The Importance of Metrics

The Importance of Metrics

Lyrics:

The power of verse is in the shape of the words

As they flow out the mouth.

The metrics of sound

Coming not so much from the lines themselves

As from the articulated embodiment of the Self.

Like a living, breathing, sui-generated bell,

The knell is the shape of the flesh is the sound of the knell.

And in the tickey-tackey of a regulated line,

you find not the soul, but the mind.

The tools the mind measures with, our cells and curves,

Themselves organized, abstracted from the living fractal world,

This one-sided balance of straight crooked lines,

In which we orient ourselves with the realization of being Alive.

Now turn an eye back at that for a second for a second feature of verse,

That combinations of words can have more meanings than a first-

‘The realization of being alive’ pointing to this space inside us

and that we are all inside.

The recognition of awareness, the shared awareness of being

And Realization also meaning making real from dreaming,

And so this little phrase contains a profound truth,

And in its layered webs of reflected connections

Shines the one that’s always two:

We are here, we are moving, we are here, we are moving.

We one are two, and I am you.

And together we have never been apart,

And we separate and come together.

The realization of being alive!
There’s infinity in that phrase, I could talk in it forever,

But lest you mistake this for an exercise in acting clever

We’d best move on to the obvious objection, the question,

Isn’t my point clouded by poetic affection?

Well, I would say-

That the objection rests on the instrumental empirical assumption

Of the rational function of our communication

And an over emphasis on this material consensus

As the one reality location

When there’s every indication

That we only believe this because born in contemporary Western civilization,

And that it’s anything but a natural or granted perspectivilization.

So, yes, my riff technically was on the nature of languaging,

And whether spoken or sung, it’s almost the same thing.

Except we’ve become obsessed with giving our stories antiseptic cleanings,

When life is a mess, and that mess is the meaning,

And somewhere along the lines we’ve forgotten how to stop believing

That where we’re talking from is what our camera lenses are seeing.

So the objection doesn’t rise in the mind of a dipshit: I love Poetry,

But it takes this message and flips it,

Like you could have an objective without a subject to fill it.

The dry, and defined, we do well to an extreme,

And it’s time to re-awaken this definite life to the possible dream:

This poetry at the heart of all acts of speaking,

From The Lancet, to “hello,” to howling and weeping,

And while stretched and grown through prose we’re at the end of its rope,

And as we struggle it gets tighter and we’re beginning to choke.

We’ve practiced our scales on this umbilical noose,

And it’s time for solos of unmediated truth.

And if by the death of our pasts we’re to find birth again,

This spiraling path will lead us to become our own origins.

And while that may sound sloppy, or some kind of regression

To a culture that says ‘a simple chemical imbalance is the cause of depression,’

And in which it makes the news when a researcher says “we don’t know, exactly,

We’re a little bit surprised, our studies show that our studies may be compromised,’

And a pause. ‘It’s almost as if…our culture is a cause of that cause.”

And they’d trace that tired line of causation ad infinitum

Without a gut understanding that they’re never gonna find one causal cause

Unless they look behind themselves, to this moving place of stillness.

And though it’s still just an echoing rumor

That we might not simply be rational consumers

You can hear the first cracks and large scale shakings

Of a long taken for granted foundation of meaning making.

So as we lean over the edge of this experimental human inquiry,

Our sense making only makes sense in becoming human being poetry.

When ‘God is everything’ and ‘there is no God’ both speak of this reality,

Lines are revealed as meaningless without our intentionality.

Which is to say, our reason is a subset of our musicality.

So today, given this heavy world of apathy,

We must remember our capacity to become and overcome gravity,

Embracing this absurd body of comic tragedy.

Spoiler alert: though united everlastingly in love, we all die.

But if you play the melodies of love and death entwined,

Let your language be measured as bursts of living fire,

If you have the courage to aspire to construct of your limited life a creative act,

Accepting this sacred pact, then death is not for naught.

The world has never been built by some disembodied thought.

But by hearts and minds and eyes and feet choosing

Heartful, mindful, iambic foot like doing.

All this doing! And not a thing to do but rest.

And let each note rise as a silent ‘yes,’

Glowing like the morning of this One Turning in your breast.

Let your joyful play sing open. Open to the Love

That has gladly crawled eons of improbable labyrinths

For just this one fleeting audience with your warm and wounded heart.

I’d say ‘start,’ now! And I also mean “stop!”

Let all the burdens that you’re carrying drop.

Stop thinking, stop trying, stop just for one moment stop resisting and controlling

And live through your dying!

