Labels – Carriers of Fear and Loathing

Democracy is not possible when people think it’s okay to label and attack not listen to each other and no matter how they are governed, people who live that way cannot be happy.

People all across our political spectrum have increasingly turned to labeling each other but if we dismiss each other as a Nazi, Libtard, racist, socialist or whatever, we won’t hear what each other has to say,

What to do, then, when we are labeled in that way? I have a suggestion and a request, but before I get to them, here’s some background and an illustration of the issue.

Forty five years ago I set up a text based social media platform that was popular all across the business where I worked. But there were two problems. I didn’t know how to monetize it so it became a drain on computing resources that underpinned our business and, until a terrific moderator appointed himself, it was a platform for personal abuse.

Now the illustration, one of my periodic attempts to motivate thoughtful dialog.

One of my friends who is a very intelligent, loving, courageous, creative person is subject to terrible fears that lead her to post things like this: “Rep Omar is beyond terrible. She is a potential terrorist,”. She posted that in big letters on a red background.

It immediately triggered these comments “yep get her out” then “No. She is a terrorist. So is CAIR and 99.9999999% of her district in poor old Minnesota” then “trump supporters are racist nazis who have no understanding what e terrorist does” followed by “to compare a trump supporter to a Jew killing Nazi is dumb as a box of rocks- go back to your mother country!!! “

Labeling Omar as a terrorist and Trump supporters as racist Nazis made discussion pretty much impossible but I asked my friend: “Why do you think that? “

A few more insults were traded followed by: “She is a terrible person as is Tlaib” to which my friend replied “They are actually scary and why does Nancy Pelosi support them so much” which prompted “scary yes, educated women with the power to enforce the constitution over the repeated efforts of the Oval Office.” More insults.

Then my friend replied “She is clearly anti Israel.” to which I replied “she is anti the actions of Israel’s current government as are many of my Jewish friends.” Someone else then wrote “and Trump has defended Neo-Nazis who killed American Citizens. What’s your point beta queen?”

A few more insults followed then came “I think people are cool with antisemitism (see Dems in Congress) No big deal. Along with infanticide” I replied “She is definitely opposed to the policies and actions of Israel’s government, an issue that isn’t getting discussed in Congress. Is she antisemitic? Maybe but it isn’t yet clear. Is she being subjected to Islamophobic hate? Very much so. Here’s a sensible short piece by a liberal Jew who was brought up to support human rights.? Another guy and I exchanged two more good opinion pieces.

My friend then replied to the comment about Dems in Congress being cool with antisemitism and infanticide “you are so right. It’s so unbelievable”. I replied “are you saying all Democrats in Congress are antisemitic? Name one who is cool with infanticide” to which my friend replied “most of them”. I asked for evidence and said I would change my mind. Then I added: “There’s a big difference between antisemitism and being anti the policies and acts of Netanyahu’s gov’t”

Now a new person responded to me “maybe you should get informed instead of making Zen like comments. Try your amateur psychology on your dog or Libtard friends.” I replied “is there something in particular I should get informed about or are you only capable of vacuous insults?” to which he responded “No, can’t reason with uninformed snowflakes. I’ve seen your posts and they are absurd. Being stuck on stupid is your problem. If you can’t handle the truth then block me”.

While I was replying “you haven’t included any truth in your comments, only insults” another person commented “she put her hand on the Quran to be swore in. I don’t mean to say this might be over your head but if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck it is a duck” to which I replied “The duck you speak of is a terrorist? Are you saying every Muslim is a terrorist?”

The first person now wrote “I can’t educate you. You’re likely a product of the failed public education system. As a wise person once said, if you argue with a fool others can’t tell you apart. Stick with your Libtard friends. I have no time for losers.” I responded “you have made no attempt to educate me. All you’ve done is try to intimidate me with insults” He replied “I have no patience for Libtards. Illiteracy is not a virtue. I suggest you get informed before you question others.”

The duck person now wrote “if they believe in the Quran they are not to be in this country. Period.”

There were a few more comments reiterating the terrorist, antisemite and socialist labels then I guess everyone moved on to the next whipping up of fear and hatred.

It would have been better if I hadn’t said “vacuous insults” even though the dialog wouldn’t have developed any differently. I knew I was wasting my time writing to him or most others who commented but I did get a couple of “likes” for “she is anti the actions of Israel’s current government as are many of my Jewish friends.”

After a day or two thinking I have a belief and a request to share.

My belief is that we must not just ignore labeling. We must keep trying, as skillfully as we possibly can, to encourage listening.

My request is, whatever your beliefs and no matter how badly you are provoked, please never label anyone, especially those you disagree with. There is more to every one of us than what’s conveyed by a label.

Sep 26 2017

Innocence, Habits and Donald Duck

We recently remembered 9/11/2001. We do not, however, remember 9/1/1973 when General Pinochet overthrew Chile’s popularly elected government with our very active support.

Why do we remember only when we were the victims, not when we were the perpetrators?

Ariel Dorfman reflects on that in A Tale of Two Donalds and his conclusion, “We really don’t have to leave this world as it was when we were born”, got me thinking.

Some preamble: Why did we help to overthrow Chile’s government? Because the Chilean people had for three years been working to build socialism via the ballot box and our leaders were afraid they might succeed, inspiring the same thing to happen here.

