Japan's earthquake and tsunami 2011

The recently series of disasters in Japan triggered serious fear in some folks in America. This is curious considering how far removed we are from the actual experience. This, I reckon, is key to what sets us apart from other animals. Thinking enables us to make matters worse than they would otherwise be (of course the opposite is also true). The fluctuating stock market is a perfect example of both cases. On the other hand nightly newscasts focus on the negative; bad news sells.

Worry makes it worse
It’s a little different for people actually experiencing disaster. Theirs is a visceral sense: feeling shock, loss, discomfort, and fears directly resulting from a physical experience. Any animal, including us, would feel this way faced with similar circumstances. Where we part company with the animals is in imagined fear of loss and discomfort which cause worry and stress.

Checking for radiation

I was dumbfounded today to hear about a friend of a friend, arriving from Japan, who had her sandwich confiscated by US customs. Such irrational, not scientifically supportable fear of radiation also resulted in panic purchasing of potassium iodide by some Californians recently. This feels understandable. However, to see this at the official level feels much less so. Once I would have just seen this as “Them… those idiots”. Now I know it is “us… we idiots”, and this is truly humbling. I’m afraid our self-image is quite out-of-sync with who we truly are, animal-wise.

Grandma and child

Curiously, whenever we feel doubt, the mind invariably imagines the worst case to be the more probably one. Ironically, the worst case is usually not the case! My mother’s state of mind whenever her cat failed to return home at night exemplifies this. She would fret and worry that he’d been run over or what not. Every time he’d return home the next morning. Yet, every next time he’d stay out, she would always imagine the worst. I’d remind her of how he’d always return, and how he was undoubtedly “out on the town”. Nevertheless, evidence and reason were impotent; emotion ruled the day.

Don’t worry, plan wisely
On the other hand, it is equally striking how consistently we ignore real worst case probabilities that lie just beyond the horizon. An obvious example is the overly optimistic way we approach life. Decrepit years lie ahead, yet many fail to take heed and prepare in body or soul. The same lack of preparation occurs in countless other ways where there is no ‘news breaking’ stimuli rattling our cage. The current debt crisis is a most striking example. We need a shocking event to trigger serious concern, and when it happens, we invariably panic and over react. We think we are rational, we talk as though we are rational, yet we behave irrationally.

'Fear' pulls most of the strings

Fear is the master puppeteer
I’ve long underestimated the deep impact emotion, especially fear, has upon our lives. Not anymore. Fear is the master puppeteer. I’ve always remembered the way the Bhagavad Gita speaks to fear.

Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in pleasure and pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin.

This is the wisdom of Sankhya ‑ the vision of the Eternal. Hear now the wisdom of Yoga, path of the Eternal and freedom from bondage.

No step is lost on this path, and no dangers are found. And even a little progress is freedom from fear.

Yes, this is a bit idealistic, but it has the priorities right. I find a more practical and realistic”progress” in simply understanding that emotion (esp. need and fear) drives thinking which creates counter-productive worry (and desire of course).

First watch this 60 Minute segment on the Corporate Tax Rate dealing with one aspect of this issue ⁽¹⁾. It hints at why the old paradigm doesn’t work well in a global market place.

Alas, our politicians still operate from a point of view that is not only fanciful, but now dangerously obsolete. One reason is that America people and politicians have long seen this country as the “leader of the free world” and “the best country the earth have ever seen”. Such a self-centric view, shared by both left and right, only exasperates the blind spot problem.

I find that framing this issue in another context helps. The body is confronted with a analogous ‘debt problem’. Indeed, the fundamentals are the same. Note, I’m relying on old memory which I’m too lazy at the moment to brush up on, so forgive any minor technical lapses.

With Debt, Lactic Acid Builds Up

When the body works vigorously beyond a certain point, it builds up an oxygen deficit. Like the government and money, there’s not enough oxygen to run a balanced metabolic budget. Metabolism shift to anaerobic processes to keep muscle working as long as it can. Government pulls off a similar thing by printing more money, borrowing on itself, and so on. The metabolic debt produces toxins which you feel the next day as aching muscles. Likewise with any national debt, the pain comes in various ways: inflation, war, revolution, poverty, collapsing economy. In short: There are no free lunches in nature.

Clearly, if you want to get more work out of your body, you must exercise regularly to build the fine blood vessels that can then deliver enough oxygen during those times of increasing demand. Similarly if the people want government to do more, they’d be wise to first build up the necessary resources. Our current folly lies in the widespread unwillingness to adequately prepare, and yet we still expect widespread benefits to continue. Clearly the population/politicians as a whole are unwilling to bite the bullet and prepare (like adopt a rational tax code as the rest of the world has). With head placed firmly in sand, the populace/politicians say “don’t touch my Medicare or Social Security”.

