無 does not mean "nothing." But it doesn't mean something either.

I'm reading something by Koryu Osaka on the 公安　無.  And he wrote what's in the title of this post more or less, or at least that's attributed to him somewhere in that text.  No matter.

I'm reading stuff on Buddhism in the blogspace, stuff that seems re-hashed, and to some degree recycled.  I've rarely, if ever, recycled anything, myself; I can't fault those who do, but I wouldn't recycle anything on this blog until I re-edit a bunch of old posts and publish them together.  At least that's my plan.

But the stuff I read on Buddhism in the blogspace...it tends towards being quite ...um...not what I'd intended to be blogging about in the Buddhist blogspace (please don't get me started on celebrity meatspace-op blog posts either, but chacun a son goûts.)  And there's still that feeling I've had of late...everything is exactly the way it should be.  Flaws and ignorance and hatred and all.   My own hatred and anger and stupidity and basest rage and all that comes with that and all that is misplaced, disowned, lost, and forgotten or repressed. That too is exactly as it should be - it is as though it is neither overdetermined or underdetermined; it's n  equations in n unknowns, so to speak.

It's all  無.     Those Buddhist blog posts, this Buddhist blog post, it's all 無.  Ditto for self/no-self,  poisons, celebrities, misplaced interpretations of sutras, vestigial rantings about George W. Bush, etc. etc.

It's exactly the way it should be; it's all the product of aggregates that have come together, dependent on previous conditions, states, actions, etc, to be exactly the way it is now.

Is this making any sense at all?  Hope so.  And the nature of the "self" is just like this.

Changing the world...

I have recently been involved in trying to do something new in my work life.  This new thing is kind of evolving with a bunch of people.

There's obstacles.  The obstacles are being maneuvered in a 功夫 kind of way - "being like water."  Obstacles are a form of dukkha.  There's one particular obstacle that has been bothering me...but I think I figured a way around that obstacle - and it requires a profundity in what we are doing.

I think I may be on to something - the degree to which one can transcend the obstacles in life is the degree to which, in being like water, we make a profound radical change (not necessarily an arduous one.)

Thanks everyone for your continued support on this blog!

And then there's the Joko Beck angle to all this...or, the confab isn't "old school"

I've got more to say on this subject, including the conflicting things about Roshi Joko Beck, who, despite her being related to some people I could call as teachers of mine, I feel quite conflicted about her relation. Look much of what she said was spot on. No complaints there.  But at least in the incarnation in which I know her school in Portland, it seems that at least her heirs want to fiddle with things associated with the tradition.

I think this is one of the more regrettable things from the Maezumi lineage. ("Big Mind" anyone?)

So, in fact one of the angles which neither Brad nor NellaLou get in their posts on the subject of the confab and the homogenization of "Western Buddhism" is this tendency to throw all kinds of junk into it that wasn't there before 'cause they think they can "improve" the Dharma. 

Folks have been honing this stuff for centuries.  Even when folks said the Dharma was dead in China it was ticking away like the Energizer Bunny.  And folks want to improve on it?

Impermanence and Travel Reading: Japan's invasion of China as seen in 1937

I was able, since I subscribe to Harper's, to download an article on Japan's invasion of China that was rather prophetic when it was published in January, 1937. It was, as would be expected from the time, rather racist and blithely unaware of the extent of Japan's war crime terrorism in China. It was probably the latter effect that united the country...

China remained the same for so long because her civilization was superior. No one, Mongol or Manchu, Moslem or Muscovite, least of all the Western barbarian, could offer her anything better. It is only recently that the West has developed anything worth teaching to the wise old East..

Then it took time to break down Eastern complacence, to teach the old dog new tricks. But at last China is in the mood for change-in fact the seeds of change are already deep planted. According to Lin Yutang, Chinese literature has undergone a more profound change during the past thirty years than during the preceding two thousand. Material and scientific change has been even more sweeping. If all this has been accomplished by mere suggestion and example, what may be done by compulsion exercised deliberately and on a great scale? It is hard to suggest anything to a Chinese; but he yields easily to force. Japan will use force. For the first time in China's history a people with better ways of getting things done are about to invade and impregnate China, open up its natural resources, build factories that require technical workers, start schools, teach modern industrialism, and drive home the teaching if necessary at the point of the bayonet.  Outwardly (and we are not speaking now of the eternal verities) life will be transformed in China during the next century.

