Last word, for now, on racism

Because I refuse to address this blog to one group or another, any answers I give concerning racism MUST apply to both the problems in the black and white communities.  They must be generative, not accusatory.  Here goes:

1) Racism is an outgrowth of natural human protective tendencies dealing with “outgroups” and the perceived scarcity of resources.
2) This tends to operate at the level of unconscious competence.  You are VERY unlikely to be able to admit to your own level of racism unless you have done deep introspection indeed.
3) These tendencies tend to decrease with positive interactions with the other group—including positive media images.
4) Humans tend to hide their pain, fear and guilt, either “stuffing” it in their psyche (obesity, financial or relationship dysfunction) or projecting it onto the “outgroup” (alcoholics screaming about drug addiction.)  “They” are the problem.  Never “us.”  Never “we.”
5) Historical factors exacerbate the entire problem.
6) The answer is honesty, personal responsibility, and love. 
a) Be honest about the fact that we all have these tendencies. The group with the power simply has the ability to turn their tendencies into law and devastating financial advantage. 
b) Personal responsibility says that you have to rise to your own highest level as a human being, regardless of your obstacles.  The more pressure you are under, the more you must struggle against the natural human tendency to blame others or wait for someone to rescue you.  Unless you are balanced in body, mind, and spirit, don’t blame others for the same flaws you have failed to overcome in yourself.
c) Love and fear compete for the same space in your heart.  You have a choice: either build a shell, or a spine.  Be a loving warrior: prepared to defend your family, but also to protect and nurture a stranger’s child.  Be strong, and compassionate.  By learning to forgive ourselves, we gain the strength to forgive and accept others.

Madea's Family Reunion (2006)

MADEA’S FAMILY REUNION (2006)

If you go to rottentomatoes.com, you’ll see a cross-section of reviews from various print and internet media.  Almost universally, they express something close to contempt for this film written, directed by, produced and starring (in three roles) Tyler Perry.  They must be baffled, disgusted and slightly condescending that it earned thirty million dollars in its first weekend.

This film, which is crude, overwrought, sometimes underwritten, often broadly performed, and made on a TV-movie budget, has plenty to raise the eyebrows.  Melodrama abounds.  Family secrets crawl out from under every overturned rock.  Conflicts are resolved with violence.  Some characters (I am told) are too bad to be true, and others too good.  Matriarchs pontificate and speechify at the drop of a hat, preaching to the audience in a way that would embarrass Spike Lee.  Tyler Perry’s cross-dressing makeup is embarrassingly bad, and simply doesn’t work in screen-filling close-up.
And yet, in its own simple way, it is one of the best, and most courageous, heartfelt, heartbreaking, intelligent, passionate films to ever succeed in Hollywood.

To understand my laugh-out-loud, lump-in-the-throat reaction to this film, you might have to step back to last Thursday, when I attended the premiere of a film called THE SEAT FILLER, starring Duane Martin and Kelly Rowland.  This black romantic comedy was released (or "presented") by The Momentum Experience, the brainchild of producers Nia Hill and D'Angela Steed.  Presented in Los Angeles at the historic El Capitan Theatre, it was more than a movie, it was a multimedia event: We were graced with black-and-white clips of black produced and released films from the past, a live band, tap-dancing, ballet, and the terrific on-stage narration of Blair Underwood (also a star of MADEA).
    During that narration, we were reminded that once upon a time there was something called "The Chitlin’ Circuit," where films made by and for blacks played to enthusiastic crowds. Quoting Ossie Davis, the narration admitted that, yes, they were often crude, and broad, and technologically inept--but the audiences loved them because there, black people saw themselves, not as filtered through white sensibilities, but as lovers, heroes, villains, fools, businessmen, parents--the entire spectrum of life.  The same spectrum of life white folks got every day, for the first time seen through a black lens.

As the methods of distribution consolidated, the Chitlin Circuit died.  Now, there is nothing black that reaches the public without the approval of some white male--and I’m afraid of the implications of that.  I’ve complained in this blog since its inception that black male sexuality is anathema to America.  That Denzel, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Ving Rhames, Samuel Jackson all are loved by America until they drop trou. And then, the box office plummets.  There are other factors too, of course, but this one can be pointed out and proven mathematically--and it is just as demonstrable that black or Asian women can have sex scenes in movies any time they want, but only with white men.  Or else white men won’t go to see it. And there we are, as Multinational corporations buy up more and more of the organs of production and distribution, whose aesthetic do you expect to see expressed?  And don’t blame Hollywood: from time to time they will try to break out of the box, but the audience simply isn’t there.
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The sexual issue is just a marker--don’t think that that’s my real concern.  The concern is the fantastic damage done to black families during 300 years of slavery, damage about which white America remains in an almost complete state of denial. And I can’t blame them: If I were on a winning streak in Vegas, I really wouldn’t want someone to point out that my dice were loaded.  No, I’d want to believe it was my luck, or my superior qualities as a player.  If I had to grasp the  fact that much of my advantage was at the expense of innocent people, well, I might have to do something about it.  And human beings, black or white, really aren’t that fair-minded.
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The destruction done to black families, as I’ve said before, was simply phenomenal.  With the males unable to protect their own females or hold their heads up, women took the lead in the black community in a way that is simply not organic to most human experience.  Statistics suggest that between 15-25% of all American women will be, or have been, the victim of rape or attempted rape.  And this is when the act is illegal, and women are considered valued members of society.  To even TRY to suggest that these numbers would not soar in an environment in which black women could not resist, there was no legal punishment, black men were powerless to protect them, and all food and privilege was controlled by whites, is absurd.  Fifty percent of slave women?  Seventy percent?  And in the decades following slavery, the damage done to the black family by turning the power-structure upside down can be matched by fascinatingly similar damage among any colonized peoples, anywhere in the world.

Look into the health of the family structures among the Maori, the Native Americans, the Irish (during British occupation), South African blacks, or the Chinese during British occupation.  Note the alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic abuse, and general dysfunctionality. During the Watts Riots, I remember white commentators saying: "Why are they destroying their own community?"  Because rage is a mask over fear, and rage wants to destroy.  And if they journeyed outside their own community to destroy what they WANTED to destroy, they would be killed.  So you destroy what is in front of you.  You kill the thing you love.

The twisted female energy, the stifled male energy, turns in upon itself.  You can find the truth of that in studies of any colonized people.  And when those people are stripped of their names, religion, culture, language--and left only with the dominating mythology that they are worthless and worthy of the slavery imposed upon them, followed by the Jim Crow imposed upon them, followed by the segregation imposed upon them--they would have to be superbeings not to be sick in spirit.
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And that is one reality so rarely addressed: That there is a deep sickness.  The other reality, even more infrequently addressed: In spite of that damage, there is love, and joy, and triumph, and success, and healthy sexual union.  This continuum, and the reality that whites will NEVER be able to compensate for what was done--that the healing of the black family MUST come from within--is what Tyler Perry has tapped into. 
Perry honors the black Matriarch, but presents her as a blend of male and female characteristics by playing her in drag. Like Shakespeare, he uses farce, because such broad strokes appeal to his core audience: working-class blacks who, in another day, would have been Chitlin Circuit customers. Denied access to the Hollywood megabucks, the training one gets coming up in the Hollywood system apprenticing under working directors--most of whom are white males--his directing is crude at times.

And he uses that broad-stroke humor, those "clichéd" relationships. (It’s not a cliché if you haven’t seen it applied to your group.  BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN would be utterly cliché if the events took place between a man and a woman.  But America has grasped that the same images of love and hope and need and renunciation, viewed through the lens of a group--male homosexuals--who have never had their internal reality, their inwardness, presented honestly on film before--well, everything old is new again.)  And so it is true of blacks in cinema. “Reunion” distributor Lionsgate deserves its reward for rolling the dice and believing in Tyler Perry's vision.

The reality of our pain and hopes and needs has so rarely been depicted on film.  The life of slaves--so central to understand the current status of black America--has been almost completely washed from cinematic history, despite the vast number of films about the Civil War.  Slavery didn’t exist.  What are you black folks complaining about..?

In MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION, multiple storylines concerning the choices women make are interwoven: a rebellious foster daughter, a woman unable to accept the love of a good man, a woman trapped in an abusive relationship, a mother who cannot admit the degree to which her OWN mother’s actions warped her relationships with her daughters.  These threads come together at the titular family gathering, and blossom at a wedding at the end.  In the process, there is great posturing and shouting and hallelujah-ing.

And if you understand the history, if you grasp the amount of pain locked into the black social genetic strand, it is astoundingly cathartic. The truth, that special pain, and a call for responsibility, communication and compassion, all on-screen distributed by a major white studio on white theater screens.  It was US, in all our human warts. With all of the imperfections that making such a film, without the assistance of the countless white artisans who assist each other when Hollywood films are made.  (I remember hearing about how the art director for a "mere" James Bond movie had called Stanley Kubrick, who snuck into the studio to show him how to properly light an internal set!  THAT is the level of resource denied a Tyler Perry.)

This man, coming outside the studio system as he did, dealing with issues that have been ignored for 400 years, showing tissues of black society from top to bottom, appealing to a disenfranchised black audience that Hollywood has fed an endless stream of polished but soulless pap--that Tyler Perry has reached this audience is only a surprise in retrospect. That his audience has broadened beyond this core is a miracle.  That white male critics would put their noses in the air is utterly predictable.

What now?  Hopefully, more narrowly-aimed films of steadily increasing polish.  Do we have our Orson Welles?  What a thought.  Considering how Welles pouted and complained that Hollywood didn’t support him as he thought it should, I’d say that Welles would have been utterly destroyed by the experience of being black.  No, Tyler Perry is no Orson Welles.  But Welles was no Tyler Perry, either.

Octavia

During the 80’s, we lived within walking distance of each other, and often got together for dinner.  I sensed a deep loneliness in Octavia, but also humor, vast intelligence, and a level of investment in her craft that was simply phenomenal.  For years Samuel Delaney, Octavia and I were the only black SF writers.  “Chip” Delaney hasn’t been in the field for years.  Octavia continued to soar.  Other black writers entered the field…almost all of them fantasists, not SF writers.  Why?  I could only offer theories. Now, Octavia is gone, and I feel a sense of loss so incredibly deep that I have no words. 

What does it take to be a writer of such depth and courage?  I say, the capacity to dig into your own wounds, to fold yourself, concentrate yourself so purely into the work that your own life is eclipsed in comparison.  To live in the penumbra of your own work.  There are costs to this…costs that I encourage my students to avoid.  But those who suggest that great artists must suffer have valid arguments to present.  Dying at 58, in my mind, is just too young.  There was so much more for her to do.  And yet, she had done so much already…

What is right?  Ultimately, we have to live by our own standards, according to our own values.  I can only hope that at the end of the day, in the depths of her dying heart, Octavia felt that this is what she had done.  I can pray that that is true.

She was one of the best.  Thank God that the world recognized it while she was could still hear the applause.

The Authentic Journey

The Authentic Journey

There are two worlds: that of our internal experience, and that of our external, sensory experience.  And in many ways, all communication, political activism, creative work, sales and commerce is an attempt to reconcile the two.

What is sales, but a communication of enthusiasm between one person and another?  What is writing or acting but the attempt to create an emotional change in the viewer or reader, by channeling our own experience and imagination?  What is any relationship other than a daily attempt to communicate our needs, and to fulfill the needs  of others?  What, in fact, is any religion other than an attempt to grow in the image of the divine?

This very human struggle, which manifests in so many different fashions, both mundane and sacred, can be impossibly complex—or devastatingly simple.
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If we are to be successful salesmen, artists, leaders, teachers, or simply human beings, we must have a   world view. But we must also understand the way we gather information, and our method to determine if our ideas are accurate.   How can we address our customers’ needs if we don’t really understand human strength and frailty? How can a novelist create realistic characters if he indulges in massive self-deception? How can a parent or teacher   raise a child to maturity without actually maturing herself?

How, in other words, can we be certain that we actually know what we think we know?

Consider the possibility that we can increase the accuracy of our perceptions by examining our interactions with the three major aspects of our own lives: our physical vitality,  our career/contribution,  and our relationships—whether to a single individual or a vibrant Tribe.


1) Body. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose the spark of physical joy.  We lose the simple pleasure of play, and settle for “fitness” at best, and the negative spiral of obesity, fatigue, and disease at worst.  To reclaim our aliveness we must remember   what we have forgotten, and begin the process of re-awakening.  We must learn once again to stretch fully, to sweat joyously, to learn new dance steps, to challenge our limits, to find delicious the body we see in the mirror.  To begin this process is to open our eyes to the possibility we felt as children.  A good goal?  Doubling your physical energy.

2) Career.   Our money flow is based upon many things, including the degree of service we provide for our communities, the self-respect that motivates us to demand what we are worth, and the intelligence and discipline with which we manage our finances. Creativity, empathy, determination, energy, honesty, risk-taking…all of these things factor in. One can either make more money, or develop the ability to find greater satisfaction within the current financial level. But without the ability to find peace and satisfaction here, much of the joy of life will elude you.  A good goal?  Sufficient resources and financial discipline to support yourself and two others.


3)Relationships. Some  crave monogamous love, others wish the comfort of a community of like-minded individuals.  Still others wish simply to be at peace with their inner world, to find the sense of wholeness available only to those who walk a sacred path.  Whatever  your bliss, it must begin with the connection between your deepest self, and the way you live your life.  However you conceptualize your “male” and “female” aspects, they must be balanced.  However you conceptualize your “child,” “adult,” and “elder” aspects, they must be in balance as well. The interplay between these five aspects determines a gigantic amount of  our emotional health.  A good goal?  The ability to face yourself in the mirror and say “I love you” with all your heart—and mean it.

There is an entire creative writing theory (“Dramatica”) that states that stories are merely conversations between the different aspects of a single personality.  There is a healing hypnotic modality (the “Parts Party”) that asks us to divide our psyche into different distinct personalities, and then have them talk to each other.  The possibility of effective advertising or sales only exists when we can actually understand the drives and needs of people other than  our gender, cultural or age group.  And relationships, of whatever intimacy level, are only possible if we can see through the masks of gender or individuality to see the universal truths of human beauty, spirit, and need.


Chose your goals in balance (one in each of the three arenas: physical vitality, career/contribution, and relationship/Tribe)  and as you progress toward them, you’ll learn things about yourself, and your life, that cannot be put into words.   And to get this effect they MUST be in balance:   your demons will hide in the corner illuminated least frequently. 

At the center of this triangle is the invisible factor: your actual being. Failure upon initial effort is an absolutely unavoidable part of the process of growth.  Note how you deal with failure, and listen to the internal demons as they whisper defeat.   It is in watching this “being” interact with these different aspects: failure and success, depression and exaltation,  that you begin to understand who you really are.  This is the beginning of mastery--the acceptance of life as it is, and the seeking of appropriately excellent performance at every moment of your life. When driving, drive. When reading, read. When exercising, exercise. When fighting, fight. When selling, sell.  When loving, love. When sleeping, sleep. Children know this. Adults forget it. It is the heart of   every evolved discipline in   history.

There are no easy answers. But there is greater and lesser clarity, greater and lesser balance. There is joy, and surrender to the process of work. There is chopping wood, and carrying water, knowing that a hot bath awaits at the end of the day.

