Are We Jingoists or Patriots?

November 30th, 2009

In my last post, I expressed wonderment about what was going on in the hearts and minds of those Americans on the political right who were demonstrating such fear, cynicism, and outrage. I asked whether or not we humans can trust ourselves to make sound evaluations and decisions when we are angry like that.

No, we can’t. Witness Sarah Palin’s following. Neither can we trust those venom vendors in the media who incite hatred and alienation in the vulnerable minds of people who have difficulty dealing with the changes always occurring in society.  As if there wasn’t enough real-world challenge to assimilate and address, the fabrications and perceptions sold by Fox News, Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter and their ilk make it near impossible for Americans to understand our collective situation and to act responsibly as a nation.

A significant paper written in 1964 by Richard for Harper’s Magazine, titled The Paranoid Style in American Politics gave me a little relief.

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

Hofstadter describes the exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that characterize the paranoid style, and traces it back to the days of Washington and Jefferson in the form of a panicked reaction by some New England clergy to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. It took the form of Illuminism, a belief in the illuminati—a composite of real and imagined organizations that allegedly controlled the world in secret—and later emerged as anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, anti-anti-Christism, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, JohnBirchism, and a variety of anti-somethings that gave meaning and purpose to otherwise vacant spirits.

Hofstadter cites the fact that this psychological phenomenon has been recorded since the middle ages, and constitutes a high-stakes battle between absolute good and absolute evil in the imagination of those with the syndrome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati

Historian Norman Cohn described it as:

“the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

Hofstadter quotes sociologist Daniel Bell, who expresses the position of the right wing of that time they both believe that:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.”

The radical right hasn’t changed much since, and today sees the enemy as:

“a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving,”

…a Fox News ideal image of Barack Obama, whom they portray as determined to:

“undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.” (Quote from Hofstadter, not Fox News. But it might as well be.)

OK. So at the extreme right, followed by an embarrassingly large number of middle Americans, paranoia reigns. A bunch of Americans feel lost, frustrated, threatened. Some are so angry with government that they want to secede from the union. They want us to dissolve like the Soviet Union. Pick up some ammo on the way home tonight, willya Honey?

Imagining

Imagine for a moment that the dissidents, secessionists, and extreme right delusionists got their way and the United States government fell apart. And imagine that by some quirk of fate, you are given the responsibility of designing and managing the process by which the states will separate. You determine the way people and objects move, and where they end up.  How would you divide the country?

The first thing that comes to my mind is to put all those angry Conservatives in one place and the Liberals in another. Build a wall. Give a chunk to the Libertarians and Independents and Greens; build a wall for each of them, too. Maybe everybody will get along with people who think like they do.

Maybe not. Assuming people agreed (We’re imagining, right?) to divide the real estate of the country into separate parts, you would need some organizing principles to sort out who lives next door to whom. You could sort by peoples’ favorite sports team, or what they believe, how much money they have, what they do and want to do with their time, what kind of climate they like, if they have kids or not, how overweight they are, and so on. Let’s say that you choose to organize by values, the things that people believe in and by which they live their lives.

With that done, we can get about our lives in peace. The ignorant and misguided live elsewhere. We are free to be ourselves without intrusion from the former government, or that government’s agents and enemies, and various factions competing for our dollar, or vote, or just our attention. With no intrusions on our freedom, we thrive.

What will our community look like in 50-100 years?

I propose that it will look exactly like our communities look now, at least where the socio-political landscape is concerned. However each community starts out, in time it will have liberals and conservatives, progressives and traditionalists, doers and stoppers from doing, paranoids and positive thinkers. Our issues won’t be about what we believe in. Our issues will be about our drinking water, food supply, safety from enemies, fires, disease, starvation, poisoning from our toxic discards, and natural disasters.

To thrive, and eventually to survive, our communities will have to generate a list of essential standards that, once established as norms, make us better off, more secure. Our relationship with each other will find its strength in those particular agreements that enable us to live as neighbors without peeing in each other’s drinking water or trying to kill one another. We call the conglomerate of these agreements government, you might recall.

If it is government for, by, and of the people, a non-perishable endeavor in which we all participate, we can continue cultivating America toward its maturation as a nation and ourselves toward individual and collective fulfillment as a people. The price of failure to do precisely that resembles The Matrix: We become a society of incubated and farmed-for-their-energy sleepwalkers who will believe anything, as long as our pleasure center is appropriately stimulated.

For those regressives whose pleasure centers respond to the call to war (on foreign soil), unending conflict over dominance (at home and nearby), and abuse of vulnerable people (anywhere), “justified,” violence provides our preferred high; it even comes with its own edifying story most of the time. We are true patriots, in the story they tell, when we sacrifice our children for the noble causes that give meaning to our lives.

Jingoists or Patriots?

Our cause had better be super-noble if we intend send our youth to kill other human beings and to die for it, not to mention the material destruction we heap on our planet. This might be a good time for separating wholesome love of our country from extreme, toxic favoritism aka Jingoism.

Love of Country

If you love your country you somehow find the courage to do what is right for your country, even if it makes your life more demanding, even as you strive to fulfill yourself as an individual, or as a spiritual being who exists in dimensions beyond ideas like countries. Doing the right thing can mean just respecting and following the law, for example, or something like putting yourself in harm’s way by joining the Armed Forces, or increasing your responsibilities as a citizen (engaging the government to support or change specific processes or policies), or by decreasing the range of behaviors you are free to exhibit without direct consequences (voting for a law that makes you pick up after your dog). It can mean making sure that your country’s actions in the world match the rhetoric coming from its politicians, or that your fellow citizens know the truth about what is happening to them and what they are becoming. You serve your country to the best of your ability.

If you love your country, your primary interest is that the nation in which you live, and its people, and its institutions all learn from experience and adapt to the rapidly changing world. You have the courage for candor, self-reflection, criticism from within your ranks, and enjoy the huge relief of having made your course-corrections in time. That’s how nations and individual organisms thrive. We correct our courses of action before it is too late. We respond to feedback.

If, instead of love for your country, your love centers on greed, then your drives will be for more. More of everything that pleases you. More freedom to live they way you want without being subject to arbitrary or irrelevant restrictions placed on you by parts of society with which you are not connected. Bureaucracy, all bureaucracy, imprisons you. The learning attained in the public and private sectors doesn’t interest you, nor does evaluating and accounting for your nation’s actions. You rationalize every action your nation takes, making anything seem OK in the service of its driving stories or myths.

In your greed, your interest—your addiction—is in preserving a self–image of being special, the best, no less than the favorite of the gods. You are a jingoist.

Jingoists don’t do critical analyses. They just sort, spin, and sell propaganda. Their cohesion comes from identity with a false image. They climb through real-world information and only treat as useful the information that seemingly supports their self-image. They pump crowds of people up with inflated, pathologically distorted compliments, reinforcements of the most egotistical self-images that the crowds can handle. They act like pep-rally cheerleaders mixed with TV evangelists and a dose of scam artist who gets his marks drunk before robbing them blind. Their followers become emotional addicts who lose their appetite for reality and develop a craving for being mindlessly stimulated.

Much of the time, this fanning of inner flames focuses on violence, entertaining the urge to kill. Having been excited to a frenzy, told that they are significant in the eyes of God, that the future belongs to them, and that they are under attack, they also realize on some level that they are being manipulated by lesser beings than God. They are right, but it’s not those whom they blame who are manipulating them; that role belongs to their source of excitement, their emotional drug dealer, the one who strokes their aggressive, righteous indignation to get them high. Think Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter, real American Jingoists.

Wrestling With Spirit

Professional wrestling comes to mind … a useful analogy since the emotional landscape is the same as the paranoid right. . In America’s number-one indoor sport, wrestlers are, in general, magnificent specimens of genetics, plus dedicated muscle development and fitness, incorporating well-honed skill and daring that play out a ritual as old as recorded time.

Today’s ritual, though, has nothing to do with wrestling. Not skill, nor strategy, nor the miracles of heart that it takes to win. The players work out well-practiced routines, a repertoire of elegantly brutal scenarios that they enact for the perverse pleasure of the audience. Instead of warriors, they are entertainers with a bag of sadistic tricks. They posture and theatrically challenge each other, and increasingly get spontaneously violent so as to stimulate the audience. The more blood they can draw, the better will be their media coverage. The more outrageous the violence, the better.  The ineptitude of the referee, the broken chairs and “illegal acts,” actions that if done in earnest would maim the opponent for life, all scream “Outrageous acts of brutality! … Performed For Your Pleasure.”

The crowd’s pleasure resembles more rage than joy. Being aroused by violence energizes people and makes them feel oddly relevant. The political version of that arousal stimulates them to respond to jingoistic slogans like eager brides saying “we do.” They confuse their excitement with patriotic fervor and justify it with self-righteousness. Claiming righteousness, they experience less existential fear. If they can stir up enough righteous indignation, they will feel authorized to do what healthy moral and social instincts forbid them to do, like torturing, profiteering, sending others to die so they themselves can become more rich. While enraged, they believe that can do whatever they want, and will continue until it catches up with them.

Doing what is right takes more courage than that. To have the humility and clarity of mind to receive feedback that says you are off track, and verify it, digest it, and then integrate it into your strategic, and existential plans (what to do; how to be) is a respect-worthy act. Instead of maneuvering to attain a position of relative power, (dominating others) you exercise your generic power in the moment by learning (making things happen).

Next Post: Relative vs. Generic Power

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Anger and Energy

October 16th, 2009

Think back to the last time you were really angry. While your rage was raging, how good was your thinking? Did you do or say something especially damaging, something you regret?

Maybe you waited until your anger subsided, allowing your cooled-off head and heart room to make more wise decisions. Good idea. After all, have you ever known anybody who makes better decisions when angry than when calm, clear, and paying attention?

We’ve got a problem. America has to make some major, strategic decisions now, and a bunch of us are so angry and upset that the best they can do is stop anything from being done. Outrage like that deserves to be attended to, but as we attend, let’s keep in mind that outrage doesn’t lead to insight or innovativeness or creativity, and it doesn’t inspire people in politics to take the generative steps that duty to their communities calls for. The Largesse of Spirit required to draw us together so we can build a future we are proud of will have to come from another place.

It is going to take some seriously large largesse for us to enable our nation to bridge the divides between us. Our range of disagreement includes our physical safety, ways of warfare, and health care; economic survival and financial management; food and water supply; our geopolitical position and relationship with the world; basically, the foundations of our way of life. As always, our decisions will determine our future, and the futures of billions of other human beings. What happens in America doesn’t stay in America; it affects every corner of the globe.

Since the world is rapidly changing around us, wouldn’t it be useful to break through the rhetoric and actually understand this split in our society and where it is headed? To know how much truth motivates the outpouring of rage, hatred, distrust and dissent coming from the right? To know where we are headed and what we can (and must) do to come through this existential trial by fire that marks our first black presidency? We might learn enough to avoid the kind of catastrophe that definitively pronounces the “End of the American Era,” and instead produce a state of affairs that we want to live with. We have to come out of ourselves, get a little bigger, do some growing up as a nation.

The issues that divide us are so complex that no one has a straightforward answer or remedy. While Washington dances its strange and terrible dance, we can look around and within and sort our problem out in our minds, maybe arriving at a new viewpoint. In my own effort, I’ve posed some distinctions that might prove useful. Here is number one:

Are We Anarchists or Citizens?
Our nation and our neighborhoods both have their roots in rugged individualism and their fruit in responsible citizenship. From the lone hunter-explorer who found the early trails, to the Native American tribes and the pioneers and settlers who followed and made the prototype modern communities, leaders have emerged to take responsibility for their constiutents’ safety from enemies, fires, disease, starvation, and natural disasters—all threats coming from outside of ourselves, from outside our family and tribal circle.

Growth brings complexity, and as communities expanded in size, threats coming from within their ranks demanded increasing attention. Standards had to be set for sewage treatment, light and power, finance and banking, law enforcement, transportation, commerce, investing, science, medicine, education, roads and bridges, water and food quality, home and commercial construction, and a long list of our other essentials that, once established, made us better off than we had been before, when we were alone or in small groups. Our relationship with each other found its strength in those agreements that enabled us to live as neighbors without trying to kill each other. We call the conglomerate of these agreements: government.

Yes, it’s gotten bigger and more complex than one might have imagined in the late 1700s, but the fact is that we govern ourselves—which means that we manage ourselves—through a system of standards that we value and uphold and laws that we expect everyone, including ourselves, to obey. Our obéissance— the submission of our individual urges to the collective laws that bind us to one another—determines whether or not we are good, law-abiding citizens. We give up the anarchistic freedom to do whatever we feel like doing in order to have a social order that we can live with. As honorable citizens, we don’t kill, rob, damage, deceive, or exploit each other, and we identify with the greater whole, the larger community, as the grouping of our peers to which we are responsible and accountable.