Revolution among a quarter of the human race-it is now more than a fifth and Chinese fecundity is rapidly bringing it to the quarter mark-cannot but have sharp repercussions upon the other three quarters. The chief repercussion will be upon Japan. It will not be surprising if Japan's first statesman of a century from this morning may sit, moodily staring at the floor, bitterly regretting that Japan ever put foot in China.

Not that the Japanese campaign in China will not be successful-temporarily. It promises to be a magnificent success. But there is just as clear promise that this success will be followed by colossal, world-shaking failure. And from that failure
the nations may see the China that enrolls one human being out of every four emerge as the world's greatest Power...

When China thus outstrips Japan and resumes her ancient position of leadership, Japan will have only herself to thank. For she is to-day assiduously laying the foundations of China's future greatness. Japan is carrying over into China the conception of government by law in place of government by whim. China's only common-sense government has been that of the village. Each village was a petty republic. Above it, remotely, was the Emperor; but he interfered so little and was so far away that he could be reverenced and dismissed as the Son of Heaven. What rule he did exercise was apt to be whimsical. But whim had not yet descended to badger the village and the family. Then China became a so-called republic. All that really happened was that the monarchy fell to break up into many small monarchies, as a great spider's pouch bursts to spill a horde of little spiders, each scurrying off with sure instinct in search of prey. The warlords, each carving out for himself a petty kingdom, have brought government by whim within the mud wall of every village and into the home of every family. The American tendency to over-optimize any good news from China may have led us recently to suppose that General Chiang has eliminated the warlords and unified the nation. That has not happened and there are forces at work that will prevent it from happening. China does not change so fast...

It was amazing to me how prescient this article was, despite the fact that the article had not one mention of Mao Zedong in it.  It's easy to see in retrospect, despite the fact that Mao was a cruel tyrant under whose regime millions died unnecessarily, why the Chinese hold him in esteem even today, and why, no matter how many calls for "democracy" are aimed at China, they just will not countenance a weaker central government - though even today there are said to be huge issues with corruption at local governmental levels.  Mao "made the nation strong" so it could not be colonized.

Did I mention this has deep implications for the United States?  What  are we doing having people running things who are hell-bent on dismantling our central government?  It would be nice to think that Facebook will solve all the problems we have, organizing people in ways that will re-establish a government for the people, but I'm not encouraged. The electoral scheme and political system we have now is arranged for the continued looting, albeit by private means, of most Americans, as chronicled in Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.  Woody Allen wrote, "More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."  

The wisdom - that's something you don't hear from any politicians these days. Who will have the wise words that will save Nansen's cat?  Who will serve the people? Well, anyway, sometime soon (tonight? tomorrow night?) Barack Obama's going to make a speech.  I hope we won't be embarrassed.

I do wish though that the up-and-coming world's preeminent power  plays nicer with its people despite the fact that it has a strong tradition of Buddhism, which is actively being encouraged by the government.  Then again, they too have their own host of problems, and predicting the future is by nature an activity that can only be error-prone in the extreme.  Why not see if American Idol is on tonight?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Blogisattvas, and Competition

Whilst recuperating from my recent bout with bad food (getting better thanks all!) I did some web surfing.   One of the side-effects of reading a range of blogs is a range of exposure to ideas.  On P.Z. Myers's  blog,  I saw an a reference to the "Dunning- Kruger Effect,"  which is a cognitive bias which seems to be somewhat pervasive in the United States:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.^[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."^[2]

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed – albeit less scientifically – for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge")^[3] and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."^[4][5]). W.B. Yeats put it concisely thus: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about.^[6]) Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying.^[7] Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.^[4] Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf^[8] or driving a car.^[4]...