The focus of Dorfman’s book was Donald Duck because: “If there was a single company that embodied the overarching influence of the U.S. — not just in Chile but in so many other lands then known as the Third World — it was the Walt Disney Corporation.”

What was symbolized by Disney’s Donald Duck world? “a belief in an essential American innocence, in the utter exceptionality, the ethical singularity and manifest destiny of the United States … the inability of the country Walt was exporting in such a pristine state… to recognize its own history”.

What history did we not recognize? What, as Dorfman puts it, was our sin? “[our] violence (the enslavement of blacks, the extermination of natives, the massacres of striking workers, the persecution and deportation of aliens and rebels, all those imperial and military adventures, invasions, and annexations in foreign lands, and a never-ending complicity with dictatorships and autocracy globally)”.

Why is Dorfman writing now about what happened almost half a century ago? Because, he says: “We are clearly in a moment when a yearning to regress to the supposedly uncomplicated, spotless, and innocent America of those Disney cartoons, the sort of America that Walt once imagined as eternal, fills Trump and so many of his followers with an inchoate nostalgia.”

Now here’s what struck me. The innocence Disney conveyed is real. At the same time, the violence, selfishness and greed that Dorfman points to are also real. How can both be true?

It’s because, in the Buddhist understanding of existence, our intrinsic nature is good; we behave badly only out of habit.

What happens is, our mistaken acts accumulate into conceptual and emotional habits, then our behavior is governed by the things we always think and feelings we always have, not the unique circumstances in each moment.

Buddhists call all that programming karma. We call the habits we share our culture.

By observing people who have studied, reflected and done Buddhist practices for long enough, we can see they are not on auto-pilot. They are naturally kind. The Buddhist understanding of our nature is confirmed by observation.

Buddhism is not the only way to overcome bad habits, of course, and Buddhist leaders in Myanmar are currently exterminating their Muslim Rohingya population. We first need the right motivation, then whatever way works to train ourselves out of selfishness, greed and violence.

One of our greatest warriors was especially clear about making the right choice. Three months into his first term President Eisenhower gave this speech:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Why did we not heed Ike’s words, or his warning eight years later about our emerging military-industrial complex?

And why did our current leaders just vote for another vast increase in military spending while trying to pay for it and a further tax cut for the wealthy by cutting medical care for tens of millions of other Americans?

Because, despite our intrinsic goodness, we keep choosing not to acknowledge the habits we inherited — our sense that we were entitled to exterminate Native Americans and enslave people of color, the greed, fear and violence that govern so much of what we do. We keep reinforcing those habits.

We could, as Buddhist and other teachers explain, shed our selfishness, violence and greed. We would just have to recognize our programming then work diligently and long to get free of those habits.

Castigating others feeds our own self-righteousness, so let’s stop doing that. Let’s each of us just work at freeing ourselves.

And let’s stop electing leaders who subvert other governments. In 1973 we worked to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government. Twenty years earlier, we’d done it in Iran. Thirty years later we did it in Iraq, then Libya. We’re trying it now in Syria and helping Saudi Arabia do it to Yemen.

Let’s elect leaders who will inspire us to act as the good people we are. But before that can happen we’ll have to work sincerely to overcome our amnesia and purge our programming.

Jul 14 2017

Reversing our Government’s Direction

I just sent this to Democratic Party leaders. Please join me in telling our leading politicians if you also recognize that our government is heading fast in the wrong direction.

I hope this will be helpful.

I have stopped responding to appeals for uncoordinated advertising and campaigns like Jon Ossoff’s whose only rationale was anti-Trump.

We must not just thwart today’s cruel proposals by President Trump and Republicans. We must recognize and respond to why we keep being defeated at every level of government.

We say Trump’s victory came from poor, white working-class voters. That’s false. Three-quarters of Trump voters were from households earning more than the national median income.

What was most important for the relatively small number of Trump voters was not economic dissatisfaction but social issues Exit poll data show it was his words about race, gender and immigration that were the main factor with his mostly middle-class supporters.

What is much more important is Trump won mostly because so many in the working class did not to vote at all. The Clinton campaign wrote them off as racist, nativist, misogynistic “deplorables”.

We must change that mindset. We must focus on what motivates those who did not vote.

We’ve been ignoring the situation of the majority of Americans where the top one tenth of the top 1% now has as much wealth as the bottom 90%, and half our population is poor or near poor.

That’s what we must commit ourselves to change.

It may be helpful to understand why we are ignoring the need to change and this article explains it well but the only thing that really matters is to make the change.

We must regain electoral majorities to make a society that is no longer organized to profit a tiny few but one where all can flourish.

We must commit ourselves not just to hope but to a program for what the majority seeks.

Do you agree or disagree? Please let me know.

— Martin

Jul 9 2017

Human Flourishing or Vast Profit for a Tiny Few

Our society has for decades been changing for the sole benefit of a tiny minority. I want it to change for all of us to flourish and I am now committing myself to help make it so.

We have been pouring money into a political wasteland where the Republican Party is no longer a thoughtful counterbalance to progressive impulses and the Democratic Party is simply anti-Trump.

Both major parties must be transformed because a society dominated by either one will be unfair.

I will focus chiefly on the Democrats, making modest and conditional contributions to half a dozen or so influential individuals and emailing them often. I began this way:

Dear Congress(wo)man/Senator/Governor xxx,

I hope this is helpful.