Solving the Debt Problem Naturally

In the body’s case, the wise thing to do is give enough time and effort to build the physical resources necessary to meet the demands. To always demand extra from your body, and later pay with pain, or worse, heart attack and death, is utterly shortsighted and childish. First ask, is the stress you expect your body to labor under truly ‘righteous and just’? If so, then it is better to stop in time and prepare it adequately before demanding more from it: Rather than fill it to the brim by keeping it upright, better to have stopped in time.

The most practical, natural approach to our budgetary problems is to stop sucking up all the oxygen. Like they say, “When you realize you’re in a hole, stop digging”. Likewise, the wiser way to get out of debt is to first stop spending.  Then, build up the resources needed for desired expenditures. This is how it is done throughout nature in a strictly pay-as-you-go kind of way. Modern economics has found clever short-sighted ways to get away without paying up front. Sure, having those in authority eating up too much in taxes is disastrous.  However, spending more than you have is perhaps even worse. Simply put, nothing could be more out of natural balance than spending more than you earn.

Need + Thinking = Desires and Blind Spots

I see both parties to this debate are driven by emotion to do the ‘right thing’. The conservative side, at least theoretically, is more in line with nature: earn before you spend, they preach (alas, words are cheap). The liberal side is so bent upon doing the ‘right thing’ for the poor, the kids, the elderly, that it fails to see the core necessity of ceasing to spend first. They are bent on solving the problem by raising taxes in a country where the majority of the population is against raising taxes (yet ironically expecting more benefits). Like the tax code and numerous other inconsistencies we see in culture generally, this is completely irrational. But there are no short cuts in nature. Spending what the majority are not willing to pay for up-front is doomed in the long run (i.e., short term pleasure leads to long term pain).

Yet, all this is natural. After all, we only think we are a rational and  ’sapient’ species. Our behavior shows we are plainly animals that may have merely evolved too much for our own good (not on purpose of course!). First Mother Nature tried out the big body-small brain model with the dinosaurs. Now she’s trying out the big brain-small body model in our species… and the blind spot is an unintended consequence. Of course, with evolution every consequence is unintended, isn’t it? That’s what makes life so fascinating. Only time will tell how it all turns out.

⁽¹⁾ Fareed Zakaria’s GPS (Global Public Square) presents superb in-depth coverage of the most important of current affairs. His interview with James Baker on Americas Budget and Foreign Policy sheds more light on this whole ‘mess’.

Yum yum

Eventually science will discover most everything that is discoverable⁽¹⁾. Recently research, reported in the Science News’ article, Cerebral Delights, flushed out some primary neurological links between fear and need.

I have felt for a few years now that fear stood at the head waters of all emotion, including those related to need. Additionally, what fear and need mean is not as straightforward as often thought, at least as I use those words. So before getting into the meat of this issue, I should clarify my sense of these words, especially need. For starters, you might review my caveats concerning need and fear.

Learning to speak Thai was the catalyst for firming up my understanding of ‘need’. I picked up Thai the easy way – living among non English speaking Thai folks. A particularly striking difference in thinking between my Western upbringing and Thai culture was in the use and meaning of the word want and need. I was used to thinking need, want and desire were different. For example, I may “want/desire” that yacht, but do I really need it? By contrast, the Thai’s, at least at the peasant level, don’t perceive a sharp distinction between need, want, or desire. The synonym-like nature of these words made sense to me, as did their Buddhist world view.

How does regarding need, want and desire as synonym-like apply to the research results here? These are deeply connected to one’s pursuit of pleasure, just as fear, worry, and insecurity are deeply connected to one’s avoidance of pain. Consider these examples: need vs. fear, pleasure vs. pain, attraction vs. repulsion. While we’re at it, why not throw in love vs. hate, beauty vs. ugly, and good vs. bad. Note how these words correlate?

Need = pleasure = want = attraction = love
——- ———– —— ————- —–
Fear = pain = reject = repulsion = hate

Now The Meat

I am pleased to see some objective evidence linking need and fear. My ‘research’ is quite literally just the opposite—totally subjective. That is a murky research environment to say the least. But in some ways the most valid, and certainly the most efficient for an individual. After all, one only lives a few decades before returning to the great Nothing, while science crawls along through many lifetimes. On the other hand, self deception is all too easy, so I welcome any confirmation, supporting evidence. Now I’ll paste the most pertinent passages below for those for whom the link above fails to work. The article begins with the subtitle:

The amygdala, a part of the brain known for its role in fear, also helps people spot rewards — and go after them.

For years the amygdala has been regarded primarily as the brain’s center for fear. Scores of studies have shown that it is essential both for perceiving fear and expressing it.

In recent years, though, a surge of new research has expanded scientists’ view of the amygdala’s importance. It turns out that the amygdala helps shape behavior in response to all sorts of stimuli, bad and good. It plays a role not only in aversion to fright, but also in pursuit of pleasure.