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Nellalou,  in a considered post on her Blogisattva award, asked the question, "Is there such a thing as healthy competition?"   People in schools, workplaces, etc. are keen to recognize when their skill levels are not recognized and others less competent are not acting properly on feedback related to their actions.  People don't view themselves as in a dog-fight per se, but on the other hand, they know when the people at the back of the pack are being graded on a curve simply to ignore the fact that differences exist.  I see this in complaints from my son about how various activities are recognized in his school, whether it be a science fair or a talent show.   When the school administration or other folks bend over backwards to avoid recognizing outstanding merit it comes across as disingenuous and cynical to the students. No doubt it it is intimately related to the prevalence of the Dunning-Kruger effect in American society.  It may be that the administrators of the school don't want anyone to "feel bad" about not having "won," but life is not about not experiencing feelings that we label as "good" or "bad."  We may not like a particular feeling/sensation but that does not mean that we therefore are better off never having felt it; you know, it's the old saying, "It's better to have loved and lost..."

I think if Nellalou wants to regift her award, well, it's her award, isn't it?  Did the Blogisattva folks protect in any way, shape or form intellectual property associated with the Blogisattva awards in such a way that dissemination of images, etc. was restricted? Did they trademark the logo?   I'm not a lawyer but one thing I do know:  All this possessiveness or lack thereof relating to this award doesn't seem apt..

What I do know is this is the largest brouhaha about nearly nothing I've seen in a few days.   Though I am glad to know that somebody has been studying the effects of the incompetent in our midst.

Beliefs, Wishes, Delusions

I had written a few months ago about Kessid Church and how it seemed a bit deceptive of them to have what was in effect a fundamentalist church that was "fed" new members by a health club.  Well, the chickens have come home to roost for Kessid Church- follow this link and watch the (flash - not iPhone/iPad friendly) video on the page from about the 15:00 mark.

I hadn't seen the comment left on my blog post until now:

As a Christian I can Assure you that even Jesus Christ was against organzied "religion". Christianity is about loving God, loving others and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the rest of the world. Mumon you seem to be very leary of any group that doesn't fit into your fundamentalist "box" [sic]. How is promoting Gods genuine love corrupting Vancouver and the greater Clark County area? If anything Christianity is bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society. I welcome you with open arms brother, you don't have to like me or my beliefs but know that regardless how angry you are right now, God still loves you! :)  

Now I wasn't in the least bit "angry" of course when I wrote that post, or the e-mail to that church.  But I think it's likely that this is what was in the minds of the folks at Kessid Church when they started their venture: They thought they  were "promoting God's genuine love" and "bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society."  (I am always intrigued by how conservatives are inevitably using adjectives with "-ic" on the end of the word when there's a perfectly good alternative, nearly identical, that's shorter and means exactly the same thing.  Can somebody tell me why they do that?  But I digress.)

They likely thought they  were "promoting God's genuine love" and "bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society."   The hubris behind such a statement is breathtaking to me. They were promoting "God's" "genuine" "love."  Anyone who believed differently from them was not.  And they had morality on their side.  They had a guy who could suspend not only disbelief, but the laws of physics, economics, biology, and mathematics for His People.  We other skeptical schmucks were "stuck" with reality.

"Nobody could have predicted" then, that such hubris might lead some folks to think that such a belief might lead them to make rash choices, such as that the cash flow from a health club could pay the freight on a budding megachurch.  And this in a place - where two other outfits had failed before, one in an economic boom time.  And this in a time when the region's economy was in free-fall, in the worst economic decline since the Great Depression. I do hope the place taking over the club, though succeeds.  Not that I'll join them, but I do hope the area comes back; Vancouver WA is still in a real-estate depression, relative to boom times.  But the complete insanity of what these guys did; it's breathtaking.   We've had some economic successes locally recently, but these have generally been places that have folks behind them who know what they're doing because they've done it before.  The Kessid guys were evidently utter, rank newbies, by comparison.

It is clear from watching the video to which I've linked that these guys were young,  enthusiastic, and utterly without the sort of business-sense needed to build a resilient operation.   That is why I sent them an e-mail, empathizing with their loss, reminding them of Buddha's parable of the mustard seed,  and hoping they would understand that in one's endeavors, skill is often more important than belief.

I hope  they will come to realize that it was the hubris and greed of taking their beliefs for reality, and becoming to attached to those beliefs, and the "wants" behind those beliefs that is related to their debacle.  It would make them ultimately healthier, happier, and  better able to really be  part of our community, which includes people of all types.