We belong and get along because we know that in order to live well together, we have to soften our claim to arbitrary actions without accountability and to live our public lives—the parts though which we have an affect on others—according to common standards. While we retain the right to private freedom, our very civilization depends on our voluntary choice to be citizens first, and free-range individualists second. Failing that, we would fall into anarchy.

Not So, You Say!
Not all Americans would agree with this notion. They prioritize their individual freedoms ahead of the requirements of being part of a nation. In fact, to them, rugged individualism defines the essence of America’s greatness. They want the collective agreements to exclude restraining any of their behavior, for government to leave them alone, to be a polite servant and let them get what they can get while they can get it, and to do what they want because they want it more than they want to create the next steps in the American story.

The story they tell is one in which free-spirited, God-fearing, courageous, adventurous men and women created a nation that enjoys God’s favor, but has lost its way to socialistic and secular deviances. To them, the socialistic forces threatening all that they hold dear and that compromise the foundations of our nation, including the Constitution, are the workings of the Devil himself. Instead of supporting and celebrating the current president—as the rest of the world is doing—they feel deeply fearful and suspicious that he might be the Anti-Christ. They want to disassemble and disempower the government, which they perceive as inherently destructive. If we are pious and responsible adults, they feel, we shouldn’t need any government.

Well, we do. We live in a time when any one of us can poison millions of others through carelessness (pesticide runoff, Salmonella poisoning), or kill each other though inattentiveness (car accidents), or destroy each other’s lives through fraud (Bernie Madoff; Enron). We exchange certain choices (liberties) for the reliable assurance that parts of government have the mission of protecting our well being, along with credible evidence of their effectiveness.

Since our nation exists in a community of nations, each with its own issues and agenda, and each with the capability to cripple the other, but all facing the same environmental, economic, and, increasingly, medical issues, we need world-class leaders and capable collaborators who can discover solutions to our complex problems and get them implemented; we don’t need inciters of outraged mobs, especially if the causes of their outrage are calculatingly fabricated lies meant to tear us down. We are, whether we realize it or not, the government. We need to find those among us who are large enough in spirit and able enough in skill to make the government work, despite the opposition, whatever form it takes.

Wisdom
As we are finding out again, there is no wisdom in inciting anger, hatred, or the purposeful alarming of Americans to play partisan politics. Our ability to be a healthy democracy is being tested. We pass the test by engaging in dialog that leads somewhere.

Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, who indeed, changed the world, said “I have learned through bitter experience one supreme lesson: Conserve my anger. As heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so anger can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.”

If we can be big enough to think as citizens first, we will also be able to transmit our anger into a new collective power as a nation.

A couple of useful articles:

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/healing-together/2009/10/reconsidering-the-anger-in-your-relationship

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/healing-together/2009/09/do-men-and-women-react-differently-to-trauma

Next post: Jingoists or Patriots?

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Living Horizonally

September 1st, 2009

Please note that there was no blog entry in July or August. We went on vacations and I had nothing to say until a few days ago.

In June, I wrote about James Carse’s extraordinary book, Finite and Infinite Games, in which the author presents some transformative ways of thinking and relating to others. Having played with Carse’s model for several years, I offer you a little taste of it.

The term “games” describes our interactions, and the games we choose to play reveal the models, metaphors, and perceptions we have about those interactions. We all play games, either formally and explicitly, like tennis or cards, or informally and implicitly, like flirting with a stranger or secretly competing with the neighbors. We mutually agree to interact in these ways, and we each retain the freedom to play or not. We choose.

There are at least two kinds of games: Finite and Infinite. Finite games begin when people establish their characteristics and agree to play, and they end when someone has won. The purpose is to win.

Infinite games have neither beginning nor end, and people tune in to them, join in them, and become part of their process for as long as they can. The purpose is to play.

While some games lean toward one of these models more than the other, Carse has said that the only example of a true infinite game is life itself.

In most contexts, you either tend to be a finite or an infinite player, and in different contexts you can switch games. You might be a finite player in your work and more of an infinite player with your kids. These preferences and the skills and perspectives they produce in you determine the kind of life you live, the way you know yourself, and the way you relate and respond to the world at large.

Finite Games — Rules and Boundaries

Remember the bumper sticker that read, “He who dies with the most toys wins?” What does he “win,” precisely? He wins an implicit, finite game or contest for the accumulation of stuff. He might not know what stuff he has or how much he needs or which stuff he wants, but as long as he gets the most among the group against which he measures himself, he wins.

Since finite players play to win, someone else must lose. If you see life as a societal competition for survival and dominance, and you feel urges to declare your worth compared to your peers, you are a finite player. You invest considerable time and energy making comparisons. To win this game, while you might not be “perfect,” you have to be better by comparison than your competition.

As a finite player, you take the game, its rules, and the boundaries of the playing field very seriously. Boundaries can be temporal, spatial, numerical, behavioral, cognitive, event defined, and so on. A boundary tells you where to stop and go to no further. As an example, we have boundaries about touching people at work: touching an opposite-sex co-worker’s arm might be OK, but their neck is not OK. People generally understand and adhere to these mores, lest they get censured or fired. Fail to sense where the boundaries are, and you are likely out the door.

Finite games depend strongly on their rules. The ball is either in or out of bounds. Unlike Schrödinger’s cat, it can’t be both alive and dead. In politics, religion, gang cultures, tribe cultures, some families, teams, and countries at war, you are ”either with us or against us,” either in or out of the tent. The rules of the game called Survival demand that.

Finite players accept or reject others categorically. If you fit the categories of people I currently have in my mind, and I think your role in the game might have something to do with helping me win, I accept you and might even endorse you. If you don’t match a slot that in my model of the world gives me an advantage in winning my game, I will reject you outright or find ways to make you unacceptable. You don’t belong in my world. This suggests an often overlooked but salient reason why competent, qualified candidates for public office get trashed by the opposition, and such ridiculous candidates for president get absolutely passionate support from their constituents; the former are “Other,” and the latter are OURS! It’s all about our team winning!

Finite games permeate global society. They comprise the background of our educational systems, commercial and political systems, entertainment, and, problematically, our upbringing at home. The problem with becomes obvious when they spill out of the competitive arenas in our lives and subsume games that are, by nature, infinite. James Carse declares that this is the only true evil: when a finite game takes over the context in which an infinite game is played. Marriage, for example, played as a finite game, ends in heart-wrenching disaster. While someone might come out of the inevitable divorce with more stuff than the other, no one truly wins.

The romance that typically sets the stage for a marriage to occur, romance that gets us to win by continuing to enchant us, proposes itself as an infinite game. If we could, most of us would feel that way and relate to our loved one that way forever. We would play day and night. 75 years later, we could still be playing, just much more slowly.

If you subordinate this romance (as an infinite game) to a finite game of, let’s say, exploitation—a vile, especially negative one, but a common game nonetheless—the whole world changes. In such a situation, one spouse plays at controlling the activities and assets of the other for one-sided personal gain, whether it is money, fame, connections, or just taking advantage of the spouse’s good nature. The act of housing a person’s genuinely romantic feelings within the ever-scheming mindset of exploiting that person can only lead to poisonous territory. That might be an extreme example, but you will find a distant cousin in most marriages under the heading, “competition.”

Infinite Games — Principles and Horizons

If they both perceive their marriage to be an infinite game, couples can find life-long fulfillment being together. While every couple has harsh and difficult moments, some people remain playmates through all the ups and downs of life. It gets easier when you can make each other laugh.

By contrast, imagine being married to one person for the rest of your life without daily play forming a central pillar of your relationship. What then, would bond you to each other? A transaction? An arrangement? Absent a layer of playfulness, and one or more implicit games you play with each other, what are you doing together?

Such play is far from frivolous. Being intimate playmates touches your hearts, makes you safe and accepted. You each have you’re your individual life story to play out, and you share the story of you together. If you were each living out a different story, playing a different game but thinking that you were in the same game, you could count on inevitably being “betrayed.”

When you compose the story of your relationship, you put it into context. At the start, you were drawn to each other in a way that made you feel bigger within yourself. When you flirted with each other, you were at play establishing lines of interaction between you; when you fell in love, you intensified the game, and when you made your public commitment, you took the whole experience to a higher level and put it onto a bigger playing field. You shaped your story and danced your dance, and you have the tone and quality of your relationship to show for it.

Infinite players understand and respect the rules and boundaries as well as finite players. But, by definition, their game can be vastly larger and last much longer. So they raise their gaze beyond finite boundaries to see the infinitely receding horizon: They seek to see what’s possible. Experienced players navigate by the horizon while keeping their feet firmly on the earth. They stay within the boundaries of the finite games existing around them with their eyes and minds open for unprecedented, unpredictable events and landscapes.

Remember that the objective of infinite games is to continue playing a game that satisfies something within oneself, something sharable among players. When a player is about to fail, to drop out, the other players can change the rules, move the boundaries—or even dissolve them—and reinvent the game so that the all can continue to play. In an infinite players’ relationship, this means genuinely paying attention to your partner, grasping who and what they are, understanding their world view, their story, and their struggle, and taking a position that promotes their well being. “Promoting” your significant other’s well being becomes an operating principle. That principle overrides your former, individualistic rules, compelling you to update those rules to accommodate your partner’s characteristics.

If this seems like a compromise, or a description of enabling co-dependency, back up from that conclusion. You don’t change all the rules, and especially not the rules that keep the players from harm. You change the rules that stifle play and growth and the fulfillment of each of you.

As an example, the barely post-adolescent newlywed dude who expects his bride to be like Mom and pick his laundry off the floor realizes that, to truly play the game of marriage, he has to show up on the field. In this case, showing up means seeing whom he is with, and participating in the process of making a nourishing home together. If he doesn’t choose to do his share of that, whatever he does becomes a chore, an obligation. He’s the victim of spousal oppression, and nagging, arguing, and inevitably succumbing are characteristics of the game he is in.

If he learns how to think as an infinite player, he gets to see the horizon. He peers into the future and imagines what it can be like when he’s 40, 60, or 90 years old, living in peace with his closest friend. Having adapted the rules and boundaries of both their games to keep play as an integral part of their navigational system, their way of solving problems, their learning process, this pair of playmates will have figured out how to live life—all of it—with a perspective and within an atmosphere filled with gratitude.

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When Winning Becomes Losing…A Topsy-Turvy Outcome

June 20th, 2009

One of my favorite books is Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse.
In this small, but amazing book, Carse describes two kinds of games that people play.

Finite Games
Most of the world understands and engages in finite games, like team sports, tennis, chess, or cards. The purpose of each game is to win. When someone has won, the game is over. We are happy when we win and disappointed when we lose. Upon losing, we might throw a tantrum, become sullen, or otherwise feel bad; we also might label ourselves inferior, or “losers.” Losing is a No-No.

Infinite Games
By contrast, we all start out our lives playing infinite games. As infants, we play with our feet, fingers, toys, other people (e.g., Peekaboo!), food, pets, and just about anything about which we can make up a story. As growing children and throughout the rest of our lives, we play via music, dance, narratives, groups, flirting, telling jokes and a long list of games that, in principle, never have to end. The purpose of infinite games is to play, and we play for pleasure. As long as we continue to play we win and the only way to lose is to stop playing.

Always Competing—Survival of the Most Vicious
As we grow up, we become acculturated to think of finite games as important and infinite games as frivolous—the average pro-football player, for example, commands considerably greater income than excellent dancers—partly because finite games match our most familiar survival metaphors: struggle, fighting, warfare, dominance, submission. By the time we are adults, we have become programmed into living in a win-lose world in which we must take sides and do everything possible for our side to win.

This compulsion to win permeates everything. If you watch any of the “American Idol” genre of shows, you notice that the emphasis is on the contest, on who wins. With all the drama focused on who wins, scant attention gets paid to the talent itself, or the beauty of the music, or the people. What the hosts know about the contestants they know because it helps them sell the drama of the contest. “Great” only has meaning if presented as “greater” or “greatest.”

In any aspect of life, if winning is at all involved, it dominates our thinking. The old adage, “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is how you play the game,” has been painted over by “Winning is everything,” and this banner conveys the message that a three-pointer in the final two seconds of the game can bring everyone closer to God… IF they were rooting for the winning team.

Limited to a diet of finite games, something gets starved within us. We stop playing with the intrinsic nature of things—what they are—and can only relate to what things are compared to other things: which is bigger, stronger, better. We lose the ability to appreciate what simply is.

Our obsession with winning permeates our schools and social institutions in perverse ways. Being downright phobic about losing, and convincing ourselves that our children’s self esteem will sustain damage if they lose at anything, we give trophies for showing up at soccer games, avoid correcting our kid’s grammar, and shield them from critically needed negative feedback.