As a life-long Democrat I am appalled that Democratic Party leaders have not learned from our defeats at every level of government. I believe they must be forced.

I’m writing to you because party leaders will not notice I have stopped responding to their barrage of appeals to pay for uncoordinated advertising.

What I will do, however, is support you to establish a well marketed Democratic Party program of change for a better world.

Opposing what Republican leaders are now proposing is of course necessary but it simply is not enough. We must be FOR changes that most voters want, and we must market them well.

We aspire to be a society that prioritizes human flourishing over private profit for a tiny minority. Achieving that requires a long-term program — the equivalent of tax cuts for Republicans — of coordinated marketing to build unstoppable demand and to mitigate the cultural concerns that now divide us.

Our economic message resonates, but we are creating powerful reasons to vote against it. As Fareed Zakaria points out here: https://fareedzakaria.com/2017/06/30/the-democrats-problem-is-not-the-economy-stupid/ “More people prefer the [Democratic Party] views to those of Republicans on taxes, poverty reduction, health care, government benefits, and even climate change and energy policy … [but] Democrats need to talk about America’s national identity in a way that stresses the common elements that bind, not the particular ones that divide … stay true to their ideals, of course, but yet convey to a broad section of Americans — rural, less-educated, older, whiter — that they understand and respect their lives, their values and their worth.'”

We can hope to gain seats in 2018 and 2020 but we will not achieve a mandate unless we make a long-term effort. Republican leaders started getting where they are half a century ago as Bruce Bartlett points out: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/24/intellectual-conservatives-lost-republican-trump-215259 “In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, many conservatives concluded that their philosophy was insufficiently well-grounded in the social sciences and lacked an empirical foundation. For example, Goldwater talked about privatizing Social Security, but had no plan whatsoever for how to do it. Hearing his rhetoric on the subject, those receiving Social Security assumed, not unreasonably, that they would just be cut off.”

Although we must build an equivalent infrastructure of think tanks and media for lasting change, we can quite soon begin to succeed because our theme, economic justice, is already popular.

Our program will only succeed, however, if it is based on the values we all share, not on those that divide us.

I am counting on you to convince our Party’s leaders to make the necessary changes. Please let me know if I can help. I will be watching.

Preaching to those who agree will not make our future better and ranting at those who do not agree makes it worse. We must focus on values we share.

And because only politicians can establish government changes, we must above all convince them to make the changes we want.

That will require persistent and emphatic effort. I hope you will join me.

May 6 2017

Words and Reality

Language is the decisive difference between us and other chimpanzees with whom we share 98% of our genes. We can articulate and review our thoughts. We can listen to and reflect on what others say. This enormously amplifies our ability to learn.

But we ought to be much more wary of words. They only point to things. Too often we confuse the name we give a thing with what it points toward. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, something an empathetic friend helped me see. She responded to my post about recognizing that I don’t exist: “What you have written about your life is intriguing […] and a little heartbreaking”. What I saw is a new level of how blessed I’ve been.

My life has never, since I started work, anyway, felt “a little heartbreaking” to me. I’ve encountered a mix of circumstances, some quite difficult, but I was blessed to accept them and take action, not suffer.

My aim in my no-self post was to show a series of paths I took that were misguided. My experience along that route to nowhere was a sense of adventure, though. It was like being on a long trek through different lands.

So I’ve been reflecting on why I was blessed to feel that way. Two powerful forces were at work. I’ve mentioned the one known as Florence, my mother who felt there was no challenge she could not surmount. I’ll say a little more about her, then some about the force in my father, Leonard, that I had to oppose.

Florence grew up in a Catholic orphanage. She loved children, trained as a nanny and worked first for a wealthy English couple then in Italy for a marquess. She loved Italy and would have stayed longer but the marquess had to replace her when he was sent on a diplomatic posting to Hitler’s Berlin.

She never said much about that time but it was evidently happy. She explored with enthusiasm and one of her very few possessions, a picture of a chalet in the mountains on my bedroom wall, likely sparked my own Himalayan treks.

Leonard’s mother died before he was a year old and his father, Whalley, was jailed for refusing to fight in WW1, so he was raised by his beloved grandmother until he was eight. When Whalley remarried, the three of them joined one of his younger brothers in Akron, Ohio. Whalley, who hated the cold, was happy when he was offered the chance to operate a citrus farm in extreme SW Texas. He knew nothing about farming and not a single citrus tree was there but he loved it. So did Leonard but his step-mother Edith hated the heat even more than Whalley hated the cold, so after a few years they returned to Ohio.

When Whalley was unable to get a job in the Great Depression, he and Edith returned to England. Leonard stayed to graduate from High School and the friend with the farm offered to fund his college education but Whalley sent him a ticket back to England where, not knowing British history, he did not qualify for the Civil Service as Whalley hoped. That was when he began giving film shows for the Peace Pledge Union.

The lesson Leonard drew from all these upheavals was, the best he could do was endure. His happy memories of the farm in Texas and of High School predisposed me to be happy in America but they compounded his yearning for stability. He was apprehensive about new upheavals anyone with power over him might create.

What my friend’s comment about “heartrending” showed me is, I always understood more than I recognized about acceptance and suffering.

Now a more dramatic example of the power of words. The Zen master who was my first Buddhist teacher told us one morning: “If you really want to end suffering, stop creating it”.

