots being separate is the "distributed" part and the process of connecting them is the "process" part: distributed processes. When we do this psychologically, essentially, we pull a few dots together to form some shape that we can see as a whole or Gestalt. This happens when brainstorming (more distributed) moves towards applications (more cohesively formed). When something forms up quickly and/or decisively, we experience what we call "insight". (It is possible to feel hints or flickers of insight and also something more akin to "being hit in the head with a hammer it was so obvious once I saw it--wow!".)

This overarching process of making things form shapes or wholes is part of how we create meaning. Each whole can connect with other wholes, in which case they are also parts (which Ken Wilber likes to call holons to signify that they are wholes on their own but also parts when seen in context). In a positive tone, we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and in a negative tone, we talk about getting lost in a crowd should the wholeness/individuality of parts gets lost in their part-ness ("you're just a number like everyone else").

Distributed processing is a big part of how we construct a self-identity, how we know ourselves as individuals (wholes). Since we learn about ourselves in a physical and social context, we come to know ourselves as parts or relational wholes (wholes-as-parts/holons). This essay breaks down a few of the phisycal-social "collections" that we draw from in constructing our self-identities. We can consider all of what is going on around and in us to make up our associational matrices.

Each preceding paragraph is an individual point that I want to now draw together to form into a single, cohesive shape. I will "connect the dots" by drawing lines between these points. Hopefully, as I move forward with my narrative thread, there will be the feeling in my readers that things are "coming together". There may be a somewhat vague sense of my purpose early on, but that should solidify as we go. So this exchange between us is an example of a distributed process, an example of how the "stuff" in my psyche interacts with my social milieu. You may get the sense that everything that is said here has been said in different ways before, but hopefully, this way/moment/post will also seem unique in itself. If each paragraph connects, then the post makes a Gestalt or whole.

Depending on my genetic endowment, family of origin, local neighborhood, education, regional cultures, exposure to diversity, nation, and generational cohort, I will be more or less likely to refer to different things. Shamans say that their bodies are the universe. In other words, our nervous systems "re-present" or filter the universe of physical stuff through our sensations. Sensations are filtered through and organized by perceptions, thoughts, and habits. Perceptions, thoughts and habits are shaped by our physical and social environment. Most of us can agree on what a physical environment is, and I believe it can be helpful to talk about the four collections that add up to put together the associational matrices we draw from in feeling motivated and making decisions.

If I am not taught or do not learn how to see and value certain "shapes" or forms, then I won't know how to understand what someone else means if they use those forms. This happens obviously with words (if someone else uses words I don't know), but it also happens with ideas. Furthermore, it happens with perceptual experiences. For example, shamans are familiar with drawing on perceptual experiences that other folks generally are not. Of course they are, because they KNOW that their bodies are the universe. It is true for everyone that our bodies represent the universe, but shamans know this, and that can make a great deal of difference.

Social Aspects--Psyche is Society

2009-09-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

In the same way that we couldn't talk about psychological characteristics without the physical action potentials that support them, we can't reasonably speak of social aspects without recognizing that psyches support and create them. That means, then, that psychological potentials will tend to shape or direct social customs. The potentials we support by our choices and actions will have greater influence in our societies--not surprisingly. But taking this as common background can tell us about how to intentionally shape (affirm, ignore, or limit) certain social practices.

In other words, if we want psychologically healthy neighbors and fellow citizens, we need to support the things that make people healthy. Meaning...we can consider whether standard social practices are in line with playful and creative selves, able selves, good and right selves, mature selves, true selves, etc. We can also see how to motivate others based on their own success and happiness rather than on emotional reactivity. Generally, when people have a solidly creative self with lots of energy, they will look for purpose. When they have a solidly able self, they will look for being right (and perhaps good if their society encourages goodness). When there is plenty of energy (action potential), one step follows another unless there is some sort of problem. [If there is some sort of problem, we can look to address the situation as well as the individual's attitudes and actions, although it is generally better to take a comprehensive perspective on increasing vitality rather than emphasizing corrective measures when possible.]

This also gives a measuring stick for our own decisions and interventions. If you want someone to be mature, mindful and appreciative, but you deny meaning, a system of understanding the world, or the possibility for progress, you stab yourself in the foot while putting your foot in your mouth. Better to not interfere when you can't be part of the solution. The important aspects lower on the developmental scale need to come first. Belief systems that deny the value of the lower levels may be lofty but will add social instability and encourage unsustainable change whether the goal-state is admirable or not.

So we want to be able to model actions and communications for whatever our goals are as well as expressing solidarity with whatever levels someone else is at. Essentially, experience with higher level perspectives should provide a wider view. Wisdom involves being able and willing to shift between addressing problems, encouraging progress, and focusing on the moment at hand as called for. Again, we are talking about how to recognize and utilize opportunities, and supporting healthy aspects of self feeds into resilient and inspired socializing. Healthy socialization feeds into resilient and inspired individuals.

All of this taken together means that we must create expectations (train ourselves to recognize opportunities) around progress. And in order to support progress, we want to act upon the opportunities these expectations point out. In very complex situations where we cannot adequately design progress, we can support the healthy emergent qualities presented in any given situation. In relatively simple situations where we can design progress, we can catalyze that progress by supporting healthy qualities and limiting unhealthy qualities. This is somewhat different than (but works hand-in-hand with) focusing on quantities. (Focusing exclusively on quantities tends to spiral diverse and divergent groups into resentment, entitlement, power analyses, and resource competition even when social coordination is possible and would be beneficial.)

The psychological qualities we support become the society that surrounds us. Therefore, we might as well have increasing input concerning what qualities we support. To do so, we will want to create customs, standards of communication, and expectations that fit with the variety levels while providing an integrated framework that embraces each level, the current physical/political situation as rich with opportunity, and progress.

Good is Better than High

2009-08-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

As a general rule, along the spectrum of development, good is better than high. This works out in more particular ways at each step. It's worth making this point since idealization seems to push for achieving an actualization of heights sometimes at the expense of overall health, happiness, and connection. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it too, but you have to learn to bake. This guideline particularly helps define practical wisdom: good is better than high.

Developmentally, there are three major problems. The first is reductionism or the Peter Pan complex--a refusal or inability to continue to grow. The second is stretching--trying too hard to be too high, too mature, too good, too something that without the "too" part is good on its own. The third problem is fragmentation or a lack of integration. This comes from being able to experience multiple levels of consciousness (being able to intentionally influence which states and levels one responds or acts from) but not feeling that and also how they are connected. The second and third problems often go hand in hand; if you're stretching too far, it may be hard to see how your roots are important for supporting where you're headed.

Overblown Purpose feels like the driven or compulsive need to "do something" or fanatically address some task. The problem here is an inability to feel playful or "loose" in one's efforts. Mentally, not being able to loosen up reduces our creativity while increasing the likelihood of fear, anxiety, irritation, and aggression. Creativity is the base, playfulness is one expression of it, and we cannot incorporate new information as well when we feel all uptight in our focus. This uptightness also lends itself to physical tension which creates mental strain in a self-catalyzing cycle. I'm a big fan of discipline, but we can take it too far. All things being equal, it's healthier to be playful and creative rather than compulsively driven even though playfulness and a diffuse creativity are actually more rudimentary than having an obvious purpose and sticking to it.

Overblown Understanding is summed up in the phrase, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Teaching is great, study is great, philosophy is great, but we can overdo it. There are some of us who are better at memorizing the manual than fixing the toilet, but if you've got a broken toilet and only a textbook understanding of what to do with it, you'll eventually agree that "good is better than high" in certain regards. Piaget pointed out that the abstract learning is more developmentally advanced (we have to reach a certain age and apply a rich associational matrix) than concrete learning, but most people will recognize the value of a good plumber, mechanic, contractor, etc. Just think of the last time you had trouble with someone who thought they knew how to fix your car or put in windows that wouldn't leak during heavy rain.

Overblown mindfulness lacks accountability and consistency--roots. And, since you can't have ethics that are recognizable as ethics without some sort of consistency, mindfulness without principles may also lack ethics. (On that note, think of the gurus who consider themselves too enlightened and wonderful to be burdened by ethics.) Certain systems like laws and self-identities may be less subtle than mindfulness-per-se, but systems allow for the communication of meaning as well as a certain degree of predictability in relationship that allows for intentional collaboration. Many of the "I'm spiritual, not religious" folks like the escapism that mindfulness can allow. The screwy logic is that, if I'm always living in the moment, do I really have to be held responsible for past actions? (Sooo cumbersome.) Mindfulness without a foundation leads to all sorts of weirdnesses including an inability to connect--or at least communicate--with others. A few cosmic clowns, drifters, and saints may be fine, but without some social cohesion, we end up with very mindful parents not bringing home the bacon. If we are going to parse time into increasingly precise and finite moments, and if we want some of those moments and the relationships they hold to contain meaning, there needs to be some solid context. I'd rather have my children grow up around good neighbors who haven't necessarily achieved the majestic highs of human consciousness than "enlightened" a**holes who are not accountable for their real-life actions with their real-life consequences. For anyone selling, "But can we truly know what is really real?" I'm just not buying.

Overblown Clarity is all about me reaching my sense of inspiration, flow, etc. Without mindfulness of my own reactivity here, I may be a genuinely inspiring and beautiful yet also a fully-blown narcissistic prima dona. My mantra will be that the world just doesn't get my genius or something along the lines of demanding that someone bring me a bowl full of only green M&Ms because I deserve whatever I may want. Genuine expertise, artistry, and beauty end up being "tooled" and demeaned when mindfulness isn't present. This faulty perspective is willing to unquestioningly or hypocritically hold privilege over meritocracy as long as I am in the haves rather than the have-nots. Here we may have pride without an understanding or experience of dignity. This is the cult of personality. Better to be mindfully appreciative of life than made famous one minute just to be hated the next. Consistency in clarity and inspiration comes from practiced mindfulness.

Overblown Nonconceptuality is about subtlety without connection to the rest of the world. It is like someone who has known the worthlessness of the prima dona's fame and moved away from society instead of decreasing the false distance from others. Subtlety or any sort of religiosity has less joy when it has less communion. Here we can look at what Trungpa talked about as spiritual materialism taking precedence over ethically and joyfully connecting. Some meditators miss the foundational aspect of mindfulness practice and appreciation or try to rush through or bypass the stage of Clarity in order to experience spiritual highs, subtlety, or oneness. The highs themselves are fine unless they cause disruption in one's connections--which tends to happen without an adequate foundation. When spirituality doesn't connect to one's actions, you can also have the sort of problem that St. Theresa of Calcutta had in feeling that she was doing what she was called to do...but...she seriously questioned her faith in and connection to God. The personal inspiration of the previous stage is an important part of spiritual life. If one opts for subtle spirituality over that inspiration, it leads us away from our own humanity.

Overblown Abiding involves too much of a focus on oneness while diminishing or dismissing joy and the rubbing of elbows with Creation that comes into full bloom at the stage of Nonconceptuality. We can't support a truly nondual standpoint if we value peace over joy (that's duality). Feel free to disagree, but that's how it is. Siddartha Gautama talked about false views, and a preference towards peace or joy is a false view. Dogen spoke of "buddhas together with buddhas". Shams and Rumi had their thing going. Christians mention "communion of the saints". While we need time away from the bustle of the everyday in order to cultivate peace, we also feel most full--abundant as well as serene--when we can embrace the peace and the bustle with clarity, finding inspiration in our own joy and also in shared vitality.

Oneness states are great, but so is throwing the old pigskin around at the end of the summer. When we're willing to drop our weight as far down the scale as necessary, the Weeble people may wobble but they don't fall down.

Segmentation in Mindful Appreciation

2009-08-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

As moments, characteristics, and options keep coming faster and faster, many lose their individual gravitas and meaning. This most often happens to degrees--not all at once. But there is certainly the possibility in meditation for depersonalization and derealization. Even without that feeling of a little too much limbo, you can practice moment-to-moment mindfulness and look around at some point as if you're standing in the middle of a field somewhere, wondering how you got there and where to go. You can get a similar effect sitting in a small apartment and spending lots of time online: searching, browsing, chatting, moving on. It's happening in "real time" but eventually doesn't feel all that real because it isn't apparently rooted. Mindfulness should actually bring us in closer touch with our roots while allowing us to be less defined and delimited by them.

The same sort of thing happens in a different context with hierarchy. It's how accountability disappears from big government and big corporations. If, say, the job of massacring Jews is broken down so that everyone in the chain is a specialist with some separation from the previous and subsequent steps, most of them will simply do their jobs and stop thinking about the overall result. "I just drive trains." Never mind that those trains are carrying cars full of people to death camps. You get cheating accountants and investors and Michael Vick saying stuff like, "It didn't seem real," until they end up in jail, and, "That's when it hit me." Aren't those Jews, those dollars, those mortgages just numbers on papers or a monitor?

So when we deal in hierarchy and segmentation, we want to look at integration and rootedness. We want to keep some awareness of the foundation that our space shuttle mover is built upon; we want to know that if we're going to spend a gazillion dollars that someone is sure of how one part made by one manufacturer fits with the parts around it made by all other manufacturers involved with creating a huge crawler. As we climb higher in most endeavors, we have to consider how the center of gravity also tends to move upwards, making the entire structure a little less stable unless we plan for that shift at the core. In constructing a skyscraper, the first step after design and planning for materials is to dig--dig it deep.

The flipside is that, when you're deep into your stupidly righteous anger (if you happen to be somewhat like me) or affected by an addiction or OCD or whatever, it can be really helpful to segment time--to take one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time, one breath at a time. Overall, it's good when a feeling of being rooted or centered is accessible and it's good when a feeling of openness is accessible. So along with having some aspiration for growth, it's great to have an appreciation for the way that things already are and have been. Zimbardo did some interesting work on time perspectives.

One of the strangest things that can happen with meditation groups is that they take up the idea of being only in the present. Being lost in the present is similar to being lost anywhere else. If you only look at the present--or "be" in the present--then, in the present, you're intentionally ignoring a lot of your potential, intentionally ignoring. If you're in a monastery or it works for you otherwise, congratulations, but it won't work for most people. Aesop said so, and I think he was right. It's good to plan for winter.

The interesting thing about planning and experience, though, is that they can take the form of heuristics, general ideas about how to go with the flow in such a way as to set yourself up for success without being rigid. Precise mindfulness and the ability to be in the present complements that experience, those heuristics, and any planning that we can actually follow through with based on experience and the ability to plan.

One of the most fascinating things that occurs in how our brains and minds work is the corner we turn at about 10,000 hours of experience with some particular field or endeavor. When I talk about an associational matrix, I'm leaning towards this qualitative change that comes with expert experience because even though you may not realize it, you want an associational matrix of experience to draw from. When we intend to learn and improve, it sometimes takes time, but we can usually do it. If we stick with that intention and practice for long enough, we get to a point where the effort pays off mentally. Things just start coming more easily. The book THE WISDOM PARADOX gets into it a little bit. A common example is driving. When you start learning how to drive, you're always thinking about checking mirrors, the gas gauge, other drivers, wondering whether you're going to get the clutch right on your next shift, etc. But at some point, over a period of time, you ease into driving. You do most of those same things but not all the time and with less effort and less stress. Driving begins to seem pretty easy and natural for most of us. Like riding a bike. And then we conveniently forget how difficult it was to learn. Same thing happens when talented high school athletes think they know a sport, only to find that it is faster, harder, and more complex at the college level...and then there are the pros.

So actually, there are at least two major corners that we turn. With driving, most of us get to where we are competent but not expert. Competence brings that sense of ease and most of us are relatively safe drivers. But we aren't professional stunt drivers or Nascar-quality competitors. Those folks get familiar with performing at a high level, an expert level, whereas the rest of us tend to get comfortable with competence. No longer newbies, but no Mario Andretti.

Keeping one foot in the present, so to speak, can become as practiced as shifting gears. We get used to looking at various mirrors, other cars, pedestrians, street signs, etc. We can similarly get used to looking at memories, impulses, expectations, creative plans, feeling disciplined, being present, etc. As the moments "shorten" and experience with intentionally shifting attention accrues, the moments and circumstance can blend together. Some people talk about this blending and flow as "process". Once we have a rich enough associational matrix and enough practice with the contents, we can shift our focus from comparatively slow-footed emphasis on content to a comparatively fluid awareness of process. But when we start practicing this shift, we have to put the effortful and incompetent practice into following briefer and smaller aspects of content. In the same way that our brains and minds turn a corner at about 10,000 practice hours, we eventually can become familiar and easier in our mindful attention of the present. It's 10,000 hours to get to the expert level, but we can usually achieve a journeyman's competence long before that. So we're looking for a fluid process that is connected to the present but also something other than a segmentation of time that leaves us rudderless, lost, and without meaning (solid reference points as context). Even in the midst of a fast-flowing mountain river, we can know where the banks and the river bottom are.

CT from M2G

2009-08-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

I think I've finally come to a point where it's possible to make solid sense of my blog's name: cultural technology from meditation to globalization. Essentially, my topic today is about bringing together an Abhidhamma approach to time and consciousness with Marshall McLuhan's point that the medium is the message.

One of the functional aspects of Abhidhamma descriptions and practices of how time and consciousness unfold is a certain precision in how one pays attention to moments and the flow of moments. For a gross oversimplification, we can think of Abhidhamma meditation as focused on increasing the precision of one's ability to take in details and to notice increasingly minute instances. One effect of many types of meditation is that one moves from emphasizing thoughts in one's attentional field to noticing the progression of thoughts. If one does not identify with the thoughts themselves or their meanings, one familiarizes with the flow of that progression. Let me expand the same basic structural movement to cultural change on a global scale.

People in all societies are aware of the direction of cultural change. Those who like that direction tend to think of change as progressive and they also tend to think of themselves as progressive. People who challenge that the change is good usually think of themselves as traditionalists or cultural conservatives. Progressives and traditionalists in our society similarly experience what we call a generation gap. Generation gaps happen with types of technology as well as with people. In proto-human prehistory, when technological generations turned over more slowly than humanity's ancestors' generations did, there was no need to notice the speed of technological advancements. Societies formed relatively stable cultures with solid assumptions and circular myths about how the world is, and kids' generations could basically agree with their parents' generation on how it is.

Now that cultural exchange has become relatively speedy and commonplace, the generation gap is not only noticeable but unavoidable. As the speed of technological change blows by the rate of human reproduction and maturation, societies are having to face innovation itself as one of the solid assumptions about how our world is. One way of thinking about this is to talk about technology and innovation as the common global "language". Although we all come from somewhat distinct societies, we have in common an ability to adapt. That ability to adapt, especially when paired with the rate of technological advance, is creating a new sort of homogenization. From my perspective, from a structural viewpoint, the way this is happening is much more influential than any type of particularist cultural input (although I will not deny the importance of inputs from our relatively distinct cultures). Because there are so many cultures to draw from, no one of them will dominate. It is the structure that predominates, and that structure is roughly analogous to what happens when people stop identifying with thoughts, begin watching how thoughts and moments tend to unfold, and familiarize themselves with the progression of thoughts. Familiarity with this progression trains one to follow directions and qualities instead of looking primarily at stable structures and assumptions and competing "sides". Where you are from and where you are now take their place alongside the importance of where you're headed.

The basic laws don't really change, but the state of the union might. It seems roughly analogous, again, to the state change between solids and liquids. We can still rely on the laws that govern physics, but we cannot continue to rely on the properties that define solids when we are dealing with liquids. The basics that govern how people function are the same when dealing with meditation or globalization, but the experience of what determines what in our lives may be as different as standing on a frozen lake ("stable" ancient cultures) or swimming in the spring thaw (present). Progressives and kids will tend to say that spring is good, while traditionalists will tend to point out that it is nice to have somewhere solid to stand. Most times they argue, they argue ostensibly about issues that are actually secondary to the fact that one tends to choose stability of or return to a golden past (which never existed as it is sentimentally portrayed) while the other favors embracing a golden future (which will be more detailed and nuanced than is usually idealistically portrayed). Both the past and future unavoidably accept without difficulty solids and liquids. That is suchness in any timeframe.

As innovation, technological change, and cultural change become increasingly obvious and unavoidable, we will tend to focus less on relatively stable assumptions while relying more on our ability to move, interact, and coordinate (which, since it is consistent, can feel "stable"). This will not in the least change that some things are solid, but we will become increasingly accustomed to giving up fictions that once seemed solid because we will be increasingly driven to give up many realities that once seemed so important; newspapers and radio and universal, institutionalized education were once breakthrough products, and newspapers are fading into obscurity. Just as the press has become less hierarchical, less professional, and less edited, education is becoming less institutionalized. That which does not grow in our culture(s), dies. It happens at a fast enough pace now that our grandparents saw it in less than a lifetime and we see it within less than a generation. Just as this affects individuals noticeably, it affects groups, companies, institutions. And just as Abhidhamma meditation can bring increased vitality and awareness and appreciation to one's life, creating and playing with this process is both the fundamental aspect of humanity and also our future.

Lalita: the Dance

2009-08-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

At first, most people are impressed with the open spaces involved with clarity. With experience and familiarity, some people begin to identify more with the space than with any limited sense of self. Mahamudra philosophy expresses this stage really well, speaking of the union between openness and the blissful awareness that it allows. The self and world can take on a very consistently bright quality that "enlightens" so-called negative emotions and experiences just as clarity can make ordinary situations seem fascinating and important.

Chogyam Trungpa said that we go up the mountain for ourselves but we come down the mountain for others. We strive for the peak experiences partially because they are simply worth experiencing, but then there is the further step of making the two one or bringing about the perspective where we are able to experience peak and ordinary or "negative" experiences as similarly vital and unique. When we can consistently bring the awareness that ordinary is good and extraordinary is good, we're looking at moving beyond good and bad and into a way of living in which we do not feel apart from the people around us and the moments we are in right now. In this sense, in bringing this awareness and sharing the vitality, we end up living for others and with others. As we exhibit grace in the presence of adversity and abundance, we become the example we would choose while living in an unadulterated communion with those people and circumstances which surround and enrich us. In John Daido Loori's words (commenting on the Bodhisattva vows): you cannot save all sentient beings without being saved by all sentient beings. In more Christian language, we speak of service to others, stewardship of God's Creation, that everything was originally created through the divine Word which is also Messiah, and we recognize that the Holy Spirit is everywhere-existent while being inseparable from the Father and Son.

Here, rather than having some clear purpose like a well-oiled machine, we sometimes seem to have purpose and sometimes seem to have no purpose in the particular dance steps we are taking right here and now. Before this step, we have not taken the full measure of joy that is possible in this universe. This step is complete harmony and joy. If there is a further step, the experience of it may be influenced by one's ideas and experience up through this point, but there will be no need to explain how openness, communion, and reality-as-is have never been separate from any beginning.

Like a Well-oiled Machine

2009-08-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

What does it take to move beyond customs and interactions based on mindful appreciation--and what is that like anyway? Mindfulness gives people a real, genuine taste of emptiness, spaciousness, like that old cowboy song, "Don't fence me in." If you can imagine spending your whole life on horseback out in the truly wilderness-wild of the old American west, tending barbed wire fences that stretched almost farther than you could ride in a month, moving cattle with a few quiet ol' boys during the summer and wintering pretty much alone on the high plains of Wyoming--if you can get that feeling of a dry wind off the plains that smells of sage and blows on through your soul, then you get some sense of what emptiness can feel like. If you take the social aspect out of mindful appreciation, the applied aspect, mindfulness can introduce that feeling of cleanliness which is right up there next to godliness. And over time, you become familiar with the existential certainty that there is no bucket, no type of fence, no prison that can really contain that in our souls which is the ether of the universe.

If you're more of a THE BIG LEBOWSKI type than a fan of Sam Elliot's earlier movies and handlebar mustache, the feel or accoutrements may be different, but the thing itself is the same. Gautama Buddha said that mindful awareness itself would get you there, and it will.

Mindfulness practice allows us to actually turn away from--in Buddhist literature, to stop "feeding the fires" of--the things we do to create unhappiness and distaste in our own lives. That's the therapeutic side. But it also brings that openness into big and small aspects of what we do, and that is what I see as the real value of it, the sati of sati.

When we're free of disturbances and distractions enough to really focus with gentle intensity on something as un-extraordinary as tying our shoes, at that point, we're really sinking into something that is sinking into us. We get beyond the boundaries of a concretely definable ego and into something spiritual-without-pretense. The ego itself isn't necessarily good or bad--like the habit of wearing shoes--but it works the way it works and we bring our presence right there. When we turn mindfulness inwards, we begin moving into responding to how our own egos work with spaciousness and equanimity. Over time, mindfulness becomes commonplace--like getting used to Big Sky in Montana--but it becomes no less valuable for being there. It is foundational, hard to imagine after a time, how anyone could or could want to live without it. Rather than being something to be feared or worked at, it is like the feeling of taking a hot leather hat off your head and taking in the breeze.

I call this clarity. Beyond mindful, effortful concentration and somewhere before grace, we incorporate this openness into who we are. Taking openness with you into big situations and small allows a certain personal balance and clarity, an easygoing way even with difficult people and work. Well, it lends to being easygoing if you also believe in the intentional relaxation I talk about elsewhere; it also lends to being intensely focused and determined when that is called for.