How to do it? What to do? How to do it what to do…

When you’re asking ‘what to do,’ and “Who am I” you’re doing it.

And when you’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it right--

And when you’re doing it right, you’re not doing a damn thing!

Shake everything off and let your empty soul sing!

And relaxing into the vibrato of the timeless and all time

You might be surprised when it already rhymes.

And whether you call your role in this symphony poetry or kung-fu knitting,

do it with the care of a blackbird sitting on a cedar limb.

And dancing to this carefully carefree hymn awakens a whole new seeing,

And the limits of lines, once binding, become freeing.

As this work: submitted with gratitude, and for the benefit of all beings.

Kaizen/Smriti Part Two (continued, obviously, from part one.)

More from the third sense of 'resolution:' a resolution of what is abstract into what is practical and direct. Or: what's Eros gonna do?

Despite my natural inclination to say, 'let's wait and see' (part of the idea of Kaizen, after all, is an embrace of the possibility and reality of constantly changing vision), I do at the moment have a sense of direction/function for this, or I wouldn't be doing it.

If time is a frontier there are no more modern pioneers, except in the individual case, as one grows through that orientation of mind. I would say that our pioneers are well beyond what we call the post-modern (should you have absolutely no conception of what these terms mean, my apologies, but stay tuned, I will be elucidating the distinction I am making between the modern and post-modern much in this year), but this is not so much my interest here, as I am not on the frontier in this sense. Having left our modern settlements to those who will grow through them, a sizable edge of our culturally contemporaneous adult humanity is laying the first solid foundations of post-modern society. Men and women have been here before, but not in numbers sufficient enough to establish a city, a genuine center-of-gravity. What we have seen in the way of post-modernity up to recently has either been exclusively individual or modernity in drag.

A major conceit of this year for this blog (or until I am disabused of it) is that we are at the endpoint of our culture's process of modernity, it has nothing new or surprising for us in a collective sense; we have turned over all of its stones, and large encampments of us are headed for or have begun establishing a post-modern city and society, a place still quite wild and undefined. This, as any process of growth, will be accompanied with great pain and backsliding, much of which we are watching in front of us now, and it is far from certain that we will be able to maintain a sustainable cultural presence there. If we do, it is because we will have been able to remake what it means to be human, individually and culturally, from this level of meaning. As a microcosm of the process, a young person still pulling himself out of the traditional cultural consciousness and family embeddedness, creating for himself an individual autonomous identity, while also reaching into the realm of the post-autonomous not only intellectually but in practical everyday life, I am situated well to document this and push it along. I see in myself the potential to be a city-planner for our new culture, someone actively exploring the implications of this consciousness in this world, and my greatest culturally valuable talent is in the kind of writing I am able to achieve occasionally on this blog, as a sort of essayist and cultural critic.

Practically, that changes little about the blog; it has always been a way for me to test out ideas and present them to whomever is willing and able to sift through them. In addition, though, I plan on a greater amount of engagement (the eternal plan...) as well as using the blog in companion to what I am reading, both for school and for pleasure, allowing me to remember what arguments others are making and how they fit into my angle of attack on the world, something I am terrible at (names), while also giving me the impetus to track through reading outside of my school's curriculum.

Also, as I feel I have a pretty good working sense of a personal philosophy but few opportunities to drag it out into the light of day where it can be challenged, and the blog serves this purpose as well. Not only can this philosophy be found in the accidental, what I happen to be reading or seeing online, but it is open to reinterpretation based on this, and based on the comments and participation of you. In my perfect world everybody is so willing to throw themselves on the table, recognizing just how permeable that thin layer of pretense is that separates our outside and inside world, but as this is not the case, engage me freely as you will, knowing that what you put in in intensity I give back; it is not a demand so much as an invitation to the constant questioning that is this Kaizen/Smriti, that is so integral to the post-modern meaning-making, and so vital a weapon against complacency, one of my pet sins.

With this in mind I hope as well to write at least an entry every day, though this is not a hard and fast rule, and the effort it takes to write some of my more involved entries obviously will prevent this from happening. The idea, though, being that having this in mind constantly, starting the day by starting an entry and finishing it by finishing one will help me keep this whole shebang in mind, Smriti.

Kaizen/Smriti, a resolution, of sorts. Part One

Kaizen/Smriti:

I have decided upon a slightly new direction/function for this blog in the new year, and that direction/function is best seen through the concepts of Kaizen (Japanese through English) and Smriti (Buddhist.) I am using the blog as a sort of record of my year (also guided by these concepts) and as a ground for writing.