Octavia Obituary

The following fine obituary ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  All copyrights remain the property of that publication.
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Octavia Butler, 1947-2006: Sci-fi writer a gifted pioneer in white, male domain
By JOHN MARSHALL



P-I BOOK CRITIC
Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs, yet Octavia Butler rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the country's leading writers - a female African American pioneer in the white, male domain of science fiction.
Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home in Lake Forest Park. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment.  
 Joshua Trujillo / P-I
 Octavia Butler was one of the Northwest's most prominent science fiction writers.

She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.
"People may call these 'genius grants,' " Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, "but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I'm no genius."
Butler's most popular work is "Kindred," a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler's solitary life.
"Kindred" was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South. Butler stuck to her social justice vision - "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you" - and finally found a publisher who paid her a $5,000 advance for "Kindred."
"I was living on my writing," Butler said, "and you could live on $5,000 back then. You could live, but not well. I got along by buying food I didn't really like but was nourishing: beans, potatoes. A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."
Steven Barnes, another African American writer, knew Butler during her early writing days in Southern California and later in the Washington when he and his writer wife, Tananarive Due, lived for a time in Longview before returning to Los Angeles. Barnes saw Butler's confidence grow along with her reputation.
"Octavia was one of the purest writers I know," Barnes recalled Sunday. "She put everything she had into her work - she was extraordinarily committed to the craft. Yet, despite her shyness, she was also an open, generous and humane human being. I miss her so much already."

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Due added, "It is a cliche to say that she was too good a soul, but it's true. What she really conveyed in her writing was the deep pain she felt about the injustices around her. All of it was a metaphor for war, poverty, power struggles and discrimination. All of that hurt her very deeply, but her gift was that she could use words for the pain and make the world better."

Due believed that Butler came to feel deeply at home in the Northwest after she relocated here with 300 boxes of books. The anonymity of her life in Seattle suited both her artistic devotion and temperament ("I always felt a deep loneliness in her," Barnes said). But Butler did become a frequent participant in readings and writers' conferences, especially Clarion West, which played a crucial role in her own start. She also served on the advisory board of Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.
A few friends did get to see the relaxed Butler away from her infrequent moments in the limelight, including Leslie Howle, who took her to see the recent version of "King Kong." Howle describes the writer as "one of the most fun people to be around, with an acerbic sense of humor and a keen observer of human nature."
Butler was a confirmed non-driver who would chat with other bus passengers or with neighbors who gave her rides when she trudged home with bags of groceries, as neighbor Terry Morgan did.
"The first time I picked her up, she took me into her house and autographed a copy of one of her books," Morgan said. "That was a great 'thank you,' especially since I am an African American and we felt a common bond. But it was also obvious to me that writing was her life."
The MacArthur grant brought increasing visibility to Butler and allowed her to buy her first house, where she tended to her ailing mother until her death. (Butler's survivors are two elderly aunts and many cousins in Southern California.)
But the MacArthur grant also brought daunting pressure. Three years later, Butler published "Parable of Talents," winner of one of her two Nebula Awards in science fiction. Then years passed without another new novel, as projects in Seattle "petered out." Characters and ideas went nowhere and her blood pressure medication left her drowsy and depressed.
The frustrated artist - who first turned to writing at 12 after the sci-fi movie, "Devil Girl from Mars," convinced her that she could write something better - battled worries that "maybe I cannot write anymore."
But at long last, an unlikely vampire novel rekindled her creative fires and brought a burgeoning joy to her craft.
"I can't say I've had much fun in the last few years, what with my version of writer's block," a relieved Butler recalled in 2004. "Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun. But now the well is filling up again with this vampire novel."
Butler's death means that "Fledgling," published last fall to enthusiastic praise, will likely stand as her final novel, to the great disappointment to Butler's many fans and friends who expected more work.
"The only consolation in losing Octavia so soon," stressed Due, "is that she must have known her place in history."

More headlines and info from Lake Forest Park. John Marshall can be reached at 206-448-8170 or johnmarshall@seattlepi.com.

Octavia Butler died Saturday

I just got this note
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Yesterday Octavia Butler fell outside her house during what neighbors thought was a stroke. A neighbor kid found her outside her house. They rushed her to the hospital, and found blood had pooled in her brain, they operated but she passed away today.
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For a time, Octavia and I lived within walking distance, and she would come to the house for dinner.  A lady of incredible intelligence and rather dark humor, she was also what I called "a REAL writer."  She put so much more of herself into her work than I ever have, or would be capable of. 
She was sweet, and kind, and generous, and brilliant.  And now she is gone.  Travel well, my friend.  Rest deeply.  I'll see you soon.

Writing and Philosophy

Writing and Philosophy

Clarifying your “reality map” is a way of saving energy
as well.  If you have no map, you drive around in
circles until you run out of gas.  No fun.  A philosophical
position on life is a theory of how the world works, or
people behave, or whatever—it is an heuristic, in
other words, that saves us time in decision making.
  Saving time and energy and confusion is one outcome
of such tools.  Coming up with great story ideas is another.

Let’s take a fine example: Ursula LeGuin’s classic story
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”  In this
three-page gem of a horror story, a perfect, glittering
society is described in radiant detail.  There is only one
fly in the ointment: down in the deepest dungeon
squats a disfigured child, smeared with its own feces,
screaming in terror and misery. If anyone helps the
child, the society will crumble.

Those who have studied philosophy will recognize her
critique of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarian philosophy, an
extension of Jermy Bentham’s “happiness calculus”
suggesting that “the greatest good for the greatest
number” is the best form of society.  Taken to its
extreme, you get Omelas.

And this is what a fine writer does.  Studying the
great thinkers of the ages, the writer exaggerates
or personifies their positions, lampoons or investigates,
asks us to assume positions and  question our
assumptions.  This is both art and craft in the service of mankind.

What do you believe?  Why do you believe it?  Under
what conditions would you think yourself right or
wrong?  Change your position?  Strengthen it?  Can
you create stories that represent each of these
questions?  Can you think of movies and books that
explore them? 

There is a lifetime of work in finding ways to dramatize
the great thoughts of history.  I can think of no
better way to spend my time and energy.

Lifewriting and Karl Marx

First, I’d like to thank those who commented on the Bush intelligence question.  I find it heartening that it was polite and measured, but also interesting that only one person thought our President was smarter than he…and he wasn’t a Bush supporter.  Either we have some extraordinary people reading this blog, or America is in worse trouble than I thought. 
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I’ve been eager to write this particular note for several days.  It has to do with the question I was asked last week about, according to Lifewriting “who has the right to propose political ideas” (that’s a paraphrase.)  I thought the best thing I could do was apply the Lifewriting theory to Karl Marx, and show why I would reject his concepts.  Boy, could I write an essay on this. Instead, I’ll try bullet points, and hope you’ll connect the dots.
1) Marx was born to an affluent family, studied for the law, and had a Phd in philosophy. 
2) He fled Germany for exile in London, and seems to have accepted voluntary poverty.  Such were the conditions of poverty in London that two of his four children died of poverty-related illnesses.
3) He claims to have based his theories on a perception of man’s instinctual self: the need for food, sex, and work.
4) He saw Capitalism as perverting natural human values, creating alienation and reducing people to objects.
5) He dreamed of a classless society, “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”
6) when it is pointed out that his dream seems to have failed, proponents of Marxism generally protest that “True Marxism has never been tried.”

Hmmm.  Well, let’s go down the list, and see how my reasoning works, Lifewriting-style.
1) A Phd in philosophy can be problematic in one sense: one has many theoretical maps of reality (Cosmology) which must be balanced with a means of establishing the accuracy of those maps.  The fact that you can defend them in the coffee-house is irrelevant.  THEY MUST BE GROUNDED IN REALITY, because logic proceeding from a flawed thesis produces a flawed result.  Garbage in, garbage out.  But what elegant garbage!  Have we any indication of whether he had such grounding…?
2) Voluntary acceptance of poverty.  His intelligence and degree certainly suggest that this man COULD have earned a decent living, but chose to dedicate himself to the political struggle. As with genteel artistic poverty, this is a perfectly fine option for an adult: BUT NOT IF YOU HAE CHILDREN.  Children are completely helpless and dependant.  If he placed the “needs of the struggle” above the needs of his children, then by Lifewriting definition he was completely dis-connected with a most basic human need: that to provide for one’s own progeny FIRST.  Such a disconnection implies a major warp in the reality map.  In the chakra system, you proceed upwards from survival.  What he was doing would be considered progressing DOWNWARD from an intellectual concept, “awakening his Kundalini backwards,” an approach fraught with peril.
3) His claims of basing his theories on basic human needs are therefore highly suspect: he himself was not in touch with his own.  How can a man so dissociated in his personal life as to let helpless children die so that he can “serve the people” be expected to formulate a theory that can actually provide safety and security organically for millions?  My answer?  He cannot. There is a serious, basic flaw in his perceptions.
4) Capitalism may well reduce people to objects, but it is an economic theory, and from the position of economics, people are less important than the things they produce.  This is neither good nor bad.  From the perspective of   anatomy, the human soul is less important than the position of organs in the body.  This doesn’t mean that a doctor doesn’t believe in the soul, just that when he puts his “anatomist” hat on, he’s not thinking about spirituality.  And when an economist puts either his “Capitalist” or “communist” hat on, he’s looking at the flow of goods and services—not the personalities, needs and individuality of the people within the system.  That is separate from the sense of caring.  The real question is whether Communism cares MORE about people than Capitalism.  What?  Both are abstractions, and can care about nothing.  Well, then: does a Communist care more about people than a Capitalist?  On the surface, one might say yes…until you look a little closer, and realize that the Father of Capitalism was disconnected from the screams of his own children.  I would posit that Capitalism seems to work better because it is more in alignment with human nature as it is in the world: spiritual only after basic needs have been met.  Until then, we care more about our own lives, and the lives of our families, than we do the welfare of strangers.  Unless you are Karl Marx.
5) “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”  Right.  And who exactly decides this?  Every child believes that he or she needs everything in sight.  It is only upon maturation that the ability to share evolves.  Parents must teach children to share, by giving them both love and discipline.  And excuse me, but in this “egalitarian” society Marx envisioned, who exactly was going to take the parent role..?
Of course, if he’d really connected with his children, he might have noticed this…
6) “True Marxism has never been tried.”  Neither has true Capitalism, or true Democracy, or true ANY OTHER KIND OF POLITICAL/ECONOMIC SYSTEM.  They have all been modified.  Always.  Why? Because the laboratory of human thought is far more pristine than the messy world of actual human affairs.  “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”  No theoretical model for human psychology, politics or economics can survive contact with the actual world.  They are ONLY MODELS, not the actual thing.  All of them.  There is ALWAYS a difference between the menu and the meal.  The real question is: what model of human society best survives contact with the reality of human existence?

You know, I sometimes suspect that pure communism could work in a society where everyone knows one another by sight (a small tribal group, or a city-state).  Or in a society where everyone has evolved spiritually (a nunnery or monastery). But an entire society?  If evolved to spirit, yes.  But the chakras suggest that we have to progress from the more basic needs first, that we cannot leap ahead.  The further ahead we try to leap, the more we need an authoritarian Parental figure to make decisions, tell us to play nice…and tell us what our needs and capacities are.

Sorry to say it, but Capitalism seems far more in alignment with human needs and motivations than Communism.  And it survives modifications better.  Add a bit of a Socialist safety-net (welfare, social Security, Medicare) and it really seems to work better than anything I know of.  Take those safety nets away, and we get a Darwinian nightmare. 
##
Maybe we’ll get to the point where a Communistic system could actually work (that sure seems the unspoken premise of the Star Trek universe!) But I won’t believe the opinion of anyone who lets his children die because he’s too busy writing manefestos.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Would a Conservative please tell me..?

You know, like everybody I have opinions about politics, but I've never claimed to any special insight.  My own politics would doubtless be thought shaded to the Left, but it varies depending on the topic.  I'm hitting threshold, though, on what feels to me like the most incompetant administration of my lifetime.  People blamed Bush I for not finishing off Saddam.  May we now state with confidence that we can see WHY he, quite intelligently, understood that this wasn't a good idea?  May we go down the list of problems that this current administration has (or seems to me to have)?  I can understand someone saying "Bush is an average president beset with extraordinary problems.  Any other President would have been equally overwhelmed."  That, at least, strikes me as a reasonable response.  But I've actually been hearing people claiming that Bush is extraordinarily wise, great, etc., which strikes me as pure b.s., and I'd love to hear thoughts.  But first, a list of what SEEM to be fairly telling problems.
1) Losing more American civilians than any president in the last 50 years (or more?)
2) Specifically, the disaster of 9-11 and
3) Katrina.
4) The (apparently) botched aftermath of Katrina
5) The biggest national debt in history, following a gigantic surplus left by Clinton. 
6) Borrowing more money than every other President combined.
7) America's first pre-emptive war based on
8) Completely shoddy intel.
9) Outing of a covert CIA agent by someone within his administration.
10) Mishandling the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, so that the country seems poised on the brink of civil war.
11)  Outsourcing port security to a company owned by a country with FAR closer ties to Al Queda than Iraq ever had.
12) His own family with tight ties to the family of hte man who attacked us.
13) An obfuscation of the rather obvious fact that Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, held more likely culpability in 9-11.  I remember not a single official comment on these ties.
14) Bush taking more vacation time than any other President of my lifetime.
15) Bush as bumbling and stumbling in spontaneous discourse.
16) Tightly, tightly managed public appearances.
17) The demonizing of anyone who disagrees with the administration's policies
18) Support for torture.
19) Earlier claims that "America doesn't torture."
20) The utter disaster of Abu Gharib, and only a few low-level soldiers being punished
21)  An apparent stifling of scientific thought, from meaningful discussion of Global Warming to Stem Cell research to an implied support for "scientific" creationism.  And this at a time when America risks losing the global edge in technological innovation.
##
Christ...I could go on and on and on.  Before I ask my question, may I please ask my Conservative readers if this man truely represents you?  Is this the America you hold dear?
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And now my question.  Do you think that Bush is smarter than you are?  In my entire life, I have never looked at a President and said: "I'm smarter than this guy."  I don't think I'm smart enough for the job, folks.  And whether I've agreed with someone's policies or not, I've NEVER thought I was smarter than a sitting president.  Until now.  So I would really, really, like to hear from Conservativers who think that Bush is smarter than they are.  And if you don't, unless you have accomplished EXTRAORDINARY things in your life, doesn't that scare the living hell out of you?

this man needs to go.  Replace him with another Republican if you must.  But America seems at the lowest ebb it has seen in almost a century, and ultimately, the Buck stops with the man at the top.  I think he's a disaster.  Please--no automatic defenses.  THINK THIS THROUGH.  We are going to hand over this country, and this world, to our grandchildren.  This is no time for Partisanism.  So Liberals--please don't just jump on the bandwagon.  I'm not saying this man is evil, or stupid.  Just incompetant to lead America in these times.  I would love some serious discussion here, not just yelling at each other.  Thanks.

Hyper-Sensitive

The light came even more easily this morning.  I slept until my body felt cool and light.  Then I sat up in bed, and began to listen to my heartbeat until my breathing slowed and mind quieted.

I looked into my mental mirror, saw myself naked, and sharpened the contours of my body—I have a goal of getting down to 175 pounds by my birthday, March 1 (2 1/2 pounds to go!) When my body was right, I created a female doppleganger, and we sat facing each other, hands touching. 

