Further Lessons in Diverstiy Training

Here is a story pulled off the wire about addressing the need for proper communication as it affects performance during adversity….

During a recent intense conflict, a GI was running and dodging exploding shells, making every effort to survive the onslaught. Seeing an open foxhole, our brave GI jumped into it and to his surprise he found a Native American dressed in tribal warfare garb sitting staunchly, arms crossed, gazed fixed and straight ahead. Having paid the brave soldier no attention whatsoever, the soldier frantically tried to communicate with this Indian about what was going on and where he was from. Since his efforts were to no avail, our soldier had an idea that maybe he can communicate with this fellow through so kind of improvised sign language. After all, we all remember what we were taught about how Indians are especially adept at the use of such a form of communication.

The soldier thought to himself, maybe I should find out what division this Indian was assigned to, that way I will know more about what he is doing here. In his attempt to communicate with the Indian, the following dialogue was relayed to us via translation after the fact:

In trying to determine the unit this Indian was from, the soldier first established the fact that since the Indian was so far behind enemy lines, he must have come here from the esteemed 101st Airborne Division. Extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI rose his right hand high over his left arm and made a slowly descending action, fluttering his fingers up and down quickly (like simulating rain) until the downward action stopped at the top of his outstretched arm. He repeated this action a few times, all the while the GI was asking “Are you with the 101st Airborne Division? You know the paratroopers…”

The Indian just sat there expressionless and motionless, seemingly ignoring the GI. Since the GI noticed this lack of acknowledgment, he decided to continue his line of presentation until he received some form of recognition from the Indian.

Again, extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI used his right hand to make his fingers walk up his arm from wrist to elbow. He repeated this action a few times to make sure it was noticed. This time he repeatedly asked the Indian, “Are with the Infantry, maybe the Big Red One?”

Again the Indian sat motionless, unflinching…

Desperately, our GI now used his logic to determine that maybe this Indian was part a failed armored division incursion. Once again, extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI used his right hand and aggressively grabbed and released the wrist of the clenched fist arm to help convey the message... “Are with the Armored Division, old Ironside or the like?”

Once again no reaction and our GI was now getting frantic, but a flash come to him, almost a revelation. As a last gesture of sign language, our GI made two circles by touching his thumb to his index finger and raised these circles to his eyes rapidly moving these two circles toward his eyes and away from them quickly, like looking through imaginary binoculars. While doing so he asked our Indian friend, “Are you some kind of scout? A lookout for the Calvary division?”

With this last gesture, the mysterious Indian screamed and jumped straight up as if wrought with sheer terror. In one fell swoop he was out of the foxhole and began running blindly, almost running for the sake of his very life. As the bullets flew and the bombs burst, the Indian finally jumped into a different foxhole and, low and behold, these was the Chief of his tribe, in full regalia. Not wasting another moment of breath, our Indian proclaimed to his Chief in their native tongue…

“Greatest pardon for this interruption, my great chief, but you wouldn’t believe these barbarous White Men. One of them came into my foxhole and frantically signed to me…” “As the sun goes down and the people go away, I am going to f%&k you in your ass until your eyes bug out of your head.”

As for the lesson learned… Be sure to adopt proper, effective communication lest your words be offensive to others. That is, of course, unless it was your intention all along to violate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protocol.

Read more

Friends and Technology

The march of technology provides us with a level of interpersonal connection that was unheard of even ten years ago. The cell phone, the Internet and the marriage of the two in smart phones, like the CrackBerry and iPhone, have rapidly increased our ability to stay in touch with an ever increasing universe of friends. Do we have the time for all these other people? Are we ignoring our true friends and loved ones in the process by being connected to the others?