Kaizen, which has been a favorite concept of mine for quite a few years, means making continuous small improvements. At each step, there is a pause, a looking-around, and a re-implementation of direction/protocol. The Japanese means "improvement," in the same sense English does, or "amelioration" in the Chinese (改善) but through an American-English translation of Japanese business practices has come to mean "continuous improvement."

I take "continuous" to mean "anew each moment." One will get two very different measurements of the English coastline using a mile and an inch as standards of measurement. I hope to continue to make my standard of measurement smaller and smaller, finding the possibility of fundamental change in each moment, until change and being are synonymous, at which point the game looks quite different.

"Improvement" is a trickier word. Change for the better, of what? My concept of this is something like "healthy growth," but each of these terms carries a good amount of baggage as well, if associated with the word "normative." For now, think of a blooming apple tree.

I should also note that "Kaizen" has a reactive connotation to it, finding a problem and fixing it, to which I would add Otto Scharmer's idea of "presencing," the ability to sense and bring into the present one's highest future potential, which is more active. I include both active and passive, past and future, in my concept of "Kaizen."

This could be terribly inefficient, and I certainly agree here with the old leadership maxim that to do anything even if the wrong thing is better than doing nothing, but quite aware that my disposition is towards theorizing without action I am actively training my capacity to act past theorizing, which is where Smriti comes in.

Smriti is an anglicized Sanskrit word which means literally "that which is remembered," but which has taken on a much greater importance in Buddhism. I will here use it mostly as self-remembrance, and, following Alan Watts, what I really mean here is 'awareness of awareness.' The Chinese etymology is helpful as well. 念 (nian) is usually the translation for "Smriti," and consists of 今 (jin) the character which means "today" or "now," and 心 (xin) which is the character for "mind/heart." What is the mind doing now, and now, and now. The English translation "mindfulness" carries this constant connotation as well, it is something underneath each moment in consciousness, at its most concentrated. When eating, know that you are eating, when walking, know that you are walking, when talking, know that you are talking.

Of course, a zen master may say "stop being mindful!" that is, when walking, walk. No need to know you are doing this. Ultimately I agree with this, but this comes at the end of a long process of mindfulness training, at least if one wants to embody it 'off the cushion,' or outside of a meditation retreat. Neither am I, though, at the stage of merely having the thought "I am walking," but somewhere in between. Eventually, as one remembers to become aware of what's occurring in awareness bit by bit (or word by word, action by action), one realizes that there are too many things to actually literally keep track of, and the mind relaxes and lets awareness watch experience without remarking upon it. Walking is walking, and talking talking, if only temporarily. When I am aware, I can do this, and can see my mind as it inserts that thin film between the action and the awareness. But I am not always aware of what I am doing; I flicker like a light bulb not quite screwed in.

Putting these two together, Kaizen/Smriti, you have my resolution, a New Year's resolution which is continuous; my standard of measurement already much less than a mile, it would be odd for me to try once and check back next year. Resolution is a particularly effective term here, "solution" meaning both a loosening and a fix for a problem, and "re-" being an intensifier tied to temporal repetition. Apply that 're-' to each moment, and you have the concept I am looking for with Kaizen/Smriti. A resolution, 'I will remember,' as a resolution to the problems of living, which is also a resolution of what is abstract into what is practical and direct, and a whetting of the resolution of my awareness to the smallest possible interval.


Glass House, also a project aimed at cultivation of awareness, was more to find out the ways in which I was embedded in others' meaning, the chains of culture and relation behind me, and to bring that in front of me, even if not consciously undertaken as such at the time. It was to discover what roadblocks I kept putting in front of myself, and why. In this, it was largely successful, and culminated in the understanding that the reason I was subjecting myself to such a ridiculous degree of exposure was that I wanted to be found out as a fraud, and I think of this as the natural side of having a persona and an ego, and part of the process of discovering the authentic, another way of thinking of 'Smriti.' One might call this "Thanatos," the death-urge, the desire to destroy the limitations of self at one level of being to foster greater growth.

With that constant resolution creating more and more space for authenticity, for a space where I can act freed from psychological embeddedness in my culture and relationships, in the rituals of being established as a child, comes the unreining of Eros.

For Eros, you can do your own research: Wikipedia's entry is woefully inadequate; I would start with Rollo May's Love and Will. Eros is the creative/destructive force of the universe. Whitehead called it 'negentropy' for its opposition to the physical concept of entropy, and so by 'destructive' I mean the destruction that happens naturally when a new thing is created, not the lethargy of entropy, nor the malice of evil, though I would not rule out that Eros works in ways that can appear to be evil. Personally, I think of it as the delight in guiding creation, and it has a rather specific emotional/psychological/somatic feel to it. And so, if 'Glass House' was an attempt to expose the habits of mind keeping me from expressing myself to the extent of my potential, this project is the vigilance over their impetus, and the release of and identification with Eros.