And to provide a bit of contrast on the topic, here's some folks trying to live on one dollar a day. While they too seem young, idealistic, and perhaps slightly naive, I think their feet are more on the ground and they are more connected to reality, at least as we are aware, than the Kessid crowd.

Update: Evidently they did keep the "center" separate from the church.  Except - and if you read the article and comment tellng me, "See! They used a manager!"  please  remember the folowing:  they made a blunder so colossal words fall short: by calling the thing "Kessid Center."   Consciously or unconsciously,  this  harebrained branding scheme  a) conflated the center with the church and b) conflated the center with a weird, foreign-sounding word  (even though it's Hebrew for something good, I'm told).  The latter effect of course would drive away nativists, and the first one would drive away Progressives.

But then, it seems like a good idea to keep church and workouts separate.

Gold: Economic Samsara

Whether it's wampum, dollars backed by debt or gold, it's all a product of the little-m mind.

The price of gold has been rising as anxious investors cast what amounts to a throw-the-bums-out vote against, well, just about everything.

The weak dollar, the volatile stock market, the lackluster economy, the yawning budget deficit, the accommodative Federal Reserve — all this and more have people rushing for gold...

And while gold is the most obvious example of this trend, other commodities are rising, too. Wheat, copper and cotton all soared on Tuesday.

Nor is gold fever restricted to hedge fund managers wielding billions of dollars. Individual investors have also been clamoring to get in on the trade, scooping up gold coins like one-ounce American Eagles and South African Krugerrands.

“People are coming in to buy 50 or 100 coins at a time, which is pretty hefty for individuals,” said Mark Oliari, chief executive of CNT Inc., a Massachusetts coin broker. “It’s not just rich people, either. A lot of people are putting 30 to 35 percent of their net worth in gold; they are scared to put money in paper assets.”

Signs of gold’s renewed appeal have been building for months, as well-known Wall Street figures like George Soros and John Paulson piled into the metal. JPMorgan Chase even reopened a long-closed vault below the streets of downtown Manhattan to meet investor demand to store the stuff...

Since the depths of the financial crisis two years ago, gold has risen 91 percent, and it is nearly a third higher than just one year ago, according to Janney Montgomery Scott [which is an investment firm].

While gold has touched new records in nominal terms, when adjusted for inflation the price remains 40 percent below its real record high, which was reached in 1980. What is surprising economists is not the rise of gold prices, but the speed of its ascent.

As a result, even longtime gold investors, like [Abhay Deshpande, a portfolio manager with First Eagle Funds], worry that the current rally might be overdone. “It’s beginning to smell a little like the beginning stages of a bubble,” he said. “Either inflation has to pick up or currencies have to plunge to justify a continuing rise.”

Armageddon is very fashionable in the United States these days.  A great deal of faith-based folks are going to get burned by this.  Full disclosure: I own some of the ETFs related to this mania, but they are by no means the entirety of my nest egg.  But I've seen these ridiculous price-rises myself, and it is yet another bubble.  Like anything else, too much of their being burned will have been the result of actually believing the stuff that appears in their minds as a result of other stuff appearing in other people's minds, and those other people telling the first group of people what to do.

Income, Class, and What Engaged Buddhism Doesn't Teach

I got a raise recently.  It was a real raise - not one of those "Oops! Eaten by Inflation!" raises, but an honest-to-goodness increase above the cost of living. So it was interesting to me to read Nicholas Kristof's "Our Banana Republic" from yesterday's New York Times.

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie. 

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that. 

 Three or so weeks back I noted that the United States reports a higher poverty rate than Vietnam, a country which Americans don't tend to think of as richer than we are.   And with this raise, it seems that I'm approaching the ranks of "not doing badly," or, to put it another way, the unfashionable end of the top 10%

± 2% or so.

But my life aside, this stuff is real, for as Kristof points out:

In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But there’s evidence that the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.

Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.

Here’s their explanation: When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely.

Another consequence the scholars found: Rising inequality also led to more divorces, presumably a byproduct of the strains of financial distress. Maybe I’m overly sentimental or romantic, but that pierces me. It’s a reminder that inequality isn’t just an economic issue but also a question of human dignity and happiness.