There was a goodly amount of light running up and down our spines/chakras, and I concentrated it into a single small, happy glowing child.  Took that child into my body, and sank  it to my base chakra.  Light, warmth, vibration. My heartbeat, low in my body.

Slowly, I expanded the light up through the next three chakras.  Stopped at my heart.  The reasoning?  If I am properly rooted in the first four, the rest will take care of themselves.  I would rather trust instinct to their management.

But I did visualize a triangle at the 6th Chakra.  Rotated it to represent each of my three major goals, visualizing them, hearing the laughter, feeling the joy.  Let the light spread through my body.  Returned to my heartbeat.

Opened my eyes.
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As anyone reading this blog knows, I’m getting hyper-sensitive to certain negative media images.  Every time I see them, I flinch, and flinching bonds my energy.  New tactic.  Envision a white-water raft traveling down a narrow river.  The negative stimulus is a rock in my path.  When I feel the fear/anxiety flinch, I switch to Performance breathing (“Be Breathed”, the technique taught in the Five Minute Miracle) for five breaths.   If I have the time and space, I might do this while performing a djuru (softly), swinging a Clubbell, performing a set of FlowFit, or performing a kinetic chain designed to remove a tightness.  A yoga pose would work as well.  But just doing the breathing, even a single good breath, would work.
##
Why?  Here’s the theory, and I invite you guys to try it and report back: the negative stimulus creates a bracing, a flinch response that interrupts the balance of breath, motion, and structure, sending us into a negative emotional/physical spiral.  Pretty natural, right?  By using the negative stimulus to trigger a positive, re-integrative response (not “positive thinking” but an actual physiological pattern) you are creating a Pavlovian stimulus response loop between stress and proper use of the mind and body.  In other words, you are  developing the habit of responding to stress with excellence and balance.
##
Eventually, (so the theory goes) that given stimulus will no longer trigger a negative  response.  You will need to look deeper to find a good trigger.  The freed energy can be invested in growth and change, and will naturally contribute to personal evolution.
That’s the theory.  We’ll see, won’t we?

Reasons or results

Yesterday was a breakthrough day.  My meditation was clean and sharp, indicating that the emotional garbage I’ve been processing has finally turned into mulch.  I met with my friend “Mike” and things were both worse and better than I’d thought.  He’s actually been sleeping on the street.  But he seemed lucid and honest about his massive screw-ups, which he feels stemmed from a childhood filled with low-expectations.  His family was pretty much white trash, and he was on the low end of the totem pole. This led to some serious identity problems that have plagued him his entire life.  But he’s going into a shelter today, and I put him up in a hotel last night.  Thank God.
##
Afterwards, I went to my Silat class, where my teacher Cliff Stewart debriefed me on my weekend helping Stevan Plinck teach his seminar at Bud Thompson’s JKD school.  One of the subjects that came up was the fact that another student has had several family members die, and that he is experiencing some emotional trauma as a result.  Cliff encouraged us to be supportive, but also to remind him that it is vital to “get on with life.”

Get over it.  Get on with it.  Wow.  It was great to hear that in another context.  Class was great, and I woke up this morning even clearer, with my energy running just great after six hours of sleep. 
##
It isn’t that “Mike” doesn’t have genuine complaints.  Or that my co-student doesn’t have plenty to feel horrible about.  Or that I don’t have real, no-b.s. reasons to feel betrayed, hurt, threatened by the natural human responses to race difference that have damaged my people beyond meaningful calculation.  But the truth is, life doesn’t care.  We either get on with our lives, learn to deal with the hurt and obstacles, or the world will just roll over us and never know we were screaming “stop.”

I don’t know a single human being who doesn’t have perfectly understandable reasons for being a basket case. We can all find reasons to be dysfunctional, and since it’s all relative, being ignored by mommy in Beverly Hills can feel just as bad as being homeless in New Orleans—to you.  It is all relative.  People commit suicide over the “silliest” crap, and others stand tall in the midst of soul-rending chaos.  It’s up to us.  We either have reasons to fail, or we have the results we crave.  You can’t hold both in the same hand.

I needed last week.  And yes, I’ll be down again…this is an inevitable part of the process of growth.  The difference is that I understand this now, better than I ever have, and I let it roll over me.

Reasons, or results.
What’s your pleasure?

Darkness and Light

 

I want to thank those of you who offered your kind thoughts over the last week.  You’ve noticed that things have been a bit darker than usual.  There are always problematic elements in our lives, but I didn’t want you thinking that that stuff is swamping my existence.  Here is specifically what is going on:

In preparation for teaching the Path workshop in Portland in April (and another one in Los Angeles in June) I have to go as deeply into myself as I possibly can.  One way of conceptualizing this is that the levels in which I operate elegantly are like “clean” rooms, and those which still give me trouble (moving up Maslow’s Hierarchy) are like “dirty” rooms stacked above them.  I have to get into them and clean them out.

My morning meditations are like running the aquarium filter on the fishtank of my soul.  It can seem that there is endless silt and muck, but past experience tells me that if I continue to have faith, if I stay with my heartbeat, if I look for the light in my mirror-image, if I see the light extending out to my family and friends and the world, flexing and changing the light through different genders and stages of live…that the muck begins to dissolve.  That I catch glimpses of light, of clarity, of God, if you will.  And I come back from the experience (which may take weeks or months) expanded.  My world is larger, more beautiful. 

But it takes work.  I wanted to share some of that—we are so afraid that the depression and fear within us represent unsurpassable barriers.  No.  They can be dissolved with enough light, focus, commitment, faith, love.  But lord God, Billy Bob, it takes work.
##
So last week (and doubtless this week as well), I’ve been dealing with demons.  My friend “Mike” is in terrible trouble.  I must find the light within me, and also let him mirror my dark aspects, to see if there are things that I have neglected.  I am troubled about some contractual things in my career.  I must use that frustration to motivate me to find answers.  I am troubled by images in Hollywood—not merely because they are movie image, but because I believe those images are beloved by America, and that they reveal some of the remaining work to do in race relations—work that we would all like so very much to put behind us, to believe needs no longer be attended to.

This stuff threatens me because it affects my ability to work, because it influences the world my son and daughter will inherit. I must face it, so that they will be less damaged by it than I was.

But…if I cannot maintain my balance there, how can I ask White men not to flinch when they see black male faces?  This is an amygdalic response, something quite pre-conscious: the tendency for people of one race to have an AUTOMATIC fear and anxiety response when shown images of those of another race.  It has been proven again and again in psychological tests, and the bigger the visual gap, the stronger the response. And in an unhappy coincidence, Sub-Saharan blacks and Nordic whites don’t look much alike—a huge amygdalic response.  By an unhappier one, the ancestors of those blacks are outnumbered ten to one by the whites, and that tiny flash of fear and anxiety has a massive effect when multiplied across millions of judges, cops, landlords, employers, banker, jurors, and real estate agents. 

But if I cannot control my response to the perceived threat, I cannot expect whites to learn the same delicate trick.  So I expose myself, I take the hits, I experiment with maintaining balance rather than pretend I don’t feel it…and it ain’t easy.  And I write about it here, in case my own internal struggles would be of value to anyone out there.
##
This weekend my northwest Silat instructor, the wonderful Stevan Plinck, taught a workshop down here at the school of JKD maven Bud Thompson.  I’ve known Bud almost thirty years, and we talked martial arts, and the old days training under Danny Inosanto, and I helped Steve teach the workshop.  It was a wonderful experience, and reminded me how long the road is, and how far I’ve come.

Yesterday, I taught my Flow class, and found a new way of sequencing physical and emotional flow to create a very powerful cleansing state I’ll be able to use in the Path workshop (www.Rmax.tv).  This morning, I had the best, and cleanest meditation I’ve had in weeks. 

I’m coming through this particular stretch of bad internal road.  It’s just the stuff that there is to be done.  There is no end to it.  The Way is in training.  I’m in this for the long haul, folks.  Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down…but I’m always moving forward and sitting still.  That’s just the way it is, and you know?  In the final analysis, I guess that’s perfect.

The past week's struggle

I’ve been opening up the back of my head, and letting some of the snakes crawl out. In preparations for The Path workshops, I have to get my mind as clear as it can possibly be, and to be cable to come from the absolutely cleanest place that I can.  That’s been kind of hard this week, because of multiple factors (and here’s the rub—the deeper you dig into your psyche, the more “reasons” you’ll find not to dig deeper. It never, ever ends.)

1) We’re still not paid for work contracted almost a year ago.  This creates massive stress.  It is a balancing act to keep that stress from becoming strain.
2) I heard some really sucky news about an old and dear friend.  Call him Mike.  I’ve known Mike since college.  A very dear, very sweet man, who has never grown up.  He’s never gotten his body together at all—both obesity and hygiene problems have plagued him.  He’s never been married.  He’s never had a job that a 19-year old couldn’t handle.  And yet, he’s one of the smartest people I know.  A few years back he suffered an accident that landed him in the hospital, and he lost his job, his apartment, damned near everything he owns.  And now he is homeless, has been for six months and wouldn’t let his friends know.  I have to try to find a way to help him, all the time fighting my fear that it is just too late.
3) In the last week two major Hollywood films opened that dealt with race relations.  In both of them an interracial relationship features centrally. In one, a black woman and a white man. In the other, it is a black man and a white woman.   Guess which one is down, dark, destructive, negative, and heartbreaking.  Guess which one is lighthearted, “inspiring”, and has a “happy ending.”  Yeah, you’re right. 

Each of these three things hits me in areas of unresolved, unhealed damage.  It would be easy for me to wallpaper over this stuff, but I can’t do that and simultaneously dig deep, clean out my psychic attic.  I can’t.  So my morning meditations have been some of the darkest and least satisfying in months.  Fear, anger, disappointment…all mixed together to obscure the light.

Fortunately, perhaps, I see all of this as an inevitable part of the process of moving myself to the energetic position where I can, honestly, speak of healing to a roomful of strangers.  Speak of a path to success, peace, love.  How can I not go deeply into the core of my humanity, and if I go there, deeply enough, I will find more of the storehouse of memories and karma that holds us back on our evolutionary journey.

It’s my belief that this is what stops people from genuinely moving forward: they try to ignore this stuff.  They cram their pain into their bodies, ignore their physicality, and try to become spiritual.  They abandon their dreams of creative self-expression or comfortable living, just bury those ambitions, and think that they can walk away from them without actually dealing with their issues, their beliefs, their pain and fear.  They turn a blind eye to their prejudices—or the pain of having suffered prejudice.  They think that the dysfunctional homes they grew up in have nothing to do with their bitterness toward the possibility of lasting love, that their broken hearts speak wisdom when they say that the opposite (or same) sex cannot be trusted with your deepest feelings.

We can only trust others to the extent that we can trust ourselves. If you cannot keep your word to yourself, cannot tell the truth to yourself, cannot see both the ugliness and beauty in your own existence, your chances of dealing with another human being with anything even vaguely resembling compassion, understanding, and wisdom are just about nil.
##
My friend Mike has a totally inaccurate reality map.  What he thinks he knows, he does not know.  Over and over again, I’ve watched him lie to himself about why he is fat, why he has no resources, why he has never had a real relationship.  Why, in other words, in my opinion, he has remained a child.  If ever, for a single moment, he had actually accepted responsibility, he would have felt the pain of regret so deeply his ego would have wanted to die.

And by mistaking his ego for his true self, he has robbed himself of the opportunity to actually live an authentic life.  It breaks my heart to say that, but I must, because I could not have been friends with Mike all these years had we not traits in common.  Which means that there must be things that I cannot face, excuses I cannot stop making, lies I cannot stop telling myself, ways in which I have avoided becoming an adult human male.
##
It is so easy.  I can genuinely point to damage done me on gender or racial grounds.  True stuff, stuff I can justify with statistics and anecdotal evidence up the yin-yang.  And none of it matters.  In life, you either have reasons, or you have results.  Either I am going to shoulder the load, and learn to stand up under it, or my son will have to do it, because I wasn’t willing to kill my ego to make the way smoother for him.  I wasn’t willing to be a man.

I disrespected my father for leaving me alone to cope with life.  And I loved him for being the best man he could be.  That conflict, that incongruency lives in me, and in us all in one form or another.  It tears us apart and defines our creative flow, our contact with life energy.

I will not allow it to stop me.  Yes, I have pain, but I also have been given grace—the ability to see the light.  I was given obstacles, but by some miracle, also the strength to struggle on against them for decades, alone in some critical ways, and never stop loving life.  Why?  I’m not sure.  But I know that the Light did not originate with me, and I have an obligation to pass it on. 

So I’ll continue to face my demons, and to talk about what I experience along the way.  It is my way of trying to stay in touch with the truth of my journey.  I don’t know another Way.

My ugliest Conspiracy Theory—

AIDS in AFRICA

This one is hideous, and I want to reiterate that I don’t think it’s true…just that it COULD be, and I’m damned uncomfortable about  it.

The following is a matter of fact: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a series of interviews, meetings, accusations and confessions by black and white South Africans, concerning the bad old days of Aparteid, with the intent to squeeze the pus from some very ugly wounds indeed.  During them, several white scientists formerly working for the South African government admitted that they had experimented with , and actively sought, race-specific pathogens specifically designed to kill blacks but not whites, with the intent to thin the population of South Africa and neighboring countries.  Among the gasses, bacteria, viruses and other agents they experimented with was HIV. 

They say their efforts failed.

I wonder.  The rates of infection in South Africa are fascinating, seen from this perspective.  If they had succeeded, would there be any difference between what we see now?  If they had perceived a combination of tribal behavior patterns, nutritional deficiencies, disease outbreaks, etc, and took advantage of it, would there be any difference?  Is it difficult to imagine a scenario in which they experimented, perhaps piggybacked HIV (which I do believe was naturally formed.  The first corpses found with HIV are earlier than recombinant technology required to create such a virus) onto an inoculation program…I can even see them testing such a program in the Carribean first.  And to be shocked that it crossed over into the white population so rapidly through gay sex.

But as the district attorneys say, they had motive, means, and opportunity. This doesn’t mean they did it, but…if I was a public official, of whatever political leaning, and I had this knowledge, knew that this was truth…I’m not sure I could speak it publicly.  Man, if I was a black African, and I found out this was true, the blast of raging fear and anger would motivate me to kill every white person in sight.  So  if it was true that AIDS had been “helped along” would we even know?

Like I said…this one is troubling because these guys ADMITTED that they tried to do it.  And because, dammit, it LOOKS as if they succeeded, even though they claim to have failed.  This one troubles me right to the core.  Do the research.  They said it, guys.  I’m not making this up.

Ugh.  I think I need to go wash my brain out.

Steve

Favorite Conspiracies…AIDS

Favorite Conspiracies…AIDS


Now this one will ruffle some feathers.  Part of it is pure Lefty conspiracy, and that should get interesting reactions.  Part of it is a fear that something truly, truly vile happened in the world.  Some of this I’m pretty certain of.  The “vile” part is pretty tenuous paranoia on my part.  But again, I can’t get it out of my mind completely…

First, the “Lefty” AIDS conspiracy…

About Thirteen years ago, Scientific American published an article on the scourge of AIDS.  I eagerly devoured it, looking for statistics that had been missing from every other story on the subject I had ever seen.  There was one particular thing that no one seemed to address. You see, when someone talks about a disease being “heterosexual” the usual assumption is that men give it to women, and women give it back to men with approximately equal facility.