I should note that not everybody's psychological life revolves around the smothering of Eros, and so while this stage of my life involves the above, this will not be directly true for everyone, or even most people. Each person carries into adulthood their own cultural/familial directives to carry out which must be uprooted and overcome if they are ever to be an individual adult.

But for me, and for now, Kenzai, Smriti, and Eros are symbols of transformation in the Jungian sense, in that they represent for me ways of human-being-in-the-world whose outlines I can vaguely perceive but whose expression I am only barely capable of comprehending, let alone enact within my own consciousness. They represent a way of being more encompassing than my own, but not by so much that it is more than a step or two away.

And with that, 2010.

Quote #8

"Questioning is the track on which the centered person moves."

-Stephen Batchelor

From someone in my program

Out of its context, which was a response to a question I had posed to her-

Hydrogen and oxygen atoms bind at the level of energetic charge to embody wetness, water molecules form, vapor condenses, clouds become heavy with potential for rain, the droplets surrender to the embrace of gravity and fall to first saturate the earth and then to run together. Rivulets become streams which carve their own beds, co-creating a landscape as the drive toward more unity creates river systems moving torrents of water toward an unbounded ocean. And at every instant the system is dynamically alive; every aspect is simultaneously arising and shifting to the next phase of expression, infinitely re-turning to itself as a self-organizing, self-renewing, self-disclosing whole.

Embedded in the whole system, the wetness doesn't know itself, but what if that aspect of being could wake up and become aware of the miracle I see when a wave crashes to the shore, or a fine mist of evening fog bathes my face in its own Presence? What if the wetness had only one purpose, which was to touch my Original Face, and be praised? From that perspective praise might be in the form of my own interior awareness - I aware of wetness as wetness; and then a conversation of appreciation for the mutual caress of mist and my permeable skin where an exchange is always taking place; and then a weather report or a hydrologist’s analysis of a watershed system expressing the same capacity for self-disclosure in the form of empirical data. I suspect there is always rejoicing in heaven whenever and however we dance in the mist.

The Anxious Mind.

An interesting article in the NYTimes, about research positing that anxious people are born with a predisposition towards anxiety.

There are discussions about how to deal with anxiety as well. As somebody with a fairly high level of anxiety, (historically...I don't think I'd fit in the most anxious group, but I'd certainly fit in the next one) though, there's something to be said about actively engaging your anxiety.

Over the last six years I've begun to use anxiety as a sort of red-flag. When I get anxious about something, it locates an issue I've got to deal with psychologically, and is often helpful in tagging shadow material, something I don't know that I'm worried about. This has also led me into meditation, both sitting, and energy-based (qi gong, t'ai chi, yoga, etc) and has been instrumental in my growth as a person for sometime.

My anxiety levels are much, much lower now than they were six years ago, but I'm not, as the article seems to suggest is the only cure, simply managing them. I've used them to head directly at those things that make me fearful, and as a way to locate areas of tension in the body.

I can't imagine I'd be the only one for which this would be extremely helpful.

Dreams of Intimacy

So I had a dream the other night, after coming back from my retreat for school, where I fell in love with one of my classmates (I'm not entirely serious.) In the dream, I was sitting at a table in a restaurant with a classmate from college who I was actually totally obsessed with, but in the dream the two of them were conflated; it was both of them.

We were talking, and then we stood up and embraced, and I felt the most powerful intimacy, that we were both open to each other, not hiding from each other, and I think, really, this is a great way to explain intimacy--it is the feeling of not holding back, of being fully open with another person. You wouldn't find that in the dictionary, though. It's the feeling of being fully present with somebody who is being fully present with you.

I think it's this sense of intimacy that's really missing from our modern sense of the word, which too often assumes a sexual relationship. There was nothing sexual about the embrace in the dream, we were just both present to each other.

It was beautiful.

Ice and frightening.

Skip maybe just to the second half if you're impatient.

One Party Democracy

An Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman, which picks up on something I had been talking about here, in regards to the political differences between the US and China, and how health care is being dealt with.

Reading the title I had thought Friedman was going to talk about how much both parties are so influenced by corporate money that in effect the government had turned into a corporatocracy, but perhaps later.

READ

An Op-Ed in the NYTimes, from Harold Bloom, this century's most prominent literary critic, someone himself who I need to read a few times to begin to understand.

Get Lost. In Books.