I once watched a children’s jiu jitsu class that my son, Galen, was in and saw a little girl lose a match against a much more experienced opponent. My teaching eye spotted talent in her, and as she returned to the sidelines, I gave her the compliment: “You’re going to be very good at this one day.”

Her mother got furious! “She’s already good!” she exclaimed. “She should have won that match! Don’t tell her otherwise.” This kid was seven.

As bad as it is with kids, the win-at-all-costs mentality reaches its most toxic levels in politics: the system that keeps us from killing each other while we try to live as neighbors. The political game is and always has been all about winning…every seat, every law, every argument, every time. The political process has little connection to its results and by-products, which are the social outcomes of lawmaking and executive management of our country, and has much to do with the cynical, manipulative tricks that people use to get elected, stay in office, push their agenda, and to shape their world….our world.

Today, ruthlessness and unscrupulousness in the name of winning political battles are as bad as ever. The quest for and clinging to power make people crazy. From the socially corrosive justification of torture, to blatant profiteering, we see the products of the wrong people in powerful positions who will do anything to win. Although they pretend to, they can’t see what they create at a national or global level through their ersatz winning. When the “entertainer,” Rush Limbaugh, declares that he wants the new president to fail, and the “smart” and seasoned politician Newt Gingrich declares President Barack Obama having “already failed” five months into his first term, one has to ask who these guys are working for. Certainly not the American people, who desperately need the president to succeed. Only America’s enemies want our government to fail.

These people represent the common mindset—Our side or nothing!—and because of it America’s government does fail to make good decisions and wise policies, to implement just laws, to function as we need it to. One finds the same dysfunction in business, academia, medicine, religion, and society as a whole. Compelled and blinded by the belief that winning some finite game is all that counts, we are all losing. Our loss already includes our air, sunlight, safe food supply, water and energy supply, financial stability, and, of course, our quality of life. If we keep it up and fail to mature beyond our internecine mindset, we risk losing our very way of life, as the U.S. stumbles into fascism while its citizens consume on command and pretend to virtuousness. This risk already shows some characteristics of escalating into a slow-burning, but palpable threat.

Liberation
What do you think would happen if we freed ourselves of this compulsion? What if we no longer cared who “won” the many competitive battles we wage in our minds each day? I’m not referring to essential survival and safety contests like national and personal security, crime, warfare, or curing disease. These conflicts are permanent parts of reality, finite games that we can’t afford to lose. I’m talking about things like racing down the freeway at 100 miles per hour in “competition” with another driver we have never met or talked with, in the attempt to “win” something, a race perhaps, that only happens in our imaginations. Or, the contest with “the Jonses,” who have more or less than we do, and with whom we secretly compete and compare ourselves. Or, the argument over power with our spouse that she/he doesn’t know we are having, the one that goes on in our mind but never gets articulated out loud.

What would happen if we found that a more evolved emotional state of body/mind is available, one that made us able to suspend our ongoing arguments long enough to hear, understand, and work with the reality models of people who think differently from the way we do? This doesn’t mean agreeing with them; it means understanding them. If we truly understand them, we can figure out how to work successfully with them, solve problems, and share respect as we play finite and infinite games together. If we have in our minds an excellent representation of the reality model they have in their minds, we can learn from them, play with them, glean from their mental portfolio of values and principles those attributes that will enhance our capability for success; we will also know when they need us to leave them alone.

This level of understanding wouldn’t eliminate conflict, but it would reduce the frequency and intensity of conflict for all of us most of the time. Instead of knee-jerk defensiveness coming from our projected fears, or misinterpretations, or negative feedback, we would have available the behavioral resources to find common ground more easily, gracefully, and graciously. We all benefit together.

Giving up the idea of winning and losing makes this ability accessible. No, it’s not easy. But it’s doable.

The Tai Chi Paradox: Investing in Loss in order to gain
Tai chi provides a direct pathway to this ostensibly elusive ability: Push Hands. This practice involves two people facing off in semi-crouched position and contacting each other by touch, such as pressing their wrists to each other’s and moving in a prescribed pattern, say a horizontal circle of their arms, or perhaps with free-form movements. At the grossest level, their task is to push each other several feet away and evade being pushed themselves. But this description doesn’t begin to touch the essence of what is hidden beneath the surface.

Masters of this art, which is an integral aspect of tai chi chuan, regularly circumvent being pushed, then launch people who are younger, bigger, and physically stronger several feet away, often making them go airborne for a few feet, or throwing them to the ground. More important, they do so with relaxed ease, following the principle: “Four ounces move 1,000 pounds.”

I won’t elaborate more on the mechanics here, but some people reach extraordinary levels of skill, uncanny abilities to register and interpret the intentions of their opponent, and to follow their opponent in order to defeat him (or her). One describes this as listening:

“Give up your opinion for your opponent’s opinion. Give up your idea for his idea. Listen to him and stick to him. Exercise courage and be prepared to have a change of heart.”

The person who can listen and follow the other better ends up winning this finite game within an infinite game. She can’t be pushed because when the push arrives, she is not there. She has relaxed—emptied—that part of her body. But she can find the vulnerabilities of the less aware opponent and exploit them.

“Upper and lower coordinate,
and the opponent finds it difficult to penetrate.

“Let the opponent attack with great force;
use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds.

“Attract to emptiness and discharge;,
attach without losing the attachment.”
and

“The opponent does not know me;
I alone know him.”

To see some push hands, take a look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76GNTdi7NV0

As remarkable as it might be, this finite game is the less significant part of the practice. The infinite game makes available a relaxation of oneself that is unknown in the win-lose world, and with it comes extraordinary power and personal security. With the pleasure of playing (and working hard) through push hands, something of our jitteriness about life lets go.

To achieve a high skill level, to become able to listen to and understand one’s opponent, practitioners learn how to lose. One invests in loss. When we get pushed, the key to our learning is relaxing and taking the push, just letting it happen. As you can imagine, this goes against every instinct we have, whether from genetics or from our biological or sociological experience. Nobody wants to get pushed. It means losing and brings up what my friend and training partner calls “The Bad Feeling,”

The Bad Feeling is like a death without rebirth, a direct threat to our sense of agency, of being something, of belonging in the world. To get good at push hands, we have to take many profound losses directly connected to our sense of self. We have to let the Bad Feeling pass through us, and be gone.

“If you sustain a small loss (of your ego) you will make a small gain (in push hands).
If you sustain a big loss, you can achieve a large gain. It is only when you have lost everything and have nothing further to fear that you learn the secrets of the practice.”

Despite the many obstacles, we slowly learn to accept being pushed, and pushed a lot. We train ourselves to study the sensations of the push: the softness or hardness in the opponent’s hands and arms, the tension and eventual relaxation of our bodies, the moment we realize that we are flying, or landing, or setting ourselves up to be pushed again by becoming aggressive. If we get quiet enough inside, we become hyper aware, first of ourselves, and later of our opponents.

Lao Tzu, the founder of Daoism, said, “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” This stillness has no ambition, no separation into “Us and Them,” “Good and Bad,” “Winning and Losing.” It just is.
We will all take losses, large and small, in our lives. We will all die, lose loved ones, pets, our youthful vigor, and our belief that we understand the world better than anyone. We will see that world change, species become extinct, and iconic enterprises come and go. Letting go and letting loss occur when loss is appropriate, enables us to transcend our sense of self and find our Greater Self. That’s the part that leads us to our destiny.

Bottom Line: Dismantle your ideas about winning and losing. When you must win, win. Whenever you can possibly see the way to transcending win-lose, let it happen.

You’ll be glad that you did.

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Dealing with Doubt — Part Two

May 26th, 2009

In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, author Douglas Hofstadter explains a little of how we create our own realities, and how our realities interact with those of others.

He asks the reader to imagine being given a map of the United States that accurately shows all the geographic features, roads, cities and towns, airports, rivers, lakes, and so on, but has no words. You are given the task of labeling everything, right down to the last detail. What you know, like where New York City and San Francisco are located, or the street names in the place where you grew up, you can fill in from memory. Once you have exhausted your factual knowledge, you can make up any names and details that you want about the objects on the map. You are instructed to make your map as detailed and complete as any good road atlas, and you are given all the time you need.

Then, you magically get a two-week vacation in the place that you created, your Alternative Structure of the Union, or the good old “A. S. of U.” When you get there, you discover that everyone you meet has done the same exercise that you just did. They are navigating from their maps just as you are navigating from yours.

What a mess! Where you have knowledge in common, such as the location of the Atlantic Ocean or the Mississippi River, you will be able to communicate, operate, and navigate either together or independently. But where you made up details on your map that differ from the details on other maps, you can find yourself in a very strange situation.

You can also forget that you made this place up through your imagination, just as the other participants did, and find yourself doing battle over whose map shows the real Tombstone, or the name of that river west of here. Which is the “true” Main Street?

Strangely, this is not far from how we actually experience reality. As infants and children, we register events, objects, and people and map the world by converting sensory input into nerve impulses in our brains, amplitude and frequency patterns that travel among networks of nerves about which we have no conscious knowledge. Then, we reconstruct the memories we need in order to function, and represent them to our conscious minds as feelings, mental pictures, and internal dialog: talking to ourselves.

With this mechanism, the human race has produced Mozart, Einstein, da Vinci, and scores of brilliant, creative people who operate with a vague approximation of reality running by itself in their heads. But the map, as Alford Korzybski famously said, is not the territory. I wrote about this last December (2008) and there addressed the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of experience. A quick look at that might be useful at this point.

See http://brodskygroup.com/blog/2008/12/02/stories-i-tell-myself-and-so-do-you

Healthy and Unhealthy Doubt
One can’t overstate the importance of having a healthy sense of doubt about what we believe to be true. Our AS of U, instead of providing an accurate representation of reality, instead presents a conglomeration of fabrications, compromises, the survivors of hard-fought battles for supremacy among the parts of our minds, plus ambiguities and guesses, impulses and misfires along nerve tracks, and a huge library of stories that give meaning to our lives. While this is all we have to go by, we would be wise to detach ourselves from believing that we know the truth. We can make a fine living by putting these useful fabrications into action, but we should always doubt our insight into Truth.

The sage walks like a man on melting ice, like someone unsure of his steps. Tao Te Ching

This kind of doubt enables quick adjustment to changing circumstances, instantaneous course-correction while honing in on a target. At its best, healthy doubt engenders uncanny responsiveness that seems to move ahead of whatever it is following. In Tai Chi push hands it is exemplified by the principles: “Give yourself up and follow the opponent,” and ”The opponent’s hands are your hands; his arms, your arms.” Because you have a position of no position, you cannot be found and then pushed. But you can track your opponent with such sensitivity that you can easily control him or her.

Self-doubt is another matter. Doubting our selves differs dramatically from doubting our data, ideas, models, and methods, all of which change significantly during our lifetimes, and all of which exist outside of our selves.

Doubting yourself—which, might look like self-reflective, even humble behavior taken to excess—can actually represent an insidious attempt to escape from one’s own accountability. If we doubt our very selves, all of our actions become subject to evaluation and veto by outside forces; we operate by permission only and perceive ourselves as not-quite-free agents. Not being at liberty to make our own decisions, we think of ourselves as also not responsible for the outcomes our decisions and actions produce. In time, chronic self-doubt becomes an addiction to a self-absolving, responsibility-relinquishing life strategy, one that removes from us the pain of being the owner of our problems and errors.

This kind of doubt provides a nice cop-out, one in which every believer in deities is familiar. Surrendering responsibility to the image of a deity, “Thy will be done” becomes our theme for escape; whatever happens, the deity did it. We then feel absolved of all wrongdoing, innocent, and if we recite the correct incantations and position ourselves correctly with the right deity, forgiven. But, in fact, we operate in the world, changing things, having an effect, influencing others, leaving a footprint. When we deny that fact, we can easily become destructive, out-of-control creatures who meticulously rationalize our destructiveness.

A healthy sense of skepticism differs from this toxic self-doubt. Skeptics remain neutral until real-world evidence proves something to them. Self-doubters lean toward disbelief in anything that might cause them to change, to reconsider the world, to adapt to new circumstances. Devout believers (in religious doctrines or dogma; fundamentalists) don’t dare think beyond what they are taught. Believers in themselves feel comfortable inquiring, discovering, not knowing, inventing, making mistakes, and learning as they adapt to the changing world.

Which are you?