In order for people to bring that to a group, the group will need to feel in some ways like a well-oiled machine. Think about this as a comparison. Cognitive psychologists talk about the difference between experts at some field--say chess, it's something I know a little--and amateurs. They have found that, across the board, something significant changes once people reach a point where they have put in 10,000 quality hours of practice in their chosen field. In my language, the associational matrix at that point is so familiar (like the back of my hand) and so rich (after somewhere around 8 years of near-fanatical practice) that things "just come together". Without extraneous effort, things "click". Michael Jordan blows by defenders, jet fighter aces feel like there is no one else even in the sky with them--just the goal, and this is genuinely a "peak" experience like stepping to the top of Everest and feeling that the only higher elevation is more space.

There are few groups, if any I've seen, that perform at this level. It goes beyond good customs and being supportive of one another's mindful appreciation. More often, there may be one or a few stars that bring openness, flow, and superior performance into a group situation. The other people in their group say of them, "He/she's on another level." How can it be when experts take enough time working together to get to a point where their team functions like their individual expertise does? Whatever else that would be, it would be inspiring. If you create this in a group, you won't want to leave.

The individuals who are capable of consistently operating at such a high level still often irritate others with their behavior and are irritated in turn by others' comparatively poor performance. While clarity is still new, it's like a favorite Christmas present that we are somewhat jealous of. We can get distracted by or frustrated with anyone who screws up our mojo. It's also possible to have one "well-oiled machine" fighting with a similarly well-oiled machine over which is best. The next step can seem somewhat modest in comparison with the potential star power of this stage, but it is impressive in its own right. (Here we will have to extrapolate almost completely from the behavior of a few rare individuals.)

Types Beyond/Within Types

2009-07-30T22:19:00.000-07:00

Types, roles, and identity politics. As much as I like Buddhism for illustrating various points, vichara is a type of contemplation that I ran into through Advaita ("not-dual" or "anti-dualistic") Vedanta. And as much as all types of Buddhism include an emphasis on mindfulness, vichara presents a wonderful illustration of what I mean by the stage of Mindful Appreciation.

When one practices vichara, one is essentially looking deeply into the question: who/what am I? After calming the mind to some extent, one says to oneself something along these lines (the gist here is more important than the details--try letting each of these sentences sink in before moving on to the next):

I have a situation, but I am not my situation.
I have roles, but I am not my roles.
I have a body, but I am not my body.
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.
I have emotions but I am not my emotions.

When we get caught up in the stream of daily life, we most often act as one of these things. Professor Gates talked about different peoples' internal narratives--the thoughts that are paired with explanation, narrative, and feeling. When we identify as our narratives, our situation, whatever, it is like letting something else drive you or like being possessed for a moment. We even say, "I got caught up in the moment; I wasn't myself." Who were you then? Well, when we aren't "ourselves", we're usually responding to some basic drive and/or narrative. The interesting thing is that we also usually identify ourselves as the roles, characteristics, and narratives that we like or that benefit us in some way.

With vichara, we take a step into these identifications--into the process of identifying (forming a self-concept that is described or bounded by something). Instead of taking that step unmindfully, we take it mindfully. Vichara is one way of getting some space between and within the things that usually push you. Do you feel pushed by identifying yourself as a black man in America? If that is how you identify yourself, probably, at least at times such as when the cops show up at your house. Do cops identify with their roles? (Sorry for the horrendously rhetorical questioning here.) Of course they do, we all do to some extent. We also fall into identifying others as their roles. Did Gates respond to Crowley showing up thinking that here was a helpful race relations teacher coming to make sure his house and its owner was safe? It doesn't seem like he did. Did Crowley show up with the attitude about Gates that he expressed immediately following their rendezvous at the White House (which apparently went much better than their rendezvous at the yellow house)? It doesn't seem like he did.

Vichara "ends" with the question: who am I? We have plenty of time to mull this over in a contemplative manner if we take the time. But when we meet other people, we usually ask and have to decide to some extent, "Should I treat you as a who or a what? And if a what--some role--then which role or roles? If I should treat you as a who, then which who?" Certainly, just as with contemplative self-inquiry a contemplative and interested exploration of another who will tend to take time, and if we bring our good nature and take the time, we can usually get something valuable out of the experience. Essentially asking, "Who are you?" verbally or not allows the other who to answer for themselves rather than leaving us to choose from only our presuppositions and role responsibilities in determining who we think they are and thereby determining how we should treat them.

Beyond the neutral tolerance of other roles and potentially interacting in mutual self-interest, we deal in a greater degree of mindfulness and a greater degree of extending ourselves to meet others in this interesting world. Simultaneously, in exploring with others who they are, the equal "flipside" is inviting them into that mindful self-inquiry that we might practice with ourselves. And in a diversity of perspectives, we find a richer abundance to draw answers and experience from.

This is especially where it becomes important to bring up awareness of the self/other divide as well as our expectations. If I am used to people telling me I am very smart and of benefit to my people as well as "other" people, I'll come to expect that sort of treatment. It's human nature. I identify with my roles and status because it allows me to answer the question of how I should interact with others. If I am used to people showing some degree of respect or at least deference based on fear, I'll come to expect that sort of treatment. When the expected treatment (or "narrative" of treatment) is positive, I will begin to feel entitled to that status, protective of that status. It defines me as a social being; it is my precious. If you are my wife, brother, friend, etc., I may allow you close to what I hold dear. But if you are not, a sense of threat will mingle with fear and entitlement and possessiveness to present me a ready-made reaction to you being all up in my grill.

When that happens, I may be educated enough to know that you maybe aren't coming to take away my entitlements, I may be trained in not aggressing just because I am feeling aggressive. And, if I am not driving in the moment when we interact, the training and education go right out the window. The more often I am in the driver's seat, and the more often I bring my good and right self to the table, the more people will tend to form the general impression that I am mature. People who are not mature may be good in many ways, but if they aggress against others in order to protect the good show involved in their reputations, they will tend to come across as aggressive pricks.

The interesting thing is that it is appropriate to create laws around physical aggression but it is important to create customs around verbal aggression and social respect and appreciation. In a pluralistic society, we should be able to enforce laws against physical aggression, but we will never be able to enforce laws against feeling slighted. If the white man slights first or in retaliation, I call both men immature pricks. I don't mean that to say I am a better person; I say they are pricks for not acting as persons although that is their legal right to be pricks as long as it doesn't go too far.

What's more, people can feel when they are either pulled back or moved ahead by social interactions. Eckhart Tolle made the point that adverse situations tend to bring mostly conscious people to a greater degree of consciousness but that adversity tends to push mostly unconscious people into their unconscious ("ready-made") reactivity. Vichara helps us separate the people from their prickish actions. I can say, "You are being a prick now even if you aren't generally a prick." That is the truth of many situations in our lives. Mindfulness practice helps us gain some degree of dis-identification from our roles, narratives, etc. If we include appreciation in that practice, it can also help us become better at identifying as the good and right selves that we can be. And the more I am actually aware of deciding how I choose to act and acting well, the more I will support a mature and mindfully appreciative self as well as maturity and appreciation as social customs and part of my reputation.

Until we begin to move beyond tolerance and speak about as well as enact appreciation and maturity, we can throw stones from our glass houses until the "chickens come home to roost", to use a memorable phrase. If I want you to treat me as a mature and decent individual, however I choose to identify and whatever my roles are, I will have to be able to line up my intentions and actions during moments of adversity. Someone once said, "Only the tested can inspire the fearful." (Test yourself: are you really a prick to black homeowners or white cops? Is that genuinely who you are?) That seems a much better example to me than, "Do as I say, not as I do." We must teach one another to act from within roles or types while going beyond those types themselves. I may not be completely described by my body or emotions or roles, but they are what I have to work with for now!

Enforcement of laws needs the domination that literal power brings to a situation. Support of customs has a different feel than legislation and the execution of laws by folks in uniforms that show them to be the enforcers. Appreciation and the equanimity it takes to get through adverse situations is supported by mindfulness practice and experience with social diversity and a diversity of value systems. Without being present, we are not living in real time. When that happens, we lose ourselves for the moment and are left with potentially competing roles and narratives. In reality, we are not so socially and spiritually poverty-stricken.

Right Understanding, Right Self

2009-07-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

One of the things I enjoy about Buddhism is the variety. The oldest type is Theravada Buddhism. Theravada means something like "wisdom of the elders". The Theravadins stick to a minimal canon of sutras and are considered by many Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists to teach the Hinayana--"the small vehicle"--style of Buddhism. This style can be respected for its thrift, simplicity, and universal applicability. It is similar to the passage in Christianity that says the Way is steep and narrow. It's old school--figuratively and literally. The Mahayanists consider themselves proponents of the "Great Vehicle", opening their canon up to an almost unending set of sutras and commentaries on sutras. The Vajrayanists consider their way most complete and exalted (although some Vajrayanists will say that the three ways are equally good). Vajrayana means something like "the diamond way", and a vajra is Indra's thunderbolt. Vajrayana is also known as tantric and can be seen as the most esoteric--full of ritual, magic, and the abundance of the world. Very different feel to it than Theravadin straightforward simplicity.

Anyway, one of the Buddhist teachings that I appreciate is the outline of the "Eightfold Path" to awakening. The eight things one is expected to work on are: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. When we look to relate with others a step beyond hierarchical status or power positions, this usually involves some set of principles, rules, guidelines, or whatever you want to call them. Moving up the ladder from Purpose level interactions to Understanding level interactions, we run into the "good and right" self-identity. Jeffrey Alexander speaks about this sort of relating on a social level in THE CIVIL SPHERE. On pages 228-234, Alexander talks about legitimacy of power, not just power. Between equals who work towards shared understandings and a social contract, power is subjected to the dictates of legitimacy. Fellow citizens and neighbors want to be known as "good and right" people. Being good is socially valuable, and in debates about what is good, one wants to come across as right as well as good.

At this stage, we take one step away from a magically-imbued ideal self--and an animalistic amped self--and a step towards an actual inspired self. The distance between who we are and our ideals now becomes a problem to be addressed--often by attempting to perfectly apply principles. The principles we choose to validate make up our personal sense of "right understanding". At this point, because people test the idea of a civil self among equal civilians, legitimacy becomes important and power is no longer considered to be an acceptable end in itself. And, in a circular but not meaningless way, we put our social weight behind the system of principles we choose while being measured as fallible and lacking by those legitimizing principles. We are "right and good" in our own eyes to the extent we live as examples of our principles, and our principles look right and good to the extent that our actions seem so.

At this point, though, we still are not fully integrated, inspired selves. We have moments of inspiration, but inspiration does not necessarily come on a regular basis just from being authentic. We still put effort into being good, but we are trying to become more graceful about it. There is often the feeling that I could be better if my society were better as well. But having a right framework, a right understanding, may help me work on being a "good" person. We may still look for competition and status, but we may be less likely to believe that physical power is legitimacy, so competition also takes the form as valued debate. The abstraction utilized here helps me recognize that a shitty Christian is a worse neighbor than a good and righteous Muslim even if I believe that Muslim is going to hell for his infidelity and he believes the same of me for my opposing religious beliefs. We may tolerate a good citizen even if he has "false" mythical beliefs (compared to my "right" mythical beliefs).

When two adults--let's stick with the Gates/Crowley couple for now--interact as good and right citizens, they speak to each other as equals rather than competing for status in ways that illegitimately attempt to utilize the power in their positions. This highlights an important shift. We begin to recognize--at least, hopefully, in a pluralistic country--that sometimes I want to be treated as a "person", but the frustrated cashier may treat me as a role (just one more customer). And, as long as the cashier follows the generally agreed-upon laws, I may not like being treated as only a customer, but I can understand it. You can even do the same as a professor and a cop. If you're willing. Now, during stressful moments, we are likely to act less maturely than we do in our best moments. When that happens, we compete for status and the one-up position. The go-to human method is to remember myself as good and righteous and everyone who I see as competing to put me down or put themselves up I see (often correctly) as illegitimately trying to abuse whatever power they can get their grubby hands on. That is only half of right view, though, which means that I'm taking a wrong view. Because I am also trying to get my grubby little hands on whatever advantage I can garner in the situation, influencing the other person to not treat me as good or right. I'm actually asking to be treated as bad and wrong (illegitimate even by my own principles)--which Gates and Crowley did with one another.

Both introjected the righteousness of their ideals but it seems that neither was mindful enough in the stressful situation to actually apply their ideals. A common failing, for sure. Right mindfulness, then, is a huge part of the "mature" self. Neither of this couple seemed to be making mature decisions in this situation even if both might argue about how they were "right". It just goes to show that over-valuing a "right self"-identification keeps us from being good and mature along with being able to claim rightness. As equal citizens, it is sufficient that they can agree to disagree after a beer with the President, but many of their fellow citizens have figured that out without an executive beer order.

Dominance Hierarchy as Conflict Management

2009-07-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

The most basic attentional skills are (passively) rest/receptivity and (actively) play/creativity. We could consider the ability and willingness to rest in a situation to be "unguardedness" or some better word for that. If you think about the tension you feel when you can't trust someone, that is the opposite of rest/receptivity. Just as these abilities are influenced by individual history and temperament, they are also influenced by the social environment.

Threat reduces one's ability to think creatively or rest. So how does one know that a stranger is not a threat? We do know that if you expect threat and the other does as well, going into any communication with the expectation of conflict closes down most folks' creativity and openness. When that happens on both sides, it's quite likely that there will be some sort of conflict or challenge. If that challenge does not result in death or expulsion from the scene, some degree of dominance and submission is likely. When we deal with this on a purely physical level, there are chemical effects in hormones and thinking--with the "victor" feeling more amped, proud, happy, etc. The "loser" will likely have decreased testosterone, maybe sadness or shame (as the flipside of grandiosity). (In this sort of conflictual situation, we can see that "learned helplessness" and "depression" may result from chronic or extreme prompting of the physical-instinctual one-down response. Both, then, can actually be socially beneficial by discouraging potential competitors from continuing conflict or repeating conflictual encounters.) Socially, we'll also see a status hierarchy along with the classic bodily responses. Together, these shape a crude social identity and social placement.

When people do not choose to mature much beyond this sort of interacting, agentic individuals who are feeling their oats will tend to compete with others who are similar, and competition for the one-up position ensues. These heroic champions will tend to treat anyone not competing as less than they are. It's part of the worldview of this way of interacting and may not have as much to do with personality flaws as it does with lack of vision and experience. But when these folks don't look to move beyond that method of interacting, they are essentially choosing a reductionist, aggressive standpoint or role. Because everything relates in a somewhat personal way at this level (me as center of the universe--appropriate for toddlers), it is fitting that their motivation to mature will come from moving away from frustration or causes of suffering and also idealization. If the ideal is magical or special enough, then it doesn't need to be felt as directly competing with ego, so ego is not signaled to feel the one-down response (in comparison to a wonderful ideal) in a personal, immediate way. In essence, ego has some room to maneuver, so it is safe to consider the ideals without needing to embody them. Because of this distance, contradictions between stated values/ideals and actions are not only likely but are inevitable.

Conscience, in my usage of the word, is socially constructed. We become increasingly self-aware of ourselves as social selves by receiving feedback from others. If we only idealize the one-up response, we will try to see ourselves as superheros, like Nietzsche's uberman. Or, I should say, like Hitler's interpretation of Nietzsche's uberman. Social feedback allows us to construct a self-image that contradicts the toddler tyrant impulses. If we face those contradictions, we look to understand not only ourselves as something other than "magical uberman", but we also consider others as something different than just less than ourselves. And of course, our social emotion-responses are a big part of this process. Because emotion is part of this process, we actually cannot understand ourselves without emotion and communication. There is a "logical" side to this as well as a neurophysiological side.

What this means is that, to become mature adults working and living with other mature adults, we must consider moving beyond the one-up reaction as well as the one-down reaction. We shape the ideal of equality and socially try to support this ideal while still dealing with our instinctual one-up and one-down reactions.

As far as tracking or common purpose is concerned, then, when dealing with the Purpose level ego and its hierarchically-appropriate reactions, cohesion is built around being appropriately one-up or one-down (leading, following, or getting out of the way). Equality at this point is possible with those who are part of one's in-group, but then that in-group will take on the mythical specialness that individuals feel when they engage the one-up reaction in themselves. In other words, the group ends up being the uberman, and so it is nonsensical to consider dehumanization or exclusivity as wrong. They simply do not really register with feelings of wrongness to the same extent. In fact, contempt may be added to winning any sort of competition if the victor feels that they did not want to compete, but that the loser forced the competition (which they, then, so rightly lost).

Pride meets pride in competition or conflict, and in this mindset, the only option besides winning is losing. Hello, Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates. Yes, I am talking to you.

We can see, then, that with little social awareness and customs that support equality, the ability to concentrate that helps shape a competent or "able self" may add to and shape conflict. Without sufficient awareness of social context (Cambridge in the 21st century), being a great professor or cop sets up two inflated roles for a boxing match. If the actual PEOPLE in those roles were not looking for a boxing match, both end up feeling unfairly punched in the face. I say that if you did the training, put on the gloves, marched to the ring, and you like the cheers from the crowd, you deserve what you get. If one or the other was simply allowed to pummel their opponent, that opponent would likely learn--after enough beatings--to stop stepping into the ring. The ideals of righteousness in the fight between professor and cop, to the extent that they are allowed to be present/activated without being held mindfully, actually impel or exaggerate the competitive energies of both fighters. Let's get ready to rumble!

You can't create the competition by competing and then complain that it is difficult, or about the outcome, without being both a momma's boy and a poor sport. You cannot take someone else's cake, eat it too, and also feel disappointed if they do not thank you for eating their cake. (Well, I suppose you can but it is ridiculous--here's your social feedback for creating a more reasonable self-image.) Luckily, we have laws in America for handling this sort of situation. Surprising that the President would choose to take on the role of referee, but it is a good example of referring to someone higher up the status ladder to keep the ego-competition from becoming more of a conflict.

While a judge and jury must consider citizens innocent until proven guilty, police must consider suspects dangerous and escalating until shown to be not so. Once an American shows that they are not dangerous but merely acting like a prick, we all need to step back and say--that's your right up to a certain extent defined by law more than opinion. Even if Sgt. Crowley got it wrong, the justice system as a whole got it right (including both parties' remaining right to stupidly sue one another for conjointly making mountains out of molehills; it will take lawyers to put that into legal language, I'm sure). America wins even if Crowley and Gates come out looking like puffed-up pricks. I will try to give them the benefit of the doubt 2 out of every 3 times, and if we look at their public records as a whole, they both look like contributors to society even if they both end up eating a little humble pie over this episode. Enjoy, gentlemen. You are a match made in a magical heaven, angels come to earth for our entertainment...I mean, benefit. No, thank you.

Tracking

2009-07-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

One of the things that fascinates me is how individual desire gets "translated" into social interaction. In research on psychotherapy, they've found that expertise does not account for at least 40% of improvement when therapy goes well. 40% comes from what psychologists call "rapport"--the interactions or relationship between therapist and client. This finding translates into relating in general, I think. John Gottman found that 2 out of 3 arguments even in successful marriages cannot be solved and must simply be lived with. That means that a lot of what makes up a happy relationship involves all kinds of factors like similarities and differences, but how many people really consider that a huge part of overcoming problems in ANY human relationship means having 2:3 disagreements go unresolved. If we look for a simple definition of maturity, we could say that maturity means giving everyone or almost everyone the chance to disagree with me two out of every three times.

So when I talk about maturity, and people say, "But who can say what maturity is?", you can hold me to this personal goal. I want to have the chops to give each individual I meet the benefit of the doubt two out of every three times we disagree at least, and what's more, I want to communicate that this is what I'm shooting for. If I can do that, much of the time I'll be able to at least relate to someone else on a human level even if we don't ever get married.

That lays out a general goal, a general direction why I bring up the rest of this. If the most basic attentional ability is something like playfulness or attentional receptivity, we can look at ways to improve that in ourselves. One way is cultivating the willingness to give others--and ourselves also--the benefit of the doubt concerning their intentions. But beyond that, the second attentional skill is concentration. How does that translate into groups? In some situations, people might be poor at staying focused on their own but find that being in a group helps them stay "on track". Think about sticking to an exercise regime, a new diet, a difficult job, etc. Those things can be made much easier or much, much harder with or without social support. This happens to the extent that many things we could not accomplish on our own we can achieve with a little help from our friends/colleagues/whomever.

So I'll call "tracking" (staying on track) the social equivalent of concentrating (which happens basically "within" individuals). Different skills go into keeping a group on track. Think of someone you know who is such an expert at something that having almost anyone else around getting involved drags their performance down. This is an example of someone who may be a genuine expert, who may be excellent at concentrating on the task at hand, but who is not so good about translating that expertise into group performance. Think of getting frustrated with anything you can do at least competently and the frustration that can arise when working with someone who is a klutz or an amateur in comparison. Concentrating increases our ability to do difficult and complex things, but it can also increase the intensity of frustration when we feel disrupted while we're trying to concentrate. This is the same with all the attentional skills--they are helpful in and of themselves, but no one of them (in and of itself) is enough; we need to complement one skill with another with another. Expertise and concentration, then, can actually disrupt a group by intensifying frustration and destroying cohesion. At the same time, tracking is the closest social equivalent to the individual attentional skill of concentrating.

Because they correlate so closely, we can often make up for one with the other. If I am bored with math, I'll be much more likely to stay engaged with that topic if I'm around a teacher or class that is really excited by math. We naturally want to feel included in what's going on. Fighting or denying that natural inclination takes attention and energy. The brain uses approximately 25% (!!!!) of our energy, so when we waste that energy, we waste a lot. What's more, since we all want to be part of the group, when there is a strong enough pull in the group towards denying an interest in math (or whatever), we look to become part of that denial or we look to split the group. If you like math, you start wishing that the people who don't care would just leave or try. And they seem intrusive for not getting "with the program". If you don't like math, the people who do will seem nerdy, maybe dominating, and you wish they'd just get out of your face with all that noise; if they like math, fine, but leave me out of it.

If you look at it structurally, this makes sense--we agitate for what we want, our negative emotions tell us something even though we rarely listen to the wisdom in them. Part of where a lot of confusion comes in is when we either want a certain degree of maturity from our groups or when we don't want to be held to some high or abstract standard that we haven't agreed to in the first place. It's hard to do intervene well in a conflict situation when we aren't aware of what makes for good cohesion, collaboration, and tracking. Hopefully, as I get more into these subjects, you'll find my logic to be very circular and self-supportive. That's an internal part of logic as well as group cohesion. Somewhere around 40% of what you like or dislike doing depends on how well you are relating to the group. That's almost half of deciding whether you like something or not. Parents who have seen teenagers run through multiple trends know what I'm talking about--when it's trnedy, it means the world; no trendiness, it's nothing. 40%. The same holds for adults.

Nothing

2009-07-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to me that this is the follow-up topic to fairy dust. It feels right.

In some types of addictions treatment, they say that you have to hit rock bottom before you can truly make life-altering changes concerning your addiction. I have found that as long as there is something left to lose, that's not rock bottom. As long as there is something valuable that can be taken away, people can be manipulated by their fear of loss. But, if you feel like you are at the rock bottom, there is still some solidity there, still some feeling of emotional sensation that can be felt as better or worse. There is still something, maybe seemingly for the first time, to rely on.

If you go beyond rock bottoms, you find nothingness. This nothingness leaves not even the sense of something solid to lie on or fall down to. In my experience, memory has still functioned at these life-moments even though there are moments within that rock-bottomlessness where nothing discernible is functioning mentally. As with many quasi-contemplative or contemplative states, there is often a residual or echo of something from the moment before. Like in dreams, we may see something from earlier in that day or week. When we come home from work, we may bring excitement or disappointment in the front door of our homes with us. The preceding moment usually has some effects that noticeably carry over.

The first time I lost my soul-deep unhappiness in exchange for nothingness, it was horrifying. My mind struggled like a fish whose tail is nailed to the cutting board. You're aware of where you were and where you are and what that means is happening as you gasp for air, thrash, and hope for some miracle. When the knife comes instead of the miracle, depending on your situation, the reality of disappointment may be harsher and more real than the pain of the knife. When you realize that the disappointment and pain go so deep that they mean nothing, not even to you anymore, something completes itself. Not only does the fish get no more air as it is eviscerated, but the disappointment also runs out of air and it breaths no more.

The nothingness is unimaginable.

I've been reading Hui-neng again. Always liked Hui-neng. The first major occurrence once Hui-neng gets to the monastery is that the teacher calls him a barbarian, denies his sense of reality, tells him to shut his mouth, and sends him off to do menial work. This is quite a contradiction to the flash of insight or recognition or realization that comes when Hui-neng hears the Diamond Sutra being spoken (his motivation for completely changing his life and heading for this Zen master).

Hui-neng says, "If you just do not think of anything at all, once all thoughts end you die and come back to life someplace else. This is a big mistake; those who study the Way should think about it."