Hearing that in a receptive moment, I got a glimpse of what acceptance means and that I had been blessed to practice it much of the time even though I hadn’t understood the word before. I’ve mostly done as my mother did and my father did not, recognized negative circumstances, not felt sorry for myself and taken action for change.

Here’s a second set of thoughts provoked by a response to my post. Richard wrote: “The intersection of physics and psychology gets pretty strange doesn’t it? I’ve done a lot of thinking about the implications of quantum physics, and our worldview. Mostly, it’s been a bunch of circular waffling. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is that our model of reality is flawed, probably because of some version of the “you can’t see the true reality from within the system” problem.”

I circled, too, until I saw that although I have no self, I do exist. We can discern the structure of reality from within the system even though we can’t quite see how it operates.

We manifest from an ever changing force field, as does everything we perceive, so from that perspective, we don’t “really” exist. But our actions change the force field, so in fact we do exist. How to think about that?

Nothing that is perceptible to us sentient beings can be found in the force field, yet every sentient being is a point of consciousness with the capacity to act. That means we exist in more than one way, only one of which, the form that takes action, is a form in the way we imagine.

Consciousness is the great puzzle to brain scientists. Is it a product of the brain, or somehow separate? I sense it’s separate but what has made all the difference for me is recognizing that we exist in a form that, because it has no intrinsic nature and is utterly imperceptible to our senses, to our way of thinking does not exist.

The reality of sentient beings takes threefold or twofold form in Buddhist metaphysics. The form that acts is the nirmanakaya, the conscious form is the sambhogakaya, and the imperceptible one is the dharmakaya. The first two are also thought of as one, the rupakaya, to highlight that the form with no properties is the ultimate level of reality.

There’s a vast mass of logic about why and how reality is multi-fold but it remains in the end a mystery to our intellect.

What we can be certain about is that matter manifests from energy. We can start by thinking of matter as congealed energy and energy as liberated matter, but when we use quantum physics to examine what’s going on we see that you and I, for example, exist in both forms simultaneously.

Or perhaps we exist in three forms, the three kayas, which we could rename Tom, Dick and Harry if that feels less foreign, or Romeo and Juliet if we’re thinking about the two forms. It’s only what the words point toward that matters.

I’ve noticed some changes since I began getting glimpses of what all these words are pointing toward, that what seem to be separate beings are not separate, that we are all manifestations from one ocean whose currents flow without boundaries, that we are all eddies in a maelstrom of pure energy.

The less separate I feel, the less indifferent I become. My impulses are more kind, I’m more prone to compassion than anger, and I’m less grasping.

The energy flows that manifest as Martin are changing because I’m watching them, and the longer I watch, the more sensitive I become to the eddies that manifest as other beings.

Yes, the way this multi-fold reality works is a mystery but now I know how to proceed, acting that way is deeply happy-making.

Apr 20 2017

Happy Birthday in Every Moment

My body was already sixty years old when I began to see with some clarity that I don’t exist as I’d always imagined. I’ll try to explain what I experienced.

What I noticed first is there had been at different times a different person in my body. I’ve given them Nordic patronymics. Leon Leonardsson came first.

Leon came to life in England during WW2 in an isolated farm-worker’s cottage with no utilities. He was the only child of Leonard and Florence Sidwell, a happy kid fascinated by farm machinery. Because his parents had no friends, Leon’s social skills were weak but he was highly intelligent. Florence made him study every day and he got the best results of all students in the exam that determined which school he would go to when he was eleven.

Leonard’s work since WW2 driving an excavator to maintain waterways paid very little but Florence found him a better paying job at this time selling insurance door to door. They were now able to buy a house with a tiny garden in the neighboring town. But Leonard hated his new job and that he now had so little room to grow vegetables. And Leon had nowhere to play and nobody to play with. As Leonard’s passivity evolved into depression, Leon fell prey to the same disease.

Leon’s new school, a bus-ride away in the county town, was an undistinguished private establishment founded in 1608 that had been recast as a State school ten years before Leon arrived. Life continued there almost as if the British Empire remained triumphant. Leon studied and remained top of his class but he was disoriented in this new world. Told after a couple of years to take the exam for a scholarship to Eton College, he passed but then read about life there and, horrified by the prospect of the even more foreign culture of the aristocracy, he failed the oral interview.

During that first year or two as Leon floundered in his new environment, a less passive new person, Sid Leonsson, began taking over. He told himself he was justifiably alienated from an antiquated culture, started building the personality of an intellectual and began reading philosophy. He labeled himself an existentialist.

The secondary school curriculum in England in those days channeled students into either the sciences or the arts but Sid insisted on continuing to study both Physics and English literature. Then, impatient with a curriculum that still felt too narrow, he drifted ever further from both subjects, roaming far afield into theories about the human condition.

He was delivered a great shock by “Three Faces of Eve”, a psychologist’s account of a patient whose body hosted three entirely different people vying for control. What if he was not the only one in his body? His current identity felt inauthentic. Maybe other personalities would spring forth, and none would be authentic? A friend whose psychologist father specialized in schizophrenia introduced him to much unsettling literature on this topic.

Sid was also deeply moved by Wilfred Owen and other WW1 poets who expressed the horror and insanity of war. His grandfather, Whalley Sidwell, had faced execution for treason by refusing to join that war and was jailed for two and a half years. Whalley’s five younger brothers also refused . One explained: “What if I kill a German boy then I meet his mother and she asks me why I did that?”