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Dealing With Doubt — Part One

May 2nd, 2009

Dealing With Doubt
Not long ago, I met with a 40-something executive in the technology sector who wanted a coach. He was smart, fit, handsome, wealthy, well educated, approaching the top of his field, happily married and with two children, and extremely well connected. His problem, he told me as we got done with sizing each other up, was chronic anxiety. He was filled with self-doubt and his doubt had escalated into a full-blown case of fud: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt working together within his mind in ways that at times almost disabled him.

I’ll call him Joe. Joe “knew” that he was on solid ground business-wise, and that he was ahead of his competitors, his colleagues, and even his own life plan. He didn’t know failure. His rational mind argued that with almost enough money to retire, comfortable personal and business relationships, and a broad social network, he had nothing to worry about. Yet, he couldn’t get a good night’s sleep, ground his teeth when he did sleep, couldn’t relax, and always felt ill at ease deep inside of himself. Even more serious, he found that he doubted himself more and more, and had postponed making several strategic decisions in the past couple of months.

“If this man is insecure,” I thought to myself, “where should the rest of us be? But he was profoundly insecure. He felt sure that the whole of his life was on questionable ground—something many of us feel these days—and that he lacked the substance to deal with the emerging challenges facing the world.

We went to work. He talked, I listened and reflected, he discovered his thinking patterns and updated them. Several months later, his business, like many others, fell into a huge slump. While he became very frugal, cautious, and hyper-alert, he felt minimal anxiety, was sleeping like a baby, and had stopped grinding his teeth.

“I never could have adopted this position without having done the work that we did,” he told me, “I would have been a nervous wreck.” He was referring to inner work: self-reflection and discovery joined with processes for “updating the mental software” that determines how one operates.

Joe’s most significant discovery in the updating process concerned a childhood decision he had made, probably around the age of five, and most likely unconsciously, when getting caught in some bad behavior and shamed in front of his entire family. The decision, which at the time seemed to be his best option for surviving emotionally, slowly festered in him and in his twenties surfaced as profound self-doubt.

It was a decision to suppress the urges that had gotten him onto trouble, which in itself wasn’t a bad idea, and to treat those parts of his mind that produced those urges as alien, foreign to him, outcasts. That was his mistake.

If a person suffers from personal fud, chronic anxiety, or other debilitating emotions, it proves useful to consider part of the problem as having made a similar decision to reject, alienate, even to hate, some parts of ones own being, specifically and most commonly those parts that have gotten us into trouble on the past. This alienation makes those aspects of mind unavailable to conscious intervention, and it is they who produce those emotions.

Joe’s story demonstrates the fact that such alienation can produce emotional undercurrents that have little to do with the seeming reality of our lives.

Tribalism and Being an Outcast
We don’t operate as homogenized entities. The human mind operates as a cacophony of conflicting, competing, dynamic sub-personalities, little holographic sub-sets of the self, each with its agenda, tasks, desired outcomes, and methods for achieving those outcomes. Some of these “parts” of mind operate within our normal consciousness, and some do not. Some are accessible by conscious effort, some are not. The key to updating the mental software on which they operate is to get information about current reality to those unconscious parts, information that enables them to redefine their roles and methods so that they can learn new ways to get their jobs done. This happens outside of consciousness, and only happens in a context of trust.

In his book, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, David Berreby describes the ways people have historically decided who belongs or doesn’t belong to their group and is, therefore, an insider or an outsider. Each society, tribe, group, and era has its own criteria for guiding this sorting process. Sometimes you are in, sometimes you are out, and if you are out, you are not one of “us.” If you are not one of us, you live in a “less valuable” reality—less valuable to us because it’s our values, not yours, that hold us together; you don’t belong; you don’t share our beliefs or culture, and in fact, you might represent a threat. Maybe, tribal instinct thinks, you should die.

Children, like tribes, go through a process of sorting out who belongs to their immediate group and who doesn’t. Left alone among peers, they establish a power hierarchy, and such sophisticated social structures as a system of care for those who are injured or sick, a fairness and reciprocity doctrine, rules for in-group loyalty, and criteria for deserving authority and respect. Most of this occurs culturally, instinctively—unconsciously—but occurs nonetheless. If you measure up in matching these standards, maybe you should live and be part of our group. We will protect you against threats from outside.

One imagines that no one would exile himself or herself from the group that provides protection, relationship, and meaning. But we do. We all go through the developmental process of differentiation, in which we make ourselves distinct from our families. We decorate ourselves differently, talk differently, dress, eat, and behave in ways that distinguish us from our family, our original tribe. After reaching emotional adulthood, and if our period of separateness wasn’t too alienating, we reestablish relations with those who share our blood and genes. We belong again. In describing this process, one of my teachers was fond of saying, “Don’t expect your children to be grateful until they are 40.”

If this reconciliation fails, and family doesn’t provide what we need, we find other groups to which we can belong. Hopefully, we settle in and enjoy the benefits of our new tribe.

But for a while, we were “outsiders,” and we flirted with one of the greatest mistakes a person can make while forming his or her own character: to categorize oneself as an outsider. Having made this decision, you don’t belong to any group, don’t enjoy any tribe’s regard for your well-being, and have no path to fulfillment in relation to your peers. You have no roots.

Yet, every child at some point takes this step, declaring themselves as free agents, wanting to “shop” for a group that fits better, belonging nowhere. Some revert quickly and go back to their roots, or land in a new group that suits them; others slowly reveal themselves as late bloomers, eventually finding a home, and still others never find where they belong. They never experience being surrounded and supported by a loving, playful, benign social infrastructure that acknowledges them as they need to be acknowledged and sees them as they need to be seen.

Lacking this developmental validation, it becomes easy to doubt oneself, to question your worthiness at its core. Such questioning leads to the assumption that the social system is right, albeit corrupt or unenlightened, and you are wrong, although sincere and well intended. You might turn out to be an extraordinary achiever, but private self-doubt erodes your satisfaction in achievement. Your offerings to the world might be sensational, but self-doubt causes you to withhold or withdraw your best offerings. You might thrive on community, family, friendships, alliances, partnerships, high-trust relationships, and mutual-benefit affiliations, but because you doubt yourself at your core, none of these gets a full measure of what your are, not your full attention nor genuine participation nor best contribution.

Seen this way, and measured as a component of fud, one can say that the most painful and destructive kind of doubt is self-doubt. Doubting politicians and TV evangelists is a sign of good metal health. Questioning yourself and ensuring that you maintain a robust, 360-degree perspective of yourself in relation to those who are connected to you says that you have wisdom. Being willing to be wrong in service to eventually getting it right shows courage and intellectual honesty. But just as hubris—insufficient doubt—breeds catastrophe, self-doubt in excess gives birth to chronic anxiety, fear, self-loathing, and disconnection from the wealth of resources most all of us have for dealing with the circumstances of our lives.

Just as with fear and uncertainty, it is useful to notice and acknowledge what chronic doubt you carry. One can distinguish healthy vs. destructive self-doubt in oneself, and name both in a descriptive way, and find or make the access path to a place in the mind that can update the destructive doubt.

Once working on that, a person can treat doubt like it’s a story, speculation, not reality. Refusing to invest emotionally in this speculation saves considerable energy.

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Managing FUD Part Two: Overcoming Fear

March 31st, 2009

NOTE
As you read this post, be clear that some situations, conditions, and emotional states cannot be resolved by applying the concepts that I explore here. These concepts have been useful for others and for me, but might not apply to you. If you feel overwhelming fear, anxiety, or other mental/emotional discomfort, especially lasting a long time, I strongly recommend that you see a licensed medical practitioner.

Also, if you have been reading previous posts, you know that my recent theme has been managing FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. This post addresses fear, and negative motivators in general. The next post will address doubt, especially self-doubt. My goal is to make it easier to manage FUD, reducing its influence to near-zero.

The Nature Of The Beast
That hard-wired, reptilian-brain emotion, Raw Fear, has saved your life and mine countless times. When immediate danger threatens, nothing gets us moving like a bracing jolt that stands our neck hairs upright and electrifies our senses. If we find ourselves in a menacing situation, it is natural and healthy to respond to it by feeling afraid then doing something about it.

As a dominant characteristic of a lifestyle, though, fear becomes a killer. Being habitually afraid or anxious is biochemically, psychologically, and sociologically toxic. It might not kill us in immediate and obvious ways, but chronic fear is one of the stressors that breaks down our bodies and souls. This destructive process becomes especially powerful when our fears find more justification in our imaginations than in our circumstances, signaling a disconnect between our personal reality and the reality that surrounds us.

Not that we don’t have enough justification in the real world. We live today with vague, long-lasting, and ubiquitous threats. What sentiment should a person have about realities like: global warming that is accelerating faster than the most pessimistic predictions; the world-wide collapse of fisheries and ecosystems; increasing buildup of pollution of our air, soil, and water; strange-minded governments or groups with nuclear weapons; terrorists and their zeal for slaughter; the reconfiguration of our economic infrastructure; epidemics of animal-human diseases; medicines and therapeutic procedures that kill; and highly justified distrust of the integrity and competence of powerful but unaccountable “leaders” in both the public and private sectors? If we are so inclined, we’ve got plenty to agonize about.

If that’s not enough for us, we have more immediate and personal events—like the actual or possible loss of our health, jobs, homes, savings, and closest relationships. If we are over 40, we notice signs of our own aging, over 50 and we can taste our mortality. In the global political/economic transformation now in process, we can feel the infrastructure of our entire lifestyle shifting toward something we can’t know. The stress of trying to understand, navigate, and find stability in this seemingly permanent undercurrent of impermanence wears on us, effectively tearing at our sense of self and inciting chronic angst.

All these circumstances might justify retreating into a fetal position in your bedroom closet, or living with crippling levels of anxiety, but we don’t have to succumb. While if we don’t feel a little anxious, we are probably not paying attention to the world, we can choose to manage our habitual, lifestyle fear more effectively, reducing its influence on us to minimal, sub-toxic levels. This is the fear that runs on its own and sometimes runs our lives, chronic worry, generalized out-of-nowhere anxiety, trepidation, fear that disables us rather than doing what fear is meant to do: energize us to act on our own behalf and on the behalf of those dear to us.

Useful Models
Caught in the grip of this kind of fear, it is not obvious to us that we inflict this suffering on ourselves. We think that it just happens to us, but being afraid is part of our way of being. Having practiced since childhood—think of the scary stories and morality tales of all cultures, horror movies, the thrill and terror of amusement park rides, and the threats of abandonment or punishment that parents and teachers lay on kids to manipulate them into proper behavior—we have been well trained by society. Having become so good at being afraid, we know how to entertain fear better than we know how to function without it.

Resolution becomes possible when we realize that we are addicted to fear. We get extra credit when we see that part of our addiction involves agonizing over our fear, fretting and worrying about it but remaining caught. The game changes in our favor when we discover that we can interrupt our addiction, replace it with a more wholesome and enjoyable pattern of thinking and behavior, and take pleasure in the freedom that this change gives us.

Consider two models:

* Addiction: We can realize that we are addicted to fear, and that fear or negativity motivates us and organizes our thinking. Today’s society knows a lot about addiction, and what we know tells us that we can break this specific addiction if we muster up a sufficiently strong emotional charge, a renewable commitment, a down-to-the-bones decision that we are done doing this to ourselves.  Like all other addicts, we have to “bottom out” or be disgusted with the method that we have been using to serve a costly function that isn’t quite working. We also find that the by-products our addiction produces to be no longer tolerable.

In this case, we examine the results of using fear as a lifelong motivator (function) and what it does to us and those close to us (by-products).

Once we make a genuine decision to update this function, a door in our minds to business as usual closes and makes possible the opening of others. Once we measure the by-products of our habit the total cost becomes evident. We might find pleasantly surprising energy within ourselves simply from being curious about we will discover. With some honest self-exploration we can arrive at total refusal to indulge in fear-driven thinking. We seek what might possibly be a more appropriate motivator than fear. If we are lucky, we will discover ways to prepare ourselves to plow through whatever resistance and distractions our minds will put in our way.

Breaking an addiction is never easy. But, where fear, worry, and anxiety are concerned it is doable. By asking yourself the question “Which will make me suffer more, remaining under the influence of these negative emotions, or working to free myself from this pattern, and not relenting until I am free?” you will know whether it is worth it or not for you. By also asking yourself what it might feel like to be free of this, to just be yourself, to do that which you truly want to do and not be looking over your metaphorical shoulder for

The Second Model:

* OCD: We can address our fear, anxiety, and worry with very direct, behavioral methods that are effective and always available. One example of such methods has proven helpful with OCD patients (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). The OCD Four Steps model, as developed by Jeffery Schwartz, M.D. at UCLA, recognizes that our brains can get stuck on repetitive loops between parts and that we can interrupt such recursive patterns and replace them with more healthy and productive ways of functioning. If it works with such an intense, neurologically based disorder, it can work with our addiction.