I got a kick out of a few of my old college buddies chasing me down on FaceBook and reminding me of the old good times had via faded photographs and dusted off stories. Should I be using my time to chat with them when I could be spending more time with my family, or actually visiting with friends? I now have a means to remain in some sort of contact with old college roommates and buddies and I believe I will continue to use my FaceBook account. As for Twitter, Tweets and text messages, they just don't do it for me. One hundred and forty characters a message. Go ahead, use it for telling me to bring milk home after work. I can see the use in that, but I don't need to know that someone else is bringing home milk to their family after work. If I am to be so informed, maybe they can pick up an extra container and drop it off at my house so I do not have to do it.

After all, this technology allows us to keep in touch with more people and we get to see small glimpses via photos, videos and messages about what they are doing with their lives. We become welcomed voyeurs into the lives of these remote peoples for we will rarely interact with them online and may never speak or meet with them offline.

Technology makes it possible to disrupt real friendships with this voyeuristic stream of inanity. Have we come to a time when new social networking might make you inattentive to your first social network: your family? How many times have we witnessed the overextended parent, head down, tapping away on their iPhone oblivious to what’s going on while they are supposedly “watching” their child play? I wonder how many children are competing for time and attention with the tiny people living in that smart phone. I wonder how many times a child has raised his head to seek out the loving approval of his parent only to see the glow of the LCD reflected in their eyes? No love for you today Junior, can’t you see I am busy taking the "What Type of Parent Are You?" quiz.

If you believe in evolutionary psychology, the theory of anthropologist Robin Dunbar called Dunbar’s Number states that the maximum number of healthy social relationships a person can maintain at any one time is approximately 150. You might not think these on-line relationships belong to your social relationships but they are taking up social and emotional space. You are chunking information about a person into your memory. A person who you went to high school with - not really a friend then or now – who just got back from a trip to Oshkosh, WI, pictures, video and text narrative freshly posted ½ hour after his return home. You can’t just turn that information off as it has been tagged all over your FaceBook wall like some repressed graffiti spray painted in neon orange. As you take this information in, it’s probably parked right next to the other random facts of your childhood like song lyrics or television commercials or the indelibly etched vision of this 13 year old guy naked in the gym locker next to yours. A comedian named John Bowman does a bit about how much stuff we can pack into our 50+ year old brains and the consensus is that there is not much room left. Pack, pack, pack…

I was just trying to find a picture of some boys in a locker room on Google to go along with this article but all I could find was gay pornography. I had to paint the gym shorts on a few of these kids using Photoshop.  I have to go someplace else!

At some point, you’re only storing a very small amount of data on a slew of people, which makes those relationships tenuous as best. The issue here is that you’re threatening the strength of all your relationships as you expand your reach. So you make a conscious effort to store more about ‘good’ friends and family, but I’m not sure we’re wired that way.

There is a reason why you lose touch with friends. The turning point comes when they aren’t really your friends anymore. Maybe we have outgrown them or our experience and wisdom requires us to seek others to whom we can more readily relate to. Recent research by Gerald Mollenhorst suggests that we replace half of our friends every seven years. I looked it up on Google; that’s what the Internet is really useful for (besides pornography). I question whether technology is inhibiting the natural shedding of friends necessary for us to move on, to establish new friends and evolve as a person. Maybe I need to get rid of my oldest, dearest friends to pick up one of my new “old” friends that I used to admire so much for making farting noises with his hands.

Read more

The Cost of Individualism

Anarchists, Communists and other "foreign radicals"

in sinister control of the Bonus March - Money promised to veterans of WWI

I was raised in this place, America, where my forefathers came from Italy to seek a new life, to taste the fruits of freedom made from their own hands, sweat and blood. I learned, since elementary school of the great sacrifice of others, a nation that was born from revolution and ideas of common men, who overthrew a government of entitlement of privilege for a government based on the rule of law.

