Avalanche

Ball bearings pouring down a slope
An incline of looping treads
As regular as a rain stick
Yet none heralds rain
Or wood, or forest
Simply implacable steel
Unyielding and inexorable
However slow they fall
Bearing down insidiously
No cycle or renewal
No seeds to spring forth
As they come to rest
Solely stasis
A sterile heap
Burying all life entire
Still.

A Time Management Strategy

Near the start of each week, set six strong intentions of what you would like to do some of to please yourself during the following week:

1 fun thing,
2 suggestions, &
3 orders.

If you hit all six by the end, that's a perfect week!

P.S. Feel free to include things you've already done some of during that week when you do this. :-)

Music Practice Session in the Park

Inspired by http://walkingmonk.blogspot.com

On the First International Day of Yoga: Connect

For the first International Day of Yoga, here's a 3 1/2 minute film, How to Find Your Organic Intelligence, of Charles Eisenstein, with a cameo by yoga. Charles says in the film: "If you do not follow that compass, if you do not listen to that experience, that's shown you the possibility of a more beautiful world, if you don't follow it, you'll kind of half-heartedly go along with the program. But, you'll rebel."

Charles wrote a Letter to my Younger Self to accompany this film.


For me this letter resonates with the words of Srila Bhakti Rakshak Sridhar Dev Goswami Maharaj. The ringing of this resonance fills me with hope.

Here are some passages from Charles Eisenstein's (CE) "Letter to my Younger Self" interspersed with words from Srila Bhakti Rakshak Sridhar Dev Goswami Maharaj (Srila Sridhar Maharaj: SSM).

CE:
"Dear self. Your secret, lonely knowledge is true. Despite all you have been told, the world that has been offered to you as normal is anything but normal.  It is a pale semblance of the intimacy, connection, authenticity, community, joy and grief that lie just beneath the surface of society's habits and routines."

SSM:
"At present, we are quarreling in a foreign land for fictitious gain."

CE:
"Dear self: You have a magnificent contribution to make to the more beautiful world your heart knows is possible. It may not make you famous, but you have an important gift, an indispensable gift, and it demands you to apply it to something you care about. Unless you do, you will feel like you aren't really living your life. You will live the life someone pays you to live, caring about things you are paid to care about. You can make a different choice."

SSM: 
"You were born in nectar. You were born to taste nectar. You must not allow yourself to be satisfied by anything but nectar. Awake! Arise! Search for that nectar."

CE:
"Dear self: You carry a deep yearning to contribute to the healing of the world and fulfillment of its possibilities. This is your deepest desire, and if you abandon it you will feel like a ghost inhabiting the mere shell of a life.  Instead, trust that desire and follow it toward whatever service it calls you to, however small and insignificant it might seem."

SSM:
"A sweet structure begins from the point when service is added to consciousness. Service can construct a beautiful capital, a beautiful country.  It is there, and you have only to feel it, enter, and take up your appointed service. You will think, 'This is my home! This appointment feels very friendly to me. Now I have come home.'"

CE:
"Dear self: The most reliable guide to choice is to follow whatever makes you feel happy and excited to get out of bed in the morning. Life is not supposed to be a grim slog of discipline and sacrifice. You practiced for such a life in school, tearing yourself out of bed for days of tedium, bribed with trivial rewards called grades, intimidated by artificial consequences, proceeding through a curriculum designed by faraway authorities, asking permission to use the toilet. It is time to undo those habits. Let your compass instead be joy, love, and whatever makes you feel alive."

SSM:
"We can feel within our heart whether we are gainers or losers. That tasting machine is within us."

CE:
"Dear self: At a certain moment it will become necessary for you to go on a journey. It isn't to escape forever. It is to find yourself outside of whomever your conditioning trained you to be. You must put yourself in a situation where you don't know who you are anymore. This is called an initiation. Who you were becomes inoperative; then, who you will be can emerge."