I don’t propose using the OCD model per se for every addiction, but instead a hybrid of our own creation, designed by us for our specific needs and patterns. The OCD model’s steps, adapted here to addressing chronic anxiety or fear, are:

Step 1: Relabel. Instead of thinking “I am afraid,” we can detach ourselves from the fearful feeling and observe it. There is no need to try to change it or get rid of it. Just noticing it and relaxing into this attentiveness, we can say to ourselves something like “The fear-addicted part of me is feeling x, y, and z right now.” Taking time to breathe, relax, and becoming aware of what that part of us feels, we separate our selves from the fear and the story behind that fear. This relabels or recontextualizes the fear from being “my state” to “the experience of a part of me.” Since not all of us is immersed in the fearful experience, the non-fearing parts of our minds can be resources to the ones who are stuck.

Step 2: Reattribute. Instead of thinking “something is wrong with me; I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” we can recognize that some part of our mind “needs” to be doing this. It knows fear and how to motivate us with fear. Maybe using fear to motivate us is all it knows, all it was programmed to do as we grew up. Nevertheless, as a functioning part of our minds, we created it to work on our behalf; it is trying to do its job. Our job—and we define ourselves as the conscious mind—is to facilitate the updating of the mental software that drives the function of making us afraid to get us to do things. Among the many results of successfully making this update, is the discovery of new, fearless ways to get our butts in gear. In NLP circles, this updating process is called reframing.

Step 3: Refocus. Instead of fighting the fear or the part of us that generates the fear, we can abandon the pattern by focusing on something else, something fulfilling. Asking ourselves, “What do I want to be doing right now?” “What do I want to be thinking, feeling, and generating in this moment?” we can move toward doing what we truly want to do and feeling what we want to feel. As difficult as it might seem, once decided and determined, we can train ourselves to take this step early, quickly, and directly whenever we feel the inkling of a rise of fear within us. We have to be determined to break the habit—having made the decision—being honest with ourselves—admitting what we are doing that we want to stop, and focusing our resources on what we want to be doing instead—and staying with our decision by practicing making the shift. This will not happen all at once so this step is all about practice over time.

Step 4: Revalue. Instead of judging ourselves to be victims of overpowering fear, if we have been practicing the first three steps, we can see our fear for what it is—a self-reinforcing pattern to which we have become habituated—and then we can recognize that we are, in fact, dealing with it. Acknowledging our own inner work enables us to see our fear pattern as simply a nerve track in our brains, a “plastic” or malleable track that we can change. Practicing, especially practicing Step 3 produces skill, and with skill and experience over time comes successful, sustainable change.

These two models provide the foundation for one person’s approach to managing the lifestyle fear inherent in today’s undercurrent of FUD. To make deep resolution more probable, the thoughts below will prove handy.

The Decision to Stop Suffering
For most of my life, I have been a chronic worrier. I grew up thinking—in a self-conscious, alienated misery that started just before I entered grade school and continued until I left my childhood home at age 18—that I would not live to adulthood, that my very existence was a mistake of Nature, that I was living outside the “normal” human process and didn’t belong in any family, community, or society. The historical reasons for this self-image don’t matter here. Like your story, my personal narrative came from real-life experience. And like your story, mine was the product of my unconscious and subjective interpretation of that experience, for which I own all the responsibility.

Despite this semi-conscious background theme, I one day woke up to find myself married with children and a house and two cars and a mortgage and medical costs and insurance and taxes and responsibility for my life and the lives of those close to me. As an adult, I did my best at producing what this life called for. But I never felt quite ready. I didn’t feel equipped, trained, or prepared to live my life.

So, I worried. I worried about my kids, money, what people thought about me, what I thought about them; war, the whales, Tibet, the human condition, and whether or not I would one day find the “secret” to living a fulfilled, self-realized life as a productive member of society. I did most of the things I wanted to do, and maintained a game face to meet the world, but in my unconscious mind, every blessing got categorized as a one-time accident and every hardship proved consistent with my self-defeating script—my belief that I was destined to suffer and then die. It would all add up to meaninglessness; my task was to get used to it. I was here to suffer, because like Gautama Buddha said, life is suffering.

I remember a moment in my guru’s antique store in New York City, circa late 1960s, when my two most significant mentors were talking about me. The pair—Rudi, my guru, to whom I dedicated myself for 12 years and who woke me up from the dream state of my childhood, and Masahiro Nakazono, my aikido sensei and acupuncture teacher who instilled a responsible-to-the-world life’s perspective in me—were about 15 steps away; they knew that I could hear them.

“Do you think that he needs to suffer more?” asked Rudi. No one was inflicting suffering on me; he was referring to my tendency to feel anxious and self-doubting in everything I did. Well, aside from aikido, which I did for 20 years with pure joy.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he realizes that he can be done with that.”

“He carries it too well. It looks to me that he is still locked up in it; his suffering still gives him something that he doesn’t know how to get from his life.”

“Too bad. He could let it go.”

“When he’s ready, it will drop away.”

I overheard but didn’t understand. To me, suffering was inflicted by circumstances; it came from others, from events beyond my control. I didn’t know that it was a choice.

Indeed, suffering is a choice. To make the choice not to suffer clear to me and therefore available, I had to make a distinction between events or circumstances and their meaning. An event, like the Loma Prieta earthquake or losing my job (Just an example; I haven’t had a legitimate job since 1969.) or getting a cold, is a neutral occurrence, a change in circumstances that one has to deal with, but in itself is without meaning. While resolving such a situation might demand extraordinary effort, the event and the actions required to resolve it are just facts. Reality just is. No meaning comes with it.

But, we apply meaning to everything. This compulsion begins to emerge while we are in the magical phase of early childhood development. It helps us continue building the mental map of reality that we started from the minute we were born, providing additions to the catalog of the goodness and badness that we ascribe to things based on how they affect us. Meaning provides the life in our life’s story.

As we grow up, we hopefully wake up, and our stories change. We become able to mature beyond such habits as believing that our favorite stuffed animal is alive, that the universe is organized according to our benefit, and that intrinsic meaning lies hidden in everything, waiting to be discovered by seekers on quests and only understood by qualified mystics. Long after the usefulness of this habit wanes, we keep attributing intrinsic meaning to events and objects, rather than realizing that their meaning, coming from us, is extrinsic.

Maturity would at least make us agnostic about the intrinsic meaning of things. But, because our meaning structures provide a key part of our life-navigation strategy (although we invent the meaning of things, we are quite clever in figuring out what meaning will give us an advantage or reinforce our model of the world.) some part of us never leaves that phase. That part of everyone remains a believer in hidden messages throughout Nature and the Cosmos that, once decoded, will give us access into the True Secrets of Survival and Success. Scientists experience these as insights, mystics as visions, the faithful as answers to their prayers, and drug users as evanescent epiphanies about the infrastructure of reality. This comes from our instinct to connect with our surroundings so we can survive. We are all shamans who somehow divine a map of meaningful reality every day, then try to navigate the territory depicted on our map.

In all cases, though, someone made up the meaning, and while the meaning often turns out to be the source of much suffering, we persist at making stuff up and believing it. When Katrina flooded New Orleans, as an especially obnoxious example, consider those TV evangelists who declared the meaning to be God’s wrath and punishment of America and its homosexuals and “other perverteds” in the Crescent City. Their declaration just made everyone suffer more.

When on my second day in aikido (circa early 60s New York) I separated my shoulder, having been roughly thrown by an advanced student before I had adequately learned how to fall. I had to address the pain, rest my body, and manage myself so I could heal and get back into training as quickly as possible. That gave me enough to do and I didn’t assign any meaning to the injury. So I hurt but didn’t suffer. I felt no shame, self judgment, self-doubt, self-disappointment, blame, or fear; it was just an injury.

By contrast, some years later when I was hit by a car as a pedestrian in Honolulu, my mind shifted to a darker metaphor. I felt plagued by the thought that I had karma that was being paid, that I had inadvertently done something to cause the accident—that I had “attracted” it like some kind of Secret-In-Reverse—and that the Universe had a lesson for me. I suffered over the possible meaning, searching my soul for months, relentlessly scrutinizing myself for some clue about what sin had brought this infliction upon me. My magical child had a field day wondering what Hawaiian gods I had offended. The self-judgment and blame that drove this process came close to self-loathing. A couple of therapists had a field day.

The meaning I gave to the situation created more suffering than the situation itself. Having watched my aging mother do that to herself too many times (“If you loved me, you would…”) and having worked with her for years trying to find how she could relieve herself of this habitual distortion, I eventually realized that my own suffering came from my self-judgment and the story rattling around in my head trying to find understanding. But the message from Haleakala never came, and putting the meaning in the “one can never know” file unburdened me of much unnecessary anguish. Years later, I came to peace with it.

I also learned that by making the distinction between events/conditions and their meaning in our minds, we can start liberating ourselves from the fear/anxiety/worry addiction. This enables us to separate fear or anxiety as neurologically ancient motivators (biological conditions) from our suffering about feeling those emotions (invented meaning). We can’t always change the conditions around us or even within us, but we can make the decision to stop unnecessarily suffering over reality.

Implementing that decision involves putting the “meaning” of fear out of the way for a moment so we can explore fear’s function more objectively. Here, we make the distinction between a negative motivator (gets us to move so as to diminish our fear, to get away from that negative feeling) and a positive motivator (we move toward the object or condition of our desire). Our ability to interrupt such processes as anxiety attacks, to gain access to other emotional states, and ultimately to resolve our addiction to fear depends on which motivators we let drive us to do the inner work of changing.

Gaining Access to Positive Motivators
If you are like most people most of the time, negative motivators dominate your mental/emotional atmosphere. You do many things because you don’t want the consequences of not doing them, like going to a job you don’t like, obeying traffic laws, or paying your taxes to a government with which you disagree. You inhibit yourself from doing other things, like telling someone an uncomfortable truth, helping a stranger is danger, or eating that second piece of pie, because you don’t want the possibly bad consequences of doing them. Whether you realize it or not, your behavior is organized around what you don’t want.

Thinking positively about what you want to create in your life makes for pleasant daydreams, but doesn’t engage your innards as powerfully as thinking about the bad stuff that might happen if you don’t do something you “should” do. You do that something because an ancient, primitive instinct to avoid suffering is written into your unconscious brain/mind programming and serves as your organizing principle.

But oh, do you suffer! If you are like most of the people who operate primarily based on what they don’t want, no matter how much you attempt to avoid suffering, you can find yourself living through a thousand emotional deaths a day, projecting in your mind highly charged arguments with people who are important to you, taking losses in your imagination that have not occurred and might never occur in reality, agonizing over mistakes that have minor consequences because, in your mental world, the impacts of even your smallest mistake seem huge. All this occurs because you are trying to navigate your day by honing in on what you don’t want to happen — on what you fear.

This strategy invokes what I call “The Law of Recursive Recidivism,” which declares:

You can’t not make happen that which you don’t want to have happen.

More seriously stated, if you are organized as an avoider, you never actually avoid the thing you are trying to avoid. Instead, you focus on it. Pilots call this “object fixation,” and will tell you that people crash planes into things because of it. Consider also those people who are trying to escape the devil; they spend a lot of time with a devil of their own making. This demon provides the only navigational reference they’ve got, so they measure every position by where they are relative to their image of Satan. Big mistake. It’s like trying to move ahead while having one foot nailed to the floor.

In part one of this series about FUD, I recommended acknowledging FUDish feelings as the first step. The same is true here. If you find your mind to be dominated by dire projections operating as negative motivators, and your behavior to be driven by attempts at avoiding the bad outcomes that you project might occur, knowing this fact marks a healthy, sound step toward resolving the pattern. I recommend studying this pattern in your mind, listening to the way it gets you to talk to yourself, spotting what triggers it, and seeing what it does within you and in your relationships, all without judgment or blame. Just know what it is in its own context.

Take your time with this. Listen to yourself and watch what you are doing. Take note of the content and strength of the thoughts and feelings that typically drive your actions and behaviors. Don’t fight them off, or spin them in any way to justify or rationalize them; just take the time to know what drives you. You do this by listening to your mind.

I also suggested in that previous post that a person could successfully deal with uncertainty by paying attention to the present and accepting future uncertainty as a fact of life. As a turbo booster, I recommended getting someone close to you to reveal where you have been tone deaf in your relationship, which alerts you to where you have not been present and gives you an opportunity to pay attention. If you took me up on these injunctions, you now know that being present pays off, and that opening new channels of communication with someone close to you helps you get into the moment. It also anchors your ability to be present in the relationship.

While you might have already known all this, if you rethink what being present means, you can discover how not succumbing to anxiety about the uncertain future is a choice. It requires only that you make a decision and act on it. While you are focused on here and now, you can’t be thinking about anything else. The mental channel that would have otherwise been chattering away over something that bothers you is now busy with the reality of the present moment.