I remain grateful to have been born an American and more importantly, an individual, with a voice that cannot be suppressed. Not everyone needs to like me or believe what I say, but I assume, without relaying great offense, that what I have to say will be tolerated. I usually reserve what I have to say to my circle of friends and colleagues. I believe in the right to express myself to a larger audience as the need arises. I know I will always be able to think on my own and express myself as an individual on something as solitary or as universal as this blog. There is no need for a response but the link is available for commentary as others see fit. No censure will be imposed by me here…

Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism have become the new weights used to balance the pans upon the scales of justice over the course of my adulthood. Some believe Conservatism imposes its values on democracy as the only true path. For others, we are moving toward socialism and communism. Reality is somewhere more at the center of the extremes but centrism is not newsworthy and much less entertaining. There seems to be only one way, one argument that is acceptable. Both the Right- and the Left-leaning media show contempt for, and often belittle, the opposing view. Chatter has become the current word for news and is delivered in sound bytes, Tweets, and Facebook posts. The media has provided us the means to interact with the professional news media and we may be able to see our Twitter contribution flash across the screen. Dystopian Newspeak as described in some detail in George Orwell’s 1984. It is amazing what people will accept as fact and reliable journalistic content. The time is upon us where individuals can share their voice as important commentary, no matter how mundane.

We have been bombarded with news reports recently about all of the new disclosures of “extraordinary interrogations” produced by the usurpers, elected by our free society, using the office of almighty power to become administrators of torture. They abandoned the principles many, my own fathers included, have sacrificed to preserve and have degraded their esteemed office and have tainted our country in the eyes of its many admirers. Since when has our message to the world been so blatant; meet in secret, twist the law to your will and force it down the throats of all societies. I hear the whispers in the streets, “Why does the rest of the world hate us so?" we say to one another in amazement. Did we really believe there would be no consequences as we continue to rail against the Muslim fundamentalists that attacked us after we have invaded and tainted their own soil with their own blood?

The parallels throughout history have been well documented. We soundly condemn ethnic cleansing whenever and wherever it occurs. We deem the crimes perpetrated against humanity during the Inquisition and the Holocaust as the most abhorrent times of our history. Pursuit of racial purity and doctrinal religious imposition at the literal expense and existence of the others has been allowed and often welcomed by societies. There is a complacent understanding that those acting on our behalf do so to save us from the danger and taint of the others and will allow us to preserve both our culture and our very lives. We make an exception to our values for the promise of the greater good. We know the consequences of what is being perpetrated but we remain isolated in our electronic cocoons thinking to ourselves, “I am not responsible”.

Individualism may be understandable and even excusable, but it should not be eternally acceptable. All-white juries have unjustly convicted black defendants in this country. Have we not come to truly embrace the spirit of the Civil Rights Amendment to be part of our collective soul such that a trial cannot be fair unless at least some jurors are the same race as the defendant? This is born of the same idea that those others, who art thou not me, will never understand each other. Maybe the times are truly changing and there is new hope for this melting pot and the proverbial stew from which I received nourishment in my youth. “Si, se puede!” I hear you my brother! Maybe, as Obama has said, “We must be the change we believe in”.

Why should I write of this? Whose deaf ears will my message pass to? I have always believed that, in America, I can criticize my government to my heart's content knowing that there will be no midnight knock at my door. Paranoia remains and I have a sneaking suspicion that at the moment I press the post button on my blog, this message will have already been received, decoded, filtered and registered in the database of criminals of the state. In the meantime, the real criminals of society provide the legal justification that torture is meant to protect us and has provided actionable intelligence. Dick Cheney is on every news show lately justifying what was done and that the ends justified the means. I am reminded of the story in Genesis where Satan temps Eve to eat the apple. Maybe eating the apple is good for us as we were taught that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”.

After all, these are the actions of others against the others. What is the extent I am willing to take responsibility for my own actions? What of holding accountable others as is available to us all via the newly open electronic media? To write takes time and time is a precious commodity. I do not know if I want to sacrifice my time and may let others do the talking for me.

But wait; was there just a knock on my door? On my, I hope it is that package I ordered from Amazon.com that I paid for with my over-extended credit card.