More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions.

There is general agreement on the indispensable canon: Homer, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton. From the 19th century until now, keeping only to English and American authors, a slightly more arbitrary selection might include Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and Joyce in England and Ireland. Among the Americans would certainly be Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne; and in the 20th century, Faulkner and the major poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane.

Many of these authors are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value. A freshman may have read Shakespeare before, but the richest and most available of all writers is also the most profound and elliptical. Rereading “Hamlet” and “King Lear” should teach a student Shakespeare’s mastery of the art of leaving things out.

To think well you must rely, in part, upon memory, and possessing Shakespeare and Joyce, Montaigne and Whitman means that you can recall much of the best that has been written.

Whatever our current travails, we now have a literate president capable of coherent discourse, but too many other politicians are devoid of syntax and appear to have read nothing. Aggressive ignorance in aspirants to high office is another dismal consequence of the waning of authentic education.

Harold Bloom, a professor of English at Yale and the author of the forthcoming “Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence,” has been teaching since 1955.

The Samatha Jhanas

Again, my apologies for the formatting. Go to the link at the bottom if interested.

Via Shaman Sun:

Steps leading to jhana/dhyana
There are 9 steps in concentration training leading to shamatha (pali samatha) as explained in Alan Wallace's "The Attention Revolution." What follows is a brief overivew of this map with 9 steps, 6 powers, and 4 types of engagements featured in Wallace's handbook, with additional notes on terminology from different sources (such as "Mahayanasutralankara" and "Shravakabhumi" by Maitreyanatha/Asanga,"Bhavanakrama" by Kamalashila etc.).

	Step	What is achieved	Power by which that is achieved	What problem persists	Attentional imbalances	Type of mental engagement	Quality of the experience	Involuntary thoughts
1	Directed attention	One is able to direct the attention to the chosen object	Learning the instructions (skt. shruti)	No attentional continuity on the object	Coarse excitation	Focused	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
2	Continuous att.	Attentional continuity to a chosen object up to a minute	Thinking about the practice (skt. asaya)	Most of the time attention is not on the object	Coarse excitation	Focused	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
3	Resurgent att.	Swift recovery of distracted attention, mostly on the object	Mindfulness (skt. smrti)	One still forgets the object entirely for brief periods	Coarse excitation	Interrupted	Movement	Flow of involuntary thought like a cascading waterfall
4	Close att.	One no longer completely forgets the chosen object	Mindfulness, which is now strong	Some degree of complacency concerning samadhi	Coarse laxity and medium excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river quickly flowing through a gorge
5	Tamed att.	One takes satisfaction in samadhi	Introspection (skt. samprajanya)	Some resistance to samadhi	Medium laxity and medium excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river quickly flowing through a gorge
6	Pacified att.	No resistance to training the attention	Introspection	Desire, depression, lethargy, and drowsiness	Medium laxity and subtle excitation	Interrupted	Achievement	Involuntary thoughts like a river slowly flowing through a valley
7	Fully pacified att.	Pacification of attachment, melancholy, and lethargy	Enthusiasm (skt. virya)	Subtle imbalances of attention, swiftly rectified	Subtle laxity and excitation	Interrupted	Familiarity	Involuntary thoughts like a river slowly flowing through a valley
8	Single-pointed att.	Samadhi is long, sustained without any excitation or laxity	Mindfulness, introspection, enthusiasm	It still takes effort to ward off excitation and laxity	Latent impulses for subtle excitation and laxity	Uninterrupted	Stillness	Conceptually discursive mind is calm like an ocean with no waves
9	Attentional balance	Flawless samadhi is long, sustained effortlessly	Familiarity (skt. paricaya)	Attentional imbalances may recur infuture	Causes of those imbalances are still latent	Effortless	Perfection	Conceptually discursive mind is still like a great mountain

* Coarse excitation: attention completely disengages from the medit. object. Medium exc: involuntary thoughts occupy the center of attention, while the medit. object is displaced to periphery. Subtle exc: Medit. object remains at center of attention, but involuntary thoughts emerge at periphery of attention.
* Coarse laxity: Attention mostly disengages from medit. object due to insufficient vividness. Medium lax: Object appears, but not with much vividness. Subtle lax: Object appears vividly, but attention is slightly slack.

More here at Dharma Overground.

Anxiety and Procrastination

My apologies for the formatting. Not sure what's going on.

A great article I picked up from Integral Options Cafe.