Studies of the brain’s anatomy reveal good reasons for the amygdala’s power: It is very well connected. In humans and other primates, the amygdala is linked through a complex network of cells to brain regions involved in all five senses. Signals about everything you encounter are passed from the brain’s sensory processing areas directly to the amygdala. And the amygdala shares elaborate communications channels with the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s control center for planning and decision making.

Its strategic location allows the amygdala to act as a spotlight, calling attention to sensory input that is new, exciting and important. In this way, it helps predict the timing and location of potential dangers, helping you dodge many of the things you dread. But those same connections also help you acquire the good things in life, by identifying and assessing rewards such as food, sex and other delights.

Though much more is known about its fear job, researchers are now vigorously gathering evidence about how the amygdala evaluates information and events for their reward potential. Recent studies offer clues to how the amygdala assigns value to rewards and adjusts that value as circumstances change. Other work provides insights into how the amygdala links actions and rewards, suggesting that the amygdala plays a role in goal-directed behavior. Still others are finding out how neural circuits in the highly connected human amygdala work with other brain structures to recognize good things and find ways to get them.

Toward the end of the article this nugget appears. It reminds us of how fuzzy the view can become the closer you get. The main point here is how important the amygdala is for assigning an emotional value, with the primary focus on pleasure and fear, or to put it more straightforward perhaps: need of pleasure; fear of pain.

Rudebeck and his group trained monkeys to play a computer game in which they assessed the value of different rewards. The animals were shown two different pictures and allowed to choose between them. One picture brought a large juice reward, and the other brought a much smaller amount of juice. The animals chose the picture associated with the larger reward more than 98 percent of the time.

After turning off the amygdala in some animals, the scientists used single-cell recordings to listen in on brain cell chatter in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. To the team’s surprise, the monkeys still chose the picture with the “best” outcome on pretty much every trial, just as they had done with a working amygdala.

Though the animals continued choosing in the same manner, the scientists found that fewer neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex changed their firing rate in response to an expected reward. When looking at the animals’ emotional responses — as measured by pupil diameter and heart rate — researchers found that monkeys without a working amygdala didn’t react to a reward in the typical way, Rudebeck says. “They seemed to have no idea of what reward was, despite the fact that they could still choose perfectly well.”

The findings, reported at the neuroscience meeting, suggest that the brain uses various mechanisms to calculate how much something is worth. While the amygdala may be important for assigning an emotional value, Rudebeck says, it may not be the “be-all and end-all” in valuing objects.

⁽¹⁾ Of course, the most important ‘thing’ from a Taoist point of view is beyond the grasp of science. Naturally! With Nothing, there nothing to grasp. Fear and Nothing are closely related, so anything science finds about the nature of fear may tell us something about Nothing, if we read between the lines anyway.

'He who conquers self...'

The details of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths vary somewhat depending on the source. I recently dug up the source for the version that I found most useful. Why useful? Mostly because it was the most sensible and succinct I’d seen.

Nevertheless, I had a minor problem with how the Third Noble Truth was stated, and long ago changed a word or two. Rereading my original source makes me want to revisit this and ponder why I revised in the first place. Here is the sequence of events:

The original says: “He who conquers self will be free from lust. He no longer craves and the flames of desire find no material to feed upon, thus they are extinguished.“

I changed the “conquers self” to “surrenders self”. I was immersed in the Bhagavad-Gita at the time which preaches surrender, e.g., “no man can be a Yogi who surrenders not his earthly will”. Perhaps the idea of ‘conquering self’ felt to aggressive to me.

A few years ago I thought back on that and changed it back to what I thought was the original, i.e., “He who extinguishes self will be free from lust…” Recently I came across that old book and retrieved the original ‘conquers self‘ phrase.

There is some chicken and the egg irony in this. The Second Noble Truth point out that “the illusion of self originates and manifests itself in a cleaving to things. The desire to live for the enjoyment of self … (and so on)” So just how is one suppose to ‘conquer’ an illusion? If something isn’t real, then what does conquer mean, in practice. It certainly is not the same as conquering a physical enemy coming at you with guns a-blazing.

Another peculiarity is the notion that, as the Third Truth say, “…the flames of desire find no material to feed upon thus they are extinguished”. The “material” would seem to be the self, which after being conquered is no more and thus desire has nothing to feed upon. However, as the Second Truth says, the self originates and manifests itself in clinging and desire. Lust creates the illusion of self, yet conquering self frees you from lust. This feels a little chicken and the egg-y.