Read more

NOW here this - Impressions of an Eckhart Tolle Lecture

"Marvelous old architecture for LA", I thought to myself as we waited almost an hour to enter Royce concert hall on the campus of UCLA. The lines were separated into one for men and one for women. Everyone was frisked by security on the way in using pat downs and wands, checking for weapons with metal detectors over the door, and all the women’s handbags were opened and inspected, more extreme than usually performed at the airport. I assume Eckhart is a man of peace and we can make the assumption that there were unlikely to be terrorists attending his lecture. I attended this venue for music performances in 2007 and nothing like this happened. The absurdity of it made me think I was actually attending one of those performance artist’s interpretation of George Orwell’s “1984” and this was the audience participation piece related to the imposition of the powers of the state over the masses. To bad the reality of it was not conjured in some playwright’s mind.

When we finally managed to get into our seats there was a lone chair that sat patiently waiting on the stage. Since we were all almost ½ hour late getting into the theatre, a spokeswoman appeared to announce that Eckhart was waiting for everyone to be seated and he would be joining us presently. She was the founder of the “Sounds True” media company and produced some of Tolle’s lectures on CD-ROM and DVD. She said that we should refrain from applause when Eckhart enters as it would interfere with his consciousness or chi or some such ethereal state and I thought to myself, “Oh brother!, This is going to be a long night…”

A few minutes later, Eckhart Tolle took the stage and he reminded me at first of some German wood nymph like someone playing an elfish character for a staging of Wagner’s Ring Trilogy. This unassuming character took the stage and portrayed a very peaceful presence, bowing in the traditional Buddhist manner, before taking a seat and sitting motionless for a few minutes. When he finally spoke, he started with a joke, about the traffic on the freeway, the long lines to get into the theatre and that it was good to bring the angst of the experience in this place with us now for it would soon be “put away”. We were told to concentrate on this present moment and to try to put those past images out of our minds. Clever, this wood nymph attempting to resolve our anxiety, the vexing issues of our collective experience, by simply asking us to step into the present.

I was reminded of the experiences I have had from attending lectures here by Thick Naht Hahn and disciples of the Dalai Lama where a similar collective consciousness was shared and a quieting sense of peace came over the audience. “Attend, my son, and hear what is said…”, I thought to myself.

I have benefited in my life by reading or attending lectures by spiritual teachers. The deep inner study performed by others and presented during a lecture have allowed me listen to their experience, to enrich my life and see things in a different light. Naturally, then, learning to enjoy the present moment would be something that I really have a desire to do. I find I must make a conscious attempt to live in the moment though I still feel trapped by grasping at what is to come. It takes a concerted effort to let the past slip away. Most would greatly benefit letting the past slip by and to use the past as a point of reference for knowledge purposes.

I found him to have an engaging sense of humor that brought in the audience and he blended his message of living in the present with witty anecdotes. He strongly emphasized that the mind is the root of all problems because it has taken us over meaning that we can't control it, but rather, it controls us. However, we can free ourselves from this by becoming totally present. On the negative side, this message was repeated over and over. Ok we understand, even the new age noodle heads with the fake blond hair in the audience (men and women both with the same dyed blond hair, by the way, I don’t want to be taken as a misogynist) got it.

Eckhart stressed embracing the present as the truest state of “timelessness”, that state where bliss is found as taught by others; I greatly appreciated his concept of object versus space consciousness. The interplay of mind-ego as the cornerstone of personal enslavement to ideas was another good part of his lecture. These were excellent ideas and are worthy of much contemplation. I have never really thought of this object consciousness before and how we waste so much of our energy filling this channel of our lives, brilliant observation.