Meditation has helped me greatly with this, personally. I have always
been a terrible procrastinator, and have relied on various things to
veg-out. The anxiety that comes up when I want to get something
done is the same across the board, felt when I see something I want
to eat, say, or when I have to deal with someone I don't want to talk
to, or approach someone when I'm afraid to. With observation, it
disappears (though this takes practice, and the observation often
must be fairly constant.) This in itself is a large part of my practice.
When I feel anxious, I watch the sensation, and later try and figure
out what about the situation was making me feel anxious so I can
uproot it.

Don't Delay

Understanding procrastination and how to achieve our goals.

by Timothy A. Pychyl

Giving in to feel good: Why self-regulation fails

Focusing on regulating mood can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

We give in to feel good. Give in to what? Food, shopping, drinking, smoking, gambling, and, you guessed it, procrastination. The problem is that focusing on regulating our moods and feelings can lead to self-control failure in other areas.

"Giving in to feel good" is the first part of the title of an important paper written by Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky (complete reference below). Anyone interested in knowing more about issues of the self and self-regulation should search out resources, and there are plenty, written by Dianne Tice or Roy Baumeister, or their students. I have quoted Roy's work before, and I will again given his prolific prominence as a psychologist.

Procrastinators will tell you that the task they're facing (avoiding) is difficult, and it creates bad feelings like anxiety or general emotional distress. Putting off the task at hand is an effective way of regulating this mood. Avoid the task, avoid the bad mood. This is what Tice and Bratslavsky refer to as "giving in to feel good." We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding.

Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs. The last-minute efforts that become necessary when we put off the task usually mean a sub-standard job overall (although not always, and this is a classic reward to the procrastinator and very memorable). More importantly, as Tice and Bratslavsky explain, "the final and overall level of negative affect is likely to be even greater than if the person has worked on the task all along" (p. 152). We actually feel worse later!

In fact, earlier research conducted by Tice & Baumeister across two academic terms demonstrated that procrastination caught up to students in the second term. Whereas in the first term, the non-procrastinators were more stressed, by second term the costs of procrastination became obvious for the procrastinators in terms of course performance, stress and illness.

The message of their research is clear. Putting off a task to control immediate mood results in problems later. They demonstrate this across a number of domains as I noted earlier, including eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, shopping and procrastination. When we give primacy to addressing our emotional distress, we usually do so at the cost of self-regulatory failure. They summarize this key idea with,

"People will engage in behaviors that may be self-destructive (gambling, excessive shopping, overeating, smoking, procrastinating) if the behaviors make them feel better in the short term. Thus, emotion regulation may have a special place in the field of self-control, because emotion regulation takes precedence over other self-control behaviors and even undermines other self-control efforts" (p. 154).

The message to each of us should be clear as well. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run.

I've been teaching my 3-year-old daughter this. A typical "lesson" goes something like this.

Me: "Sweetie, it's time to pick up your toys before we go."
[Mood now visibly changing.]
L: "I don't feel like it. I don't want to."
Me: "Sweetie, according to Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky it's not the best strategy to focus on your feelings now, it's . . . sweetie?? Where are you?"

Ok, so it is about delay of gratification, and we do (should) learn this early in life. But, the evidence seems to show that we all can (and do) act like 3-year-olds at times.

In fact, we may spend a lifetime acting like a 3-year-old, and rationalizing it to ourselves the whole time. I don't feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.

No you don't.

In fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors. Progress on that task will improve your mood.

For example, new research where introverts are instructed to act extraverted shows that the introverts who act extraverted also feel happier (an affective advantage of extraverts). We'll talk about this more in the near future.

For now, the message is, don't give in to feeling good, get going instead - don't delay!

Reference

Tice, D.M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 149-159.

Quote #7

Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love.

-St Francis of Assisi

I read an interesting take on this quote today from the 99th Monkey rephrased like this:

Grant that I might not so much seek to be loved (and understood) as to love (and understand.)

Wow, "real" America is batshit insane.

Three Articles from Esquire:
Is Obama a Fascist?
Obama Birther's Movement Quotes
Obama Birth Certificate Update

"It was pus exploding from a wound."

This is frightening because it really is the end for these people. They have no power other than guns, and no recourse but to violence. While that is a scary thought, the upside is that if they do lash out, that could be the end of the influence of the whacko-right in the country. They are wounded.

Creativity, a baby's world, and happiness.

Occasionally I get behind in my blog reading, and sometimes this creates fortunate coincidences. Like, now.

First, an article in Scientific American about how babies see the world. (both SciAm and the Shambala Sun articles are off Integral Options Cafe.)

