Traveling Through SpaceTime

The False Guru Test

2011-11-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

Traveling Through SpaceTime via the Internet, also known as "surfing", I just ran across this article at EnergyGrid. As I spend a lot of time helping people pursue their spiritual quest, I am amazed at the number of phony "spiritual leaders" that are popular. They range from Deepak Chopra, who does, occasionally have some wisdom, but whose main enterprise is selling his snake-oil products and the recycled wisdom of real teachers, to Rhonda Byrne's regurgitated mindlessness. (Not "mindfulness" or Zen, no-mind) Among the most egregious is Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel, a direct contradiction of Jesus' statements.

A "False Guru Test" is a useful tool. This is written in English and at least one word needs to be translated into "American". The word "bollocks" in English literally means "balls", but more generally means "bovine excrement." (There may be other Englishisms, but they are easy to understand.)

I know nothing of the author, Andrew P. except what it says on the webpage, he lives in London. However I did follow the next link to his blog and his essay on Michael Shermer, a "fundamentalist orthodox scientific skeptic."

The False Guru Test
Andrew P

The False Guru test seems to have struck a cord here in the West because of the outrageous abuses and exploitation by gurus, many self-proclaimed and completely misguided.TAKE THE FALSE GURU TEST. If seven or more of the following describes your guru or spiritual teacher, then unfortunately he or she may not be be as enlightened or good for your soul as you would like to believe:

States his or her own enlightenment: The wisest masters tend not to state their own enlightenment or perfection for they know that it is both unhelpful to themselves and to their students. The false teachers often make this claim because they have little else on offer to attract followers.
Is unable to take criticism: False teachers strongly dislike either personal criticism or criticism of their teaching; they do not take kindly to ordinary unenlightened individuals questioning them. They or their organisations will even undertake multi-million dollar law suits to stop ex-members from spilling the beans.
Acts omnipotently with no accountability: Some spiritual communities are run like concentration camps, with guru and his chosen ones acting like Gestapo officers. Unjust or outrageous behaviour by the guru is passed off as what is needed to help the followers grow (how kind). These are the dangerous gurus who have often severely damaged their students. A real master respects your will even if he or she understands that your particular decisions may not be in your interest, and he or she will act accountably to an ethical code of conduct.
Focuses on enlightenment itself rather than teaching the path leading to it: It is amazing how much false gurus have to say about enlightenment. They argue their points in the same way that the scholars in the middle ages argued how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. Any fool can talk about the end goal because what is said is irrefutable to most of your listeners. What is skillful is guiding those listeners to having awakening within themselves. The real teacher focuses on the path and strictly avoids any talk on enlightenment.
Does not practice what is preached: Contrary to spiritual myth, you don't reach a point of realization whereby you can then start acting mindlessly. If a teacher preaches love and forgiveness, then he should act that way, at least most of the time, showing suitable regret for any lapses). If he teaches meditation, he should meditate. If he insists that his followers live in austere conditions, so should he.
Takes the credit for a particular meditative or healing technique: The fact is that meditation and guided visualisation work. Anyone doing them will experience major changes, benefits and realizations. The false guru will try to own or trademark particular methods and techniques so that she has something unique to attract followers. And she will hijack the effects of meditation as the guru's blessing rather than each individuals natural potential. Often the students or followers are forbidden from divulging the techniques to maintain a sort of intellectual property right, usually under the guise of needing the technique to be taught correctly.
Specifically gives satsang or darshan when it is not part of his culture: Darshan is when the disciples or students of a master line up and to pass their master, who is usually seated, with either a bow or traditionally kissing their feet (yes it does happen). In the East, this is part of their culture and a normal thing to do to show respect and reverence (even children will kiss the feet of their fathers). However, here in the West, such copycat behaviour is a strong indication that the guru is acting a role. Satsang, on the other hand, means literally "the company of the Truth". In a deeper sense it is an affirmation of the Guru-Disciple relationship in Eastern traditions. But some Western gurus will use this terminology because they are playing a role.
Lives in total opulence: There is nothing wrong with living in luxury or being wealthy. But when that luxury turns to unnecessary opulence using funds that were not explicity donated for that purpose then you are probably dealing with a false guru. Money is collected from followers usually in the form of donations, and those donations are given as an act of love, appreciation and to help spread the influence of the master. However, a genuine master is more likely to use such wealth to lessen the suffering in this world, not to buy another yacht, private jet or Rolls Royce.
Encourages or permits adoration from his followers: Avoid any group that focuses on the "master" themselves rather than the teachings or spiritual practices. This will be a hindrance to your self-realisation for your focus will be drawn outside of yourself, and usually indicates that there is not a lot more on offer than guru worship.
Presents himself or herself overly fashionably and glamorously: Beware of masters who present glamour photographs of themselves and dress overly fashionably (whilst proclaiming that they have no ego and leading ego-death retreats). Yes it does happen!
Demands love and devotion from their students: Keep clear of any master who demands love and devotion. One very well known Western guru stated, "Anyone who loves me is guaranteed enlightenment"! Real love and devotion is earned over time when we begin to really know the whole person and not their public image.
Speaks with an Indian accent or vernacular when he is in fact a Westerner: Not sure how much this happens now but there are some high profile Western gurus who have (or had) Indian accents, mannerisms and vernacular. Unless they have genuinely spent considerable time in other cultures, they are probably playing out a role.
Runs expensive miracle workshops and courses: You are unlikely to reach enlightenment after a few weekend workshops with cheesy titles. In our society of "must have now", we want to be able to purchase spiritual development with minimal fuss. Also, avoid meaningless accreditation — it is often used merely to encourage followers to do more courses.
Takes sexual advantage of his or her followers: This happens much more than many believe. It is not being prudish to include this one because when a follower falls under the spell of a guru he or she is likely to do anything for the Chosen One. It is only afterwards that it may dawn on the follower that his or her openness has been used and abused. This can be very psychologically scarring.
Flatters you and treats you as very special: Sure we are all special in some ways, but this is one of the things that a false guru may do to hook a potential follower or to get a current follower to do a particular task. Nothing can be more intoxicating to the ego than to be selected by the master or leader (or any high profile person). A real master will stand back and allow you to make your decision whether to accept his or her teachings without trying to influence the process.
Talks bollocks: It is surprising what a person will listen to when he or she is devoted to the speaker. It is always a good idea to get hold of a written transcript of what has been said and really read the message. Then tell an open-minded friend who is not a follower what their opinion is purely on the strength of the words. You will soon find out whether there is any real substance to the teacher's message, or whether you are merely being drawn in by the charisma of the messenger.
Overly relies on slick presentation: Slick presentation can often mask poor content, and so it is important for you to look past the lovely music and video shows at the actual message. The slicker the presentation, the harder it is to see what exactly the teaching is.
Gives him or herself outrageous titles: Not satisfied by being "merely" an enlightened being, many false gurus give themselves titles (or allow their followers to do so) to indicate that they are literally God-Incarnate, the reincarnation of the Buddha or Christ, or THE chosen one. Some continually change their names, to keep pace with their burgeoning egos.
Runs abundance workshops: A guru or master is there to help us find an authentic life. This is nothing to do with becoming more successful at work or making more money, although this may or may not follow from being more authentic. There is nothing wrong with abundance weekends, but if we mistake spirituality for increased business success, then we are guilty of spiritual materialism and we find ourselves deeper in the illusion. (The Japanese say that the Gods laugh at those who pray for money.)
Is not interested in you personally: If a teacher or guru does not have time to interact with you personally, then you may as well read his teaching from a book, because merely being in his presence doesn't help you find realization inside you. You may model some of his spiritual characteristics, but that often only places you deeper in illusion.
Allows his followers to set up a hierarchy of access: A guru must be accessible. If he is not, or if he allows his followers to block your access, then he is playing the role of a king and not a spiritual guide. A guru is only useful to the process of awakening if you can directly interact with him. With the false guru, it is often the case of the more you donate the greater your access.
Makes false claims of lineage: Many mistakenly believe that realisation can only happen under the guidance of a realized master. In this belief system, gurus are only authentic when they come from a line or lineage of realized gurus. Desperate not to be left out, some gurus claim a false lineage of enlightened masters to bolster their authority to teach. Another pseudo form of "lineage" is to recount a miracle that once happened to them (maybe they cured themselves of some disease or God spoke to them personally) which infers that they are "chosen" and therefore have the authority to set themselves up as teachers and gurus.
Presents themselves as non-profit whilst raking in the millions: Often, the false prophet will present her teachings for free, whilst strongly encouraging her devotees to make large donations. In this way she can appear above money considerations, whilst maintaining her greed and opulence.
Collects a large band of angry ex-followers: This is an indication that something is seriously wrong. If she has used kindness and love in her interactions with her students, and has discouraged them from projecting denied spiritual characteristics onto the guru (rather than encouraging their integration into the self), then it is extremely unlikely that there would be more than a few disheartened ex's. Many might drift away and feel they have wasted their time, but they are only likely to have the great anger if they have put their teacher on a pedestal, given him their power, and later realized that he was never worthy of such adoration. Contrary to what some believe, it is actually the teacher's responsibility to strongly discourage students from putting them on pedestals, for this is counterproductive to finding realisation inside.
Uses pseudo-technology: Many false prophets and organisations base themselves around pseudo-technology in the effort to appear scientific — special meters, communication devices (do you really expect the aliens to use a mobile?) and energy clearing instruments and pendants that involve crystals and copper wire. Once again, this is to distract the unwary from the poor quality of the actual teaching.
Acts like a complete paranoid mad person: If your Precious One acts like a complete paranoid schizophrenic or psychotic then he or she probably is. Run! Remember that there is no such thing as "crazy wisdom"—wisdom is the art of being balanced. However charismatic they may be, and sane between moments of madness, you WILL be damaged by them.

A Sermon, Aug 7, 2011--Sausalito Presbyterian Church

2011-08-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me to preach in her stead as she was ill. I share this with anyone who cares. . .

Sausalito Presby. Ch. 8/7/2011

Scripture:

Gospel of Thomas: Vs. 2, 3

Jesus said: The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.

When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Children of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.

1 John: 4:7-8

My dear friends, let us love each other, since love is from God and everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.

Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.

Korzybski: Science and Sanity, p.35

'Say whatever you choose about the object, and whatever you might say is not it.' Or, in other words: 'Whatever you might say the object "is", well, it is not.

Hotei: (ca. 923)

Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?

Sermon Outline—Sausalito Aug. 7, 2011

Sermon Title:

God:A Meaningless Subject or Object

1. My life has passed through Akron, Ohio. Akron was the home of the evangelist, Rex Humbard and the Cathedral of Tomorrow. Curious, I went to his worship one Sunday. Probably over 1500 people. Pageantry, music, bands, singers. In the midst of the sermon, Humbard asked the congregation to close eyes and hold aloft a bill, a $10 or $20 to symbolize that they dedicate their wealth to God. As they did, the ushers went around and picked the money out of the raised hands.

2. Close your eyes, but keep your money in your pocket. If you believe in God, raise your hand. Good. Keep your eyes closed and put down your hand. If you don’t believe in God raise your hand. Excellent. Put your hands down. Now you can open your eyes.

3. So, who or what is this “god” that you just indicated you either believe in or don’t?

4. I am about to attempt something very difficult—almost impossible, in fact—to convince you to not take seriously the word “God”.

5. The only clear and plain description of God in the New Testament is that in 1 John: God is Love.

6. At least we can say God is Love. That has meaning, doesn’t it?

7. The word “Love”, we are insistently told, is a translation of three different words and meanings in the original Greek: Eros, Philos and Agape. This has become almost a dogma in Christian circles. There were actually a few others, Storge and Thelema were the two most common. But John did use “Agape”—selfless love. Does that really help us to define God? Not really but, in a strange way, it does point to God—but back to this later.

8. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus:

o Sisyphus was a king in Greek mythology. He considered himself cleverer than Zeus and the other gods. Zeus condemned him to an eternity of rolling a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it escape as he neared the top, and roll back down. Sisyphus had to do it over.

o This is our condition. We are born into the world. Thrown from our mother’s warm and comfortable womb into a frightening, unknown, and cold world. Our lives proceed through moments of joy and ecstasy, but a great deal of toil, strife, boredom, pain and suffering. Each moment of life takes us closer and closer to death. Even in the long term, some day, in some future epoch, the earth will fall into to sun and be incinerated—or some other such cosmological end.

o Albert Camus wrote a philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: The only real important question is, “Why not just commit suicide?”

o And his answer, “Embrace the absurd”. Revel in it by living the life of pleasure, theatrical pretense, or conquest.

9. I propose a different response. The answer of the Gospel of Thomas. The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.

10. So what is it that we are to seek? Camus is not entirely wrong. Life lived alone and singular is absurd. So what we seek is a reason not to commit suicide.

11. Or put another way, we are to seek a purpose, a Ground of Being, to bring us away from the absurdity of our singularity. To bring meaning to our lives. And when we find that purpose we will be disturbed and astonished. Not disturbed as anxious, but disturbed as when a pan of water is sitting quietly and you dissolve an ingredient by stirring it with a spoon. The water is disturbed into action. And then we will live a life of astonishment.

12. This, to steal from Cervantes, “this is our quest,” To spend a lifetime, not tilting at windmills, but finding our Ground of Being, the place where we are to stand, a reason for existence. A spiritual reality where we are disturbed and astonished. Let me be cute and coin the word GOB for Ground of Being.

13. I asked about your belief in God, not because I really care whether you believe or don’t believe. Remember that I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you mean by the word “God”. Discussions about God and whether you believe or not are meaningless. I go further, “I don’t even know myself what I meant in that moment.”

14. Words, according to Humpty Dumpty, don’t really have any meaning in themselves, they just have the meaning we give them. They have no life of their own. They are just pointers, or according to Alfred Korzybski, they are the map, but not the geography. If you have a map, there are symbols on it. There may be a bridge symbol for each of the six bridges. But when you arrive at any bridge it may be like the Golden Gate bridge or it may be the small wooden bridge over a chasm in the hills above San Rafael. The symbols may be the same, but the bridges will not.

15. So when you use the word God, it means just the meaning you give it—because it is a metaphor to explain your encounter with the Sacred. It is like the bridge symbol. My bridge will not be like your bridge. In fact, the river may have risen and collapsed my bridge which is no longer there.

16. Do you believe in God? Is there a God? These are meaningless questions. The word “God” is not god. In the words of Hotei, “It is a finger, pointing to the moon.”

17. The real question we might better be asking is, “What is my purpose in life,” “What is worth giving myself to?” And that is a question we continue to pursue for all of life. It is a question for which we can quest. We seek a purpose—or we live in absurdity. And when we find that purpose, if it is worth the price of a lifetime, it will disturb us, move us, astonish us. It may not be our God, but it will be our GOB.

18. The answer can’t be anything less than love, being a Follower of the Way—which is what the early Christians called themselves. Jesus says to love others as we love ourselves. When John writes, “God is love” then he is pointing to the inter-relationship of love. That all beings are related in God, in love. This is our spiritual quest, to discern our ground of being and being disturbed, to be astonished and find God there—not a word but a reality.

19. I have had many mentors and teachers in my life—some I knew and who knew me and some who just taught me via “distance learning”. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the latter. I’ve only been in his gathering a few times, but I learned much from him through his work and life. A key Buddhist concept is “sunyata”. Westerners usually, erroneously, translate it as “emptiness” but Thich Nhat Hanh translates more accurately, as “Interbeing.” He writes:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. The cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too.

20. Another person who has brought this home to me, this understanding of God, is your own Renee Rico. I had the privilege of knowing her when she was in seminary and interning at Westminster. She brought to us her vast awareness of Interbeing in her knowledge and concern for the environment.

21. I return to my question, “Do you believe in God”? The better question is Do you experience God who IS Love, and, if love, then the God who is Interbeing, who glues us all together, because we all Inter-are. I am driven to seek, find, be disturbed and astonished, by Interbeing.

22. A tribe of natives in Brazilian Amazon basin teach their children that to become human we must “make room in oneself for the immensity of the universe.” Unless we do so we will never find our true nature. Fragments of our nature will take each further away from our center.

23. Now breathe. You’ve just heard a lot of words. People who practice Zen are extremely suspicious of words. We take Korzybski and Hotei to heart. So all these words are merely the finger pointing to the moon of experience, not dogma about God.

24. But, if you let all the words just swirl around in your mind like a zen koan, somewhere among them you may find something to inform your spiritual quest.

25. I conclude with a warning Zen story:

Finding a Piece of the Truth

One day Mara, the Evil One, was travelling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up on wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara’s attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth."

"Doesn’t this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a dogma out of it."

Teddi

2011-08-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

As I've said, one of my goals is to "know everything about everything" before I die. I have other goals like learning to love more fully also. But in service of the first one, about a year ago, I noticed a small announcement of a "Basic Bird" class at the local Humane Society. The class was actually put on by Mickaboo, a bird rescue organization.

Why not. I had the Saturday morning free. Something else to know something about. I never knew that parrots live 50-70 years and even smaller birds like budgies live long lives. And parrots, conures (What's a conure? That's another thing I learned.), cockatiels, macaws, etc. create real, solid bonds with their owners, much like dogs and cats. I found out that the best bird food is an extruded pellet with all the nutrients needed--not seeds and nuts. Like most people, I assumed that birds eat seeds.

I've been a life-long dog lover. An old memory is getting chewed out by my mother because I fed a pound of hamburger, our planned dinner, to my friend's dog. But the apartments where I live won't allow dogs or cats. In March, I discovered that my neighbor is keeping cockatiels and the manager knows that. Oh, not just my neighbor but several others in the complex have birds, even one macaw. Yes, birds are fine.

Mickaboo is an all volunteer organization which takes in abandoned, wounded, or just surrendered birds. Lots of conures--go ahead, look it up--and cockatiels, Eclectus, African Greys, and budgies. They put the birds up with "foster parents" who nurse them back to health if possible before they are adopted out. They also place a few birds in "bird hospice."

I went to their website and looked at pictures of all their birds. Like many folk, I was attracted to all the pretty colors of the conures and the brightly colored macaws, but conures tend to be very noisy and inappropriate for an apartment and macaws are generally too large. I saw a gorgeous red female eclectus (The eclectus is one of the few parrot species where the male and female have very different coloring. The males are mostly green and females are red and blue. Most parrots cannot be sexed by appearance.)

So I filled in the l-o-o-n-n-g-g application form to adopt a bird and after a certain wait was contacted for an extensive interview by phone. After all, this is not a baby, it's a bird. As a result, I was cleared for a home visit. Home visit? Oh, maybe it is baby. We had the home visit and in person interview. I passed. All humor aside, the Mickaboo folk are very conscientious and want to be sure that an adopter takes her/his responsibility very seriously. Birds are fragile. For example, they can easily be killed by the fumes from teflon cooking utensils. They need a reasonable amount of space for a cage and they need it to be placed well so that they get light when awake, but darkness to sleep.

Unlike finches and canaries, larger birds want companionship--especially the larger parrots. So the home visit included questions about my work habits, even hobbies and vacation plans.

I was approved. Then began the effort to set appointments to visit and meet potential "adoptees". Since all the "foster parents" are volunteers who also have their own lives, a visit has to be scheduled for mutual convenience. There was one conure who seemed promising. But actually hearing him let me know that he just wouldn't fit in. Cockatiels might have been good, but somehow I never quite warmed up to that breed. I met my Eclectus in Oakland, about thirty minutes drive from here. Rose is a great bird and would eventually become a wonderful companion to someone, but a previous home had left her apathetic and unapproachable. I knew that I just didn't have the bird-raising skills to help her recover.

The next bird I met was Kelly, an African Grey Timneh. She is a beautiful bird. When people speak of African Grey parrots, just the word grey suggests drab and uninteresting. But that does not do justice. The subtle shades of gray are amazing and then there is the surprisingly red tail--more maroon in Timnehs. Kelly though had many other socialization problems and the "foster mother" advised me that lacking experience, I would be even less successful with Kelly than she had been. Even after nine weeks, Kelly was still having trust issues and Janet, the "mom" had a lot of time to spend with Kelly.

The next week brought me to San Jose, a two-hour drive, to meet Teddi, a Congo African Grey. Teddi, like most Mickaboo birds, had problems. "Trust issues" are common as many of the birds have been with owners who either ignored them, treating them like goldfish--nice to look at, but not to interact--or actually maltreated them in some way. But Teddi was not so badly damaged as either Rose or Kelly. She would step up on my hand without biting and she would take treats, very carefully, from my fingertips.

I was warned that Teddi had some interesting whistles and mimics. While carrying her out to my car in the parking lot, I heard a truck back-up alarm. Looking around for potential danger, I could see no trucks--nothing that would have had such a sound. No, it was Teddi. Later, a few hours after getting home, I heard my phone ring. Running to pick it up, all I heard was the regular dial-tone. Just as I was about to hang it up, there was the ring again. Again, Teddi. Since then, Teddi has exhibited a wide range of whistles, including a loud wolf-whistle--no, my female readers, I am not so crass as to teach her that. :-) Then one day I heard a whistle I recognized. She was whistling the first bars of the fourth movement of Dvorak's Ninth Symphony. Huh-h-h-? Honest!

African Greys are noted as among the smartest birds, known to speak clearly and even create new sentences from their arsenal of individual words. Teddi doesn't frequently speak--though occasionally I do hear, "Hello Kitty"--but as we get to know each other better, I have confidence that she may eventually learn to do psychotherapy. She will probably be as good as many of the therapists I've known.

We are getting more and more comfortable with each other. She will now take treats from the palm of my hand, not just the fingertips. She will even let me kiss her beak. In fact she even asks for kisses. If I am VERY gentle in my movements, I can touch her body with my cheek. She still freaks out if I try to touch her with my hand. There must be some really bad association with hands. I have more than a few wounds from her defensive bites.

My lack of bird inexperience shows up occasionally--frequently. Last Saturday evening, I heard a strange squawking and ran to see what was up. I thought she was choking from something stuck in her throat. Putting her in her "travel cage" we ran to the emergency vet who looked carefully, probed with a forceps, found absolutely nothing--and didn't even charge.

Still, I'm glad I checked it out. Teddi and I have a long way to go, but we are definitely falling in love. Every morning, I take the cover off her cage and as she wakes up, I realize just how glad I am that she is with me. When she looks deeply in my eyes, my heart does melt.

The Eleventh Plague

2011-08-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

When Moses, under God's direction, pleaded with Pharoah to free the Israelites, Pharoah refused. Each time God sent a plague. There were locusts and bad water and even the death of all the first-born male children. That was the tenth plague. It was the one that finally brought Pharoah's capitulation.

What is not recorded in the bible is that God still held an eleventh plague in reserve. If all the first ten plagues could not convince Pharoah, God would have sent the eleventh plague which surely would.

The eleventh plague is conservatism/fascism. Nothing can destroy a country more than conservatism. Conservatism comes from a closed heart and a closed hand. A closed heart is one that is dead or dying. A closed hand is a fist.

It is like that today. We are experiencing the eleventh plague in the United States.

When I was growing up, during World War II, we all knew that we would have to temporarily give up some amenities. There would not be as much milk as we wanted. Sugar was in short supply. Gasoline was rationed. My mother, a three-pack a day smoker, had to roll her own cigarettes. But despite all that, the outlook was bright. We would win the war and then see a better day.

And all through the post-war era and the 1950s and 1960s and even the inflationary period of the 1970s, things were getting better. Polio was conquered. The US was crisscrossed by new highways and bridges that helped expand commerce. The average working person could make enough money to raise a family and send his kids to college.

Much of this came about because of the rise of labor unions. The union movement brought us a five-day work week, decent pensions for retirement, health care, labor laws that prevented the abuse of 10 year old children in factories and much more.

Then came the so-called Moral Majority, in actuality neither a majority nor moral. Funded by wealthy contributors, just as now, they elected as president, Ronald Reagan, a man who began by destroying unions, continued by destroying pensions and putting this country into tremendous debt. They still continue by destroying the public education system that brought prosperity and innovation.

(The only administration which has not added to the debt was that of Bill Clinton. The current one has added to the debt by continuing the unfunded wars begun by the conservative Republican administration before it, as it struggles to reverse all these trends.)

Now, by it's intransigence, the conservatives both Rethuglican and DemoRats continue to be a plague on this country. The more extreme ones deny the reality of global climate change despite the clear evidence. They have declared war on women, on minorities, on the poor.