But there in SA, in black and white, were the numbers I was looking for.  As I suspected, the percentage of men who were said to have contracted AIDS from women was about 5% of the number of women who said they had contracted AIDS from men.  This number is so small that it fits comfortably within the number of men who won’t come out of the closet, or admit to using needle drugs.

In other words, women are not good at passing AIDS to their partners.  To put it another way, you primarily get AIDS by being penetrated: with a penis, with a needle, with unsterilized tribal scarring implements.

For years I wrestled with this one, waiting to hear something, anything, that would contradict this.  And to this date, I haven’t heard a single man who CLAIMS to have gotten AIDS from a woman through intercourse, and can give her name.  I’ve heard dozens of women name the men they got it from.  With guys, it’s always “some hoochie.”  Really? 

So I began to suspect that something was going on.  That when AIDS first burst on the scene in the 70’s, the gay community was hit like a bomb.  According to male gay friends I had at the  time, bathhouse sex was like screwing as an extreme sport.  MAN they were having fun, and frankly, I was jealous (as I suspect a lot of other heterosexual men were.  There has never really been an equivalent to the baths.  Ask the people who tried and failed to establish swinging clubs.  The problem is, and has always been, getting women in the door.  The number of women interested in anonymous sex is a fraction of the number of men who’ll boff anything that moves.  Guys are just like that.  Not all of us—but enough.  Don’t believe me?  Pick up a half-dozen pieces of erotica written by and for gay men.  And then a half-dozen pieces written by and for gay women.  Chose them at random.  Count the number of sexual encounters and partners per page.  Add it up and do the math.  I rest my case.)
##
The conclusion I came to was that members of the medical establishment and the news media certainly knew the truth: that the primary way to catch AIDS is to be the “receiving” partner of vaginal or anal intercourse, with anal being considerably riskier.  But they also knew that if this information was ever stated honestly and directly, several things would happen:

1) Men would feel safe, and be more difficult to convince to use condoms.
2) There are many who control the public pursestrings who would say: “let the faggots die.” 

So they  lied. And the lie has continued almost to this day.  Only in the last five years have I really heard much of anything about the specific behaviors that are highest risk, and the groups at highest risk, and that heterosexual, non-drug using males are at very little risk indeed.

Don’t believe me that women are terrible at transmitting AIDS?  Look at the difference in AIDS rates in the male as opposed to female gay community.

On several occassions, I've had an opportunity to have quiet conversations with people seriously involved with the AIDS awareness movement.  And several of thenadmitted to me, privately, that the risk to men was deliberately overstated.  Does  this mean it's true?  No, but it's worth thinking about.  And only now, after so many years, do I feel comfortable talking about this publicly.
##
Again, I’m sure we all know men who supposedly caught AIDS from women.  And it HAS to be true in some cases—I’m just guessing that women are 10-20 times more vulnerable.  If that weren’t true, if women really gave it to men as easily as men give it to women, we’d be knee-deep in the dead.

Don’t go by anecdotal evidence.  Look for the statistics.  Compare them.  And you’ll see why I have my suspicions.
##
But what, you will say, of the Third World?  What of AIDS in Africa?  There, certainly, it is spreading both ways through heterosexual intercourse.  Well, maybe.  But I have my suspicions.  To run through them in no particular order, we’d have:
1) A different strain of HIV? 
2) Tribal scarring with unsterilized implements, and lack of autoclave to sterilize needles used in inoculations?
3) Homosexual behavior that is so culturally taboo that men have even greater motivation to lie about it than they do in America?
4) Overreporting of AIDS—in other words, starvation, parasitism, other wasting disease that attacks the immune system being reported as AIDS.  There is an interesting gap between rates of AIDS  and rates of HIV infection.
5) The same kind of well-intended scare tactics that happened in America for the last twenty years, writ large on the International scale.  Doctors who know that the starvation in Africa will be less seriously considered by the West if we’re not afraid it’s gonna come and get us.
6) Pre-existing disease patterns like open sores and compromised immune systems that make men more vulnerable than they are in the west.
7) Other cultural factors of which I’m not aware

And the biggest, nastiest one of all: it’s not accidental.  I’ll address that one, my favorite, ugliest conspiracy theory of all.  Again, I DON’T THINK ITS TRUE.  I’m just unable to put it completely out of my head, for reasons that are not as wild-eyed as you might think.

More on this ugly subject, quite soon.

Energy

In many ways, everything I say in this newsletter—or on my blog, is just a different way of trying to express something I’ve grasped over my years of writing and living.   Something that has enabled me to accomplish every goal I had as a child, and MOST (but not all, by any means!) of my adult goals.  This thing can’t quite be put into words, but by approaching it from different directions, and encouraging you to try different thought experiments, you can glimpse the same mountain I’ve been climbing, and decide for yourself whether it is worth the time and effort.

When I talk (endlessly!) about fitness, and relationships, and career, it is not that these things are some end-all be-all in and of themselves.  It is that if you learn to succeed (by your own definitions) in these three arenas, that you learn some very interesting things about life, things that the great sages have been trying to express in words for centuries.  They elude precise definition.  But in actions, truth can be clarified.

Let’s try looking at it another way.  Everyone reading this has had what they would consider success in at least one of these areas.  Who among us has not learned a difficult subject?  Or excelled, even for a day, at a sport?  Or found a healthy, loving relationship, even if we could not sustain it for long?

What I ask you to do is to go deeply within yourself, and ask WHAT WAS IN COMMON BETWEEN THESE EXPERIENCES?  This is so slippery, and so hard to express with precision.  Let me try this way: at that moment in time, you were able to produce energy, and use it appropriately.  You were neither less nor more than you needed to be.  You were able to simply BE, and in that BE-ing, you found, just for a moment, excellence. 

You glimpsed it. You probably lost it.  We sometimes spend the rest of our lives seeking to find it again.  Note that most stories that have lasted for generations deal with people placed in high-stress situations: they love, they lose, they are threatened, they seek power or glory or revenge or relief.  SOMETHING knocks them out of their complacency.  Objects at rest tend to remain at rest.  Objects in motion tend to remain in motion.  You can’t teach an old dog new tricks because the old dog is tired, and wants to simply do the same things over and over again. 

We are the same way.  If you want to get different results, you have to do different things.  To do that you have to raise your energy, and then match it to the current situation in an appropriate fashion.  This is HARD, people.

And what three things motivate us the most?  Love/Sex, power, and survival.  Madison avenue has understood this for a long time.  Almost every product you see is pushed using one of these three.  It requires a more evolved, spiritual, and mature person to be motivated purely by intellect or spirituality. 

Energy.  Passion.  Drive.  Motivation.  Ki.  Chi.  Prana. Num.  So many terms that dance around a central truth. 

1) Where in your own life do you experience the most natural flow of energy?
2) Where in your own life is this energy most blocked?  Where do you feel the greatest fatigue and depression?
3) If you were to evaluate your successes and failures in the arenas of relationship, physicality, and career (please alter these definitions so that they make the most sense to you) is there any common pattern that would yield wisdom or understanding of your own process?

Let us seek the source of our energy.  Once we’ve found it, let’s find the way to most appropriately use it in our lives.  Yeah.  Stalking energy.  Sounds like a good use of our time for the next few days or weeks, doesn’t it?

Conspiracy Theory, part II—Drugs, Bush I, and the CIA…

Again, I’m aware that there is no real logic here, but I can’t help the fact that this stuff swirls around in the back of my twisted little head…

Let me just lay it out in pieces.
1) Our current drug policy makes no sense to me. Alcohol and tobacco are legal, pot is illegal.  I don’t think that pot is harmless—I would consider it about on the level of beer.  If you eat it instead of smoking it, the risk goes down even further.  In addition, it would be very, very easy to make the case that it is much less dangerous…but I won’t bother.  What matters is that the current drug policy is created by people who smoke and drink, and therefore have subconscious motivations to project their own guilt and incongruence onto others.

2) as to other drugs?  On this subject I do have an opinion as to how to end the drug problem.  One creates a battery of tests or standards for measuring the danger of a drug.  Let it be medical: LD50, brain damage, deaths per thousand, violent acts per thousand at typical levels of intoxication, whatever.  Anything that tests less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco is legalized.  Tax it to the hilt, and sell it only in plain-wrap “package” stores.  Take the tax money—all of it, and all the profits, and roll it into drug treatment programs and anti-drug campaigns.  Price the product to undercut the street gangs and cartels. The effect to organized crime would be devastating.  The money saved in our prison systems could fund treatment programs like nobody’s business. No consumer product unable to advertise itself could survive the onslaught of a multi-billion dollar campaign against it.  But you know what?  Anyone who seriously proposed such a plan would be murdered. It serves no one’s interests to actually diminish the damage done to our country body by intoxication, the black market, and the unfair justice system that pretends to care about the lives of those it destroys.  So…this is just a joke.
3) I find the CIA-Crack connection to be plausible.  Not certain, but plausible.  I have sources that suggest it was not a planned thing.  That Congressional funding for certain Central American black ops got cut, leaving operations officers with networks of hungry soldiers and no way to pay them.  But they also had access to cocaine, and means of smuggling it to America, and superiors who turned a blind eye… a recipe for disaster. Remember that line from The Godfather?  “I say we import the drugs, but confine it to the Coloreds. They have no souls anyway.”  Anyone who doesn’t think there are plenty of people who think just exactly this way about any group that isn’t “theirs” simply hasn’t gotten out much.
4) “Just Say No.”  Now, the whole CIA thing, if it happened, seems to have happened during the time that George Bush I was either head of the CIA, or in the executive. And the “Just Say No” campaign blossomed during the same time.  The combination of crack and a crack-down was devastating to black neighborhoods. In the back of my mind, I connect the dots.  I wonder if a single mind could have dreamed up both pieces of this, and realized that they  could simultaneously further a secret war, and tear the black underclass a new one.  And if that conversation ever took place, that would be about as close to pure human evil as anything I’ve ever thought of.

Do I really think it happened?  Not really. 
Am I afraid it might have?  Wellll…let’s just say that I’ve never been able to get the possibility completely out of my mind.

Inner and Outer relationships

It is clear that the question of relationships touches an exceptionally deep and powerful nerve for many readers.    I appreciate both the rather raw and accusatory notes, as well as the comments from those who  would defend me.  Both of you, in your own way, are seeking to heal and express your light to the world.  As are we all. 

But what is that essence called love, and what is the nature of the human pair-bond?  Obviously, we still have desires and needs outside of that primary bond.  Even those most committed to monogamy admit that.  And there have clearly been, and continue to be, many, many ways to navigate these waters. 

For those who  are not interested in that monogamous bond, I ask, what is the nature of the bond and intimacy that you seek?  I would trust that such bonds are best created by those who are healthy, sane, happy, and have nurtured their capacity to provide goods and services to their chosen community—that these bonds are made of choice, and not because of any dysfunction.  In other words, they could choose to have any bonds they wish, and find these the most satisfying.  There have been periods in my life where I operated in this fashion, and was quite happy.  And now, at this point in my life, I am investigating the means by which a monogamous relationship can be deeply satisfying on every level, and that is the primary focus of my inquiry.
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But be that as it may…what human qualities cut most deeply here?  Are most attractive to those we wish to attract?  Allow us the quality of perception that allows us to avoid toxic individuals masquerading as exciting opportunities?  I have a growing sense that it is a balance of male and female energies (however you conceptualize that), with the capacity to age or regress those energies along a time line.
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In other words, whether you are gay, straight, polyamorous, an orphan, or whatever, you are the result of the union of a man and a woman’s genetic material.  I think that reality lives in our cells, even if we choose to live out our lives in another fashion.  Whether we are attracted to males or females, many or one, there are aspects of ourselves that  are…shall we say useful?  Yes, useful, to divide into male and female qualities, that usefulness dissolving the instant that we confuse a conceptual tool for some kind of immutable social or psychological truth.  It’s just a tool.
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Here’s a thought exercise:  envision yourself sitting in front of a mirror.  See your body, naked.  Visualize it in whatever is YOUR definition of perfection.  Now regress it until you are an infant.  Can you see this clearly?  Can your eyes see beyond the flesh, to the spirit and light within?  Now, age it, take it to the point of old age, and the moment before death.  Can you still see the light?

Now bring it back to your “perfect body” stage, and morph genders.  If you are heterosexual, the body you see now should be damned attractive to you.  Regress it to childhood.  Age it to the point of death.  Can you see the light at all phases?

Now allow the flesh to dissolve, so that all that is, is the light.  Take that light into your own body.  Shrink it down, condense it until it is almost unendurably bright.  Sink it to your genitals, and then down to Muladhara, the spot at your perineum. Then feel and see and hear that energy flowing upwards through your body to your head, and then outward into a luminous cocoon.  Feel what you feel.  Then, taking all the time you need, come back to the room.
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My suspicion?  Someone who can run their energy in such a fashion, can identify with all their ages, and with all the ages and stages of the opposite gender, is genuinely on the road to self-discovery. Take that energy and extend it to your community so that you are inspired to create goods and services they appreciate.  Take it and pour it into a healthy physical discipline to create fitness and vitality.  Take it and heal your own emotional wounds, love yourself and have enough love left to overflow into the cups of those you cherish.

Such a person is exactly the kind of neighbor, friend, lover, follower, leader I would want to have.  I think that on the path to becoming such a person, we accomplish all our “goals” and discover that they were never important in the first place: what was important was that we developed the ability to manifest them, that we disabuse our notions of scarcity.  We have the ability to love, and to attract love, and to have the kind of relationships, or sacred solitude, that nurtures us most fully. 

That’s what I think.  When I remember the thousands of hours of meditation, prayer, introspection, and ceremony I have engaged in over the decades of my life, it seems that the visual/kinesthetic process I just described goes to the heart of much that has been of genuine power and worth.  Much that has healed my heart and mind and body.  It is just an opinion.  I offer it here without further comment.

Love First, Conspiracies later…

A reader posted a lovely reply to my question about love and beauty, stating that she loves her husband because the divinity within him sparks and reflects the divinity within her (Namaste!)

And I think that that is the key.  Several different models of humanity suggest that the end point of all our efforts is the connection with the divine.  The Chakras, Maslow’s hierarchy, and Core Transformation map over one another elegantly, suggesting that this drive, to re-connect with the ultimate realities, can be found everywhere, in every culture, through all of time.

They also suggest that until one satisfies the more basic needs (survival, sex, food) it is difficult to evolve to the higher ones.  Not impossible—certainly many people manage to do this.  But in general, this is the way to bet.  Now…AFTER you have taken that evolutionary step, one can forgo the lower in preference to the higher.  Martyrs and patriots give their lives for their higher values.  We push out of our comfort zones for high levels of self-expression in the arena of athleticism. We give up our right to random sexual pleasure to increase the emotional bonds with our partner.  Children want satisfaction, NOW.  As they mature, they learn to postpone it, or to understand that the things that feel good in the moment may cause misery down the road (excessive simple carbohydrates, for instance.)