I get past the chicken and egg dilema by simply keeping actively aware that my sense of self is caused by my desires and fears. The illusion has a hard time withstanding such constant clarity. Conquering self is just maintaining enough perspective to avoid being completely hoodwinked by biology, the bio-hoodwink⁽¹⁾ as I call it. In other words, the more aware I am of how biology is pulling my strings, the less convincing the illusion become. Conquering self is really a matter of seeing how the trick works. Once you clearly know how the trick (magic, illusion) works, it can no long captivate you. When the illusion of self no longer captivates, it has been conquered—or at least you’ve established a truce.

One final thought on Buddha’s Second Truth. I am inclined to rephrase it this way: “He who conquers, surrenders and understands self will be free from lust. He no longer craves and the flames of desire find no material to feed upon, thus they are extinguished.” The conquering comes first as you wage battle with yourself to ‘get your act together’. Next comes the surrendering when you realize that conquering your self is not possible, at least in the normal wage war sense of the word. Finally, seeing what is actually taking place, and understanding how a bio-hoodwink is always pulling strings diminishes the “illusion of self” enough to return to one’s roots and just be who you naturally are.

(1)bio-hoodwink: I coined this term for the trick biology plays on perception. See Peeking in on Nature’s Hoodwink. Chapter 65 says: Of old those who excelled in the pursuit of the way did not use it to enlighten the people but to hoodwink them. The oldest ‘of old’, when it comes to living things in nature, is the biological process of life, ‘hoodwinks’ and all.

For example, a bio-hoodwink tells the brain that the richer the food (and the more you eat) the better. This was the case in the wild before we cleverly devised ways around natural limitations in order to make food as rich and plentiful as we wished. Alas, the bio-hoodwink is inherited and out of sync with human willful innovation. The only counter-measure we have against this is understanding, which explains why Buddha put Right Understanding at the head of his Eight Fold Path.

Always

I think of desire as the glue of attachment, which makes them pretty synonymous in my book. (Of course beneath it all is the foundation: need and fear.)

Saying attachment is always good is perhaps being facetious. Still, I find non-attachment can be a little hairy when it goes too far. After all, life and attachment go hand in hand (i.e., they correlate: life=attachment, death=detachment).

Reading the correlated version of this is interesting: Life attaches death; Death detaches life. Saying that death detaches life is obvious; saying that life attaches death is more subtle.

life -> attaches
===== ======
detaches <- death

Ridding yourself of desires can become as precarious as having too many desires. Non attachment (having as few desires as possible) is a fine balancing goal when one is loaded down with attachment (whether attachment to things or beliefs). However, much has fallen by the wayside as I’ve aged, to a point now where I increasingly find myself on the “few” side of this coin. Sure enough, allowing myself to have desire⁽¹⁾ is as difficult as ridding myself of them used to be. As gentle as it sounds, ‘allowing’ is no more realistic than ‘free willing‘ myself.

Now this is what I call natural justice. It makes the whole idea of desiring not to desire seem nonsensical. In other words, I desire not to be full only when I feel stuffed. Is this any different than blonds who want to be brunette versus brunettes who want to be blond? Oh well, at least the Tao Te Ching is balanced nonsense—rid yourself of desires; allow yourself to have desires.

⁽¹⁾ Lau’s interpretation,  ”Allow yourself to have desires…” can be a little misleading. The literal Chinese is closer to this: Hence, normally without desire so as to observe its wonder. Normally have desire so as to observe its fate.

Personally, I never had a problem allowing myself to have desire in the sense of giving myself permission. To the contrary, I’ve often gone overboard in the allowing department. The literal Chinese has a simpler matter-of-factness to it.  Simply saying have desires avoids the moral connotation that saying allow desires might evoke.

I’ve long touted the benefit of watching for mysterious sameness. Seeing differences, while often stimulating, is just not as satisfying in the long run. Being able to discern differences enhances survival… up to a point. For example, being able to distinguish a snake from a crooked stick. On the other hand, imagining mountains of difference out of actual mole hills of similarity is just plain counter productive and stressful. The recent Science News article on human relationships, Getting to not know you, offers evidence of the wisdom to let mole hills remain mole hills, or as they say, let sleeping dogs lie.

Young couples are better than long-term partners at discerning each other’s preferences

BASEL, Switzerland — Long-lasting marriages may thrive on love, compromise and increasing ignorance about one another. Couples married for an average of 40 years know less about one another’s food, movie and kitchen-design preferences than do partners who have been married or in committed relationships for a year or two, a new study finds.

Note the subtitle of the article: “Young couples are better than long-term partners at discerning each other’s preferences“. Cultural bias is creeping into this research right from the start. If you think it is better to discern things more sharply, then your understanding gets skewed in that direction as these excerpts go on to show:

The psychologists observed this counter-intuitive pattern in 38 young couples aged 19 to 32, and 20 older couples aged 62 to 78. “That wasn’t what we expected to find, but this evidence lends support to a hypothesis that accuracy in predicting each other’s preferences decreases over the course of a relationship despite greater time and opportunity to learn about each other’s likes and dislikes,”

In long relationships, partners may also come to perceive an unduly large amount of similarity between themselves, the scientists add. Members of long-term relationships often attributed their own food, movie and design preferences to partners who had different opinions.