The California university system provided free tuition to Californians for many years. That brought a tremendous outpouring of technological creativity. Silicon Valley is almost synonymous with the computer revolution and is a direct result. But the conservatives, beginning with the aforementioned Ronald Reagan have starved the system so that tuition is now at outrageously high rates. The result is a loss of competitiveness in the world economy.

Similar results have obtained in mental health efforts, physical health maintenance, the prison system and even fire-fighting and law enforcement. The roads and bridges of the U.S. are deteriorating as is the electric grid and most other parts of the "commons"

The only reasonable conclusion is that God has brought this plague of conservatism, the modern form of corporatocracy to this country because we allow the wealthy to dominate the political system.

Look it up. It is very biblical. (Isaiah, Micah, Amos and other prophets.)

Trust, Openess, Realization, Interdependence->Synergy

2011-04-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I participated in three workshops organized by Jack and Lorraine Gibbs. Jack was a Ph.D. psychologist and leader in the burgeoning field of Organization Development, but his work was significant for individual human growth and for self-actualization (Abraham Maslow). And it was significant for me.

In the last week, I have had two opportunities to share my learnings from the TORI workshops from so long ago. I went to the "World Brain" to Google TORI. Along with Tori Spelling and Tori Amos I found a handful of relevant references. I'm quoting one of the best. (Long since in the public domain.) I think TORI has largely fallen into the black hole of the selfishness of the "I've Got Mine" environment beginning in the 1980's.

TORI THEORY AND PRACTICE

Jack R. Gibb
From The 1972 Annual Handbook For Group Facilitators
©1972 University Associates
(This material is used by permission of Jossey-Bass, Inc., a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

TORI theory is a general, unitary theory that applies to all formal and informal social systems (3, 6). It is structured in such a fashion as to be particularly adapted to the engineering of system change: learning communities (8), therapeutic communities (4, 9), management systems (1, 3, 7), change-inductive small groups (2, 5, 8, 10, 11), and organizations (3, 12).

Several assumptions of the theory are directly relevant to the work of leaders, trainers, and consultants in small groups.

1. Any social system–a group, person, community, nation, or organization–is best understood and improved most effectively by focusing upon system characteristics of a living, growing organism.

2. The primary and leverage variables in organic growth are the antithetical processes of fear and trust and their correlates.

3. Growth occurs as a movement from fear towards increasing trust. The primary correlates of this central process are the following four: movement from depersonalization and role towards greater personalization, from a closed system towards a more open system, from impositional motivation towards greater self determination, and from dependency towards greater interdependence (2, 8, 12). TORI is a convenient acronym for these four factors in the organic growth of living systems: trust, openness, realization, and interdependence.

4. Fear-defense levels are thus manifested in systems in four ways: depersonalization and role living, facade building and covert strategies, impositions and persuasions, and high control and dependency (2, 3).

5. Trust and low defense levels are manifested in systems in four ways: personal, intimate and non-role behavior; open and transparent behavior; self-determining, assertive, and actualizing behavior; and reciprocally-fulfilling, interdependent, and "with" behavior.

6. An efficient and powerful way of optimizing growth and the trust factors in growth is to focus upon the environmental forces that impinge upon participants in the system. This environment may then nurture and sustain growth behaviors which are associated with classic and desired group outcomes: creativity, high learning, group productivity, personal growth, and group vitality (7, 12). This is true of training and therapy groups as well as "natural" teams in industry, volunteer organizations, and educational systems.

TORI theory implies a theory of learning which is inextricable from the main body of the theory. Growth occurs when a person, on his own steam, on his own impetus, does things that reinforce desired physical responses and behavior patterns. Changed behavior results from showing feelings rather than from talking about them, from doing things rather than thinking about or observing them, from letting one's self happen rather than examining one's motives, and from physically carrying out an impulse or making a choice. After growth people look different. Growth is its own reward. The kind of sustained learning and growth that makes possible living in trust comes from self-sustained and self-directed changes in life style and behavior patterns.

The primary condition of learning is not diagnostic sensitivity but the process of trying out things that a person deeply wants to do and then experiencing the effects of the behavior upon the self and upon others. Permanent and genuine growth comes from a person finding out what he is and what he deeply wants to do, getting in touch with what his body tells him, and then doing things that integrate self-body at all levels of experience and awareness. Deep learning is not a remedial or corrective process but an inner emergence, a building upon organic strengths, and an increasing trust in self.

PERVASIVE ASSUMPTIONS

There are several assumptions in the TORI system which are immediately pertinent to the leadership style of the trainer, leader or consultant:

1. A group leader is most effective when he is as personal, open, allowing, and interdependent as it is possible for him to be within the limits of his own defense level.

2. A system such as a small group "learns" actualizing styles of coping when the environment is low-defense. The group itself develops a norm system which implements its actualizing style. The most effective leader is one who "flows" with the organic growth of the group norm system, becomes an active, assertive member of the group, but does not attempt to place himself out of the group system as a "role" or as a "leader" in the classic sense.

3. Functional behaviors or styles (personal, open, self-determining, and interdependent behavior) are intrinsically rewarding and self-perpetuating if the immediate system environment is a high-trust and low-defense environment. The group leader "trusts the process" to develop and does not feel the need to teach, train, persuade, or model behavior for others.

4. Groups tend towards entropy when group styles are predominantly impersonal and inrole, strategic and closed, persuasive and coercive, and dependent-controlling. Groups tend towards self-sustaining growth when system styles are predominantly personal, open, allowing, and interdependent.

5. The flow of perceptual and feeling data in high-defense groups is so low that raising these data to visibility in the group is a powerful force in creating more functional styles of coping and relating. Functional feedback is apparently a powerful variable, as is indicated in a number of recent studies.

USES OF TORI THEORY IN THE LEADERSHIP OF GROUPS

The following table gives a checklist for persons who would try to apply this theory to a practical setting, either in therapy or training groups, or in team training in an organizational setting.

The primary leverage principle is that the TORI leader makes a series of trust assumptions about the world. He is predisposed to trust his impulses, his inner self, the motivations of others, the health-directed processes of group interaction, the general non-malevolence of nature and persons, his own abilities and capacities, the capacities of persons to assume responsibility for their own lives, and the world in general. When the leader is fearful he tends to be impersonal, closed, non-allowing, and controlling. He recognizes these tendencies and their genesis in his non-trust. Predisposed to recognize his fears, he is able to reduce his tendency to "act them out." Experience with groups and group phenomena enables the TORI leader to trust himself to show his fears when he recognizes them, to trust enough to show his distrusts, to share with others in a joint quest for a more trusting relationship in and out of the group.

CHECKLIST FOR GROUP LEADERS USING TORI THEORY

Leader moves away from:	Leader moves toward:
1. Being impersonal, "in role"	1. Being personal, non-role
2. Selecting my behaviors because they are helpful or therapeutic (a role prescription)	2. Responding to my current feelings and perceptions (showing my self)
3. Focus upon relations between role and role (leader and member; member and member)	3. Focus upon relations between persons and persons
4. Responding to what patients or members seem to need (programming)	4. Responding to how I see and feel about my relationships now (being spontaneous)
5. Screening my responses and modeling appropriate, relevant, helpful, role, or professional aspects of self	5. Minimal screening but sharing all areas of self, however relevant or professional they may seem to me to be
6. Responding to the other as a client, patient, member, or person needing help	6. Responding to the other as a unique person, qua person
7. Concern for changing, curing, or remedying the deficient individual	7. Concern for growth and development of each of us in all of our relationships
8. Being consistent with my theory of action, training, therapy or group growth	8. Focus upon intuition, "gut feel" of what to do: following impulse
9. Focus upon motives, interpretations, and other derivative, inferential, or role concepts	9. Focus upon more available, direct, experienced and visible behavior
10. Focus upon separate, autonomous individuals or entities, as entities	10. Focus on relationships (on how it is now between or among us)
11. Focus on abstraction, generality, or principle	11. Focus on concrete, primitive and elemental feelings and perceptions
12. Focus upon evaluative or moral judgments	12. Focus on descriptive statements about feelings and perceptions
13. Focus on and concern for then (other relationships in the past or future and on the past history of members)	13. Focus on and concern for now (how each of us feels and sees things at this moment)
14. Focus on and concern for there (data from other relationships and contexts)	14. Focus on and concern for here (feelings and perceptions visible and available to all)
15. Focus upon description of the passive self as a static being	15. Focus upon description of the dynamic, in process, becoming organism/person
16. Focus upon limitations of the person	16. Focus upon strengths and growing edges of the person
17. Focus upon punishment and rewards	17. Focus upon flowing behaviors and feelings
18. Focus upon legality, "contracts," norms, controls	18. Focus upon flow, fluidity of temporary, self sustaining systems
19. Focus upon the terminology of fear, risk, caution, and conservation	19. Focus upon trust, venture, impulse, and liberation
20. Focus upon words, semantics, and speech	20. Focus upon non-verbal and body flow and organic integration

Fears become less frightening as they become more familiar, as their effects become better known, and as one learns that the fears will dissipate with openness and interaction. In order to become truly personal in a group, a leader must become very familiar with his fears and the fears of others and be able to deal with these verbally and nonverbally in the continuing feedback of the group interaction.

The inexperienced leader has many fears: fear of letting things get out of control, fear of being seen as incompetent or unprofessional, fear that persons in the group will be hurt or damaged, fear that he will not be perceptive enough to see what is going on under the surface of things, fear that he will not live up to the expectations of group members, fear that he will lose his objectivity as a professional observer, fear that members might see others in the group as more competent or helpful than the appointed leader, and fear that he will not be able to invent or provide a method for resolving a conflict or crisis in the group. Only when the leader sees himself as a role, tries to live up to role expectations, and protects himself from personal relations does he have these kinds of fears. As he comes to see himself as a person and accept his personal relationships with others he finds that these fears come to dissipate.

The leader who comes through theory-motivated and theory-guided experiences in "leaderless" (person-full) groups to gain trust of group processes is increasingly able to enter the group as a person. He is able to ignore the initial role demands of inexperienced group members and to enter into personal relationships. He gains his satisfactions from his own growth, from genuine interdependence, from depth relationships with other persons, from the exchange of human emotions with others, from his growing congruence, and from his growing freedom from the crippling feelings of responsibility for the lives and learnings of others. These are health-giving satisfactions, intrinsic rewards, and freedom-giving behaviors (11).

The central concepts in the leader style described are freedom from role (11), taking responsibility for self and giving others responsibility for themselves (6), giving self the freedom to follow impulses and one's own spontaneity (12), giving primacy to interdependent and with relations (6), the focus upon emergent strengths rather than upon remedial processes (5), the focus upon organic flow rather than upon "contracts" or role obligations (8), the focus upon ecological engineering rather than upon leader behavior for group improvement (5), and the focus upon bodily and non-verbal processes rather than upon verbal relationships. The TORI theory relies upon a set of general assumptions and experiences and a general world or person viewpoint or set, rather than upon a methodology or a technique. TORI is a life style, a way of living, an organic integration and not a tool or a method. The orientation comes both from a person-oriented theory of life and from a set of experiences that create a trusting stance toward persons and groups. One can learn to be more trusting. The general trust theory outlined above emerges in individuals who have trust-inductive experiences. Trust is a master variable. As a person becomes more trusting he becomes more personal, open, allowing, and with others. He inevitably becomes less role-locked, closed, manipulative, and dependent-controlling. One can choose to be less controlling or more open. This choice-directed behavior, if theory-directed and if satisfying to the learner, is self-fulfilling. That is, such experiments with self can reduce fears and increase trusts. The experimenter finds, for instance, that allowing and non-manipulative behavior is more satisfying to him and to others and the allowing behavior can become ascendent as an emerging life style.

Proficiency in the use of TORI theory and practice as a life style and as a way of working with training groups and natural groups can come in one of several ways. Reading the theory as outlined in the sampling of references listed at the end of this essay may be helpful. Performing miniature experiments upon oneself in trying out a role-free style in a series of group experiences is helpful in getting oneself in tune with his capacities to be personal, communicate in depth, join in shared search, and live interdependently. In my experience I have seldom seen a person who makes a genuine and sustained effort to be role-free revert to role behavior. Role-free behavior is more organically rewarding to all relatively non-defensive people than is role behavior. Role behavior is rewarding only in defensive climates, in formal structures, and in controlled or dependent relationships. Non-role behavior is organically suited to the actualization of man. Another route to learning a TORI personal style is to work closely with a person who is using TORI theory in practice. There is obviously no single path to personness.

The TORI group leader, when he has developed a congruent life style, acts in the same way in the group when he is the announced leader or trainer as he does if he were a member of the group. He uses the same "theory" in all situations. His behavior as a therapist, an administrator, a trainer, a parent, a teacher, a counselor, a manager, or a friend is essentially the same. He does not have a special theory to fit a special situation. He does not "choose a leader style." He is as much a person in all situations as it is possible for him to be. He does not "take the role" of parent or therapist. Being present as a full person in the here and now and responding with minimal screening to himself and to others has growth-giving effects. In being a full person in all situations lie gives and receives life, warmth, love, with-ness and humanness. He thus, as serendipity, meets his role obligations as a parent, a therapist, a teacher, or a minister. That is, people around him grow, learn, get healthier, and become more creative and enriched. People may model after him if they wish, as all persons in some ways model after many others. He does not set himself up as a model or consciously intend his behavior to be a model. His life is a continuing quest for richer interdependence. Interdependence is the direction of the growth. Openness, congruence, self-actualization, and role-freedom are means, are steps along the way, and paths toward more full interdependence.

TORI-STYLED LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS

The TORI style of leading a group is appropriate to the most functional leadership within the organization. When persons take or are given "managing" positions in groups or organizations (parents, teachers, administrators, managers) they often attempt to manage the warmth, the communications, the motivations, and the structure of the system (3). They inherit from conventional theory and prevalent practice a series of distrust assumptions about the nature of men and organizations. Based upon these assumptions they institute a series of counter-growth and self-defeating programs: praise and punishment, performance appraisal, merit badges and merit pay, competition, quality control, and arbitrary rules. The critical dynamics of the system are so masked that leaders continue to get falsely confirming data. The systems seem, on the surface, to be effective, but they exacerbate latent and cumulative counter-growth forces: depersonalization, role behavior and fear; strategic distortion and circumvention; persuasion-passivity; and dependence-hostility (1, 3, 7).

More functional behavior for the parent, teacher, group leader, or manager is to "go with the flow" and contribute directly to the emergence and growth of the system. When this happens persons and organizations grow, emerge, and become. There is movement toward primary and stated aims: productivity in the company, spirituality in the church, socialization in the home, learning in the school, and psychological health in the clinic.

Movement and growth are toward the health and fulfillment of members: the essence of effectiveness of any social system. Growing—personal, open, realizing, and interdependent behaviors — is highly correlated with each of the organizational outcomes stated above.

It is my observation, both in research and consulting, that the most direct, economical and powerful way for the manager, group leader, or therapist to enhance these organizational outcomes is to direct attention to increasing the trust level. He optimizes growth and reduces defense levels by being personal, open, self-determining and interdependent, and fostering these behaviors in others.

This is not to say that the manager or group leader becomes passive, non-directive, "permissive," impotent, encaptured by forces he cannot understand or control, an observer, or even a servant. Rather, the high-trust TORI leader becomes a full person. He is assertive, warm, open, active, demanding to be heard, expressive of his own feelings and needs, and very much involved in decisions and processes in the group and in its creativity and productivity: just as are all the other growing members of the group or the organization.

The leader does not assume responsibility for the group or the organization. Taking responsibility for someone else feeds the counter-growth forces of role taking, filtering, passivity, and dependency that we see in low-trust groups, teams, and organizations.

Any change in a person or group or organization, however significantly it may relieve symptoms of distress, is dysfunctional if it does not move in the direction of increasing the trust level and optimization of the four variables of personalization, openness, self-determination, and interdependence.

REFERENCES

1. Gibb. J. R. Defensive communication. The Journal of Communication, 1981, 11 (3), 141-148.

2. Gibb, J. R. Climate for trust formation. In L. P. Bradford, J. R. Gibb & K. D. Benne (Eds.), T group theory and laboratory method. New York: Wiley, 1984.

3. Gibb, J. R. Fear and facade: defensive management. In R. E. Farson (Ed.), Science and human affairs. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 1965.

4. Gibb, J. R. The counselor as a role-free person. In C. A. Parker (Ed.), Counseling theories and counselor education. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

5. Gibb, J. R. Group experiences and human possibilities. In H. A. Otto (Ed.), Human potentialities. St. Louis: W. H. Green, 1968.

8. Gibb, J. R. Search for with-ness: a new look at interdependence. In W. G. Dyer (Ed.), New dimensions in group training. New York: Van Nostrand, 1971, in press.

7. Gibb, J. R. Managing for creativity in the organization. In C. W. Taylor (Ed.), Climate for creativity. New York: Pergamon Publishing Co., 1971. -~.

8. Gibb, J. R., & Gibb, L. M. Humanistic elements in group growth. In J. F. T. Bugental (Ed.), Challenges of humanistic psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

9. Gibb, J. R., & Gibb, L. M. Emergence therapy: the TORI process in an emergent group. In G.M. Gazda (Ed.), Innovations to group psychotherapy. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1968.

10. Gibb, J. R., & Gibb, L. M. Leaderless groups: growth-centered values and potentials. In H. A. Otto & J. Mann (Eds.), Ways of growth: approaches to expanding awareness. New York: Grossman, 1968.

11. Gibb, J. R., & Gibb, L. M. Role freedom in a TORI group. In A. Burton (Ed.), Encounter: the theory and practice of encounter groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969.

12. Gibb, J. R., & Gibb, L. M. The process of group actualization. In J. Akin, A. Goldberg, G. Myers, & J. Stewart (Eds.), Language behavior: readings in communication. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton & Co., 1971.

Multi-Dimensional Spirituality

2011-02-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

At the top of each entry of this blog is a Calabi-Yau image of ten-dimensional reality along with the title "Traveling through SpaceTime." (The Calabi-Yau image is named for mathematicians Eugenio Calabi who is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Penn. and Shing-Tung Yau, now at Harvard.)

Calabi-Yau images are a way that physicists and mathematicians model the reality that their mathematics describes. Super-string theory demonstrates mathematically that there are many more dimensions to reality than we humans can perceive directly. In some versions of the theory there are 6 or more, up to 11 dimensions. This does seem strange to us, but even for our normal perspective, it is easy to see that there are four dimensions we can work with. We usually say height, width and depth, but every object also has a perceivable history, past and future. So time is the fourth dimension. (Hence the word spacetime.)

So why can we not directly perceive the additional dimensions? For several reasons. Among them are that the "objects" that exhibit these additional dimensions are extremely small, billionths of trillionths of times smaller than objects visible even with our best microscopes--or even with the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN--the largest particle accelerator. But also because understanding all this requires advanced mathematics and most of us are just not in that league. It is all most of us can do to balance our checkbook; maybe, with difficulty we can even handle simple math of building a table or shelf or adjusting a recipe. Beyond that, even if our schools taught math better than they do, it might be beyond our abilities.

BUT, that doesn't mean these dimensions are not real. We can't see viruses, but our lives are affected by them. Even the most healthy of us seem to catch an occasional cold. Most people don't understand lasers, but they have no trouble using a DVD player which is completely based on lasers.

For a long time, longer than most people, I've been trying to understand spiritual reality. Of course, like most, my spiritual reality is based on our ordinary three--or four--dimensions of life. Super-strings, M-theory, p-Branes, and all the newly discovered understandings of reality, call into question a spirituality that is only based on these three or four dimensions.

Then I discovered Quantum Mechanics, where strange things happen; where photons seem to be in two places at the same time, except that as soon as you look at one, it decides at which location it will be; where the only certainty is a probability, not actuality; where objects separated by light-years are intertwined and affected by each other. Quantum Mechanics is not conjecture; Some technology we use daily is based on it: Computers, cellphones, modern aircraft and cars, CD and DVD, the laser-based measuring equipment that modern surveyors and carpenters use. Suddenly, spirituality based on everyday perception began to corkscrew. Spirituality based on eternal verities became and becomes a pretense to cover cowardly weak thinking.

The spiritual guides of the past, Abraham, David, Gautama, Mohamed, all based their understanding on some version of a world that is no longer even a fantasy in the world of the least educated among us. That doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying truths are wrong, only that the old visions no longer tell those truths. The bible understanding of the world where heaven is a dome held up by four columns. Windows in the dome open and allow rain to fall. That world does not exist and spirituality that takes it as serious fact cannot satisfy any thinking human being in the present time.

Super-strings, M-theory, p-Branes, and all the newly discovered understandings of reality, call into question a spirituality that is only based on these three or even four dimensions of height, width, depth and time.

No. I do not have a new spirituality. Those who base their spiritual claims on specious science do not either.

But we must seek out the new frontiers of spirituality, not based on science or mathematics, but accounting for the realities those disciplines are providing us. I don't know the size or shape of a reality that accounts for super-strings, but I do know that it will include some form of Jesus' commands to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, care for the ill and the poor--and the similar directives of other religions. It will not appeal to a supernatural god who magically creates the universe, but it will derive from universal godness in all creation.

Male Troubles

2011-01-30T17:18:00.000-08:00

Warning: If discussion of human anatomy and physiology or medical conditions grosses you out, please click the following link to leave, Leave this blog.

If you are still here. . .

When I was a child growing up in Texas, women would speak in hushed tones about having "female trouble" or "female problems." Of course I had no idea what that meant. In fact most adult men had little more understanding than I did. In those days, even to speak of a woman having a "period" was to be greeted with snickers or giggles. Anything more was far beyond the comfort zone.

The idea of "male problems" was not even thought of. But here I am, at the ripe age of 74, having "male problems".

Of course "female trouble" covered a wide range of medical conditions but "male problems" could mostly refer to one thing, "benign prostate hyperplasia," or an enlarged prostate. In a design flaw that would cause a professor to fail any engineering student, the urethra (The tube which carries urine from the bladder to the outside) in men runs through the prostate gland. Now that might not be so bad except that the prostate gland has a tendency to become enlarged over the years, squeezing the urethra and limiting the flow of urine. About 8% of men 31-40 have an enlarged prostate; by 50, that percentage has reached 50% and by 80, it is 80%. (For those who believe in "Intelligent Design", I'm sorry, but this is one more piece of evidence that God flunked out of engineering school.)

In the last few years I've come to realize that I fall on the wrong side of those percentages.

Experiencing the symptoms of a weak urine stream and frequent urgency, I thought that I had no choice but to live with it. Then about two years ago, a friend of mine told me about the "green-light laser" procedure that he had undergone. He entered the doctor's office and under anesthesia, a tube with a laser was inserted in his urethra. The laser was used to "ablate" or cut out some of the prostate obstruction. He left the office with a catheter; returned the next day to have the catheter removed and within a few days was back at his normal routine.

For over a year, I considered this. Finally in November, my urologist performed the same procedure on me. And I expected the same results.

HA!

Now I'm not sharing my tale because of some exhibitionist tendency. I thought about this quite a while before writing, but decided that for the many men out there who might experience BPH, I should share my experience so that you know the possibilities.

I did return the next day to have the catheter removed. But by that night, I was unable to urinate and had to go to the Emergency Room to have a new one inserted. Several days later it too was removed. But that is not the end of my sad tale. I experienced various symptoms, irritation, difficult urination and much more. I developed a great deal of irritation in the urethra, a weakening of the sphincter muscles and just a very miserable time of it.

For the first time, I now am experiencing incontinence. No one warned me of this possibility. As I left the Y one day, after a workout, I found my pant legs soaking from the flow of urine. I began wearing "panty shields" designed for women to use during their flow to protect their panties. Even that was not enough. I discovered and began wearing special disposable underpants which capture the flow. Some days I had to change those three times. Still that was a lot better than having wet underpants and pants.

My doctor gave me a "penile clamp" which clamps around the penis and puts pressure on the urethra (Without also stopping the blood flow within--parts of the body that don't have good blood flow tend to develop gangrene. We wouldn't want that.)

My physician has instructed me to do specific exercises (Kegel exercises for males concentrate on the pubococcygeus muscle or the PC muscle. This muscle can easily be identified by the man by trying to stop the flow of urine half way.) to strengthen the muscles which will improve and eliminate my incontinence over time. He has also let me know that there are medications he may prescribe to help. So I have great hope that eventually I'll be free of this.

Since then I have searched the Internet and discovered a whole industry catering to those of us with incontinence. There are several varieties of penile clamps and different types of both disposable and washable underwear for this. While women don't get BPH, they also have a high occurance of incontinence for other reasons, so there are similar incontinence products for women. (The Skene gland is sometimes called the female prostate because it does secret a similar fluid, and while it can become problematic, it does not surround the urethra and cause the same symptoms.)