And then love.  If it is true that every human being is the result of a biological union between a male and female, then it stands to reason that much of our biological, psychological, and social apparatus will be dedicated to keeping this chain going.  YES, there are other bonds, other ways of living and loving other than monogamous marriage between a man and woman.  Anyone who suggests otherwise has never cracked an anthropology text.  But it is easy to see this pattern in behaviors around the world, and much (but not all) makes sense viewed through this lens.

To that end, it would make sense that much (but not all) of what we are attracted to in each other initially has to do with the question: could we create children together?  Which is very similar to another question: would you be able to parent and protect me when I am weak?  Which is similar to ANOTHER question: can you see my strengths, and appreciate my accomplishments?

All of which cluster around a more important, more central, and less quantifiable question: Do you see my divinity?  Do you see the energy that connects me with all of creation? 

And: Can I see yours?  Do you show the world your creativity, your honesty, your passion, your clarity, your courage?

In any culture I know of, most of the time this boils down to: are you healthy?  Can you protect and raise children, or contribute to society so that others can protect and raise children?  Can you learn and pass on your knowledge?  Can I trust you?  Do you have values that I recognize from my own mother and father?  Can you see who I really am, flaws and all, and accept me? 

For men, these questions often (quite often, actually) initially appear as visual attractiveness.  Secondary sexual characteristics.  I’ve said it before: few women seem to have any instinctive grasp of just how powerful the visual apparatus is in males.   For women, this usually seems to initially trigger on power issues: the ability to protect and provide for a home.  The specifics of beauty and power vary greatly between cultures and people, but if you start from the assumption that this is what people want and then modify outward from this point, you’ll be right more often than not.  What you must determine is the percentages of each.  In the 21st century, we seem to be heading toward men and women wanting equal amounts from each other.  I defy you to name a culture (not a sub-culture) that operates in the opposite fashion: women primarily chosen for power, men primarily chosen for beauty.

Gay culture: I’m not at all sure about lesbians, but gay male culture is so beauty-driven it isn’t even funny.  So one might say that men don’t want beauty from women: they want it from their sexual partners.
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But how does all that relate to spirituality?  Just this: once the bond is made, the energy begins to evolve.  Whereas I was certainly attracted to Tananarive’s face and body, now that I love her, I’d continue to love her if her face got blown off by a hand grenade.  Why?  Because I see her.  I feel her divinity. 

And many women, initially attracted to a man because of his perceived power, will stand by him if he falls on hard times—if that bond has been truly made.
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In the movie “Swept Away” a delightful case is made for the proposition that, in the right circumstances, ANY two people could fall in love.  Stripped of social b.s., the capacity to connect is there within us all.   It is why arranged marriages work.  Given two people committed to the same values and outcomes, over time they see more and more deeply into each other, down to the originating, core energy, and the only name that we have for that is Love.  In that mirror, we see our own past (“what was the shape of your face before your parents were born”) and we can drop our desperately maintained acts.  We see each other.  We see ourselves. We love.
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So I enter a room filled with women.  I migrate toward the one I find most visually attractive.  Interact with her, if I can.  If we connect, fine, if not, I move toward the one “down the chain”, until I find one I connect with.  Now, maybe she doesn’t like ME!  In which case, I keep moving “down” until I find one I like, who also likes me.  We talk.  We bond.  Perhaps we love.
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On the internet, it’s almost exactly the opposite.  We talk with people.  We connect.  We speak of hopes and dreams.  Love sparks.  Pictures are exchanged.  And THIS, according to many who have met people on chatrooms and so forth, is where things screw up.  People lie about their appearance, we see the truth, we are not attracted (“there was just no magnetism” she says) and we try again.  And feel some guilt and pain about it.  Isn’t love supposed to look past all of that?
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Yes.  When it gets a chance to deepen. Here’s another case: I work at an office, or go to a school.  Over months or even years, I get to know the woman sitting next to me.  She is not initially “my type” but through time, I see her spirit.  She is intelligent, funny, nurturing.  One day, my heart is troubled, and in her presence, I feel strong.  I cry on her shoulder, and can feel that she still thinks me to be a man of worth.  My heart opens.  At the core, THIS is what I really want.
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But there are so many millions of people in the world.  We cannot be blamed if we sort for those who delight our senses as well as our souls.  I do not blame a woman for wanting a man with more resources than I have—although if she would be as attracted to someone who INHERITED his money as to one who EARNED it, I would consider her shallow.  In the same way that a thirty-year old man who is as attracted to an eighteen year old with a perfect body as a thirty year old woman with a perfect body. The thirty year old (or forty, or fifty) not only has the secondary sexual characteristics, but is absolutely radiating her discipline,  energy, clarity, and physical intelligence. The 18-year old just got a gift from God. 
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Once the link is made, we evolve toward spirit.  This is what we want and need and the way we are designed.   The initial connection seems determined by personal history, cultural conditioning, and genetics.  Love is the flower, attraction the root. 

Watch out for the thorns along the way.

My favorite Conspiracies: Kennedy

Lest anyone get the impression that I think I’m sane in a world filled with crazies, I thought I’d trot out some of my favorite insanity.  These would be ideas that run around and around in my head, and never quite resolve themselves.  They have varying levels of evidence attached to them.  None of them make it fully past the logic test, but none of them will go away, either.

Today’s conspiracy:
John F. Kennedy.  The 60’s were a pretty hideous time for the Left.  John, Bobby, Martin, Malcolm…it makes you wonder if the Right has the only accurate aim in the country.  Yuck.  And just as it would be pure paranoia to insist that all of these were conspiracies, it is almost as naïve to think it impossible for none of them to have been…shall we say, helped along by the powers that be?

For various reasons, John Kennedy strikes me as being the most likely conspiracy.  The reasoning is this: there are simply too many people who might have wanted him dead.  From Mafiosi upset that the unions had helped elect him, only to be pursued by his Attorney General  brother Bobby, to Pro-Fidel Cubans and Anti-Fidel Cubans and CIA honchos, ALL pissed off over the Bay of Pigs, to the Military Industrial Complex and anti-communists upset about his proposed withdrawal from Vietnam…to Southerners upset at the attention he was starting to give the Civil Rights movement…to anti-Catholics (I remember the venomous propaganda at the time, although I was only about 10 years old during the elections.  He’d turn the country over to the Pope!) this is one man with lots of powerful enemies.  And if only a tiny fraction of human beings are murderous bastards, you know what? There were enough murderous bastards among all the groups listed who had the will, the position, the money, the power, and the training to set up a patsy named Oswald to take the fall.

I’ve heard a story, from a source I trust, that at an important sniper school within the American intelligence/Military community, the Kennedy assassination is used as a text-book example of a three-man sniper hit.  Truth? Fiction?  I don’t know…but this one won’t quite go away.  Your thoughts?

Beauty and Power

I’ve probably had more comment on my thoughts about beauty and power in relationships than any other single aspect of Lifewriting theory.  As a result, it seems only fair to throw the floor open explicitly on the issue.  What is it that you, as readers and writers, feel happens between men and women, or women and women, or men and men, when it comes to the realm of the heart?  Certainly, there is endless thought and speculation on this, and there is no single theme which has appeared in more fiction over the years with the possible exception of survival. 

Sexuality, love, power…physical grace, spiritual depth, emotional strength…all of these meld together in the realm of romance and relationship.  There are those who seek only union with God or self, those committed to a community but not an individual.  Those who are monogamous, and those who seek group intimacy, or swinging.  Those who opt for temporary or permanent celibacy.  In every case, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to run your energy, rules and principles, attractive and repulsive behaviors and traits. 

I would love for you to comment, either on the blog, or on my bulletin board, or the discussion list.  Please respect each other’s thoughts and lifestyles. If you are too shy to share your thought with us, put them into your own diary or journal, or writing.

  I am seeking to open my mind to the different ways people see these issues.   What fills our hungers?  How do we seek to negotiate the sometimes perilous waters of love?  This is a broad arena, hopefully not too broad..but I would very much appreciate thoughts here.  I can promise that if you dig into your thoughts, your successes and failures in the realm of love, your philosophies and rules and observations, that there is another endless treasure trove for your creative pleasure.

What is it that human beings want from themselves, each other, their communities, their God or Goddess, in the realm of love?

The Magic of Balance

Those who have been reading my words for a while will realize that everything I say is merely the repetition of a single core idea,  addressed from multiple directions: Balance.  Whether body, mind, and spirit, or the Chakras, it is all the same.

Even the Hero’s Journey seems to me to be merely the path that we walk evolving from one level of balanc e to another: satisfy the lower nees and we automatically rise to the next level of concerns.

I evolved the  Lifewriting system to address balance after a lifetime of observing intelligent, educated, good-hearted people simply flailing about, unable to create the lives they desired, eventually consumed with despair and anger.  And the answer seemed simple (although not easy).  They had theoretical models for the way the world worked, but failed to understand that EVERYONE deletes information from their conscious input.  It is simply impossible to take in all the data that exists.  So the danger is that they delete everything that confuses their model of the world.  We must all have a cosmology—a world view. But we must also have an epistemology—an understanding of the way we gather information, and a way to determine if our methods of gathering or correlation or extrapolation are accurate.  Since experimentation with the outside world is often beyond us, the only laboratory we have to test our ideas is our own lives: our bodies, our careers, our relationships.  To be certain, some aspects of these are beyond us as well, but we have infinitely greater control here than we have of events in the outside world, or events on the level of international politics.

Briefly:

1) Body.  Our bodies are created by our daily behaviors.  They obey the laws of physics: the balance between calories in and calories out must be maintained.  Yes, some people have slower metabolisms than others.  Perfectly true. Life isn’t fair.  Get over it.  The smarter you are, the easier it is.  It is possible to get all the exercise you need to be basically healthy in less than two hours a week.  Diet is a nightmare of conflicting opinions. Again, if you haven’t been able to navigate this maze, notice that there are a few constants, and stick to those: large percentages of fresh fruits and vegetables, few processed foods, only eat carbohydrates to replace the fuel burned during the day.  Calories  must be below the amount burned  to lose weight.  Forget the fancy stuff.
2) Career.  We have to balance income with expenditure.  It is possible to be happy (or content, or at peace) in any life situation.  If you are miserable at work, then it is your responsibility to either make change, or to change your own attitude.  I’ve known people who waste their entire lives blaming their jobs, when it is their own lack of courage and emotional/creative flexibility that keeps them there.
3) Relationships.  In relationships, you can have anything you can afford.  The coin is passion, health, intelligence, self-respect, confidence.  Men and women get into terrible trouble because they are attracted to people more attractive than themselves, and can’t be honest about it.  Women complain that men want beauty, while men complain that women want power.  Get over it.  We’re wired up that way.  The sooner you stop complaining, the faster you’ll be able to make decisions about the level of beauty or power you are willing to manifest in your own life to get what you want.

In each of these three arenas, there are painful truths we must face: we are lazy, we are dishonest, we are confused, we childishly wish the world to recognize our genius and follow our advice.  If you can’t master these three arenas, don’t think you can save the world.  I know many, many people who are balanced in these three areas.  Few of them are geniuses.  But they are honest, hard-working, loving people.  And they have a certain deep wisdom about life that is acquired by actual contact with the realities of their existence.  And they are happy, in ways that those who have mastered only one of the three arenas rarely are.

The more blocked or imbalanced you are, the more unfair the above will seem.  And yes, there are those relative few who don’t want financial security, fitness, and an intimate relationship.  But then, they will NEVER complain about not having those things.  These things are attainable by about 95% of those in our culture through discipline and self-awareness.  Some are born to poverty, or bad metabolisms, or horrific family situations…and will have to work harder than others.  But it can still be done.

Balance and Reality Maps

The balance I speak of is SIMPLE to attain, but not EASY.  First, a clarification: NO ONE reading this blog (including its writer) is gonna marry   Halle Berry with a NASA-level brain.  That would require a combination of Denzel and Steven Hawking.  So what can we expect from life?  And what levels of achievement am I talking about?

1) A career that we find satisfying, making enough money to support the lifestyle we have chosen.
2) A stable, loving relationship with a partner we admire and lust after, who is also a friend and helpmate.
3) A body which we would find desirable if we were the opposite sex.  One which has the energy and aliveness to support us in our dreams.

For the vast majority of people, these are not only an accurate representation of what they want—it is achievable.  There are those who genuinely don’t want a relationship, or money…but then, they don’t complain about these things, do they?

But we take emotional damage as we pass through life, and it corrupts our values and beliefs, and we store massive pain in our bodies that makes it difficult to deal with ourselves honestly on a continuing basis.  Success in these three arenas is the result of hard, honest work over years and decades.  Of maintaining our passion.  Of developing the ability to forgive ourselves and others.  Of loving ourselves enough to accept a healthy discipline.  Of disabusing ourselves of the notion that our bodies disobey the laws of physics (you’d be shocked how many people seem to believe this!).  Of understanding that we attract what we are: if you don’t like the level of the men or women attracted to you, you have some serious work and healing to do.  That there is no intrinsic satisfaction in a given level of success, or a given job—it is up to us to find that satisfaction.  I have never said that someone has to be a millionaire.  I HAVE said that our level of financial output and input must balance, and we should find satisfaction in our lives on the level of career.

That means that a schoolteacher or maintenance man can find great happiness in life, and would ABSOLUTELY meet my standards if they felt centered and at peace and as if they were expressing themselves healthfully.  Anyone who thinks I’m saying something different is viewing my words through a distorting filter—and should ask themselves what else in life they are distorting.
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Do you know why it seems that the world’s troubles are easily solved, if only there weren’t so many idiots?  Because we agree with our own thoughts.  And then we surround ourselves with friends who agree with us.  And then we find pundits who agree with us.  And WOW!  It’s all so simple.  And the fact that Harvard economics Phd’s can’t balance the budget, and lifelong ethics philosophers can’t agree how we should live, and panels of generals and Intelligence analysts can’t win wars without loss and waste seems…well, it seems that they must be STUPID!

But when I meet people who ARE balanced in those three arenas, they tend not to be so dogmatic. They seem to grasp the actual difficulty of embracing life in its wholeness.  It is easy to solve life’s problems in your head.  But if you can’t solve the basic puzzle of healthy  body, healthy career, healthy relationship…I say that you are probably SMART enough to do it, but that your values, beliefs and reality map are skewed.  Yep, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And if you can't   solve the basic puzzle in your own back-yard, on what basis do you  assume you are smarter than the people wrestling with 300 million people's problems?

Any worm will move away from pain and toward pleasure.  It’s not a matter of intelligence.  If you haven’t navigated this maze of pleasure-pain in these three arenas, it should tell you something very important: human life is messy.  Reality is messy.  Answers are not easy.  Life didn’t come with an instruction manual.  If you think the answers are easy, then get out there and fix the world, folks.  But fix yourself first.

Politics isn't Rocket Science!

A reader writes:

"but because i'm not yet making the amount of money i want , not yet at what i consider a decent fitness level where i'm running five miles in less than 30 minutes , and not yet in a committed relationship with a gorgeous exotic dancer/nasa scientist , and oprah and hallie berry STILL won't answer my calls--i should doubt my ability to look out the window and see what's coming down ???

the mechanic who fixed my car has a gut that rivals a junior sumo wrestler ...in making small talk the guy jokes about his divorce and complains he can't charge what he'd really like to---but he's got more cars lined up to fix than he has room for on his lot
--but i shouldn't trust him to check the brakes ?

this politics stuff isn't rocket science , it's not even as complicated as auto repair --there's a ton of information out there --but it does requires a degree of patience to sort through it all and common sense and comparisons with historical and present day reality to determine the wheat from the chaff..."