In the case of food, taste perception suffers as people get older, Hertwig notes, which could make it more difficult for long-term partners to keep track of each others’ increasingly inconsistent food likes and dislikes.

It’s also possible that older couples in the new study come from a generation in which men and women generally knew less about each other to begin with than couples do today, Hertwig says.

What’s more, long-term partners may be especially apt to tell “white lies” to each other in order to keep the relationship running smoothly, thus diluting their knowledge of one another.

Despite their relative disadvantage in predicting partners’ preferences, long-term couples reported more satisfaction with their relationships than did younger couples.

This letter to the editor points to some of what the researchers overlooked:

Over time, it gets complicated
After reading “Getting to know you less and less” (SN: 11/6/10, p. 16), I felt the researchers’ assumptions were incomplete. So I asked my wife of 42 years what her favorite color was. Her response was just as I expected: “I don’t have a favorite color,” she said, “only a range of colors.” This was true for me also. Thus, I think that one factor is not that couples get to know each other less the longer they’ve been together, it is that over the years they experience more and more things, and their likes and dislikes are more complicated than when they were young. Each partner then is less likely to know what the other likes because the other has no simple answer.

Frankly, I would say it’s not “more complicated”, it is just less sharp. As we get older we become more adept at untangling the knots and softening the glare. The simple answer is mysterious sameness. Although admittedly, explaining that can get “complicated”. Over all the article, Getting to not know you, while accurate in fact, lacks perspective (truth), at least from the point of view of the way.

Too much of a good thing

The Science News’ article, Making Nuanced Memories, shows the ‘better’ bias in regards to memory from another angle. The better our memory, the better we can discern things more keenly. I suppose we place such a high value on memory because it is the main thing that give us a competitive edge on this planet. Here again we may have a case of accurate fact, erroneous interpretation. It is not easy to realize when we have reached the tipping point of “too much of a good thing”. Perhaps our attraction to alcohol comes from a need to turn down memory’s glare.

“We are closer to understanding how memories are truly formed and stored in the brain,” says Craig Stark, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. “If we want to try to help get better memories, we’d darn well better know how the system works.”

Once the cells finish maturing, they integrate into the rest of the hippocampus, where they remain for a lifetime. “Most of the dentate gyrus is formed after birth,” Gage says. “A lot of it is formed in the first four years of life. That’s when you’re getting your baseline of memories. Then a low level of neurogenesis persists.”

“New neurons are helping to distinguish between events that are close to each other,” Gage says. Let’s say someone offers you a banana. The dentate gyrus records the fact that you’ve just seen a yellow tropical fruit. “It’s like a bar code,” he says. “You put the bar code of the banana into the dentate. It’s coded with lots of information.” When you see another banana, the dentate will determine whether it’s the same one. But if the next fruit is an apple, the dentate doesn’t get excited, Gage says, because the difference is so big you know it’s not déjà vu.

An eye for subtlety Neurogenesis appears to slow in old age, perhaps explaining why the elderly have trouble telling a new but similar image (outlined in green) from a previously seen version. In one study (graph), older adults were more likely to label such images as “old,” thinking they’d been seen before, while the young correctly pegged the images as “similar.”

Stark and others are now trying to understand why short-term memories become more difficult to capture as people get older, even among adults who remain mentally sharp into their later years. In 2010, in Hippocampus, Stark and his colleagues described evidence of a sluggishness in new neurons that arise in the dentate gyrus of aged brains. In older tissue, the newborn nerve cells appear to require greater contrasts among images and experiences before reacting and capturing a memory. As people age, Stark says, “we seem to be less good about details and specifics.”

But researchers are also exploring ways to keep newborn neurons of old age as numerous and eager as those formed in younger years. First, scientists are identifying influences that, in animal studies, appear to decrease neurogenesis in the dentate

“Exercise is the strongest neurogenenic stimulus I know of,”

The Being of Just So

If put to it, I suspect few could really pin down what ‘natural’ is. Of course, there are many superficial definitions, some commercial (e.g., natural food) and others spiritual (e.g., natural healing). These imply a non-natural, un-natural side. Try right now to define natural without this implied ‘not natural’ devilish side. Difficult, yes?

There is a beauty-in-how-it-is kind of natural that has no opposite—mystery upon mystery may describe it best. Sure, we resist ‘how it is’ and idealize a better world, but this is a projection of self interest, of what we desire – a better memory in this case. Feeling the ‘beauty of how it is’ happens when we drop our ideals of how better it could or should be for a few moments.