"As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

Finally, you can think about what adult experience is like when we put ourselves in the same position as babies. When we travel for instance, we are suddenly surrounded by an unexpected new world and, instead of just focusing on the important things, we take in lots of information at once. That actually makes us more vividly conscious of our surroundings, not less. I think that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris."

Also, on play and pretending:

"...they seem to use their imagination the way that creative scientists do. One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is.

When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what would happen, for instance, if there was a rocket that traveled close to the speed of light. In fact, the ability to imagine these possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of understanding how the world works. Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. Its actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention."

In a second article from Scientific American, researchers look at a way to increase creativity, and find that making something psychologically distant from oneself (anything not happening here, now, and to oneself is psychologically distant) increases creativity around the problem, which makes sense. How playful would you feel if you were trapped in a room slowly filling up with water? You'd probably be freaking out.

It also accords with the candle study, explained in the video below from TED talks:

Basically, people have to figure a simple task out. There are two groups, one given money if they complete it quickly and one not given any money. Classically, you'd expect the group given money as a reward to do better, but they do worse. See, the task they have to do involves some creativity. Giving people money apparently takes away some of their playfulness. (The talk is actually on motivation and the twenty-first century work place. I might talk about it in a later post, it's good.)

One more from TED: something I've put up before:

Finally, an article from the Shambhala Sun on happiness.

Now we can get to the point. It seems to me that the mode of consciousness described in the first article is not unique to babies, we're just educated out of it, at least when we're facing concrete and tangible problems, but we have access to it at anytime, and can certainly train to enhance it (the guys on "Who's Line is it Anyway"come to mind). Of course, the restricted, focused consciousness is just as important, we'd never become adult without it, but we're losing something when we ignore it, something that (as the first video explains) is increasingly needed in our world, and which might be linked to happiness. Or perhaps over-reliance on the focused method of consciousness, the "get-the-loot" consciousness, as the article puts it, causes us to ignore those million little things that are uplifting in the day.

Indeed, though the article in the SS doesn't present it in this light, we need both of these kinds of consciousness to be successful, and in meditation are training both: a simultaneous rigid focus on an open and innocent ("virgin", the article says,) state-of-mind. This could be why both the first and the last article are concerned with paying attention. Children are paying attention to everything, and if you're unhappy, maybe you're just not paying attention.

But children are not enlightened, nor are they all-in-all more conscious than adults (well, healthy adults.) The combination of the two is something attained through growth. As the SS article says, the "get-the-loot" mindset is always looking for something exterior, an experience or thing, while happiness comes from the inside. Babies don't have this, they aren't differentiated from their environment yet.

Remove the pillars of your belief in this world and look around a little bit, at least every once in a while, I guess is the take-home message.

Dark Flow, and limits to knowledge

An oddly written but interesting blog entry about something called "Dark Flow."

The phenomenon is pretty interesting in itself, apparently hundreds of millions of stars are all rushing (relatively) towards one spot on the outer edges of the known universe, something no one saw coming (hence, "Dark.")

I'm more interested, though, in the reaction:

"This is giant on a scale where it's not just that we can't see what's doing it; it's that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can't be right if this is happening. Which is fantastic! Such discoveries force a whole new set of ideas onto the table which, even if they turn out to be wrong, are the greatest ways to advance science and our understanding of everything."

Which, I think, is spot-on. Too often we assume that our models of the world are correct, and we fight to keep them. Rarely does something come along that beggars some sort of contrived explanation.

I think one of the hallmarks of integral awareness (though it is in the healthy scientific consciousness that it first pops its head up) is the knowledge that we don't really know anything, except that we're here, and here is us.

Tarantino and the Ol' Switcheroo

I walked out of "Inglourious Basterds" about an hour ago. If you haven't seen it and think you might, I wouldn't read this now, but I would give the film four stars, out of four. Go see it and come back.

Violent, yeah? Oddly enough, I went to go see this movie with my mom, honestly can't tell you the last time I've seen a movie with her, let alone in the theater. In any case, all my mom would say was "that was so violent." (She'd never seen a Tarantino film before. She actually suggested this.)

Of course, that was the point- the violence was grotesque, and it served the purpose of the film, which was humanitarian. There's a juxtaposition of the violence of the movie (fairy-tale) and the violence the Nazis perpetrated in real life. This movie was a scalping of the Nazis, doing exactly what Goebbels had thought he was doing to film (there's the one line about beating the Jews at their own game.) It dehumanizes them in the worst way, because its dehuminization is a fantasy. Hitler's face getting blown off in the end, all the Nazis getting raked by machine gun fire, is the last laugh, it is the vengeance of the Jew that the main female character proclaims as she taunts the theater-goers to stare into her Jewish face (which is, of course, perfectly blonde-haired blue-eyed aryan.)