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You're setting up a straw man argument, taking an extreme (which I never recommended) and then suggesting that if you're not at the extreme, then I'm saying that your most basic perceptions must be inaccurate.  That's freshman debate tactics, guy.  Not being able to run five miles in thirty minutes is different from, say, not exercising at all, or being seriously overweight.  Not making "all the money I want" is very different from a history of business failures, or a constant griping about how you don't have enough money, or the inability to face your checkbook.  And not being married to a combination of Halle Berry and a NASA scientist is simply too absurd to believe--and very, very different from having a string of failed relationships leading to bitterness and belief that women are alien creatures.
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The garage mechanic can almost certainly be trusted to fix your car--but I'd be cautious about his advice on the nature of relationships and body-mind issues.  And success in both of those arenas is a matter of value clarity, goals, priorities, daily actions, honesty, and other things.  When I see someone "blown out" in two arenas, I am certainly more cautious about them--they tend to say that the world is responsible for their body, and their partner for the divorce.  Tend to.  Not always.  When someone is blown out in all three arenas, I very rarely see any real personal responsibility--there would be too much pain in admitting that it is their own actions that created the life they are living.
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As for "this poitical stuff not being rocket science" you are absolutely right.  It is infinitely more complex than rocket science, which is a matter of mathmatics, in other way, the way our minds manipulate the images we have ofthe material world.  Not the ultimate realities themselves, but the agreed-upon shell we culturally place over chaos.  We're manipulating our symbols, and that is incredibly easier than dealign with the nature of human consciousness.  Politics is psychology, spirituality, and sociology...it deals, in other words, with the true nature of human existence.  I know intelligent, educated, honest, caring people on both sides of the political spectrum, with real, serious disagreement on political issues...far more than disagree about whether Newton or Einstein were correct.  Rocket science is child's play in comparison.  And those on both sides, like you, think "the truth is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes."  If you really believe that, then if someone disagrees with you, that person must be a knave or a fool.  After all...the answer is obvious!
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You know what's obvious to me?  That we can have a healthy, loving relationship, a satisfying career, a healthy body.  That stuff is below rocket science in complexity.  And after talkking to thousands of people about these issues, I've yet to meet someone "blown out" in these three arenas (note that I'm not saying: "who isn't in the top 1/10 of 1% in these arenas") who doesn't seem to have some serious flaws in their understanding , or some serious perceptual filters created by pain and fear.  Those same flawed goggles get angry at our government's monetary waste when the person can't balance their own checkbook.  Get angry at our bad relationships with other nations when they can't hold a relationship together to save their lives.  Gets angry at the state of our infrastructure, when their own bodies are a disaster...and in each case, they blame their genetics, or their childhood poverty, or those horrible men/women (or say 'there aren't any good men/women out there...") not realizing that the precise same self-rationalizations, carried to the macro level, create all of the stress and strife in the world.
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Want to understand why the world is where it is?  Clean up your act in these three arenas.  On the way to doing that, you will learn lessons that cannot be put into words, and you'll start seeing right through the b.s. that people offer to disguise their pain, fear, sloth, and confusion.  WE are responsible for our lives as individuals.  And if we're not, isn't it rediculous to expect our nations to run any better than our lives?  And if any of this stuff was "easy" wouldn't we have it better together by now?
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So no, Politics isn't rocket science.  I wish to hell it was.

And by the way...

Yes, my “balance” model has to make room for the ascetic, the yogi, the committed bachelor, etc.  I’m not saying that you have to be rich, or a bodybuilder, or whatever, to have a valid opinion about the world.  What I AM saying is that the clearest path I know to self-knowledge is to simultaneously seek:
1) Satisfaction in your career.  Do something you love, love the thing you do, and manage life and finances so that they fit one another. Someone constantly complaining about the amount of money they earn doesn’t fit here.  A schoolteacher content with her tax bracket does.
2) Physical health and fitness.  Enough energy to work hard all week long, and party on the weekend.  In the top 10% for both in your age group.  If you strip  and looked at yourself in the mirror    and, frankly, would want to boff yourself.  Ahem.  (I mean, honestly—if you wouldn’t want to sleep with you, isn’t it dishonest to be pissed that no-one else does either?)
3) A healthy committed primary relationship.  Gay, straight, I don’t care. 

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     But there are those who wish to embrace voluntary poverty, a celibate life, or to divorce themselves from all bodily concerns.  Or want to Swing, or join group families, or whatever. For them I say that I haven’t the experience to judge the results of such things, although I know of people who seem healthy and live that way. 

And that in the case of the celibate or ascetic, some of the people I respect the best in all the world live such lives.  But such a rude tool as Lifewriting is not intended to measure or guide such lives.  Honestly.
     The balance concept is like a GPS system.  If you assume that deep inside, you want a Soulmate,  success, and fitness, take responsibility for the results you currently have and begin to take actions to correct the problems, you can be very, very confident of building an accurate “reality map” that will help you evolve as a human being. 
But go “off-road” into a realm where the measurements are not so clear, and you’re on your own.  If you develop a life of joy and grace, bless you and please report back to us Vanilla, mundane types.  But if you don’t, if you end up off a cliff, don’t blame the GPS—you are the one who decided to ignore it.  Fair enough?

More on Politics and obsession

Recently on my blog we began a conversation about extreme political positions and mental illness—or drug addiction.  The way that people who hold very strong positions on the Left-Right continuum are using their brains the way junkies do, filtering out conflicting data, rewarding themselves for behaviors that connect them to their political group.  One of my readers  noted quite accurately, that this can also be applied to relationships, exercise addiction, etc.  Excellent thinking!

The original Washington Post article didn’t go into the detail you can find with a little Googling.  The original study seems pretty straight-forward, and simply begs replication.  I think a LOT of people, Left and Right, are going to be unhappy with the results.
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The Left (on Air America, for instance) is trumpeting this as evidence of Racism on the Right, without noticing that the study also calls them to task, and in fact suggests that all strongly partisan behavior contains elements of madness.
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Religion and politics, right?  Those who follow this blog know that I think they are closer together than anyone wants to admit.  Instead of “Religion” what if we were to say “Transexistential philosophy”?  would that be better?  Specifically that (and these are vectors, not absolutes):

1) The Right tends to believe that Essence precedes existence.  The soul enters into the world relatively whole and expresses itself.  Thus, the opposition to abortion, and the support for the death penalty. Also, if nutcase religious fanatics bomb buildings, it must be because they are, by nature, corrupt and insane.  Also, they support building prisons more than supporting after-school or “Head Start” programs.  After all—the way we manifest in life is an expression of our “is-ness,” our basic nature.  If it is good, we will thrive and be good people, regardless of the environment we find ourselves in.  And if it is corrupt, well…to heck with rehabilitation, or blaming society!

2) The Left tends to believe in the opposite: that Existence precedes Essence. That we are relatively Tabula Rosa, or that the soul is like a reef created by our experience in life.  Thus, the support for Abortion rights and the opposition to the Death penalty.  How can we execute someone if society is responsible for what that person became?  Why bring more babies into the world if we cannot care perfectly for the ones we already have?  If terrorists bomb us, we must understand their motivations, right? 

Of course, a sane person can have a serious left or right tilt, and still be open-minded.  But Lord God—if you listen to the dialogue on either side, it’s pretty obvious that sanity is in shorter supply than we might wish.
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     I’ve noticed, in a VERY informal non-scientific survey (hah!) that the more balanced a person is in his or her personal life (healthy body, healthy relationship, healthy career) the more likely they are to have a genuinely open mind politically, even if they have strong affiliations.  But a person who is wrecked physically, is in a dysfunctional or defunct relationship, or is financially challenged is far more likely to exhibit rigidity of political or religious thought.  To me, this suggests that they have “stuffed” their pain in one arena, and don’t look at it. This creates a rigid “no-man’s land” in their psyche, an entire arena in which they cannot look at their own garbage, so they externalize their fears into the external world.
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     A primary arena of this is race.  EVERY group has the myth that God created them first, and that they are closest to the divine (that is, every group except American blacks, who had their mythology stripped away from them. But that’s another subject.  Perhaps.) Racism, the “we’re better than you are” attitude, is as human as breathing.  If you think you DON’T have it, you’re part of the problem—your racial attitudes are sitting at the level of Unconscious Incompetence, and will influence everything you think and feel about whole groups of people without your conscious mind ever engaging.
     Black Intellectuals get very frustrated with me because I won’t go all Afrocentric with them.  White Conservative Intellectuals get frustrated with me because someone as “intelligent” and “well spoken” as I am should surely see that I have more in common with them than with, well, ahem, “those others.”  Cough.
     I remember a political cartoon by Jules Feiffer, many years ago. In it, a black intellectual and a white intellectual are sitting across the table from each other.  The black man says: “you have your history.  White history.  Written by white men, to promote white power.  We want our history.  Black history.  Written by black men, to promote black power.  Our demand is separate but equal lies.”
     And that’s it right there.  Substitute ANY duality for the words “white” and “black” and you will  touch the core of a serious human problem.  Everyone thinks their right.  The problem is that they can’t see that THE OTHER PERSON CAN BE JUST AS SMART, JUST AS GOOD, AND EQUALLY CORRECT.  They cannot resolve the duality.  Male-Female, Black-White, Conservative-Liberal, Christian-Moslem, Gay-Straight…all sides believe themselves “right” and are locked to the death in a struggle to prove it. All they are really fighting is their own terror.  If I can be “correct” enough, maybe I won’t die, or burn in hell.
     If I can hide in the strongest group, maybe I’ll be safe. 
     No.  There is no safety. There is no salvation.  There is no way to get out of life alive, save in the unity of man, and in love.
     I’ve never suggested that we not defend our country.  Or our families.  Or ourselves.  Or our beliefs.  But beware the leaders who will lie and exaggerate to get the troops riled up to march off.  If they will lie to you about one thing, they will lie about another. 
     And it’s even worse when they don’t know they are lying, or cannot admit it to themselves.  That, in a post-nuclear world, is suicidal insanity.
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So I ask you: are you balanced?  Is your body healthy?  In a healthy relationship?  A healthy career?  No?  Then PLEASE entertain the possibility, just the possibility, that your brain isn't processing reality optimally.  That there is an entire corner of your 'living" room where crouches the dustiest mammoth imaginable.  That you can't be certain that your map of reality is accurate at all.  Even if you HAVE these three things cooking, you can't be certain...but isn't it obvious that if you're "blown out" in one of the three, your chances of having a warped lens skyrockets?  Please...just consider the possibility, before you are so damned certain that you see life as it is.  If you did...mightn't you have more love, more health, more success?

Just a thought.

Ann Coulter and Jeannine Garofalo in a steel cage deathmatch!

I have good news and bad news for Ann Coulter.  She said that Liberalism is a mental illness.  She is right.  The problem is, so is conservatism.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900642_pf.html
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Go ahead.  Say it's just leftist drivel.  But you're missing the point: the REAL point, that  should scare the hell out of you,  is that people on either side of the political spectrum can see the b.s. in the other political point of view BUT NOT IN THEIR OWN.  That the rigidity of thought on EITHER side is similar to drug addiction, and is a form of insanity trying to boil the world down into a Newtonian action-reaction "this or that" formula.  Yes, they suggest that the Right has more problems with racial attitudes.  This is news?  What one can miss is that white liberals ALSO have more racial problems than they can admit. And that blacks have worse attitudes about THEMSELVES than they like to, or are able to admit.  Cultural?  That's my attitude, but what I'm saying is that there seems no automatic reason to think these folks were screwing with the data. 
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I would assume that those on the Left have their deep problems as well.  My guess?  Excessive moral or cultural relativism, inability to admit to differences--this would be in balance with the Right's problem with excessive hierarchicalism. That would make sense to me.
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But if you can get past the automatic screaming, what you have  (especially if you will bother to google the original paper, not just the "this guy gave some money to John Kerry!" talking points.  Too lazy?  Try this for a start, then keep digging:
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:rF_9sgs5VWEJ:projectimplicit.net/nosek/talk/SPSP.mitchell.handout.2000.doc+Brian+Nosek+race&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3&client=firefox-a
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Note the non-political aspect of the conclusions: that the insistence that one's position represents what is good, and that the other side consists of fools and knaves ("traitors" "bigots" "cowards" etc. are thrown around) is essentially a form of mental illness.

We have to move beyond this.  Those who cannot, on the Left or the Right, deserve to be lied to by their leaders, who apparently don't believe that people can handle the truth.  I have good, decent, thinking friends on both sides of the political spectrum, just as I have friends of all races and creeds. They don't point fingers, scream, or think they have the only answers.  They remember that they might be wrong.  They don't make excuses for their own leaders for things they criticise elsewhere (I love it when someone expects me to see and understand the humanity of the great man Jefferson, a slave owner, but then expects me to see people of other nations in the contemporary world who practise slavery as "evil."  Ummm, well, either it's evil, or its not.  Child rape isn't moral or immoral depending on the year it takes place.  If I can forgive and understand the social context for our Founding Fathers, don't expect me to have a knee-jerk "Eep! Slavery!" reaction when you wag the loathsome human trafficking in the Middle East in my face.  Want to stop it, sure.  Abhor it?  Sure.  Wish the slaves would cut the throats of their masters?  Sure.  But I feel the same way about Jefferson.  Deal with it. I don't hate him, and I don't hate people who enslave today.  I do, however, want it to stop.)
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Here's what I think the problem is.  We may have to kill to protect our children.  Most people cannot kill without demonizing.  There has to be a "right" and a "wrong" rather than just a terrible, sad necessity.  So governments do what they've always done: say the folks on the other side of the mountains are beasts and perverts and inhuman cretins who worship satan.  Wow!  Guess its o.k. to bomb their towns, huh?  That is the worst kind of cowardly tripe. If you have to kill, or send your children off to kill, at least respect your enemy as you blow them to bits.  See their humanity as you drive the knife into their guts.  If you can't, you shouldn't do it.  But then, that's what I think a warrior does.  How a warrior feels.  And no society REALLY wants its citizens to be warriors. They want them to be soldiers.  So flags are waved, and political parties formed, and everyone is certain that their side is "right" and we hide our fear behind labels, and we turn our enemies into garbage to be swept aside.
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I have struggled all my life with the effects of this dehumanization.  I do not hate my white readers.  I will not join with you in hating others.  Those who wish me to would, behind my back, say terrible things about me.  You think I don't know this?  I will address the world only with love...even loving my enemy.  Even if, God forbid, I have to kill him to protect my family.  Don't think you can ever convince me to raise myself by lowering others.  

Iran and Me

Following up on questions about my answers...

1)  I don't for a moment doubt that Iran wants Israel destroyed. They've said as much too many times.

2) Providing someone with "the technology" for building a bomb, and selling them the bomb, are two different levels. My comment is limited to selling.  I don't have an opinion about the amount of trouble someone would be in for selling ideas or component pieces.

3)I didn't say anything about what Stalin did.  I said that "If I was Russia" I would behave in such and such manner.  The comment stands.

4)I'd have to look at the histories of each and every one of the other nations mentioned to decide whether, if I were them, I'd "mistrust" America.  Isn't Turkey a NATO ally?