Here is the point of this posting. If you suffer from BPH, don't hesitate to get treatment. The green-light laser also known as TUVP was the treatment I received but your physician may have a reason to use another. And medicine keeps coming up with new treatments. BUT remember that the recovery seems to be very different. It has taken as much as four to six months on rare occasion. But, as with my friend, it has also been known to take just a few days. Don't be surprised. Be prepared. But if it takes longer, know that there are products on the market that help you maintain a normal life during the period. (I have a different penile clamp on order and hope that it will be a little less uncomfortable.)

We have been taught to be embarrassed about incontinence and, in fact, about any "male trouble." All that does is make things more difficult. You-I must take the mental position that it is no different than a sprained wrist. It is uncomfortable, inconvenient and a damned nuisance BUT THERE IS NO FAULT and should be no embarrassment. And there is a whole industry out there trying to make it less onerous. Take them up on it.

Just thinking out loud

2010-12-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

I was responding to a friend's email. My response should have been three or four words, but it kept growing as I kept "thinking."

Religions are not something to believe in. They are, at their best, a gathering of people who support each other in each one's spiritual quest. I think (not "believe") that there are and have been some individuals who have left hints on spiritual growth: Gautama, Jesus, Isaiah, Rumi, Meister Eckhart, George Fox, Gerald Gardiner (in modern times). Those who become "followers" are making the mistake of orthodoxy. But those who learn insights for their own growth can find inspiration.

I've spent much of my adult life trying to understand people and reality. I am a psychologist/counselor, spiritual coach, and searcher. (A coach is not great performer, but is skilled at helping others with talent become better at something.)

Spirituality is finding the answer to one question: Why not commit suicide? (Albert Camus). Life without purpose is inherently absurd, subject to some happiness within and with others, but mostly pain, suffering, illness, war. It only becomes meaningful when one chooses a purpose for which to live.

Not sure we know so much as we think we do. If we did, we would not be facing the threat of global climate change, continued war, and a Republican Congress whose agenda is destroying the middle class.

Fingers, Moons and Maps

2010-12-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

This post came from AwakeBlogger.com, a blog from a gentleman in Germany. I don't usually quote other bloggers because this blog, unlike my progressive politics blog (www.maringprogressive.wordpress.com) is strictly about expressing my own ideas and being exposed to the world. I try to reduce my boundaries here and own up.

In this case, however, the original author does such a masterful job of explaining my own spiritual, emotional and epistemological reality that I post it here with a great "Amen."

The Meaning of the Finger Pointing to the Moon

Hotei pointing with the finger to the moon
The nun Wu Jincang asked the Sixth Patriach Huineng, "I have studied the Mahaparinirvana sutra for many years, yet there are many areas i do not quite understand. Please enlighten me."
The patriach responded, "I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps I will be able to explain the meaning."
Said the nun, "You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?"
"Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?"
The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon is the essence here. But what does this mean on a deeper level? How does it relate to todays everyday life? How can we understand the meaning in an useful manner?
The laughing Buddha Hotei is pointing to the moon, who was a monk who lived during the Later Liang Dynasty (907–923 AD) of China. Contentment and happiness being his defining attributes, Hotei has a cheerful face and a big belly.
Analyzing the pointer is pointless
… said Eckhart Tolle, yet we tend to analyze the pointers without noticing it. If we are discussing about whether something is good for us or not or especially if we come to a philosophical debate, we are discussing the validity of models and concepts. We can also go out and experience something directly.
It’s the same with spirituality.
Spirituality is all about experiencing and the truth itself. So this post here is of course a finger pointing. The words are only pointing. So as long as we are pointing and discussing about the different pointers, we are not experiencing. The experience of something is the connection with something, the feeling one with something, without labeling.
What happens in philosophy and in religion again and again is the intense discussion about the pointers. How can it be that there is a discussion about one thing that is true? It is one thing right? It can only be because we represent something differently, which are different pointers. Then it is easy to discuss and disagree about them.
The map is not the territory [Alfred Korzybski]
The map is not the territory is just another way to point to the same thing. The map is the concept of what we have in the mind about something. It’s a belief, an image or a thought-pattern. We use this map in the same way as we use a city-map to find a location. If the map is correct, we will find our location. If it is slightly incorrect, we have to correct it by new knowledge, optimize it. If it is completely incorrect or we move to another city, we have to replace the map altogether. What is happening is that we changed the map. And this is happening all the time.
Another map is the self-image or we may call it the ego. It is everything we saved about ourselves. It is the map of ourselves and we act from it. We want to improve our self-image and we use our intellectual abilities to do so: we get our desires and we set goals and work towards them. The map called the ego is a very useful map that we constantly create ourselves. But here is the important thing: it is still a map.
It’s nice to have a map, as long as you know it’s a map
Which means:
1. The map can change : which means our self-concept (the ego, who we think we are) can change and this is the basis of personal development. This changing map includes our thoughts, beliefs and actions: the whole world-view and the self-image.
2. The map is not the territory : I am not the ego, my self-image. You are not your self-image, or in other words: You and I are not who we think we are; think in the literally sense of the word: thoughts (and all other concepts) are the map, not the territory.
The important step to Spiritual Awakening is dropping the map and experiencing what is without the map.
But, (for me at least) this means not to remove the map for all time. I need the map to function in the world and to relate to everything. So I create maps and use maps in a very intense way, in the best way possible. But there is one difference: I dis-identified the map from the territory. So I know that my self-image is my self-image but not the self.
Ken Wilber called the process "Transcend and include". Or as Genpo Roshi put it: the reason we are able to transcent the ego but still use it as a human being is that we know the Being side of the Human Being as well as the Human Side: check my posting about Personal Power vs. The Power of Now for more.
This is a Zen story I found on the website Pointing To The Moon :
"When Zen Master Nan-chuan saw his student Ma-tsu diligently practicing meditation hour after hour, he sensed a certain effort and ambition in the young monk’s demeanor, so he sneaked up behind him and asked, "What are you doing?" "I’m trying to become a Buddha," Ma-tsu replied proudly. Nan-chuan then picked up a stone and began rubbing it against a spare tile from the monastery floor. Hearing the sound, Ma-tsu asked, "What are you doing?" Said Nan-chuan: "I’m trying to make a mirror." Ma-tsu had an awakening.
And it goes on:
Everything is just as it is! Ma-tsu is Ma-tsu, the tile is the tile, and you are you, just as you are. There’s no Buddha apart from this fundamental truth, and any attempt to achieve some special state of mind just leads you away from who and what you already are. In the direct approach to truth …, the direct recognition of your true nature is available in every instant, on or off the cushion, whether you meditate or not. You merely need to "take the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate the Self," as Dogen Zenji said."

I may elaborate on this because it is so important. I'm in an email conversation with a Japanese gentleman from whom I have purchased a few Japanese antiques. He was suggesting that I buy some absolutely gorgeous blue tea cups as a present for another Japanese friend. But those cups, aethetically beautiful though they were, did not have any meaning for me. They are not a metaphor for me. What makes art meaningful is when it "speaks" to the observer. Each person has a different map and sometimes the art fits the map and sometimes it doesn't.

More Spirituality

2010-11-06T23:39:00.000-07:00

What's a good Jewish boy doing in a place like this? How did I get to be a Non-Theistic, Zen, Heterodox Christian born to a good Orthodox Jewish woman from Scranton, Pennsylvania?

It was a long road. To be clear. By the time I was in high school, I had already abandoned my mother's version of Judaism. To her, even the rabbi was insufficiently Jewish. Even as a teenager, that kind of superstitious adherence to illogic no longer kept my allegiance. As a Boy Scout, I had no trouble eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and sopping up the pork sausage gravy with my southern biscuits.

Not that I ever abandoned my love of kosher dill pickles and hot pastrami on rye. But early in my Air Force days, under the influence of a chaplain, I became a Christian. It did trouble me to have to know that my mother was bound for hell because she was not Christian, but that is what my conservative mentor taught me.

My travels from Corpus Christi, Texas, where I was born and grew up through years in Japan, first in the U.S. Air Force and then university, followed by seminary in California, New York, language study in Washington, D.C., urban studies in Chicago, death squads in Brazil, friends tortured and killed by the Brazilian military, teaching and studying in Akron, Ohio and so much more, have taken me through a spiritual journey as well. But my travels through my heart and mind have been even more drastic.

Let me parse out the spiritual description in the second sentence. I'll start from the end.

Christian: Does not mean a follower of all the traditional Christian creeds, dogmas, and doctrines. It simply means someone who tries to follow the model and example of Jesus and our best guess as to his words and actions. (The best guess is probably from the work of the modern New Testament scholars like those of the Jesus Seminar.)
Heterodox: Means counter-orthodox. It means not being bound by orthodoxy. Kind of like Jesus, who found himself and his disciples being hungry on the sabbath and picking ears of corn, even though the "law" said not to "work" on the sabbath. From "Heterodox" arises my only dogmatic statement. "Absolute statements of 'truth' are always wrong, including this one."
Zen: More difficult to define. Discovering non-duality. Recognizing "suchness". Finding that subject-object is only a convenient shorthand. Meditation. Much more. Please note: Not Buddhism. Though I am very appreciative of Buddhism and have much to learn from it, I do not embrace the Buddhist language and vision.
Non-Theistic: Realizing that there is no supernatural deity "out there". Unlike most atheists the Non-theist may use the word "god" as a symbol of something otherwise indescribable like the spirit of all community or greater unity of all beings including perhaps, the non-sentient beings. This gets pretty fuzzy. Perhaps the "panentheist" understanding of "god" is a good choice. God is in everything and everything is in God, but everything is not God. Okay. We're still working on a good explanation.

I have come to understand that all words are but pointers to reality. They have no real meaning in themselves. Sometimes a few human beings come to a tentative agreement on the meaning of a word, so we use that word. Words are all we have to communicate with. But we make a great mistake if we take too certainly the idea that we really agree. Even with common objects, our understandings of words differ. I was taken aback when I asked someone the time. His answer was "1730". Of course, having been in the Air Force, having flown as a private pilot and having lived in Japan, I quickly realized that he was using 24-hour time and when I later looked at the time on my cellphone, it said "5:47pm". But most people on hearing that would take longer, if they ever did understand.

It is so with spiritual reality, but even more. Each person has experienced spiritual reality in her different way. Some even blanch at the use of the word "spiritual" because it connotes something distasteful or even untrue to them. At best we have to use words. They are the only tools available.

I do use the word "god" because, despite the joke, if I used the word "dog" it would really be confusing. (Except to a handful of us dog lovers.) But, again, I certainly do not mean some supernatural god out there who created all of the universe. I do mean the confluence of nature and humanity which brings feelings of awe to me on a misty spring day. And much more.

I am uncomfortably comfortable with the word "prayer". It means, for me, self-talk reminding me of my intentions or exclaiming my sense of gratitude. Not gratitude to a supernatural god, mind you, but gratitude still. My discomfort bells start ringing when someone insists we pray to "God" for deliverance from something unpleasant--illness perhaps or victory in sport or natural disaster.

Another word is "miracle". On a purely rational level, when I consider my replacement knee, I think it is a miracle. The miracle is not supernatural or outside of natural laws. Still it is amazing that science and medicine have collaborated to create this device which relieves the pain with which I lived for so many years.

But when two parents pray for their children to be healed from a brain-tumor--a real example for me--then one is healed and the other dies. I can't simply say, as some can, "God moves in mysterious ways." That certainly is an explanation, but it makes God into a monster. If God heals one and not the other, God is not a just God. After all, both children were equally worthy of life. Too young to have committed serious moral wrong, the injustice is blatant. On the other hand, if God isn't the source of healing, then God is not worthy.

Then what is spirituality. If not God, then what? I go back to Camus. The spiritual quest is the search for something on which to found one's life. The great Christian theologian Paul Tillich invented the phrase, "Ground of being." The aim of spirituality is two-fold. To discover a ground of being (GOB), somewhere to stand in life. And it is to find a way to express both awe and gratitude.

In a future blog entry, I will go forward and explore spirituality itself; perhaps some useful pointers for pursuing it as well. I'm not sure that a person who does not search for a GOB (Ground of Being) can be emotionally and mentally healthy. More later.

Attitudinal Healing

2010-10-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

My friend called last night. She doesn't own a TV or DVD player. Could she come over to watch a DVD of Jerry Jampolsky and Diane Cirincione, talking about Attitudinal Healing with a Japanese interviewer in Hawaii.

So I got a chance to watch with her. It was very interesting. Much of what they teach is quite congruent with my own philosophy and approach to counseling. It is a combination of the principles of CBT and a lot of Glasser's Choice Theory along with ideas from existentialism and mindfulness. There were a couple of things that were very similar to techniques I use to help people stay in the here and now.

All together, I was quite happy that people are being exposed to these ideas. Perhaps more people will actually learn to use them for their lives.

This wasn't the first time I've encountered Jampolsky's work, but my exposure in the past has been second hand. I've heard Jampolsky before but not clearly laying out his ideas. This time he was being very specific in answering some questions being asked by the Japanese woman. I didn't get her name but she was quite bright and insightful in her input.

Jampolsky began formulating all this many years ago when he was working with terminally ill children. In the intervening years, he broadened his reach to include all manner of people. The Center for Attitudinal Healing, which he founded in 1975, has now become an international network of attitudinal healing with centers in many countries.

Though a couple articles I have read associate AH with Positive Psychology, I think Jampolsky has a stronger handle on reality. From my association with a few people at the old Center for Attitudinal Healing in Sausalito, CA which was the original locus for Jampolsky's work, I have been given to understand that there is a new regime which has not only changed the name to Corstone, but has also abandoned the Attitudinal Healing structure and has simply become associated with the Positive Psychology movement.

Random Comments on Recent Life

2010-03-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Heaven and Hell

I wish I believed in a god of retribution and hell. The world and national leaders and heads of corporations would be looking forward to an eternity of paying for their crimes. They continue to rain death and destruction on the ordinary folk of this world. The leaders of Uganda and their anti-gay laws. The runaway banking corporations which have brought the finances of millions of everyday people to the point of, in some cases, homelessness and illness. The health insurance industry leaders who have fought against reform. Big pharmaceutical industry which lobbies against regulation and whose monopoly raises the cost of medicine beyond the reach of so many people. And I'll not forget the fundamentalist religious leaders in Iran, Israel, the US, Palestine, and many other places would roast in hell.

The latest atrocity that has come to my attention is the famine in North Korea. The mismanagement of resources, military oppression and other policies of the paranoid dictator are bringing terrible misery to the people of that country. It was not on my radar--amidst the many atrocities--until a friend sent me an article from the LA Times with the story. The situation has long been bad, but now is escalating. I won't repeat it here. You can go to the link for that. But surely Kim Jong Il will soon join his father with the blood of millions on his hands.

New York

New York City is greater than life. I have lived there twice for a year each time. Even so, I was struck by the vitality, the immense amount of life. There is always activity on the streets at almost any time of day or night. My hotel was near the theater area and that intensifies the level of energy. But even on the subway coming in from the airport, I could feel it. And despite the stereotypes, as I was lugging my suitcase on the Air Train and subway, strangers were helpful with information or by giving up their seat so I could rest.

It was also striking that on any one block, one could hear several languages and a wide variety of ethnic heritage. People from all over the world mixing amicably. Sure, everyone pursues their own agenda with single-mindedness, but they were also ready to stop and give suggestions or direction.

The last time I lived in New York was in the 1960s. My impression now is that the city is cleaner; the sense of safety and order is better; and public safety is much more obvious. Of course, any time more than a handful of people live together, there will be crime. But I had the sense that it was much better than before. Police are more effective and also more polite and helpful.

No way am I ready to move to New York. But that's mostly because I hate cold and the winters in New York are certainly colder than my preferences. I no longer want to live where it snows and slushes and ices. But New York is a great city. I have lived in Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco, São Paulo, Brasilia, Washington, and other cities. They all have their charms, but New York surpasses all of them in the great variety of people of different ethnic backgrounds who manage to live together cooperatively.

And food. As the airport shuttle threaded its way from hotel to hotel, I noted that in any couple blocks, there were Mexican, OA (Ordinary American), German, Indian, Brazilian, French, Persian, etc., restaurants. The Jewish delicatessen in New York has no equal, of course.

Aunt Pearl

I went to New York for the unveiling of my aunt Pearl's headstone. It is Jewish custom to mourn for a year before officially placing (or unveiling) a headstone. Aunt Pearl was the only member of the family who maintained a relationship with me over the years. Three years before she died, she called me and suggested that it was time for me to meet my cousins. She was the last of her generation but, she told me, here were the phone numbers for six of my cousins and wouldn't it be a good idea for me to phone them and make contact

In the end, I really only met Ruth from Oklahoma and spent a couple hours with Claire, Ruth's sister. Still I did make contact with most of them and we did agree to "try to get together."

Little did we know that it would be at aunt Pearl's unveiling that this wish would come to fruition. And it was appropriate that, in the end, it would be aunt Pearl who would make it happen.

Aunt Pearl touched so many of our lives. It was so fitting that the service was exactly as it was; attended by all who could be there and laden with stories of her being with us, moving us, teaching us. She was the center of a network; calling each of us every so often, check on our welfare, giving advice and wisdom.

It was really a joy for me to meet all of my cousins. Until last Sunday, only Ruthie and Claire Beth were at all known to me. The rest of were just names. But now I feel the kinship that Aunt Pearl let me know she wanted.

They each brought special, admirable gifts to the occasion; each exhibiting his or her own strengths. The flair of joy in Ruth P's flowers on her attire, I have been told, is the way she is throughout. Gene and Evelyn's clear, straight-forward handling of all aspects speaks of a life with few distortions of character and a commitment to accomplishing the tasks which make everyone's life easier. Claire Beth brought her kindness and generosity to the day; and she was well prepared to continue it for any who wished to visit her apartment nearby. Ruth S comes with a very strong heart of caring and love, but also a strength of character and ethic that inspires. David functioned wonderfully as our rabbi. And having Richard there, being a part of the family, was the last level of perfection.

I was especially grateful for Sarah. Sarah is not a cousin, but the grand-daughter of Gene and Evelyn. In this economic era, we ignore the inspiration of the arts at our peril. A people who do not value artistic expression--of this period or previous--lead a very impoverished life. So I was inspired that she is studying art history and hope that she will help carry this forward to another generation.

Thanks to Aunt Pearl, who even in passing has strengthened and been the center of a web of our lives.

My 2009

2010-01-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

Excuses and Caveats
This is the period of yearly "Christmas Letters". I haven't partaken of this ritual for many years. Initially I will admit that it was laziness, but as my sophistication grew, I was able to create more and more pseudo-legitimate reasons. "Think of the trees that have been cut down just to write the letters." "I don't want to add to postal worker's burdens." "The extra energy that is being wasted carting around all those Christmas card and letters."

Of course, as the Internet and email has grown, more and more of my friends use it. I would have to work very hard to use my environmental excuses. It's true that I might inconvenience a few electrons. Yes, there is a minuscule amount of energy which I would be using. But seriously, David . . . Give it up. . .

The Heart of The Matter
So here follows my 2008-9, One Year (Plus) in the Life of David M. Pittle. It has been an exciting year. To set it off right, though, let's begin with the end of 2008.

The Backtrack

On October 29, I had my first total knee replacement operation. Tamayo was kind to help me, even staying in my apartment for several days after the operation so she could handle chores and help me through the worst of it. In the hospital I received wonderful care. The nurses were great. I had seen them working with other patients, but now I was experiencing this for myself.

For the first two weeks, I was in excruciating pain despite all the icepacks and several Vicodin a day. I moaned and groaned; complaining of how that operation was causing me so much pain and agony.

In the middle of the second week however, I suddenly realized that this was my own operation and my own pain. I was the decider. It was my knee and my pain. Almost as quickly, the pain receded. In mid-December I had an appointment with my counselor/psychotherapist. I see her once a month usually to make sure I'm keeping my own head on straight while working with clients. After I related this experience, she starred at me for a moment then, "David, you teach others to do self-hypnosis and tell them how it can help alleviate pain. Why did you not do this for yourself?" Uh..h..h...

Now for 2009
My second knee was scheduled for January 26. Beginning from mid-December I did that self-hypnosis and prepare myself for the second knee procedure.

For the second knee, I was given the choice of a general or an epidural anesthetic. The choice of the latter allowed me to be awake for the operation. I remember being able to joke with the surgeons during the operation and being awake during recovery--I even got a phone call from my daughter while in recovery.

While I was still in the hospital I did have a morphine drip, but I was conscious that the pain was simply not bad. After I left, I took an occasional Vicodin but only when approaching physical therapy. I relate this because it reaffirms the degree to which the self-hypnosis and an attitude of ownership made a difference. I have used self-hypnosis for other purposes but never had to handle this level of pain--and it worked.

Again, Tamayo was my angel, carting me around to doctor visits and physical therapy. I can't overstate my appreciation that I have such a good friend in life.

The Cowboy
Since these knee surgeries have influenced the course of the whole year, I'll give you a couple more facts: My surgeon is not the only one at Kaiser. There are several, but I chose Sol Rosenblatt because he also rides a motorcycle. Perhaps not a very rational way to decide, but since they are all excellent, why not? After the surgery I found out more about him. When the nurses started calling him the "Cowboy" I began to investigate.

Solon Rosenblatt, besides riding motorcycles, also flies airplanes, skydives--in fact he teaches skydiving--and is the physician member of a reserve airborne special forces unit. That's all fine, except for the skydiving. As a pilot, my attitude is to ask,"Why would any sane person want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?"

By the end of February I was able to drive and in March was only using a cane to get around; even giving that up by mid-April. Not that I have even yet attained full recovery. Rebuilding the muscles takes time. I'm told that typical recovery time is 9-18 months. But getting around without even a cane was great.

Japan
The second biggest occurance of 2009 was a trip to Japan in mid-May. Some of you know of my history in Japan. In 1956, the US Air Force gave me an invitation to travel at their expense. (I had asked for a ticket to some European country, but it doesn't work that way.) While stationed there, I met several wonderful people including Sunao Yokobiki and his lovely wife, Mihoko as well as Teruaki Miyata, Suzue Ueno and Don Sears. Of course I also met Tamayo Sato. Sunao, Mihoko, Suzue and Don made me part of their family. They taught me so much about Japan, but also about human love.

I learned to love the culture and people of Japan in a way that was totally unexpected. I also got to visit a new university that was coming into being. Called, in English, International Christian University, it was designed with a new vision. Every student was to leave there with a bilingual education that encompassed a broad appreciation for the humanities as well as the more traditional specialization of their major field.

Leaving Japan in 1959, I returned to the US and a year later was discharged. I applied to ICU and was accepted, returning in 1960 and eventually graduating in 1964. Altogether I had spent seven years in Japan, learned to speak, read and write the language, came to understand some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses of the country and its culture. I also met Tamayo and married her. And even though we were divorced some twenty years later, she remains my closest friend.

In that context: Sunao, after all these years, made a point of researching the whereabouts of Don Sears, David Pittle and Tamayo Sato--and he did it without the Internet! He invited the three of us to come back for a reunion of souls. He organized and enlisted others whom we had known.

May 10th Don flew in from Kansas City, spent a couple days here in San Francisco and the three of us flew to Tokyo on the 12th. Prior to the trip, the Japanese wanted to rent a scooter chair for me, but I would have none of it. I did concede to take my cane, however. We were greeted at the airport and put up in splendor.

Over the next two weeks, Sunao, Teruaki, Suzue and many other friends gave us a luxurious reunion with visits to the old air base location in Saitama, now a much reduced size and occupied by the Japan Air Self-Defence Forces. We visited the location where my barracks had been--now turned into a wonderful public park. We got to visit the countryside, Sunao's home in Tokorozawa and various urban areas. After a week in which we also visited my alma mater, we transferred our base of operations to Yokohama where Teruaki and family took over our entertainment. We spent two days in a wonderful ryokan--Japanese hotel--visited hotsprings, and so much more.

Finally, just the day before Don and I were to leave, Tamayo's brother and wife, Toshihiro and Masako, picked us up and took us to Jogashima for the finest sashimi I have ever eaten.

