Cheese enchiladas
were definitely yummy
not rocket science

I've had many struggles with conflict, and mindfulness has helped me to start noticing patterns that tend to run through them. These patterns are almost always true for me, but I've noticed that most people I've met have the same patterns.

( Read more... )

After all the rain a few weeks ago, Spring has been teasing us. Today, Spring is definitely here, in full bloom. It's such a beautiful day.

I was out and about today, running errands. I went to the library, the post office, and the car dealership for an oil change. Everyone I talked to was so nice to me. All day, I just felt this overwhelming gratitude for the freedom of my retirement.

I've been increasingly desiring to give back, to do some volunteer work, and thinking a lot about what I desire doing. Every time I asked myself this, I got the same answer: I want to work in a library. I love books, and I want to be surrounded by them and others who also love them. I've been keeping my eye on volunteer and job opportunities in the local libraries, but haven't found anything until today.

Mountain View Library is hiring for a part time person to do shelfing and organizing. It's a paid position, but I'd donate my salary to charities. As I ran my errands, I fantasized about all the causes I'd donate my salary to.

I went to the library to get my application, and I found that I know the guy who's doing the hiring. He's a fellow musician named Izzy. We've geeked out about music before when I was at the library. He gave me an application, and we scheduled a time on Saturday for me to take the test.

I felt a little guilty. I'm over-qualified for this job. I don't need the money. There are so many others who need this job more, especially in this economy. But I'll be doing a lot of good with the money I earn. Part of me hopes I don't get the job, so it will go to someone who needs it more, but I get the feeling I will.

Spring is here! Get out of the office and go out and play!

I love this part in the book The Dance of Fear:

It helps to break a goal into small steps and take the first one. A writer friend from Oskaloosa, Kansas, Lou Ann Thomas, described herself as dangerously overweight when she received a breast cancer diagnosis at the age of forty-six. She was terrified and decided to start paying attention to her health. She had lost 190 pounds when I saw her last, some years postdiagnosis. "I couldn't fathom losing 100 or 150 pounds, and never in my wildest imagination could I picture losing 190," she wrote, "but I knew I could lose one pound. That was doable, achievable and possible, so I simply lost one pound 190 times."

A crisis can become an opportunity to live more fully and healthfully, or to make some bold and courageous act of change in an important relationship. Things fall apart, and we vow to begin to live more mindfully, with careful attention to what is. If we stay on automatic pilot, we live less in the present than in the past and future--like the bumper sticker that says, "Having a good time, wish I were here." A crisis can knock us awake.

A crisis, however can also be the most difficult time to direct our attention to the beauty of the moment or to enhance a relationship we never worked on to begin with. Crises evoke anxiety, which, by its nature, drives worry and rumination and sets your brain on overdrive. We are better able to deal with tragedy if we've already begun the process of coming to terms with the unpredictability and unfairness of life in our calmer moments.

Why wait for the universe to send you a great big lesson in fear, vulnerability, and loss? We can all move in the direction of more peacefulness and authentic connection with neighbors, friends, and family, rather than moving in the direction of more distance and isolation. We can each look for our personal mustard seed story, a fitting mantra, and ways to calm ourselves and live more lovingly and mindfully.

I watched the movie, Equilibrium recently. It's a really good scifi dystopian movie, a la The Matrix, but with better acting and better fighting scenes. The future society of this movie is based on the concept that the cause of war is emotion, so the way to end war is to end emotion, banning anything that might evoke it, and forcing all people to regularly inject a drug which suppresses it. Not surprisingly, the result is an extreme form of fascism.

Watching that soon after I watched the documentary, Why We Fight, really got me thinking about what incites people to kill people. Yes, emotion is a big part of it, but not all emotions, and not emotion alone. We have a choice about what to do with our emotions. Unfortunately, most people react to their emotions as though they were real, rather than just a state of mind. It's the fight-or-flight part of our brains, which works great for emergencies, but most killing is pre-meditated. So we need to engage a different part of our brains, and this is something that must be learned and practiced.