Whalley was a powerful presence. His son, Leonard, drove a van with a film projector all over England during the 1930s for the Peace Pledge Movement. Their idea was to make war impossible because everyone would have pledged not to participate. When WW2 broke out, Leonard did refuse to participate and he was jailed. On his release he was assigned to agricultural work. Sid did not yet notice that Whalley was occupying his body, too.

Further study felt useless to Sid by the time college was due to start and he decided he must get a job. Having no other idea how to get one, he went to the government office where jobs are posted and was given one picking apples. When all the apples were picked, someone told him jobs are also listed in newspapers and showed him one as an inventory clerk. A couple of years later someone told him the computer department would be better so he went there as a computer operator.

A year later, married and living in London, Sid for the first time searched for a job. He found one as a programmer at a Dickensian insurance company. A year or two later someone encouraged him to apply to IBM where for three years he for the first time worked alongside thinking people. He liked that but disliked the culture. Asked “What is the purpose of business?” he realized he didn’t know. The answer was: “To make a profit”. That can’t be right, he thought. It’s like saying the purpose of life is to breathe.

So, when Sid saw a small American company’s advertisement about opening for business in England, he joined them. A couple of weeks later they decided not to enter England but gave him a job in America. It was 1970, and that was when Martin Sidsson, the third person to do so, took the reins of what was by now a 26 year old body.

Sidsson made a determined effort to fit into the entrepreneurial technology startup and the local culture. It was not hard because everyone he worked with was smart and interesting. He also made a determined effort to take the initiative and he was soon assigned to manage development of a precursor to the Internet. Over the next few years he eagerly took on additional responsibilities and made a determined effort to manage according to his belief that the chief purposes of business are to delight customers and provide opportunity for employees.

He eventually remedied his utter ignorance of business operations, established a management consultancy and learned how to market and sell. That led him to study why businesses fail and how to set effective strategies. His last decade of work was in leadership positions in a long established global business followed by an Internet-based startup.

Sidsson’s career was not entirely a smooth progression, however. In the same way that Whalley and Leonard Sidwell had played an important role in Leonardsson’s life, Leonardsson resurfaced a few years into Sidsson’s. Sidsson always started out ignorant about new responsibilities he took on and he enjoyed the necessarily fast learning, but because his responsibilities grew rapidly, it was stressful. Also, everything took extra effort because of the depression he had inherited from Leon, Sid, Leonard and Whalley.

As Sidsson’s stress built up, Leonardsson saw an opportunity to regain control. Believing farming to be the only truly satisfying occupation and unhampered by understanding the unending work required or why small scale farming was no longer viable where Sidsson lived, he got Sidsson to establish a sheep farm.

Some years later, Sidsson recognized another presence in “himself”. His mother, Florence Sidwell, had believed there was no problem she could not fix and no challenge she could not overcome. Without her presence Sidsson could never even have attempted what he had achieved.

By the time he retired, Sidsson was aware not only of his immediate predecessors, Leon and Sid, who were still vying for control of his body, he also saw his parents, Leonard and Florence, taking action with his body. He no longer had a strong sense of self and was not surprised when a new person, Martin Martinsson, emerged and took control.

Martinsson went trekking in the Himalayas and experienced there a culture that attracted him greatly. People were cheerful, as if that was their policy, and they were respectful of each other. What was the cause? It seemed to be their Buddhist practice. A few years later, after many more long treks, much reading, and closer study of the reality, he realized the truth is much more complicated. The people he thought were Buddhist were mostly animist, Nepal’s traditions come to a great extent from its Hindu aristocracy, and it is a caste society with much domestic violence.

But by the time Martinsson saw that more complex picture, he was acting on what he had first sensed. He was practicing Tibetan Buddhism. He had received teachings from Anam Thubten whose book, “No Self, No Problem”, makes clear that we do not have an intrinsic self and whose magnetizing presence shows that one really can he happy in all circumstances and can always be spontaneously kind.

He then met a second teacher, Phakchok Rinpoche, who insists his students follow a disciplined program to reach the state Anam Thubten and others exemplify. We can’t think our way to that state, he insists, we must slowly, slowly retrain our mind by observing how it works, studying teachings, and reflecting. Now Martinsson had something to work at, which felt good because it exercised the discipline his first incarnation, Leonardsson, had inherited from his parents, Leonard and Florence.

“What is Buddhism?” Rinpoche asked. The answer: “Selflessness!” When you experience not having a self that is intrinsically separate from others, your behavior naturally is selfless. But gaining and sustaining that experience takes practice. Having “no self” is not how we ordinarily feel. Instead, we feel we are in a body that actually is separate from others.

Struggling to understand this, Martinsson returned to physics. The butterfly effect and more in James Gleick’s “Chaos” got him reflecting on the weather, which manifests in different ways in different places, calm, windy, hot, cold, clear, foggy, sunny, raining, snowing, and always changing. He came to see that what we call weather is the product of a giant energy field of swirling currents which constantly interact with and change each other, that have no fixed boundaries, and that are always different from moment to moment but which recur in broad form from season to season.

Martinsson recognized that just as weather manifests in the Earth’s environment, what we think of as selves manifest in the environment of bodies.