But doesn't the violence dehumanize us as much as the Nazis are dehumanized, and so tear apart the whole point of the movie? Again, no, it's a fanciful fiction, which makes the real violence of WWII that much more horrific. Hitler can portray himself as beautiful. In our film, he is disgusting, pimply and old, wearing a cape, a cartoon. That's what you get for being a supreme asshole.

Well, again, I've just seen this an hour ago. It still hasn't quite sunk in, and there's much more in the movie, but that was my first take. What do you think?

Mythic Religion and Containment of the Power Ego

A great post from Integral Options Cafe:

The Benefits of Religion

from Integral Options Cafe by WH

Yesterday morning I was being a slacker and not doing homework, so I watched Top Gun, which was on some cable station or another. I really dislike Tom Cruise so I had never seen this flick, but I had heard that it offered a great object lesson in memetics.

Maverick (Cruise's character) is a hot-shot young pilot, but he is very cocky and takes too many risks to show off his skills. Eventually, through no real fault of his own, his best friend and co-pilot dies on a training mission.

Iceman (Val Kilmer) is the rival pilot, equally as talented, but he flies within the rules of the Navy pilots training program, one of which is to never leave your wingman. Iceman eventually wins the Top Gun competition among the pilots in training. Maverick eventually submits to the military structure and saves Iceman in a real life firefight.

Maverick represents an ego-centered memetic stage of development, while Iceman represents a more authoritarian memetic stage. The film demonstrates through (melodrama and bad acting) that the power-drive of the ego needs some strong containment within authority structures to allow it to reach its potential.

By now, you may be wondering what this has to do with the benefits of religion.

Over the weekend, a video made the rounds online of a pastor up in Tempe (just outside of Phoenix) saying he hates Barack Obama and wished him dead. This same man and some of his congregation had shown up at Obama's speech a little more than a week ago armed with assault rifles and handguns.

Here is the video:

Popout

This video has resulted in a lot of despair about the role of mythic religion in our culture. You can read some of the discussion the video generated at my friend Stuart's Facebook page.

Many people feel that mythic religion has outlived its usefulness, or that it is no longer an appropriate developmental response to a complex world. This is not wrong, but it is only a partial truth. In fact, the mythic worldview is losing its power, and that is partially why those infected with a more malignant version of this developmental meme are reacting with fear-based violence.

However, not all religion is bad, and not all religion is malignant. As is the case with the military structure portrayed in Top Gun, mythic religion offers a structure to contain the power-drive of the raw ego. But mythic religion is only one form of religion (and here we are talking specifically about Christianity, not Islam, Judaism, or other religions). There are many rational, egalitarian, and even some integral stage Christians. It is not Christianity that is the problem.

The problem, rather, is that some of the people who adhere to a fundamentalist religious dogma also adhere to a very rigid and hateful form of ethnocentrism. The result is a profound fear of the other, and the other is anyone who does not share their specific values and beliefs about the world.

In the example of this clown up in Tempe, the other is Obama - because he is liberal, because he holds some postmodern relativist values (a woman's right to choose what happens to her body), and quite possibly because he is black. The Phoenix metro area is already well-known nationally for its fear/hate of all people who are not them, as Sheriff Joe Arpio demonstrates on a regular basis.

When religion in this country isn't infected with this ethnocentric hatred, it performs valuable roles in society. It has been inner city churches that have done the most to help those involved in the tribal and ego-based power drive of gang culture grow out of that. Even Malcolm X, although his faith was Islam, found containment for his power-drives in the authoritarian structure of religion.

In the same way that sports teams or the military provide that rule-bound structure to contain the raging egos of young men, so does mythic religion. When well-meaning but misguided liberals worked to disempower inner city churches in the sixties and seventies, it was the the neighborhoods that suffered for the lack of religious authority.

And none of this even touches the benefits that religion has for its believers. Churches provide community, comfort, and certainty. While we may not share their values or beliefs, most of these believers are good citizens. The few hateful people should cause us to condemn the whole religion.

It's strange that I find myself, an atheist, defending religion so often against other atheists. This is not the first time, and it likely won't be the last that I make these arguments, so I guess it part of what this blog is about - an integral approach.

Moment of Zen, Kennedy Shrug

At Orbit48.

Not sure how to embed this, so you'll have to head there. But it's worth it.

Quote #6

Mencius speaks to Republicans blocking health care reform:

"Talk is easy when you don't have to get the job done."

-Mencius



From The Useless Tree, an excellent blog on Chinese philosophy in the present day.