Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
Weed, California, Easter Sunday 2009: Here is an Easter gift for you … a super-quick little thing you can do in about twenty seconds, and it makes you feel really good. Most likely this is very good for your body and mind as well, though I can’t prove it!
I call it ‘Arthur’s Twenty Second Tune-Up,’ and it’s both startlingly effective and super-easy.
First, get an index card, or something similar, about 3″ x 5″. And then … [Read more…]
New York Times, August 22, 2004: Writer Stephen Johnson reports on an almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala (pronounced “uh MIG’ dulluh”), which is part of the primitive limbic system, which relates to emotions.
“Studies of stroke victims and scans of normal brains,” he reports, “have shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy.”
If amygdala activity is a reliable indication of emotional response, it raises the interesting question: Do liberals ‘think’ with their limbic system (emotions) more than conservatives do?
And the answer appears to be: Yes, they do.
Not long ago, U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed neural activity of Republicans and Democrats viewing images from campaign ads. It turns out that ‘violent’ images — such as pictures of the 9/11 attack on New York’s World Trade Center towers — produce different effects in Republicans and Democrats.
In fact, you could predict which are the Democrats just by observing the brain scans, because the Democrats had much stronger activity in the amygdala region. Note that this is a reading on a ‘gut response’, operating below the person’s conscious control.
So we learn that liberal brains have generally more active amygdalas than conservative ones. So what?
It’s a plausible explanation that matches some of our stereotypes about liberal values:
* an aversion to human suffering
* an unwillingness to accept capital punishment
* an unwillingness to accept military force
* a fondness for candidates who like to feel our pain.
Which suggests how we may become Republicans or Democrats in the first place.
“Say you’re inclined to form strong emotional responses to images of violence or human suffering,” said the Times article, “and over the course of your formative years, most of the people you meet who respond to these images with comparable affect turn out to be Democrats. That’s a commonality of experience that exists beneath conscious political affiliation — it’s closer to a gut instinct than a rational choice — but if you meet enough Democrats who share that experience, sooner or later you start carrying the card yourself.”
Some of the pundits elsewhere were generalizing from these experiments to suggest that liberals would be more emotional and less rational, using “emotional thinking” more heavily, and that they would be generally more fearful. And that conservatives would tend to be more analytical and more courageous.
Last night, watching Vice-President Dick Cheney debating John Edwards, it seems to me that’s exactly what I saw. Cheney seemed to be more analytical and cited a “braver” course of finding and stomping terrorists around the world till it’s done. Attorney John Edwards seemed more like a car salesman, hitting on the emotional buttons, and glossing over inconsistencies of the past anti-war voting records of himself and Mr. Kerry.
I’m not a political expert, but with a fair amount of past experience in language de-construction and training in counseling and reading body language, I personally would trust Dick Cheney over John Edwards. I caught John Edwards in too many sophistic devices (trickery in using the language) to believe him very much.
I’ve also noticed two things in life.
One is that if you experience a friend or employee or anyone who’s attempting to ‘blackmail’ you, it never pays off to pay them off.
For example, your pal is using emotional blackmail like “If you don’t loan me this money, I’ll feel awful and it will be all your fault!” Or for example, your employee says “I need to have a raise immediately or I’ll quit.” In that case, no matter how awkward it is to let them quit, you’d better just let them quit. Because if you give a raise for this reason (instead of giving a raise because their work has earned one), they’ll just wait till another awkward time to spring the same ruse again. (I had this experience with a bookkeeper named Kathy. The first time I paid up. The second time I paid up. The third time I bid my fond adieus.)
As regards terrorists, if we follow Spain or the Philippines in a pattern of appeasement, we’ll just get more of the same. I’m no political analyst, but it seems like the USA did that very thing under Clinton, with no consequences for the bombing of the USS Cole, no consequences for the Oklahoma government building bombing, no consequences toward Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the United Nations. And we got more of the same. Just like Kathy, they’ll be back.
Till we kill them.
That takes courage. That takes guts.
I don’t like war. But even less do I like our kindergartens in Oklahoma being bombed by fertilizer-filled trucks, discos blown apart during bar mitzvas, dirty bombs in our cities, and seeing people leap from flaming skyscrapers to fall, and fall, and fall.
Some “humans” are not quite human. Some are still barbarians. Some will knife you in a ghetto for your sneakers. Some will bomb your children’s kindergarten and call it religion. They aren’t like me and you.
Being nice won’t work.
Pulling out of the war, on a certain date, won’t work.