He continued deeper into quantum physics. Einstein recognized decades before even Leonardsson was born that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. Sid had not felt that truth in High School physics classes but Martinsson now began to feel the reality that atoms are not solid things, and nor are solar systems. Studying Lee Smolin’s explanations of theoretical physics in “The Trouble with Physics”, he began to see that what we experience as things like the Earth, our own body, atoms and everything else do not in fact have fixed boundaries or any intrinsic nature.

Matter is congealed energy; energy is liberated matter. It only appears to us sentient beings that matter and space are different. The boundary between them is simply a product of our mind.

The configuration of energy that manifests as a human body is sentient, but with limitations. Every human body is uniquely configured — the high intelligence of Leon, Sid, and the Martins results from the configuration of the body they share, for example – and every body is constantly changing.

Martinsson began to see not just that everything is in flux, but everything is a manifestation of an energy field whose flows constantly interact producing results that propagate endlessly.

There is no real beginning or end of anything, only of appearances in our minds that manifest from flowing energy.

Catching up on quantum physics made the Tibetan Buddhist teachings real. Martinsson could now to a growing extent feel the two levels of reality, an underlying energy field and what manifests from that energy to our senses and concept generators as, for example, things and personalities. Leon Leonardsson, Sid Leonsson, Martin Sidsson and Martin Martinsson all exist on both levels, manifestations of an ever-changing energy field that has also manifested Leonard Sidwell, Florence Sidwell, Anam Thubten, Phakchok Rinpoche and so many more who we think of as “others”.

Well now, am I saying that Leonardsson, Leonsson and Sidsson were real people? Yes and no. The more I told you about them, the more real they would seem, but that’s also true of Martinsson. All of them manifested as real in a situation which made that possible. They were real in the same way as a rainbow when sunlight is separated by raindrops into colors that we usually perceive as one. We think of a person as having an intrinsic nature in the same way we think of a rainbow as a thing.

Is a rainbow made of matter? Is it energy in the form of light? We don’t ordinarily ask such questions. We do speculate about people and their nature, but with the wrong perspective. We think of behaviors that manifest as a person as something with an intrinsic nature although those behaviors are in fact manifestations of an ever changing interaction of energy flows with no fixed boundaries and which, although ever changing, never end.

What does all this imply? The body labelled Martin Sidwell was conceived at a specific time, was born at a specific later one, and will die at a specific future moment, but the sentient being who manifests in that body had no fixed beginning, it has no fixed nature, and it will have no definite end.

Our every act takes place within and is part of an unimaginably complex energy field. Our every act changes that flowing energy, just as the tiny force of the butterfly’s flapping wing interacts with the results of other acts and eventually manifests a tornado.

Buddhists refer to how the system operates as karma. To a great extent our actions are shaped by our concepts and emotional habits. We rarely respond directly to what we see because what appears in our mind is something that fits an existing pattern there. We see what we expect to see. We don’t experience each new moment as unique. We don’t experience it as it really is. Karma means we keep reacting as we always do until we shed our fixed ideas and emotional habits.

So everything we do matters, and everything we do out of habit instead of what is actually present is flawed.

Pattern recognition and autopilot enable us to navigate what appears — we must, after all, stop automatically for red lights. Feeling the energy behind what appears — that results in compassion and brings happiness.

Feb 9 2016

Maslow Misapplied to Nations

I was excited 35 years ago to see the rewards for structuring data into quadrant charts. That was for me! And management consulting with those charts was fun, but I saw how misleading they can be and at last returned to product and business development.

The chart tool began as a guide for business and product strategy, the idea being that you’re in trouble in the bottom left where your competitive advantages are few and small. You must develop more and stronger advantages to soar to the profitable heavens on the top right.

BCG Advantage Matrix

Learning how to use and not abuse that tool has continued to be useful. What provoked this post is research from 1981 to 2014 that is well illustrated by this animation but misleadingly presented in chart in the Findings & Insights summary linked to on this page.

The religion-based labeling is accurate but, in the two-dimensional chart context where the goal is to move from bottom left to top right, it is misleading.

And in this article by a different researcher the data is naively misinterpreted to suggest that capitalism transforms national values toward the political left.

So this is an example of tool abuse. The data points are real, the research is valuable and the animation of changes over time is meaningful. But the complex underlying reality is distorted by a static chart labeled in this way.

Nations' Survival vs Self-espression

The World Values Survey (WVS) researchers describe the two dimensions as follows:

Traditional values emphasize religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, traditional family values and national pride
Secular-rational values place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority
Survival values emphasize economic and physical security, are relatively ethnocentric and feature low levels of trust and tolerance
Self-expression values emphasize environmental protection, tolerance, and participation in economic and political decisions

The researchers say the data show that as a country moves from poor to rich, it also tends to move from traditional to secular-rational. The move is a tendency not inevitable because values are also highly correlated with long-established cultures.

And there is movement in both directions over time. The USA, for example, is in 1989 a little toward the traditional end and quite far toward self-expression, then it grows more traditional over the next decade, less so in the next, then steadily less traditional and less concerned with self-expression.

The writer claiming that capitalism transforms national values so nations labeled Islamic will, if they embrace capitalism, naturally move toward Protestant heaven, confuses correlation with causation.

His explicit blunder is conceptualizing nations as people to which Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” apply.

Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Maslow illustrates how, if we have no food, all we care about is getting our next meal, but once we have that, we start caring about how to get the next meal and the one after that, and if we secure a reasonably dependable supply of basic needs we put effort into friendships, then start working for the respect of others, and finally devote effort to self-actualization.

Here’s a simpler way to see what Maslow was driving at (hat tip to Lexy):

Lexys-Version-of-Maslow

What Maslow’s hierarchy does not show is how circumstances impact the motivation of nations. It can’t because nations are not people. They are made up of people whose situations can be very diverse.

This comment on the naive article (click on the link and wait for it to scroll down) summarizes what the research actually illuminates: “Economic and political systems, and culture/psychology interact with each other in both directions … autonomous individuals create capitalism, safety creates capitalism, peace creates capitalism.”

The top left is not unalloyed heaven because “increasing empathy and mutual respect [and] the breakdown in social capital go hand in hand with secularization and the domination of the market.”

And good governance is a prerequisite: “the state monopoly of coercion helped create the safety required for the large social networks of trust, and individual autonomy.”

According to the US Census Bureau, 15%, i.e., 47 million Americans are living in poverty meaning “a lack of those goods and services commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society.” That includes more than one in five of all children under age 18.

The WVS research, excellent as it is, can tell us nothing about the value those 47 million Americans place on traditional vs secular-rational values.

And we would be utterly mistaken to imagine they over-value self-expression relative to survival.

Feb 7 2016

How We Choose Political Candidates

Why do we have such bewilderingly diverse presidential candidates this year, and why are they arguing so passionately for such different kinds of change?

The passion is because while every President must now declaim as each year begins, “The state of our union is strong” many believe instead that, as candidate Reagan said in 1980 and candidate Trump says now, it is urgently necessary to “Make America Great again.”

But why do we have such different ideas about who can make America great again? The recently developed Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) offers an explanation.

The direction we want our nation to take is governed by the relative value we place on half a dozen different “moral foundations,” i.e., intuitive ethical values:

Care: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable or suffering
Proportionality: We feel people should get what they deserve, good or bad
Liberty: We resent restrictions on our choices
Loyalty: We keep track of who is “us” and and hate traitors
Authority: We dislike those who undermine authority and sow chaos
Sanctity: We feel some things must be protected from degradation

The relative importance of the values differs from individual to individual and can change with experience but the pattern is set to a large extent by the society in which we live, and each society’s value system evolves over the long haul depending on its circumstances.

Traditional societies that are vulnerable to attack place high value on loyalty, authority, and sanctity to defend themselves. Trading societies place higher value on liberty and fairness and tend to be more open. And so on.

But it’s important to remember that nations are in many cases made up of diverse groups — the USA, for example, is better understood as eleven nations. And those groups are made up of diverse families. That’s why there are diverse value systems within nations.

So how does MFT shed light on the support for this year’s diverse presidential candidates?

The following charts show how a representative sample of supporters of each candidate over- or under-valued each of the moral foundations relative to the average American. Since people tend to place similar values on loyalty, authority and sanctity, they are lumped together as a single category.

Among supporters of the leading candidates we see the strongest difference is on proportionality, the belief that people should get what they deserve, good or bad, with an inverse relationship to the feeling that we should care for those who are suffering.

The major difference for Sanders and Clinton is the value their supporters place on liberty vs authority. The major difference between supporters of Carson and the other Republican candidates is that Carson supporters under-value liberty and do not under-value caring.

Candidate Supporter Moral Foundations - Tier 1

Supporters of Trump have a more traditional Republican value profile, somewhat over-valuing proportionality and authority while somewhat under-valuing caring relative to Americans as a whole.

Among supporters of the second tier candidates, the consistent difference is the value placed on proportionality. There is no pattern to the other differences.

The stark difference between supporters of Huckabee and Paul confirms the validity of the theory — Huckabee supporters over-value loyalty-authority-sanctity and under-value liberty while Paul supporters are the reverse. Paul supporters also under-value caring.

The weight supporters of Bush and Fiorina place on each moral foundation is much closer to that of the average American. They are in the second tier because they have not energized passionate support.

Candidate Supporter Moral Foundations - Tier 2

This research does not tell us who will be our next President, nor even which pair (or more?) will be candidates in the election. It could help us make a guess if we knew how many voters have which value-weighting profile, and we could estimate that using the Eleven Nations map since the population of each “nation” presumably has a relatively homogeneous moral profile.

But my aim is not to predict the outcome of elections. What struck me when I saw the MFT research was a form of deja vu.

Early in my career, when I was doing product development, I sometimes wondered how people who wanted what we sold could be so stupid as to buy others’ offerings when ours were so much better. It was only later, doing market research, that I realized the issue is not what customers want to buy, but why. The deja vu was when I realized it’s the same with supporters of political candidates.

Those who don’t support our favored candidate are not necessarily stupid — although they may be that, too. They have a different sense of what’s most important, of how things should be. Their morality and ours are different. That’s why democracy was invented .

Dec 15 2015

TCN, Episode 11 – Corruption and Government

Saddened when I went trekking by all the hardships I saw, I thought: “I know how to devise strategies, what’s a good one for Nepal?” It was only after many more trips that I saw the root of the problem.

It is easy to see a good strategy for Nepal. It has over 80,000 MW of hydro-power potential, much of which it could export, and its near neighbor, Bhutan, has made good deals with India to do exactly that.