This rising inequality engenders obstacles - it is a manifestation of dukkha. I can already see that I can do things with money that I could not twenty years ago, and I can do it because I can effect a multiplier effect on others and their work from  I do that others cannot. (Do read Noah's piece on income inequality.)

Now, with the exception of NellaLou's blog, (especially here) this particular issue isn't getting much attention in the Buddhist blogosphere. And it kind of tells me how really alienated we as Americans in particular are (I beg the understanding of all you European readers & bloggers for the moment, but it's an American, and to a lesser extent, UK problem).

You know folks - and you know to whom I'm referring - you can can the "Free Tibet!" and "Free Burma!" and the latest outrage du jour platitudes etc. and so forth.  I am mildly amused at one site that boasts "Made on a Mac" - now don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone too,  especially the fact that it uses patents on technology I developed back when I wasn't approaching income levels that were comfortable. Plus, I'd actually buy Apple stock if I didn't think it was a tad overpriced at the moment.   But the same site seems to be ignorant of the word "Foxconn," or, for that matter, terms like "Taft-Hartley."

I'm not saying this as any kind of a boast, but to note that although my boat's rising in the tide, too many folks in America are drowning, and that's just not good.  It's not good for me, it's not good for them, it's not even good for  the plutocrats.  Eventually this economic and political system will be come highly unstable, and I think the recent elections are the reflection of that.  Our system's out of balance, and the rebalancing will  likely anything but  painless, and to minimize the discomfort and suffering it's useful to approach this - like everything else - mindfully.

All of which is to say, Dudes, Tibet is here  Burma is here.  Those younger folks that go those your meditation seminars that aren't investment bankers, lawyers, or high priced creators of intellectual property? They're Tibet. They're Burma. They're Vietnam. 

Travel and Memories

Shortly I will be on my way on "the business trip."  It seems to be a tradition I have inherited from my father.  It is one year ago today that my mother passed away after a much longer than expected bout with cancer. 

Memories are bittersweet today.  May all beings come to peace with their finite nature.



Good chance I'll have cool pictures though when I get back...

I did say my memories are bittersweet.  Weird. Grief one year removed mixed with anticipation.

More on Procrastination, Planning, and Dukkha

I have a few more minutes now to expound a bit more on the post I made yesterday.

When we plan, we often think we are creating an expectation about how certain things will be done within the context of certain events we expect to happen.   But as any good project manager or field commander knows,  all plans go awry at some point, and there are still expectations of things that need to be done and events that will happen, as well as the realization that certain unexpected things had to be done or weren't done, and unforeseen events happen. 

Murphy's Law is real, and it is a hindrance, really, only when dukkha is reigning over the planning and execution of the plan.   The "plan" must be carried out moment to moment anyway, even though in the very near term we might value surfing the net over coming through on our deliverables.

So when we regret procrastination - or other "unforseen" events, we are really regretting a realization of a world that never existed, where all plans and expectations were fulfilled.  

Such a world doesn't exist as far as I know, but it is possible to be dependable despite Murphy's Law.

 The trick is neither to be come too attached to the plan or too attached to departing from the plan,  or even, oddly enough the execution of the plan.

The practice of breath-counting in meditation is one of humanity's greatest inventions: not only does it "build up concentration" or, if you like, help you develop 情理気 (I presume I got the Kanji right on that one - it's joriki!) or concentration energy, but it also helps develop nonattachment. Your "plan" of course is trivially simple: count from 1 to 10 in synch with your breath.  But if you lose count, go back to the beginning.  The trick of course is not to see "10" as some kind of success, and not to see losing count as some kind of failure.  Either attachment will of course result in an inability actually carry out the exercise!

Executing all the other plans of life are similar cases, in my experience.

Murphy's Law is a Corollary of Dukkha

That's the conclusion my Rube Goldberg mind came to after reading this article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki on procrastination.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”...

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run..

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

 I'll have more to say on this in another post; I'm just too pressed for time right now.

Social media does not replace real human relationships

This article by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker pins down why I've had a sneaking suspicion  and skepticism  about sites like Gaia, "intent", and of course Facebook.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena...