It is the same with negative motivators like fear. When you are ready to stop being habitually fearful, you can make the decision to stop and succeed in carrying out this decision. The next question is how, which we have been exploring. Because fear has been so useful, it takes work to find out how to manage the change.

As you build awareness, and as you decide that you will stop being driven by negative motivators in all the aspects of your life—work, family, friends, health, money—you might find that, surprisingly, you can just do it. You don’t feel inclined to calculate the costs, negotiate with anyone, or set preconditions for moving forward. Instead of the idea running around in your head as a good idea, or feeling it in your chest as something you “should” do but won’t, you feel your determination in your gut. When you can feel the emotional location of your determination to change in your belly, you are done with the old way. You will change.

If you are inclined to visualize, it can help to do so, seeing yourself as free from the pattern of using fear, worry, and anxiety as drivers of your behavior, and making pictures of yourself responding to positive motivators such as achieving your goals, enjoying being authentic and true to yourself, becoming highly productive, and fulfilling your artistic talents. The world will not change because you are making pictures in your head, and the problems that worry you or scare you will still exist. What you are changing is your inner state, your response to events, your motivational strategy.

I also like another way to say all this, stated in Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from his Dune Book Series. Such a litany can be useful. Declaring your own version of this to yourself at the right moments can prove powerful:

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”

Frank Herbert had it right. Instead of succumbing to fear, his heroes refused to indulge it. In my real-life experience, you and I can do the same. Instead of giving fear a landing place within you, you can face your fear head on, letting it pass through you unobstructed and unattached to any rationalization, justification, self judgment, physical tension, or breathing pattern. You can let your fear wash through you and move on with no part of you grabbing onto it, not believing it’s story, not feeding it; then, you can turn your mind to see and feel the emotional space you have just created within yourself. You own this space entirely, without dependencies on something outside of yourself, and you can enjoy the freedom of feeling ownership of the whole process. The negative projections have come and gone. Only you remain.

Having acknowledged and faced your fear, anxiety, and worry, whatever the content associated with them, and having known your fear and letting it pass through you, you can stop running from it. You can find that fear is digestible once you develop a belly for it. You can transmute it into nourishment for your courage—which can only exist in the presence of fear. Whether you use some method like the four OCD steps, a modification of your own making, some version of AA’s 12 steps, or your own from-scratch recipe, you can free yourself from fear, anxiety, and worry as habits of your lifestyle. This doesn’t require special strength or magical powers; it’s just a decision.

Acting on this decision will liberate considerable energy within you.

Next Post

Dealing With Doubt, Especially Self Doubt

In his book, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, David Berreby illuminates the whys and wherefores of humanity’s process of deciding who belongs to what group and is, therefore, an insider or an outsider. Each society, tribe, and era have their own criteria for guiding this sorting process. Sometimes you are in, sometimes you are out, and if you are out, you are not one of “us.” If you are not one of us, you live in a less valuable reality; you don’t belong, don’t share our values or culture, and you might represent a threat. Maybe, tribal instinct thinks, you should die.

Children, like tribes, go through a process of sorting out the belonging question, along the way, they establish a power hierarchy, a system of harm care, a fairness and reciprocity doctrine, parameters of in-group loyalty, and criteria for deserving authority and respect. If you measure up in matching these standards, maybe you should live and be part of our group.

One of the greatest mistakes one can make while forming one’s own character and life strategy is to categorize oneself as an outsider. Having made this categorization, you don’t belong to any group, don’t enjoy the tribe’s protection and regard for your well being, and have no path to fulfillment in relation to your peers.

Yet, every child makes this mistake at some point, declaring themselves as free agents, wanting to “shop” for a group, belonging nowhere. Some recover quickly and land somewhere; others slowly reveal themselves as late bloomers, and still others—fortunately, very few, never find where they belong. They never experience being surrounded and supported by a loving, playful, benign social infrastructure that acknowledges them as they need to be acknowledged and sees them as they need to be seen.

Lacking this developmental validation, they learn to doubt themselves. They might turn out to be extraordinary achievers, but private self-doubt erodes their satisfaction in achievement. Their offerings to the world might be sensational, but doubt causes them to withhold or withdraw their best  offerings. They might thrive on community, family, friendships, alliances, partnerships, high-trust relationships, and mutual-benefit affiliations, but because they doubt themselves none of these gets all of them, not their full attention nor sincere participation nor best contribution.

When FUD prevails, …

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Overcoming Fear & Doubt…an Appetizer

March 24th, 2009

I have been slow in getting out my thoughts about fear and doubt. Got too much to say for a blog, so I’m breaking it down into smaller chunks: Fear this month, doubt in April. It’s hard to say less!

Here’s something interesting in the mean time.

Terje Haakonsen does the impossible

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Turning FUD into Food

February 10th, 2009

Let’s face it; we’re in for some serious FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt arise naturally during socioeconomic and political changes like the huge and unpredictable shifts occurring now. Mismanaged, such products of the mind can turn into chronic states of anxiety that damage people and their enterprises, causing sleepless nights, marital strife, substance abuse, mistreatment of loved ones, and a long list of disturbances typically known as “stress” or “anxiety disorders.” If we don’t know how to manage FUD over the coming months and years, we are in for a rough, unnerving ride. If we learn how, this difficult period will become more navigable at a lower emotional cost.

How does one manage fear, uncertainty, and doubt? How can you turn FUD into a source of energy, a form of psychological food?

First, recognize the presence of these emotions. Let yourself consciously feel what might have been an unconscious emotional undercurrent that you were suppressing so you could keep the pattern of your life going as normally as possible. Such suppression can sometimes be useful during short-term emergencies, but unless the world somehow transforms into something comforting instead of presenting a new challenge to us all, each of us will be better off knowing how we are responding emotionally to global and local events.

If you haven’t had some uneasy moments lately when reflecting on the human condition, the value of your home, the global meltdown, your cash reserves, and perhaps, your place in the grand scheme of things, you are probably not paying adequate attention. If instead, you recognize feelings within yourself that range somewhere between vague unease and raw panic, this recognition can enable you to address your FUD in useful ways.

Once acknowledged, these feelings can be recognized as perfectly natural; our world is changing in ways that none of us understands. Also useful is the realization that these feelings historically act as motivators. But they are negative motivators that organize the actions they unleash around avoiding the things we don’t want, the things we fear or worry about. Like our fat metabolism, which prepares us for long periods without food, they evolved in a world that no longer exists for most societies. Rather than getting us to survive, when negative motivators dominate our minds, they become chronic stressors that break us down. This is the long-term result of unmanaged FUD.

To become better at managing your personal FUD, try thinking like a dedicated martial artist. We practice a discipline that we like and that enables us to be more present here and now, to be a little more ready for whatever comes our way, a discipline that brings us nearer to a state of mental, physical, and emotional equilibrium. We want the ability to be active and agile on the outside while remaining calm and still on the inside. We also want to be able to restore our equilibrium quickly and easily after any shock imbalances us.  We train hard to get the most effective results with the most economical efforts. Over time, we develop deeply rooted skills for handling unexpected real-world tests without a warm-up. We strive to neither worry about nor fear the future, with full realization that he future will bring us unforeseen difficulties along with unexpected gifts. We call our desired state “centered” or “present” and seek to be in this state pretty much all the time.

Achieving such a state of body/mind as a stable state takes years of self-development, but we immediately feel the benefits when we move ourselves even a little in that direction. Imagine what it would be like, for example, to get a good, natural night’s sleep, even though faced with huge financial pressures? To switch off the worrying for a while and let our minds take a creative break in dreamland while our bodies rest, so we can awaken the next day with more energy moving through our bones? Or, to take a moment or two during the day to let it all go? Instead of agonizing non-stop because of our situation—with full realization that our situation might be extremely difficult—what if we could break fear’s grip and replace it with renewed determination, maybe even excitement about the opportunities that might pop up before us? Even modest steps in this direction would be a relief for many people.

We might still feel very uneasy about the profound socioeconomic tsunami pouring through our nation and neighborhoods and personal lives, and we might doubt our ability to do anything about the big picture, but the right FUD management skills will help us to rest, relax, relate, think, analyze, problem-solve, plan and operate better while navigating the uncharted waters in which we find ourselves.

Learning Strategy for FUD Management
Learning complex skills or solving complex problems becomes easier when we break them down into bite-sized chunks; we might not have a Big-Picture Solution, but this way we can solve one chunk of our problem at a time. When addressing FUD, it might be most useful to first address uncertainty. Unlike fear, which can be diminished by improving circumstances or doubt, which can be neutralized through better knowledge, no matter what we do, uncertainty about the future is not going away. Nor will it diminish.

Uncertainty was, is, and will always be a significant characteristic of our lives. By accepting uncertainty as part of the human condition, we nurture our ability to live with it, which in turn reduces our resistance to perceiving the pattern shifts that are occurring around and within us at this time, which in turn makes us more alert to the standing patterns of our lives. Accept uncertainty and you pay more attention to the moment.

I like the Korean proverb “Knows his way, stops seeing.” This succinct statement means that we become programmed like old-world robots (new-world robots approximate thinking; they make decisions based on real-time experience) when we assume that we know the pattern of things and expect that this pattern will continue indefinitely. In his best-selling, 1998 parable, Who Moved My Cheese, author Spencer Johnson used mice in a maze to make the point that some people will adapt when their “cheese” gets moved, while others won’t.

Recognizing that everything happens in its pattern—traffic, money, war, the zeitgeist, or spirit of the time, the way that we think—we can become better at identifying and adjusting to shifting socioeconomic patterns. Pattern recognition may turn out to be the greatest sign of adaptive intelligence, and awakening this intelligence shortens the lag time we require for adjusting to unexpected events. Managing ourselves in intelligent ways, which includes cultivating the martial artist’s equanimity, also brings forward our personal resources in new, often surprisingly inventive ways. One’s inner state determines how we operate in the world.

You have surely seen both sides of this coin, in yourself and in the people around you. During high change-velocity periods, whether at work, at home, or in your neighborhood, you know people who resist changing the way they live or behave because they are so deeply set in their established pattern. They don’t feel equipped to adapt to new circumstances because the emotional cost of adapting is too high. Letting go of the way things have been doesn’t come easily.

In similar circumstances, you know people who more easily let go of the past, adapt relatively quickly to unplanned change, and thrive in new situations. Many times in your own life, as I in mine, you have experienced both positions.

Those who adapt with the least amount of stress have most likely made an accommodation with uncertainty. They might not be able to remedy their situation, but they can at least be at peace within themselves while they figure things out, finding out what pattern is falling apart and what pattern is emerging to replace it. The best among them are never overly confident in their assessment of their situation; they walk, as is said in the Tao Te Ching, “Like a man walking on melting ice, like someone unsure of his steps.” But don’t be fooled; they are just paying attention. Their plans are flexible, and they can change direction at any time and in any direction while their core, or center, remains relatively still. To build such a place within themselves they practice their own version of t’ai chi.

The Surprising Path to Peace with Uncertainty
We like the illusion of certainty, and will embrace some truly absurd notions if they foster the feeling that something, anything, about the future is certain. Death, taxes, Heaven, Hell, we want to know what is going to happen down the road. But an honest appraisal over enough years leads to the conclusion that we simply won’t ever know what the future brings. We can predict some limited outcomes, like who will win an election, but we can’t predict our future. We can have stories, beliefs, and comforting folklore. We can believe what we want. But if we are paying attention and learning from that which actually occurs within and around us over our lifetimes, we reach a point in which we accept the unpredictable nature of life on Planet Earth.

Whatever we believe, managing uncertainty is all about sustaining our own central equilibrium while keeping one eye on the horizon, the other on our “dashboard” (our sources of real-time information), and the third eye —mindfulness— on ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with them.

Achieving this balance—and coming to peace with uncertainty—takes a decision, ironically not about the future, but about the present. It starts with a decision to relax your habitual investment in the way things always appear to you—your pattern of perception—a decision to open your mind to nuances you might have been missing, here and now. Letting yourself become curious about what you have been overlooking in the present makes you more able to experience reality in greater depth. Focused on reality right now, you will become less anxious about the uncertainty of the future. This is because, once new insight about how you operate penetrates your awareness you will find yourself managing your inner state more consciously and comporting yourself more competently. Get this to happen over enough time, and you will earn your own trust that whatever comes, you will handle it.

You can start such an exercise in any context you want, exploring with a newly focused mind areas like your work, career path, health, money, home life, primary relationships or any context in which you are willing to wake up to things you have been missing so far. You might find it productive to learn about the people closest to you all over again, and to learn more about who you are to them.