SSM:
"The real substance is within, just as fruit is covered by its skin. What we experience at present is the cover, the skin, and we are making much of that, ignoring the very substance which the cover is protecting."

CE:
"Dear self: Powerful forces will attempt to make you conform to society's normality. These will take the form of social pressure, parental pressure, and very likely, economic pressure. When you encounter them, please understand that they are giving you the opportunity to define yourself. When push comes to shove, who are you?"

SSM:
"That dedication is just the opposite of exploitation. In the mundane plane every unit wants to exploit the environment, but in the plane of dedication, every unit wants to serve the environment; and not only the environment, but the real key to the life of that plane is to serve the Centre. We are living in an organic whole, so every point must be true to the organic Centre."

CE:
"Dear self: On this path, you are sure to get lost. But you are held, watched, and guided by a vast organic intelligence. It will become visible when things fall apart - as surely they must, in the transition between worlds. You will stumble, only to find overlooked treasure beneath your feet. You'll despair of finding the answer - and then the answer will find you. Breakdown clears the space for synchronicity, for help unimagined and unearned."

SSM:
"So you must not be a miser. You are to fully die as you are at present. You are to put your false self into the fire and allow the alloy to be eliminated.  The pure gold will then manifest with its dazzling colour....those alloyed things – ...so many other false aspirations – will be reduced to ashes by the fire of dedication. So die in order to live in the real world."

CE:
"Dear self: None of this advice can be sustainably implemented by a heroic effort on your part. You need help. Seek out other people who reinforce your perception that a more beautiful world is possible, and that life's first priority is not security, but rather to give of your gifts, to play, to love and be loved, to learn, to explore. When those people (your tribe) are in crisis, you can hold them in the knowing of what you know. And they can do the same for you. No one can do this alone."

SSM:
"What is home? It is where we find that we are in the midst of our well-wishers. If we do not care for our own benefit, then there are so many who will take care of us – in fact the whole environment will take care of us – and that is home."

SSM:
"The underlying principle of love is sacrifice, but sacrifice for whom? And who is the beneficiary? Love is the beneficiary. Everyone should contribute to the center, but no one should draw energy from there. 'Die to live.' With this spirit we should combine and work for real love and beauty.

"And beauty will be victorious in the world. Love will be victorious in the world."

"Cui bono", "Follow the money", and "Follow the status"

"Cui bono" is a Latin phrase meaning "Who benefits?"  Its use usually indicates that everything may not be as it seems.  It suggests we dig deeper in two ways:
1) The answer to who benefits may not be immediately obvious.  It may take at least some cogitation, and perhaps some investigation, to uncover this.
2) If a person or entity benefits from some turn of events, they may be playing a role in pushing events to take that turn to their advantage, even though it may not be immediately obvious how.

A related phrase is "Follow the money".  It too suggests we dig deeper in a couple of ways:
1) It can be a special case of "who benefits?"  Specifically, who financially benefits?
2) If a person or entity has spent money, they must have received something in return which they perceive to be of greater value to themselves.  What is that?

Another currency of human motivation is status.  Thus, in some situations it would be equally or more useful to say: "Follow the status" for two reasons:
1) Status is also a universal currency of human motivation and is pertinent in situations where, for whatever reason, money is not in question (or at least doesn't seem to be).
2) Money and resources may flow from status.

On the other hand, money has the useful property that its exchanges are objectively knowable and traceable in principle.  Even an exchange of cash is something a fly on the wall could see if it were there.

One might think that status exists in the eyes of other people and should also be observable.  However, the person or entity may only care about status within a select circle of people.  It would take some effort for an outsider to understand what is the relevant circle and what confers status within it.  In the extreme case, status may only exist in one person's own mind.  Only by keen observation and perhaps by winning the trust of that person can another person find out the role of status here.