My Japanese Family
Despite the divorce, there are some in Tamayo's family who have remained close to me. Toshihiro and Masako are among the most loving, caring people I know. Tamayo's mother and I fell in love the first time I went home with Tamayo. We have remained so. But also, Mariko, one of my nieces and I made a "connection" that gets strongly reaffirmed whenever we see each other. Unfortunately, that is not as often as either of us would like. Mariko was not able to get away from her work until the very last day of my trip. So on the day I was to leave, Tuesday the 26th, we arranged to meet at the airport. Even though the flight was not till the afternoon, by meeting at 10:30am we had several hours together. About 3pm everyone else showed up to see Don and me off for the return. But those few hours with Mariko were special.

Tamayo was not returning with us. She, already there, decided to take an additional week. Soon after we arrived, her mother went into the hospital, Tamayo left the trip to be there with her mother who seemed to recover. So Tamayo came back to our tour, but moved her return so she could stay an additional two weeks. While she was still in Japan, but after Don and I left, Tamayo's mother did pass away the next week. It was well that Tamayo was able to be there with her mother at the end.

Don Sears' Yokan
At the Narita Airport, after saying our goodbyes, Don and I started through the security together. My new, but metal, knees came in for some scrutiny, of course. But the security guards know about metal knees, and while they checked thoroughly, they quickly let me through.

I looked around for Don. He was no longer in the same line. The guards hurried me to the end of the "cleared" room. I stopped again to look and saw the guards going through his carry-on luggage with a fine-toothed comb. What little I could see was the guards and Don talking about the several blocks of yokan that he was carrying. ( For the uninitiated, yokan is a thick jellied dessert made of red bean paste, agar, and sugar. It is usually sold in a block form that resembles. . . you guessed it. . . some kind of plastic explosives.)

At last Don was able to convince the guards that he may be planning a sugar high, but he wasn't going to blow up the airplane. He started down the staircase on the other side of the room, so I started down on my side. They both led to the same boarding area.

The knee replacements and Japan visit were not the only things that occurred during the year, just two of the peaks.

Hugo

June brought a big one. Hugo (My grandson, Adriana's son) graduated from high school. I can take little credit--not even sure anyone can--but I am immensely proud of Hugo. His potential both for himself and for contributing to the betterment of the world is enormous.

He is an amazing young man. He has been an exemplary child, helping Adriana maneuver the passage from immigrant through colleges (College of Marin and Smith College--Connecticut) to being the organizer and director of the Brazilian Alliance. He's been a source of strength for her through marriage and divorce. He's also the evidence that Adriana has done a great job of parenting. Hugo is very bright, very intelligent, very adventurous. As I write, he is spending a few months in Brazil before starting college.

Oh. And before I forget, Hugo has a great eye with his photography. I provided him with a camera and he has been using it with amazing results; getting to the heart of the subjects he photographs.

July
I live in an apartment complex of buildings, each of which has four units. Early in June I received the word that I would have to abandon my apartment for several days. The management found termites in the walls of one of my neighbors in the same building. They hired an extermination company to "tent" the building and gas the termites.

The apartment management provided a suite in the Embassy Suites as well as a generous stipend for meals. When I showed up at the hotel, there was a nice fruit basket in the room. I was surprised. Naturally it was all very inconvenient, but the management did a very class act in accommodating us. Seeing this two story building fully tented was astounding. When I rent a motel room, it is a small and plain place with a scarred table, bed, etc. The suite I lived in for four days was three rooms plus bath. Two TVs, a king-size bed, full bath, a table in the living room and another in the bedroom. -- how the other half lives.

September:My Cousin, Ruth

My Aunt Pearl died in April. Of all my mother's family, her youngest sister Pearl was the only person with whom I was able to keep in touch during the years since I joined the US Air Force. It's a long story, but Aunt Pearl kept the connection when no one else did. That may be partly because Pearl was also the black sheep of the family. She had a series of boy-friends and lovers until eventually she lived with one for the last 20 or so years until she retired and moved to Florida with her long-time friend Rita. Pearl taught high school in New York. I remember when she took Judo lessons for self-protection. It must have been a rough high school.

Four years ago, Pearl put me in touch with several cousins. When I visited Aunt Pearl in 2006, I stopped off in Tulsa to meet Ruth. Cousin Ruth was born a few months after my last visit with her family. She and I spent just one day together, but we immediately felt the link between us.

About ten years ago, Ruth moved to Oklahoma to begin her mission work. She is an evangelist against cruelty to animals. The way Oklahomans abandoned unwanted dogs and cats, leaving unwanted litters on the side of the road or in the state parks moved her to move there. With grant funding, Ruth has constructed a network of low cost spay/neuter clinics, lobbied for better laws against cruelty and provided expertise to the police and sheriffs all over Oklahoma, even extending her work into South Dakota. She is an inspiration to many and someone I greatly admire.

And she works far too many hours, takes far too few days off and minimal vacations. I tried for three years to get her to visit the San Francisco area. Finally, in September, she came. Even in the car, from the airport to my home, she received a phone call asking for her opinions about dealing with some seventy dogs that had been confiscated by a sheriff. They wanted her, long-distance, to figure out how to house these dogs for a few days until more permanent facilities could be found.

We had two great days together, sightseeing in San Francisco, visiting wineries in Sonoma/Napa and getting to know each other better. This trip cemented our connection. I love this woman and though I wish I had not lost fifty years of knowing her, am grateful for the now.

Just A Few More Comments

I had my 5,000 mile checkup on my knees in October. The surgeon almost danced with glee as he showed me the xrays of his "handiwork". He also admonished me to wear knee armor when riding so I won't mess it up if I take a tumble. (I haven't had an accident yet but, on the motorcycle, you always wear protection, just in case.)

I'm really grateful for the new knees. The muscle strength is still less than I would like, but it is so good not to have constant knee-pain. And the strength is increasing.

Tamayo and I went to Frankie's home for Christmas dinner. Frankie did a marvelous dinner. One of her guests wanted prime rib instead of turkey, she cooked it perfectly and, at my request, eliminated all the traditional carbohydrates--with the exception of Tamayo's apple pie. As a surprise, Frankie brought out a package of photographs from our days in Japan in the 1950s and '60s.

In 2002, when I returned from Mexico, I contracted with someone to bring my housewares from the home in Rosarito. He brought most of it, but at least one box was lost. That box contained about 2,000 slides and negatives, photographs that I took during my years in the Air Force in Illinois, Japan and N. Carolina. Also lost were all the pictures from my days in Japan in college and all the pictures since then, including many from the years in Brazil, Ohio, trips across the US and Mexico. I finally made peace with this loss and took it as a chance to move completely to digital photography. (Film is very damaging to the environment. The production of film begins the process. But film developing puts many very dangerous and destructive--and toxic--chemicals into our water. Of course production of digital equipment has its downside, but not nearly as much.)

However, Surprise!! Frankie found about 70 slides from the college days in Japan and had some of them printed for us. She gave me the rest of the slides that she had and I am now having those scanned so I can print up copies for Tamayo and for me. I must tell you that this is probably the best Christmas gift Frankie could possibly have given me.

Also, those pictures have reminded me how far from my youth I have come. ( is the way I can communicate my wry grin in this medium.) In those days, I was a great-looking guy. Hot, but not nearly as much as was Tamayo. She was, and still is, gorgeous.

Ah well, I'm vain enough to think that what I've lost in looks, I've made up in wisdom--and humility.

Gratitude Is The Theme

It's been a wonderful year. I am so grateful for so many gifts, my new knees, my cousin, my daughter, all those who love me. Not the least is my sense that this nation which has lost its way may be on the track to finding itself. Never did I think that electing Obama would solve everything. It requires "boots on the ground." The opponents of justice and equity are strong. But at least we are moving in a new direction. Fast enough? No, not by a long shot. But definitely, the country, and the world, are becoming more progressive.

Among the gifts I have had this year are friends who have borne with me in reading all this.

Love and Abrazos,

Stretched Thin

2009-12-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

Stretched Thin

The most recent issue of Journeys, the journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors was dedicated to the theme, "Stretched Thin." It held moving stories of pastoral psychotherapists and patients in chronic pain, both physical and emotional. Some of the stories had to do with spiritual and emotional struggles or being stretched thin in ethical dilemmas.

Being stretched thin financially leads many to being stretched thin emotionally. Yes, the economic indicators are improving but it continues to be hard on individuals and families. The level of anxiety in those with whom I am counseling has risen in the last couple years. This has also led to difficulties with children and marital relationships.

My "Between Employment" group continues to be filled.

Even those who are still employed are being stretched thin. They may have a job today, but they no longer feel they can count on the future. For older and retired folk, many have lost significant amounts of their retirement income and can no longer recover it.

Because of our cultural proclivity, to do a lot of our spending and gifting during these holidays, much of the pain is experienced at a deeper emotional level now; parents can't afford to fulfill children's wishes or give family members a material token of their love. Of course we will tell them that their love is the most important thing--and it is--but they may still feel that they have failed. Even worse when real, hard needs can't be fulfilled.

My work in chaplaincy at the hospital provides me the privilege of deep conversations with nurses and doctors. We often think that health care jobs are relatively secure, but even as the patient load increases, new positions are not opened. The present staff is forced to more and higher work-loads, as some positions are reduced from full-time to part-time. Many are stretched thin.

There are many ways our parishioners, members and clients are stretched thin even in good economic times. Current economic strains just put that much more pressure on every relationship and even on spiritual life.

For some, stress leads to depression; depression can lead to suicide. Add to this the increased post-holiday incidence of depression that we usually see.

Being stretched thin can lead to situational anxiety and then to chronic anxiety and depression. The Mayo Clinic makes the connection. While admitting that depression is not adequately understood, they say, "Although anxiety and depression are regarded as two distinct disorders, it's quite common to have both at the same time. . . Treatments for anxiety and depression must include psychological counseling (psychotherapy)."

Helping your loved ones depends on your awareness of their plight. For most, just a word of encouragement may be enough. But for some, the best course of action will be to encourage them to find professional help with a credentialed pastoral psychotherapist or other mental health counselor.

Just a response to Comment

2009-11-21T01:20:00.000-08:00

This is a response to the kind person who commented in Spanish. I do apologize that I am not using my Spanish enough right now and, while I could understand the comment and questions, for my answers I must revert to English. (The Spanish begins to come back when I visit my favorite town, Mazatlan.)

The fact is that yes, my parents were Jewish, my mother was strictly orthodox but my father was much less so. My father died when I was 10, so was raised only by my mother.

I, like many teenagers, informally abandoned religion--though not the Jewish culture--at 16-17 years of age. (I've never abandoned my wonderful Jewish heritage or culture, but am now opposed to all orthodoxy which claims to know too much.)

I joined the US Air Force at 20 and after basic training was sent to Scott Air Base in Illinois for technical training. On a cold, snowy March night, I was crossing the center square. I was invited into a building to have a hot cup of coffee. There was a talk being given by one of the chaplains. I didn't have to stay, but it seemed impolite to leave. The talk was interesting and led me to ask the chaplain to meet and talk some more.

After several meetings, I requested to be baptized and was so on Easter morning of that year, 1956. I put off telling my mother for a while, but when I did, her orthodoxy told her that she must treat me as dead and sit mourning. This was when all connection to the family was broken.

I fell in love with Japan and went there for university. But I also found and fell in love with my wife there. (I should add that I also fell in love with her mother. My mother-in-law and I had a wonderful relationship until this year, when she died at age 96.)

Later, my new wife made the effort to establish contact and become friends with her. This made it possible for me to renew some tentative contact with my mother. So we did have a small and extremely weak relationship during her final few years.

I hope this explanation is not too much. Of course the previous blog entry was really about my cousin Ruth whom I have come to admire and love.

It's been a while

2009-10-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't written anything for some time. The Marin Progressive blog has taken my spare writing energy--or at least my editing energy.

A lot has happened in my life in the last few months, but I think the most significant was the visit by my cousin. This takes a bit of telling of history: In 1954, I graduated high school in south Texas. Intending to learn more about radio and electronics technology--by this time I had been an amateur radio operator for four years and already had my Second Class Radiotelegraph and First Class Radiotelephone commercial licenses--I moved to New York City, enrolled in a school, RCA Institutes, and also began working at RCA on shipboard radar and communications equipment.

For younger readers, in those days most overseas travel was still by ship. International air travel was expensive and not very available. Jet planes were limited to the military and passenger planes were all propeller driven.

In New York, I lived with my aunt, the doyen of the Steinberger (My mother's) family.

When I finished my studies and was ready to return to Corpus Christi, aunt Fanny and I crossed the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel to visit my uncle Joe and his family. There were two children, only slightly younger than I, Claire and David. Joe's wife was pregnant with a third child.

I did return to Texas and spent the next year helping to build the first color television station in the area, KSIX-TV. At the end, I decided to enlist in the US Air Force. Not only was I potentially liable to be drafted, I also really admired the Air Force. After basic training, I was sent to a techincal school.

While there I made the decision to convert from Judaism to Christianity. I won't go into all the reasons at this time. They are irrelevant to my story--though I may touch on it in another context some other time. But when I told my mother about this, she immediately followed the tradition in which I became dead to her. Not only did she sit in mourning, but she also informed all her family.

This was 1957. From that point, the only member of the family with whom I had continued contact was my aunt Pearl. Pearl was the "black sheep" of the family. She and I visited on three occasions and had phone conversations at other times.

In 2006, aunt Pearl called me and during the conversation, she implored me to make contact with some of my cousins. She gave me the phone numbers and I did as she suggested. One of those cousins was Ruth. In December, I went to Florida, where Pearl had retired, to visit. On the way, I stopped in Tulsa Oklahoma for one day to visit Ruth.

Even though we only had 14-16 hours together, by the end of that time we both knew we had a special feeling; a chemistry that one rarely achieves. Since then I have been trying to get Ruth to take a vacation, come out to California for a visit and relax. It took until September for all my cajoling, begging and pleading to bear fruit.

Ruth is driven by her call to protect animals from cruelty. It is not enough to be a vegetarian, or to rant and rave about the subject. Ruth has spear-headed the drive for low-cost spay/neuter clinics in rural and low-income areas of Oklahoma. Under her guidance and with her organizing skills she has created a network of clinics that now has done over 25,000 operations. But she has done this at great sacrifice of her energy, and stress.

She came for only two days, and even then had to field several phone calls on her ever-present iPhone. But she did come. We spent two days getting to know each other better and confirming the earlier feelings. The bond is strong and I am grateful to have her as a cousin--or in any relationship. At some point I may blog again and at length about her accomplishments.

Naturism

2009-09-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

This is a copy from another website's article. I include it because it does explain a little of the reason more and more dedicated, and often very conservative, Christians are embracing Nudism/Naturism.
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Many people have been brought up taught that nudity is immoral and we should never allow others to see our true bodies. It is alright to titillate with provocative clothing, or tiny beach wear, but not to show the natural beauty of our bodies, especially genitals or women's breasts.

This sense of shame is not inborn: it is learned. Babies have no shame and neither did many early Christians in Biblical times.

Fortunately today there is also a very rapidly growing naturist movement that has learned: "Nude is not lewd"

Nudism promotes a healthy respect and trust with each other and after a few minutes of uncomfortableness when first exposed to this experience it becomes much less sexual and more naturally enjoyable. Nudity can be sexual if consenting persons wish it to be and in appropriate settings, but it is not necessary to progress from nudity to sexual activity. We can learn to respect one another's sensitivities and interests and communicate these to one another.

Naturism is commonly accepted in much of Europe, where it has been shown that sexual attitudes are much more healthy, with less sexual abuse and violence.

Many women worry that their nudity might be mistaken to mean availability. Many men worry that nudity might become too stimulating. However, these fears are mainly fears of the imagination, not the reality of actual experience.

I have visited a number of wonderful clothing optional resorts. In Europe whole resort cities are clothing optional with a great deal of success raising well adjusted children in such a wholesome environment.

We are living in a society in which sexuality is very distorted. The interplay between sexuality and nudity is very confused. In our concern that any attraction has to be carried out sexually, we are repressing healthy sexual attitudes and meaningful loving interpersonal relationships. The blocking of these natural needs leads to strong cravings. This leaves us open to commercial exploiters with sexually titillating material which brings not emotional satisfaction, but only teasing. A healthy respect for our natural bodies, being comfortable being natural and sharing in relationships without the expectation or need to engage in sexual activity, makes the naturist much more fulfilled.

A Teenager's reflection of naturist experience
"If you're like me, you don't say much in front of your friends, do you? Most of the kids I know think getting naked is totally gross. All of the kids want to see somebody else nude. Some of my friends brag about looking at Penthouse magazines when their parents aren't home.

I did tell a couple of guys about going to Paradise Lakes with the Sanibel Naturists, but they thought I was lying. They both said that they would really like to go to a place like that, but never take off their clothes; they just wanted to look. Aaron said that he would give anything to see Holly nude, and Rick spends most of the day in school trying to look up the girl's dresses. Once when I took a shower after gym, all the guys started to make fun of me because of my all-over tan. Most of my friends are very uncomfortable about being seen nude even in the boys' shower. I really feel sorry for these kids; they're so uptight. I guess I should be really thankful that my mom and dad didn't make me ashamed of my body."

God made nothing more beautiful and dignified than the human body, which He especially designed in His own image and likeness. God's own Supreme Beauty is reflected in the human body as well as the soul. Whatever is beautiful in all creation, finds its perfection and fulfillment in the human nude. If God meant for us to go nude, we would have been born that way!

Summary of the benefits of social nudity:

Greater experiential appreciation for the beauty and dignity of the body.

A greater feeling of unity with others, as external fences of clothing are removed.

A greater appreciation for our masculinity and femininity as we become convinced of how good it is to be a man or a woman.

Many people suffer from feelings of not being accepted. Social nudity has proven to be marvelous therapy for this psychological malady.

Unnecessary curiosity about the naked body will be replaced by normal curiosity about differences. The false, puritanical shame ingrained in us by our upbringing is overcome.

Children exposed to social nudity are more likely to grow up with healthy attitudes towards their bodies.

Nudity is healthy because it exposes the whole body to the air and sun, and gives people an added incentive to be fit.

Nudity is more recreative, more joyful, and thus our recreation is more effective. Who truly prefers a bathing suit to a birthday suit?

By being accustomed to nudity we can react maturely to social situations of nudity that used to embarrass us, such as locker rooms, gang showers, hospitals, and modest nudity in cinema and art.

We will not hypocritically admire the nude only in art, but in reality as well.

Theology of Clothing
Many people with different philosophies all claim God's guidance. Some say our bodies are a wonderful creation and showing them in public is proper and beautiful. Others say that our bodies are sinful flesh warring against the soul, the source of lust and impure desires, and therefore ought to be kept hidden. Most of the rest claim it is too disgusting to even talk about. But let's look at the evidence.

TRYING TO HIDE FROM GOD
After Adam disobeyed God and was sinful he was ashamed and afraid and tried to hide. He tried to hide behind fig leaves but God was disappointed at Adam's excuse about clothes. God asked: "Who told you you were naked?" This was man's immediate confused reaction to sin.

Clothes were for man's mental comfort, thinking he could hide, and were not for God's benefit. When one builds a temple, he usually doesn't mind if people look at the masterpiece and admire it. Why would God want modesty when only 2 people existed and they were declared husband and wife. Later God provided animals for food and man used their skins for clothing. God went along with man's idea of clothes to try and hide his sin as a concession if it would make him feel better.

The Bible and Nudity
Nowhere in the Bible does God say we should keep his temple covered. The last supper with Jesus hardly resembled anything close to a modern formal, sit-down dinner. Jesus himself was undressed at some point, according to John 13:4-5: Jesus rose from the table and laid aside his garments briefly.

Christ was not only naked on the cross but he also left "the linen cloths lying there" (Jn 20:5) in the tomb when he rose. Did He tell Thomas to wait a moment while he took off His robe and then to "put out your hand and place it in my side"?

There was no mistaking the idea when "the word of the Lord" came through Ezekiel in reference to Israel: " I made you grow like a plant of the field, naked and bare. You grew up and became tall and arrived at full maidenhood; your breasts were formed and your pubic hair had grown" (Ezek 16:7).

But read the rest of the Chapter: Jerusalem after being "Clothed with embroidered cloth, swathed in fine linen, and covered with silk" (16:10) "trusted in your beauty and played the harlot." (16:15) This misuse of God's gifts, not respectfully using our bodies as God intended, is what caused God to become angry.

If it is really wrong to be seen nude, why would Jesus be around the naked fisherman who "stripped for work" (Jn 21:7)

Did those who were baptized by John have to be dressed? It was the early Church's custom to baptize men, women, and children together nude. The priest strips off the candidate's clothing before leading them into the water, were Saint Chrysostom's instructions (c.400). Saint Hippolytus of Rome (c.200) says total nudity was required; women were to remove even jewelry and combs. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (c.350) preached to nude candidates: "You are now stripped and naked, in this also imitating Christ on the Cross. " Theodore of Mopsuestia (c.400) said, "Adam was naked at the beginning, and not ashamed. This is why your clothing must be taken off as baptism restores right relation to God."

What about the blind man in Mk 10:50 who, "casting away his garment, sprang up, and came to Jesus"? Did a distraught Jesus tell him to put on some decent clothes?

In Old Testament times being nude was very common and accepted. Touching the testicles of a revered superior was a man's way of testifying to the validity of his statement or vow. This was true in Hebrew, Greek and Roman custom. Our words testify, testimony, and testament have come from the word testes.

Neither the Ten Commandments or the New Testament dictate any restriction on being nude. Greeks customarily exercised nude. In fact the word "gymnasium" comes from the Greek: "to exercise nude".

God commanded Isaiah to go naked and barefoot for three years. King David danced naked in the City of David to celebrate the return of the Ark. When his wife Michal criticized his dancing nude, she was soundly rebuffed and ended up childless until her death (II Samuel 6:20-23). Peter fished nude. The Jewish prophets were commonly naked, so much so that when Saul stripped off his clothes and prophesied naked the people figured he must be a prophet ( I Sam.19:24).

In the first centuries of Christianity, public baths - sometimes several acres in size - became a gathering place throughout the Roman Empire, similar to our shopping malls today. There were more than 850 public baths in Rome by the end of the fourth century. It's pretty evident that Christian women frequented the baths and were bathing with men, even though some writers opposed the practice. writes Roy Bowen Ward in about the Nov 93 issue of Harvard Theological Review in an article entitled Women in Roman Baths .

Mixed nude bathing was customary for early Christians until about the end of the fourth century AD. Then the anti-body philosophy adopted by the Church took over. By the fifth century St. Jerome considered it immoral for a Christian virgin to bathe in the nude - even if alone! This practice continues today in a few ultra-strict Christian sects. This body-negative theology can be traced to Plato's negative view of the body, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus or the early Christians.

Much writing has been done regarding Christian nudity. Even Catholic groups approve of it. "Nudity and the Bible:, Its Approved" by The Reverend J.A. Mackey, S.L.D. D. Min. is just one of many supportive articles. There are many Christian special interest groups within both the ASA and The Naturist Society. Of course in Europe and other places there is much less body shame and Christians are even more active.

Morality
The real problem is not that our bodies are obscene. The problem is the sexploitation of society that makes us look at the body as a sex object rather than the beautiful creation God intended it to be. Yet in a nurturing environment where trust and respect is given to the body, mere sexual attraction gives way to sincere love and respect for a person as a wonderful creation of God. We should never be tripped up by the puritanical perversion that our body is shameful and should be covered up at all times. Being unclothed is not immoral. Immorality lies in not respecting your body or the bodies of others.

Nudity And Sexuality
Nudist activities have absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. Most people find it much less stimulation than a beach with swim wear designed to tease and titillate. It is about respect of the body and person, and enjoying the beach or other activities in freedom of clothes. It also is used in some counseling to be more open and not hide but our natural selves as God wonderfully created. The initial problem is overcoming the shame based unscriptural teaching of some Churches.

The issue of nudity and sexuality is a hot topic for nudists. The politically correct view is to completely divorce nudists from any sexuality. That of course is too extreme. Meaningful sensuality/sexuality is a separate issue from nudity. We also show how responsible non-monogamy is a valid Christian choice and practiced by many Christians. Request our introductory material if interested in more liberal sexual views. Again, however, this is very separate from nudity issue. Many nudists also practice responsible non-monogamy but many couples in open relationships do not practice nudity.

Actually the whole ideas of Liberated Christians began with Bill placing an ad in a nudist publication to contact other Christians nudists. The response was overwhelming and also exposed (pardon pun) need for Christians to also openly discuss sexual issues in more frankness than the Church is willing. We discovered we both reached the same conclusions independently on most all issues from years of study.

A problem with many Christians, is they are taught to have a closed mind. They all support each other in fixed thinking and never really explore the real world, thinking it is evil, or really looking at the whys and what is really in scripture - which often as not as it appeared from Church traditional teaching.