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

I do tend to think that this is quite unrecognized in many on-line social networking communities.  To put it another way, there's many,  many orders of magnitude in commitment between a Facebook "friend" and your wife.  At least I hope so.

That also has implications, I'm sorry to say, for on-line sanghas.  Now, to be honest, I think what folks like Jundo are doing is a good thing, and of course deeply well-intentioned.  But then I think of a guy in my (very small) sangha, with whom I've been practicing, when Osho is in town, for quite a few years.  We have not had multitudinous conversations with each other; the norm of communication in my sangha is not a lot of words.

And yet...

I feel profoundly close to the few people in my sangha, much closer than my co-workers at lunch; the time we spent committed to our practices and to each other in silence has forged a much stronger bond than those with many of my colleagues.

And I think Gladwell has hit upon one reason why.  I've almost forgiven him for "Blink."

The Layoff Economy Cause Suffering and It's Bad Business

In reading this blogpost at The Baseline Scenario on management consultants (I'll have more on that later), I came across, via (ugh) The Huffington Post, this article critical of management consultants.  I'll have a word to say on that in a bit.  Of more importance, though is that the Huff Post post linked to this article in Newseeek on the true costs of layoffs.

... Much of the conventional wisdom about downsizing—like the fact that it automatically drives a company's stock price higher, or increases profitability—turns out to be wrong. There's substantial research into the physical and health effects of downsizing on employees—research that reinforces the seemingly hyperbolic notion that layoffs are literally killing people. There is also empirical evidence showing that labor-market flexibility isn't necessarily so good for countries, either. A recent study of 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economies over a 20-year period by two Dutch economists found that labor-productivity growth was higher in economies having more highly regulated industrial-relations systems—meaning they had more formal prohibitions against the letting go of workers...

There are a number of myths that have taken hold to justify managers' urge to downsize. Many of them aren't true. For instance, contrary to popular belief, companies that announce layoffs do not enjoy higher stock prices than peers—either immediately or over time. A study of 141 layoff announcements between 1979 and 1997 found negative stock returns to companies announcing layoffs, with larger and permanent layoffs leading to greater negative effects. An examination of 1,445 downsizing announcements between 1990 and 1998 also reported that downsizing had a negative effect on stock-market returns, and the negative effects were larger the greater the extent of the downsizing. Yet another study comparing 300 layoff announcements in the United States and 73 in Japan found that in both countries, there were negative abnormal shareholder returns following the announcement.

Layoffs don't increase individual company productivity, either. A study of productivity changes between 1977 and 1987 in more than 140,000 U.S. companies using Census of Manufacturers data found that companies that enjoyed the greatest increases in productivity were just as likely to have added workers as they were to have downsized. The study concluded that the growth in productivity during the 1980s could not be attributed to firms becoming "lean and mean." Wharton professor Peter Cappelli found that labor costs per employee decreased under downsizing, but sales per employee fell, too.

Another myth: layoffs increase profits. Even after statistically controlling for prior profitability, a study of 122 companies found that downsizing reduced subsequent profitability and that the negative consequences of downsizing were particularly evident in R&D-intensive industries and in companies that experienced growth in sales. Cascio's study of firms in the S&P 500 found that companies that downsized remained less profitable than those that did not. An American Management Association survey that assessed companies' own perceptions of layoff effects found that only about half reported that downsizing increased operating profits, while just a third reported a positive effect on worker productivity.

Layoffs don't even reliably cut costs...

 Of course, despite what the author of The Baseline Scenario says, too often management consultants have recommended layoffs and job cutting.   So many companies have been gutted by this mentality.  Which brings me to my next point...one business blogger asks, "If management consultants are so bad why are they still around?"

The answer is very simple: they tell management what they want to hear.  It's the same type of question as, "If hocus-pocus fortune-tellers are so bad, why are they still around?

I do have to slightly update my view on monastic/lay practice

Paul Gerhards, who I met at the Portland Buddhist festival, and who has a blog, has a post that reminds me that there do exist  monks who depend for their livelihood on people who are pretty poor themselves (scroll down to the Ajahn Chah documentary parts).  Read the rest of Gerhards' post as well; his advice is good advice.

I'll have more to say on the Portland Buddhist Festival; but it did feel really good to help out the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and their efforts there, thanks to Ken Wilber's ads on this site.