Meditation has taught me to engage with my thoughts and emotions in a new way. It's hard to articulate why. After all, I'm just "sitting there". Why is that such a big deal? But it truly is a powerful tool. Jon Kabat-Zinn has done the best job at articulating it that I have seen. But thinking about it after watching that movie, I was able to articulate a nice way to summarize how meditation has taught me this new skill.

Meditation brings me five things: awareness, focus, acceptance, freedom, and peace. It's more like a process than something that happens all at once. Here's how this process works.

( How meditation works )

I think I'm ready to try learning to cook again. I was hoping to wait until I could afford some cooking classes, but that won't happen for a while. I still plan on doing that, but not soon.

Since I've been riding my bike, my appetite has gone up. After aquestrian made me yummy enchiladas last week, I've become inspired to try making them on my own.

Tonight is the night. *crosses fingers*

After I watched The 11th Hour, I've been thinking a lot about the most efficient way to effect change. When I watched the documentary, The Corporation, I found one of the interviews along these lines intriguing.

Several books by Daniel Quinn that I read years ago, particularly Ishmael, have shifted my entire perspective about the world, where humans fit in it, and how to most efficiently effect change. They were the most pivotal, values-shaping books I've ever read. I became so intrigued by this thinker that I joined discussion groups for his books and scoured his website for more of his thoughts.

There, I saw an article he wrote, called What To Do, where he stages a discussion with a fictional person asking him how he could effect change as an activist. Quinn, in true spirit, turns the entire problem on its head, and shows how abysmally inefficient activism is as a means of effecting change. Then he gives an example of how powerful his advocated approach is.

The example is of Ray Anderson, CEO of the Interface Corporation, who radically changed his entire company's business model toward a more sustainable approach after having read Ishmael and Ecology of Commerce. Not by activists fighting for change, passing laws, or lying down in front of bulldozers. He changed because he thought differently. That's all it took. Changing they way someone thinks is the most powerful way to effect change.

Ray Anderson was an interviewee in both The 11th Hour and The Corporation. In the latter, he told the same story, but it was slightly different than how Quinn tells it. According to Quinn, Anderson changed his thinking because someone handed him a couple of books. Anderson does say that he changed his thinking because of the books, he calls it an epiphany actually, but he fills out the picture as to why he read those books in the first place. Nobody handed them to him. He read them because something got his curiosity piqued, and he sought out books that might enlighten him.

What piqued his curiosity? Customers.

Customers increasingly asked Interface what they're doing to be more ecologically sustainable. The customers didn't fight them, walk outside their headquarters with picket signs, or refuse to do business with them. They simply inquired. Interface's PR department became so overwhelmed with these inquiries that they decided to set up a task force to address the issue. They asked Anderson to give the kick off speech. He was scared to give this speech because he'd never even considered sustainability before. So he decided to read some books and educate himself about the issue.

Now, Anderson is not only changing his corporation by cutting its carbon footprint by a third and targeting complete sustainability by the year 2020, but he's also a huge activist in the corporate responsibility community. He has a second career as a speaker and advocate. He's written a book about it, called Mid-Course Correction. He's worked with Rocky Mountain Institute to make more sustainable and cost-effective solutions for other corporations. Who knows how many other corporations have been influenced by this one man, who was influenced by a couple of books and a bunch of concerned customers?

That's the way to change the world. Books and communication.

There are a lot of concepts used in The Lucifer Effect, many of which are traditional words which bring with them a lot of connotations and baggage, so it's important that he defines them precisely.

Evil - Intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others--or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.

He talks a lot about "the Person in the Situation." Those are the two factors that will determine their behavior. Although the Situation will better predict the majority's behavior, neither one of them in isolation will give you a reliable picture. So, later in the book, he defines Person, Situation, and System.

Person - An actor on the stage of life whose behavioral freedom is informed by his or her makeup--genetic, biological, physical, and psychological.

Situation - The behavioral context that has the power, through its reward and normative functions, to give meaning and identity to the actor's roles and status.

System - The agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence.

In the last chapter, he discusses heroism, and expands it from its common concept of just people who risk their lives to save other lives. But older dictionaries have a wider definition of it, which Zimbardo tries to emphasize, encompassing "courage, bravery, fortitude, intrepidity, gallantry, and valor."