These articles exemplify our instinctive blindness to the ‘beauty of how it is’, unless ‘how it is’ happens to coincide with what we desire. Naturally then, it only makes sense for the sage to desire not to desire.

This short lecture, John Cleese on creativity, shows he may be a ‘defacto taoist’ or perhaps a ‘natural taoist’. Meaning, anyone who has this contrarian point of view  is a ‘taoist’, although they may never have  heard the word Taoist.

The Blind Spot

This idea of backing off in order to move forward, and the humorous way he talks about the “blind spot”, parallels core Taoist principles.

For example, his comments about the “blind spot” are simply another way of saying, Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty. His take on this also parallels chapter 70’s My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

I’d like to take this a little further though, and drill down deeper if I can. What causes the “blind spot”, and why does “sleeping on it” work, are questions that come to mind. No sooner do I wonder why, than the word ‘agenda’ comes to mind. My agenda, more than anything, blinds me to the big picture. When I “sleep on it”, I am backing away from the urgency of my agenda for a while. That distance allows me to see more broadly and create a way around the current problem. That distance allows me to see more forest, rather than just trees; I can at least begin to peek around any blind spots I have.

The next question: what gives birth to my agenda in the first place? Clearly fear and need play a huge role. These two words address the core drivers of emotion. My agenda is born from my desires and ideals which are simply the thinking side of need⁽¹⁾. What I think blocks out or otherwise skew perception to favor these emotions – and voila I’ve created my person agenda, with serious blind spots sure to follow.

How do I know when a blind spot is currently blinding me? Any stimuli out in the world that directly impacts my agenda, hidden or known, will produce symptoms. One of the most evident symptoms is anger, or its counter part flight (i.e., fight or flight). And beneath that, of course, lie my core fears and needs. Using any sign of anger as a symptom of a probable blind spot can tell me volumes about myself. Here is where the courage of self honesty comes in, and where the difficulty lies. Fortunately, difficult things in the world must have their beginnings in the easy. The “easy beginning”, in this case, is simply accepting that anger is a symptom of my “blind stop”, and therefore an essential eye-opener, if I really value being true to myself.

Seeing past my blind spot is only half the journey. I also have what I’d call a “crippled spot”. Here, ironically, emotion is essential to ‘live true’, and practice what I preach. I call it will (though not “free will” mind you). This parallels Buddhas Eight Fold Path: First comes seeing my possible blind spot (Right Understanding, Right Mindfulness). Next comes remembering my possible blind spot (Right Attentiveness, Right Concentration), and finally comes living according to what I see (Right Effort, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood).

To sum up: Emotion is what veers my life onto by-paths; emotion is what enables me to follow the way. As with everything else in life, there are two sides to each issue. Making emotion (desire, need, fear, etc.) the ‘villain’ is as shortsighted and foolish as being ignorant of their overwhelming influence on my life.

⁽¹⁾ Viewed more closely, desire seems to be a amalgamation of instinctive emotion (’gut’ need) and thinking. Without that thinking side, we’d be moved by spontaneous need just like all other animals. Need (and its source spring, fear) is the driving force behind all action. Without it we’re dead—literally. It is the thinking side of desire we could (and should) have misgivings about. Thinking beats the drum of emotion, easily making mountains out of molehills (of need and fear).

Maturity, as I see it, is simply how gracefully I can accept a reality that doesn’t match my expectations. Children get their hopes up for this or that, and when life goes the other way they crash – lack of maturity⁽¹⁾. This is what we expect from children. But adults? This shows how little difference there is between children and adults – we’re just big children struggling to ‘look adult’.

The expectation of social change was terribly naive and doomed from the start. Society is like a huge ship; ‘captain’ inertia is at the helm; no wonder we say ‘the ship of state’. Turning a large ship around is a slow gradual process, as is social change. Seen up close, this ’ship of state’ is more an illusion than reality. The so called state is really a horde of people, just as a bee hive is really a horde of bees. The state is the people; the people is the state, and change is glacial. Speaking of glacial, there is the exception.

When the ship hits an iceberg, change is sudden. The ship sinks. I suppose revolutions are the parallel in society. When the ‘horde’ changes course, the state must follow. The events of the last few years sure look like the ‘great ship of state’ has hit an iceberg. Revolution is in the air. Obama promised a civilized revolution… ‘change we can believe in”.  Now the Tea Party promises a more radical revolutions… ‘throw the bums out’. Then of course there is the economic revolution that hit a few years ago. All this looks to me like natural and inevitable consequence of the modern ‘get it now; pay for it later’ approach of life. The ‘horde’ has come to its dead end and is desperate for a course correction.