Keep clickin', dear readers.  I'm doing what I said.

The truth...

One of the recurring themes of late seems to be the inability of Folks in Power to 'fess up to wrongdoings, whether it's BP, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, or the Catholic Church.

It's kind of odd, because what  PR firms tell these guys to do - get the bad news out quickly, say it yourself,  get on top of it, and above all own up to responsibility - actually works.

I suspect the reason this is so difficult is because people are conditioned to avoid the truth, or they are conditioned to accept a magical belief as the truth.  They are also conditioned to believe that what they believe is true should be taken as true, no matter how much or how little evidence supports that belief.  Too, I think Barbara O'Brien's point about morality in Buddhism applies here: like other aspects of morality in Buddhism, owning up to the truth in word and deed, in practice is hard work.  Of course, it's hard work in other ethical and religious systems too; it's just we don't have "get out of jail free" cards, or special stamps saying we're Vicars of The Deity.

In addition to avoidance of awareness and action on reality being unskillful Buddhist practice (as if the above-mentioned care?) it's also bad politics, bad psychology, and somewhat ignorant.  Bad karma dude...

Of course that doesn't explain Toyota.  They're best explained by the sentence, "They're a Japanese company."

In an unfortunate but useful way, we can learn from recent PR disasters and apply them to our own lives.  Perhaps it's a coincidence that "Kessid Church" didn't respond to my queries, or perhaps they were hard for the recipients to cohere a response.

More on suffering and beliefs

The cultural aspects of mental illness get a light shone on them by the NY Times.

What is being missed, Lee and others have suggested, is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology,” Lee says. “When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize eating disorders, then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick eating-disorder pathology as a way to express that conflict.”

The problem becomes especially worrisome in a time of globalization, when symptom repertoires can cross borders with ease. Having been trained in England and the United States, Lee knows better than most the locomotive force behind Western ideas about mental health and illness. Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed. Taken together this is a juggernaut that Lee sees little chance of stopping.

“As Western categories for diseases have gained dominance, micro-cultures that shape the illness experiences of individual patients are being discarded,” Lee says. “The current has become too strong.”

The power of a belief, of a certainty that things are "this way" and "not that way" seems to have a profound effect on the incidence of particular types of mental suffering.

Putting aside all preconceptions and attachments to them would therefore seem to be mentally healthy.

Oh, wait, that's Buddhism, we can't possibly do that, it's a religion, you see, and it's not ours, I'm sure some folks might say.

One more quote:

Mental illnesses, it was suggested, should be treated like “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility. This was promoted both as a scientific fact and as a social narrative that would reap great benefits. The logic seemed unassailable: Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma. This idea has been promoted by mental-health providers, drug companies and patient-advocacy groups like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in the United States and SANE in Britain. In a sometimes fractious field, everyone seemed to agree that this modern way of thinking about mental illness would reduce the social isolation and stigma often experienced by those with mental illness. Trampling on indigenous prescientific superstitions about the cause of mental illness seemed a small price to pay to relieve some of the social suffering of the mentally ill.

But does the “brain disease” belief actually reduce stigma?

In 1997, Prof. Sheila Mehta from Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama decided to find out if the “brain disease” narrative had the intended effect. She suspected that the biomedical explanation for mental illness might be influencing our attitudes toward the mentally ill in ways we weren’t conscious of, so she thought up a clever experiment.

In her study, test subjects were led to believe that they were participating in a simple learning task with a partner who was, unbeknownst to them, a confederate in the study. Before the experiment started, the partners exchanged some biographical data, and the confederate informed the test subject that he suffered from a mental illness.

The confederate then stated either that the illness occurred because of “the kind of things that happened to me when I was a kid” or that he had “a disease just like any other, which affected my biochemistry.” (These were termed the “psychosocial” explanation and the “disease” explanation respectively.) The experiment then called for the test subject to teach the confederate a pattern of button presses. When the confederate pushed the wrong button, the only feedback the test subject could give was a “barely discernible” to “somewhat painful” electrical shock.

Analyzing the data, Mehta found a difference between the group of subjects given the psychosocial explanation for their partner’s mental-illness history and those given the brain-disease explanation. Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical “disease like any other” increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

The Guardian's comment section goes where I was going

Buddhism beats depression...