Legal Issues
Being unclothed is not illegal on Federal lands, says the National Park Service. It is one of our Constitutional rights according to a federal court decision (Williams vs Hathaway 400F Supp.122 {D.Mass.1975})

The Surveillance Society

2009-08-28T20:44:00.001-07:00

In 1968, I graduated from Marin's own San Francisco Theological Seminary. Choosing--wisely as it happened--not to look for a position as a pastor of a local church, The Presbyterian church sent me to further schooling in community organizing and in urban studies, then sent me to Brazil as a "fraternal worker." My job was to help the city administration of Brasilia work with churches and other groups to "humanize" the city. Brasilia was a new city designed by an architect, not a city planner and was badly in need of amenities for real humans. The city administrators were aware of this and eager to get whatever help they could. I was also tasked with being the protestant chaplain at the University of Brasilia.

Brazil had been under military control for years, but the military had still allowed the civilians to administer the government and as long as they didn't rock the boat for the wealthy elites--at least not much--their was at least the patina of civilian government. Three months after my arrival in Brazil, the military published a decree that established absolute control. In one day, they invaded the campus of the university, imprisoned many of the student body leadership and arrested others. At the same time, the suspended parliament, arrested opposition leaders and hunted down other opposition legislators. (In fact the brother of my supervisor, a Brazilian, was among these and eventually was caught and killed.) My work in Brasilia ended with the publication of this decree.

Prior to the decree however, I became friends with a Brazilian who was himself friends with the head of the central government computer system. I was shown row upon row of IBM punch card machines that were used to track every person who carried an identity card. That card was needed to stay in a hotel, visit any government office, take a class at the university--or any school-- or take any other significant action. It was particularly explained to me that it was one way they were able to track "subversives." They could know when any group visited a city for a meeting.

Eventually, after the military decree, I moved to Sao Paulo and began working with a program of literacy training. There were several Dominican priests who were part of the school as well as many other lay people who had been trained by Paulo Freire, the great pioneer in literacy work. Before I left Brazil, several of my colleagues and friends had been tortured and/or murdered by the military. The ability of those computers to enhance surveilance contributed to this military dictatorship.

Today, the computer systems have become orders of magnitude more powerful. Cameras are now small enough to fit in a button-hole. Electronic eavesdropping is now a simple matter and the equipment not even very costly. Every government and every corporate entity seems to believe that it has the right to spy on its customers, workers, citizens whether on private or public property. With the advent of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices), the contents of your life are available to anyone who has a scanner and can come within several feet of you. Watch such popular television programs as NCIS, CSI, and other crime programs and be amazed at how much surveilance contributes to the solutions. Fortunately we are not yet at the level envisaged by these programs--but not far from it.

I am greatly troubled by this. The misnamed Patriot act was not the first incursion into our civil liberties, our privacy and our freedoms, but it is also not the last.

The Surveillance Society will set back the cause of freedom if we let it happen--and we are already letting it happen. Only the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and a few other organizations are all that stand in the way.

But it is not government alone which rushes ahead to 1984. Almost every large corporation claims the right to spy on its employees, customers and the general public. There are surveilance cameras everywhere. Many companies had such cameras even in the restrooms until they were sued by employees. Clothing stores claim the right to put cameras in the dressing rooms and, if not challenged, they do so. Telephone companies record your interactions with their employees; even though they tell you that ahead of time, and thus make it legal, you cannot object as they will then not serve you. When I tried to order Dish Network, they insisted that I provide them with my social security number. (Of course, if I am making a loan for a new car, it makes sense that the lender run a credit check, but for a service that can be cut off if I don't pay, there is no justification.

One of the joys of being a citizen of the United States is my claim to freedom, liberty and privacy. We must not let these go without a fight.

God and Spirituality

2009-08-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

Where is this God about whom so many prattle? Those who claim to know and those who claim to know not are both in error.

For millennia questions about the existence of god would not have been questions anyone would have understood. From the time that the human specie began to think about gods, they were all out there in the trees, the rocks, the water, the wind. At some point the gods were conceived to be in some non-material place, but always nearby, watching and controlling, requiring appeasement, sustenance, pleasure.

Then along comes Ankhnaten (various spellings) and the primary God is "out there". Where? Beyond the dome of heaven. (The dome of heaven was held up on four pillars in the directions of the four winds. It had windows that openned to let in rain, lights hung from it and two big lights traversed from east to west.) Even Moses didn't really change this. There were still many gods. He just announced that Yahweh was the greatest of the gods and that Israel would "have no gods before" Yahweh.

Throughout most of Israelite/Hebrew history, the people believed in multiple gods, but eventually the Hebrews gave up that idea and decided that there was only one God and all the others were idols.

The location and realm of that one God has changed and diminished over the years as Galileo and an ever increasing horde of scientists encroached on the body of misinformation about the physical world. The earth became round, not flat. It became one of many bodies in space. The time of its origin began to be pushed back. The animals, plants and other life forms were found to have existed for millenia and into pre-history.

In the end, any talk of a God "out there" is very speculative. If such a god put natural law into action and thereby created the moral being (Whether human or chimpanzee) he/she/it did so by the mechanism of the big bang. We have good experimental evidence of what happened after a few milliseconds after the big bang. The Large Hadron Collider was supposed to bring us within microseconds, but there have been major "glitches" with the supercooled magnets. Still, those look to be resolved within a couple months and we will get more information.

The point of this is, even if we get within micro-seconds, we cannot go beyond the Big Bang. Nothing can pass beyond the Big Bang. Therefore we cannot know anything about God as an entity. (Besides the obvious logical problems with that.) Beyond that, any God we discern, being non-personal, would be very unsatisfactory from a spiritual perspective.

I don't believe that we can demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of such a God.

Another part of the problem of the quest for an objective, transcendent god, is the semantic one. What does the word "god" mean? Words don't really have their own meaning. With all due respect to makers of dictionaries, different people mean different things by the same words. Each of us carries a mental image of the referent for a word (Or perhaps several for some words.) and those referents are different. Let us take a mundane example. You and I look at a map of the town. A stream runs through the town and the map shows a bridge crossing that stream. You look at the map and make a decision to drive to the bridge and then cross it to the other side. When we arrive we find that the bridge is really a one-way bridge. To cross the stream from our side requires that we go several blocks further to a second bridge which is one-way in our direction. The map is not the territory, to quote Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics.

Words and language are only a map to the territory, they are not the actuality. So the word "god" can have--does have--different meanings for each person. At another level, the word "god" is a metaphor by which people have, throughout history, attempted to share their experience of the spiritual which, by every definition, is beyond words and definition. Whatever that word means, it is clear that it cannot mean something or someone "out there." There may be a good use for the word but it is not the traditional theistic meaning. (Of course, it may be that the word has become so contaminated with the "out there" meaning that it may no longer be a useful word. This may be the reason so many people refuse or are reluctant to use it.)

So we come then to the question, "If God is not, what is the subject of 'spirituality'?"

The answer to that is, I think, the one Albert Camus poses in "The Myth of Sisyphus"; given the absurdity of life, there is no purpose to living. Why not just commit suicide and avoid the pain, struggle and difficulty of living. In the end we will become ill, or deteriorate and die. Life is a terminal diagnosis. Are the few moments of joy worth the cost of continuing? Camus' answer is that it depends. If life is absurd, any purpose for it must be one you existentially create for your life. If you choose to do so, that purpose can make living worthwhile and be a reason not to commit suicide. Sisyphus found his purpose in thumbing his nose at the gods and not surrendering his spirit. Yes he had to push the rock up the hill, but he did it magnificently and that became his purpose. (I know, the gods didn't give him the option of suicide.)

Spirituality, it seems, is that process of creating a purpose for your life. Paul Tillich, one of the great Christian theologians of the 20th century had a key idea that is quite congruent with this. He spoke of finding a "Ground of Being," for your life--which he identified as God. He derived the ground of being, God, primarily from Christian revelation, but he also took much of it from existential philosophy, e.g., Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre. Tillich was writing in the 1940's and 1950's and could not yet escape from conventional, traditional neo-orthodoxy. Others have pursued this in further direction.

Today we have Christian theology that is even more cognizant of new thought. Particularly "Process Theology" (Built initially around the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead but carried now by John Cobb and others.)

What this makes of spirituality and religion is something different from the past. Spirituality is to be seen in the behavior that it engenders. Do not tell me of your beliefs or your "spirituality" without showing me the results in your behavior. And I will apply that same standard to myself. This is really not all new. The Buddha preached this, but even before him, Jesus did so. And even before Jesus, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah said it also. Even before them, it was embedded in the Torah.

So what about "god?" Surprising myself, I find I am quite able to use the word "god", in prayer and in words, but not because my prayer calls upon some "out there" god to fill in and accomplish what I cannot. Rather, my prayer has something to do with instilling in my unconscious, the will to do what is moral and good and to oppose what is "evil" and not good; in other words, to "love my neighbor as myself". I look to the reports of Jesus, among others, his teaching and behavior, for inspiration in this without suggesting that only he could so inspire.

Struggling to find words to share my spiritual experience and aware of the perils of language, I have begun speaking of myself as a non-theistic (No "out there" god), heterodox (Orthodoxy is almost always wrong), Presbyterian (The milieu in which I have learned and grown), Zen (My personal spiritual meditative practice) follower of Jesus, the Jewish spiritual master.

French Fries!

2009-07-25T21:17:00.001-07:00

No. It’s not earth-shaking. French fries should be (Note the rarely used word, “should”.) cut and fried just before serving. There is simply no excuse for those pre-cut, pre-fried frozen potatoes that are poured from a bag to be reheated and served along with hamburgers which taste more like cardboard than beef.

I don’t often eat meat anymore. Most often, when I do, it is a lamb chop or a rib-eye steak. Even less often do I eat hamburgers. And perhaps once a year I may indulge in French fries. I am very particular when I do.

To be considered edible, the potatoes must be cut and fried on premises, preferably immediately before serving. My taste is for potatoes cut with a cross-section about 3/8 inch on a side and with the skins left on. But others may like theirs without skins and either larger or smaller in cross-section.

Very few restaurants do French fries in this way. Most, even fancy restaurants which charge heavy prices, simply pour those abused potatoes out of a bag. A few refry them so that they are tough and almost burnt. One has to search well to find potatoes done correctly. And if a friend tells you of such a restaurant, consider it a great gift.

Of course, with only one exception, none of the hamburger chains can be included. The In N Out burger chain is the lone chain that does it relatively right. They do cut and fry on premises, and if not to order, at least the fries are not kept warm for long periods.

Hamburgers are another matter. An excellent hamburger should be cooked to a rare point. Unfortunately, because of the factory beef production, hamburger meat is not necessarily safe to eat when cooked rare. That very pink meat may well harbor bacteria and other bugs. Sometimes the bugs are actually insects that get mixed in through lack of cleanliness. We consumers had learned to depend on the FDA to keep tabs on our food supply. We know that the FDA does not do all the inspections they should and often let the meat packers do their own inspections.

Only hamburger meat ground at a restaurant from clean and inspected chuck (or other meat) should be considered safe to eat rare. Otherwise medium to medium rare is best. The patty tastes best if it is still juicy, not dried out from overcooking.

Again, only In N Out comes close among the chains. BurgerKing does a reasonable second quality. McDonalds, Jack-In-the-Box, Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr, Sonic, among the other chains do not even come close, in my opinion.

In N Out Burger, grinds their own chuck which is one factor they get right. The resulting burgers are still overcooked but not as badly as in many restaurants and JIB, etc. If a friend recommends a local burger place, it may be worth trying. Then, if they measure up, treasure them—and your friend.

I said it is not earthshaking. My physical health would be better if I refrained altogether, but a lifetime of meat eating has left me with an occasional monkey on my back. On rare occasions, you have to give in.

Technorati Tags: Meat,French fries,hamburger

Health Care Reform

2009-06-29T16:34:00.001-07:00

It is long past time for the United States to join the civilized world. Spain, Germany, France, Canada, England, Italy, Brazil, Israel, Singapore, Taiwan, Finland, The Netherlands, Scotland, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico and many more nations have national health care services which provide universal health care. Each one is different. Some are some form of government provided health care, others are single-payer systems where all the providers of basic health care services are private but the bills for service are paid by a single public entity out of mandatory contributions or taxes. In the latter cases all decisions of service are made by the patient and doctor.

The most talked about, because of its proximity and success, is Canada. Here is a comparison

Category
Current System	US	Single-Payer/Canada
Uninsured	45 million	0
Total Cost (2002 projection)	$1.6 trillion USD	$1.1 trillion USD
Cost Per Person 2002 (aka Per Capita)	$5,440 USD	$3,507 USD
Administrative Costs (2003)	$399 billion USD	$114 billion USD
Cost Difference of 28 Top-Selling Drugs (2002)	$1.00 USD	$.72 USD
Infant Mortality, Deaths per 1000 Live Births, 2000	7	5
Life Expectancy (average male and female), 2002	77.3	79.8
Health Insurance Employees, per 10,000 enrollees	Cigna: 31.2, Wellpoint:13.7	Ontario (Canada) Health Insurance Plan: 1.2
Employers' Medical Benefits Costs	8% of salaries and wages	0.6% of salaries and wages
Applicants per Medical School Place	2.4	5.5

Health care must be seen as a right. If life is a right of all humans then health care is as much a supporting right as food and shelter. Of course having a 4,000 square foot home is not a right, nor is caviar, but basic nutritious food and shelter from the elements are. So a private hospital room with cuisine, perhaps not, but both preventive and curative medicine is necessary for life.

This should be obvious. There should not be a debate. But it is politically difficult because of the vested interests of the insurance industry. They have no intention of losing their profits and perks. They have created a system where they make exorbitant profits by denying proper care. Thirty to forty percent of every dollar goes to "administrative" costs, most of which are outrageous senior executive pay scales and profits to the largest shareholders. Much of the rest pays for bureaucrats whose job is to find ways to deny coverage to people who have already paid for insurance.

Here are some more facts:

In 2008, health care spending in the United States reached $2.4 trillion, and was projected to reach $3.1 trillion in 2012.1 Health care spending is projected to reach $4.3 trillion by 2016.¹
Health care spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense.³
In 2008, the United States will spend 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 20 percent by 2017.¹
Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.³
Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.⁴
Un-insured. Nearly seven million Californian lack health insurance during all or part of the year. About 70% of these people are employed but do not receive employer-based insurance.
Under-insured. Most insured Californians are “under-insured.” Under insurance means that you have health insurance but procedures or benefits are not covered or are only partially covered.
For example, your insurer has excluded a preexisting condition from your policy. Or it may be that your deductibles and co-payments will become a financial burden that could lead to personal bankruptcy if you become seriously ill. Or your lifetime policy benefit is too low and your share of costs will be enormously high if you have a catastrophic illness.
Last year two million Americans – 75% of whom had health insurance – were forced to declare personal bankruptcy because of their medical bills.
Lack of personal security. You should have the personal security knowing that whatever your employment status, age, income, or medical history or condition, you have health insurance. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t have a national health insurance plan that covers everyone.
Runaway premiums. Annual health care premium cost increases far exceed cost-of-living increases. Both employees and employers are paying more and more. Very soon the average annual cost for a family health insurance policy will be $20,000 – not including the co-payments and deductibles for which you are responsible to pay.
Rising deductibles and co-payments. Even as premiums rise dramatically, we are paying more and more out of pocket for the heath care services we need.
Employer squeeze. Employers are placed in the uncomfortable position between employees and insurers. Employers face the difficult task of choosing among insurers and among the myriad of policy plans. They must then communicate the unwelcome news to employees about higher premiums, co-payments, and deductibles.
Emergency rooms closures. Today, for every Californian whether insured or not, emergency rooms are less and less available for emergencies. Why? Emergency rooms have become the health care provider of last resort for the uninsured. They are providing so much uncompensated care that some have been forced to close their doors.
Lack of choice of providers. Your choice of health care providers is severely limited by insurance companies. Often, you are not able to find a provider near where you live.
Poor benefits. Many insurance plans have limited benefits. For example, mental, dental, and vision health care are often non-existent or inadequate.
Inefficiency and confusion. We have thousands of insurance companies and tens of thousand of insurance plans. It is confusing for patients and providers and very inefficient. Much too much of the health care dollar – nearly 30% – goes towards administrative costs, marketing, and profit instead of towards direct health care services.
Poorer medical outcomes. The United States has the worst population-based health care outcomes in the industrialized world. For example, our life expectancy is the lowest in the industrialized world. To a large extent, this is because there are no system-wide standards of care or standards for reporting and investigating errors. It is estimated that over 700.000 Americans die each year in from preventable medical errors in hospitals. Clinical waste in our system is a big a problem as administrative waste.

It is time. Time to tell the Blue Dog Democrats to shape up. Time to tell Harry Reid to grow a spine. Time to tell Diane Feinstein that 72% of Americans favor a public option according to a CBS/New York Times poll.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/19/opinion/polls/main5098517.shtml

Americans generally see government involvement in health care in a positive light, and most support it. Fifty percent think the government would be better than insurance companies at providing medical coverage (up from 30 percent in 2007), and 59 percent think the government would be at better holding down costs (up from 47 percent in 2007).

More generally, 64 percent of Americans say the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. Just 30 percent think this is not its responsibility. Those percentages have been stable for many years.

When presented with the option of a government-administered health insurance plan similar to Medicare to compete with private health insurance companies, 72 percent are in favor and just 20 percent oppose. Even 50 percent of Republicans favor that option.

Farrah Fawcett

2009-06-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

Wow. Farrah Fawcett died this week. Sure, everyone dies. I know. But Farrah Fawcett . . . I had a special feeling for her for several reasons. Not the least of these is that she was born and grew up in my home town, Corpus Christi, Texas. She graduated from the same high school as I did, W. B. Ray High School, the Fighting Texans, albeit eleven years later.

Of course I didn't know this. I remember her first in the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man where she played against Lee Majors--and later married him. Then it was Charlie's Angels. Both were fun shows and I watched them occasionally, but I was not impressed. To be truthful it was the thoughtful Kate Jackson (Sabrina Duncan) for whom I lusted. I chalked Farrah Fawcett up as just another bit of Hollywood fluff. My opinion changed drastically when I saw her play the role in The Burning Bed, about domestic spousal abuse. This was followed by other dramatic parts which established that she was a serious actress. The ones I remember were Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, and her role as the wife of Robert Duvall in The Apostle. All of these were excellent performances of serious subjects which demonstrated her abilities.

All through the 1970s through the '80s, she had been offered roles that would have shown her nude and she refused them. But she finally appeared in a feature in the 1995, December issue of Playboy. This became the largest circulation issue of the '90s. Then in 1997, at age 50, she was featured in a second pictorial in Playboy's July issue. This was the same year that she made The Apostle.

Since then, she has had several serious roles but in 2006 she was diagnosed with cancer and was treated. Despite an apparent remission the cancer was back in May of 2007. This time she chose to go to Germany for "alternative" treatments; eventually the cancer metastisized to her liver. Much of her fight against the cancer and with her struggle was filmed in a documentary, Farrah's Story, seen on NBC in May of this year.

Everyone dies. Not everyone touches me this way, especially not famous personalities like Farrah Fawcett. The airwaves are filled with eulogies for Michael Jackson. But it is Fawcett's death that has moved me. I dismissed her too quickly for, at the end, she showed just how much courage, openness, grace and good sense she had. Her documentary was intended not to point up the uniqueness of Farrah Fawcett, but to show how each of us faces life challenges in our own way and with our own strength can overcome, even in death. Farrah Fawcett has died, but she has overcome her challenges.

Rest in peace, Farrah Fawcett. And thank you.

Toilets--Read This Rant At Your Own Risk

2009-06-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

Public toilets are disgusting. At least Men's Rooms are. I don't visit the Women's Room so I can't write with any experience about those.

I was in a medical facility yesterday and walked into a Men's Room. There was toilet paper in several places on the floor. Visitors had tossed paper hand towels at the wastebasket--and missed repeatedly. The urinal was filled with urine and not flushed. One or more users had poor aim so the floor was disgusting. When I reported this to the person at the desk, she had already called the Housekeeping department to get it cleaned.

But this was not as bad as so many Men's Rooms in other facilities. This was a medical facility and they make a serious effort to keep their restrooms clean. Many other organizations are less careful to maintain the facilities.

Of course, it is not just the facilities. How many men in restaurant Men's Rooms have I watched use the toilet or urinal and then walk out without washing their hands. It almost seems the norm. These are men who will be perturbed if I refuse to shake their hands. "Please pass the salt and a little feces on the side."

Washing one's hands is a minimal effort at the prevention of disease. I volunteer at a local hospital providing emotional and spiritual support efforts. Before we walk into a patient's room, we must wash our hands or use hand disinfectant. After finishing with the patient we repeat the process. This way we do not spread infections from patient to patient, but it also protects us from picking up illnesses.

The US Army did a study some time ago. One group of soldiers were ordered to wash their hands at five specific times during the day, in addition to any other occasions. They had many fewer illnesses than a control group. It was especially effective at protecting them from colds and flu.

So why can't men wash their hands after using a public restroom? Why can't they control their stream at a urinal? Why can't they make an effort at keeping the restroom clean?

A mystery!

The World Brain

2009-06-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

Having been an avid user of the Internet for many years, I was startled to have a friend remark, "David is addicted to the Internet."

I don't think it is fair to say addicted. Rather, the Internet has become something of a World Brain. Just as not everything in life that a human brain dictates is correct or useful, the same is true of the World Brain. The Internet does have a great deal of foolishness and error. Yet, when queried wisely, it is an amazing resource of good information.

It has become fashionable to decry the amount of garbage floating on the Internet. Certainly it does contain a great deal of misinformation posted by biased writers, but in that particular it is no different than any other information resource. On the other hand, just looked at as another locus for the free exchange of ideas, it has the potential to enhance the level of discourse.

Like any other venue, one must look for multiple sources to approximate truth. Those who take their news only from the Washington Times will believe they have facts that back an ultra-conservative political position. Only getting "the truth" from AlterNet will give a contrary perspective. Similarly, on Palestine, one can read Al Jazeera, Haaretz, The Jordan Times, Iran Daily and The Jerusalem Times will all have different slants and interpretations of the same event.

That said, there is a great deal of good information. Whether it is a recipe for making sauerkraut at home or the latest information about Super-string theory, there is a vast resource of knowledge. Looking for a new laptop but confused by all the different models and the vast number of central processing units being used. There are websites for that. Do you want a list, as I did today, of Barack Obama's accomplishments prior to becoming president? Within five minutes I had a fairly complete list of his Illinois record as well as his actions in the US Senate. Of course the Republicans also had a list of his "accomplishments" detailing what they see as his failures.

I have two friends who have mentioned Scientology to me recently. One was positive, the other negative. A quick search with Dogpile (An agglomeration of search engines) gave me a great deal of information, much propaganda and very divergent opinions. Of course, I then had to use my own personal and individual brain.

Things get murkier when searching for information about spirituality, religion, faith and God. This won't surprise anyone. Every person deals with these concepts differently. Words fail to convey the truths understood in the human heart. Still, at the very least, one does find out what others believe, feel and act on. Thus, a willing and inquisitive soul will find an ally in The World Brain. (Let me suggest http://www.religioustolerance.org/ as a good starting point.)

The Internet, which began as an adjunct to the military establishment, has become a vital, cultural, "game-changing", social phenomenon. The World Brain is the boundary between generations, but for those who are TWB savvy, it promotes the possibility of a world of peaceful, inter-cultural exchange. China may wish to block news of Tienaman Square and they do have a very powerful filter to prevent their citizens from fully participating in the world dialogue, but they will fail. There is a community of very clever programmers, themselves relying on TWB, who will overcome the barriers.

The world is becoming one large community, enriching each person's life through inter-connections. The World Brain helps make this possible.

Japan-Third Post

2009-05-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Today is my next to last day here. Our hosts have put us up in the Hotel New Grand, not far from the room that Gen. McArthur used when in Yokohama.

Yesterday morning we attended worship at Shiloh Kyokai, the first Presbyterian church founded in Japan. The worship was long, a 40 minute sermon, four hymns and much other business.

This was Tamayo's church when she lived in Yokohama and many of the older folk remembered her with foundness. It was also the church where she and I married in 1962.
===============================================
After I wrote the few sentences above, I continued with a great deal more. There were many wonderful insights. I drew from my experiences much wisdom to share with my readers. (Probably no one but myself. ). Then the computer I was borrowing decided to quit saving the work without letting me know. I thought it was being posted along the way. No so.