There is some incongruity here with his concept of the present that conflicts significantly with most observers of this phenomenon. Eckhart sees the past and future as time, and the present as timeless. This is counter-intuitive as the past, present, and future is all of time. The present, the now in that sense, is not outside of time. By mentally drawing your attention to the present, you are merely focusing on a different aspect of time. This may aid in a sense of spiritual freedom, but only shifts one's attention temporarily from all things that make up time. It should be noted that the concept of the now in most philosophical and spiritual teachings is that state of timelessness that is generally considered beyond the past, present, and future. Maybe that what he means by the present, the now…

The only negative impression I came away with was that just focusing on living in the present, releasing yourself to embrace this moment, is just a defensive mechanism to avoid depression and to turn on happy apathy when the going gets tough. Maybe this is the psychologist in me speaking, clouded by my storehouse of knowledge, which chains me to my past.

Overall, the lecture was enlightening and informative. I still do not believe that he has all the answers to bring us, through his Power of Now concept, to the one path of spiritual enlightenment. It is a good concept to keep in the arsenal for our struggles in this life. I think spiritual enlightenment would more likely come to you when accept the taking of full responsibility for what we have experienced. Do and go about choosing to follow a future path. You have to realize to expect and be totally willing to make adjustments for what you plan to do in the future. Wisdom comes from what was learned. What you choose to do with that wisdom is up to you and implies taking action toward some future outcome. Living life with blinders on so that each coming moment is to be lived anew is a fool’s folly and those who adopt that philosophy are surely people who could not function well in the world we choose, and are often forced, to live in. Adopting that lifestyle is the ultimate retreat into selfishness and egotism.

On a personal level, I enjoy accepting the experience of living in the moment. The sensuality of it is liberating. I am not ready to give up all of what is past and that which may be yet to come. I am very thankful for the past coming to me in this moment as the richness of all my senses can be awoken with the memory of past experiences. My past and current experience has an influence on which of many possible outcomes I may encounter and my reaction to being in that moment when it comes. Isn’t that the same for all of us? We are at our best when we achieve balance of mind, body and spirit in whatever time we are experiencing.

Read more

Being, Nothingness and Love

Sartre/Camus

I am suprised when people proclaim that it is not possible to truly know one’s self. One of the earliest great philosophers, Socrates, wrote “We must know thyself to be wise, as the unexamined life is not worth living”. What comes out of knowing one’s self? True introspection exposes the deceptions we weave for ourselves and we must choose to recognize them for what they are or justify why we will live with them. That decision affects what we present to the outside world; that face we want others to see.

I have found that most relationships developed later in life are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves and how they want to be perceived by their own delusion of what they should be. If I embrace what I project myself to be, delusions and all, do I care if the relationship is based on the deception that I have embraced as the “true me”. I believe this leads to an emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with what others should perceive them to be. The consequence of this is conflict and cognitive dissonance, and the silent voice in our head that claims, “They do not truly know me”.

Many wiser then I have written that the striving we make is for nothing or no thing. This is at the core of the Existential dilemma. We interpret the world through the rose-colored glasses of our own design. We seem to be required to live our lives to collect things, from material to intellectual to spiritual cargo that we carry with us until we are no more. Possessions are fleeting at best, only attainable in the course of the time of our own existence. Possession as legacy has little meaning to those who come after us unless they too share our delusion and embrace something from nothing. It is cruel to make our delusion the substance of an innocent’s purpose in life. In the end, it is the illusion that leads us to the ruthless probing and clawing toward an achievement that is borne from our own personal fantasy. What we have collected is for our own selfish benefit.

There are four basic tenets of Existentialist thought that are central to human experience: 1) death, 2) freedom, 3) isolation, and 4) meaninglessness. The problem with Existentialism is that it presents the bleakest view on life that has been produced by the philosophy of man. As a youth, I figured myself to be part of a revolutionary movement and the zeitgeist of the great Existentialists, Sartre and Camus, fit my expectations of man as separate from the natural world, God is dead and we are nothing more than the sum of our individual actions and lonely existence. Embracing Existentialism was a call to heroism in the face of cruel facts about existence, and answering that call, we must respond to every day as if it is the first day of our existence. This was what I believed I witnessed when I was younger.