Last week I saw Steve Pinker speak at the Long Now Foundation about The Decline in Violence, summarizing his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Gathering a lot of data from many sources, he demonstrated that on average, violence has declined over the long term, despite what one might think by watching the news.  He posited that one of the reasons was the greater availability of fiction, history, and journalism, enabling people to empathize with and understand others.  This led Saheli Datta  to muse earlier this week on the role of fiction in developing critical thinking.  Above I tried to express in principle some of the most useful lessons from fiction, history, and journalism.  As in most cases, going through examples is nearly essential to being able to apply the theory; fiction, history, and journalism supply such examples in abundance.

Cross-posted on Facebook

My Personal Thank You To Facebook

To all of my friends who have worked, are working, and will continue to work to build Facebook:

My mother hesitated for a long time before joining Facebook. When she did, though, several months ago, she jumped in with both feet and took to it like a duck to water.

Over the last several years, my mother's chronic ill health and low energy had left her frequently housebound. Even speaking on the phone would tire her. Thus she was growing increasingly isolated.

Joining Facebook provided her the wonderful opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones from across the globe. In the last months of her life, her loving and humorous exchanges with them were a great source of joy and happiness to her, and inspired her with renewed energy and enthusiasm for projects old and new. She became a wholehearted fan of Facebook. We feel greatly blessed that thanks to Facebook, these friends were all there for her.

When my mother passed away late last month, Facebook provided both a repository of her most recent activities, and a medium through which a flood of loving affection from friends and well-wishers around the world came, to honor her and to soothe and comfort us.

Expressing gratitude was one of my mother's strongly held values. I would like to express sincere and heartfelt gratitude to all of you, on her behalf as well as our own.

Thank you very much, and hearty congratulations to you all!

Force Is More Than Violence

Inspired by discussions with Victor Ganata and others on FriendFeed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, I decided to post this bit I had written in a private mailing list a year and a half ago.

A lot of argument arises because of confusing voluntariness with actual freedom. This subtle distinction was very cogently elucidated by Serena Olsaretti in the argument summarized here. I learned of this argument from David Singh Grewal's Network Power (that's an affiliate link).


Libertarians object to the majority having power over the minority. Well, a majority already has power over a minority, by virtue of its numbers, completely regardless of the form of government or lack thereof. What is the libertarian solution to lynch mobs? In every country where the government has failed, warlords have arisen, through their own physical and mental strength and usually aided by being a member of the ethnic majority in that locale.

Power exists whether it is wielded by a government, a corporation, a group or an individual. Whoever has power over me restricts my freedom, i.e., my available set of choices about how to live my life. It is simply impossible to eliminate inequalities of power. They can only be managed dynamically through a system of checks and balances—which is what our system of government is meant to do.

Libertarians make much of the government monopoly on violence. But violence is not the only form of coercion. Imagine a spaceship where I live with Jack and Jim. Jack is physically stronger than me and willing to kill me if I don't do what he wants. Jim completely controls access to the ship's food supply and is willing to withhold it if I don't do what he wants. As far as I'm concerned, Jack and Jim each have power over me and can each coerce me. The fact that Jack may kill me quickly and Jim may kill me slowly doesn't change the fact that in the presence of either of them, I am not totally free. Perhaps Jack is also stronger than Jim, so Jack is the "government" of this little system. For me it doesn't make any difference: labeling one particular entity as the "government" doesn't entail anything special about the power wielded by that entity over me.

As a more down-to-earth and salient example, I may not be able to leave a job because it is my sole source of health insurance. Jobs that pay by time periods essentially restrict the employee's freedom: they require a certain level of obedience to the supervisor within working hours. There are many people stuck in jobs they hate specifically because of health insurance.

The choice to undergo bodily harm due to lack of medical care is not any more acceptable than the choice to undergo bodily harm while being arrested or imprisoned. Each can be seen as a voluntary choice, but the person who has only such unacceptable choices available is not free. This is the distinction between voluntarism and actual freedom to which I alluded at the start. As a liberal, I strive to maximize people's actual freedom--a constrained maximization problem, given the existence of other people. To me this is much more important than maximizing their freedom from government.