Heroism - A contempt of danger, not from ignorance or inconsiderate levity, but from a noble devotion to some great cause, and a just confidence of being able to meet danger in the spirit of such a cause. The danger may be immediately life threatening, or it may be insidious.

He emphasizes that heroism is culture-specific--what one culture calls heroic, another may call evil. But he spells out 12 kinds of heroism that we know of in our culture: military and other duty-bound physical-risk heros, civil heroes, non-duty-bound physical-risk heros, religious figures, politico-religious figures, martyrs, political or military leaders, adventurer/explorer/discoverer, scientific (discovery) heroes, good samaritan, odds beater/underdog, bureaucracy heroes, and whistle-blowers.

He also spells out ten ways we can resist the impact of undesirable social influnces and at the same time promoting personal resilience and civic virtue, and foster heroism in ourselves.

The Lucifer Effect is a book about the psychology of evil, but not the kind of evil you'll find in religious books or neoconservative propaganda. The basis for most of these is what the author, Philip Zimbardo, calls "dispositional evil," that there are good people and evil people--good people do good things and evil people do evil things.

But every single one of us has a potential Mother Teresa and a potential Hitler within us, and what brings out these traits are situations. We're a product not only of our upbringing, education, and values, but much more the environment we find ourselves in at any given time. This is what he calls "situational evil."

This flies in the face of everything we're taught about good vs. evil, from popular culture, religion, politicians, and education. People are used to a very simplistic idea that someone is either good or evil. Yet, all evidence defies this. Look at history. Lynch mobs, the holocaust, Salem witch trials, etc. There are so many cases of "good, normal people" doing horrific things when they find themselves in a horrific context.

And it has been demonstrated time and again by social psychologists. It never ceased to astonish, even frighten them, how easy and quick it was to reproduce these evil situations. How easy it is to make good people do some of the most horrific things. The most pivotal of these is the Stanford Prison Experiment, but The Lucifer Effect discusses several others. In every single case, the evil was created practically instantaneously, and so pervasively that sometimes the psychologists themselves got sucked into it, as Zimbardo believes he was with the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It's creepy, but that much more vital that it be understood. Because now we have the scientific evidence to understand evil, and we know that it's mostly situational rather than dispositional, so we know that it's much easier to prevent. We can't control peoples' genetics or even their upbringing. Many Christians try to control evil by controlling people's sexual behaviors, the media they consume, how they spend their free time, even the language they use and the clothes they wear. But all that's really necessary is to prevent evil situations from arising in the first place.

This is particularly convenient since the worst of these situations tend to arise from within the State itself, and many of the rest arise within corporations and other institutions. Whenever there's a large control structure, and significant power dynamics. These institutions operate by means of policy, so it's just a matter of changing the policies. That's why it can get so political.

Zimbardo repeatedly makes it clear that "psychology is not excusiology." In other words, understanding the power of situations to bring out the worst in people does not mean that personal responsibility isn't important. In fact, it's more important than ever.

There's a positive side to this. If evil is situational, then therefore its contrast, heroism, is also situational. Heroes aren't born; they're made. Situations bring them out in people. Zimbardo explores this in depth at the end of the book, but it's very hard to study, and not very well understood. What is known is that heroes don't conform easily, aren't quick to trust authority, have a unique ability to retain their moral compass in trying situations, and are less afraid of personal consequences in order to do the right thing. But often, these traits don't come out until they're put into an extreme situations. It's possible to consciously foster these traits, so that when evil situations do arise, we'll be ready for them, and we'll be more inclined to do the right thing.

The Lucifer Effect was written by Philip Zimbardo, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's a book about evil, not about evil people, but evil situations. Its subtitle is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

It's broken down into four sections. The first is about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It spells out, in more detail than ever, what exactly happened in this experiment. It was a two week experiment that was cut short to only a week. He breaks that week down, day by day. You can watch clearly how things went, in a matter of a day or two, from a game of cops and robbers into a serious, pervasive situation of psychological abuse, which caused two prisoners to become hysterical. Zimbardo tells the tale so clearly that it's easy to imagine it, and picture yourself in that situation, and ask yourself how you'd behave in such a situation.