When I first began using a desktop computer, about 1980, I was working with a program called Magic Wand. It was the only word processor available. Entering text required putting in a lot of special formating symbols. We had no hard drives then, but used 5 inch floppy disks. One night I began writing an article. I worked on it for hours. It was a very incisive and insightful piece about--well, I don't remember--but I'm sure it was one of the very best written articles of that year, from anyone. Then, about 2:00am, when I was just putting the finishing touches on it, the power went out.

Thus was the world was deprived of my wisdom. So it was with my last Japan post here.

Perhaps it will all percolate through my brain again and be spewed out upon this blog.

Meanwhile, I did return on Tuesday afternoon, about six hours before I left Tokyo. Well, that's the International Dateline for you. Don Sears returned with me but Tamayo stayed behind to spend another week with her family and especially with her mother who, while she did rally, probably will not continue for very long.

Arriving early at the Narita (Tokyo) airport, I was met by my niece, Mariko. Mariko was trained in college to be a computer person, but found dancing the Brazilian samba to be more to her liking. She eventually became a professional samba dancer. Like most artists, she also needed a "day job" and travels around Japan representing a distributor of a line of hypoallergenic cosmetics. In February though, she took a month off to visit Brazil and join a samba school there. Then she danced in the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. This is a very competitive samba environment with amazing costumes and lots of special dance moves. Eventually I intend to post some of her photos, but I just wanted to complete this blog entry and send it out into the Internet "cloud".

Until next time.

Japan-Second Post

2009-05-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

First let me say that Tamayo returned to our trip last evening. Her mother is doing much better, taking a little food by mouth and hanging in there. Tamayo reported that her mother, though paralyzed on one side and only semi-lucid, was aware enough to grab her and hug her with the one good side. I am delighted for Tamayo and for myself. Thank you for your care, prayers, meditations and intentions.

Just a few quick notes before we leave Iruma-shi, the location of Johnson Air Base where I was stationed from 1957 through 1960.

A. We've been traveling with our friend Sunao Yokobiki. His small car seems to be able to handle the four of us with ease, but not much space left for a lot of baggage. Still, it is quite nice, gets excellent gas mileage and, like the Toyota Prius, is a hybrid. We see a lot of these small cars which are about the size of a VW bug, but with a square shape, they hold a lot more.

B. It is still startling to be in the left front seat as a passenger and to turn right across traffic. Driving on the left side of the street with the driver in the right front takes some getting used to. When I lived in Japan before, I did not drive a car. I rode a motorcycle, so it was different. (In the Air Force, I did drive a jeep or a truck, but on base we drove just as in the US.)

C. Chairs and tables are lower here, as befits the Japanese stature. That has been a little hard on my knees which are still recovering from the total knee replacement operations. Actually, it is getting up that is difficult. Yesterday the challenge was visiting a home where they were sitting in the traditional way, on the floor. That was even more difficult.

D. Yesterday, Sunao took us out to the countryside at the invitation of one of his friends. We had a delightful time looking at the beautiful gold, yellow, black and white carp. This friend grows tea and we had some of his crop, ate home-made Japanese pickles with rice, enjoyed the views along the river and the pleasure of his household. His home was 160 years old and incorporated a tree over 800 years old.

E. Today was spent at my university. Kokusai Kirisutokyo Daigaku has changed much in the 45 years since my graduation. There are now three libraries instead of one. A separate administration building houses many functions. The old dining hall has been demolished to make way for a newer one. There is a very modern building devoted to the physical sciences as well as another for the psychology department. In fact there are about 15 new buildings all together. A lot of the land has been sold off, but it is still one of the largest campuses in Japan, even though the student body is relatively small. (I don't have the firm numbers at hand, but I think it is under 4,000.)

F. Two things are still on the campus. The old tea house which is quite ancient still stands and is used for ceremonial tea. I was also assured that the archeological site where we dug up pottery shards, as well as a couple skeletons from 2300 years ago, is still maintained, though the site has been thoroughly investigated.

G. As the fourth American to graduate from the school, I was a bit of a curiosity. I was given two books about the early days. One was a biography of Hachiro Yuasa, the first president of the university. Dr. Yuasa spent much of WWII in prison for his refusal to support the war and to accept the divinity of the emperor. The second book was a history of the university written by Dr. Charles Iglehart who was one of my professors. His usual summer vacation was to walk the length of Japan. That would be a feat for any person, but Iglehart was already 82 when he was my prof.

H. Our visit ended, we ate lunch at a small noodle shop just outside the university gates. After we finished the proprietor showed up. When he discovered that both Tamayo and I speak Spanish, he was delighted. He lived in Bolivia for 13 years as a representative of a Japanese trading company and he wanted to have a conversation in Spanish.

I. Tomorrow it is on to Yokohama area and more friends there.

Japan, First Post

2009-05-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

We arrived on Wednesday, the 13th after a flight of eleven hours. The Japanese can be very efficient and they made Customs easy. Our friends, Sunao and Teruaki, greeted us with unbridled joy and an unusually big expression of emotion. They bundled us into a couple of taxis for the short ride to a hotel right at the airport.

Before going further, the United Airlines flight was wonderful. The hours were long, but they provided the usual variety of music and several choices of movies. I brought along several old psychology and political magazines that I had not yet read as well as my Brian Greene book on cosmological physics (Written for a lay audience, like me) so I was never bored.

I also need to say some good words for the flight attendants who were pleasant, attentive and really made the trip so much better than other flights. (A friend told me to order special meals if they were offered when I purchased tickets. I ordered kosher for Don and me and vegetarian for Tamayo. These are made individually rather than on an assembly line. But on this flight, the regular meals looked quite as good.)　I will fly United again.

In the morning we took a bus to our base of operations, Iruma city. This was the location of Johnson Air Base and Emmaus House. Of course the city is very different today. Rickety wooden buildings are gone. Modern housing, businesses and public buildings have replaced them. Where Emmaus House once stood, there is now an apartment building. (The Japanese refer to apartments as *mansions*, whether derisively or not, I cannot yet tell. This is because the apartments are often very small.) Johnson Air Base is no more, of course. In it's place is a much smaller Iruma Japan Air Self-Defense Force airbase. Where I lived in a quonset hut 50 years ago, now stands a magnificent public park with winding paths and a small lake.

Friday,we visited various old landmarks of our younger days, but yesterday-Saturday-was very special. One of the co-workers of Sunao and Don was a young man named Genji Seya. Gen became another close friend to many American servicemen, certainly including me. When I visited Japan in 1982, I made a point of visiting Gen and his family, wife and two young daughters. I was saddened a few years later to hear of his death at 55, of a heart attack. Yesterday we met Gen's widow and youngest daughter. Together we went to his grave, placed flowers and remembered him with song and prayer.

The wife and daughter were both fascinating, bright and had interesting lives themselves. Gen's wife has worked for the UN in Japan for many years. She has a strong and independent spirit that captured all of us, no one more than Tamayo, who herself has such a spirit. Mizuka, the daughter, dances ballet for fun but works as a representative for a Japanese trading company. She travels all over with seeming boundless energy. Both of them speak flawless English.

After the time at the grave, we adjourned to an Italian restaurant and continued to enjoy each other's company for almost 3 hours. Fortunately we were the only guests and the proprietor was a friend of Sunao.

Arriving back at the hotel, about 5:30, Tamayo called her brother to touch base.

The hotel has this one public computer in the lobby. I came to it intending to write this blog entry. A few moments later, Tamayo came in and asked for a hug; then she informed me that her mother is in the hospital, not taking food and being fed intravenously. Her mother is 99 years old and has done pretty well so far, but from the description I suspect that they are putting her on *comfort care*. They will make no more curative effort, but simply keep her comfortable while she does the work of passing on.

Today is Sunday. Don will be preaching at Sunao's church. Tamayo had intended to translate for Don--most people don't speak English--so she decided to stay through that, but after church she will abandon our plans and go immediately to be with her family. I will stay here, partly for Don's sake but also because of family dynamics, I would be in the way. Tamayo will share my feelings and words with her mother. Tamayo's mother and I fell in love the first time Tamayo took me to the home. We have always felt the connection. Uncharacteristically, especially for an older Japanese woman, when I come to visit, she wraps me in her arms and we hug with tears of joy.

Minor annoyances aside (Like chairs that are too low for me, but perfect for Japanese bodies) I am really enjoying being here. I remember why Japan has been so special for me. The subtle beauty, the understated grace are part of Japanese character. But also the more practical: quality public health care, broader social safety net, strong environmental concern. Sure Japan does have its problems, but they tend to solve them with a greater sureness.

Enough for today. I will try to write once more during the trip. Meanwhile please keep Tamayo and her family in your thoughts, prayers, meditations, intentions, whatever your spiritual discipline.

Japan

2009-05-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about religious belief, a follow-up to the grandson post, but what is most on my mind right now is my forthcoming trip to Japan.

In 1956, a nice young lad from south Texas joined the US Air Force which, in all its wisdom and after both basic training and technical school, sent me to Johnson Air Force Base, about 25 miles NW of Tokyo. (JAFB is now called Iruma Air Base and is operated by the Japan Air Self-Defence Forces.)

Outside the front gate of JAFB was a "Christian Servicemen's Center", later renamed as Emmaus House. This was a serious attempt by the National Council of Churches to serve all the American military which had only recently given up its job of occupation of Japan and become a key in defending the world from "the spread of Communism." The Korean war was just over and there was serious threat of renewed aggression from the North Koreans. Moreover we were about to embark on the misguided adventure in Vietnam where we committed to promoting a corrupt regime in what was really a civil war.

The program at Emmaus House brought a group of young, American GIs into contact with a large number of Japanese young people. Some of them came to the center to practice their English. A few came because they were attracted by the Christian focus. Emmaus House had programs in Japanese culture, occasional dinners, parties and sponsored trips into the real Japan. Most GIs (That was the generic label.) who came to Japan only saw the base, a few bars just outside, perhaps a brothel or two, and if lucky, a few tourist attractions. Those of us who frequented Emmaus House were taken into Japanese homes, had a chance to see more of the "real" Japan and grow to care about the people, especially those who had become our friends.

A few of us even became very close with some of those we met through Emmause house. Sunao and Mihoko Yokobiki became like brother and sister. Suzue gave unstintingly of her caring. Hiroko, another young woman, taught me about haiku. Another person was a Kendo expert and shared his love of the sword culture. We went to Japanese churches, especially Shiloh church in Yokohama. I found myself spending two weeks in a Zen monastery in a ludicrous effort to discover what this religious understanding had to offer--and much later I hooked up with the Zen Christian community in Tokyo. (I am still learning much more about Zen. I am still just a beginner.)

I fell in love with Japan; a love I have never lost nor abandoned. So much of the culture touched my heart. I had been a child during WWII and the Japanese were the enemy. But that was the dehumanization that war brings. Getting to know real Japanese, I learned that their nation had been taken over by the military and the ultra-conservatives; that many Japanese had been imprisoned for opposing the war; that there were many heroes who welcomed the end and the victory of U.S. because it furthered a democracy that they believed in.

On one of the trips, we visited a new university, Kokusai Kirisutokyo Daigaku, or as it is known in the US, International Christian University. This university, situated west of Tokyo was a collaborative product of Japanese scholars and churches and the churches of the US. It was designed to be a contrast with other Japanese universities, which demanded that students begin immediately a narrow focus on their major area of study. This made for a student who was amazingly proficient in a particular field but who had a very narrow life philosophy or understanding. The new university would insist on competence of the student before graduating, but every student would have to read, write and speak fluent Japanese and English (English being the lingua franca of international exchange.); the student would spend at least one year in a liberal arts curriculum, arts, philosophy, history, civics, before being allowed to begin area studies. Finally every student would be required to write a thesis and defend it.

In 1960, I was re-stationed in the US at Seymor Johnson Air Base in N. Carolina for the last few months of my enlistment. I had joined the USAF with the intention of making it my career, but by this time, I knew that I wanted to get out and go to college. And I knew that the college of my choice was Kokusai Kiristukyo Daigaku.

I was amazed when I received my acceptance letter for I knew that there were many more applicants than openings. (23:1 was the ratio in my first year class.) It was not until much later that I found out that there was a sliding factor. If I could walk and chew gum, I was a shoe-in as a foreign student. The ratios only applied to Japanese applicants. Learning that took a toll on my hubris.

Not to bore you with details, in those four years I had a dual major, a minor in Japanese art, taught English to adults from Panasonic, Asahi Shimbun and other companies, worked for the English Language Exploratory Committee, teaching Japanese high school teachers. I married an amazing woman, fell in love with her mother, and became part of the family. (While we are now divorced, the family continues to treat me as a member. I have three marvelous nieces.) And I made an inordinate number of friends.

So here I am forty-five years later. I've made two quick visits to Japan, but could not spend enough time there.

Over the years, friends have lost track of friends. No matter how close we are, if we get busy and fail to nurture the friendship, it goes into hibernation--or dies. This is especially true with the great geographic distances involved. However, a year ago, I received a phone call. Sunao had gone to great lengths to find me. Sunao is probably the one Japanese in a thousand who doesn't have an internet connection. So he did it the hard way, phone calls to various organizations and people. With great tenacity he eventually found me. I was surprised to hear his voice. After all these years, I did not even recognize it.

The upshot is that next Tuesday, Tamayo (My ex), Don Sears (The "proprietor" of the Emmaus House) and I will climb aboard an airplane and head for Japan to renew old friendships and perhaps make new ones. While there, I intend to visit with many people including one of the nieces and my brother and sister in law, spend a little time in the special Japanese atmosphere of quiet meditation, and visit my alma mater.

Like my Japanese friends whose grasp of English conversation has deteriorated over the years, my once fluent Japanese skills are now such that I have been assiduously studying to regain at least a little.

I am coming home to visit the Japan I learned to love and the friends I learned to lovee. It will have changed. My friends will have changed. But I too have changed.

Some time in the future, I'll let you know how it went.

Belief in God

2009-05-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

Every recent survey gives similar results. Seventy-five to ninety percent of Americans believe in God. Yet regular involvement in a religious group only reaches 48% in the deep south. Even in the northern Midwest it is below 35%.

What does it mean to “believe in God?” Both of the key words hold broad differences of meaning. For some “belief” means certainty of presence. Others simply have some vague idea, irrelevant to their personal life. “God” holds an even more diverse set of meanings. There are, even within colleagial groups, those for whom “God” is a separate being, existing somewhere outside of human realm and those for whom God is an amorphous spirit, and there is another group who identify the word “God” with the emotional connection between and among diverse human beings.

As is evident from my previous blog entries, I read a lot of work on cosmological physics as well as other science and technology. Unfortunately I do not have the mathematic skills to read and absorb professional level material, but fortunately there are some top physicists and writers who have translated all the math into English and written excellent explanations for us, mere mortals.

Among the excellent authors are Brian Green, Brian Swimme, Michio Kaku, Steven Weinberg, Elizabeth Leane, James Gleick.

At the moment I am reading Brian Green’s 2005 book, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality as well as Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, published just this year. (It was not intentional, but both of these authors are leading lights in regard to super-string theory, aka. M-Theory. The books are not similar at all, however. Kaku won a Nobel prize for his invention of string theory.) I'm not sure either of them would make the statement, "I believe in God," but both of them have written very spiritual works. (Green moreso than Kaku)

Then, last night, our “Spiritual ThinkTank” group discussed these same questions: What does the word “God” mean? What does the word “believe” mean? Since we had eight different answers for each of these among the six people in the group, how can we even possibly communicate?

I was brought back to Alfred Korzybski. The map is not the territory. Words are only pointers to reality, they do not have reality themselves.

As soon as we try to define “God”, we are forced to say “God is.” But clearly, whatever follows the word “is” isn’t correct. A God who “is” whatever we say, is not God. At best we can only describe some aspects of our own apprehension of God. I still hear people praying to “God above”, when clearly God is not “above” in any literal sense of that word. There is no “God” who inhabits a “heaven” out there in space. All these words are not wrong, they simply reflect the experience or understanding of the speaker. In fact, they actually say more about the speaker than about God.

One of the clichés that came out of World War I is “There are no atheists in foxholes.” In the first place, the statement may or may not have been true in WWI, it was definitely not true during the Korean or Vietnam wars and is even less true today. Beyond that, I am not sure I understand what the word “atheist” means. I’m not sure atheists know either. “Atheist” means “without a god.” But we are now back to “What does god mean”. Again, words are pointers and at the least we must know to what they are pointing. If “atheist” is used to mean “I don’t believe in God,” I want to know what your word God is pointing to. What does “God” mean for you? And what does “Believe” mean?

If you can’t answer those questions, then your use of the word “atheist” has no meaning. It is nonsensical.

But for me (Or another religionist) to say “I believe in God” is just as nonsensical. Until we can understand that all words about spirituality are only metaphors to point to our own, highly individualistic experiences and are not normative or prescriptive, we will continue to misunderstand.

All dogmatic statements about God are wrong, including this one.

My Grandson and Christopher Hitchens

2009-04-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

My grandson sent me a Youtube link to a debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens with a "Wadayathink?" So I responded (probably at greater length than he hoped.)

Here's what I wrote to him.

Hitchens and a couple others made a big splash two years ago when they each wrote a book that was anti-religion. In each case they were countering conservative religion. Every major religion has some factions. There are the "fundamentalists" who believe that their conception of God is the only correct one. There are also the conservative group which while believing in their understanding of God, will at least accept that others have a different one. They still tend to be certain that they are right. Then there are the "modernists" who see that there can be a variety of concepts of God and that these all have some validity. Finally, there are the "post-modernists", like myself, who envision all God-language as just metaphor. Most of us do not believe in some transcendental God, in some assumed heaven, but rather find God in our world, in everything and everyone. We tend to be called "panentheists" (Not pantheists. A pantheist is one who believes that each creature is a god. A panentheist feels a larger spiritual sense of the universe in which we all live.)

The various faiths are in different places about all this. I think that Buddhism (Which really does not believe in a god, or believes that "god" is irrelevant.), and Christianity have a larger panentheist percentage. Hindu and Islam have more fundamentalist and conservative ideas. But it is not that clear-cut. The Buddhist Sokkagakkai group is fundamentalist, while the Sufi branch of Islam is more toward the modernist perspective.

I consider anyone who is absolutely convinced that they have the only truth about anything to be fundamentalist.

Hitchens' argument in the Sharpton debate and in his book sounds like a religious argument. In fact it sounds like a fundamentalist atheism; just as "religious" as a fundamentalist Christian.

Scientists do not, generally, believe that they have the final and absolute truth. Science is, by nature, always open to new evidence. Further, science, it seems to me, is asking a different question than spirituality. Science is asking "How, What, Where" questions. Spirituality is asking the question "Why." They only clash when they stray from their appropriate questions. For example, when religion insists that the world is only 6,000 years old, or that man came to be in a certain "Biblical" fashion, then it has strayed into the realm of science. When scientists insist that the only reality is the physical sense experience--as it did in the mid-19th century with the philosophy of "Positivism", it has also strayed beyond it realm of expertise.

When cosmological physicists like Brian Green and many others contemplate their work in quantum mechanics, GUT (Grand Unifying Theory combining the four known forces, Gravity, Electromagnetic force, Strong nuclear force and Weak nuclear force.), dark matter, etc. they often become more spiritual rather than less. It is not conventional religion, but it is still spiritual.

Another approach to this question is the existential approach. I don't know if you have read any of the novels of Albert Camus, the French existential philosopher, but I do recommend his work. Camus was an agnostic with atheist leanings. He was also a resistance fighter during WWII. He fought alongside Christian resistance fighters and came to admire their Christianity, but could not himself go there. One of Camus' works is The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, you may remember was condemned by the Greek gods to push a rock up the hill to the top only to see it roll back down. This went on for eternity. Camus saw this as symbolizing the absurdity of life. Camus' statement was that, "The only important question is the question of suicide." If life is absurd, then it has no purpose, why not end it? His answer was that we can choose to create our own meaning in life. Another of his works was "The Stranger" in which he demonstrates this.

But all this is spiritual because in creating the meaning of our lives, we create the foundation for existence and this is what keeps us alive and becomes our God (I tend to only use the word God when speaking with religious people. For myself, I use words like "The Sacred" because they don't carry as strong a connotation of the old man with the beard who has a throne in the sky.)

All spiritual language is metaphor. Whenever we speak of our own spiritual experiences, like love, awe, etc. we can only use words and the words we use can never fully express the experience. That's why there are thousands of different love-songs. So the word "God" is only a metaphor; an attempt to express the inexpressible. What is really weird about this is that it is not just spiritual words that are metaphor. All language is, to some degree, metaphoric. Every word carries a different meaning to each person. Words are like maps. You point to a place on a map and tell your friend that there will be a party at that location. The map point is not the location. Another example is that I am in a strange town and a river flows through. There are several bridges across the river. On the map they all pretty much look alike. When I drive to one of the actual bridges it turns out to be a bridge, but for freight trains, not cars. Another bridge may be only a footbridge. Some time, when you have the time, read Alfred Korzybski's book, Science and Sanity--or read a summary.

When I was in seminary, my Hebrew Bible professor--a leading international scholar--used to jokingly say that "God speaks Hebrew" because the bible was written in Hebrew. But I have come to believe that "God" really speaks mathematics. Only the language of mathematics comes close to being non-metaphorical enough to describe the universe.

If my previous response was too short, I'm afraid I've been too verbose in this one. But I hope it shows that the debate between Sharpton, a conservative Christian and Hitchens a fundamentalist atheist, is far off the mark. I would even say that it is irrelevant to spirituality. The God that Hitchens doesn't like is not the God of most modern faith communities.

Now that you are graduating, I hope you will have more time to pursue your photography. You have a lot of talent for the photographic art.

My Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

2009-02-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

The Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza has intensified my internal conflict about the issues in Palestine, but also about my relationship with so-called progressive movements.

Let me be clear. I have long sympathized with Palestinians who have been uprooted from their previous homes in what is now Israel. They were encouraged, by propaganda from the Arab League nations and by the turmoil of war around them, to leave their homes in anticipation of an Arab victory over the new Israel. They were also panicked by the fighting and, no doubt, encouraged by Israeli propaganda. There was the atrocity at the village known as Dier Yasin where, in the heat of the siege of Tel Aviv-Jerusalem, 107 Palestinian villagers were killed. (There were also documented atrocities by Palestinians, e.g., Sheik Jarrah, Kfar Etzion, Mount Scopus and others.)

The descendents of the Palestinian refugees, especially in Gaza, live under conditions of poverty and suffering. Even in the West Bank area, the Palestinians struggle to build a society and nation and are subject to the predations of the illegal settlers.

But I am also very aware that Israel has lived under the threat of constant attack for sixty years. While it now enjoys some peaceful relationships with Egypt, and Jordan, it remains under threat from Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists. Syria remains implacable—at least until recently. Hezbollah occupies Lebanon. Iranian leaders deny Israel’s right to exist. Hamas and Hezbollah both threaten to eliminate not only Israel but every Israeli.

In the sixty years of its existence, Israel has been the target of four wars. Israel is always the target of suicide bombers whose victims are invariably not military but civilian targets: A busload of children, the pizza parlor near the beach, a restaurant where families are eating a meal. As one young woman told me, “When I enter a restaurant, my first reaction is to scan the place looking for any suspicious person.”

In the south of Israel, they have developed a very elaborate air-raid warning and bomb shelter system to protect themselves from the constant rocket and missile attacks from Hamas in the Gaza, which are exclusively aimed at civilian targets even though there are abundant military targets available. This accounts for the low physical casualty rate—though there have been hundreds wounded. Psychological casualties are much greater in number. According to psychologists, 28% of the residents of Sderot suffer from PTSD. Seventy-four percent of the children there suffer from clinical levels of anxiety. More than 90% have had a missile or rocket explode on their street. Many families sleep in their bomb shelters.

So as much as I sympathize with the Palestinian refugees, I also understand the Israeli response in the Gaza.

There are the Israeli settlers who continue to contaminate Palestinian areas, building settlements where there should be none. There are the right-wing Israelis who push for occupying even more Palestinian territory; who deny Palestinian rights; who also deny the rights of secular and progressive religious Jews. They are a minority but have managed to create a strong political power base.

Israel is a tiny nation, under constant threat and cannot rest until some way of peace is found. Likewise, Palestinian refugees will not be able to receive their due until a way of peace is discovered.

Now my dilemma. I am a strong progressive. I read the progressive press, belong to organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, voted for Obama, but would have voted for an even more progressive candidate if there had been a viable one available.