This ‘get it now; pay for it later’ approach to life flies in the face of nature’s most basic tenants: living things work and earn their for what they get. Struggle followed by reward.  Modern civilization has managed to ‘outwit’ natural law with its ‘get first;pay later’. Ha! Woe to him who willfully innovates, while ignorant of the constant. So as we see, nature rules in the end. Consequences come due – unpleasant, unexpected, unwanted, yet as predictable as night and day to those who maintain a proper sense of awe. If not, some awful visitation is in store.

⁽¹⁾ The Tao Te Ching say, circumstances bring them to maturity. That certainly plays a huge role in it. I was always struck by how much more mature third world  poor kids were compared to their modern world counterparts.

(this is the working title and draft cover)

I wrote this Yoga manual^[1] in 1979. While it still holds up well, I decided it’s worth updating. As part of this, I am attempting to sum up the Principles (the “spirit of yoga”) as I see it today.

Yoga is a process, not a destination. So many folks think of yoga as something you need flexibility for. Just the opposite. If anything, the more flexible you are, the harder yoga becomes. Again, unlike most secular things in life, yoga isn’t about the destination. It is about the journey…the way.

PRINCIPLES

(from an older and perhaps wiser point of view)

I wrote this Yoga manual in 1979. Now, 30 years later, it still holds up well. I’ve decided to leave the original introductory pages mostly as is, especially PRINCIPLES (from a younger point of view). These reflect my youthful belief in free will … that anything is possible if I set my mind to it. Naturally, it reads a bit strident, naively so from my point of view today. Yet, its message may offer a useful perspective.

Ideal Free Will

Soon after I finished the manual, I began to question my faith in free will^[2], and I began earnestly searching for evidence of it. So far, I’ve found nothing in human behavior that can not be explained by a simpler motivation—the biological push-pull force of need/fear. In the end, free will appears to be a case of wishful thinking more than fact. It seems that I just needed to believe in free will. Why?

Conflicting needs (or fears) was the problem, and free will promised a solution. If, as it now appears, free will is no more than a promise, what can I do? Ironically, I’ve found hope lies in knowing that the strongest need (or fear) I feel at the moment determines what I do (or don’t do). Paradoxically, this makes ‘free will’ and need/fear almost synonymous, i.e., need and fear determine what I want, and what I worry about. Need and fear, wanting and worrying are as interdependent as muscle and bone.

Actual Free Will

Happily, the resolution of conflicting needs (or fears) depends largely upon me being mindful of what I truly want of life. And what is that? Honestly, I’ve always known what I want deep down. We all have (and do), intuitively anyway. It is just that short term desires and worries keep distracting us. We forget again and again, turning over one new leaf after another as we wander and stumble down life’s very short road.

Prioritizing desires counteracts this distraction by diminishing desire’s (and worry’s) impact on us. In doing this, we are effectively desiring not to desire. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: “Therefore the sage desires not to desire, and does not value goods which are hard to come by”… (64).

Watch Your Self

If I had to sum up the secret of yoga, I’d say it all comes down to watchfulness—or as Buddha said, Right Mindfulness, Right Attentiveness, Right Concentration. In a yoga posture, this means watching your body, mind and emotion moment to moment. Are you pushing too hard, (too ‘Ha’), or taking it too easy (too ‘Tha’)? All you need do is watch for these lapses from the ‘middle path’, and go the other way… towards balance.

Watching oneself honestly couldn’t be easier or more straightforward. This is a level playing field, perhaps the only one in life—no knowledge, skill, teaching, or innate talent is required. And yet, as the Tao Te Ching says, “Our words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice”… (70). Okay, that may be an over-statement, but not by much. Living in watchful self-honesty is most difficult.

Why? Because every innate advantage we have has its downside. I can’t emphasize this enough; every plus we enjoy has a minus we suffer. Worse yet, what we think is so gets in the way of seeing what is actually so. We fool ourselves. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.“…(71).

Balance

Individually, we are on both sides of balance’s happy medium—over-doing some areas, under-doing other areas. Clearly, balance lies in under-doing the former and over-doing the later. And fortunately, despite fears to the contrary, there’s little chance of overcompensating in either direction. Why?

The areas where we innately under-do or over-do are actually symptomatic of our primal ‘inner’ nature. That means, unlike the tip of an iceberg, it changes little. Sure, we may think we can change, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg talking. Like free will, the ideal of true change is more likely a case of wishful thinking.

Is it Karma?

Our primal nature is like an iceberg below the water line, massive and unseen. As it bobs and tilts one direction, we react by ‘over-doing’ or ‘under-doing’ in the opposite direction to counterbalance. Deeper down our primal nature may itself be counterbalancing still deeper currents. Who knows—it’s a little murky down there.

This whole balancing process may represent a kernel of truth in the myth of Karma—not a cause and effect chain of Karmic past and future, but of ‘karmic’ layers of cause and effect… moment to moment. This is where balance lives, without memory, past or future. Only now!