From an intellectual perspective this makes a great deal of sense. Embracing the purely intellectual component though is emotionally sterile, devoid of those elements which we embrace as essential to how we see and interact with our world. Passion, true friendship, empathy and all the other great traits that we have inherited and practice instinctively in the natural world. One of the main problems with Existentialism is that it does not allow for the power of love, which is itself a force that destroys all reason and causality but in a compelling, creative way. From my experience, a great love can have a transforming effect upon you. It can be physical (warmth and fullness), intellectual (inspiration) and spiritual (acceptance of an alternate reality beyond our perception). The ideas of existentialism resonate with our political self, but in my experience, living seems to be truly all about negotiation and compromise, hope and faith, love and forgiveness. These are the profound mechanisms for dealing with others on a common ground beyond the intellect. Experiencing a great love is one force that can open you up to change. Some great early philosopher once wrote that there are two human certainties of our existence, death and change.

Love, of course, does not fit into the realm of the four Existential tenets but is part of the two certainties. I would hope it fits into the certainty of change though for some love and its consequences are a destruction of freedom and brings us that one step closer to a metaphorical death. Considering the Existentialist perspective on love from Sartre where “love is the apprehension of the other's subjectivity, in order that I may know my ‘being-for-others’”. From this perspective love is about a pursuit to know one's self in a way that we cannot on our own. By pairing with someone who is choosing to be with you that you can come closer to knowing a most important aspect of yourself, which is what you are for others or you are “being-for-others”. Sartre put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the pairing must be one that maintains subjective freedom of the individual, because to possess the other would be to pervert the reflection of knowledge of the "being-for-others". Continuing from Sartre, “In reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving”.

We extend love to culminate in the Western institution of the traditional church marriage and verbatim wedding vows that tend to make a love relationship seem like one of possession. Belief in God and church impose a coercive aspect over marriage. This forces a relationship that, by definition, needs to be based on a sense of freedom into one of possession that will be held together by a sense of pending guilt. From this perspective, the obligatory coercion that is imposed upon the relationship turns people into objects.

There is an alternative force that is seen as a catalyst for love that is known as "fate". Lovers often believe that their encounter had to be; there was no choice. We are soul mates. This fateful version of a relationship is delusional but appears to solve the paradox of freedom leading to bondage by removing freedom from the equation. Fate can be a cruel tyrant and fateful lovers may become confined to live out their lives in the pages of their own story.

Sartre's idea of a free separate individual is idealistic. A more realistic view recognizes that seldom are lovers free separate beings, but rather, each lover is a member of strict social hierarchy. The swirling intoxication of unfettered love feels like liberation but is truly a brief reprieve from our other entanglements. We all possess bonds, obligations, and duties associated with other relationships to family and friends. Eventual the love sick must awaken from their enchanted dream. The usual course of intense initial romance is to pass through a brief stage of exclusivity when the paradox of freedom and devotion is most intense or the notion of fate is most believable. The inevitable more mundane and enduring social contract is the next step leading to the long and great plateau that will the resting place of love. The Self is subjugated by the We.

The intense act of falling in love is only a temporary reprieve from isolation where we inevitably will return to the constant tension that is; you are not me. In the beginning of a relationship after the intense romance, we often find that our needs will be out of synch, our desires will diverge, our biological rhythms and tendencies will be different and those differences will have a tendency to enlarge if we have had increasingly divergent life experiences.

Here is where change is required to allow you to adapt to the new requirements of “being-for-others”. Maintenance of self and knowing one’s self allows you to embrace, or at least, except differences from your mate as you accept their place in your life and in relation to you. Is true love and commitment to another incongruent with Existentialism? I hear the voice of the Existentialist and its message resonates within me, but mercifully, my heart belongs to a more encompassing love.

Read more