This is a new face of war, and there are no Marquis of Queensbury Rules in a knifefight. The bad guys aren’t just the soldiers inside a certain country. You can’t just go there and they’ll come out and fight. Yet, to avoid barbarians murdering those we love, we must fight. And we have to go about fighting differently.
The second thing I’ve learned in life is that, if you must fight, what wins is the use of excessive force.
For example if you just block the incoming blows, sooner or later, you’ll miss and you’ll lose. This reminds me of President Bush debating Senator Kerry last week. Kerry continually attacked, and Bush continued defending against the attacks, and that’s not an effective way to win such a debate.
Similarly, once we have the fact that these subhumans called terrorists do intend to kill us and our children, it will not be enough to just block them. They won’t go away. In fact, our refusal to viciously fight will be interpreted by them as weakness, and will encourage them to escalate. In their eyes, we the enemy are running away and so it’s time to mow us down ha ha ha! Look at the funny bleeding infidels! Ha ha ha.
Empathy, a “more sensitive” war, holding “summits”, issuing “directives”, or “withdrawing in six months” — none of these are courageous. None of these will work.
Cowardice won’t work.
We may not like it, but we’re in it. Relentless effort on our part, unreasonable effort on our part, deadly effort on our part, toward terrorists and their allies like Mr. Hussein … that’s the only thing which will work.
Liberals, with gut-instinct aversion to war, too bad.
Fight or die.
Dallas, Texas, 1966: On this particular day, my girlfriend and I decided to take the psilocybin before heading out. Driving the Morgan from Dallas to Shady Shores was an odd adventure. It was about thirty miles, and seemingly many days driving.
I knew of this place from years earlier. College roommates and I had lived nearby, and some scouting trip discovered an abandoned roadway that had once run atop a dam built across Lake Dallas. In a concrete building halfway out, remnants of the dam’s machinery remained, huge wheels and vast pipes, going nowhere.
Whoever these mysterious builders were, they were fickle, for after building the dam across the lake, they’d cut a hole through it, so it was no dam any longer. Just a finger of elevated land reaching toward, but not touching, a finger of land from the other side. On the elevated crest, earth and stone and even trees, and the once roadway ran, and stopped at the cut.
Just the spot for our picnic.
I recalled a time from college when the gang of us, plus the girl gang too, hiked beyond the road’s blockade, and spent an afternoon with beer and burnt hotdogs and more beer, on the crescent moon beach that formed at the end, beside the cut.
Now, above the Morgan, the day was turning overcast, the air keen and wild. I parked beneath the trees, and we hiked. It was a strange journey. Past the old spillway’s jumbled boulders, and there among the mesquite trees, we stumbled across a horrible and alarming black and orange snake, which proved to be a fragment of nylon rope.
The ground was heaving, and the trees whispered. The sky darkened, and a breeze began to blow. As we sat beside the abandoned roadway, to the west the sun peeked out, low across the lake.
The water between sparkled with flashes of God and the unseen heavens beyond this Earth. Bright flashes, as bright as the sun, and the water’s chop swirled them round and round in a pattern we could sense, and could almost see clearly.
And then clouds came in from the northwest, and the sun was covered, and the clouds drifted, a million miles above the earth, and slowly across the lake. The breeze returned, lifting the grasses around us, whispering. Then, from the clouds, rain.
Falling in parallel streaks like a Hiroshige print, going on eternally, and the lake turned its face up to receive the gentle rain.
I’m sure we returned to our homes later; unless, of course, we are still there.
San Francisco, 1975: I saw the flimsy poster, but it was quaint rather than crude. Bishop Nippo Syaku would give some short talks about Zen. In the rawboned Victorian near Filmore street, poor lighting made the room seem drab, but Bishop Nippo lit up the place. The Bishop was a round-faced, cheerful fellow, very chipper he was. He spoke often of the nature of things.”We say, ‘Oh the flower is pretty!’” He beamed, “But flower does not care!”
On this evening, he spoke of how the True Buddhist is without fear. This amazed me, and made me ponder. I raised my hand.
“Yes?”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. I pointed to an empty chair. “Let’s say the True Buddhist was sitting right there.”
Bishop Nippo nodded.
“And let’s say that a Sabre-Tooth Tiger came through that door.” Everybody looked at the door. I continued, “Now the True Buddhist would feel no fear, but he would jump up and run like hell, correct?”
“Ah!” said Bishop Nippo Syaku. “That is True Buddhist!”