One practical consequence of seeing life this way is that you soon realize all your perceptions and actions are merely reflections of yourself. In other words, what you perceive or do ‘out there’ is really symptomatic of your own needs/fears (a.k.a. loves/hates) deep down ‘in here’ right now.

Self-honesty floods awareness; the judge becomes the judged. Judging books by their covers becomes increasingly difficult when you realize that you are just perceiving symptoms of a deep, less definable other side. Such a blurring of distinction, (”mysterious sameness” as the Tao Te Ching puts it) can really help you avoid being knocked off balance by self-serving judgments and biases.

Thinking beats the drum

Of human emotions, desire is the one with which all religions take issue. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “There is no crime greater than having too many desires; There is no disaster greater than not being content”… (46)

However, I say desire is not the real problem, per se. Viewed more closely, desire seems to be a amalgamation of instinctive emotion (’gut’ need) and thinking. Without that thinking side, we’d be moved by spontaneous need  just like all other animals. Need (and its source spring, fear) is the driving force behind all action. Without it we’re dead—literally. It is the thinking side of desire we could (and should) have misgivings about. Thinking beats the drum of emotion, easily making mountains out of molehills (of need and fear).

Just look at the world: From political and religious extremists at one end, down to the little neurotic quirks, opinions and bias that are common to everyone at the other end. All illustrate the consequences of overly trusting that what we think is true. However, when we take thought with a grain of salt, it becomes easier to calm down and preserve emotional equilibrium.

But, who am I kidding? This is a tough nut to crack. Those primal emotions (need and fear) drive thinking. To make matters worse, thinking feeds back into and reinforces emotion. It is a vicious cycle. Still, contemporaneously knowing this is going on as I think helps me distrust thinking, even as I’m thinking. This lack of faith in thought weakens its ability to feed into and re-enforce emotion.

Civilization’s price tag

One of the primary functions of civilization is providing the means to achieve our goals and satisfy our desires. To meet this end, civilization must side-step nature’s wild ruthless side—a side which happens to help keep life balanced. It’s not surprising that our nearly obsessive avoidance of nature’s uncomfortable side increases our difficulty maintaining balance. No wonder we easily swing from one extreme to the other. Civilization’s endless blind pursuit of safety and comfort comes with unforeseen, unwanted, and unpleasant consequences. We only think we’ve conquered nature; the negative consequences prove otherwise.

I have a motto to help me counteract civilization’s safety and comfort bias and keep me more grounded: “Short term pain; [leads to] long term pleasure. Short term pleasure; [leads to] long term pain”. Civilization is biased towards the later. Balance lies in accepting the former. That is the principle essence of yoga for me—balance.

The Spirit of Yoga

Through these Principles I’ve tried to convey the spirit of yoga. Now the ball is in your court. When you do yoga postures deep amid this spirit, you will be truly doing yoga no matter how stiff, weak, or far from the ideal form you are.

Conversely, yoga done without this spirit, is not yoga… no matter how much it looks like yoga. It is merely exercise, which isn’t bad—it’s just not yoga. Naturally, no one else will know. Only you can know when you are too ‘Ha’, or too ‘Tha’. Only you can fear your imbalance and feel the need to tilt yourself in the other direction…towards balance and what you truly want.

^[1] If you are doing or would like to do yoga, download these two PDF’s for instructions on the first few dozen beginning yoga postures.

Hatha Yoga: Principles and Precautions and Hatha Yoga: Programs 1 & 2

A non-neurotic nitpicking conversation

Noticing differences really aids survival… up the point of diminishing returns. Continuing along this path is counterproductive and eventually leads to anxiety of some sort. Of course, in the wild, such discernment would seldom turn as worrisome.

Civilization, in taming the wilderness, removes natural stresses that would otherwise counterbalance us, and before we know it, we’ve become neurotic nitpickers in one way or other.

Noticing similarities (mysterious sameness) softens the glare and untangles the knots which effectively supports sanity. Knowing where we are on the ball curve of balanced awareness (not too much difference or similarity) helps in this. As in maintaining physical balance, noticing when we near the tipping point allows us to maintain a situation while it is still secure. For this, we must watch our own mind as circumspectly as possible. (I suppose that’s the weakest link in this chain.)

Okay, so far so good. Of course, if it that was all there was too it, who could fail? The heart of the difficulty lies in what we think we need. Desire (think + need) drives us to gloss over differences at times, and yet make mountains out of molehills of differences at other times. Simply said, we habitually think what we need to think; we habitually see what we desire to see. No wonder thinking that one knows will lead to difficulty. Seeing boundless examples of this constantly, leaves me continually on guard for this trap in my own awareness. Thankfully, by being alive to the difficulty I seem to avoid it… somewhat. Although, how do I really know? Impartiality is the lead indicator I use.