But during the Gaza war and since, most, but not all, of my progressive allies found it necessary to promote a one-sided view of events. They were almost unanimous in condemning Israel’s actions to defend itself and excusing every Hamas action which took place. They claimed violations, by Israel, of prohibitions against attacks on civilians, but have never argued against violations by Hamas—and there were many. They do not mention that Hamas soldiers did not wear uniforms but rather fought in civilian clothing, counter to international law, in order to give pause to Israeli soldiers. They never mention that Hamas stored not only its weapons, but even its communications and command operations in the basements of schools and hospitals; that Hamas used civilian Palestinians as human shields; that many of the “civilian” casualties were Hamas soldiers but indistinguishable from civilians because of the lack of uniforms.

Most of my “progressive” news sources failed to report on the massive leafleting by Israel and the large robo-call effort made to encourage civilians to evacuate the areas where fighting would soon take place. This Israeli effort made their own cause more dangerous by warning Hamas, but my friends never mention all this.

It does not further the cause of peace to blame either the Palestinians or Israel for the problem. The situation is far too complicated and there are plenty of potential villains to go around. AI, the AFSC and others who are quick to condemn Israel are not furthering the cause of peace. They are, in fact, supporting Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism.

Does that mean I agree with Israel’s decision to attack Hamas in Gaza. First, I must admit that I do not. I think there were and are better options; options that would and could undermine Hamas more successfully. On the other hand, I was not personally under attack. I do not live in southern Israel. Ultimately Israel has to make their decision. "War is hell," and in the heat of battle, adrenalin mixes with many emotions to make moral decisions very difficult. But consistently, even on those occasions where Israeli forces have behaved badly, Israel has investigated and punished those responsible. I see no such behavior on the part of Hamas--or, for that matter, the right-wing religious and settlers.

For my view on a better approach I suggest something like what Rabbi Michael Lerner has proposed, a Marshall Plan type action where, perhaps led by Israel, the wealthier nations provide aid to build up the infrastructure of a strong Palestinian state under a political system and regime which can be a partner in the Middle East.

For the best neutral information about the history and present situation in Palestine/Israel see
http://mideastweb.org .

For Rabbi Lerner’s proposals see http://www.tikkun.org/ , the Network of Spiritual Progressives (You will need to use your favorite search engine as the website host is down as I write.) and http://www.globalmarshallplan.org/.

For a balanced appreciation of the pain and suffering on both sides, there is an excellent book which in the guise of a “detective story” provides such a vision. It is Richard North Patterson’s book, Exile. If you read one book on this subject, this is the one.

Gratitude

2009-01-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

For years my knees have been deteriorating and in pain. In 72 years of active living, I have banged them up a lot. High school, my years in the Air Force, later boating accidents have all contributed to growing arthritis and difficulty walking. Finally I surrendered and in October, I had an operation to replace my left knee. The plan was to start there and then when I had enough recovery to do the right.

After consultation with my surgeon, in November, we scheduled the right knee for January 26. Just yesterday I had a pre-operation physical with my primary-care physician. In the course of that, she informed me that my EKG was good, my blood tests showed that I was in good health, and the blood pressure and other vitals were excellent.

As she shared this information with me, I realized that I had received a gift of essential good health that I really didn't deserve. I have taken my health for granted and not really worked at maintaining my body. In the last few months, several close friends have had major medical problems: heart attacks, congestive heart failure, breast cancer, MS, etc. My sadness for my friends is great and my heart is filled with awareness of them. At the same time, it is also filled with gratitude for this undeserved level of health, and not just for my health.

For years I have been centering my spiritual life around gratitude. This doesn't mean being grateful to God for a lot of gimmies, but gratitude to the Sacred, without definition, for sustaining and growing me. I am open to and affirm other's understandings and experiences of what that Sacred may be. (People use a variety of words, God, Allah, Yahweh, Gaia, etc.)

Among the gifts I have received at the "hand" of the Sacred is a large group of "mentors", some of whom I have known in person, learned from, studied under or with, and a few whom I have known only through reading what they have written. Some of them would be surprised to be called "mentor," yet that is the appropriate word. So I am here to list them and explain, at least in part, what they have given me. I'm sure I will miss some, but these are the ones I most remember.

Bob:
I don't remember, if I ever knew, Bob's last name. When my father died, I was ten years old. My mother was terribly grief-stricken and completely unable to comfort me and my six year old brother, Melvin. The man who took upon himself that task was a young black man who worked in my father's business in the stock room. Bob took me under his wing, held me, spoke caringly of my father, let me tell him of my grief and helped me cope with my mother's struggle. This was south Texas in 1946. It was still a segregated South. The fact that my father was a rare white member of the local NAACP probably had something to do with Bob's closeness to the family.

I learned from Bob, the universal laws of love, caring, and compassion; that skin color was unimportant in those realms or almost any other. He also taught me more--though my father had begun this education--about the indignity of discrimination.

My mother was not able to maintain the business at the same level and after a year or so, could not keep Bob employed. My memory of those days is foggy, but I think Bob moved to another state and we lost contact. Yet my gratitude lives on.

Chester "Chet" Malins
Chet Malins was the first band director and head of the music department at W. B. Ray High School when I entered as a freshman in the very first year of the school's founding. Mr. Malins was a Reserve Naval officer who had served in WWII and he ran the band with a level of honor code that spoke well of his military background.

Mr. Malins demanded that we perform well. He inspired me to excel and so I did. He brooked no excuses, and taught me that "You may have a good reason for failing, but you have no excuse." If circumstances prevent you from succeeding, then you may have failed but you need no excuse. If you need an excuse, it is only because you were the reason for failure. That is not acceptable.

If that sounds harsh, it was, but he also recognized that my mother was incapable of teaching me the way to live competently so he took me under his wing and became a father figure. I often wound up in his home, eating dinner with his family. He recognized my talents as a percussionist, helped me gain skills and coached me to winning a first place in the Texas State snare drum competition. (For the scoffers, real concert drumming requires the same level of skill as any other instrument.) He encouraged me to learn the tympani, to play with the school orchestra and eventually with the city symphony; even to play under the baton of Arthur Fiedler when he came to be guest conductor in our little city of Corpus Christi, Texas.

What I learned from Chet Malins has stood me in good stead in my life; not percussion, but that I can learn anything if I want to and if I am willing to put in the effort. He also taught me not to whine about failure. If the failure is circumstantial, then accept it, if my own, then work harder.

The other wild thing that I learned from Chet still stays with me: Being late for an appointment is unacceptable. I learned to set my watch a couple minutes early. It sounds funny to relate this, but that has always been helpful in my life.

Philip R. Hampe
I met Phil in a very strange way. Newly enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, after basic training I was sent to Scott Air Base in Illinois. It was mid-winter and desperately cold, especially for a young guy from south Texas. One night I was walking across the barracks area when someone called out, inviting me to come in for a cup of coffee. That sounded good. I did--and a doughnut--and stayed to listen to a chaplain give a lecture on the Lord's Prayer. I was Jewish, even if not observant, so was a little miffed that I had been hoodwinked into this. On the other hand the chaplain did say some interesting things. Phil, Chaplain (Captain) Philip R. Hampe was open to talking privately with me, but only to help me understand the Hebrew bible and my Judaism better.

A digression: While in high school I obtained an amateur radio license first and then the commercial radio licenses. Corpus Christi was a large port city, and I often communicated with ships via amateur radio. I got to know the Radio Officers on some ships and even met them in person when they docked. So, after high school it was natural to want to learn more and even become one of these radio operators. To this end I went to New York, lived with an aunt and attended the RCA Institutes training in shipboard radio/radar. I even worked for RCA for a short while. When and opportunity arose, I then returned to Corpus Christi to help build the first color TV station in the area. There were not radio operator/officer jobs available after the Korean war and I decided to join the US Air Force, which I did in 1956.

Back to Phil. At my insistence, Phil and I met several times and despite his reluctance, I pushed to be baptized and that's how I became a Christian. Phil being Presbyterian, it seemed natural to make that decision as well.

Over the years, Phil Hampe helped me spiritually and supported my decision to enter seminary. After seminary, he was there when Tamayo and I boarded a ship for Brazil. He greeted us on our return as well.

Donald F. Sears, Jr.
Don has been my pastor, teacher and friend since 1957, when the Air Force, in its greater wisdom, decided to ignore my request to be posted to Germany and sent me to Japan instead. I was stationed at Johnson Air Base, near Iruma in Saitama-ken. Shortly after arriving, I met another airman who told me about the Christian Servicemen's Center, just outside the base. When he brought me there, I met Don and Joanie, Don's wife.

For the next three years, Don helped me develop my spiritual life, introduced me to a raft of Japanese who became my friends, brought me to worship at a local Japanese church, helped form my sense of calling, but also became my friend. He taught me so much, and not only about my faith.

Don was a missionary. He had been sent to Japan to minister to American GIs as we were called. The first program was the Center, later renamed as Emmaus House. After about a year and a half, Don, Joanie and their two boys moved to Yokohama to open another center. Even so, I traveled to Yokohama frequently to spend a weekend with them. I was there when their daughter, Katy, was born, and then Becky. They taught me about being open to understanding the faith and to appreciating Japan. They also taught me a lot about family dynamics that I missed growing up.

They because "big brother and sister" so that when I returned to the US, they introduced me to their own parents and sisters and saw to it that I was invited for frequent visits.

Over the years, I have spent as many visits as possible with Don and Joanie, loving and being loved. And grieving when Joanie died from cancer. And over the years, Don has continued to be a mentor and an older brother.

Sunao Yokobiki:
When I first met Sunao he was working for Don Sears. It was at the same Emmaus House center outside the gate of Johnson Air Base. Sunao, a graduate social worker, was the main liaison with the Japanese community, setting up trips to local events, visits to the area church, and making Japanese young people welcome at the center.

But Sunao was more. He was also the person who introduced me to Japan and the Japanese culture in such a way that I fell deeply in love. Learning that WWII was, in so many ways, an aberration, I also discovered through Sunao that Japanese have a deeper sense of community and a connection with family. He was there at times, not just for me but for the other airmen when we were lonely and homesick, when we got a "Dear John", when we were tempted by all the temptations outside of most military bases.

He included me in a level of closeness that I never expected. After his marriage to Mihoko-san, the two of them included me within their circle, even inviting me on a trip to visit Sunao's home town in southern Japan.

What I learned from Sunao--and to a lesser extent from others--was the common humanity among all people. Having grown up during WWII, I had learned as a young child that the Japanese were "the enemy". Even though, by 1957, those strong feelings had subsided as the Japanese were now our allies against Russia in the Cold War, it was the warm human touch of Sunao and Mihoko--as well as Suzue and Genji Seya--that converted my heart. They loved me, and I them. There is a heart connection that is stronger than the particulars which want to divide.

When I became interested in Japanese religious ideas, it was Sunao who pointed me to a Zen monastery where I learned more of Zen Buddhism. I returned after two weeks with a new perspective and the understanding that Zen could also be Christian.

Zen Christians and Zen Buddhists:
There were many. There was a small Zen Christian community (Sangha) in the Tokyo area and I deepened my understanding of Christian Zen through my presence at some of their meditations. Most of those I have learned deeply from have taught me through their writings. Some I have known in person, at a lecture or a meditation sesshin.
William Johnston
Hugo Enomiya Lasalle
Ruben Habito
Thomas Merton

In later years. . .
Robert E. Kennedy
Brother David Stendl-Rast
Thich Nhat Hanh

Joseph Fletcher:
I put Joseph Fletcher in a special place. During my last year of college, in Japan, Fletcher appeared on campus as a visiting professor of Christian theology and ethics. He was on the faculty of Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts as well as Harvard Schools of Law and Business where he taught Christian Ethics, Ethics in Business and Law. Dr. Fletcher was the author of many books and articles, regularly debated with more conventional ethicists, but became well-known among the general public with the publication of his book, Situational Ethics: The New Morality.

He taught that the cornerstone of Christian ethics is Jesus' command to "Love one another," to "Love your neighbor as yourself" coupled with his parable of the Good Samaritan--which extended the word "neighbor" to include the "Other," even the enemy. Joe, as he insisted we call him, taught by the use of case studies, simulations and dramatization.

In a Japanese university, it is customary, to write a major thesis paper. A handful of the brightest students would write at a level that their theses were contributions to their field. Mine was not, but Dr. Fletcher did, as one of my two thesis advisers, help me to keep it real and write something that, if not original, was work I could be proud of, be honest with, and believe in.

Yasuo Furuya:
Dr. Furuya was my other thesis adviser. He introduced me to Paul Tillich and the ways that Tillich, though by no means Buddhist, was conversant with the Zen Buddhism and enjoyed discussions with Zen Buddhist teachers and theorists. (Buddhism being non-theistic, does not have theologians or theology.) In addition to all the classes and directed studies, Dr. Furuya helped me discover Japanese Christian spiritual and theological insights.

James Muilenberg:
After college in Japan, I entered San Francisco Theological Seminary. The primary teacher of the Hebrew Bible, which in those days we called the "Old Testament," was Dr. James Muilenberg. Dr. Muilenberg was an amazing and distinguished gentleman. Two doctorates in English Literature and in Old Testament (We now, correctly, say "Hebrew Bible" or Tanach.), he had by this time retired from the faculties of at least two seminaries. Reading the credits in the Revised Standard Version of the bible will reveal his name as one of the primary translators.

It is difficult to isolate one or two major contributions Dr. Muilenberg gave me in mentoring. He was an inspiration to study and to learning. But four do stand out as representative: The first was one day when I was studying Hebrew, Dr. Muilenberg came up behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "David, I know that you are a convert from Judaism. Please do not abandon your Jewish heritage. It gives you all the more grounding to understand Jesus. Never forget that throughout his life, Jesus was a Jew and while you may have become a Christian, your Judaism has prepared you to be a better one."

The second was the day when we had a scheduled class with Dr. Muilenberg. It was a beautiful spring day. The leaves had begun to turn green; new shoots were coming out; and budding flowers were everywhere. The large class was about the frequent denunciations of Baal in the early Hebrew writings. Instead of, as we students expected, reading some of these passages and then meeting in discussions with teaching assistants, Dr. Muilenberg began preaching, evangelizing. Suddenly we students were being converted to worship Ba'al. Dr. Muilenberg was helping us understand the gospel of a fertility god, convincing us that we could just look around and see the glory of such a god. How could we not worship him? And how could the early Hebrews not be tempted as well.

It was very effective. Now we could understand how the Hebrew people, entering Palestine--Canaan--and ever afterward could be tempted all through their history to put phallic stones at the corners of their fields, to worship Ba'al.

One of my favorite keepsakes is a statue of an Egyptian pharoah. The Muilenbergs invited several students for dinner one evening. Later Dr. Muilenberg was showing us some of the objects he had dug out of archeological explorations. He picked up this statue and explained that tourists visited the pyramids even back in the days before the birth of Jesus. Just as now, there were many vendors to sell souvenirs. These were junk, quickly produced and sold. This statue of Tutankhamun was "junk", but 2000 year-old "junk." He held it out and asked if anyone would like to have it. I reacted far quicker than usual and took it from his hand. My guess is that he was not really intending to give it away, but my quick reaction gave him little choice. He graciously let me have the statue and a couple days later, even initialed the mount for me.

My fourth memory of Dr. Muilenberg is watching him and his wife walking hand-in hand wandering along a path on the campus, lost in each other.

Jaime Wright:
Not only a mentor, but a hero as well, Jaime Wright was the head of the Presbyterian mission in Brazil. He was the son of Presbyterian missionaries and held dual citizenship. His brother Paulo was a member of the legislature, was hunted, captured, tortured and killed by the military. Jaime worked with the Archbishop of Sao Paulo, Cardinal Arns to form a group which took the name Clamor. Clamor worked with the World Council of Churches to create a list of the "disappeared" and to document the tortures that took place under the military--and with the connivance of the United States military.

In the two years I worked for Jaime Wright, one of those tortured was a colleague of mine, a young Brazilian woman named Cecilia, who taught people to read and write, something that made her a "subversive." Two other victims of the right were Dominican priests who crime was that their bookstore specialized in "liberation theology" (They were murdered by the political police.) In midst of all this, Jaime and Alma, his wife, taught me the reality of right-wing governments and ideology, but more importantly they gave me a new lesson in courage and in the truth of personal sacrifice in the face of unrelenting evil.

When Jaime came to me with the word that I was to be expelled from Brazil for being a subversive, I knew that I would not forget him and his family. That what I learned under his tutelage would radicalize my politics and my faith. It could never again be theology as usual. Jaime Wright exhibited and taught me a new level of courage; not just courage in ideas, politics, theology, but also a physical and spiritual courage. He and his family lived under threat of arrest, torture and death at all times, yet Jaime never wavered--and neither did Alma.

William H. Fisher:
Bill was always the smartest guy in the room. He knew the subtle signals of a group, the dynamics of shifting influence, power, emotion, more than anyone else. He was my teacher in psychology, but also taught me about living life by choice. No matter what we do, Bill insisted, we are making a choice. Yes, circumstances may limit the options, but they do not make the decisions for us.

With Bill I learned much more to push through my fears: To act beyond fear. To do the unexpected. To act spontaneously, but with plan and passion. To think strategically (Ok. I'm not a great student.)

From him I learned again--or maybe for the first time--that there is no room for excuse, guilt or worry. "Guilt will only keep you estranged from the other person. Worry will only keep you immobilized and ruin your health." It has no positive role to play. Plans will often go awry and may, in fact, fail because you cannot plan for every eventuality, but worrying about that will not help.

I could write many paragraphs about Bill's teaching and influence in my life. I don't mean that he was always right, but that he always made me think and decide for myself.

It is hard to exagerate Bill's influence on my life.

Albert Ellis:
Al Ellis was the originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, the original form of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. I was teaching psychology at the University of Akron when Al Ellis arrived to lead a seminar on REBT. (It was actually called RET in those days.) While completing my clinical training in Transactional Analysis, I was also under supervision for membership in the Marriage and Family Therapist organization as well as another professional group in sex therapy. It was in the latter context that I first heard of Albert Ellis who not only developed RET but was also a major contributor to sexology and sex therapy, working with Alfred Kinsey among others.

My clinical training in Transactional Analysis had just finished and the ink on my certificate in ITAA was still a little damp when I attended that first seminar. That led to a training program in RET and more training. After spending two years in training for TA, I moved my primary mode of doing counseling to RET as I found it more helpful with people who were suffering with depression and anxieties.

Over the years, I had several opportunities for direct supervision under Al. His sharp mind and intuition helped me develop my therapeutic skills.

Even though I do use TA as a model for some work with couples, REBT has proven itself in my work with numerous people. In sex therapy, though the main tools are behavioral and based on a standard body of research and knowledge, Albert Ellis' REBT is central to getting folk beyond the mechanics.

Jan Hardaway:
Jan Hardaway supervised my preparation for examination for the American Association of Marriage and Family Counseling. (It was not until three years later that the AAMFC replaced the word Counseling with Therapy.) This was in Ohio and there was no licensure of any mental health counseling at the time. AAMFC was the credentialing body in the field. But Jan is included here because she also taught me to do sex therapy. The whole field of sex therapy was very new and Jan had been trainee at Masters and Johnson.

While I have not continued to do much sex therapy, it was an important part of my practice, even more after I began my work in RET. A significant part of Ellis' work was in sex therapy and he made many contributions to the field. A good sex life is a fulfilling part of most relationships. This was brought home to me when, working with Jan, I began to treat a couple in their eighties who told me, "We don't know how long we have together, but we want it to be the best possible."

When I found an excellent and competent counselor who was completely dedicated to sex therapy, I began referring to her instead of doing this myself. However, when she retired I was forced to renew my interest and work in this field.

Others:
In my lifetime, I have been privileged to learn many things about living a satisfying life and enjoying my mind and my spirit, but also how to work with and be helpful to others. Some of that has come from books and seminars, classes and workshops, some has come from my clients and my friends.

In addition to the people noted above, there have been a handful who have taught me mostly through their written work. The following three have been mentors, not only because I may have taken a workshop or seminar with them, but mostly because I have taken to heart the ideas and philosophies which have come from reading them. Obviously I have read hundreds of books from others, but these three have had life-changing influence on me. It is the depth of their influence that makes them my mentors.

Thich Nhat Hanh:
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has been a great guide in my spiritual practice. He has helped me learn of the Zen in Christian life. I have only been to his teachings twice, but they and his written work has brought me closer to the Sacred within.

Brother David Stendl-Rast:
Brother David has taught and preached the word of gratefulness as the center of the encounter with God, with the Holy. Only through gratefulness, the heart of prayer, can one, acknowledging the love and the gifts received, go about loving neighbors, sisters, brothers, the world.

John Shelby Spong:
Marcus Borg:
If this is proportional to their influence, each of these is entitled to a section. Spong is the prophet, a now-retired bishop of the Episcopal church, he calls the Christian church to a new appreciation of its ministry and to a new formulation of its focus, one that does justice to the truth of modern world views and does not require adherence to what is clearly contrary to fact. He proposes a new, more challenging, more invigorating pursuit of the spirit.

If Spong is the prophet, railing against putting our new spiritual wine into old wineskins, lest those winskins split and all be lost, Marcus Borg is the pastor. He helps us flesh out the new spiritual directions. He delves into the Christian faith, bringing forward from ancient truth the application to modern life and ChristPower.

Why do I call them my mentors? I have had no personal relationship with either. While I have been an attendee at three Borg workshops and one of Spong's, I have read and devoured their writings and found truth that touched my soul.

Still So Many More:
These are only a few of the many women and men who have tramped the path and led me to my current place, spiritually, politically and in my personhood. There have been so many more whom I just can't write about. They belong here, even if I don't have time or capability to write about them--don't even remember their names.

My gratitude includes a thankfullness that these people were in my life; that they gave me of themselves--even some who would never recognize my name, like Borg, or Spong or Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh). Each of them taught me how to be with myself and with others.

Gratitude:
I only hope that I have been able to "Pay it forward," to help one or more others learn to be better who they are; to live a fuller, more satisfying life.

Gratitude: This is "eternal life."

My Mother Was A Psychotherapist

2008-12-10T04:43:00.000-08:00

She didn't have a college degree or any other credentials. Like all psychotherapists and counselors, she was much better helping others see their key issues, strengths, and options, than she was with her own. In fact like most, she had parts of her life where she was "crazy." Still, she did have some major key insights that she tried to offer her children and others.

To tell you more, I need to share some inside information. Almost all families have their own onomatopoetic or euphonic words for the major bodily functions. Ours were "pish" and "uhohdoo"--go ahead, you can guess.

One of my mother's favorite teachings was, "Wish in one hand, pish in the other and see which weighs more."

Now that is a very good restatement of a good rule of sanity. Today I frequently find myself helping clients realize that you cannot change the past. It is what it is. You may wish it had been different, but it is what it is. You can build on it. You can plan for the future. You can learn how certain antecedents lead to certain consequences. But you cannot change it. That's why continuing feelings of guilt are wasted emotional energy. The same is true of continued anger.

If you feel troubled by something you did that harmed another person, the first thing is to ameliorate the damage. Attempt to fix the present results of your behavior--and if possible acknowledge and apologize for having acted that way. But continuing to feel guilty serves neither you nor your victim. It interferes with effective correction. Sometimes it even reinforces the others feelings of being unable to move on.

A good example of this is the remorse and guilt some parents have for the way they raised their children. There are very few perfect parents. There are also very few perfect children. The little bundles of joy just don't come with an instruction manual. They are also not like pancakes. If you burn the first pancakes you can throw it away and start over. Not so with children. Also, any lessons you learn on the first one, don't seem to apply to subsequent children. That doesn't mean that there are no general rules, but the specifics are different with each child. (However, you may wish to read my blog entry "Operating Instructions for Your Life")

At some point every parent has to come to terms with his or her failures. All you can do is accept the reality, change or ameliorate, in the present, whatever can be changed, and move forward without being paralyzed by guilt.

Blame is as useless as guilt. I will often hear laments about how badly a client was treated by her parent. She had a clinging mother or a father who was abusive. Sometimes a woman client will share that she was the subject of sexual abuse. While, if true, there may be reasons for her to confront the father--sometimes even involve the authorities--in reality she cannot change the fact of the abuse. This is especially true when the parent has died. No matter how badly treated, the client's wishes that the parent behaved differently are fruitless. What the client can do is change his or her emotions about that past parental behavior.

I think my mother understood all this. Wishing always weighs less and has less value than "pishing." Or, as a local counseling/coaching group likes to say, "Love what IS." Accept and embrace reality. Pretty good advice for a woman with a high school education and a lot of her own craziness.