While I am altering the context to some extent, this was the feeling of coming through the moments of nothingness. There was the lack of air or a total suffocation of spirit (sometimes accompanied by some other sort of pain or suffering), some sort of death and the stillness of death, some strange state in between where there was what I can best describe as glimpses or flickerings of feelings or perceptions or sensations, and the awareness that waking up tomorrow would bring a different "someplace else" but that I would be no wiser, better, no healthier for that change. After the first time, those flickerings felt as if soul or self or whatever was clothing itself once again in its same old trappings--something like a dance of the seven veils in reverse.

Somewhere in the repetitions, you become familiar enough with the process that the surprise lessens; when that happens, the horror begins to drop off; the interest in paying attention to the suffering--the fascination with one's own suffering--begins to fall away. And although there are moments within this moment where there is no attention that can be called as such, there are also moments where--without some previously or instinctively chosen "object" or focus, attention is present. In "Braveheart", we have the William Wallace character find something through the pain of being quartered and he cries out heroically, "FREEDOM!" If the gutting happens, but for some mundane reason like dinner, and if you are something like prey rather than a hero, there is no heroism or other ideas to draw that momentary attention.

Now, if all of this seems melodramatic, it is not far from a great deal of the Theravadin focus on death and decay. We can imagine ourselves a good bit of the way into this process and pair that with analytic meditation. As long as there is some drama to hang our attention on, we can imagine into it. But when it happens often enough, slowly enough, or deeply enough, we are there for the moments of attention as well as everything else I have described. I don't know that it is pleasant or that I recommend this aspect of Theravadin monk training for anyone, but the process is like that which has become somewhat popularly known in the all the assassin movies when the Cleaner comes in to clean up the mess. The bodies must be disposed of, usually in some caustic manner.

In contemplation--spontaneously or intentionally--the body and mind are disposed of. Especially if it is your first time, you may feel a slight burning sensation.

I don't specifically know any Buddhist take on the matter, but if you pay attention during those moments of attention, you may notice some light, almost careless, curiosity. It's without care, but it isn't the common connotative usage of careless. It may be one instance of bare attention--bare due to wearing everything else out rather than some degree of actualization. The sense of utter nothingness provides a great deal or depth of equanimity afterwards. Nothing can be taken from, nothing can harm you because you are already gone. It's like the shadow of prajnaparamita.

Gretel Ehrlich is a fascinating author who has been struck by lightning twice. She said that a cowboy is most like a pile of stones. More than anything else, he makes it through the brutality of the seasons; he lasts. That is the impression afterwards: "I last", or "Awareness lasts." This is different from the more vital "I am" experience. The lasting is more a sense of vulnerability than invulnerability; there is no escape, no way out, no relief available, the wind and rain and cold abide. The word "unremitting" describes everything that is and ever was. The lastingness is different from the equanimity, but the association between them runs deep as the feeling of a razor's edge cutting into the inside of your backbone.

After all of this, the brightness of attention or awareness stands out like the feeling at the end of A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENOSOVITCH, like if you ran until you collapsed from complete exhaustion--long after running through vomiting and migraine and sunstroke--then a cool breeze blew across the back of your left ear. The equanimity seems less something that came from the nature of the universe or humanity or consciousness and more something that has been hammered into your spine by a sledge with the weight and force of a collapsing star. And you may not know if the lastingness is the greatest blessing that could be given or the harshest sentence even a cruel god could devise.

With all of that, I say smile. But bullshit doesn't mean much here.

Glimmerings (III) Don't Exist

2009-07-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

I'd like to address the, "There are no such things as fairies," perspective. That idea is an impediment. Many people impede themselves without knowing that they are choosing, behaviorally if not intentionally, to impede themselves. Hui-neng, again, said that the substance of mind going and coming freely is prajna. Hasrat Inayat Khan said, "The more one knows reality, the less one uses the word 'real'." There is an interesting feeling of denial and exclusion that comes along with the perspective that there are no such things as fairies or that glimmerings don't exist if they don't have a boring scientific or Latin name. That feeling, like mental constipation, is the opposite of the "freely coming and going". Structurally, "freely coming and going" is not a bad description for playfulness or for subtle phenomena. What's the difference?

I don't know that we can say that there really is a really real difference. I like that Khan focused on the difference between talking about ideas about God as opposed to realizing the presence of God. In the debate, presence is often ignored; in the presence, the debate becomes meaningless. But God may not be really real. As we come to know reality, the mental constipation and the wavering of doubt become less interesting and we tend to go with gnosis over impediments to prajna. (From a Buddhist perspective, we might focus the language more on the form and emptiness of a "self" as present but not necessarily really real.) Trungpa talked about the existence of the "illusory body"; Chuang Tzu gave his famous butterfly dream remarks. In the Bible, in Ecclesiastes or Lamentations I believe, it says that nothing is really real but life is hard anyway.

But, as with many things involving attention and mental phenomena, we can say that if you pay attention to the glimmerings, you notice them more. The more you notice them, the more you increase your familiarity. The more you increase your familiarity, the less you doubt or deny their "reality". And the less you spend your mental time and energy in doubt or denial, the more vital you feel and the more life you bring out of your body and mind and into interaction with the world. The quickness involved is something--whether it is a real or formed something or more of an unreal or formless something is unimportant. Glimmerings don't exist. (Wink.) Derrida is laughing. Psssh, glimmerings. Whatever. The laughter is certainly one possible response to my original reactivity.

Want a Zen joke? This is just my style.

How do you split the ocean in two?
With a see-saw.

(Good one, Betty.)

Glimmerings II: Pull-up Diapers for Everyone!

2009-07-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

I like stories. I like the story about the crazy astronaut who drove across the country in Depends so that she could get right to attacking her romantic competition with pepper spray. Yes, there is evil lurking in the darkness (of the parking garage). Then there's also the story of Jesus saying we can't get into heaven unless we become like children. So, then, diapers for everyone?

While you can do what you like on that subject, I systematize. It's not always entertaining, but it can be helpful. Something I've figured out is that gross-level affirmation of a subtle self is important for developing what I consider to be an adequate understanding of self, consciousness, the world, etc. Mindfulness trains one in equanimity, and equanimity is good for allowing one to deconstruct the up/down reactive interpretation. Communion is good for by-passing the in/out division, rejection, by bringing people in. In a psychological sense, then, equanimity and communion structurally counteract or can't really exist simultaneously with the up/down/in/out complex of reactions. So that's part of the goal, but how do kids get that sort of thing across without writing long blogposts?

Kids often work in and with glimmerings. It's so natural, they often don't know they're doing it--which makes them good at it because glimmerings are faster than thought. Think of how many times you were told to stop fidgeting or to be consistent or pay attention or whatever. When we introject that domination, we learn to deafen or blind ourselves to glimmerings. Dogs have glimmerings, and we can teach dogs to sometimes ignore their glimmerings. Glimmerings are nearly universal--they aren't limited to people. And there is a magical life-energy that comes with glimmerings, an energy that is diminished in our world when we blind and deafen ourselves to it.

Probably my favorite biblical quote is the one where Jesus talks about glimmerings, fairy dust. Did you know that Jesus told his disciples about fairy dust? He did. He said that they would not be ruined by what they put into themselves (the way they had been taught that shellfish and pork were defiling) but by what they did not bring out of themselves. In other words, heaven is not an absence of pork (what kind of heaven would heaven be without bacon?) but rather a magical life lived by bringing the fairy dust within you (which we feel as these glimmerings) out. Jesus liked stories, so he also talked in metaphors about keeping your light going, not hiding your light, etc. Show your glimmerings. Other than wanting sons who will one day play in the NBA and take our last names into glory and history forever, we love kids for bringing out the life they feel.

I won't necessarily suggest Depends, but Jesus and I believe in wine and fairy dust. That just leaves us with the difference between play and subtle awareness. In Hui-neng's words, "Going and coming freely--the substance of mind without blockage--this is prajna."

Glimmerings: A Quasi-technical Talk on Fairy Dust

2009-07-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

Prompted by the questions, "What is play therapy?" and "If I'm more actualized/conscious than you, why does interacting with you make me want to punch or avoid you?", I've worked out somewhat of a structural analysis of interacting beyond and within an Understanding level of awareness. A slightly less personalized way of looking at this topic is to think about it as looking at the difference between play-states and "subtle" states.

The second question (punch/avoid) is easy enough to answer, although an answer doesn't necessarily change the feeling. The aggression and avoidance are two behavioral options (fight/flight) that spring from the reactivity which results from feeling that anything I do will be interpreted from a limiting perspective. This is slightly different from simply being misinterpreted from a wrong perspective. Wrong perspectives (if someone simply misconstrues intention) can be corrected with a simple, "That's not what I meant; I mean this instead." Of course, spending all out time correcting one another is not all that much fun, so that answer is not really a solution.

And if we think about Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development", we can reference how kids learn from one another in ways that often don't happen when overly institutionalized adults are around. See Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments. This is like the educational variation of play therapy--mixing fun, competition, and collaboration into education. Certainly, kids can be pedantic, but their groups often have less tolerance for pedantry than adult groups. If you watch enough groups of kids, you will clearly notice some times when kids are intentionally learning. But you will also be struck by how often kids pick things up that they didn't seem to be paying attention to. Adults are the same way, but we may be better at denying just how much we are influenced by things we don't necessarily choose to be influenced by.

This raises an important question: can we really design an effective educational system if we don't really know when and what people are learning? A second, equally relevant question: do we want to? Let me contextualize: if people are not clearly aware of having peak experiences, what is their motivation to move beyond a pedantic worldview? And, for the folks who are clearly aware of subtle and/or causal states, how can they share this sort of experience without being pedantic. (Hopefully, you can take my pedantic answer somewhat ironically.)

The obvious solution is fairy dust (dreadfully sorry for having a title that ruins the surprise). Think of how serious kids can be concerning its importance.

Without waking experience of higher states, the motivations towards contemplative practice (into intentionally achieving higher states) include idealization with aspiration and also suffering-avoidance. We have all wished for a better something, one without some particular cause of suffering (like hunger, back pain, reductionistic interpretative frameworks, 80s music and styles, a lamentable absence of ice cream, etc.). Idealization and avoidance both structurally mimic the up/down and in/out relationships we are instinctively primed for. This place is better/worse; this group is better/worse; I can't believe I'm part of this family; Mean people suck, nice people swallow...you get the drift.

To really move beyond the affirmation or endorsement of that sort of separative reactivity, mindfulness practice works really well, but if you're not already doing it, then we come back to the question of how to engage with contemplative practices without simply reproducing the up/down/in/out while possibly adding subtle experiences (you know, the ones that allow a spiritual-not-religious us to feel better than them while denying that we hold that truth [our betterness] as self-evident as well as backed up by our higher consciousness and their decrepitude).

Time: It's On My Side

2009-07-07T09:35:00.001-07:00

Here's a link to a presentation by Philip Zimbardo concerning time perspectives. This supports part of what I've put together as a combination of stages, changes in brain potentials, self-identities, and attentional abilities.

The developmental part--approximately 11-15 minutes into the video--covers generic differences in time perspectives across a lifespan. When we're young, we're present-oriented. As we grow up, we learn future orientation and past orientation. The more educated we are, the less present-oriented we become. If we're lower-class economically or in a politically unstable situation, we stay more present-oriented. Zimbardo's basic point is that there is an optimal time perspective that involves some past, present, and future orientation along with some degrees of optimism and skepticism.

An interesting point is that, as we get into the age-range that defines the stage of Understanding, we become less present-oriented while we're learning theories and complex systems of logic, social organization, and ideals. Further down the road--as all that new prefrontal growth during adolescence has also been pruned, after some of the raging hormone storms die down a bit--we shift back towards present-orientation to a greater degree. Raising children encourages and also forces this to some extent.

Part of what Zimbardo gets into, then, is that as adults we have enough perspective to look to optimize what we focus on. This is Mindful Appreciation, but since most people don't make the mindfulness or the appreciation explicit, they often mush themselves partially into this stage without really grasping it decisively. That's not surprising since they are, to some extent, leaving the conceptual ideals--the absolutes--of the stage of Understanding behind to some extent. (Maybe mitigating or contextualizing the ideals is a better way of saying it.)

Mindfulness, though, allows us to put a sharper edge on those ideals and apply them less often (or more appropriately) as an option to putting a duller edge on ideals or hiding them away in a certain cynical/cosmopolitan embarrassment of our adolescent idealism. When mindfulness is applied with an explicit awareness of the desire to include appreciation, we can choose to modify realistic potential over fighting for unreasonable ideals.

Ideas at Play

2009-07-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about what happens "structurally" to mental phenomena once we become somewhat accustomed to mindfulness, when mindfulness becomes enough of a trained habit in our brains that the potential onslaught of phenomena is too familiar to be troubling or distracting. I put the word structurally in quotation marks because I am not as interested in the physiological correlates as I am in the "logical" structure--mind, not brain, in this note.

And, as always, I question the place of play--how important it is, how it fits in with work, relationships, meditation...etc. Hasrat Inayat Kahn said that many people feel their ideas are dead because they model their ideas (or their ideation, the process of making and using ideas) on inanimate things. People, then, who model their ideas on living things seem to adjust more easily to growth, change, novelty, and unexpected occurrences.

I am also interested in this intersection during a meditation session where, once one has calmed the mind and found a reasonably stable sense of centeredness, clarity, and precision, what then? There are all kinds of possibilities. The tranquility is not the same as mind-blowing or transcendent insight, but the moment of tranquility is certainly rife with potential. In Zen, there are plenty of warnings about makyo--illusory phenomena--and how easy it is for one to invest the feeling of novelty and interest in unimportant, even deluded, daydreaming. Certainly, if one is on the straight and narrow path to "enlightenment", all this potential is a distraction to progress. But part of what makes makyo compelling, besides the novelty, is the heightened sense of awareness-energy that it involves. Like being high, makyo is enticing because it is different and can be pleasant--although, even when it is unpleasant, it tends towards being fascinating. (Alas and alack, though, vacationing in makyo will probably not lead to the true-dharma-eye-treasury.)

For those who are not familiar with makyo in Zen or in their own meditation, makyo brings in a range of feeling(s) that is similar to those in dreaming. Ken Wilber calls this range "subtle" phenomena. In this range, or realm if you like, we end up feeling enchanted, compelled, enticed, curious, bright, enlivened, quick, etc. Even something like fear is likely to be pumped up and become something like the terror that lets you know you are alive. And this terror easily rolls into jubilation once the perception of threat has passed if one is not already feeling an adrenalin "rush" while the perceived threat is still immediate.

Play is often hard to logically structure adequately. What really happens in play? In asking this sort of question, we are usually trying to see what purposes can be imposed on play. While we grow, the types of play we choose change. Sometimes play can be engaged in in order to determine a status hierarchy, and especially this type of play can go "over the line" and become not so fun while still being rewarding for the winner. We incorporate formal conceptions into play in strategy games. I love chess, and I like to play just for the fun of it, but I also prefer to win. In playing chess, some days I get in the flow of the game, and it's almost like I'm not thinking through what my moves are. My awareness is very much on the chess, but it feels like I'm almost not there. The normally functioning, gross-ego/chunk-processing is occurring, but it is not the only thing going on in my awareness; it's not even primary on the better days.

Now, we all always have more going on in our brains than we can attend to. With mindfulness training, we can learn to attend (be aware) at a much higher degree of precision and to a much wider range of phenomena than is usual. In these moments of flow, I'm aware of being able to think and attend in my usual manner or I can "let go" to a greater extent, like mentally relaxing my focus analogously to the way we relax our visual focus to see a certain type of visual illusion (the type I am terrible at seeing). In team sports especially, coaches talk about "letting the game come to you". In more individual athletics, it's more like, "Be the ball."

Being the ball allows for time to "stop" or be so unimportant as to seem nonexistent; the same is true of self-awareness in that it is so heightened that the usual self may seem nonexistent. When coordinating with others, flow involves feeling not only some degree of relationship but also of pacing, timing. Time only seems nonexistent after these flow moments when we look back and have the feeling that time didn't matter then. If you think about it, you can re-mind yourself of your sense of timing during that moment of coordinated action.

In the same way that tranquility can be said to exist between (temporally) thoughts, and we can become very aware of this by doing intentional relaxation meditation, the bright energy of bliss can be said to exist between sensations and perceptions that are more subtle than thoughts. As we become aware of thoughts, we can learn to dis-identify with them, and this dis-identification allows us to familiarize with the time/space between thoughts. And as we become more mindfully aware of perceptions and sensations, we can either be led around by the tails or trailers of these stimuli or we can familiarize with the energy that is available as like the background of all of that. We can stick our attention in the background, in the bliss, while allowing sensation and perception to pass in and through, or we can also "follow" the sensations or perceptions that seem so alive with this energy. It is like playing hide-and-seek in heaven. This variety of options is becoming more obvious as it becomes more familiar.

And then--there is always one more "and then"--it is very interesting to think about bringing this energy consistently and intentionally into relating. I think that we can do with ideas, relationship, pacing, etc. the same thing we do with impulse and emotions when we play in ways that seem more simplistic. It's just harder to say what the game is, to limit the game, because of referring to a wider array of stimuli and also investing our responses with bliss--which is like the icing on the cake of ecstasy. It's okay to just eat the icing.

Regarding Others Equally

2009-07-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

For a long time I've been wondering what would be a complimentary form of contemplation/meditation to go along with mindfulness training. Much of the mindfulness training I have been exposed to is somewhat depersonalizing, so it is very helpful in creating the space that allows one to drop a great deal of one's negatively reactive responses, but it doesn't necessarily help beginners become more connected with other people and connective emotionality. This is not meant as a slam on mindfulness training in general or on any particular techniques, nor is my exposure to various techniques exhaustive. But in my experience, mindfulness leads people away from habitual reactivity and also often leads away from connectivity to some extent. Stepping away from habitual reactivity is like opening the door to a more immediate and authentic connection, but it's still necessary to step through that door.

I'm a big fan of Traleg Kyabgon's book MIND AT EASE. One of the few aspects of this book that can make it somewhat inaccessible or not directly and deeply applicable (especially if you spend your life grinding through books on meditation to distill techniques and effects!) is the number of suggested meditations. I've often felt like, "Well, there are so many things to possibly focus on, how can I just focus on one? And which one? How do I know which one?" As my study focus and interest shifts somewhat away from an emphasis on neurological effects and metaphysical states, it is shifting towards emotions and relationships.

I believe there are probably one or two techniques that can be chosen as "essential" for each level of attentional ability. Obviously, mindfulness practice will be hugely important at the stage of Mindful Appreciation. But I also wondered if some seated meditation technique might be really applicable concerning the appreciation side to go along with the precision of mindfulness. Since a great deal of my remaining stress comes from interactions with other people, I'm most interested in turning that "stuck energy"--frustration and disappointment--into appreciation and communion. Our frustrations and desires and inspiration are usually closely connected.

I like Kyabgon's method of moving through a variety of steps in one meditation session. Starting off with releasing stress and deep breathing perhaps, establishing calm and some degree of clarity, and then incorporating some type of analytic or thoughtful contemplation into that state of tranquility or balanced mind. And, again from Kyabgon, I like the effects of comparing one sort of personal reaction to another. This is the one I find most solid, earthy, or fitting right now.

After about three minutes of calming and focusing--it may take up to twelve or so minutes to feel relatively calm and somewhat stable in one's calm--I spend a few minutes (maybe three to five again) thinking of everyday stress. I think of how I tend to be when I feel agitated or frustrated in my daily life. There's the exasperation in facing chores ("I don't want to do dishes again!"), worry (With all this traffic, how will I get there in time? If I'm late will I keep my job? How will I pay my bills if I lose my job?"), disappointment in myself and others (We should be so much better than this; I thought so much better of you/me"), frustrated aggression ("Get out of my way, Jackass!"). Although spending time in this frame of mind is unpleasant, I know I'm going back to it at some point tomorrow if I don't find a way to address it. I can't just feel nice when I feel agitated this way, and positive thinking doesn't do it for me. So I'm sharing what works for me. After I feel like I'm really "in" this sort of feeling, I switch gears. I shift to focusing on some instance when I helped someone, when I did something worthwhile for or with someone else that I can feel good about. I think about some instance where maybe I could help someone and I visualize myself helping. I think of some instance where I could use some help, and I visualize what it would be like if someone helped me then. I stay with this emotional feeling for a long time (I don't know what will feel like a long time to other folks). I listen to this feeling as a very important and basic part of human nature. And I take a few minutes, going slowly, to think about engaging with this part of other people when I run into them. I think about how this is part of their emotional make-up too, but that they may get caught up in their everyday preoccupations like I do. And I resolve to value this state of mind over being stressed, this type of action over those that are focused primarily on gaining me some comfort. (There is actually a different set of neurological pathways in the brain that are activated when we regard ourselves and our comfort as opposed to when we are generous with others.)

If this seems like too much of a "hearts and flowers" type of meditation, read ON KINDNESS. Rather than giving metaphysical "reasons" why we should be good, I tend to prefer the evolutionary psychology and neurophysiology that presents evidence on how we are social animals. So I've got more references if ON KINDNESS doesn't fit the bill for you. But the more we practice shifting out of self-regard-mode, the more able we are to get outside of our personally constructed mental prisons. The more we regard others, the more our minds "naturally" move in that direction without effort. And the happiest people are those who are most socially connected and active (along with getting into flow-states). That is simply how it is. This is one of the techniques that strikes me as directly applicable, effective, and fitting. Exemplary.

Mindful Humor?

2009-06-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

My question for today is how closely locked mindfulness and equanimity are. Further, does mindfulness or equanimity--in very precise moments--exclude humor, or maybe more accurately, laughter? Is there a significant shift in mental states between the precision of mindfulness (perhaps more synchronized cortical functioning?) and whatever inconsistency in comparison that sparks laughter? I think it's likely that this can be answered by compiling existing neurophysiological data rather than needing to create more.

But seriously, folks...if samatta leads to tranquility, that tranquility is different from humor and laughter. In my own experience, it seems that there is a sort of blissful sense of possibility, like a nimbus of almost-laughter, that sometimes accompanies mindfulness meditation. Laughter itself seems like a distraction from focus, from single-mindedness and the drift into depths of equanimity. But laughter feels somewhat distinct from that nimbus that is like potential-laughing-with-me. I wonder about whether that liminal feeling full of possibility is like the anticipation that precedes a punchline. I think it is. And if that is so, if that is like Jeffrey Schwartz's equipotentiality (concerning potential brain states/responses) is there a clear and obvious bifurcation between moving towards laughter and tranquility?

It seems to me that, in an Abhidhamma sense, mindfulness may put a sharp edge on consciousness that can accentuate humor, but there is a significant shift between a moment of mindful precision that sets up humor and some actual conception or feeling of humor in a following "moment". (I'm assuming we're already ruling out nervous laughter and the type of humor that simply reduces cognitive dissonance, "manufactured laughter", "purposeful laughter".)

In this question, I think we're getting at the differences (or potential differences) between sahaj samadhi and something along the lines of nirvikalpa samadhi. In one sense, samadhi is samadhi. In another sense, oneness is eternal and ever-present and unchanging while in another, it seems eternal and ever-present and fluid.

Group Identity

2009-06-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

This hierarchy of identities may help to direct organizational progress as well. We can compare private organizations (family), civic organizations, and professional organizations (companies). With families, it is obvious that one purpose is to "raise" the children, and it is not such a stretch to include "raising" the adults as well. With the obvious age/experience difference, the adults will have a greater accountability but not necessarily any greater ability. Nonprofit and voluntary organizations usually exist for an explicit purpose. Their group dynamics will be similar to the group dynamics that play out in for-profit organizations.

There are at least two major types of for-profit organizations. The first is private organizations that are not under the pressures inherent in the stock market. Private organizations are able to find a business niche, produce a product or service, and survive by maintaining an acceptable net profit. Public for-profit organizations are under the pressures of the interest of absentee investors. (My bias is notably, admittedly against this interest. This is where I find profit and growth acceptable but economic exploitation unacceptable.) Generally, the push from absentee investors is towards increasing profit rather than sustainable growth and profit, so this type of organization tends to grow to unsustainable size through unsustainable means. (Recently, "too big to fail".)

In order to sell, a company provides some product or service. This is analogous to the creative self. As a business, this production does not need to be playful or involve any depth of curiosity if the product or service is simple enough and if demand and competition are somewhat consistent. As competition increases, or if demand is erratic, then a greater degree of creativity and flexibility becomes important. So production of a saleable product or service is necessary in for-profit organizations.

At the level of Purpose, or able self, we encounter the bottom line. The bottom line involves staying in business. Because societies progress, industries progress, and most products also must progress. Even with products that don't change much over time--such as bread--we'll see changes in production, distribution, and sales. With products that involve technology, we'll see more noticeable, more significant change even in the products themselves. At base, then, companies must keep up with the changes in their industries even if their (energy) industries are behind social expectations. With something as competitive as software, if you're not producing those changes, the industry may pass you by altogether. So with different industries, there are different pressures, obviously. Staying in business, continuing to produce, is the bottom line even if the products one produces change. There's a strong product focus here.