Second, he talks a lot about what has happened in social psychology after this pivotal experiment, some of his own research that it inspired and influenced, some reproductions of this experiment in other cultures, and some experiments that others did that demonstrated the power of situational evil in other ways. He talks about personality measures like the F-Scale, Machiavellian Scale, and the Comrey Personality Scales. He talks about cognitive dissonance, deindividuation, dehumanization, social approval, obedience, and conformity. He explains Milgram's experiment on blind obedience to authority, the "strip search scams" that happened a few years ago, teacher Ron Jones' duplication of Nazi Germany at Palo Alto High School called "The Third Wave," and much, much more, absolutely fascinating research that has been done in this field.

Third, he spells out the Abu Graib tortures that happened in the American-run Iraqi prison. He considers it a real world duplication of the Stanford Prison Experiment. He describes the parallels between these two, and they are indeed very eerily similar. When Zimbardo saw the parallels, he really felt like he had something to contribute to the trials, and wanted in. He was able to serve as an expert witness, mostly because he wanted to learn the inside details. In this way, he became a sort of investigative reporter, thoroughly researching a political situation so as to tell the world about it. Then he becomes a political activist, implicating the system that made these tortures possible. He goes through all the players, right up to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and shows how they all had a hand in Abu Graib.

Fourth, he discusses heroism, what it is, the different types that exist in our culture, and how to foster it in oneself.

This is definitely one of the best books I've ever read. It talks about a lot of things I already knew about, but didn't understand completely, nor did I grasp their full implications.

I'm almost finished reading the book, The Lucifer Effect. I've realized that this book is just too pivotal for a review to sufficiently capture what I got from it, so I'm going to split this into multiple entries. For now, I want to write a bit about the history of how this book came about.

This is a book about evil. That's a word that is almost cliche and meaningless now, often associated with simplistic philosophies and ideologies. Popular culture has toyed with the idea in countless ways, and the neoconservatives that have been influencing or outright controlling the American government for the past few decades base their entire political philosophy on it.

But it's an important concept, one that needs to be taken seriously and addressed just as seriously. It's an idea that needs to be reclaimed from Bush and the fundamentalist Christians. It needs to be specifically defined, demonstrated in controlled settings, and understood scientifically. That's what Philip Zimbardo set out to do when he created the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE for short) in the 70's. He was able to reproduce the conditions that turn people evil, but he shocked the world and even himself by how quickly it happened, and how powerful it was when it did.

It freaked him out so much that, although he started writing a book on it back then, he couldn't follow through with it until only a couple years ago. After testifying as an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trials, he decided it was time to write the book.

He has so much more perspective to offer on the subject now because he's done a lot of research in the past few decades to help him understand what the hell happened in the SPE. There's also been a lot of other research that was inspired by the SPE, most notably the work of his high school friend and colleague, Stanley Milgram. So now instead of writing a book about just the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo was able to write a book about the psychology of evil in general. It's fascinating, and sometimes outright creepy, but it's vital to understand.

Zimbardo also found himself and his work going through some transitions as a result of the SPE. The SPE raises a lot of big questions, many of which are outside the scope of social psychology. It raises philosophical questions about the nature of evil. It raises political questions about how to organize people so as to bring out the best in people rather than the worst. Then once some of these questions are answered, the next logical step is to work to make these changes happen. So he found himself going from social psychologist to investigative reporter to political activist. This book walks the reader through each of these phases. It starts off as a psychology book and ends as a political book.

"Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
We have refused
Again and again
Until now.

Until now."

- David Whyte

"The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.

"These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

"An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

"The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. 'A man,' said Oliver Cromwell, 'never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.' Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason, they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

"The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, -- 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Heroism

"The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, -- those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely."

"It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friendship

"When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions."

"The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny,--is a familiar fact, explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, History

From The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

Moyers: Why is a myth different from a dream?

Campbell: Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Moyers: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I'm more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public--

Campbell: --you'll be in trouble. If you're forced to live in that system, you'll be a neurotic.

Moyers: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?

Campbell: Yes, they are.

Moyers: How do you explain that?

Campbell: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience--that is the hero's deed.

"Until one is committed, there is always a hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one's favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

- Goethe