But Nepal has failed to make such deals and has developed less than 1% of its potential.

Why the difference? Corruption. Corruption is when someone uses a position of authority for their personal gain.

But the whole point of having a position of authority throughout Nepal’s history was personal gain.

And that motivation has not changed — see Electricity and Corruption.

Nepal never had what we understand by “government”. Its administration never was intended to provide services to the people. It existed to operate a tax farming business owned by Hindu kings and run by a high caste Hindu family.

That ruling elite was a tiny minority within the high caste groups that make up less than a third of Nepal’s diverse population where over a hundred mutually unintelligible languages are spoken.

As these charts from a good article on the topic illustrate, Chhetri and Hill-Brahmin people make up 29% of the 28 million population. Doma’s Tamang people are one of the larger non-Hindu tribal groups.

Since Nepal was owned and operated by high caste Hindus for 240 years and the Hindu monarchy fell only seven years ago it is no surprise that the government is still dominated by high caste Hindus.

Nor is it surprising, given the enormous over-representation of high caste men in the government, judiciary, journalism and other positions of influence, that they would have engineered the new Constitution to maintain their privileged position.

Voting in Nepal is along ethnic lines unless that’s trumped by who pays most for your vote. Brahmin and Chettri subsistence farmers who live in the hills will vote for wealthy Brahmin and Chettri politicians simply because of their caste.

That is why the electoral districts defined in the new Constitution were jerrymandered to include a sufficient number of hill people.

Can this culture of “corruption” that makes it impossible for Nepalis to have “government” be changed?

When the new Constitution was announced, Dr. Baburam Bhatterai, Prime Minister from August 2011 to March 2013, split from the Maoist Party that had led the monarchy’s overthrow. He is forming a new party. To replace exploitation with government, he says, it is necessary to start anew.

Baburam’s leadership will have some effect but much more will be necessary, and while legislation can sometimes be enacted quickly, cultures only ever change slowly.

Nepal’s politics-for-profit culture will not be changed by those it benefits. I’m hoping the protests by the Madhesi that make life even harder for all but the privileged few will turn out to have been the equivalent of our civil rights protests half a century ago.

Dec 11 2015

TCN, Episode 9 – Retreat and Empowerment

Nov 6 – I ask Nagendra what he thinks about retreats. The longest ones I’ve done have been a week long. My mind calmed, it became easier to observe what thoughts arose and see their origin, and that helped the meaning of teachings get through the usual distracting clutter.

I hope to do a one month retreat sometime because that’s the traditional next step, but I shall not take the following step, a three year retreat.

The two week-long classes I just took were a form of retreat. We were instructed to consider them so. At one point our teacher said: “People think what it means to be a lama is we give up sex, but it’s so much more than that. We make more than two hundred commitments about what we will and will not do, and after the third empowerment we must have a consort for the next practices.”

Empowerments authorize you to perform certain practices. They are given by teachers when you have attained the results of your current practice. Each of the four empowerments authorizes one to perform a certain class of practices. One is then granted approval for specific practices within that class.

I am at the first level and feel unlikely to get to the second.

The original set of Buddhist practices is known as Nyingma, the Old School. My teachers are in this tradition. Three New Schools came later, one of which split into two, and the latest of which is headed by the Dalai Lama.

An important way the Nyingma tradition is different is its practitioners can live an “ordinary” life with an approach that is different from ordinary.

Both my teachers are married with children. The younger one, who is mid-30s, was told by his chief teacher: “It is time for you to have a wife.” He was quite surprised but did as he was told and is happy that he did. His wife alerts him to negative behaviors that he had not noticed. There was no question of disobeying, anyway. He is unusual in teaching from his own experience, which makes his teachings more accessible.

I’d been thinking the Nyingma ordinary life approach seems the most effective. Our experiences in ordinary life trigger our habitual negative concepts and emotions. That causes us to suffer, which can motivate us to change those habits. If we hadn’t triggered our suffering, we would not have noticed the existence of our negative concept or emotion.

But doesn’t that mean a three year retreat is counter-productive? If I sit by myself in a cave for three years I won’t interact with anyone and trigger any new suffering. “What do you think, Nagendra?”

A long pause, then: “When there is no temptation there is no examination.”

“Is that original? It must be a quote!”

“Oh, it’s original…” He was just articulating his opinion. Pretty amazing.

In any case, it’s what I always thought. But then Nagendra went on to say his more considered opinion. What would happen in long solitude is thoughts would come from one’s past experiences. You might recall a particularly fine meal in a restaurant. You would think about going for such a meal again but it would be impossible.

Or you might think only about your Buddhist practice. In that case you might imagine the results you hope your retreat will bring, or fear that it will not.

The lama who taught the classes I just took mentioned the most powerful teaching he ever received . He asked his teacher what he gained from twelve years of solitary retreat. He replied: “Oh I wasted all that time in hope and fear about the results I might get.”

So I see how I might benefit from a three year retreat — but I still won’t be doing one

After that our conversation degenerated into more examples of what is wrong in Nepal now and the deep rooted origins. Every so often, to vary my response, I would say “Bullshit!”

At last Nagendra said: “I like this concept, bullshit. It gives us the power to ignore what we label that way.”

I was very happy. I had originated the Bullshit Empowerment.

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