At the level of Understanding, we begin to deal in management and business planning. This is the "good and right" self. As far as for-profit businesses are concerned, a good business is a successful business. At this point, then, we're focusing on effective planning and efficient management. With a hierarchical structure, the managers are not necessarily producers of product. To the extent that managers are not hands-on producers, they face multiple and competing goal sets. Bureaucracy becomes very important as managers focus less on the quality of the product and sustainability of the company and more on maintaining their own jobs. The "good" manager will be able to handle these three goal sets. At this level of abstraction, besides bureaucracy gaining ground, there is also the possibility of conceptual products: teaching, consulting, therapy, research, etc. So intellectual rights also come in.

Now, as we include increasing levels of complexity, integration becomes increasingly important. If you are an individual farmer looking to get agricultural products to a local market, your business plan may be fairly simple even if your business takes a great deal of personal investment. As multiple classes of workers come into the picture, the competition between class interests (the interests of different positions) complicate the overall process to the extent that these interests cannot be (or simply are not) integrated. Historically, managers have enjoyed a greater organizational status than front-line or ground-level workers. Recently, as the preponderance of available products also moves up this scale, managers have found their status challenged as well. This is not a new process even if it is a new class being challenged. Just as mechanization devalued physical labor, the ready availability of information challenges the expert status of "knowledge workers" and managers while devaluing every type of intellectual property except cutting-edge material. Even the valuable/saleable lifespan of cutting-edge material is shrinking.

The market also changes. Consumer expectations change. This is true for governments and their citizens as well. As the availability of knowledge becomes expected, consumers become more educated. As consumers become more educated--which occurs while production methods and products become increasingly differentiated--they have the option of becoming choosier. And in order to make what they consider to be good choices, they expect a greater degree of transparency. These expectations influence business to not only be "good" at production but also "right" (in the consumer's eyes at least) about how and what they produce. While there is no absolute transparency, information, or coordination between producer and consumer, it is generally in the interest of producers to coordinate with their consumers. All of this so far is taken for granted for the most part.

But this space between Understanding and Appreciation is full of promise...and tension. At the level of Appreciation, you have educated amateurs who can compete with businesses in endeavors that allow open-source production (Linux v. Microsoft, for example). This threatens the market share and sometimes even the existence of certain businesses. As this occurs, coordinating a group of dispersed, interested individuals (coordination) challenges the institutionalized management process (design) itself. As it turns out, coordination of educated individuals is much more effective at producing innovation because of the nature of innovation. This is interesting. Management always had to be somewhat responsive to the physical situation, ground-level workers, competition, and consumer expectations. But this expands competition to include groups that are not under the pressure to create financial profit. In the past, management could improve by focusing on efficiency; but now, management is competing against a production process where efficiency is not a significant concern. And, by taking out efficiency as a significant concern, open-sourcing can be much more effective at creating innovation. To the extent that it ends up making goods available to the public for free, its effects end up being very efficient if the public utilizes the products on a widespread basis.

Part of what this does is to emphasize the important of reputation. When someone needs a finite product within a certain timeframe and certain parameters, it's still best to hire a reputable business. But as societies meet the basic needs of their populations, those populations increasingly turn their attention to progress, to innovation and appreciation--same as happened with mechanization of agricultural production. Surplus attention moves upwards and out. Increasingly--and this is noticeable at the most creative, most competitive firms--people look for the expression of their creative, playful, and true selves where they work.

As firms look for sustainability in this changing environment, it can seem that demands come from all over. It can help to organize goals by degree of necessity in order to determine what is possible. The most basic set of necessities are the physical necessities that it takes to create and market a product. This forms one set of pressures. Integrating expectations of worker classes, reducing conflict between classes (alignment), creates another. Improving production and distribution methods towards consumer-driven expectations of ethical production is another (one which has increased and will likely continue to increase for some time). Developing and maintaining industry advantages are another. Competing with open-sourcing is one that fits hand-in-glove with maintaining and developing talent. Truly talented individuals with cutting-edge training have high expectations. Here, it can be helpful to differentiate between playful enjoyment and creativity as separate from the sense of a meaningful life. While talented individuals will want (demand) both to some extent, providing one or the other may be easier. Trying to provide both may be possible, but even so it helps to distinguish the two. In fact, it may be possible to set up the context of the work situation to also encourage flow experiences at work (pleasure, flow, and meaning being different but complimentary).

A great part of integrating company mission, worker class interests, consumer expectations, and pleasure-flow-meaning will involve being able to communicate to these different levels of goals and interests. Depending on the message one wants to convey, it will be helpful to set up communications customs and expectations to fit with these different levels. A further dialogue on customs and expectations within communications may be called for. Further exploration on where open-sourcing is more effective than institutionalized design will also be interesting.

Why Affirmation of Identities?

2009-06-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

When we look towards emergence in social processes as opposed to looking at how to garner more power or status from the social structures and customs already in place, we are looking in a fundamentally new way. Rather than looking at a zero-sum equation (as if there is only so much affluence, power, status, whatever), we end up looking to create. One difficulty, though, is that many of us feel that desire to create without having a clear idea of what we want to collaborate on creating. This is where affirming identities can be applicable.

Essentially, we are asking the question: where is opportunity? Or, "If Opportunity is always knocking, what is possible now?" In the same way that it is somewhat true that all politics are local, all actionable opportunity is local, present, immediate. In order to seize the day, this day, this moment, we need to see the opportunity that is offered here and now. With limited vision, the easiest and surest way to do that is to garner some degree of power or status as historically (already) recognized. This is a process of painting oneself into a corner, though. Eventually, we will bump into everyone else who is painting THEMSELVES into the same corner!

Conflict only makes the limitations obvious and unavoidable--it doesn't suggest progress. What's more, the conflict is only an outcome of limited vision--not so much an inevitable consequence of human nature. When we have enough to space to grow into, most of us are more interested in growth, play, and creative exchange more than limited and limiting positions (corners). It's a high enough percentage that, once we realize what is genuinely inherent in human nature and how to recognize opportunity, there are easily enough of us to contain the psychopaths that will still be attempting conquest of various corners of the world.

In order to suggest or prompt for progress rather than ignoring conflict, winning conflict, or despising conflict, we have to train ourselves to see and utilize opportunity. Now, the physical world (ecology, pollution, economics, etc.) is too complex for me to actually control or even understand fully. But there are certain trends in psychological motivations that are based on universal brain potentials and genetic programming which coordinate our actions whether we recognize the coordination or not. An unintentional experience of these motivations will as likely lead us into competing for corners as to progress and a utilization of opportunities.

Because the world is so complex and society is so mobile, it is hard to plan explicit and concrete progress on a large scale. That's okay--human planning has always fallen far short of the mark set by those who believe in planning. And when it does, and it usually does, we rely on our resilience. If we know ahead of time that our planning is likely to come up short, it doesn't mean we shouldn't plan. It simply means that we should begin to emphasize our resilience. Focusing on resilience--as opposed to only looking at threat and security--not only teaches us about resilience but also puts us in a frame of mind that encourages creativity and action in the face of threat. Emphasizing threat and pumping people for fear, on the other hand, encourages reliance on authority, learned helplessness, and "groupthink".

From an Understanding-level interpretation of the world, we can do our power analyses, risk analyses, etc. and try to problem-solve. But unequal power structures and risk will not go away. In order to take the next step towards flexibility and agency, we need to look at how to move beyond seeing the world in terms of competitive structures/positions and problems to be solved. How? This is simple. We need to encourage intentional experience of the things that drive us. What's more, rather than seeing those things, those drives, as problems, we need to find ways to see our basic and universal drives as potentially valuable. (I say "potentially" because I am a realist; the same drives, taken in a close-minded way, also move us towards fighting in various corners.)

How do we find these seemingly elusive opportunities, these perspectives on potential value? Simple. We look at which "selves" or what qualities others are trying to feel by what they do. We are all almost always trying for something better. We almost always interpret other people's behavior as selfish or incomplete in some way. And that combination allows us to see our own aspiration in comparison to other people's limitations. Psychologically, this puts us in the one-up position, gives us comparative status or moral power in our own minds. Other people are doing the same, and in the real world, our competing visions (when I believe I'm one-up while you believe you're one-up) lead us to conflict. What we can do instead of painting ourselves into that contested and shrinking corner is to start to see our interpretation of ourselves-as-good as a bad thing. This goes into all the humans-are-corrupt, ego-is-evil interpretations. Those interpretations also set up a shrinking corner where people compete to be seen as less-selfish rather than as good or worthy. Bleh, I say, bleh.

Another option is to start to see other people's motivations as affirming in some way, just as I experience most of my motivations to be affirming. This sets up an expanding space and an expansive mindset. What we look to do with this mindset, then, is to separate the limiting aspects of behavior from the positive aspects of motivation. In other words, we combine realism and affirmation while diminishing the assumption that being in a separating/separated one-up position (shrinking corner) is so ideal. I do the same thing for myself as for you. I look at what I'm doing, what positive aspect or self this behavior is intended to affirm, and I check whether or not it is actually supporting a playful self, able self, good and right self, a mature self, a true self, a beatific self, or a fruition self.

Part of what this method assumes is that I am willing to be "right" enough in my thinking and interactions to actually question myself. Usually, when other people question us in ways we don't want, we take it as judgment and threat of our precious corner. We feel cornered. That's a pretty consistent sign. If I feel cornered, I've probably painted myself a good ways towards a corner. In such a situation, someone else competing for that corner or pointing out how I'm limiting myself is secondary to whether or not I am actually painting myself into a corner. If I can't question myself, I have already cornered myself, put my spirit in a stranglehold. If that's what I'm doing, it makes little difference--although it can be distracting--if someone else comes along and tries to choke me!

We are all looking to experience ourselves as open, clear, and free. That is truly who we are and we fight against untrue expressions of who we are. But to actually grow into that freedom--the actual, real-world truth of that freedom--we must know ourselves as creative, able, good, and mature. As Shams of Tabriz said, "All lights are friends to each other." My true self is open to your true self. When I feel closed-off, that is not my light, not my true self. When that is how I am being, I have work to do. My opportunity, at that point, is to take responsibility for how I am feeling and what I am doing. Putting in the necessary work, at that point, is the genuine authentic expression that I want to be and express who I really am. I affirm my light.

Hasrat Inayat Khan said, "Everything in this world which seems to lack harmony is in reality the limitation of man's own vision." If we want to live the beatitude in that statement, we must be true to ourselves, true to each other, true to our world. To find the beatitude in that statement or this world, we must find how it is true.

Integrating Aspects of Self: Affirming Identity is Affirming Life

2009-06-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

Okay--it takes a group, a society to affirm actualization of self-identity. Without social affirmation, we may be relatively transcendental in some ways, but it won't establish in a gross-consciousness way solidly. I know everyone is tired of numbers and categories from me, but there are four steps that need to happen in order for one's actualizing self to be felt, recognized, and fully established in one's gross awareness and social identity (which necessarily involves subtle experience).

1. Experience of various types of healthy self.
2. Expression of...
3. Social recognition of...
4. Social affirmation of...

When we invest individual psychological energy or intention into self-expression, it comes out in noticeable and distinct ways that have distinct feels to them. As we actualize, we learn to intentionally experience, express, have recognized, and take in affirmation of these ways of being. When other people's sense of us does not change, when affirmation and recognition are not forthcoming, we have a surplus of attention and potential that ends up stagnating (actually rejected at the point of expression in this case)--also in somewhat particular and distinct ways (which are, as always, affected by temperament, situation, and culture).

To describe these types of self in line with the levels and skills I've already laid out. The first type is that of me as a playful self. Curiosity and creativity are part of this. The second type is of the able self. Third is the good and right self. Fourth is the mature self. Fifth is what I feel to be true self (dhyana, flow). Sixth is beatific self. And the last could be called many things that refer to eternity, peace, purity, the sacred, saintly, etc. (We can also posit a nondual self, the expression [...etc.] of all these as non-separate.) I'll call that last self the fruition self, as one comes into fruition of one's personality and realization.

This also provides a concrete means of identifying what we feel is lacking in reference to individual experience. We all have the desire to be recognized as each of these things. For some people, those "desires" are not as strong and noticeable as impulses or instincts (like hunger or lust) so they don't necessarily feel those desires as salient, tangible, psychological things. Typically, what I feel most lacking is a general awareness and expression of true self. That is different from what I'd call the genuine momentary expression of self or the right-now-moment expression of genuine self. Sometimes I want to feel able and affirmed as able, so acting able rather than from a center or psychological "place" of dhyana is fine or fitting and genuine in that particular the moment. A different expression may be genuine at the next moment.

People feel pressure when they are called upon to act from a "higher" place than what they genuinely feel at the moment. (Invoking idealization and the demand characteristic involved in expectation is often counterproductive at these moments.) We may also feel disappointed when we are not recognized and affirmed where we are at. (Experiencing and overcoming some disappointment is probably necessary and unavoidable.) In this way, expecting people to act from somewhere they are not feeling, we encourage an inauthentic self by idealizing and expecting something other than what people feel. This idealization or pull method is different from a more organic or supportive "push" method. We may find role models and try to live up to them--that is an example of introjecting an ideal. If we pretend to achieve acting from that idealized place without actually making it, we will probably project grandiosity; but if we can't pull off the pretension, we feel shame.

When we support people in their genuine experience of self, they tend to look for progress at some point. People look to push, we look to improve things, to make things better. It's natural. That is like having a surplus of energy (action potential, priming). If we put that surplus into expectation and idealization, we'll also tend to project our ideals and feel disappointed by--and maybe aggressive against--anyone not living up to our idealizations. When our idealizations become entrenched and habitual enough, they become unquestioned and often even unnoticed expectations (hidden justifications for disappointment and aggression).

We deny an individual and their human potential when we expect or hope for something other than a genuine expression of self. But, since all of these types or aspects of self are universal, we can also deny their genuine self by idealizing and projecting ideals as unrealistic idealizations. When people are supported--put into a context and relationships where they are healthy--they will naturally aspire to a full experience and expression of their potential. When our aspirations fit our expectations and our actions, we are living as inspired selves rather than not living up to idealizations or projecting ideal selves. Since we have different temperaments, we will show different types of inspired selves that involve different degrees of the various levels (or types or aspects of healthy selves).

Honing attentional skills can help increase the efficiency with which one deploys attention. Applying one's experience as to when to push oneself to achieve and when to just be genuine is an expression of individual wisdom. I call the fifth type of self "true self" because it involves a return to clarity and what buddhists call anatta (roughly, "no-self"--the center of my six points of psychological balance). Aspiring to clarity is worthwhile and reinforcing clarity as an integrated aspect of self is also worthwhile. You were meant to be clear and connected; I was meant to be clear and connected. Feeling something other than that is an expression of some sort of ignorance or muddle--it's something less than what we want and deserve. Denying or projecting our genuine desires diminishes our chances of actualizing the potential that motivates those desires.

Happiness

2009-06-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

This is great. The first 9 minutes of this video of Seligman is pretty boring, but after that, the content itself is exciting. He breaks down happiness into a categorization that actually is fitting and applicable. This is the first top-notch psychological material I've seen on increasing happiness. (I'd set FLOW aside as not necessarily about happiness per se without being included/contextualized as it is here.)

Back to Hierarchy

2009-06-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've recently been reading CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT CONSCIENCE, and it's brought up the topic of hierarchical relationships through the lens of folks who are ready to follow unquestioningly or lead without consideration. There is something about the fear and closed mental state that go along with authoritarianism that may be the experiential antithesis of mindfulness--sort of a willed ignorance.

Acceptance lies between grandiosity and shame (the negative feelings associated with being either one-up or one-down in relationship). Mindfulness puts a bright edge on acceptance. With mindful awareness, escapism into exaggeration or avoidance can be understood and felt to be the denial of reality and denial of living that they are.

If one is always attempting escape, this life in this world appears to be a prison. If one is willing to embrace reality, the actual circumstances may not immediately change, and just "thinking positively" is like putting a dress on a pig. Mindful engagement, then, may begin as feeling like getting more intimate with a pig or taking a genuine interest in the characteristics of a prison cell.

The willingness to take an interest is the first step in removing contempt and dissatisfaction from one's life. Willingness is an invitation to authenticity. Authenticity couples with inspiration.

When our experience is based in authenticity and inspiration, rather than exaggeration and avoidance, we might find that there is room enough in this world for pigs and prisons and much, much more. But right now, at this very moment, am I willing?

Resilient, a Sidenote

2009-06-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

I had not found a workable definition for psychological resilience, and that may simply have been because of looking at it from the right angle but not going far enough. The work on play that Dr. Stuart Brown has done really brought home to me the limitations I had assumed. Rather than dealing with resilience from a problem-solving perspective--which is understandable when you're looking at researching how to overcome emotional difficulties--resilience is really about the profusion of health that overcomes challenges.

From a psychological perspective, the positive emotional experience people have this right. Resilience, then, can be described and researched as the capability of returning to a state of creativity, playfulness, or purpose after experiencing adversity. These states, as foundational to psychological health, describe or characterize healthy functioning. Without experiencing these states on a somewhat regular basis, it is impossible to relate well. By focusing too much on the aspect of durability that may be involved in overcoming adversity, we aren't actually drawing from the most basic healthy aspects of our psyches. Being able to maintain some sense of purpose and focus is actually a poorer approximation of the more complete health involved in--and stemming from--the ability to play.

In this vein, then, we can describe play therapy as any intentional behavior aimed at overcoming blocked playfulness. This is different from play itself, which may not be intentionally focused towards overcoming anything. While play may have therapeutic affects, it is not therapy.

VIIInnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

Just as pluralist democracies are still relatively new (in the toddler stage of development), electronic exchange is relatively new. At the same time that the three major 20th century attempts to address tyranny (especially as oligarchy and hereditary aristocracy) in large, densely populated industrial societies were in conflict (fascism, communism, and expansionary capitalism), the issue of electronic exchange became significant. In comparison, the issue of the importance of fossil fuels really came into its own in the previous couple of centuries. And, just as we haven't quite figured out a commonly accepted method of redistributing and utilizing fossil fuels, we haven't quite figured out a commonly accepted method of electronic production and exchange. A relative timeline is important for considering the pace of economic progress. If we don't like the timeline that it takes to create sustainable progress, we will try for revolutionary reforms that will ultimately prove to be unsustainable. If we want changes to be sustained, we will have to institutionalize them. Now, if we see democracy as a form of governance that is inherently revolutionary (or communism for that matter, or Islamic revolution for that matter), we structure-in cyclical (at least--think of Jefferson's ideas about refreshing the tree of liberty) or consistent conflict.

Revolutionary violence seems a fairly intuitive response to colonial oppression. Cyclical or consistent violence may be called for, fitting, until the revolution is successful. The problem is that with Russia's oppression of its neighbors and America's oppression of its client states, both countries went against their own proposed political ideals. While both might have accepted that the "Third World" could be a battlefield and testing grounds, the conflict between the two appropriated huge amounts of resources from the "First World" countries, "Second World" allies, and "Third World" lowest class nations.

From the vantage point of an ecologically aware world citizen, not only is the political hypocrisy of both fomentors of "global revolution" stark, not only is the devastation...well, devastating, but that utilization of resources is unsustainable. This unavoidable--in the light of obvious fact--outcome was a largely intended result of Reagan's policies. He wanted to bankrupt the Soviet Union, wanted to prove the futility of trying to out-industrialize a more economically innovative competitor. And he was willing to pay the environmental, social, and political costs it would take. I say, "Touche, sir; well-played."

In comparison, China has so far wisely decided to avoid much of the cost of competing for global military superiority while embracing the competitive spirit of industrialization through environmental devastation. India, seemingly, has not been as able (without such a central command structure) to push environmental devastation, so they have gone more in the direction of utilizing their human resources and inviting technological investment (of course, the Chinese are hedging their bets and also working on financial and human resources investment and regional military superiority). The two major competitors in the latter half of the 20th century were able to successfully bankrupt themselves while the greatest beneficiaries of the competition over fossil fuels have done what the leisurely rich have tended to do--spend and enjoy while maintaining the status quo in their neighborhood.

In looking forward, if I am correct, the people who get caught up in things such as the debate over whether English should be dominant will do one of two things (both a waste of time): 1)resent this secondary outcome of recent historical imperialism, or 2)luxuriate in the passing advantage of this secondary outcome of recent historical imperialism. While the backward-looking post-colonial critics may be accurate enough in their power-analysis description of this outcome, they will already be behind the ball in comparison to the Indians who are leveraging their (also historically recent) full-scale exposure to the English language. The more provincial Islamist revolutionaries who have adopted the 20th century fascination with cyclical or continual violence (so passe) are reaping the benefits of trying to remain a cultural backwater throughout the last sixty years. Again, the various justifications for trying to remain aside are secondary, in my opinion to the effects. It's impossible to remain aside culturally. But it is possible to slow the rate of assimilation and coordination. (Interestingly, the Islamic Republic of Iran has had one of the few accepted state-sponsored drives to significantly reduce population growth rates in recent decades.)

Where does all of this lead? Simple. In one way, it really is simple to understand--maybe not as simple to do, but I wonder about that. Optimally, this leads each nation, social group, and individual to something akin to what I described as balance by six points. It leads to a point of view in which one actively and consciously works on resilient progress (whether by "one" it is you as individual or as part of one/each group). It leads to the possibility--as people consider degree of coordination that they want as opposed to assimilation or rejection--of less military and cultural conflict without capitulation. It leads to a revised understanding of democracy as a utopian sort of static ideal (with concomitant cyclical violence since stasis is impossible) to the idea of democracy as the real-life process of political and social inclusion and progress. Adopting innovation as a second language is a crossroads between the post-modern post-structural prison and a post-modern post-structural reaffirmation of human history and potential.

This quote from Donald Merlin that I began with is still apropos:

In fact, the uniqueness of humanity could be said to rest not so much in language as in our capacity for rapid cultural change.

VIInnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-15T05:34:00.000-07:00

What if it has been the case that social institutions have changed at just the right pace? Not to argue with Voltaire over this, or get too Platonic or New Agey about it, but what if? If there are constraints on the pace of social progress as well as constructs that aid progress, knowing them might help us decide. The discussion of these constraints and constructs may be more fruitful in producing further progress than what critical analyses of power differentials allows for. In fact, we generally see that the constructs or supports of earlier generations or moments shape the constraints felt by more recent generations. That's part of how we recognize or trace change as progress.

When progress is too idealistic or revolutionary to be sustainable, the later generation forgets the sacrifices, lessons, and wisdom of earlier generations, repeats historical mistakes, and history repeats itself. In this way, progress cannot be "too fast". When progress is not sufficiently thorough, old problem rear their ugly heads. Part of what this means is that we must "structure-in" progress. Any sense of progress must become part of a social institution deemed worthy of maintenance. Although we have deemed tyranny an enemy of the people, pluralist democracy is a recently proposed solution that the jury is still out on, for example.

Part of what it means that each generation must learn certain lessons (like how to use the language of origin), is that the lessons that must be learned by each generation are one of the hypothetical constraints on social progress that I propose. At some point in prehistory, it became custom to teach language to every child who could learn language. Although this takes a great deal of time and effort, we still deem this valuable. Because language learning is an assumed custom, we spend our attention on HOW to improve education not on WHETHER it is worth learning to speak and--more recently and in many countries--to write. (Now, is it economically worthwhile for international world citizens to learn the most dominant language in the world today? Whether one answers yes or no, we can be certain that it will take extra investment if it is not one's language of origin.)

A further constraint to progress is too much diversity mixed with conflict (or lacking coordination). This is part of why assimilation into the dominant culture has been the preferred method of cultural exchange throughout history--it's easier in one way and generally economically beneficial to those in the dominant society. This is where cultural relativism is still relevant but also a constraint on further progress (yesterday's solutions becoming today's problems). Since dominance and assimilation as opposed to accomodation of difference and equal exchange is still the relative norm, critical power analyses and identity politics are still relevant. They are simply not optimal. They were necessary and good enough in the post-colonial period (which is still ongoing for some countries), but they are a brake on further progress for any pluralistic group attempting to move beyond post-colonial political conflicts.

I am not saying here that I've forgotten the sacrifices made in order to bring up the necessity of revolution against colonial and supremacist oppressions; I am saying it must be structured-in or we are doomed to repeat the same old thing in new forms. Or, alternatively, we may doom ourselves to repeat the same old lessons of relativism, tolerance, and a tired, monotone repetition of the value of diversity.

Although my personal interest is much more on the cultural side of cultural technology, we all must adjust to the technological side as well. It's unavoidable. Even extremely remote Amazonian tribes are forced to deal with modern-day political structures in order to face advancing economic interests in the form of oil companies (and others). Some social instances bring social tensions into stark relief, such as Evo Morales leading Bolivia.

I suppose I have two significant points to make here. The first is that, for the next generation or so (if not already for my own), the dominant world language is becoming electronica and electronic/virtual technological innovations. Genetics and other new innovations will help distinguish and define later generations. The second is that, more than any sort of social structure, democracy as an ideal is about a particular type of process. Affirming both of these can help us situate a genuine vision of sustainable global progress, help to produce coordination rather than continued conflict (including oppression).

VInnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

The idea of advancement in technology can be seen in relatively simple terms. If the next generation of computer is faster, more powerful, and more reliable, the technology has advanced. If not, if some aspects have improved but others have suffered, then we should be able to say which aspects have improved and which have not. (This may lead into the development of a new/specialized/differentiated product or a revisioning process aimed at improving the next generation of personal computer.)

With social institutions, though, there is a mix of adaptability and overall improvement. Our founding fathers did not have to structure-in ways to address al-Qaeda. The Bush administration did have to adapt to al-Qaeda. The debate on whether they adapted well points out the difference between change and improvement or progress. In the same way, mushrooms may have as much evolution behind them as we do, but we have progressed beyond mushrooms' abilities towards agency. Mushrooms are well-adapted to where they are adapted to, but they have limited options compared to ours.

Democracy as a liberal form of government changes the political equation. More than a structure, democracy is an ideal concerning interactions--the social dynamic, the process, the fluid. (It is functionally very difficult to distinguish between a republic and a democracy with large populations at this point in history.) Just as this ideal dynamic signals a shift in the relationship between a government and its citizens, management theory has changed in a way that signals similar differences in the relationship between management and workers. Management theory used to mean that someone at the top of the power pyramid would give orders which would trickle down. Then it began to take on more feedback from the bottom up. (If you've earned admiral status but can't fix the nuclear engine to your aircraft carrier, you must take in feedback from specialists/mechanics much lower down the chain of command.) Now, to some extent, there is a flattening of hierarchical relationships and a movement towards an emphasis on speed and functional fit of responsiveness to changing market forces and consumer expectations.

Just as the democratic ideal is that the government express the will of the people, much of recent management theory is about meeting the demands of the market and workforce. This is adaptation rather than improvement. To make this point, consider planned obsolescence. The idea is simple: if I can sell you fifty lightbulbs over the course of ten years rather than selling you two (each of which might actually last), I might be able to increase my profit margins by selling a product that is made to wear out. Easy. But, if we consider the ecological effects of planned obsolescence, we may decide that increased profit margins provide competitive advantage (increased adaptability to this situation right now) but an overall drop-off in functional quality. In other words, while I might be beating out competing firms, I am selling environmental resources at a ridiculous loss to the future of my own firm...maybe the whole industry. Sometimes adapting really well to market forces (different from consumer demand) can go too far; same is true with workers' demands and unionization.

100 years ago when the world population was closer to 1.6 billion (6.7 billion today), waste was not as important to consider because we had fewer waste-producers per square mile than we do now. At the end of WWII, we tried to (with our allies) out-produce and out-consume the USSR. Maybe a Pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless. Okay, maybe I'd side with Stalin if I could keep him out of America and he'd help me beat Hitler, but once we've beaten Hitler...well, ask Ike. While the history may be sensible enough, continuing to invest in the maintenance of social institutions--including customs--we've been handed down may not be good enough.

Saying so does nothing to diminish my sense of appreciation for the men and women in our armed services who, during WWII, were deployed for year after year. It's a way of saying, "Thank you," and now what can WE (my generation) do? A Keynesian focus on consumer demand along with industrial production and technological improvements in the defense industry made America's market the largest (and therefore most desirable and powerful) in the world. Now, it is time to question the ecological and social effects of defense industry spending and a focus on consumption of goods and services. We can consider this re-evaluation as a point of adaptation and also consider whether refocusing in a variety of different ways may actually be progressive (involving improvements) as opposed to being just adaptive. Planned obsolescence was adaptive for a while. And, just as our country adapted to a focus on markets and consumption between the 1900s and 1960s, we have begun a shift towards sustainability while keeping a focus on technological advancements.

Cultures take time to change even if the lifespan of a generation of personal computers is decreasing. If it took us thirty years to change from a Depression-to-post-Depression focus to one in which we were the dominant country in the world, it is not surprising--nor should it be a matter of fanatical criticism--that it has taken us from the 1960s until now to focus on renewable energy. Just as we were able to decrease the amount of pollution from our steel industry between (what?) 1900 and 1970, we will be able to do the same with energy production now that social opinion and market forces are behind that sort of change.

(i)Vnnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

What are social institutions? The answer depends on your perspective(s). In my hometown of Nazareth, PA, Mario Andretti is a social institution. He's an icon and as lasting (at least if we include his legacy) as the local love of high school wrestling. He isn't a custom, but we could consider him to be an institution. The high school he lived next to for years is another social institution, one in brick and mortar as well as nationwide or wider. In my opinion, we can consider the custom of political debate and voting to also be social institutions or established customs. All of these "institutions" are somewhat different or distinguishable from the social functions which they perform. From my perspective, Mario Andretti is as established as Nazareth Area High School and almost as significant in my life because he gave out LOTS of candy at Halloween (he's supposedly important in racing too).

Part of what distinguishes an institution for me is that people assume it. Part of what we tend to assume is that institutions will remain. Part of what I am focusing on here is that these institutions need upkeep, and assuming allows us to do the upkeep without recognizing just how much work goes into supporting institutions. The school needs upkeep, the Andretti name needs upkeep, the habit of voting needs upkeep--social investment and active maintenance. We can easily recognize that a new wing built onto the school is "innovative" in some way, it involves what some people consider to be significant progress. But, if the same tired old teaching occurs in the new wing, we could also consider it to be a continuation of the Same Old Shit. Whatever the perspective, it didn't build itself; it takes investment to maintain institutions, and one way or another, those institutions keep up with progress.

Think about it like this. One biologist I listened to pointed out that every simple fungi on the planet is as evolved as we are. The process of each specie's evolution is as long as ours. So that mushroom in your salad may not be as complex as you, but you can consider it to be as evolved. It has taken a lot of mushrooms over the millennia doing what mushrooms do to complete your salad, ravioli sauce, soup, or whatever. But we tend to assume that mushrooms will keep doing that. It is like growth is an ecological custom and law, and fungi are an institution.

Institutions are animate. The legal system does not function without constant human input. Each courthouse itself could be apartments or an office building if not for what happened in it. Corporations have become easily recognizable social institutions, but they did not exist as we know them four hundred years ago. America as the most powerful country on earth is an assumed reality right now, but it won't always be so. My point is that, if we want to improve social processes or social inputs to ecological processes, we might trip over our assumptions if we don't consider our overall investments.

My experience with old-school social criticism (like second wave feminism and Foucault's structural stuff) has often come through (or with) analyses of power positions and resources. So this sort of critical impetus for change often involves looking at measurable chunks (like whether I have more gold than you) and showing the connection between the Haves, their Havings, and status quo relationships that allow the Haves to not become Have-nots. Liberals tend to assume, at this point in history, some familiarity with social criticism and some degree of identification with "marginalized populations". They also most often seem to assume that the center will hold (that majority-supported institutions will last or that at least their functions will remain). Liberals tend to assume that they are revolutionary, which makes it difficult to see to what extent liberal ideals have become common custom. If "liberal" now means revolutionary, then liberal also means fundamentalist, as neo-fundamentalism is a powerful revolutionary force against the neo-liberal world order. But Promise-Keepers are clearly not socially liberal; they simply assume a liberal social context that allows their right to choose an interesting brand of minority values.

When self-proclaimed liberals support abortion rights, they are supporting a social custom that has lasted for over thirty years. How long does it take to invest something with the label "social institution"? This is not a question that has a right answer, but something we must agree on if we want to communicate about it. The actual high school is just a pile of stones with electrical wire and plumbing running through it, but the idea of high schools and universal public education will probably last long after that pile has ceased to function.

IVnnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Just as markets work better than centralized planning partially because there are many voices or competing influences, we are adaptive creatures because we have so much going on within us--we're complex. When there is too much noise and too little coordination within that complexity, we end up being complicated as well. Same goes for societies and economics overall. And, just as human psychological needs can be organized into a hierarchy from survival demands to self-actualization, economies can be organized based on both capital influences and human needs. There is, not surprisingly, a huge problem when the interests of "capital" diverge too far from human needs or the needs for human progress.

(I'm moving towards making the case that one of our greatest needs--as well as capacities--is for progress, something Abraham Maslow and Charles Darwin didn't find surprising. This fits with the idea of innovation as a standard--like a language--that becomes increasingly important in a technologized, global environment.)

Kay writes, "Markets advance through the coevolution of technology and social institutions (p81)". Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about the increasing speed of technological innovation. Although this is within his field of expertise, any of us can recognize the significant rate of technological innovation. In fact, we are no longer surprised by most innovations because we are used to innovation itself. The Blackberry and iPhone were impressive for a blip in time. This raises a really important influence on society. The difference between my parents' generation's familiarity and comfort with changing technologies compared to current high-schoolers' familiarity and comfort is really significant. While employers are still asking whether I can use Excel, the next generation already expects that any spreadsheet program will be somewhat intuitively useful to anyone who has ever seen any spreadsheet program. They'll make allowances for differences as a matter of course.

Since Cro Magnon man began setting up trade networks and differentiation of professional specializations, humans have always used technological advancements as part of culture, part of life. Sometimes at the end of the last century, though, we in the industrialized-techonologized world became used to continuous technological innovation. Of course, my grandparents could use fire and wheels and so can I. They used innovations as amazing as automobiles, telephones, vacuums, and even microwave ovens. At this point in history, nanotechnology is putting thousands of cell-sized machines in people's bloodstreams to overcome the effects of chronic diseases. The symbiotic exchange between bacteria and more advanced biological animals and plants is huge--think of your farts here and know that you couldn't digest most of what you eat without the help of bacteria in your gut. Now we have cell-sized, man-made symbiots in our bloodstreams (still somewhat experimentally at this point) that help us function much more optimally. Probably within our lifetime, we will be doing things like growing bacteria within ourselves that can function as sunblock. Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne were able to imagine the future wonderfully, but we are moving towards a civilization where we improve not only our symbiotic relationships but also the chances for the Leonardos to meet and collaborate. What's more, most of these processes are impressively driven by human potential. By that, I mean that if it wasn't for Einstein laying out the theories of relativity, someone else would have not much later.

Anyway, all the futurists point out that sort of stuff. My point is that innovation itself becomes a usual aspect of life just as, throughout history, innovations had become usual parts of human life. You probably do not have the same agricultural profession that your ancestors did, and neither do I. And just as most folks from the 18th century didn't have nuclear fission in their plans for the future, we can't predict what effects free internet porn will have--let alone the further advances between cell-sized machines and genetic engineering.

But, if we become comfortable with the idea of innovation itself, we can influence some of the outcomes. So most folks won't argue that technologies are advancing. What has to happen with social institutions, then?

IIInnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-04T11:34:00.001-07:00

Drucker's "creative destruction" is an economic analogy for evolutionary selection within a market. Diversity in an ecological or economic environment encourages a robust selection process which pressures for both specialization and, alternatively, for a generalist's resilient adaptability. Innovation requires pluralism and the competition that drives selection over entrenchment and resilience rather than over-specialization.

Dealing in human systems, "selection" involves intentional preference and adaptability to changing social reality or realities. Because of technology and preference, specialization remains important, creative destruction continues to allow differentiation to drive evolution.

Because design--rather than emergence--can be satisfying in a closed system or limited context, those satisfied by a particular design/structure/ideology are invested in particular limitations or closures. Because social systems are complex and adaptive, Kay's "disciplined pluralism" (organized experimentation), rather than a purely designed process, fits. Keep in mind that most experiments fail--perfectly natural. If the organizing effects or structure can be implicit and assumed ("Of course since sliced bread is available today and will be available tomorrow..."), then explicit effort can be directed to the pluralism/experimentation (...I can become something other than a farmer"). Without implicit organization, discipline must be explicit, or coordination will be unlikely. In other words, if we aren't all connected by a somewhat structured global food distribution network, political agreement, etc., we must explicitly coordinate in a disciplined manner if we want something other than a muddled but perhaps progressively evolutionary process. (Notice this gives us options--internal/implicit structure or disciplined coordination or muddle/competition.)

Innovation occurs through relatively small-scale (closed/understandable) design changes in products and processes. At a larger scale, differentiation is insisted upon when individuals reject unsatisfying limits and push for greater openness or different organization. Too much openness/disorganization disrupts communications, including intentional coordination.

Without a sufficiently rich and non-intrusive context, innovation suffers. ("Intrusion" here can be seen as "unwanted/unwarranted/extreme demands upon intentional deployment of attention".) Innovation, then, can be seen as the crossroads between design and emergence. Innovation is the motivated application of creative focus within a sufficiently rich socio-ecological context.

When innovation is not "structured-in", differentiations will encounter limitations in the system (closures, limitations) in equally destructive but less creative ways. Emergence will be more disruptive when less coordinated even if it can be seen as progressive.

IInnovation as Crossroads

2009-06-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

To contextualize my comments on innovation, I have two quotes from John Kay's CULTURE AND PROSPERITY.

"Rich states are rich because of a process of institutional evolution that has taken place over centuries, even millennia (p69)."

"Markets work because there is never a single voice (p120)."

Kay's work builds nicely upon Jared Diamond's work in GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, pointing out how certain social innovations ("institutions", above) in advanced markets present advantages over those that have been seen as more "natural"...such as natural resources like oil, timber, iron, water, etc. Just as the availability of those natural resources did not come out of nowhere in an instant, just as the advantages that Diamond points out (like animal husbandry or high quality grains) did not come about overnight, the development of progressive social institutions (including customs) did not come about overnight.

Of course, being a very adaptive type of primate, we can adjust to the presence of these institutions in the flash of a virtual evolutionary instant. For example, it is easy for us to take for granted things such as sliced bread even though sliced bread has only been with us for a few decades. In the space of a century, we can go from a primarily agricultural country to one in which only about 2% of the workers are involved in producing more food than even our obese nation can consume. To adjust to such shifts, it's necessary to allow the functioning of what Peter Drucker calls "creative destruction". While Drucker was not the first devotee of Kali-Durga, we can easily grasp that his take on the matter fits hand-in-glove with the topics of markets and affluence.

Creative destruction (of products and businesses) in markets is as natural as the cycle of birth, death, birth again. The same is true concerning social institutions and customs in cultures--at least in healthy cultures. To understand the cultural aspect of this analogy, it is helpful to think of the phrase "time is money". Time for mortals is finite, and since it is finite, we can assign a comparative value and decide whether we are using time wisely or "wasting" time. We can do the same thing with attention and say that attention is time and money. This becomes more obvious when media outlets are nonstop. By the point where we can watch Jon Stewart knocking MSNBC on the Internet whenever we want, we have adjusted far beyond expecting to find sliced bread available whenever we might want it. I have about 100 channels of television to choose from and seemingly countless websites, chatrooms, and real and simulated web-persons to interact with. I can't pay attention to all of them all the time, and any ad exec or lowly consumer easily recognizes that the more people that are paying attention to YOUR channel, site, or whatever media outlet, the more valuable it is. Attention is money. And my attention is finite.

Who cares? Well, we can ask the question of whether I am using my attention wisely or wasting it. We can take that question back a step, to a further remove, and ask whether the available media outlets in general waste attention and we can debate who is responsible if my attention is wasted. My point is just to show we are familiar with the concept of attention as "money", as measurable or comparable value and as a medium of exchange. It is interesting that the same idea--attention as valuable--also affects us on a profoundly personal level in our relationships. We show status and importance by who we pay attention to--so it is not surprising that, in our society of nonstop media output fame would be such a high-level "commodity". It has taken centuries at least, even millennia if you believe Socrates' comments on writing or take language development itself into consideration, to evolve to this point of media output and our common customs of visiting pornsites and social networking sites more than others. Whether you visit them personally or not, pornsites have become a common institution of the early 21st century and any institution so widely attended to will certainly affect cultural evolution even if we never get to the point where we publicly say, "This is the best thing to happen since free porn". So, cheer with me for Wonder Bread.

Having presented the concept that attention is money along with creative desctruction and evolution, we can now look at innovation as a crossroads.

Innovation as Crossroads

2009-06-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

Donald Merlin, author of ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND, felt that it is cultural innovation which sets our species apart from the rest. In his words (p10):

In fact, the uniqueness of humanity could be said to rest not so much in language as in our capacity for rapid cultural change.

To that, I would add that innovation is a great intersection for seeing similarities between institutions and individual consciousness. (Beyond this, we can extrapolate connections between institutional functioning and cultural functioning--an emphasis in direct opposition to identity politics.) In some ways, it is easier to understand the agentic aspects of an entity than the universe of circumstances that any entity inhabits. By beginning at this point, we can compare design processes with emergent processes along with intention as compared to activity (which involves both intentional choices and behaviors along with behaviors and influences that are not necessarily chosen or even noticed).

(My interest, here, is that feeling innovative or progressive is an important part of an inspired self. When we relate to someone else as uninspired and uninspiring, we train our own consciousness in boredom, apathy, and denigration. When we expect less than inspiration from ourselves and others, we are always capable of delivering.)

Contrary to the cliche, opportunity is always knocking. But to actually engage opportunity, we have to recognize our circumstances as presenting an opportunity and we must seize the day. In his book THE ACHIEVING SOCIETY, David C. McClelland talks about the importance of teaching kids important heuristics for success by providing worthwhile stories or myths. Unsurprisingly, kids learn how to look for opportunities based on the suggestions these myths and their parents provide. Even in the Christian Gospel stories, those who already have something tend to gain even more. It is the way of the world that success breeds success.

Beyond childhood, though, adults also tend to do well when they are capable of recognizing opportunities. I contend that our current cultural myths about how adults can achieve inspiration ("First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women", etc.) fall somewhat short in teaching us to recognize opportunity. Getting onto a reality show like Danny Bonaduce may get you your fifteen minutes of fame but may not provide the spark you're (I'm) looking for. Alternatively, we've recently run into the Aesop-like fable about unrestrained speculative investing--again--as well. Throw in Youtube, the poor man's Hollywood, and we've found the trifecta of our current myths' limitations. But if fame, money, and the Internet haven't already made you into the next Vanilla Ice, does that really mean you're out of options? If I'm not feeding directly from the tits of the great whore of Babylon, do I really have to choose apocalyptic fundamentalism as my last and only resort? Is our culture as bankrupt as our country will be if we keep buying into insurance scandals and trying to float foundering companies that have already saturated the market with more of their products than can be consumed?

In fact, the uniqueness of humanity could be said to rest not so much in language as in our capacity for rapid cultural change.

Sambhogakaya

2009-06-01T04:43:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite translations of sambhogakaya is "reward-body". Regardless of how we view the actual functioning of the world (as based on karma, God's law, or physics and biology, etc.), I like the idea of a reward-body. This naturally leads to the question of what one is considered to be rewarded for.

I enjoy that, to earn a reward, you must do something, accomplish something, deserve something. What? At the level of subtlety involved in Purpose, the myth of the hero describes a life-journey involving struggle, climax, denouement. The hero is rewarded for success in some trial or set of trials by an end to the trial--which is comparatively very relieving, heavenly, maybe even addicting. Alternatively, the Greek or Shakespearean tragedy may offer an ending that is less than rewarding (punishing). Glory for success, but shame and punishment for failure. We get a mythic sort of narrative. At the level of Understanding, we can consider a context of multiple myths. One of the rewards or completions at this level is a sense of comprehension, of wholeness or systematization/contextualization. "I get it. I know what is happening here." Moving on to Appreciation, we don't limit ourselves to a sense of rational satisfaction in recognizing that mythic explanations can be limiting and partial. We mindfully re-invest the myths as deeply moving, culturally rich, personally meaningful, etc. From this viewpoint, while we may have moments of ignoring the contextualization (other, competing myths), it's not desirable any longer to maintain a true-believerism, a single exclusionary perspective and narrative. We may allow ourselves to be moved by the myths like being moved by a good movie without confusing the movie for reality; we move with the myths. If we get too much into disembodied mindfulness at this point, we are "rewarded" with feeling that we transcend rational understandings, explanations, and scientific doctrine. If we deal more in appreciation-with-mindfulness, we end up feeling more embodied-intelligent rather than less. We move beyond a rational belief in--or position that sets up--the mind-body dichotomy. (That position is more of a scientism than actual, experimental science that includes exploration and emergence.)

Basically, then, we are tried by and rewarded by doing things correctly or punished by and for doing things incorrectly. Beyond that, we are tried by and rewarded by trying to "get it", and we alternatively suffer from not getting it. Another step along and the trial/method/experience is one of either being present and paying attention or missing out on what's going on. With actions, concepts, and attention, we can "do" them well or poorly. The result of doing all of these fairly well is a feeling of inspiration that is somewhat different from relief, comprehension, and connected-present-appreciation. At that point, we can compare everything to inspiration or bliss. It's like asking a guiding question at each level.

1. Am I doing the right thing?
2. Is this reasonable or wise?
3. Am I present, aware?

By the time we are somewhat familiar with inspiration, we are asking, "Is this inspiring; am I centered in and acting from inspiration?" This involves comparing actions, concepts and systems of understanding, and the intention to be present against that balance-point of inspiration. The challenge is to invest each of these with inspiration. By God's Law, karma, or simply good functioning, we end up at this point where there is almost a demand to be inspired by being inspiring and a desire to be inspiring in order to be inspired. Feeling and accepting this challenge may be as important to psychological health as the need for acceptance and love.

As we mature, most of us don't realize that we're moving towards this gold standard. Many people sort of sense it, though, and a usually vague fear arises about not being able to measure up. What blows my mind is that this standard is already implicit, already felt to some extent, and so the fear of not being able to measure up actually comes from the desire to measure up. But if we endorse the fear more than the desire, we end up denying our best aspirations and denying the part in us that allows us to measure up, the part that does measure up.

So at this point, the reward is still earned by accepting the challenge. When we are aware that this is the gold standard we already carry within each of us that we already want to achieve, the standard by which we want to find ourselves and be found worthy, we at least have a fighting chance. When we work with this standard, we actually have the chance of being inspired by what we do and who we are every day. This is universal. It is subtler than belief systems, cultural expectations, and personal temperament. It is the standard you judge me by and the standard I judge you by whether we want to or not. When we deny that, we remove our chances of measuring up, or earning the reward. At this level, it is the same as at each other level in that the trial, the action, the believing, the intention, the method--the living itself--is the reward. Are you ready? Are you in? Yeah, you can't escape even if you tried. Sambhogakaya--no way out, the red pill.

The Way We Think

2009-05-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Some books are just impressive. The Way We Think, by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, is one of them. Unfortunately--in one sense--it is very much a cognitive psychology production. The implications of the work by these authors are stunning, but it probably takes some unpacking (simplification, examples, and repackaging) for that to stand out to many readers. Nevertheless, sometimes the results justify the work.

In this book, the authors present a unified description for what it is about humans' thinking that makes us a unique species (cognitively at least). This is important because it presents a UNIFIED description in the same way that Darwin's theory of evolution provided a single framework for speciation that can account for the biological developments we are familiar with.

While I'm not interested in oversimplifying their whole presentation (I'll actually be leaving the best part out), they offer a functional set of rules for describing what makes one perspective better than another. Nicely, this set also points the way for improving any perspective. And essentially, this is a big part of what experts in any field of endeavor do cognitively to improve their performance. Remember, good applied psychology seems commonsensical once we see it, so this set may seem obvious, but consider how often you have actually applied all of these rules to improving your understanding of any particular topic or field. These rules also apply to presentations.

Compress what is diffuse.
Obtain global insight.
Strengthen vital relations (between significant parts).
Tell a story.
Go from Many to One.

All of these rules fit together to achieve the overarching goal of the set: achieve human scale. The authors explain what they mean by human scale.

The human scale is the level at which it is natural for us to have the impression that we have a direct, reliable, and comprehensible understanding (p323).

Just as a spellcheck applies to words, these rules apply to conceptual packaging. The fascinating thing about this concept-checking process is that it has a progressive, hermeneutic aspect. In other words, we can run the program to achieve a good fit, run the program again to achieve a better fit, include more information and run the program again, etc.

Marshall McLuhan made the important comment that humans adjust to their media of communication just as we adjust to overall environments. Along with physical media, we adjust to customs and "common" sense. Different societies present different customs as commonsensical. For example, in the interest of tolerance (one such customary perspective), cultural relativism came about. While it has been a valuable step in some ways, its time has passed. Cultural relativism supports not only cultural diversity, which will always be valuable, but also a certain diffuseness. (Compress what is diffuse.) Cultural relativism stymies progress because it suggests the inability to choose one thing as better than another. This gets us directly into denial of reality.

While cultural relativism may seem like a tangent, it provides a real example of how the hermeneutic process can work. At one (less than optimal) level of social functioning, tolerance is better than open conflict. The attitude of tolerance is not what I am arguing against, then. We want to keep tolerance but divest the perspective--and those holding the perspective--of the inherent shortcomings. In order to do so, we want to tell the story of progress. We want to strengthen the vital relation between tolerance and the potential for progress that peace affords but then also move forward. So we can look at why tolerance is valuable, we can see why cultural relativism was part of that perspective historically, and we can look at whether it is best to keep all of the parts.