>San Francisco, 1983: April R. was a pretty girl with red hair and pale skin. She and Madonna M. started work at Network Answering Service at the same time. Madonna was a beautiful black woman, and the two of them were physical opposites in every way. April was thin, quick, shrill. Madonna was voluptuous, languid, calm. They went through training together and became best of friends.At Network, operators worked in pairs, according to an eccentric scheme I’d developed with Bob back when we were the only two operators. With your team partner you develop a coordination, passing calls back and forth. The training was extensive, including training in how to communicate effectively with another human, as well as how to operate the telephone machinery. April and Madonna worked together with style, wit, and humor.But today April was in the kitchen, very unhappy. She was hungry, and somebody had stolen her avocado.
The system in the kitchen was that people didn’t need to label their food. Although you might not know who owned something, you knew darn well that it wasn’t yours, so you weren’t to eat another’s food. This generally worked.
In this case, April had brought her lunch, an avocado, in a small paper bag, and put it on the cabinet shelf. There were about eight paper bags there. I asked the obvious.
“Did you look in all the bags?”
Miserably, she said she’d checked them all, twice, thinking that surely it was there. But it wasn’t.
I told her that the best possible solution was that it was just there in one of these bags, because if it could magically disappear, then it could magically reappear. It’s as if magic doesn’t like to disturb the physical universe. Big puff of smoke and a flash? Not the way magic likes to manifest. It likes to perform its miracles unseen, unexplainable.
Sour at my chatter, she went through the bags again, bitter because she was hungry and had no more money for food today. She asked me what I was talking about.
I told her about a small miracle I’d seen, and how it felt so natural, so unforced. “For example,” I said, “with no sense of effort at all, you’d just pick up a sack …” I crossed to the cabinet and picked up a sack. I handed it to her. “You’d just say ‘There is your avocado,’ and it would be there.”
April peeked down into the sack she was holding. She looked up at me, looking much like a siamese cat.
“How did you do that?” she said.
Was it the avocado? It was.
How was it done? I don’t know. Bishop Nippo Syaku used to ask, “Where do we go when we die? Nobody knows that.”
But of course, the avocado was there all the time, and she had just been unable to find it, while searching the eight bags carefully three times.
Sure it was.
[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, March 28, 2010]
In another article (‘What is the Unconscious Mind?‘), I described how the so-called Unconscious Mind consists entirely of things learned by habit or happenstance, and which then sunk below what we call consciousness, so as to operate automatically to promote our survival.
There are many things which our culture believes are automatic and unknowing processes — such as regulating our blood pressure, remembering to breathe, regulating the salinity of our blood and the acidity of our stomach acid — and that these processes are built into the body, are automatic, and cannot be controlled.
Yet we know by observation that there are yogis who have in fact taken control of many of these processes, and so we know it can be done. But why don’t you and me have awareness of these things?
[reprinted from Shyguy’s How To Get A Girlfriend Blog, March 28, 2009]
All too often, in our lives we find ourselves being manipulated or influenced by other men, by women, and sometimes even by the damned television.
Of course, as a kid against a schoolyard bully, perhaps the only options are the Charles Atlas course, karate classes, or a tactful withdrawal. But in later life usually we’re not influenced by physical threat.
It’s done with worths, with images, and with social pressure.
If you’re being influenced this way … what that tells you is that you DO NOT actually understand how it’s happening. Oh, you may have theories and opinions about those bad people.
But if you’re still being manipulated, either “having” to go along, or even resisting but feeling upset or angry about it .. then you DO NOT fully understand how it works.
But here’s how to change that …
[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, January 9, 2009]
I make and sell guitars. Unusual guitars that you can play without strumming or picking, and this lets you play strings with both hands, so you can play bass strings and guitar strings at the same time. The name of this instrument is the Mobius Megatar.
Recently, a college student had inquired because he wanted to get one of our instruments. We wrote back and forth, and he was all set to go, but then he sent me this email —
“I’m sorry but the Megatar is not in the picture any more. I was coerced into buying a 2700 dollar classical guitar from a company that gives referral bonuses to the teacher who I was coerced by, so I’m left broke and on crappy terms with my main teacher for the next 3 years.
“I really wish I had the cash and time to delve into a tapstyle instrument right now, and if I could, it’d be a Mobius with Bartolini pickups, but it seems like that won’t be available for a while. With student loans and a no emergency funds (thanks to the aforementioned jerk of a teacher) I’ll be lucky if my car makes it without scheduled servicing for the next 6 months.”
What is really odd is that I got another email from another college student, in a similar situation who told me something of a similar story, that he’d been required (or perhaps urged) to get a nylon-string guitar for some upcoming course work. However, the second student seemed much less bitter.
And it got me to thinking. I can understand the disappointment he must feel.
And actually, it does sound kind of crappy behavior for the college music instructor, to push the student toward an instrument that pays the instructor a commission.
On the other hand …