This takes courage, the determination to grow, and the self-discipline to keep your mouth from moving at the wrong time, deciding instead to listen. Just ask someone dear to you, for example, to tell you what they have been trying—and failing—to get you to understand about them or about yourself or about your relationship. Assure them that you will listen with an open mind and then, be true to your word. Let them start with one item at a time, not a data dump, and listen to what they say with an open mind. Allow yourself no comments, rebuttals, or defensive spin. If they trust that you will not retaliate for the things you don’t like hearing, they will surprise you. If your only reaction is no more elaborate than, “I understand” or “Tell me more about that,” with no correcting their perceptions, explaining their experience for them, or spinning their narrative based on your perspective, and they will give you the truth.

You can count on the fact that their truth will not match yours. They perceive and act on their truth, not yours. Their truth is all they have to go on, just as your truth is all you have to go on. That is, until you start paying attention to the moment in ways that enable you to see what you have until now missed seeing. You will see more of the story you are living out and have a better understanding of theirs. Then, just let it be.

If you take on this little interrelational adventure, or one of your own design that gets you into the present with new insight, your anxiety about the future, regardless of how uncertain the future appears to be, will diminish. By going deeper into the present, you will agonize less about what is to come. You will understand more about your reality.

You will also be preparing yourself to be more resourceful in solving your problems. If you have lost your job, home, savings, marriage, health, dog, friends, guitar, canary and car, the difficulties of your situation should escape no one. But by paying attention to what you do have, you can regain your equilibrium and plan your next steps.

When my son, Osha, was about nine years old, and we were living in Kihei, Maui, he had a nemesis named Nathan. Nathan was big and tough and mean, and bullied lots of kids. One Saturday, while I was meeting with a venture capitalist in our home, Osha came back from the nearby store with tears in his eyes and told us that Nathan had taken his money. The VC and I listened with empathy, then both blurted out the question that came to our minds:

“How much did he take?” I asked.

“How much do you have left?” asked the VC.

I immediately understood why he was a wealthy investor and I was just getting by.

In managing uncertainty, first pay attention to what you have before you, what is, “how much you have left.” Plan from there and remember that all plans are contingency plans that will change in real time based on real experience. Be ready to change directions with new-found alacrity and agility.

Uncertainty about what is to come will always be with us. Certainty is an illusion; deal with it and let it go. Practice presence.

Next posting: Addressing Fear and Doubt. Think: Dog Whisperer for Your Inner Animal.

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Inner Work During Difficult Times

January 12th, 2009

This is a tough time to do business. The forecasts are horrible and the numbers stagger the mind. As we wonder which collapse-from-within will occur next in an iconic American institution, it becomes clear that our presumed truths about Capitalism, government, leadership, global power, and the foundations of our way of life are dissolving beneath our feet. One asks the question: on whom and on what can we count to get us through this juncture?

If the Obama administration grows into being the course-correction instrument that we hope it will become, we’ll be fortunate. Even then, we’re in for a long struggle, and more jobs, homes, and lives are likely to be lost before we achieve stability in the coming world order. If a silver lining exists, it is that we will likely become more informed and engaged as citizens, find a much better path as a nation, upgrade our nation’s structures and systems, forge a healthier relationship with the rest of the world, become more responsible to and respectful of each other, and grow into better human beings for having come through this challenging transformation. This period will pass and we will grow.

My old friend and fencing master, Charlie Selberg, used to remind me that the universe is right on schedule. With that realized, I know that it’s up to me to manage myself in ways that make my attitudes and actions more resourceful, so whatever occurs, I can deal with the churnings of life with greater personal mastery. While being frugal and prudent and industrious, this is a time to work on myself so I can adapt to unprecedented change. While this is a tough time to do business, it’s a perfect time for inner work.

Inner work means self-tuning, making mental software updates, adaptively rewiring nerve tracks in the brain. In figuring out what to do to get through this transformative period and on to our next incarnation, it means adopting Abraham Lincoln’s principle, “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening my axe.”

A person doing inner work treats self to be both the axe and its wielder. While in truth, we might just be the instrument of something far greater than we can possibly understand, we who do this work hold ourselves responsible for our actions and demeanor and the outcomes we produce. We work to operate with greater presence, inner peace, equanimity, and resourcefulness, and to cultivate these attributes while taking care of business. To better handle tectonic societal change, we work toward personal mastery.

What, exactly, is that?

Getting Out of Your Mind
A neurologically educated friend tells me that we typically respond to 20-percent of what we see before us; the other 80-percent of our actions come from the stories and pre-programmed routines already playing in our minds, independent of our surroundings. I think he is being generous, and the figure is well above 90-percent. While one might be embarrassed to admit it, a very large portion of the perceptions, interpretations, thoughts, stories, emotions, words, actions, reactions, and behaviors that we experience were there beforehand, poised to play when our buttons seem to be pushed. We play like a juke box.

Personal mastery is self-and-situation management that moves beyond these programmed processes and enables us to operate more fully in the moment. We don’t erase our mental tapes; we just include and transcend them.

We become more powerful and resourceful when we change the ratio of pre-programmed processes playing in our minds to in-the-moment, conscious experiences. Being more present, or even becoming fully present for a moment or two now and then can unleash a growth spurt in our minds that could transform our lives. Practicing presence—paying attention right here and now—brings us closer to a sustainable state of mind in which difficult times become more navigable. Navigation becomes easier because we experience more of the whole of things. Presence makes us more effective.

Finding such states of mind is simple but difficult, partly because the idea of being present, while generally considered admirable, is inconsistent with the behaviors fostered by all mainstream cultures (“don’t think too much; buy my product; do what I want”) and the beliefs we have about ourselves and about reality (“presence is an extraordinary experience bordering on enlightenment”). While making a shift to phenomenal presence is actually very close at hand, to us it seems very distant.

For a powerful example of how close such a shift could be—as it turns out, it’s simply a choice—watch Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor’s wonderful narrative:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Dr. Bolte-Taylor’s experience, which involved having a stroke and recovering over eight years, is too extreme to become a method, and no one would recommend it. But her insight indicates that we can practice and prepare for more practical and sustainable shifts like hers. Because of the way our brains are built, the shift can one day be a decision away.

Meanwhile, cultivating greater presence is a paradoxical process. Want to become dramatically more aware? Don’t try. Start by relaxing instead. Want to be more effective at understanding? Let go of your effort to understand. Relax. Try easier and your learning will deepen. Let yourself discover new ways to perceive and do things instead of intensifying your existing problem-solving patterns. Let your shoulders fall, your jaw relax, and follow your breathing for a moment, Discover a little more about what is possible by becoming still. Find your inner strength by becoming soft to the world. Look, listen, be silent; then you can move. Just decide that you will do it.

On the surface, it would appear that everything we have learned about effort and achievement, whether in sports, school, business, or other kinds of social competition, contradicts this idea. But this is what we will do when we have gotten to mastery. Beginners try hard, and for a long time, they must. Masters try easy.

Relaxing into one’s “natural angle of repose,” a stance that effortlessly taps your greatest intrinsic strengths—turns out to be a simple act. While you can’t do it by trying, and it’s not about becoming a more deserving person or successfully begging the gods, it results from a personal decision to make peace with your essential nature and let yourself know yourself. This peace makes insights available about what you might do that is fundamentally new. Make the decision to be quietly genuine and adaptive change can emerge in you in the face of difficult circumstances.

Ironically, we change in dramatic ways when we accept who we are. Self-acceptance gives us release from our stories, our beliefs about what we are supposed to be and pretend to be. Realizing what we are also frees us to uncover what we truly want to become. In this reflective process, we invariably become more genuine. Less caught up in pretense and self-delusion, we find peace of mind and the energy to enliven the project of completing ourselves. Continuing this work, our essential nature and fulfilled potential emerge together.

Capitalizing on Loss
It seems that most of us only come to understand our own true natures after we have faced significant life challenges, some of which we overcome and some of which defeat us. Winning is much more fun, but it’s our defeats that empty us of false self images so we can learn more about what occurs inside us, and between us and the world. Finding the courage to continue growing in the aftermath of these realizations, to harvest the learning, we discover what we can become.

In Tai Chi, there is a primary principle called “investing in loss.” In the two-person exercise known as Push Hands, partners attempt to neutralize each other’s push while never tensing up. When your balance is broken and you are being pushed, the idea is to let this loss happen, to simply relax and let yourself be pushed. Since you have been trying to not be pushed, this letting go is supremely difficult on the ego level; everyone tenses up. But with dedication, you forge the discipline to keep relaxing and paying attention each time you are pushed. After enough years, you discover a dimension of skill, power, and awareness that you never can realize if you invest in the smaller victories that typical effort brings to the stronger, faster competitor.

In a situation in which loss is part of the landscape, as is ours for now, some things will inevitably be taken from us. So it pays to consider the investment already made, and capitalize on it. Learn from loss. You then can discover the only sustainable competitive advantage: adaptability.

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Surviving the Holidays and Thriving Well Beyond

December 22nd, 2008

Face it; you’re going to regress.

If you go home for the holidays, visit with your family and/or old friends, even talk with your parents or siblings around the holiday season, you are guaranteed to trigger some from-the-deep-past emotional and behavioral patterns. The very sound of your brother’s voice across the dinner table, your sister’s laughter, your mother’s repeated advice, or your Dad’s disapproval of your main squeeze or your personal path will cause you to lose 20-30 years of hard-won maturity. It’s nice to know that all it takes is a little criticism to turn you into a teenager again.

Well, not so nice. You’re an adult now with adult responsibilities, thoughts, friends, and stuff. You shouldn’t lose your cool so easily just because of contact with your bloodline. You established your identity in the world on your own steam, and the childhood kryptonite that can render you a raving idiot shouldn’t work any more. But it does.

If, on the other hand, you are the one in the parental role, just watch yourself try to restrain your vocal cords and to ultimately fail. The urges to correct your adult-child’s grammar, or slip in your unasked-for-and-therefore-unused advice, or to find otherwise clever ways to remind Junior or Juniette that they are still your baby will take you over with the sleight-of-mind of a stage hypnotist.

Even if you don’t connect with those walking, breathing, family portals to the past, you might find yourself harassed by the traffic, grocery-store congestion, the pressure to shop and send cards and give to charities and go to temple or church and be an exemplar of Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanza/Winter Solstice cheer, and memories, both good and bad, all mixed up with a profound sense of ambiguity about what might occur in the world when these holidays are over and the new economy gets into full, depressive swing.

Traditionally, people tend to take stock at the end of the year to measure how they have done. Were you good? (Santa knows) Did you meet expectations? Did you disappoint anyone, most significantly yourself? Was it worth a whole year of trying as hard as you did to get to where you got? Then, people set goals for the New Year, making resolutions for being better human beings.

Fortunately, you can use such a moment to dump some obsolete emotional and behavioral patterns that don’t serve you any more. Taking advantage of this time of year and the regressive patterns it invokes, you can rewrite some of your life.

All it takes is being mindful (aware) and using some self-management tools and you can be centered, think clearly, respond to your family’s foibles with poise and maybe even grace, and act according to the deeper wishes of your heartmind (a Chinese term that describes people better than the Western idea of separated heart—meaning their emotional center—and mind—one’s rational center).

Managing yourself well while experiencing your own tendency to regress creates opportunities to grow new behaviors, terms of relationship, boundaries, emotional responses, and mutual understandings with those around you. As you circumvent familiar pitfalls, you learn how to transcend family patterns, especially the toxic ones. This leads to sanity.

Steps to Sanity
Be aware that that the story going on in your head about your life is just a story. Your take on reality might be correct, but more likely, it is fiction built over a lifetime like the rest of us. Knowing that reality is self-derived fiction—a script with plots and sub-plots, in which you are the hero—becomes especially useful when you apply this awareness to little things that upset you, like family patterns.

Remember that all humans are wired to create life stories and live them out. You just don’t have to believe them or be brought down by them any longer—whenever you so choose.

Living within this scripted experience, you could be giving meaning to events, gestures, and behaviors that have either no meaning in themselves or meaning to others that differs significantly from yours. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, as Dr. Freud famously stated, and your Dad is complaining about today’s youth because that’s what he does; perhaps he is not sending you a clumsily covert message that you should stop wasting your life and get a different job/spouse/plan. He’s just being Dad, and Dad has a whole library of mental “tapes” that he plays whether anyone is around to listen or not.

Once you identify some of your stories, you can name the more emotionally charged ones (i.e., “Mom always loved Lucy more than me,” or “Dad never accepted me as I am.”). These are your tapes, or at least their foundations. When a bad feeling comes up, ask yourself what is the background story that unleashes this sensation in you. Then, notice what you feel and how you behave under the influence of this story. Take the opportunity to relax while you continue to notice what you are doing. Study the pattern well.