If it is possible to improve from conflict to tolerance, is it possible to improve from tolerance? To this end, and because everyone I've ever met has wanted things to be better in some way, I'd add a sixth rule: make it better. This motivation is so fundamental to who we are that it often goes unrecognized. This is a motivation that has its roots far below the development of ego, but the possibilities that humans come across through and with egos, far outstrip the humble beginnings of this drive. (Amoebas follow this drive as well, but they have no need of coming up with explicit rules.) One vital relation worth strengthening is that between our imaginings and reality. Is it possible to imagine a relationship or attitude that is better than tolerance? Is there a type of relating that makes sense on a human scale that is "intuitively" and obviously better? Of course. We all want to be appreciated, we want to appreciate where we live and who we live with, and we want to feel inspired.

I propose (and claim no credit for what seems like a commonsensical proposal) that any perspective which does not support appreciation and inspiration is less than what people deserve and can achieve. Less than acceptable. I also propose a method--rather than rejecting whatever we believe in right now--that supports improvement in any perspective. Follow the rules. If it is helpful to see that we have a common conceptual heritage and cultural foundation along with a common biological inheritance, read THE WAY WE THINK. The commonality is already there.

Sex Differences in Brain Functioning

2009-05-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

I just came across some info that is hugely important in understanding differences between men and women. HUGE! Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has found that women's autonomic nervous system ramps down more slowly than men's (like during/after an argument). Here, we're mostly focused on sympathetic system arousal--the fight/flight/keep-on-arguing response. This is as important, maybe even moreso, concerning miscommunication between genders than the awareness of women getting a shot of oxytocin just from talking to other people. I'm going to also pair this bit of data with John Gottman's finding that two out of three arguments between couples are about topics that simply cannot be solved.

From men's side, in an argument that cannot or simply will not end in agreement, we want the stress to end. We may try to get some distance and allow ourselves to calm down, and this will generally happen if we aren't keeping the argument going in our heads and trying to still win. BUT, if we try what Gottman calls a repair attempt too early, our much-loved partner will still be amped. Or, we may not try anything, but if we show a relative degree of relaxation, that can signal that we don't care about the topic or the relationship as much as our partner. She might even be frustrated and jealous of the relatively quick turnaround (calming down) in us.

Over the long haul, we end up learning certain indelible "truths" about the other sex as well as our own. One is that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned...or ignored...or simply not adequately mirrored in her emotions. ("Yes, I am VERY excited about that new hand-bag you found; it is WUNDERBAR! for so many reasons" [that I don't know].) Another is that it is a woman's prerogative to always change her mind--always. Another is that guys are expected to "be the bigger man" or take "it" like a man even though we supposedly have fragile egos. Clearly some of these truths are contradictory, feeding the battle of the sexes.

We all know that women nag. Ladies, you know it's true. And men blow up when they lose their temper. Or shut down (sometimes due to "nagging"). But what is nagging? Sometimes, the guy is calming down, which is being interpreted as a lack of caring. His gal is still focused on getting somewhere on this topic because she is still amped about it. So she sticks to the point just when he is calming down enough to begin to feel close--or at least nonantagonistic--with/towards her. For women, they are simply trying to further the relationship by gaining closure or progress of some kind. And this attempt, this one more comment, is like a cattle prod applied to the base of the skull just when the guy thought it was safe to let his guard down. Because there is a literal extra unpleasant jolt, which feels treacherously timed, from a behavioral point of view the guy learns not to let his guard down or trust. Or he can blow up or shut down. Or he just has to "take it" because that's how women are.

Alternately, your girl may be looking for emotional reassurance (because she's still amped, but it's leaning towards anxious rather than angry/aggressive this time) while you're still trying to simply relax out of an argument or let it go (since you know things won't go well while you're still pissed). This is compounded by the fact that it takes guys more effort to verbalize. So in general, the demand or even expectation that we verbalize what we're feeling and thinking before we're "re-set" makes a little jolt feel like a cattle prod. (Besides, before we've calmed down, we're thinking and feeling about how we're right, she's wrong, etc. But you can't say that's what you're feeling, oh no.) That exaggeration on our part ("She just jammed me with a cattle prod, and she waited just until I started to calm down in order to catch me by surprise") suggests for an exaggerated reaction from us. BOOM!

From this unenlightened perspective, then, women simultaneously want men to be strong (not pushovers), they want reassurance, they want to be right, and they want the right to be vindictive while being treated as if they have really helped us open into our full potential emotionally. Wow, then there is no right response. And guys are big, petulant children prone to tantrums, uncontrolled aggression, sulking inexpressiveness, and emotional withdrawal.

It impresses me how often and how greatly timing matters.

The Six Points

2009-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

At each stage of development, there is some sort of center or focus or key reference point for personal effort or intentional attentional deployment. As Kabat-Zinn's definition points out, the reference at the stage of mindful appreciation is present-moment, nonjudgmental, on-purpose attention. That purpose, directly or indirectly involves appreciating life. As we move up the scale to the stage of Clarity, we are moving more beyond appreciation and into straight balance, clarity, and bliss. While bliss results directly from mindfulness meditation, it is more closely linked to meditative periods at the stage of mindful appreciation. By the time we're moving into Clarity, the bliss and inspiration it fits with are less "caused by" the formal meditation and more simply indicative of living well--more "spontaneously" arising.

So how does one's key reference point for progress or actualization change? Mindfulness never loses its value, but a reapportionment of attentional deployment is called for--a growth or a shift. I believe that shift is towards balance for its own sake rather than nonreactive mindfulness more for the sake of greater appreciation and diminished suffering. We're looking to act as an inspired self at this point rather than holding onto a feeling and/or ideal of some idealized self. In other words, rather than noticing repression and reactivity and choosing nonreactivity (which is different from non-action or passivity), we find that the value of repression and reactivity drops off when it is possible to be balanced and unconfined. If we try to move into Clarity without mindfulness practice and appreciation, it's possible to feel less confined, but we'll remain less mature; we'll be more self-spoiled and freewheeling than free.

Let me describe balance at this point, then. Balance is referenced to three continuums, each with two poles. You can think of an x axis and a y access crossed by a z axis, making our imaginary grid 3D. The center is an imaginary point in the same way that we speak of a physical "center" of gravity. The center is always there, but it is always shifting. Even the act of thinking shifts molecules within our minds that shift that centerpoint of gravity. So there is, one sense, no single point on our physical bodies that is the center (like--my nose is here and always in a similar relation to my ears), but there also is a predictable center (at least in geometrical space) which depends on how gravity works.

One of the axes is like left to right. Between (in a metaphysical way) tamas and rajas is sattva. If we're neither too aggressive nor too lazy, we're sattvic. There is a certain equilibrium and proportion. This will also be experienced in relation to other people around us as sometimes being too dominant or too passive. All three positions--one-up, one-down, and as equals--are called for in different situations.

Another axis is like forward to backward lean. This is like trying to go too fast or too slow concerning psychological development. Although this has aspects that feel like tamas and rajas, rather than that sort of aggressive to passive quality, this has more to do with a sense of speed. Again, just as there is a time for different positions, there is a time and place for different speeds.

And then lastly, we decide how subtle or obvious our actions should be. This is like an up/down axis. At some points, transcendental or blissful sorts of actions are fitting, but at other times, play or hard work or study is called for.

Without mindfulness practice, it will be difficult to maintain, perhaps even to recognize, psychological balance. This is why consistency in mindfulness as well as appreciation is important. If we don't come to know our own vasanas, habits, or gross-level psyche, it will always be in the driver's seat whether we ignore/deny that fact or not. Just as mindfulness practice is a cultural technology and not naturally occurring as practice, this sort of psychological balance is not the same as physical homeostasis and cannot happen without awareness that it is possible as well as the preparation, intention, and consistency that is called for.

At the stage of mindful appreciation, we are noticing and being nonreactive to (vigilant against) our very own personality disordering, emotional reactivity, and personal limitations. (Emotional reactivity actually keeps us from being emotionally spontaneous, so I am not speaking against emotions here.) This vigilant practice both highlights and supports awareness of the moments when we're being appreciative. At the next stage, there is a shift from the important reference point of mindfulness practice as a vigilant practice to balance or clarity as a simpler thing in and of itself. Rather than doing the work of taking off our clothes, it is more like enjoying the fact of nakedness and a slight breeze or warm sun on our skin. The mindfulness is connected to the bliss and balance and clarity, while the balance and bliss and clarity stand forth due to the mindful appreciation.

Psychological Balance: 6 Points

2009-05-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Working through these more basic analogies allows a more abstract range of analogies as well. In the last post, I began talking about psychological balance, using physical balance as a comparison. And while I knew I was getting at something in talking about differences in how an Olympic lifter, a basketball player, and a ballerina would balance, I hadn't really formulated a clear sense of what I meant by those differences. (Sometimes these things are too obvious/"intuitive"/nonconscious/fundamental to put into words or clear concepts.)

Of course, these different athletes will have different body maps and muscle memories due to different body types and training. I'm currently working on a fascinating book: THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN.

Alright, so if we look at what influence mindfulness has on one's psychological self-image, we get some amazing possibilities. Jon Kabat-Zinn's proposed definition of mindfulness is--paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. The interesting thing is that mindful purpose is based in physical awareness. This is a significant point, so if there is disagreement, I'd suggest reading the body map book.

If, in the course of one's meditation, one maintains awareness but allows purpose to drop out, strange things can happen. If one meditates without an intentional purpose, there is a really fascinating opening. In the same way that humans have the fascinating ability to conceive of psyches or souls that are not body-bound, we can further experience awareness that is not psyche-bound or tied directly and obviously to our sense of self, psyche, soul, etc. If I define mindfulness as, "Individual or localized awareness that is neither grasping nor aversive," that gives a stripped-down version in comparison to Kabat-Zinn's. (And we can use a different word for this if folks like Jon's definition for "mindfulness".)

Here's the jump. Kids who are about 2-5 years old correctly make a distinction between walkers and "babies". Walkers know themselves as "big kids" even if they toddle rather than moving smoothly. From the perspective of crawlers, walking would be pretty impressive if the crawlers could conceptually formulate that thought. And maybe they can--not my area of expertise. But imagine that first time when you're taking first steps--no longer bound by your whole body to the floor. Imagine how much more you could see--like being twelve feet tall or able to fly! Of course, it will take time to learn how to utilize your newfound ability to balance and move like this, but it is a wonderful process involving many spills along the way.

Psychologically, there is a similarly HUGE transition from how we normally identify--from normal self identity--when we take the perspective of individual or localized awareness that is neither grasping nor aversive. In the same way that our bodies are constantly adjusting physical balance (maintaining our normal routine of physical balance), our psyches or psychological habits are doing the same with our self identity. Once this neither grasping nor aversive perspective (and it is a limited perspective, but a less habitually limited perspective) becomes familiar, we can still "crawl", but we are unable to go back to the blissful ignorance of being "babies". At this point, being bound to the ground--in this case, habitual personalities--becomes a frustration unless we are playing at it. And for all the newfound glory in being "big", the frustration is like psychological toddling--we haven't really developed much grace with our new perspective, so there is much farther to go.

A very obvious example of this is provided in the 2005 movie "Revolver", with Jason Statham. As long as there is an identification as a persona or personality, there is a Shadow. When the identification doesn't occur, all the same physical and psychological tendencies remain (vasanas, habits, training), but there is possibility of a new sense of balance.

The Goonies: Sattva

2009-05-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

I'm taking this quote from Sankhya philosophy, but it seems to hold for a number of presentations I have seen:

Sattva is equilibrium. When Sattva prevails, there is peace or tranquillity. Rajas is activity which is expressed as Raga-Dvesha, likes or dislikes, love or hatred, attraction or repulsion. Tamas is that binding force with a tendency to lethargy, sloth and foolish actions. It causes delusion or non-discrimination.

This sort of idea seems to put a finishing touch on the understanding I've been working on. Essentially, a fairly thorough understanding of the goonies describes and prescribes balance as one moves through the stages of actualization. Because our attentional abilities become more complex as we develop (adding more advanced abilities and perhaps improving lower abilities while also tracing an increasingly unique life-path) as well as potentially more subtle, "balance" will have a different look and feel at different times throughout any given life. Or we could say that an Olympic weightlifter will adjust his/her balance differently than a basketball player or a ballerina. But balance is still balance whether our bodies or our consciousness is relatively "heavy" (obvious or gross or undeveloped) or relatively subtle. Balance is important to all of them/us.

I've been talking about intentional deployment of attention or attention as an economy. A working understanding of both balance and stages of actualization provides a rubric for how to deploy attention so that one profits from this type of investment or deployment. Smart or wise investment involves a good proportional mix of the gunas depending on one's situations, temperament, and abilities. It also involves recognizing that there may be a progressive development and how much energy to put into development as opposed to balance.

It is very important to understand that I am speaking of general, orienting heuristics rather than precise instructions. While we can improve our knowledge of various fields by following instructions, we develop resilience and wisdom in those fields by applying our own strength, flexibility, balance, and concentration. As opposed to very precise instructions, this is like taking off the training wheels.

By utilizing the gunas for a rough description of balance/proportion, we can distinguish psychological balance from wisdom without needing very subtle descriptions or experience. We can think of balance as involving not too much tamas or rajas and not too much or too little progress. Wisdom, then, is the understanding and application that comes from such a perspective--a perspective centered within one's ability to notice and remain engaged in a balanced manner. We can see, then, that wisdom is much more about knowing what I know rather than being intelligent, experienced, or subtle.

While I have discussed much of this in terms of the individual, since we include speech, emotions, and relationships, it is not possible to work on this stuff without including others. Actualization, then, can be described as balanced continuation of wellbeing in body, speech, and mind. And because we are human, that continuation means a homeodynamic progress rather than more of just a homeostatic maintenance.

Rest and Digest vs. Fight or Flight: the Goonies

2009-05-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

I was very happy to review the three gunas with a set of videos with James Swartz recently. Most of what I'd heard about gunas--referenced to yoga here--struck me as very strange and unworkable. Swartz's presentation seemed very sensible to me, and I think it fits easily with most modern science. I've been trying to decide how to present a hierarchy of development in a straightforward and understandable manner for some time now, and one of my remaining challenges had been to find an applicable and understandable way to talk about qualities rather than quantities. This gets into the same murky areas where the psychological "catfish" like to spend time--talking about "process" in a muddy way if they aren't into some particular sort of esotericism.

Now, although not all of my connections hold up incredibly well, there is a really solid and simple addition to be made regarding the goonies--tamas, rajas, and sattva. In a rough sense, tamas is like the parasympathetic functioning (rest-and-digest) and rajas is like sympathetic functioning (fight-or-flight). Too much of a tamasic influence will lead to sloth and perhaps depression. Too much rajasic influence leads to overactivation/overstimulation: anger, lust, greed, anxiety, fear, envy, etc. And we can see how many people use something like caffeine (stimulating, rajas) in the morning to wake up and then balance that with alcohol or valium or sleeping pills (depressant, tamas) to calm down. Relying on these two influences to get things right is crazy-making because going from one to the other is like being on a merry-go-round. The more important it becomes to change from one to the other, the faster it spins. In Hinduism and Buddhism, this is described as a whirlpool--samsara. And believing that the whirlpool can be solved by spinning either faster or slower is believing in illusion--maya.

Just as many concepts don't translate perfectly and directly between Hindu and Buddhist usages, the goonies also don't translate perfectly into modern scientific language. But it's a workable fit in most instances in the same way that most of us can get through our lives perfectly well by following Newton's rules and not fully grasping quantum mechanics. While it is somewhat rough, it also is a fit.

Why is this important? Well, when most of us want things to improve, we either try too hard or quit too early. Or, we might advance and retreat--one step forwards, two steps back. The same is true when we are talking about personal actualization. In meditation, there is a really important aspect of awareness that often goes unrecognized or creates unnecessary confusion. This is like mindfulness' twin. I think of it in terms of "vigilance". Mindfulness could be described as a balanced and precise awareness that neither grasps nor rejects. Most of us have at least heard of mindfulness practices. One question that arises with experienced meditators is: when do I shift from mindfulness to something else? something deeper or better? While there are all kinds of doctrinal answers and wonderful teachers, since they're not me, I'll offer what I've got.

If mindfulness is the balanced or precise and focused awareness, vigilance is that bit of attention we deploy to recognizing when we slip off that mindful point of focus. Vigilance reminds us to return to mindfulness. (This is coming directly from MAHAMUDRA: THE MOONLIGHT--QUINTESSENCE OF MIND AND MEDITATION, a fantastic presentation if you're ready for it. Yes, this note is getting into two fairly different applications. I'm giving one fairly high-level example, and I'll give another example that is more applicable to beginners.) Basically, as long as we still need to allocate some attention to vigilance, it is impossible to intentionally choose a state of oneness. Although this is subtle stuff, it is the same principle that athletes are familiar with when they talk about the difference between playing to not lose and playing to win. Some things are difficult enough that we cannot simultaneously try to succeed and also try to not fail. Although we may not be guaranteed success if we go all out, we are guaranteed failure if we lose focus or don't commit 100%. Intentionally entering states of oneness is basically like that.

So, in the beginning, we need to practice vigilance. And later down the road, if we hit rough patches, we may need to be willing to bring vigilance in again. But one goal is to become good enough with mindful concentration that it is possible to have certain moments where we can trust ourselves and our ability and situation enough to go "all in"--to let go of deploying vigilance along with mindfulness.

Lower down the developmental scale, we can also check ourselves by the quality or feeling of where we are at any given moment. For example, if you're angry, you don't want to drink so much that you become morose and depressed. That doesn't balance things out. That's more like flipping the same coin to its other ugly side. Or, if you're depressed, drinking coffee will give you a little pick-me-up, but after that rajasic up moment, it will also give you a little extra drop-me-down afterwards. That sets up the merry-go-round or toggle. Back, forth, back, forth. If that is happening, you're probably out of balance between your rajas (stimulation) and tamas (heaviness, groundedness, rest). Too anxious/aggressive or too lazy.depressed. In other words, you can't fix having too much sympathetic arousal by overstimulating your parasympathetic system; you can't caffeinate your way out of depression or booze your way out of anger.

More to come on sattva.

Stretching

2009-04-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

It's warm tonight, but not too warm. Perfect for stretching. Knowing there will only be a few hours' respite between the heat from today and the heat tomorrow, not feeling sleepy as the house retains the day's warmth, and uninterested in sitting meditation at the moment, stretching is perfect. Kristin bought me these $10 cotton pants at Target a few years ago, and they still fit the bill. Some things never change.

Loosening my pelvic muscles and back, it strikes me that I am not always in touch with or interested in "meditative" states--the deep absorptions. Right now I'm bothered by no one, the ceiling fans keep a breeze going, and I can hear minimal late night traffic on the Interstate a mile or so away. It strikes me that this is an apt setting for me as a simple self--more drifting or contemplative than pinpoint meditative or resting in formlessness. This is more like vacationing in the shadow or echo of formlessness. It's like the seduction before the act itself and also like the quiet afterglow. The stirring of lemonade and clinking of ice cubes in the glass pitcher rather than the tart, cool sweetness itself.

I like this idea and feeling of a simple self. It does not "break through" like moments of original face and it is not as deep as eternity. It's an easy movement away from my everyday mentality but not needing to arrive somewhere else. Just the peaceful, enjoyable feel of stretching.

Intoxication and the Self

2009-03-22T01:38:00.001-07:00

From early on, I've had a somewhat ascetic view on drugs. The simple understanding that drugs tend to be used in escapist ways was obvious from the beginning; even when they are used for practical purposes, they often cloud the mind. While that perspective still seems "correct" to me, it now seems correct in a somewhat narrow or rigidly disciplined way. After too many years of back pain, drinking, and a (somewhat) recent interest in the effects of LSD and marijuana--certainly influenced by living in California--I'm revisiting that narrow view (with a glass of wine in hand).

While much of my attitude has a tongue-in-cheek feel, I really appreciate the deeper tones involved in revisiting the subject of drugs. And, as far as I'm concerned, we can throw dietary restrictions into the same category of external physical things used for psychological purposes like substituting ice cream for love. Not surprisingly, wine has softened the militaristic edge that youth put on my early perspective. That's been both good and bad--good in that it has made me a little easier in how I approach many of my own and other people's downfallings, and mostly bad in how it has fuzzed my sense of focus and purpose along with the judgemental edges.

The reason I am writing tonight is that I think I have found for myself the center of how all intoxication of whatever kinds keeps one (in this case, me) off the meditative point or lifestyle. At the same time, intoxication can help one get beyond the strict boundaries of the relative ego or jiva. But just like happiness, meditation can't really be avoided into. Avoidance and a balanced awareness of suchness are mutually exclusive. So we may have to use a "dirty" method of moving forward before dropping or minimizing that method. Shoshaku jushaku.

As usual for me, this particular insight or consolidation came along from a sort of low level or background consideration of a few different messages. The first is a comment from Ramana Maharshi that the intellect is valuable insofar as to direct the ego to return to the Self, original self, or original state. Once there, he tended to recommend staying there. As with many spiritual aspirants, this seemed reasonable to me but I didn't know what it meant. (Yes, it's fine if you're laughing at me:) And maybe there is more for me to glean from this comment, but I get it at a deeper level than before. Another comment that took a few years to sink in was Trungpa's discussion of the five buddha families. The gist is that people have different styles (families) of enlightenment. It took a long time before I took this as more than just Trungpa's favorite sort of astrological or personality classifications. Again, I had a hint that there was something valuable there, but I couldn't tell if it was mostly just a joke or a sham.

One more thing to throw in, since I like triangulations. As a counseling intern, I related with folks who had addictions, psychoses, severe depression, phobias, and eventually I encountered mania too. (I don't know that traumatic stress responses fit in this commentary, but those were interesting as well, to say the least.) The point of mixing in these states is that, whether the major influences are internal or external, we can be quite fascinated with various forms of intoxication. In a crude sense, we can see intoxication or attachment to these sorts of states as the complex forms of a basic ignorance which is the opposite of awakeness. And, as we all have different families, experiences, and personalities, we prefer different forms (or allegorical "families", you could say) of intoxication. Getting stuck in philoosophy has also been described as one of these forms.

The breakthrough with Ramana's comment about returning to and resting in the Self came when I was reading James Austin's ZEN-BRAIN REFLECTIONS. He mentioned the phrase "preattentional resources", and the lightbulb went on. PRE-attention...I'd heard that from numerous meditation presentations. Before your awareness reaches out for something or attaches to anything, the brain or our basic awareness already has existing processes and resources which function as noticing. But it is noticing and aware-ing before it becomes concentrated or directed enough to be considered attention. For years, people would tell me to just relax into meditation and I'd respond that I was willing to try as hard as necessary to relax. The problem with their commentary and my interpretations was that this basic awareness is phenomenologically prior to the trying. So attempting to "relax" into it was like trying to relax into being human--how? And Ramana stuck to this idea of going before anything reaches out and dwelling there. Oh, what a relief once you get it!

But even now, it isn't deep for me. It's obvious and light and clear, but it will probably take some time for me to really take it deep. That's okay, the obviousness and the relief make the timeframe perfectly workable. This preattentive, pre-self (pre-small self) state doesn't strike me as being prajna, but it is nice to be able to connect with it as a basis of consciousness and a place of rest, a place of denuding the self of itself--or more accurately, a place where the bare thing needs nothing added or subtracted...prior to any complication.

From a sense of familiarity with this standpoint, everything that is not peaceful, obvious, and clear all feels the same in some way. It's all unnecessary, all extra. Because there are no personal interests in justifying or projecting, no solid, relative, desiring self around which to hang justifications and projections, everything is simple on its own. It is like this state, then, is the doorway to prajna. In this state, there is no reason to go out and look at things and interact. But there is also no reason not to go out and look at things and touch and interact. If one does more than "rest in the Self", it seems to me that prajna arises in this fundamental space or from this fundamental space. Tranquility and insight.

Ramana also said, "Peace is the state of utmost activity." I wrote that one down because I knew that it was beyond me. I wasn't impressed by it--rather I felt, "Well, I know all those words. What the f#%k?!" The amazing thing is that this preattentive state seems to allow one to "go into" any situation without losing this state. Being able to say and feel that I have my own buddha style or family let me separate out other styles that I can't pretend to pull off. It's not "my" style because it comes in somewhere before the individual "I" does. But, like the family that includes my brother, sister, mom, and dad, it doesn't matter whether or not I want them or choose them--they're already family. It's a little strange to think of peace that way--that you're already in that state whether you choose it or not. I don't really know what the neurological correlates or signifiers are, and I may never care.

It is wondrous to feel the phrase, "I know I do not know" as praise and utter simplicity.

Male/Female Differences

2009-02-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting three minutes in this talk by Helen Fisher on the differences between male and female brain functioning. It's between 10 and 13 minutes into this talk that she give a nice, succinct simplification--unavoidably an oversimplification, but a really good snapshot regardless.