4) The fact that I think self-defense is a rational reason to want the Bomb doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stop them.  It DOES mean to be suspicious of anyone who tells you there is no rational or non-aggressive reason to want nuclear weapons.  And this is exactly what we will be told if our leaders believe we must go to war.  Not that there are not reasons to go, but that they will chose the simplest, black-and-white motivation to rally the troops, whether it is the truth or not.  This approach is probably effective, but it is dishonest as well. 

Beyond a doubt, politicians since the beginning of time have over-simplified situations to get people riled up, rather than encourage debate.  This is probably a survival value in some contexts: PERHAPS even this one.  I don’t know, I really don’t.  This is certainly one of the reasons I could not be a politician.  Lying seems to be built into the system.  Seems to be a requirement of the job.  I’m simply not capable of thinking this way. 

I’ve never, ever claimed to having the answers, just to having observations about the way people think.  I believe that clarity and honesty and empathy solve far more problems than obfuscation and lying and demonizing.  I own a gun, can fire it just fine, thank you, and have spent most of my life learning how to defend myself, so it isn’t that I think the world is sugar-coated.

But…and this is a hard thing for me to say…the   sense of extending my own humanity to the majority white culture that demonized and degraded my ancestors and told me I was  worthless kept me from hating.  Asked me to understand how I might behave in the same way, were I born into that position.  I CAN’T TURN IT OFF.  God help me, if I did, the lifetime of resentments, fear and homicidal anger it channeled into love, compassion, and a desire to reach out would then be forced to look at the behavior of those who have behaved as my enemy in this country…can’t you see where that would lead?  Either I seek to understand (even as I keep my powder dry) or I don’t .  Either I commit to love, or I don’t.  I am who I am because I never, every yielded to the bitterness and the fear and the temptation to say that those who offer me violence or insult are subhuman, evil, or corrupt.  Just human, terribly human…and that I must seek to understand, or I will become the thing I fear and despise.

I’m being blisteringly honest here, admitting I have no answers for the political arena save the belief that the means ARE the end.  That approach has served me for fifty-three years, allowed me to achieve virtually all of my dreams, helped me to survive, helped me to interact with almost everyone I’ve met, everywhere in the world, with peace and honor, defused violence, disarmed muggers, and allowed me to feel that I have supported the highest dreams of my ancestors and smoothed the way for my grandchildren.

Aside from that…I DON’T KNOW, people.  Honestly, I don’t.  My head isn’t large enough to know. 

But my heart is large enough to love, and I choose to come from that space.  I swear to God that if I didn't , I would have murdered someone by now.

On Iran and Nukes

Remember: I DON'T WANT MORE NATIONS HAVING NUKES.  Anything I say below has to be held remembering that I'm not saying "it's o.k."
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I was asked the following:  If the Iranian government wants nuclear weapons for deterrance, then:

"1) why doesn't the Iranian government say that instead of pretending that they are developing nuclear power for peaceful reasons.

2) Since the program was begun before the invasion of Iraq, why did they suddenly come to believe they needed such a deterrent?

3) Since Iraq was invaded, why do they believe that they are subject to invasion now? I mean we've been there for what, three years now and haven't invaded? And the only postureing for invasion is a direct result of their nuclear ambitions. Seems odd."
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1) Because if they say they want them for deterrance, they have to admit they're making weapons.  If they admit that, they are less likely to have the chance to develop them.  It profits them not at all to say anything about it until they have  them--BEFORE they do, it just increases the chance they'll never get them, due to actions of the nations who want to restrict the size of "Club Nuke."

2) who said it was sudden?  It was probably a matter of long, loud debate.  They then, after deciding, had to decide HOW to implement the program.  I can promise you that the invasion of Iraq increased their fear and sense of urgency, though. 

3)  If someone I mistrusted invaded my neighbor, I'd simply assume I was next.  I would expect them to consolidate their position and then move on.  Three years ain't much time, guy.  Given who they are, and what we just did, why in the world should they trust us?  Would you, if you were them?  It's not odd at all.  Its pure human nature.  If Germany invades Poland, if I am Russia I'd start cleaning my weapons.  And if Der Furher spent a decade protesting only peaceful intentions, I wouldn't listen to a single thing he said.  History suggests  that those who relax when their enemies get closer get killed in their sleep.  We "know" we are the good guys.  Why, we wouldn't attack for no reason, right?  So what are they afraid of, right?  Even if you're absolutely right about us being the good guys, do you really think that's the way Iran sees us? 
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Now, that being said, I'm not saying that they might not want to nuke Israel.  But considering that Israel has probably let it be known through back-door diplomatic channels that if they are nuked, they will nuke Mecca, I tend to doubt Iran really wants to go down that road.

Steve

Walking The Path

It’s time to make a formal announcement.  Scott Sonnon, the man I trust the very most in the arena of body-mind exercise technology, finally created the tool I’ve been looking for for a decade, and we’re using it as the core of a new workshop  called The Path.  The first Path workshop was scheduled for April 22 2006 in Portland.  It sold out in three weeks. The next has been set up for June 24th in Los Angeles.

##

Let me back up a bit, and talk about the origins of all this.  My entire life, I’ve been fascinated with the eternal human puzzle: how shall we live?  How can we become the good, moral, successful, loving, healthy human beings I believe it was our birthright to become?  As a child, my mom drilled The Power of Positive Thinking and Think And Grow Rich and Psycho-Cybernetics into me until I thought I’d barf, but as I went out into the world, I found that some part of me believed what she had programmed me with, and I began to shape my life to those philosophies, adapting what worked, discarding the rest.

They worked, in a Newtonian action-reaction way, but as Maslow’s Hierarchy suggests, as soon as we resolve problems on one level, the next level of abstraction presents itself.  The question of leading a spiritual life that does not conflict with material success and worldly happiness popped into my little brain, sending me off in other directions.

Fast foreward to about 1990.  Teaching at UCLA, I accidentally made the connection between Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey, and the internal world of our hopes and dreams.  As a results, I began teaching the “Lifewriting” workshops, using this pattern to organize resources for success.  Those resources were pulled from too many disciplines, from too many cultures, to list here.  The “Lifewriting” workshops were a huge success, but something was still missing.

In one of the yogic disciplines I’ve been fortunate enough to study, they have an expression: “You can awaken the Kundalini (intrinsic human evolutionary energy) from the body up, or from the heart out, but never from the head down.” 

And in looking at this, I realized that this was exactly what I was trying to do: help people change their lives without engaging their hearts or bodies properly.  Could I start with their hearts?  How? Once they leave the workshop, they are right back in their ordinary lives, surrounded by their prior relationships.  Good, strong, decent, honest people get dragged down by the toxic environments they built while in less resourceful states.  So while healing the heart is paramount, the only safe way was to go in through the body.

But how?  I needed something that I couldn’t even quite define.  There simply was no tool I knew of that could do what I needed here.  For this, and other reasons, I stopped teaching Lifewriting for ten years.

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Living in the Northwest, I heard about a masterful martial artist named Scott Sonnon.  Investigating him as part of my never-ending search for cool exercise stuff, I discovered that he was really a guru in a warrior’s clothing, a man who had tripped across a genuine mother load of radical data while training in Russia, and had then brought it back to America and transformed it through his own genius and gut-busting hard work.  And somewhere in there, he’d made a real breakthrough.

His techniques for removing fear from the physical body were simply unprecedented. His concept of “being breathed” by motion was so wonderful that I based an entire DVD around it, The Five Minute Miracle. In the years we’ve sold it, there hasn’t been one single request for a refund.  Not a single one.  And Scott’s “Flow State Performance Spiral” simply upset Descarte’s apple cart, linking mind and body so directly, and in such a practical fashion, that I had to listen to the tape fifty times to be certain I understood what I was hearing.

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For two years, I begged Scott to create a tool that would bring his extraordinary technology to the average person.  I reasoned that if he could do that, if there was a way to allow anyone, of any fitness level (not just the advanced and professional athletes he was used to dealing with) to trigger what he referred to as the Neuro-Immuno-Endocrine response, an aspect of neuro-plasticity that creates the phenomenon known as “Second Wind.”  This response, properly guided, can create a fear-coping mechanism that is effective beyond any technique I know of or have ever heard of.

Scott went beyond what I asked for, creating a multi-phasic exercise simple and easy at the beginning, but ultimately tough enough for a SEAL.  In other words, for anyone from Gramma to Grandmaster.  Unreal.  It also specifically dissolves the planes of muscle tension created by stress.  With no equipment, learnable in about two hours, and infinitely scalable, it provides all BASIC fitness requirements in about ONE HOUR A WEEK (three twenty minute sessions.) This is not a joke.  I’m talking basic flexibility, cardiovascular conditioning, upper and lower body strength, coordination and balance, rhythmic endurance…the whole enchilada.  Not advanced fitness, although anyone who can do the top-level for  20 minutes is in gnarly shape indeed.

Now, then.  An entirely new possibility opened up.  What I’d dreamed of doing fifteen years ago was now possible.  Everything I’d learned over the entire course of my life could be boiled down into a core workshop.  Remember   that my buddy Tim Piering, one of the best and most successful men I’d ever met, said that what you needed to succeed in life was “Well defined written goals and the ability to take action despite the voices in your head?”  Well, totally independently, two students, one my daughter and the other George, a 400 pound guy with no toes on his right foot due to diabetes, were coached through this technique.  Totally independently, without my goading, they said the same thing: “It turns off the voices in my head.”

The light went on.  I could create the workshop.  Guide people to clarity in a balanced matrix of healthy, achievable, well-formed goals.  Then teach them a technique  that, in only one hour a week,

1) Would provide all basic fitness
2) Help them deal with the fear that arises whenever we try to change.
3) Raise and sophisticate their energy.
4) Help them deal with stress.

If they would then commit to practicing this for an hour a week, for just six weeks…I think that something extraordinary can happen.  Yes, there is more to The Path that Scott and I are laying out.  But I wanted to make a clear statement of our basic intent.  And no, if you already have

1) The physical fitness you want
2) The career you want
3) The love relationship you want

This won’t be something radical and world-shaking for you.  Absolutely.  But I have honest reason to believe that we’re doing something very special, and very new here, and I can’t wait to share it.  If this sounds like what you’re looking for, go to www.Rmax.tv and learn more.

June 24th, 2006 in Los Angeles.  It’s going to be phenomenal.

Steve

More ranting: our current political scene

Can anyone out there say honestly that if they were Iran, they wouldn’t want nuclear weapons?  After all, it’s not too much to suspect that if Saddam had had them, he’d still be in power.  And the question of intent doesn’t keep us from invading, does it?  We recently have an example of a preemptive war fought with bad intelligence…and that is absolutely giving the benefit of the doubt to those who made those decision. 

But if Iran is developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, and our government wants to make a case for invading to the world, isn’t it obvious to both sides, Right and Left, that this administration has handled itself with…um…less than optimal efficiency, clarity, forthrightness and intelligence?  Just a few thoughts on the current political state:
1) There is reasonable doubt that the evidence America presents to the world is accurate.  The recent catastrophic failure in Iraq makes that clear.
2) There is reasonable question about the readiness of our military resources to handle everything we are asking it to do.
3) There is reasonable doubt about the current allotment of our national treasure.  Honest and informed debate about our future debt load seems pretty non-partisan.  And mightn’t our domestic issues be better addressed if we weren’t stretched so thin?  If the military-industrial complex were not getting so large a chunk of our tax dollar?  Remember: ANY ORGANIZATION EXISTS TO PROMOTE ITS OWN SURVIVAL.  Never make the mistake of forgetting this.  Eisenhower certainly didn’t.  A state of perpetual war may or may not be necessary…but it would certainly fit the needs of an organization that eats tax dollars and children. Note that I’m not blaming the men and women within it—they are no more responsible for what is happening than your individual cells are responsible for your drunk driving.
4) There is reasonable question about the honesty of our leaders.  Just a year ago, weren’t Bush and Chaney and the others protesting the depictions at Abu Gharib, saying “America doesn’t torture”?  And haven’t they, or their representatives, recently been protesting just that need?  What?  And didn’t Bush claim that surveillance requires court order?  And then turn around and say that there wasn’t time to get them?  One might say that such deception is necessary in time of war…but you can’t then say that the speaker’s words can be trusted.  And if the world cannot trust the words of our leaders, how shall we build a coalition if Iran is a genuine threat?  We have a real, real problem here.
5) With the degree of evangelical Christianity that seems to be influencing our government, how can anyone think that we are genuinely dealing with the Moslem world with respect?  Give me a break: the core tenant of any major religion is a superiority complex.  Deep down, they all feel that they are the only Way.  Any other Way is, at the least, misguided and wrong-headed.  America as a non-sectarian state can deal with the Moslem world just fine.  As a Christian nation, there are certain…problems that are obvious, and dangerous.
6) Was there a better way than invading Iraq?  Yes.  Stay in Afghanistan and build it up, and create democracy there.  All right—now that we’ve made a horrible mistake, how do we deal with Iraq?  First…GET THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE MISTAKE THE HELL OUT.  That would show the world that we are serious about understanding that we erred. 
7) Unless it wasn’t a mistake. The original reason we went to Iraq was WMDs, remember?  When it turned out there weren’t any, the motivation was magically retrofitted to bringing democracy.  Sort of like after the civil war the term “States Rights” was bandied about 10 times more than it was prior to hostilities…BEFORE the Civil War, southern spokesmen knew damned well they were fighting to preserve their society, and that that society rested on the “Peculiar Institution” of slavery.  Our memories are so damned convenient.  On the other hand, there are those who believe that WMDs were an excuse to go in, install a government we want, and grab oil.  Ur…my understanding of human nature suggests that motivations are never simple—that in all likelihood there was a real mash-up of reasons, some of them honest, some not.  But what’s clear is that either there was gross incompetence, or dishonesty.  I don’t see how anyone could say there was both competence and honesty at work here. 
8) We need to apologize.  To Hans Blix, at least.  Remember the U.N. arms inspections?  Remember all the right-wing pundits saying this guy was an idiot?  Turned out he was right.  THERE WERE NO WEAPONS.  I haven’t heard one apology, one “ur…sorry we slandered you to the whole world, Hans, old buddy.”  And while we’re at it, how about France and Germany, who said there wasn’t sufficient reason to believe Iraq was a threat.  Weren’t they correct as well?  Wouldn’t honest, decent, caring people who really have the intent to be “uniters not dividers” apologize for all of the “Freedom Fries” nonsense?
9) And while we’re at the “uniters not dividers” bit, remember when Bush said that, coming in?  The political situation in America is worse now than at any time in my 53 years of life.  The President HAS to accept some responsibility for the political tone in Washington.  ANY president.
10) Stop demonizing the media.  My friends on the Left hate the media for being Corporate, Right-wing toadies.  My friends on the Right  claim the “mainstream” media is controlled by the Left.  Yeah, right.  Guess what?  There’s a way they’re both correct. Reporters seem to skew a bit to the left, but all the news organs are owned by gigantic conglomerates that skew to the right.  So they end up pretty close the middle.  But if YOU lean one way or the other, anything in the middle looks like it skews to the other side.  Is it heads?  Is it tails?  Only if you’re an ant crawling across the surface.  For God’s sake step back and see it’s a quarter, people.