Each pattern is made up of (1) a story that puts some experience(s) into a context, (2) emotions arising from the meaning of the story (your meaning; maybe nobody else shares it), (3) behaviors that those emotions stimulate, and (4) your resultant interactions with the other people in your story.

If you want to move beyond a pattern, don’t invest in it by trying to fix it or fighting with yourself over it. Don’t blame or judge yourself for having the story or the behavioral pattern that comes with it. You have had no other choice but to create narratives that put your real personal history into a workable context. Your survival patterns derive from your narratives, whether those narratives resemble objective reality or not.

When you have studied your pattern enough to understand it in context, accepting it as part of your history, you can replace it. Replacement starts with interrupting it followed by practicing a pattern that you prefer.

Once interrupted, you can replace most patterns with either (1) intense presence, or (2) an emotional state of your design. Intense presence means being so present, paying such attention, that you have no room for any other behavior; practicing this generates an internally intense yet still state. If you design a state, I recommend a state that enables you to resourcefully deal with the situation, such as a centered, non-reactive state. As an example, you might select loving disattachment from which you observe and accept your family’s behavior. As long as you interrupt and functionally replace the old pattern, the choice is yours.

It pays here to pause and define the difference between reacting and responding. You and I are neurologically wired to react to some forms of danger without first engaging our brains. If you touch a hot stove, the nerve impulse goes from your hand to your spine and back to the muscles that control your hand so you can remove it as fast as possible. You only become aware (engaging your brain) after the fact. This is reacting.

Responding involves some reflection, a little thought before you start jerking things around. Responding involves using your brain up front.

You can react just as mindlessly to abstract signals as well as you can to physical stimuli. When someone shouts at you in anger, for example, especially someone like a family member shouting about something that carries a strong emotional charge in you, you can begin shouting back long before your reflective brain becomes engaged. Several minutes later, as you begin to become self-aware, you can find yourself deeply immersed in a conflict that escalated because you and your opponent were “out of control,” saying harmful things without listening to or understanding the intent or perception of the other.

Actually, your reptilian brain was in control because you reacted to signals that indicate immediate danger or harm. It was doing its job.

To fully make the distinction between reacting and responding, let’s also differentiate between our experience of signals and symbols. Signals, such as the heat of the stove, or a car bearing down on you, cause you to react; you don’t have to do much interpretation to know you will suffer harm if you fail to react. They don’t, however, automatically mean anything.

Symbols, by contrast, always have their own meaning. They require interpretation, understanding, an agreement about meaning between you and other people. A “thumbs up” is a symbol, as is applauding, smiling, bowing, or on the negative end, frowning, refusing to make a social gesture of respect, or ridiculing someone’s home. All symbols have meaning; they intrinsically represent something.

Although most of your painful family patterns, along with other patterns you find emotionally uncomfortable, start in your brain, they resemble reactions more than responses. They occur because you react to symbols as though they were signals. You interpret someone’s behavior to mean something menacing or harmful and, instead of reflecting for a moment and consciously managing your response, or asking them what they mean before you decide for yourself what they mean, or quieting your innards so you can see and hear what is actually going on (presence), you jump like you had sat on a hot stove. You react.

You react because the meaning of the moment—to you—originates in your story. Your script, in this case, includes some unresolved intra-family conflict that rages among your family members, or an injustice, or betrayal, or sustained disappointment. Your parent or sibling does what they do—just because that is what they do, not because of you—and you interpret their behavior as signaling a threat to you.

As described above, it pays in the long run to become aware of your stories, recognize that they are just stories, and free yourself from their grip on you by suspending your belief in them and replacing their associated patterns. In the immediate moment, you can use some tools to break the spell your negative stories put on you.

Simple Self-Management Tools

1. Breathe consciously to interrupt the negative pattern and initiate a positive one.

When we are anxious or upset or afraid, we tend to hold our breath. Most of us don’t realize it, but because of the ongoing conflict built into our personal stories, we restrict our natural breathing pattern much of the time. We bear the weight of our narrative in our breathing.

This common habit produces a physical and mental state that makes us less resourceful and energetic than we would enjoy if we breathed fully and deeply more of the time. Any martial artist, performing artist, or yogi can tell you this. All internal disciplines, like yoga or martial arts, teach that purposeful breathing can be a powerful, state-changing tool.

Once you have breathed consciously to interrupt the negative pattern, you can take another deep breath, and another, as you take charge of your immediate well being by choosing and creating the state of heartmind that you want to be in. It’s your choice, and as long as you remind yourself that the story driving the undesirable pattern is just a story that you can invest in or not, you can exercise this choice. It’s easy and simple to use breathing as a catalyst for this change, but surprisingly effective. You are, in essence, dislodging a story that motivates your less desirable actions.

2. Relax by surrendering to gravity.

If your pattern is emotionally uncomfortable, it also makes you physically tense. Even without the pattern, you—along with the rest of us—also have plenty of reasons to be tense. But tension doesn’t help you deal with things; it just makes you unable to respond fluidly and economically to your circumstances. Those reasons (from world-wide events to personal worries) might never go away, but you can respond to them any time you choose (you contain the locus of command; your actions are yours) and you can respond in any way that you are capable. By contrast, you might react (the locus of command is outside of you; you act because someone/something makes you.) and unconsciously push your own buttons while thinking that someone else is doing the pushing.

Making the decision to relax, even while worrisome conditions continue, enables you to regain the energy you would have spent and mental bandwidth (available brainpower) keeping the tension going, and, since tension feels uncomfortable, to feel better. The best way for this task is the easiest way, because when it comes to discontinuing an ongoing process—like tensing a bunch of muscles somewhere in your body because you have a lot on your mind—the very nature of the act is ease. It’s good tai chi.

While learning something like tai chi takes considerable work, it leads to ease of being. Tai chi principles lead one to relaxing with gravity because it is easier than fighting gravity. It is easier to practice releasing than to not practice it, especially when you realize that gravity always helps you. It also takes less work to let go than to carry around a bunch of emotional baggage in the form of tension.

3. Stay present.

When you are acting out a story, you don’t experience reality. Being present means maintaining your mental/emotional focus on what is really happening, not on your projections.
You can pay attention to yourself as well, giving the people around you the gift of your presence, from the inside out. They will thank you.

So breathe, relax, and stay present. You can practice this a hundred times a day: in the car, at work, at home, at the store. You don’t need incense, music, or bells and whistles to help you. You just need to remember to do it.

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Stories I tell Myself (and so do you)

December 2nd, 2008

The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset.
—Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947)

No one experiences reality, at least not as it is. We’re wired to make up our personal reality from a relatively small sample of neuro-sensory input, to invent the rest of the story and act as if our invention were true. This helps us survive, up to a point.

It also creates a lot of trouble.

People have been organizing real-world events into narratives since early humans began to make sense of experience. This works because a story puts things all together. It presents a cohesive picture of what is going on.

Most of our reality stories, being about life-and-death struggles, also evoke deep drama that energizes us and engages us in life. Our personal story shows how we fit into our society’s meaning structure, declaring our value as members. Whether a comedy, tragedy, or action adventure, the personal story going on in each of our heads, gives us a way to remember experience, to organize information, to feel about things, to predict events and plan and carry out our plans, and, hopefully, to reap the benefits happily ever after.

Maybe this usefulness tells why we love stories so much. We cherish books, movies, and songs for the stories they recount.  We tell ourselves and each other epic narratives about hunting, fighting, love, sacrifice, survival, magic, courage, our origins, our death, afterlife, and the meaning of it all because something in the telling gives us agency, shape, and strength. As children, when we enjoyed endless repetitions of our favorite bedtime stories, we created as much reality as we learned through them. We even dream in stories, acting out in sleep scenarios that take us to extremes beyond rational thought and enabling us to measure and redraw the boundaries of reality. As a result of all this, we each navigate our lifelong path with a deeply imbedded story driving us from the depths of our minds.

If our stories proved true, they would give us a significant survival advantage. After all, if we know the story, we know the ending! But none of them are true and failing to realize that fact brings us considerable strife.

Why? Remember that we start with incomplete information. We see only a small part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, hear relatively few of the sound waves coming our way, miss the olfactory subtleties of pheromones, and feel nothing of the movement of the Earth through space. We don’t know what is going on in other people’s minds. We don’t yet know the operating principles of the universe. We don’t register everything about the world as we decipher it. If we did, we might perceive solid objects as vibrating electro-magnetic fields and become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data surrounding us.

Instead, taking in what sensory information we can, converting that input into amplitude and frequency patterns in our brains and then retrieving, reconstructing, representing, and putting meaning to those patterns we act on behalf of our well being by molding it all into a story. In so doing, we delete and distort some of our information to make it fit our existing beliefs or fears or desires. It’s useful to always recognize that, rather than having insight into the reality of reality, we have made this construct, this useful fabrication. It works because the resulting mental map provides us with principles for organizing our thinking and behavior.

But the map, as Alford Korzybski famously said, is not the territory. Remembering that, we can realize that our stories—and along with them our beliefs—are just fabrications. Instead of thinking they are real, and acting as if our beliefs were Truth, we can relax some of our grip on those beliefs and sense the world a little better. We can find ourselves wondering, what would our lives be like if we freed ourselves from the most destructive of our stories, the most toxic of our beliefs.

To me, the most toxic beliefs are those that incite fear, hatred of self and others, alienation, and forfeiture of personal responsibility by putting our actions into the hands of a ritual-responsive, guilt-absolving deity. The stories that house these beliefs keep us from maturing as individuals and as a race. They compel us to continue our brutality and ignorance.

The astonishing author and speaker, Byron Katie, writes that we can become free of such a story by honestly answering four straightforward questions:

1.    Is it true? Is this story/belief a fact or do I just entertain it as a possibility?
2.    Can I absolutely know that it is true? If so, by what means?
3.    How does believing this story effect me? What is the affect?
4.    And last, what would my life be like without this story in it?

Worthwhile, potentially liberating questions. Try posing them about one of your most pain-producing beliefs. Better yet, take a look at Katie’s writings:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=byron+katie&x=0&y=0

When I stopped believing the passing array of stories always dancing through my head, and saw that they were simply the endless, inventive conjecturing of my mind—useful for organizing experience, useless as ultimate truth—something relaxed. Finding that one creates the meaning of events, that my fear-or-worry-driven projections had only the force that I invested in them, and that I didn’t need to make any further investment in poisonous ideas, something became a little more responsible and a little more free at the same time.

Projecting something onto the world and living as if it were true proves to be a mistake unless you want it to be true and are willing to be responsible for making it happen and will enjoy living with the results. There is no need to continue attachment to any belief or story that promotes suffering.

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Projecting Onto Obama

November 19th, 2008

Since the beginning of Barak Obama’s amazing rise to the presidency, I have harbored the belief that the best thing about him is what people will make of him. That’s not to diminish his qualities. Being the antithesis of GWB, and demonstrating superb intellect and integrity (father of a healthy family, opposition to the war, inspiring wordcraft, impressive academic background, and great strategic management of the campaign) I admire the guy and am grateful for his presence. My belief comes more from the fact that he appeared as an minimally known figure to many people world-wide who instantly believed that he brings what we need. Further, it looks like people will continue making him into a transformative catalyst.

If we are to some degree who others make us to be, any position of leadership provides a great arena to become what we are capable of becoming, for ourselves and those around us. Unless we betray their hopes  and declare ourselves incompetent or corrupt, the positive projections of others will define a major part of our function in their lives. Where politics is concerned, we can’t really know our politicians from afar, but we will invariably make them into symbols, whether positive or negative, and everyone will invest themselves accordingly, reaping a harvest largely of their own sewing.

Right now, the whole world is projecting onto Obama and investing in his direction. It looks like the net symbology is so far strongly positive. What a relief!

I got very emotional, as did most of my friends when Obama won the presidency; in my own projection, he was and still is a symbol of hope, progress, the renewal of America, and the transformation of our standing in the world. But some others feel themselves gripped with fear when they think of the just-beginning Obama era. They project the removal of their guns, attacks on their religions and traditions, and the socialization of our society. They find themselves terrified by their projection.

The majority, whose strong investment in organizing, campaigning and voting this year added up to a win and yes, a mandate, wants social progress. America, through the Obama phenomenon, has the opportunity to project positive outcomes, and as citizens work to realize these outcomes during and after this presidency. It is we who actively plant the seeds of the Obama era. It is we who must speak and let others know who we are, what we want to have happen, and what we are ready to make happen as productive citizens. We should expect Barak Obama and his administration to respond resourcefully and creatively. We should expect him to continue riding the wave in a rare and refreshing convergence of a society’s readiness for transformation and the emergence of the right leader.

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