In my language, I've said that some people have a temperamental or biological propensity towards "doing" certain levels and abilities more easily. And in general, women are better at Appreciation while having to work harder at valuing Purpose while men are better at Purpose, having to work harder at valuing Appreciation. So we communicate and Understand in typically different manners (generally speaking). The largely male influence on meditation traditions has often influenced our understanding of mindfulness away from mindful appreciation, webbed mindfulness, connected mindfulness, social mindfulness. It seems that the American influences on meditation--towards social action, female influences including women in leadership roles, and psychological applications all bring meditation "off the mountain" so to speak, pragmatically demystifying much of what is possible.

Research Support for Purpose/Concentration

2009-02-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

Well, it hasn't been all that easy finding research that relates directly to what I've been looking for in terms of attentional abilities, but our neuroscientists are getting it done. In the book THE ATTENTIVE BRAIN, chapter 18 "Executive Attention: Conflict, Target Detection, and Cognitive Control", the authors cite research that supports the idea that infants at around 10 months have trouble "concentrating" in the manner I mean it, while at 18 months, this ability is common. This gives a background for determining the basic brain structuring involved in the function of concentrating as well as giving a strong relative date for common development of the basic ability. A.B Clohessy and Michael Posner are two of the cited researchers on this topic.

This is exciting because it points the direction for determining a solid anatomical foundation for this second step. Most likely, adequate research already exists for distinguishing the stage of Understanding. Beyond that stage, the abilities may be less dependent on developments in anatomical structure, although they will be related to changes in anatomical structure. For example, mindfulness may come more easily once we're through the chemical firestorm, neuronal growth, and pruning that adolescence brings--related to physical changes in adolescence while not being so directly dependent upon changes in anatomical structure because it is so directly influenced by chemical elements, hormones.

Associational Matrices

2009-02-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently commented on how it is as if we all live in our own personal universes, like interacting video games. To me, this sort of comment seems connected to how I have described intuition and distributed processes (in the glossary). Rather than thinking in politically and psychologically loaded terms like biases and prejudices, and rather than trying to model our living experience on mechanical processes like video games, I think we can talk about our "individual universes" or familiar frames of reference as associational matrices. This seems like a fairly neutral/abstract term that people can apply in their own ways.

Part of what I find fascinating is that much of what exists in my associational matrix is not always accessible to my attention or conscious awareness. (We can think of an association matrix as including items that are reside in conscious access awareness and nonintentional or nonconscious access awareness.) Many of my associations, then, function without me being aware of them. This happens in positive ways of training or habituation, like in learning to drive a car. Much of what needs to happen to drive fairly safely happens "on autopilot" so to speak--and my conscious intentional attention is pulled to the fore only when necessary. This "active" autopilot is different than when I am simply spacing out or daydreaming and not paying attention to driving at all. These nonintentional functions can also happen in ways that are politically "negative"--concerning bigotry and prejudice, for example.

My associational matrix will be mostly made up of things from my past and things I am becoming peripherally aware of now. We are usually more likely to have intentional control of whatever item or process when we can name that item, remember it when we want to, and "see" multiple other things that are connected to it. (By "see" in this sentence, I mean think about.)

One of the interesting points that comes up is that it is equally stupid to expect ourselves to not react to things within our association matrices as it is to expect ourselves to react to things which are not included in our association matrices. An example is that earlier environmental activists could react to pollution, but we cannot hold them accountable for reacting to "global warming" until we reach that point in history where people have tied together and compounded the effects of multiple sources of pollution as "global warming". Likewise, we can't hold people accountable for dealing with things in a simplistic or prejudiced way when their association matrix is thin on those particular things.

While these ideas may lend themselves to all sorts of whacko apologists, I am only an apologist for sensibility here. Once we have relatively position-neutral terms, we can work on those items in our actual universe in a shared endeavor rather than in a position-privileged manner. This helps to grind "wisdom" into a more pragmatic definition as well. If we are trying to engage in a conversation that incurs minimal resistance from another party, it makes sense to converse in ways that are not necessarily position-privileged or "loaded". Dealing with associational matrices as common, necessary, and not always open to intentional control allows us to emphasize the aspects of our lived experiences that tend to be common--such as trying for position-privileged ways of interacting that privilege our position over their positions. From that common ground, we can expand our matrices and explore our world(s) together.

**For those of us who have been talking about perspective-taking, I'd say that a "position" added to personal history yields a particular momentary perspective. While we may never get the fully individual perspective of another person, we can get our own taste of their experience by taking their position and that position's perspective to the extent we are able. The more richly populated and similar two association matrices, the closer the individual experiences will be when we "share" positions.

Levels as Energies or Textures

2009-01-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

This whole tantra thing has really caught on in my thinking. It brings up the possibility of living with each circumstance either well in some way or not so well. I've thought of that (worse to better) fairly often in relationship to competence with the attentional abilities at each level, but it also fits for our experience of the "energy" of each level. Generally, as we move upwards through the stages, the energies or textures have a subtler feel (with inspiration being somewhat unique because it pulls together the lower levels quite convincingly--the clarity aspect of that level is obviously subtle, though).

Basically, mindfulness allows one to regularly consider where it is one is acting "from". For instance, if I'm acting from the first level of Play/Creativity, there are the positive types of feelings or experience--curiosity, playfulness, exuberance, comfort, etc.--and also the more negative feelings or experiences of feeling threatened or having my comfort attacked. This is less "subtle" than Purpose partially because this energy feels like it is everything, "I'll never feel differently," felt excitedly or discomforted.

At the level of Purpose, we can feel confident, competent, and motivated or we can feel aggressive/dominant, ashamed, or helpless. At this level, we begin identifying purposes with roles. At the level of Understanding, we can begin to become comfortable with not knowing, we really consider. On the other hand, we can keep the world at an intellectual distance or we can roll our dominance-drive into trying to know everything. The feeling of compulsion behind this knowing is different than an open and potentially playful curiosity.

The point with all of this is that we can eventually get a "sense" for which energy/energies we are feeling at the moment and try to "satisfy" them. This follows a very basic principle of motivation. It goes something like: no action potential can remain in potentia or as potential. In other words, when we have a certain type of energy, it will be expressed. (If you smoke the crack, you will feel amped!) We don't always choose what level or texture of energy we are experiencing, but we can affect the expression. While I'm not a big fan of chakra language because it tends to be too metaphorical or metaphysical for my taste, there is definitely something to this description of textures and our ability to notice and work with these textures.

I believe that one of the basic points of tantra and mahamudra is that lower energies, with the right technology and situation, can be invested in moving "up the scale" so to speak. The companion point is that each texture is just fine, wonderful, self-redeeming if you will. That is not to say that we should all be big, selfish babies or toddling tyrants, but that I can recognize the texture of feeling threatened to be the opposite and companion to feeling curious. The situation hasn't changed in the least, but I can affect whether I want to respond to the situation by feeling curious or by feeling threatened (like one is the yin to the other's yang). Certain types of training affect my ability to choose how to respond in different types of situations, depending on what sorts of instincts, emotional reactivity, and conceptual biases are triggered.

In my personal understanding, it makes more sense to me to think in terms of the fight/flight/freeze response (for example) in the brain rather than thinking and talking in terms of chakras, but one way or another, we end up with different textures of action potential. That action potential is basically human--we can all freak out, get angry, laugh, etc. How we respond with that potential, how we express it, is what we can improve with time. As we physically and socially mature, our brains and sometimes our social circles support that improvement.

We can, then, develop a recognition of the various qualities or textures of action potentials (energies) and decide which ways we want to respond. Depending on particular aspirations and weaknesses, different types of training are called for. Depending on different types of action potentials, different attempts to improve the situation may be either bound to fail or likely to succeed.

The same holds true for recognizing the steps in the process of paying attention and feeling motivated in that, if we recognize the steps involved, we can see which ones are lacking or incomplete. Of course, if we have an idea of progress, we can then fill in the blanks to the best of our ability. By looking at situations from two different angles (qualities or textures as well as the process of deploying attention and motivation), we can gain a certain degree of perspective. In other words, when I can't see how it works from one angle, I can usually see something from the other angle. The perspective that we develop in this manner is more analogous to pragmatic wisdom as opposed to the equanimity and ability to observe gained by mindfulness practice. While mindfulness and pragmatic wisdom support each other, some people will feel more of a preference for practicing one or the other. The world is our oyster.

Continuation

2009-01-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

Continuation is an interesting stage in its own right, but it may have to be addressed in relationship to changes that are either intentional or unintentional. It seems that continuation is a good point to bring in the interaction between individuals and groups, institutions and bureaucracy, communications and expectations. Big subject. (To be continued.)

Change

2009-01-19T16:16:00.000-08:00

Change is unavoidable. Change is part of life. We can't avoid actual change. But the stage of change is somewhat of a luxury and a strength. Alligators don't really change. Sharks and alligators have survived for a very long time because they are efficient at living. They have basically one method and it works. In comparison, dogs can change some--they have a rudimentary ability to change. Viruses can change quickly, but this is not considered, intentional change, so it is different than what we do as humans. We have the luxury and strength of making intentional, creative, considered changes.

Very few people are actually interested in random changes. Sometimes we're so bored that it seems any change would be better than a continuation of the status quo. That's what we think because we aren't really considering changes such as getting gonorrhea, breaking my neck, having a retina or two detach--changes that affect people every day. The point is simple: people want progress. So when I talk about the stage of change, I'm talking about trying for progress.

As I've outlined the process, there are a few spots that people are particularly poor at changing in a positive way that supports a feeling of healthy continuity. Each of us is good at certain ways of changing, but we all have a great deal of unfulfilled potential. As a group, we have common blind spots. The stage of change involves recognizing those blind spots and addressing them. This is why I've said that you can't avoid your way into happiness. Happiness isn't something we can usually get by trying to be happy, but it is something we can improve by looking for progress and creating progress. In fact, it is amazing what hardships people will willingly put up with if they believe those hardships are faced in the service of worthy progress.

The single biggest change that I believe could improve our global culture is an increase in equanimity. But people rarely wake up with the thought, "I hope to be more equanimous today." For those that do, they often also have the feeling of, "I should be more equanimous today." That feeling of should, which goes along with the judgment and feeling that things are not good enough, does not fit with acceptance and equanimity. In other words, it doesn't work to tell myself or others, "We should encourage equanimity; we'll be better for it."

But everyone wants to feel inspired. Many of us feel, "I should feel inspired in this life." And I think there is some truth to that feeling. I think it is our birthright as humans to feel and enact that drive towards living inspired lives. To relate this to the stages I've just outlined, that means we want to change in the direction of being more inspired by what we do. Progress is progress towards inspiration (and perhaps beyond). Now, whether or not we agree on the large-scale importance of equanimity, I have yet to meet someone who wants to be uninspired. Equanimity by itself, then, is not the goal. But equanimity is one of the tools that helps us to achieve the goal.

In order to achieve this goal, it doesn't work to simply win the lottery. Inspiration that only happens to passive people tends not to last. In order to "own" a sense of resilient inspiration, we have to 1) work for it, and 2) deserve it. We work towards it by developing emotional resilience and applying equanimity training in the service of progress. We deserve it by pursuing it ethically.

All that may sound somewhat circular, but I'll point out the major blind spots in the process. The first major blind spot is not recognizing priming and change as unique stages with unique functions. When we don't work with these stages, we try to force (rush) change or we wait for it. The solution to this problem is to learn about these stages, their functions, and to practice being aware of when they're mostly absent or ignored in our lives.

The second major blind spot lies in the interaction between engagement and affirmation. When we see and experience these stages as too far from one another or as conflicting, we lack a feeling of continuity and act as if there is simply no way to address problems which have that feeling of drive or lack of drive. The solution here is more complex and depends upon how exactly one experiences this problem. Essentially, though, struggling here means we need to integrate the two types of processing, top-down and bottom-up.

The third major blind spot lies in our ignorance concerning how to recognize and deal with shock and overwhelm. Again, there is no solution I can sum up in a sentence or two, but we already have much information and wisdom concerning this problem. Research and continued attention will help us progress in this area.

The fourth major problem lies in the stage of affirmation: ambiguity. Ambiguity is like the opposite of equanimity, like retarded equanimity. Ambiguity occurs when we want to avoid something unpleasant that we simply must do, when we are confused and do not want to explore further in order to move beyond confusion, and when the situation is simply too complex to gain any solid grip on. The solutions, then, are to do what needs to be done, explore in order to understand and overcome, or train in equanimity. Mindfulness training makes a significant difference in all these solutions. When facing procrastination, holding oneself accountable and facing what we want to avoid must be included. This involves some degree of intelligence and courage.

As individuals, we can face these challenges by developing the major attentional abilities I have outlined elsewhere: responsiveness, concentration, intentional relaxation, mindful appreciation, inspiration, harmony, and serenity. As a species and global village, the solutions are similar, but at a cultural level rather than a personal/personality level. It is generally recognized that we humans are the greatest danger facing humanity right now. Dangers are engaging, enlivening, redeeming when we do not support avoidance of our potential--when we engage, live, redeem. The most significant human characteristic is the ability to change; progress occurs when we turn difficulty into inspiration.

Engagement and Affirmation

2009-01-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

The order or primacy of these two steps determines which of the two processes is dominant in a given situation. While we feel these two processes to be different, they are not absolutely distinct. That's why I talk about which is primary or dominant rather than speaking as if they are completely separate.

Engagement

Engagement is a stage with characteristic feelings. If motivation is a car, engagement is like the engine--it's where the feeling of power comes from. At times, we feel that we are in control of where that power is pushing, but at other times we feel we are at the mercy of this power. This power can feel like reasonable pride or it can push into hubris. This can be a feeling of strength and balance in one's body and can also feed into dominance and oppression. It can feel like a healthy attraction or an obsession. It is the feeling of a driving force.

When something becomes noticeable enough to us as relevant to me, we engage it. We have instinctual and emotional reactions that engage, and we also are able to engage with our thinking and a sense of contemplation in many instances. While we sometimes feel like we are looking for whatever, that we are active in going out and engaging, it also happens that we might feel that particular things engage us. If you're out for a walk and some big dog rushes at you, you will probably feel that it is engaging you. By walking near it's territory, you will be engaging its instinctual or trained reactions. However you see it, though, you will soon begin to feel like you must react to that dog actively--you will engage this particular situation. (Much involving traumatic responses comes from a feeling of passivity in this brief attentional moment. Compulsions and habitual emotional reactions are also found here.) Whether you respond to that dog by screaming, fighting, running, whatever, this type of situation has energy. That energy is drive or "engagement".

Affirmation

Affirmation is the point where we decide that our methods of engagement and the situation are good enough or lacking. This stage of the attentional process can include acceptance or affirmation (good enough to excellent), ambiguity (don't know), negation (not good enough), and overwhelm (aaaaahhh!) which might include shock. If you already know that there is an aggressive dog in your neighborhood, when you go for your walk, you may be prepared. Preparation makes it more likely that our engagement responses will be felt as at least good enough. This can be as simple as remembering that there is a chain-link fence that will keep the dog from biting you. You might walk by, listen to the dog barking and snarling, and laugh at your response yesterday when you froze and almost shit your pants. Ah, it feels good to be competent.

Since we know that preparation can be helpful, we plan, we expect. Some people try to plan more than others. If our love of planning encourages discretion to the exclusion of valor, we can find ourselves living like academic weenies. It's possible to spend almost all of our time in expectations and memories. At the other extreme, to the extent that we discourage thinking or contemplation because we want only the feeling of engagement, we can live mostly like animals.

It does not so much matter in each instance whether engagement or affirmation comes first in our experience; it matters that we can align our actions and our judgments. When we feel a sense of continuity and rightness from priming through affirmation and into engagement (or vice versa: priming then affirmation then engagement), we feel healthy and right. When that doesn't occur, we can look at whether we need to change our thinking and expectations, our actions, or whether we need to pay attention to something we have possibly been ignoring. That occurs in the stage I call change.

Priming

2009-01-19T14:59:00.000-08:00

Priming is the first stage, when we are starting to become aware of something or when we are starting to become aware that something is relevant to ourselves. This can happen in a few different ways.

Fast to Slow

There are some very quick neural processes that can be involved in priming. For example, if we see words like, "criminal", "dangerous", "evil" flashed in front of us very quickly, we will be faster and more likely to make negative observations about ambiguous persons we see soon afterwards. (Most of us are familiar with the idea of subliminal advertising.) The same is true for topics such as sexual arousal, relaxation, people we know, etc. This process also influences "triggering" for issues such as addictions, obsessions, etc. We can learn to speed up our attention to notice things at a quick rate, and we can also learn how to slow down most things in order to think about them. (But many of our responses occur faster than thought.)

Small to Big

Besides things which enter awareness briefly or quickly, there are other things that we may be completely unaware of because they are too small for us to register. An apprentice begins learning a craft but often cannot imagine what distinguishes his work from a master craftsman's. (Even a trained apprentice will be better than I am at many jobs, getting the main steps right.) The master's expert experience lends to paying attention to very minute details that the apprentice has not yet learned to notice. In this type of situation, our brains can actually grow towards being able to recognize smaller and more complex details. This process will happen over months to years. Experts may have trouble putting their expertise into words, feeling more that they simply have the right "touch".

Ambiguous to Obvious

Other things are always there or have been around for a long time, but we simply don't notice them for various reasons. When we begin to notice them, they start off as ambiguous or vague. So when we are trying to learn something like a new language, the meanings are often ambiguous or vague, and we slowly learn how to make sense of large amounts of information. Or, say that you see obvious signs your neighbor doesn't. His marriage is on the fritz, his wife is unhappy, but he doesn't know it yet. Eventually, he will start to notice that there are strange moments where he can't understand why his wife is acting the way she is. He will feel somewhat confused, knowing that something is happening but not knowing what. We also enjoy watching this process with our pets. Have you ever laughed at a dog for that quizzical look they give something they don't understand--say a remote controlled electric car? In that type of instance, the car is obvious to the dog, but it is not at all obvious to the dog WHAT that thing is.

Each of these types of priming can happen with enjoyable things or actions and also with uncomfortable things or actions. As material moves from the unknown to an area of liminal or peripheral awareness, we feel that we are getting glimpses or hints of something but we don't necessarily know what. Since first impressions count, we can prime for success and enjoyment involving many of these things--and if that doesn't happen, people will often feel as if they have a small voice warning them away from these things; in such a case, they have been primed towards a negative experience.

For teaching meditation to beginners, I like to begin with deep breathing. When people breathe deeply, it tends to engage certain physical processes that relax the body. When the body relaxes, the mind tends to relax. Herbert Benson called this the "relaxation response". You can feel it and notice it. Since awareness of breath is a good tool for many types of meditation, a good first experience that feels "successful" primes people for a feeling of competence and positive results, which lends itself to maintaining engagement.

(Obviously, I'm using the word "priming" in a few different ways here. I often move from a general or mushy usage to increasing precision.)

Priming, Engagement, Affirmation, Continuation, Change: Differentiating the Two Main Processes

2009-01-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

People are usually conscious of only three major steps out of five concerning what we do with our attention. Then, they often feel like there are gaps in their understanding along with contradictions between what they feel should happen and what does happen. Well, those gaps are real, but they don't need to continue. There are two different processes (generally speaking) concerning how we are aware of being motivated and staying motivated. These processes involve the same five steps but two of the steps change their order, depending on which process is stronger at the moment. My title lists these five steps in the basic order.

We move through a process of noticing and then reacting or being intentionally responsive. When emotions and instincts are primary in this process, the steps follow in this order: priming, engagement, affirmation, continuation, and change. This is following what neurologists talk about as bottom-up processing (the evolutionary "bottom" being instincts and emotions while the "top"--concerning the brain's processing and activity--has more to do with the primate and homo sapien aspects of consciousness [thinking, planning, certain types of training and creativity, etc.]). I'll explain the separate steps in a minute, but I want to point out the two main processes first.

When top-down processing is predominant, the affirmation stage comes before the engagement stage: priming, affirmation, engagement, continuation, and then change. This happens when we think to ourselves that we want to do something and then we try to do it. That process tends to be weaker than the emotionally-driven process where engagement comes before affirmation. But this second process is very powerful across extended periods of time because it can be more consistent (in a certain way) than the instinctual-emotional process. As an example, think about Jonezing for a cigarette, beer, lay, doughnut, whatever. When it's something you don't think you should really go after, the two general motivational processes are in conflict. Your (weaker) top-down, thinking mind says, "Don't do it--one more doughnut isn't what you need." But your (stronger and usually faster) bottom-up process doesn't say much. It pushes the geeky weenie out of it's way and rips through a whole box of doughnuts.

Hopefully, as we mature, we learn how to improve the strength and accuracy of the top-down processing, and that geeky weenie studies up on how to get bigger and stronger. Eventually, that geeky middle school kid can become Tony Robbins and the high school jock (bottom-up processing) either stays the same or just gets fat and lazy. (Not to go too "Breakfast Club" on you, but it's pretty simple.)

Two types.
Bottom-up: priming, engagement, affirmation, continuation, change.
Top-down: priming, affirmation, engagement, continuation, change.

Usually, people are only aware of and somewhat knowledgeable about engagement, affirmation, and change. If we learn about how all five steps fit together, and how the two different processes interact, quite a lot becomes possible.

Priming, Engagement, Affirmation, Continuation, Change

2009-01-16T03:11:00.000-08:00

I've benefited greatly from studying the Buddhist Abhidhamma to some extent. The Ahidhamma canon basically presents something like a psychological equivalent of the periodic table of elements. With Abhidhamma-based vipassana (analytic or insight meditation), one can become quicker and more thorough at recognizing the nature of various moments or experiences. Essentially, by learning to deal with experience at a rate faster than the speed of thoughts, one becomes very honest and clear about one's world--especially about one's immediate, pinpoint experience. This can become a very thorough process, a very precise way of experiencing. By becoming quick, precise, and clear with one's attention, we can stop instigating and feeding the normal emotional problems, ambiguities, and delusions that tend to create the usual suffering within human life. (That's a simple version of the basic story.)

Just reading this story in the right amount of detail (which would be the fitting amount of detail for me to become clearer--"right") has helped me recognize the potential in the method and within myself. It's a good method, but the texts strike me as too detailed for everyday application that isn't reductionistic or doctrinal. In other words, there is so much in the texts that one could spend a lifetime or eight trying to study well enough to understand. And we all know academics' tendency to get caught up in studying their topics and then not really getting into doing those things. Luckily, good things are often very simple and clear, so we can often grasp things or have a genuine feel for them without understanding them thoroughly; if we couldn't do that to some extent, relationships would be impossible.

To draw from another body of work, I want to add in that Stages of Change theory and motivational interviewing outline a similar process to Abhidhamma meditation, but at the speed of conscious thinking, the speed at which we formulate our ideas for conversations. This is much slower and less precise than the Abhidhamma stuff, but it works for thinking about all of it in the beginning and then being able to talk about it. (Many traditions talk about the quickening of one's soul or attention, so Abhidhamma isn't unique in that--it's just impressive for being so detailed and systematic.)

Okay, one more angle and I'll be able to lay out my points. Stages of Change has been most often utilized to help addicts and anyone trying to help addicts to get a grip on what happens in the decision-making process and how addictions often run rough-shod over one's decisions. So the stages of change laid out in this theory are most often thought of in the sense of time that it takes to overcome an addiction (months to years).

My question has been: how can we take this phenomenally productive sort of approach and apply it at the speed of conversation? Or, in other words, how can we think and talk about walking through the entire decision-making/motivational process at everyday speeds? How can I apply this stuff right now to anything I am experiencing? The meditators have their answers in Abhidhamma and other sutras, the folks working to overcome addiction have an understanding and way of communicating laid out in Stages of Change theory and motivational interviewing, so what about everybody else in everyday situations?

Simply put, there are two different processes involved--speaking in general terms and about everyday speeds. The order of these two processes is different, but the steps or parts are the same. What's more, recognizing how they are different yet also the same can clear up a ubiquitous misunderstanding about how people motivate themselves and others. This process is not technical and doesn't need to be seen as complex or hard to understand. Each person's experience of their own mind is enough to begin with.

Cultural Disorders

2008-12-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

While different people have different ideals of health, the idiom of resilience has a built-in, pragmatic connection to reality. It is like health-in-relation-to-challenge. So instead of trying to define or find an ideal of health, I like to look at how to improve resilience--a practical understanding and standard of health.

When trying to learn a new set of concepts, it can be helpful to know what a new idea is NOT. So in talking about resilience, it can be helpful to differentiate resilience or health from disordering. Many of the characteristics of cultures that I talk about fall somewhere along a continuum between one unhealthy extreme and another. Some situations will call for actions that are not always in the center of the continuum. For example, in a culturally and ethnically homogenous country like Japan a few centuries ago, it would be appropriate to have less of a value placed on pluralism and diversity than in the America of today. In essence, then, as situations change, cultural values can change to help people adapt to their changing situations. The flipside, of course, is that we can institutionalize certain values while denying others and allow the culture within our society to fossilize. To the extent that individuals or societies are impressed with static or idealistic values, they will resist change. (An interesting point to return to later would be that every value can be thought of and acted out as a living process or as a static idea and ideal.)