Anyway, I really, really don’t like talking about this stuff, but the Iran situation could actually be dangerous, and the folks currently in control of America have squandered so much of our cultural, financial and moral capital that it may be difficult to do a damned thing about it.  I put the problem squarely on the current imbalance: both Houses, the executive branch, and the judicial seem to lean to the right, and that’s dangerous as Hell, AND WOULD BE JUST AS DANGEROUS IF THEY LEANED TO THE LEFT.  If you love the direction America is going, credit it to the Right.  If you’re worried, make a course correction. 
End of rant.

Name of Australian Aborigines...

A few weeks back, I used the term "Abo" to refer to the native peoples of Australia. A reader observed that this was similar to the term "Nigger."  I don't know if that's true, but it immediately sent up a red flag in my head, and a call out to anyone who knew what the appropriate term might be. I had a chance to speak with a knowlegeable anthropologist this last weekend, and he remarked that they call themselves "the people"--like everyone else does, and that their mythology suggests (of course) that they were made first, that they are closest to God, who loves them best, and so  on.  But by what term do they refer to themselves?  The closest answer I've found is: Anangu.  This term originally seems to have meant human as opposed to non-human life forms, but since the arrival of those pesky Europeans has come to mean Aboriginal as opposed to non-Aboriginal.  So until new information arrives, it's Anagu.  And apologies to my many Anagu readers.

Steve

Oh...on firing people who make mistakes...

I didn't mean to say that the main reason to oust the folks who made arguably the single worst mistake in American history by declaring war on Iraq to find weapons that weren't there, was to reassure the world that we're serious about change.  No. The major reason is that the only reason to trust someone who makes a terrible mistake to not make such mistakes in the future, and to clean up their mistake is:

1) they openly, honestly, quickly admit they made a mistake.
2) They demonstrate great flexibility in thought and action
3) They recruit a wide range of new resources and idea input, ESPECIALLY from those who disagreed with them in the past.

Absent these three qualities, no, I don't trust the current administration to get us out of this.  They seem almost absurdly rigid in thought and action. Which is great if you're right, and suicidal if you're wrong.
PLEASE don't think that I think these things because they are Republicans.  I never felt this way about Bush I, or Reagan, or Ford, or Nixon.  This is something different.  This goes beyond party.  I'd say the EXACT same thing about a Democrat if I felt similar fear for the direction of our country. If I wouldn't, I would be a traitor and coward.

Steve

Arrrgh! Politics...

I hate this stuff.  I want so very badly to stay away from this arena, but no matter what I do, current events and conversations pull me back to the realm of the male-female, black-white, right-left crap, and it drives me crazy, it really does.  So I’m going to vent a bit for the next few days…hell, if I don’t do it here, where WILL I do it? 
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It was just in the news today: rapper Busta Rhymes’ bodyguard was shot and killed outside a video shoot.  I am so incredibly, deeply, poisonously sick of this, and also of the criticism of anyone, black or white, who suggests that there is something toxic and self-destructive (is there a word for the crossbreeding of genocide and suicide?) in the world of rap and hip-hop.  I mean, excuse me.  We don’t see that kind of violence in any other form of black music, so it ain’t racial.  You don’t see it in blues, gospbel, R&B, Jazz, pop, or whatever.  You just don’t.  So don’t think you have to defend it on racial grounds.

I have a suspicion about the violence which crops up with sickening regularity in connection with rap.  Its   image, its  thematic content, seethes with death.  There is little honest and true there—a   fraction of black existence is magnified and shouted out.  I trust no artists who deny their pain, their love, their softer emotions.  My guess is that the term “artist” simply doesn’t apply to most of these men and women.  I’m not speaking of Mos Def or Kanye West, who I genuinely respect.  And I have a lot of fun with some of them…can’t deny the infectious beats of Snoop, the bitter irony of Ice Cube, or the house-party hip-hop flava of Will Smith (who gets dissed for being “soft”—he speaks of love and family and joy). 

But I remember going to a Nelly concert, and while I enjoyed watching him fly through the air in a giant track shoe, the preliminary acts were, not to put too fine a line on it, PITIFUL.  I’ve watched concerts my whole life.  Seen black and white acts from around the world.  Never in my entire life had I seen a lower level of talent and ability commanding a stage.  They couldn’t sing.  They couldn’t dance.  They couldn’t play instruments.  They just hunched across the stage mouthing doggeral as the crowd went wild. 

Last night on the Superbowl, there was a terrific, telling commercial with P. Diddy and Jay Mohr.  On it, Diddy wanted to make a rap song with Mohr’s client…a can of Diet Pepsi. The result was hysterical.  They built an entire, catchy, radio-worthy song around a can that could occasionally hiss to the beat.  Hoochies, singers, synthesizers, dancers, guest artists…they had it all.  Wow!  An instant hit. 

And all the can could do was hiss.  And you know something?  That is ultra-believable.  I think that part of what goes on in the rap community is that most of them know that they are created by producers purely for image, that they are frauds.  That they have no real talent to fall back on, and that their shelf-life is shorter than celery.  They taste the money at the top, knowing that it can all be taken from them so easily.  And that, my friends, breeds fear, and fear breeds violence.

Add to this the incredible thuggish image system.  Do you really believe that there are not real, genuine thugs among them?  That either before or behind the microphones there are not real killers, real drug dealers, real gangsters?  It simply stretches the imagination.

In a musical genre where even the sweet-faced girls croon for “roughnecks” and “soldiers” what in the living hell do you think is going to happen?  To remain silent about the diseased ethics and morals being promoted as entertainment, even as the death statistics mount, is to be complicit with the destruction of your own community.  I am ashamed that so many remain silent on this, or protest the criticism, and when I hear right-wing commentators dancing around the issues of whether this actually represents what black people are, I want to cry, because in too many cases, I hear reasonable and intelligent black commentators say: “yes.”

I had dinner with a very famous black playwright once, and this person defended hip-hop culture most eloquently.  I cannot deny the power of the arguments, or the clarity of the thinking behind them.  And yet…and yet…

I open the newspaper, and look at the headlines.  Another one bites the dust.  Name of God. When will it be acceptable to say that the Emperor has no clothes?

MENTAL SYNTAX

What is mental syntax?  This is the ORDER in which we do things.  If you are opening a safe, 6 left,17 right, 24 left is very different from 24 left, 6 left, and 17 right.  Same numbers.  Completely different result.

In the creation of a life you can treasure, there are certain things that must be done, and they must be done in certain sequences.  Part of what you do in seeking out mentors and teachers is to determine the sequence in which they perform the component aspects of their high-level skills.

Writing, for instance:  Generally, I will start with an idea, or a theme.  If a theme, I imagine the effect I want to have on an audience, and begin to dream up the kinds of scenes that might have that effect.  After those scenes suggest themselves, I look into the structure of the hero’s Journey, and arrange those scenes in a sequence of sorts…all very loosely, based more on feeling than logic (this is, of course, the advantage of understanding plot until it has reached the point of Unconscious Competence).  Once a loose structure evolves, I’ll notice that the story has begun to people itself with characters.  Generally misty ghosts, but characters nonetheless.  I then begin to research the world until those ghosts solidify and begin to speak to me about their feelings, hopes and dreams.

Sample dialogue creates itself at this point, and it gets easy to go deeper.  I’ll begin to structure story and character in a screenplay format using Final Draft, moving the “Index Card” outlining screens around, again, using instinct.  Just feeling my way through.  I’ll do this every other day or so (giving my mind an opportunity to rest) and then, at some point, I’ll start writing a script.  When the script is done, I read it, put it aside for a few weeks, and then read it again.  If it feels right, I turn it into a book, polishing, expanding, and changing as I go. For the last eight years I’ve written pretty much like this, and it feels great.

This, of course, is just my approach.  When you talk to other teachers and writers, learn theirs…and then evolve your own!

Confidence

Just came back from the Futurehealth brain functioning conference in Palm Springs.  I gave several lectures, and attended a few, in-between hanging out with my daughter Nicki, and driving back early on Sunday to watch the Superbowl with my wife.  I can’t believe I just watched a football game.  Ah, well…
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We’re going to talk a bit about some of the things I learned there. 
Nothing radical, but to have long-held beliefs so clearly reinforced is of great value.  No, I’m not going to say something new every time you visit my blog or open one of my e-mails.  I’m going to talk about the most important, core aspects of performance, and relate them to writing, relationships, and fitness.  That’s it, folks.  There are plenty of places to get other info on the Web.  Lifewriting is about results in these three arenas.
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The most interesting person I met at the conference this time around was a gentleman named Nathaniel Zinsser, Phd. He runs the Human Performance Lab at West Point…in other words, he is responsible for keeping our warriors alive, functioning, and guarding our ramparts under killer stress.  I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum—we all want these young men and women to perform brilliantly, humanely,  efficiently…and to come home safely.  And Dr. Zinsser (who is also a Sandan in Shotokan karate…you could see it instantly in his bearing) is one of the real gurus in this field. 

And of course, what he had to say applies to all arenas.  We’re going to start with his thoughts, and my thoughts on them.  His first observation was that:
“Success is all about confidence.”  Re-read that.  Before we go forward, ask yourself what confidence means to you, in all of its positive and negative aspects.  WHAT IS CONFIDENCE?  Because, according to one of the world’s great experts, your ability to achieve anything you desire in life is going to rely upon your storehouse of this quality.  What is it?  How do we get it?  How do we lose it?

One of the best ways to increase confidence is to increase the clarity with which you envision your goals.  Spend ten to twenty minutes a day just envisioning the results you want. Clearly.  As sharply as possible.  Imagine what it will feel like.  Look like.  Sound like.  Do this first thing in the morning.  Where will you live?  How happy will your family be?  What will your body look like? Increase this clarity: really GO FOR IT.  Feel the satisfaction.  There will be obstacles…but you mustn’t let them get in the way.  Keep your eyes on the prize, people.  Writing…relationships…fitness…it doesn’t matter.  An important part of our psyche is goal-driven.  If we ignore it, we can drift aimlessly, and lose our chances for success and happiness. 

Ten to twenty minutes.  What in the world is more important than creating your future?
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Modeling: Beliefs

Modeling--Beliefs

We talk a lot about body, mind, and spirit…but how exactly do you quantify such things?  It’s my belief that the ultimate truth of these subjects is beyond direct discussion, but we can have great fun dancing around it.

The discipline of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) long ago said that if you want to pattern the skills of another human being, you would examine the belief systems (emotions), mental syntax (mind) and use of physiology (body), and then implant them into your own consciousness.

This can easily be applied to writing.  Our belief systems are composed of symbols and the emotions anchored to them.  What are relationships?  When you close your eyes and think of one, do you visualize happy, intimate people, or a screaming fight?  A ball and chain, or a secure home?

When  you think about career, do you visualize a service-oriented existence?  A thieving salesman?  An impoverished artist?  What beliefs underlie each of these images?

When you think about the body, do you visualize someone who can’t change their body composition regardless of what they do?  A child being abused?  A master athlete?  A sensual encounter?  What do each of these images say, and what beliefs underlie them?

When you create characters, do you create them with conscious awareness of the way their lives represent belief systems on your part?  On the way their actions and the world’s reactions represent your thoughts on the ethical structure of the universe? 

These things cannot be separated from the life you yourself lead.  Look more deeply into that life…find your attitudes. Decide if they will actually take you where you want to go.  If so, nurture them.  If not, change them.

How?  Well…that would be telling, wouldn’t it?  Heh heh.  More later…

Annapolis (2006)

The best review of this movie I've seen so far read something like: "a perfect movie for people who've never seen a movie before."  If there was a cliche' unturned in this tale of a welder (James Franco) who claws his way into the naval academy to be tormented by a strict officer (Tyrese Gibson) and aided by an inspiring female (Jordana Brewster) I couldn't find it.  Boxing movies, military training movies, love movies, lower-class aspiration movies...it's all here, and been done better elsewhere. 
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On the other hand, I kind of liked it.  I admit to being fascinated by the rites of passage, perhaps because we have so few of them in our culture, or perhaps just because I longed for them so deeply as a boy.  we long for love, for belonging, for that illusive line which, once crossed, means that we are finally adult.  I watch my son developing, and he wants so much to be a "big boy."  He'll want that his whole life, and look for signs that he's reached it.  When he's old and gray, he'll wonder how he missed the moment at which it happened...if it ever did.  Strange, and powerful, this thing called adulthood.
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For me, I think the moment of adulthood is the moment at which we stop blaming others for our lives.  We take responsiblity, with all of its warts and wonder, for what we have made of ourselves. This is so incredibly hard.  Women, throughout time, have often considered this to be motherhood.  Men have often considered this full employment---or in other times, going to war.
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I don't really know what it is.  I know that somewhere along the way I seem to have crossed that line.  I'd be interested in hearing what some of you think that line is, though.   When do we become adults?

And by the way..."Annapolis" only gets a C+.  Still liked it, though.

Conducting Light

I’ll say this again: your ability to succeed in life will be in direct proportion to your ability to maintain flow state under pressure.  Last week on “Commander In chief” there was a bit about how potential contributors to a presidential campaign wanted to watch the President dealing with an emergency.  This week on “24” a weasel of a president claimed that he had acted under “duress” in an emergency, excusing felonious behavior.

One often hears that grand excuse: “I was under stress” or “I  was drunk” or “I was tired” supposedly excusing bad behavior.  Don’t you understand?  The reason that you   meditate, or work out, or pray, or whatever else you do to center yourself is SPECIFICALLY so that, under pressure, you remain balanced and can perform with grace.

All military training, all martial arts training, is centered around this idea.  And if you would have a career in the arts, what in the world do you  think is going to happen to you when the contract comes due? When you know that a publishing company is betting thousands, or a movie company betting millions, on your performance?  Will you fold?  If you can’t confidently say “I will perform with grace under pressure” why in the world should they trust you with their money?

All that there is is structure and flow.  Structure is the component aspects of your skill.  Flow is the ability to express and creatively recombine these aspects.  The Tao of performance is the ability to play Jazz with your chosen skill while the house is burning down around you. 

Of course, some of you will immediately note that such laser focus can itself be dysfunctional.  Of course.  I deliberately chose an extreme metaphor to evoke that response from you.  And now I ask: what part of you was it that gave that knee-jerk response?  Was it the best and strongest part? Or a part that wants an excuse to remain at the level of mediocrity, and is afraid of its own excellence?  Only you can answer that.

Meanwhile, I watch people who are good, caring folks writing me about how they can help their friends, their loved ones, their communities.  HELP YOURSELF FIRST.  To bring light to the people you love, FIRST CONDUCT THE LIGHT INTO YOUR OWN WORLD, and THEN channel it outward to your family and community.  Jerry Pournelle said to me once that if I wanted to save drowning people, first get my own feet on dry ground, and then throw them a line.  Despite our drastically different ways of looking at certain social issues, I love that man.  The truth in that image is stark and clear.

Unhappy with the direction of the country?  FIX YOURSELF FIRST.  Don’t blame your friends, family, leaders, or world for being the same human being you are, with the same limitations, prejudices, and inabilities to cope with stress. 

Balance yourself.  Seek out the darkness within your own psyche.  Look at the lies you tell yourself about your career, your relationships, your body…and fix them.  Remember, all you are seeing in the external world is a reflection of who and what you are.  If it frightens you…it should.  If it gladdens you…it should.

The choice is up to you.