A report I wrote for the Mental Health Foundation highlights the impressive clinical evidence for an approach called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) – the eight-week courses have been shown to reduce relapse rates by half among people who have suffered several episodes of depression. The report also finds that very few patients who could benefit from mindfulness training are currently being referred for the treatment – just one in 20 GPs prescribes MBCT regularly, despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of doctors think it would be helpful for their patients with mental health problems. Changing that could make a massive difference not only to them, but to the economy – the cost of depression to the UK has been estimated at £7.5 billion every year.
Despite its convoluted name, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is pretty straightforward – a set of classes that teach meditation practices which help people pay attention to their breathing, body sensations, thoughts and feelings in a kind, accepting, non-judgemental way. Mindfulness training shows us how to notice and work with our experience rather than engaging in a futile struggle to fight or run away from it. That may sound simple – perhaps because it is – but developing this mindful way of relating seems to alleviate some of the suffering that struggling with life's pain creates.
Mindfulness is especially relevant to depression, in which sufferers tend to get caught up with cycles of 'rumination' - when people get depressed they churn negative thoughts over and over in their minds, a pattern which actually perpetuates their low mood. Mindfulness short-circuits rumination – by learning how to pay attention to our present moment experience, rather than getting tied up in negative thinking about the past or future, we create more space in our minds from which new, more effective decision-making can emerge. It isn't a miracle cure – while simple, the techniques take time and effort to master, but mindfulness-based therapies are now supported by a substantial and rapidly-growing evidence base that suggest they can help people cope better not just with depression, but also with the stress of conditions ranging from chronic pain and anxiety to cancer and HIV.
Mindfulness-based therapies are fundamentally and unapologetically inspired by Buddhist principles and tools – the Buddha both noted that suffering (as opposed to pain) is created by struggling with experience and prescribed mindfulness meditation as a way of working with it skilfully. However, the B-word rarely, if ever, gets a mention on MBCT courses – their reputation in health services has been built on scientific evidence rather than spiritual conviction. This is the only way it could be – while some of us Buddhists might argue that practising mindfulness can open up insights about the nature of mind that go way beyond what can be measured in a randomised-controlled trial, the most important thing here is that techniques which reduce suffering are presented in whatever way will make them most accessible to the largest number of people.

So, while I may have oversold CBT in the post below, my point stands. Today it turns out that Barbara O'Brien's been smeared by the Family Research Council. Her repsonse on the Tiger Woods/Brit Hume/Buddhsim affiar was distorted by one Peter Sprigg.

Apparently, Hume’s apologetics require an apology not just because he violated the well-known constitutional principle of the separation of church and television (?), but because he expressed his heretical disbelief in the scientific theory that all religions are equally valuable and effective.

Odd, Buddhists have had effective techniques for combatting things like depression and phobias for millenia, and Christianity...or should I say Western culture, had to invent the field before they could reach out to Buddhism for methods relating to the cure!

Now I don't like playing my religion's better than yours, especially since Christianity is a relatively easy target, what with the sort-of filicide as a quid pro quo for wrongs presumably made against a Semitic tribal god and what-not. But let's face it, when it comes to efficacy, ...

Anyhow, here's a comment I left on the FRC post (and Barbara O'Brien's blog). Let's see if the FRC has the courage to post it on their blog:

The title of that article was “Persecution for the Brit Hume Witness.” yet I read of no lion ripping anyone to shreds, nor did I read of any beheadings, flayings, amputations, vandalism or buildings being burnt.

As far as the “effectiveness” of religions, I’ve alluded to that on my blog in the past couple of days: would Hume accept a “mindfulness” based therapy to help him deal with the grief over his son’s suicide, if it were known to him to be “Buddhist” – like?

P.S., Read and understand what Barbara says about reincarnation and Buddhism, dear Christians, before you write something that makes you look worse than foolish.

Finding: The brain helps maintain a stress-cycle

It's not for nothing that people get stuck:

Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

At the very least, when one practices forms of mindfulness meditation, one gets the ability to "step out of the loop," and with practice, one remembers to be able to do this more and more.