Here's a partial list of cultural disorders:
Internal rigidity/immobility/caste (Hindu India)
Extreme homogeneity and/or xenophobia (early Japan, tribalism in general)
Rejection of diversity/multiplicity of values (almost all traditional societies and cultures)
Inequality of personhood (based on class, gender, race, religion, profession, intelligence, health, etc.)
Lack of interaction with other cultures (perhaps not a problem in the Kalahari, but becomes a problem for Amazonian tribes when the oil companies try to move in–whenever resources are disputed)
Overindulgence (upper classes everywhere, Portugal 14/1500s)
Apathy/fatalism/cynicism (communist bloc, 20th century)
Aggressive expansion (pick your favorite)
Ignorance (due to censorship or lack of educational opportunities)
Diffusion (lack of purpose/meaning due to loss of history or information overload)

What fascinates me is how many people have argued over which values or virtues are best, as if values and virtues are abstractions that have little to do with our actions. So for instance, a strong sense of tradition can easily become internal rigidity or xenophobia when it is allowed to be abstracted and exaggerated. On the other extreme, a valuing "progress" can lead into diffusion when progress is seen mostly in idealistic terms or as a rejection of tradition (1960s America). Further, while there are many influences that fed into the Baby Boomer's radicalism and Gen-Xers subsequent sense of diffusion, regardless of which causes we notice or which people we may want to blame, the cultural and social characteristics remain.

The ways in which societies retain cultural disordering are very similar to the ways in which individuals retain personality disordering. And, interestingly enough, although the ways which groups communicate and make decisions are somewhat different than the ways that individuals makes decisions and choose to act, overcoming cultural disorders can follow pretty much the same path as overcoming personality disorders.

Competition Versus War, Roles Versus Hierarchy

2008-11-18T12:57:00.000-08:00

By commenting on the difference between a competitive situation and one where purpose is shared, I opened the door to wondering about the differences between intimacy and competition on one hand and then competition and war or violence on the other. This thinking follows the rubric of moving from intimate situations where we feel close to someone else on to situations where we relate socially based on power and status or roles and then on to situations where we must decide whether those we must face are either included in our sense of the in-group and those who are excluded altogether.

If we reverse this continuum, we must first decide (or, instinctually react as to) whether to include anyone as equals (include/exclude, animal or basic relationships). If they can be considered as equally human instead of as less than us, we will interact based on perceived power and status roles (social relationships). If we become closer than interacting primarily through roles, if we feel able to be ourselves more openly and authentically, more heartfelt, then we can speak of a realm of intimacy (private relationships). [Sometimes people operate in supposedly intimate or private relationships primarily through role relationships and reactive emotions and instincts, so we could say that close human intimacy has not developed.]

In the best sorts of relationships, we can mix business and pleasure, business and private sorts of interactions, role responsibilities and intimacy. But to do so, those involved must develop some sense of professionalism, respect for privacy or "boundaries", and also some agreement on when to act professionally or intimately. When the people involved are not quite mature enough for this, we separate business from pleasure or suffer the consequences. The question becomes one of when, or if, it is possible to mix business (role/status/power types of relating) with pleasure (and intimate means of relating). Therapy certainly crosses those lines.

Let's work outside in--from that inclusion/exclusion response to status/power/role relationships to intimate/personal relationships. The exclusion response occurs when we feel that the other party or parties involved are less than human, or not part of our group, or a threat to survival. This allows for eating meat, cruelty to animals, genocide, slavery, and on an individual level, rape and physical assault. Essentially, at this level, we are dealing with basic instincts. If we include someone as human or like us, we relate based on status, competition for power, and roles. Other social animals do this, too. Other animals are relating somewhat on emotions and somewhat on instincts, but humans also include the possibility of relating based on explicit social roles (other animals have differentiated roles, but ants aren't as conscious of this differentiation or as flexible in their ability to change their roles, for example). We end up with a complex mix of basic instincts, the ways those instincts relate with emotions, and also the ways in which our roles relate with instincts and emotions. Things get more complex as we move towards intimacy which is why it can be helpful to distinguish between complexity and complications. When we feel free to interact as the complex individuals we are, this feels very freeing rather than feeling complicated. And at the level of intimacy, we can include all instincts (although usually moderated), emotions (moderated), thinking (moderated), etc. without feeling competitive and without needing to put on a "role-face" (and be primarily professional).

These distinctions should make it clear that it is possible to have competition (between roles and types of status) without being at war. In essence, we still compete, like for that next promotion, but we agree to "play nice" (compared to lions eating male cubs, anyway). Furthermore, it is possible--however unlikely--that we can incorporate business and pleasure or our professional role relationships with our personal relationships. The better we are at all of this, the closer we can feel. War and dehumaninzation (exclusion) make it impossible to feel close, and professionalism alone (role relating without personal intimacy) makes it impossible to feel close.

Therapy fascinates me because it is a professional role that usually is expected to incorporate intimacy. In other words, few people would want Mr. Spock as a therapist. As a professor, maybe, but not as a therapist. That role simply does not fit his manner of relating. One difficulty for therapists, then, is that they inevitably mix business and personal relationships and feelings. As opposed to business associates deciding to strike up a friendship or friends deciding to strike up a business relationship, therapists' business is the constant management of roles and intimacy, the constant crossing of lines between what is public and what is private.

In this dance, clients have the right (a professional-level concept) to certain expectations of what their therapist will do for them. Most therapists have a desire to feel personally intimate with their clients, and indeed, if this feeling is shared, it is a strong aid to progress. And this leaves us with the conundrum of when to respond from a role-position and when to respond more personally. The situation is complicated exponentially when therapists cannot or do not formulate clearly what their professional role is. Even without this complication, this type of relationship is complex. But my relationship with my girl is more interesting for being complex...only we try to keep that happy complexity as uncomplicated as possible.

If you've seen mixed martial arts fighting, it is not so hard to distinguish between competition and war or malevolence. Two people step into a UFC ring, agree not to bite one another, gouge eyes, or punch balls--but otherwise proceed to batter one another until there is a knockout, a submission, or time is called. Since many of these competitors respect each other and the game, people don't get killed, hatred doesn't have much place (well, maybe somewhat for the fans), and we get to enjoy intense competition that is not war. Pretty clear distinction as long as people mostly follow the rules. Competition, not war.

In therapy, clients have a right to expect the expert (hopefully, the therapist) to take the lead in a noncompetitive manner. This calls for a particular skill that many professionals clearly do not possess and do not need to possess. While salespeople can get away with feeling competitive with both other salespeople and their own clients, while salespeople can try to "win" against their peers and their clients, it doesn't work for therapists to try to "beat" their clients. And yet, the peculiar difficulty to this type of relationship is that therapists must respond to expectations while I have rarely or never heard anyone speak about a client's responsibility in the relationship. How do we treat clients as social equals while supposedly having a greater expertise on intimacy? What can we expect or ask for from them as our social equals?

It seems reasonable that a client expect a certain degree of expertise from a therapist. It seems equally reasonable to me that a therapist expect a certain degree of civility from clients. And in moments where civility and expertise come together, there is an opportunity for intimacy, personal growth, and gratification on both sides. In order to do that, we simply have to recognize that there is a difference between an instinctual/emotional reactivity that is based on one-up/one-down relationships and an unavoidable equality between civil equals. In other words, we carefully set the situation and choose our moments so as to invite intimacy into unequal role relationships (therapist/client) that are based on civil equality (client/professional). The customer is not always right, but common respect allows for diversity of opinions and experience and expertise. In other words, the customer is never wrong in expressing what they want.

Psychological Resistance as Opportunity

2008-11-18T10:56:00.000-08:00

Perhaps in furtherance of what I picked up in an internship at the VA, I've been thinking about how an understanding of strategy and tactics could help therapists. I'm currently reading Liddell Hart's book STRATEGY, in which he recommends strongly what he calls "indirect strategy"--which we know of, loosely, as "reverse psychology" essentially. (This comment is mostly one on attitude, but can be taken to a point of developing better understanding and techniques as well.)

One of the more difficult tasks that therapists supposedly face is the number and complexity of symptoms with certain clients. But this is largely a false problem when rapport exists, if we can expect that a client will return for the next appointment. Short of that being present, we are dealing in crisis management, not therapy. I don't know all that much about crisis management. Situational crises are analogous to fragmented personalities as well, so I am not really addressing issues such as schizophrenia, but this perspective may help identify when and how a stout ego--even if applied in apparent resistance to progress--can be a good thing.

The attitude shift I'm getting at comes from the realization that multiple goals allows one to adjust focus and techniques in such a way that resistance can be avoided, so I guess this is mostly a comment on difficult clients or difficult issues. The beginning of this shift (in terms of therapy) comes from recognizing the individuality of the other person along with their sense of threat. When we feel vulnerable, we are likely to feel threatened or pressured, reducing our ability to think creatively and increasing the likelihood and often the intensity of emotional reactivity. In therapy, clients often alternate between feeling threatened and soothed--both of these engendering low-creativity mind states, reduced agency. From my angle, I tend to be dissatisfied with simply soothing anxiety rather than increasing resilience and agency, and I think that idea is generally accepted, but I think many methods contradict that agreement.

The beginning of this shift (in terms of strategy) is a shift from a focus on superior force alone to a superior concentration of force. (Stick with me a few steps here, this makes ready sense once we arrive.) In boxing or war, we know we need to be prepared for both attack and defense--usually simultaneously. The best offensive strikes most often follow putting our opponent off balance, dispersing their defense while concentrating our offense. Hart highlights the idea, here, that in order to do so, it is very important to have multiple objectives. (This is where complexity comes back in, but as something that can support therapeutic goals rather than stress out therapists.) Just as it takes boxers or armies time to adjust their defenses--and they are vulnerable while adjusting--it takes people time to adjust their defensive mechanisms or resistance as they shift from resisting one perceived aim to another. That gap is rich with potential. When we have only one objective, our opponent can readily see where we are headed and align their defenses accordingly. When therapists find themselves caught in a head-to-head struggle, then, it is evidence of their own shortcoming.

Motivational interviewing addresses resistance by explicitly putting the focus on the client's motivation and allowing them the space to redefine the relationship as nonthreatening. The stages of change model provides multiple goals and also alleviates therapists' fear by outlining the process of change (reducing the "offensive" pressure).

The same force of will that is "resistance" in a conflictual relationship is "agency" from an individual or noncompetitive viewpoint. In these terms, then, the very idea of resistance as resistance saps a relationship of rapport and wears out anyone involved, reducing the force available for progress. Since clients cannot reasonably be expected to have a thorough theoretical background, this is always a shortcoming of the therapist when two conditions are met. The first condition, again, is that the situation not be a full-on crisis. Therapy as therapy does not occur during crises. Crisis management is called for, even if crisis management done well has therapeutic effects. The second condition is a workable degree of ego integrity. In other words, the ego must first be somewhat stabilized. Therapy as a talking cure--at least as is most often taught in training programs--is ineffective by itself when dealing with significant brain trauma, psychoses, and extreme drug effects.

Therapists wear themselves out by dispersing their own psychological energy or force, and clients do, too. Rather than diminishing force, progress occurs through an adequate application of force. So I'll define a therapist's realm of expertise as expertise in the excellent application of psychological force towards progress. (Since progress is constituted differently in various situations, I will leave "progress" undefined for now.) Essentially then, moments of head-to-head competition are healthy when we are playing or "exercising" (testing our strength). But otherwise, unless we are actually in a wartime situation, this application of force is stupid, wasteful, and unpleasant.

In fact, supporting someone's strength of agency comes from making explicit the availability of force and it's multiplicity of applications. In other words, when someone is willing to show us where they want to apply force, they show themselves. When we have multiple goals in mind--whether those goals are shared or not--we are able to use that knowledge to advance our goals. In war, those goals will not be shared, but in therapy, we can direct that force in whichever direction will gain the greatest progress rather than trying to railroad clients towards one goal. Whenever we feel "resistance", we are trying to dominate an opponent, and they are right to perceive it as so. This is where it can be incredibly helpful to have multiple goals; it is better to make progress towards a secondary goal than to lose ground or waste energy going nowhere in a stalemate. Similarly, crushing a client's "resistance" (sense of agency) is inappropriate.

The same understanding applies to education. While there may be a time and a place for dominating opponents, should that occur, we might as well be honest that this is what is occurring--at least with ourselves. Maintaining deceit or avoidance of reality also diminishes our available psychological energy--will and attention.

Updated Questionnaire

2008-11-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

Here's an updated version of the questionnaire. I changed some of the questions in the hope of more directly addressing the topics I wanted to with each item.

Profile 4

2008-11-05T00:51:00.000-08:00

These results are interesting for the similarity between (a) responses and (b) responses. Interpreting this set of results was a little different. Rather than trying to pick out what I thought to be most relevant from a large array of responses, this person chose which items there was a desired change for. Since it is relatively few, I don't have to do much sorting. We can get right to work.

E. Laughter, fun, curiosity.
1. 9,9
9. 4,7
16. 7,7

Rather than looking at straight scores, I focused on the differences mostly for this profile. Items 1 and 16 had no difference between (a) and (b). But within this set of three, that consistency is significant. This responder feels that they laugh more than most folks (rated as a 9) and are satisfied with how much they laugh (a:9, b:9). Looks like the picture of psychological health so far. But wait a minute. For the item on fun, there is a three-point difference. Is that a comment on oneself or the world? I can't answer that because my test item is not simple enough, but that needs to be addressed.

P. Avoidance, mental persistence, discipline.
7. 4,1
14. 7,4
17. 8,8

Well, it is rare to find people who are satisfied with their discipline. (As with most other profiles, I tend to begin interrogating sets of responses at this level.) This person finds their discipline to be satisfactory/perfect, but lists both other items at this level as differences of 3. On this set of results, there is only one difference of 4, so this is most likely significant (if my levels and items have any validity). For item 14, "Once I make up my mind, that's how it is," there is the desire to be less rigid. Maybe, then, discipline is working in a behavioral or action manner but it is harmful in a social, emotional, or motivational manner. Item 7, "I avoid thinking about anything that makes me uncomfortable," shows that there is more avoidance than desired. Certainly, these two responses (for items 7 and 14) are relevant to discipline. Are they relevant to changes in other areas that make this person uncomfortable? Is there a mental rigidity around desiring change in other areas or in admitting a desire for change in other areas? Probably.

U. Planning, intentional relaxation, complicated problems.
3. 8,8
11. 6,10
21. 6,8

Oh yeah. Here's our four-point difference. Number 11, "During work and at the end of the day, I am able to stay relaxed when I choose." Intentional relaxation is the single biggest desired difference listed in this score-set. While the numbers in this response set are unusual for what I've seen so far, this problem may be quite common. So far we know that this respondent is both more mentally avoidant and mentally rigid than preferred while seeing discipline as just right. Also, while laughing more than others, there is a desire for more fun in life. And the hang-up seems to be somewhere around intentional relaxation. This is different than distraction and all the bells and whistles our society provides, different than drugs and anything you can put into your body. This is about knowing how to relax when one chooses because one chooses. How much better would life be for all of us if we knew how to relax when we chose to? I know I don't have to mentally avoid (#7) anything I can be relaxed about. And I can also be mentally flexible (#14) when I can remain relaxed while paying attention to something.

Prognosis here is good. Diagnosis: lacking intentional relaxation. Here's the caveat, and it's a doozy. What happens to people who have been mentally rigid in a protective way for a long time? What happens when they do relax? Emotions come out. And since we don't need to protect ourselves and those around us from pleasant emotions, that means that unpleasant emotions are going to come out if this person learns intentional relaxation. The good news: you can handle it. The bad news: it probably won't be easy; most people don't avoid things they are already prepared to handle well. With as many responses where this respondent rates their self at where they would desire to be (10 of 21 times), it looks like the mental rigidity, when it begins to break down around self-identity, will unleash a...something. Maybe a drizzle, maybe a flood.

Three things need to happen.
1. Learn intentional relaxation techniques.
2. Expect unexpected sorrow, yearning, anger, blame, sense of betrayal, loss, shame, etc.
3. Recognize that this process may be old-school "cathartic" or it might be a walk in the park.

The comment written in for #14 was, "wish I was more willing to adapt". When people are able, they don't have to wish. In this situation, I would want two questions answered for me, "Why bother?" and then, "How?" My answer for why it is worth doing this is that it leads to greater appreciation and perhaps a greater sense of inspiration. The how part is more complex. Depending on the individual, there needs to be a mix of more or less social sharing, more or less relaxation and equanimity, probably exercise, increased communication skills (and effort concerning communication skills, I'd guess), and an adequate understanding of emotions--probably something more in the line of increased awareness and control of emotions rather than "sensitivity training". It's a type of control more like being on a sailboat than driving a tank. You can't control the wind and the waves, but if you have a sense of what you're doing, you can probably get where you want to go.

A real strength in this profile is #13: 10,10. Depending on the degree of emotional integration and mindfulness, these scores are usually a sign of inspired activity or good focus (with maybe only hints of inspiration or flow). Take this ability to concentrate and enjoyment of being immersed in difficult tasks and apply it to learning intentional relaxation and emotional awareness as the next difficult task. Make it something "to do". But it must be done in a new way. Since you've always felt able to be disciplined and follow through but you've also been able to avoid whatever you find too uncomfortable, you might end up learning a lot about relaxation and take the emotional stuff only for what is pleasant or relatively superficial/easy/comfortable. The real question here is one of how to do the personal introspection in one's own space while also opening up to other people to a greater degree and opening to one's own emotions to a greater degree. Emotions, from an evolutionary perspective, are ways for social animals to communicate and act in accord. When we close off certain emotions, we close off certain connections. When we open to those emotions and address them well, we embrace our potential for deeper, more loving, more interesting types of accord. Eventually, mindfulness helps, but for now--relaxation.

Profile 2: Second Verse

2008-11-04T23:51:00.000-08:00

E: Overall, what if a person conceptualized their spirituality or summarized their spiritual path in a paragraph to complement the survey?
T:That's one way of going at it. I am considering giving people a few options to choose from so that there is a write-in section where people get to fill in the blanks. I was thinking about asking for two stories that show something you want to change about yourself, three that add to that picture that show what you are proud of, and two more that round things out. I think I'll have to ask about who gets more out of reading and writing versus who gets more out of actually telling their story in conversation.

E: In your commentary on part one, I'll confirm that it’s the comparative phrasing that I was aversive to. But that would give us something to talk about if we were in a follow up session. Or you could tweak the phrasing.
T:One of the things that really stands out with aspirations is idealization (you give an example below). I think there has to be both room for disagreement--which will involve some unpopular bubble-bursting on all sides--as well as actual grit, for traction. I'm wondering whether it is good to keep this phrasing because when respondents go so far as to remark on it, that's worth noting. It could mean a few different things, but it might be worth having that comparative phrasing. I have to think about it and get more comments from more people.

E: Given your commentary for the second section, are you saying that my lower Part “b” answers can be accounted for because I’m female? I would like to work on discipline; I feel I’ve declined from the level of intensity that I maintained two years ago; I see the effects in my career progress and my body.
T:I'd not go so far as to say "accounted for", concerning those Purpose level responses. "Affected by" fits--just as my responses are affected by my experience as a male/man. I think that women are more likely, based on social upbringing and probably neurophysiology, to need to make more of a point (on average) to work at improving at that level if they choose to. And they might be more likely to undervalue that level. Men seem more likely, based on social upbringing and neurophysiology, to need to make more of a point (on average) to work at improving appreciation and emotional integration (which can be significantly supported by mindfulness practice). Of course, your own experience is more relevant to you than any theorizing, supported by evidence or otherwise. Being on the fanatical side of intensity (for you) a couple years back gives you direct experience in where the center, the balance is...for you. To check on whether I might be right about the gender stuff, see if you can empathize and relate with guys you have difficulty connecting with by recognizing that they are simply sometimes operating from a reliance on discipline and drive rather than relying on intentional relaxation (that they probably have not developed) and mindfulness along with emotional integration. You might already be better at emotional awareness and speaking about emotions than they are; the midway point is shared understanding and intentional relaxation. There's a lot more to say on this subject.

E: With a smile, I can confirm that your commentary for section three is an accurate interpretation of where I’m at-- the forefront as an example is with my career path. I’m seeing a career counselor (tonight was our fourth session), and I’m allowing the ambiguity of whether or not it’s helpful or producing "results" and just doing the work. In general, spontaneity thinly veils my being arrested or procrastinating (but not due to laziness but fear) in “career” planning. Planning and stick-to-itiveness are skills I want to develop in this area. I am aware of possibility.
T:Yeah, the Purpose and Understanding stuff go hand in hand. Although, at the further level of Appreciation, mindfulness and being able to maintain equanimity in the face of ambiguity is really important, if it has a weak base, it will be weak or off-target. Plenty of people miss what spontaneity actually is by distracting themselves (okay, ourselves). That's a Purpose-level, immature defense mechanism. When my purported "spontaneity" involves mental avoidance, it's probably closer to impulsivity than authentic spontaneity. The planning needs to be built on healthy discipline if you want it to be consistent rather than simply intense.

E: Commentary for Section four is also accurate. I’ll confirm that rather than unaware, I am aware and easily overwhelmed (though leaps and bounds more balanced and equinimous than, say, five years ago). So rather than full-blown panic attacks and pulling out my hair, I can, even after freak out, try to direct my attention back to tracking anxiety in my body and thoughts. After 20 minutes of focusing on tracking, they start to disappear.
T:Yup. This is also where having a strong career path lends to a strong social identity--very foundational for one's self identity. And since we are talking about the maturation of self-identity (since actual self may already be whatever it needs to be), a strong self-identity allows for backbone and flexibility. Having a strong self identity and being able to communicate that to others without double messaging lets us figure out what we can and cannot do for others. So it looks like you're putting the pieces together. Actually getting a little more of the Purpose level and Understanding level stuff together will set up your mindfulness/openness to let you sort of unfold into inspiration. For many people, inspiration is like happiness in that, if you work for it directly, you won't get it; but, if you work for the things that support it, it seems natural, maybe even unavoidable.

E: Your commentary in Section five makes sense and is agreeable. In the past I would have disagreed and pushed (and probably did). I went through a 2 year period of mostly consuming/reading than doing. Now I’m doing and with some consistency. A lot of the reading is falling away, not as unimportant but not relevant or necessary. A lot of what felt mystical falls away and consistent skills and strategies remain. Consistent tools of mindfulness. So it makes sense that growing into/ exploring mindful appreciation would be a focus.
T:One of the biggest differences between me and most people I've heard talk about mindfulness is that I emphasize that mindfulness is the basis for consistent inspiration when it is applied as mindful appreciation. That mindful appreciation allows attention to easily flow into a sense of unhindered-if-still-directed inspiration. Social identity is very important. Monks and professional athletes, surgeons, etc., all have very strong roles on which to base relatively stable social identities--roles that encourage the sort of focus that leads to flow states. For the rest of us, we will have to decide whether our professional roles are strong enough to allow that sort of focus...or we might look for that sort of focus in other areas of our lives. The sufi saint, Rabia said, "I gave up teaching because it is easier to fly peeling potatoes." For her, the activity of peeling potatoes gave her that pinpoint focus. For others, teaching is really their thing. Once we experience flow enough, especially if we experience it in different situations, we can begin to accurately identify (not completely, but authentically) as flow. It is very inspiring to know this is in me, in potential at least in every moment. This inspiration is our human birthright and we all feel, if having a hard time admitting to ourselves, that settling for less than inspiration is demeaning to ourselves and a diminishment of the human spirit.

Now, that's a hard pill to swallow. If you're not consistently inspired, you are neither accepting your "natural" birthright nor furthering human culture. As my good friend Steven says, though, "Take your medicine." Most of us have some sort of ideal self, a sense of who we'd like to be. When we don't live up to that ideal, we kick ourselves for it. We can be brutal. Being consistently aware of just how often and how far we are from that ideal can be crushing, so most people find ways of hiding or smudging that awareness. So what do we need in order to be able to swallow this pill? Well, I've already said it but it bears repeating. In order to handle what otherwise would be the mental strain of that awareness, some people deny their ideals and others become workaholics or religious fanatics or whatever. Instead of those methods, I recommend incorporating: the playful exuberance we are born with; the confidence that comes with concentration, discipline, and a sense of purpose (our purpose as humans is to become inspired); the basis--not fortress or prison--of a solid understanding along with the ability to relax when our minds spin nearly out of control; the mindful appreciation of our situation as human beings with unlimited potential that comes with personal integration and acceptance of emotionality and mortality; and the clarity and inspiration that come of identifying oneself with flow, openness, freedom.

There is another Sufi question/story that I always remember. One guy asks another, "Why is it that God makes his saints to look like everyday people?" And the answer is something like, "So that you will learn to treat every one you meet as one of God's saints." The integration of these aspects of human potential into our everyday lives allows us to do that. Even without the integration, we sometimes stumble upon it anyway. Your pushing for more than mindful appreciation was both the sign that you have the drive that is necessary for "spiritual" progress and the "spiritual" desire for what is yours. Claim it. It has been wonderful to work with you and learn with you.