A second therapeutically sound aphorism of my mother was "We all know that we all stink when we make uhohdoo." Uhohdoo is a human part of everyone's life. My mother would say this when we would put down another person because they screwed up.

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone does the best they know how. It's easy to assume malevolence when we have been harmed by another. But the truth is, the other person may have been careless, may have lacked awareness, or knowledge or ability, may have even been vindictive. Yet whatever the behavior, the person was doing what they thought was right under the circumstances as he understood them.

I'm not justifying bad behavior. People who harm others and don't recognize that, need to be made aware of the consequences of their behavior. Those who repeatedly do so may need to be restrained and retrained--that's what jails and prisons are for. However, a year of internship in San Quentin prison taught me that most inmates, as they began to understand the consequences to the victim and the other options that they had not seen at the time, were remorseful. That at the time of the offense, they did think that this was the best they could do. (I leave it for another posting to discuss prisons and our overuse of them. We hold more prisoners per population than any other nation on earth both in absolute numbers and proportionately.)

Most of us do not commit terrible acts on others or ourselves. When we do harm to another, we properly feel remorse and try to correct the problem to the best of our ability. However, what we were thinking and feeling at the moment was almost always based on our own misperceptions, lack of understanding, poor cognition, habits, etc., not on malevolence. We all "make uhohdoo." There are times when we all stink. It is in the nature of humans that we are fallible.

That's not an excuse, just a fact. That's why restitution works wonders in the criminal system. It gives both the victim and the perpetrator a new vista. It brings both to a realization of the humanity of the other. It links them as people. That's also why forgiveness works. Forgiveness is not an excusing of bad behavior. It is an acknowledgment that every person makes errors of judgement, knowledge, emotions and behavior. It is also an acknowledgment of the humanity of the other.

So my mother was, at times, a pretty good psychotherapist. She didn't always apply those things to herself. But all of us who do counseling/psychotherapy know that we too fail in that way. That's why a good counselor always finds someone who can be our own counselor.

(For clarity, let me say that I much prefer the word counseling to psychotherapy. Counseling, coaching and education are what promote mental health. Therapy and psychotherapy have simply become the common terms that we are forced to apply in our overly pseudo-scientific and medicalized profession. For more on this subject, you can read William Glasser, E. Fuller Tory, and Thomas Szasz among others.)

Spirituality and Mental Health

2008-10-20T21:47:00.000-07:00

What is the connection between spirituality and mental health? As I think about this, the prior question interferes. What is “spirituality?” Then there is the next question, “What is mental health?” But I thought I had this neatly tied up years ago. Now, I find that I am struggling with it again. Always beginning again. I began to address this in a blog entry in September. But then other things got in the way.

The financial crisis and the bailout of the elite, crooks on Wall Street. (Oh? Do I have an opinion? Who me?) Also the very important election of the next U.S. president. Not that these are less than spiritual or important to mental health. In fact, they are very spiritual issues. Both directly and indirectly the election of a new president will begin to correct the insanity of the current American foreign and domestic policies and the evilness which has taken over our lives. But I’ll get back to this in a bit.

Ruminating about the subject of spirituality is not a new endeavor for me. This blog has several entries about the subject from theological, religious, psychological, psychotherapy and social perspectives. Lately I’ve had some new experiences and musings that I want to share.

First, I hit a dry spot in my meditation. For a few months I was distracting myself with other concerns. I got caught up in the news cycle, began an intense review of my earlier work in Transactional Analysis, had several new clients with sexual dysfunction and that drove me to focus to catch up with the latest research. (I have done a lot of sex therapy in the past, but for a few years now have been referring clients to a well-known sex therapist whose work I respect. She has retired and is no longer accepting clients. I have searched for others but not yet found someone I am prepared to recommend. In addition, my clients tend to be low-income and not have a lot of financial resources.) With all this, I gradually let take my meditation time wither away.

Eventually, I realized what I had done and what I lost and have reclaimed that energy and time. Zen meditation has always strengthened my life, helping me to both grasp it and let go of my illusion of individuation. It has enriched my walk as a follower of Jesus, as a human being, as a part of all humanity.

The second experience was encountering the story of Jill Bolte Taylor, a researcher at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. Taylor woke one morning with the beginning of a stroke which left her without a sense of where Jill ended and the rest of the universe began. Taylor, neuro-scientist to the end, was able to track her experience and later document it for the rest of us in a book entitled, My Stroke of Insight.

Because Taylor’s stroke incapacitated her left hemisphere or left brain, she was not constricted by her usual limit-setting rationality of time, judgment and ego. What was left operational in her brain put her in contact with, as she later put it, “the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time...My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”

Of course, that is not to demean the value of the left, rational, hemisphere. It takes both. A healthy person, and a healthy society, honor and live more or less equally out of both halves of the brain. But most of us, most of the time, again as Jill Taylor says, “The two hemispheres of our brain are yoked opposites: limit-setting rationality (time, judgment, ego) in perpetual interplay with the eternal and unbounded now. Together, and only together, do these two halves of our awareness make our human destiny.”

After hearing Jill Bolte Taylor being interviewed—on KPFA, I think, but I don’t remember—I went to my Internet guru, Google, and looked her up. Of the many references, the one I found most helpful was a video of her talk at the TED conference in February of this year. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is a 25 year old series of conferences. Taylor’s talk is at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

This suggests a hard-wired proclivity for a spiritual connection with the here and now. It touches on the experience of mindfulness and "suchness", both Zen experiences—I almost said “concepts” but they are not concepts because they are not cognitive or intellectual, but experiential.

Third has been a series of sermons by he pastor of the church where I find my community of spirituality, sustenance and social action, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon, California.

Doug began preaching a series based on the passage about putting old wine in old wineskins and new wine in new wineskins. In Jesus day, you had to get this right because otherwise the wine would spoil or the new wine would break the old wineskins. This story appears in all three canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke. It also appears in the Gospel of Thomas as "Nobody drinks aged wine and immediately wants to drink young wine. Young wine is not poured into old wineskins, or they might break, and aged wine is not poured into a new wineskin, or it might spoil."

So Doug was proposing that the story of Jesus was a new wine, but put in the old wineskin of dogma, and hardened doctrine, it has begun to break the container. He has followed by looking at a radical acceptance of the one commandment of Jesus, the commandment of Love. Then quoting 1 John, “God is Love. Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

The sermons that have followed have been practical application of the centrality of love, applied not just to those near to us, but to all people, all communities, all animals, all nature and, ultimately, all universes.

The latest key was a return to my readings of Brother David Stiendl-Rast’s books, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, A Listening Heart, and The Ground We Share (Written with Robert Aitken-Roshi). There is a primacy in the spiritual search. The heart of spirituality—like the heart of prayer—is gratefulness. It is because I am grateful that I search out the path to life, only to find myself already there. Being mindful, I find myself grateful. Being grateful I discover that I am myself the path. That path is Love.

This is not a new teaching. It is nothing that I have discovered. It is there in the bible, in the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Zen monk, in the writings of Thomas Moore the contemporary spiritual teacher, St. John of the Cross, and especially, Meister Eckhart, the 13th century theologian and mystic. Whose words, among other amazing sayings, include these.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "Thank You", that would suffice.
The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.
He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.
We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.

That does not answer all the questions, but it does provide a framework. Spiritual practice begins with an awareness of the reality that we are a part of all that is. There is not a separation of subject and object, but there is a unity. Gratefulness for this unity of the gift of all that is real and true. The practice of love in all places and times, with those we love, friends and with those we see as enemies, recognizing that we are, in this, loving ourselves. This is spirituality.

But, this is only a beginning and I am a beginner. When I know the full answer, I will have returned to the beginning, and I will not know. And it will be Sacred.

Spirituality--Another Look

2008-09-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

One of my clients frequently tells me that her "ego" interferes with her focus on her REBT homework or her "ego" gets in the way of her relationship with her boyfriend, or with a colleague.

Funny word "Ego". It has acquired many meanings.

The origin is Latin and had (approx.) the meaning of the Self, as contrasted with the outside world.
Freud used the word to mean that part of the psyche which is conscious and controls thought and behavior.
It is often used (And I think my client uses it this way) to denote an exaggerated sense of self-importance or pride. (Somewhat similar to the Tolle reference below.)
Still another meaning is consciousness of our own identity.
Transactional Analysis uses the term "Ego States" but doesn't really seem to define "Ego". (Ego States are the Parent, Adult and Child. They are distinguished from Freudian constructs in being behavioral rather than inferred.)
The current pop guru, Eckhart Tolle, regularly trashes "the ego" but does a less than adequate job of defining his object of contempt.

On another subject. . .

A friend sent me the video of Jill Bolte Taylor talking about her stroke experience. In one of the major talks at the February TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference in Monterrey, California, Ms Taylor spoke of being forced to a total awareness of her present. She lost, not only her verbal skills but also, any sense of her past or future. The only consciousness she had was sensory contact with the present and not even the words to express this to others.

In many ways this is not so different from describing the experience of mindfulness meditation. Clearly Taylor's mind took on its own version, even though it was based on deficit rather than intention.

If you haven't seen this, there is a great video of her presentation at the 2008 TED talks.

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

This is extremely interesting and worth your time.

Getting Sidetracted

2008-09-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

It has been a very busy summer. Hospital work, increased counseling load and even a short vacation in Mazatlan have kept my mind focused elsewhere. I've thought of things I would like to write, but then something else would sidetrack me.

One of the activities that has sidetracted me has been involvement in the elections. I reluctantly accepted John Edwards dropping out of the primaries. And wasn't that a blessing. How would we have dealt with his revelations if he had become the Democratic candidate. With McCain turning from his "straight-shooter" image and becoming a liar of major skill, it would have been a terrible burden for John Edwards to be discovered to be a philanderer. I am never too surprised when a politician is a liar or a philanderer but Edwards fooled me.

McCain did not fool me. I've come to expect lying, cheating, theivery, deception from the Republican party faithful. It was not always so. Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican and an honorable man. Mark Hatfield (The former Senator from Oregon) was another. Barry Goldwater was very mistaken in his proposed policies, but overall he too was honorable. However, since the advent of Nixon, and even more of Reagan, the liars and cheats have take over the Republican party. They have been warmly embraced by the wealthy elites and major corporate business entities whose only concern is to protect their own interests even at the expense of the nation, but surely at the expense of the middle-class. In this they have joined forces with the religious right who believe that God has spoken to them and that they alone, knowing the mind of God, have not only the right but the duty to impose their will upon the rest of America.

In pursuit of this endeavor, these Republican allies have employed a most effective tool, the political operatives like Karl Rove, and Rove's horde of disciples. The have been engaging in a variety of dirty tricks to limit the Democratic vote. There is a list of about 12 states in which large numbers of voters are being purged from the roles by scurrilous means. Thousands of voter registrations are rejected in Ohio, Florida and other states because they come from Democratic strongholds.

It is bad enough where county Registrars of voters are Republican. It gets even worse in states in which the Secretary of State is also Republican.

In Colorado the Republican Secretary of State dumped one fifth of all registrations, almost all from areas and neighborhoods with primarily African-American populations. In Florida, another swing-state, they are refusing to accept 85,000 new registrations from voter drives in overwhelminglay Black voter areas. In New Mexico, half of the Democrats of the county of Mora, a very poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, discovered that their registrations had disappeared. The disappearance at the hands of a Republican contractor.

Tens of thousands of voters in Ohio and Nevada who have lost their homes to foreclosure have also lost their right to vote due to a federal regulation under this administration.

In Georgia, the Secretary of State Cathy Cox purged 80,000 voters as convicted felons. Among these was Bernice Kines, convicted in 2009 (That's right) of an unknown future crime.

These were not real felons--real felons wouldn't risk more jail time by illegal voter registration.They just had the same name as some real felon somewhere in the US. Sec. of State Cox didn't arrest any of these 80,000 even though registering constitutes another felony, suggesting that she knew better.

Ohio is becoming a battle ground for voter registrations. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is going to battle against the state legislature over a law that was passed in 2006 that allows counties to remove voters from the rolls if election notices sent by the counties to the voters are returned for any reason. This is a violation of state law and federal law and the US Constitution according to her lawyers. Any voter removed from the rolls must be given due process.

Under the Republican Bush administration the Veteran's Administration has prevented non-partison groups from registering veterans who are in the VA hospitals. It is only this month on September 9 that pressure from veterans groups, state officials, and even the Justice department finally forced the Department of Veteran's Affairs to allow these veterans to be registered. This pushes the envelope for registration deadlines in most states.

And we haven't even gotten to voting machines that flip votes or lose results. Machines that can't pass muster are made by Sequoia and Diebold. (Diebold, reeling from bad publicity has changed its name to Premier.) For more information on this subject see Black Box Voting .

Back to my original premise. Sidetracking. All the fuss about Sarah Palin takes our eyes away from the real skullduggery by Rovian operatives and tricksters who are stealing the election. (Or doing the worst they know how and it is very bad.) Sure, we have to point out that Palin is a right-wing religious zealout with the morals of a mouse and a propensity for murdering wolves; someone who shills for the oil industry, takes the "bridge to nowhere" money and builds a road to nowhere, but claims to be opposed to earmarks--Yes, and a lot more. She is almost as much of a liar as partner John McCain.

But we must not let Rove and his people steal the election while misdirecting our attention.

For still more on this subject see Newsweek

Scary Idea

2008-06-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! I was listening to a radio show. The subject was, "What should you buy as a Father's Day gift?" A poll of middle-class fathers, conducted by one of the universities resulted in the following:

Don't give your father a new tie. 53% had worn the last two ties received exactly one time.
Don't give your father a new shirt, underwear, etc. The numbers were not too different, but the fathers complained of getting the wrong kind of underwear--briefs instead of boxers, or the reverse.
Don't give your father a book. (Here's the scary part) Over 40% of the fathers stated that they had not read even one book during the previous year.

Now I don't like to receive gift books because very often the giver gives a book that she/he liked without considering what I might like. I can't tell you how many "spiritual" books I've received. Why would I want another book by Wayne Dyer? I think this guy is a phony guru who has had few original ideas. Because I'm a counselor, I've received a couple of John Gray's garbage books. But Gray has absolutely no research to back up his assertions, no experience and no credentials (Even his doctorate is from a diploma mill that was shut down by the state.) Worse yet, he's basically wrong.

But I am always reading several books. If you want to give me a book, ask me what I want first. How can any person consider himself intelligent and knowledgeable and then admit that he has not read even one book in the last year? How can he be a responsible citizen? How can he even be competent in his own chosen profession?

Given the damage done by the policies of the last thirty years of regressive government, we need citizens who are more, not less, knowledgeable politically, socially, culturally, scientifically, and spiritually. We need men and women who do read and consider new ideas. Most of those come in books.

"Over 40% of the fathers stated that they had not read even one book during the previous year." That is really frightening.

More Thoughts About Transactional Analysis and CBT

2008-06-09T13:07:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking more about my rediscovery of Transactional Analysis. (If you don't know about TA, please take a look at my recent blog entry about this.)

First, I was troubled with my too facile explanation for the semi-demise of TA. I attributed it to the increasing rejection of all the playful, intuitive and creative ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. With the coming of the "hard-nosed" rationalist, "me first", "taking care of number one", anti-sexuality, conservativism of the 1980s (I know, much of it was the self-delusion of the Reagan right wing.) creativity was not so valued. I do think that is part of the answer.

However, I think an even more important reason TA dropped out of sight even as Cognitive Behavior Therapy became more and more recognized as the therapy of choice for many emotional and behavioral problems is that, unlike Albert Ellis, originator of CBT/REBT, Eric Berne, the father of TA, did not fully abandon his Freudian tendencies. Many of his students and followers likewise had been trained in the same psychoanalytic, Freudian ideology.

Freudian theology believed in an invisible group of mental parts including id, ego and superego. The more dogmatic insisted on these parts as a reality. Even the most progressive still tended to reify this doctrine. So Berne and his followers initially tended likewise to conceive of the ego-states as something real, rather than as a way of conceptualizing behavior and mental processes.

As the TA therapy and theory progressed however, it became more and more behavioral. Even Berne himself, tried to distinguish the Parent, Adult and Child from Superego, Ego and Id, by stating that one could see the PAC in action; that they were behavioral. The process of counseling began with hammering out a "contract for change" which stated how "Others can see that you have changed," that is very behavioral and results oriented. Furthermore, the focus of therapy moved toward making a "decision" and then learning to follow-through on that decision by behaving (Defining emotions too as behavior) consistently in new ways.

This new understanding has led me to consider TA as one more, albeit hidden, Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Taken as simile, PAC maps very well into rational and irrational beliefs or automatic negative thoughts. There are some pieces of the TA schema which are less useful, but many more which help clients understand their habits of thought and action. Critical Parent messages are certainly mapped as irrational beliefs. The Adult is the more healthy Critical and Nurturing Parent, etc.

But it is in the realm of interpersonal dynamics that these come to life. CBT has to stretch greatly to include relational dynamics. Just as intrapersonal functions are the natural realm of REBT, CT and other CBT, interpersonal dynamics are well mapped by TA. Working with families and couples one can watch in amazement the Games play out. Ain't it awful! Let's you and him fight! Why don't you; yes but! "Now I've got you, you SOB!" and "I'm only trying to help you. Careful observation can help people see how their irrational beliefs lead them to the games and the payoff when the Victim becomes a Persecutor and the Rescuer becomes the new Victim. (For more information, search the web for the Karpman Triangle.)

The payoff for the client and therapist is that the client gets a better understanding of where to discover the wording of the irrational belief. For a couple, they can understand how their respective beliefs inter-twine to sour their relationship.

Of course, in the end, the solution is for the clients to learn to challenge their beliefs and find better rational ones. In TA terms, putting the Adult ego state in charge of the Parental and Child ego states.

I have begun incorporating my old TA training into my CBT practice and find that this is enriching my work and making it easier for clients to "get it." I have not yet, however, made a strong move toward working under "contract." And I have not been rigorous about identifying the "decision" a client needs to make. CBT does not really use the decision language very strongly, but in fact it is part of the work. I do think TA misunderstood how a decision needs to be constantly renewed. Clients who failed to fulfil a decision were too easily dismissed--at least by me and some of my TA colleagues. I have enough humility to think other TA practitioners may have done much better.

I will return to this subject from time-to-time. If you would like to learn more about Transactional Analysis, there are few better introductory books than Born To Win, by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward. Originally published in 1971 and updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 1996, it is still an excellent aid to self-understanding and a clear explication of Transactional Analysis.

Operating Instructions for Your Life

2008-04-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

Actually, this is a summary of the Operating Instruction Manual. The full manual is many pages long. When I found it many of the pages were torn and had been exposed to the weather so they were a little hard to read. I'm working on interpreting those pages. As I get them cleaned up and readable, I will be publishing them here.

Unfortunately, when you were born, the operating instructions were lost almost immediately. We learn to drive a generic automobile but have to adapt to the differences in models. Here are a set of generic operating instructions for the human being. Each person will have to adapt them for her or his own model, but they are broadly applicable to all versions of whatever color, location or year of manufacture.

The present is the only place to be; the only place you can be. In the present you can be alive to reality. In the present, if there is a bad feeling, you can take action to respond to it. In the present you can decide how to correct for past bad action. In the present, you can plan to make life better for the future.
Only the present exists. The past is done. You can’t change it. Don’t even try. You can change your feelings about the past, and you can learn from the past. But the past is gone. The present is partially a result of your past but it is all you have, all that is real.
Your emotions are largely the result, not of what happens to you but your beliefs, attitudes and thoughts. It is as if you had tape recordings. What happens to you pushes a button that plays a tape that was recorded long ago. Those tapes have little or nothing to do with present reality.
One corollary is, guilt feelings are never a good thing. Guilt doesn’t motivate someone to correct the problem or make restitution for damage. If you are sorry for your actions, apologize, fix the damage to the extent possible, make restitution. Then learn from the mistake and move on. Guilt will only keep you estranged from the other person. Guilt keeps you in the past.
Worry keeps you in the future and is another way to avoid making the present changes that would be helpful,. Worry allows you to feel bad ahead of time and not make the plans or take the actions necessary to change the future.
Anger, like guilt and worry, is not useful or necessary. We largely get angry because we feel helpless to change a bad situation or we use anger because we are frustrated. Some people also use anger to cover sadness. It would be better to feel the deeper feelings so they can be dealt with. It would be better to find a way to change the bad situation.
In the reverse, when someone says something harsh or in anger, it’s really not about you. The other person may think it is and say it is, but it’s really about themselves, their situation, their own lives, their own emotions.
If you are stuck in a hole in life, the first thing is to stop digging.
Your feelings are based on your beliefs about yourself, other people and the world in which you live. Epictetus, over 2000 years ago, said it right, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.”
Treating someone with contempt is one of the surest ways to destroy a relationship. This is true for friendships, lovers, and working relationships.
Don’t lie to anyone you respect, love, admire or with whom you are friends. It may be necessary to lie to someone who is an enemy or means you harm. But this should be a very rare exception.
On the other hand, don’t ask questions to which you don’t want a truthful answer. Don’t answer questions unless you can tell the truth.
Keep other’s information in confidence, unless you have their permission to share it. It belongs to them not to you.
Words are metaphors; they have no real meaning in themselves. The meaning changes with context. We need language to communicate, but every word is an invitation to misunderstanding. No two people really speak the same language. Always be prepared to accept that you may have misunderstood. Always be prepared to be misunderstood. Also, be prepared to sometimes be understood correctly.
Our beliefs, to a large extent, are both formed and expressed by our choice of words. During war, to call someone a “gook” or a “rag-head” dehumanizes them and helps us believe and act as though they are not really a human being. While this makes it easier to kill them, it does not provide a way of making peace with them. Even with a war, eventually there must be a peace. (And even in the efficient prosecution of war, it may cause us to misjudge the other person’s offense or defense.)
There are no bad people. There are people who make poor choices. Everyone does what they believe to be right in their view and under their circumstances. Even psychopaths believe they are doing the right thing. Of course, some of those behaviors are harmful to ourselves and others. Those behaviors must not be allowed. Sometimes that means physical restraint like jail and prison. But that does not make those people inherently evil or bad. However, some may well use the word "evil" for their behaviors. (See instruction #14)
Two very strong keys to having a good life are gratitude and forgiveness. They acknowledge our connections with each other; how much our lives are interconnected. They tie us to the larger community as well.
You are more than your body. It becomes very confusing to talk about soul, spirit, even mind. It would be so much simpler to ignore the spiritual; even more so to be dogmatic about it. Yet something more is going on than just your body and brain. Consider your basic reason for existence, what has been called, “the ground of being.” There are a wide variety of spiritual “languages.” Aside from dogma, there is a lot of similarity among them. Gratitude and forgiveness are spiritual qualities more than emotional. Communities of spirituality, church, mosque, synagogue, temple, and coven are all places where your own individual spiritual journey can be supported. But don’t succumb to the easy answers of any doctrine or dogma. No group has the answer; the best communities are the ones with the best questions not the best answers.
There is no “Secret” that some guru can impart to you. The true teacher is like any good educator, helping you to find what will make your life whole. Even the instructions in this manual are only generic. A true teacher will help you to find the specific ways they apply to your life. Every real guru or teacher knows how little she knows. A true teacher knows himself to always be a beginner. Someone certain that they know the truth, doesn’t. Don’t follow them.
There are no absolutes for all times and places. Orthodoxy is always wrong. That’s true for religious, spiritual, scientific, psychological orthodoxies. It is also true for orthodox atheism. Even so, you have to rest your life on some sense of purpose, a ground of being. Existence demands it—or else your existence is an absurdity; which is absurd. Even the "always" in this instruction is not absolutely true.

A Forgotten Therapy

2008-04-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

The 1960s and '70s brought a great deal of innovation to psychotherapy, counseling, and human growth efforts. There were "T-groups", Primal Scream, Jungian, Gestalt and much more. Most of these have fallen by the wayside. Increasingly, behavioral therapies have demonstrated their efficacy in dealing with the major dysfunctions like depression, anxieties, phobias.

Like many psychotherapists and counselors, I went through that era learning some of these modes, but discovered Rational Emotive Therapy, the original version of Cognitive Behavior Therapy invented by Albert Ellis. (Cognitive Therapy was another version of CBT invented only about two years later by Aaron Beck.) Cognitive Behavior Therapy is by no means the only behavioral treatment mode. Since then several others have been invented including Dialectic Behavior Therapy, which has had great success with "personality dysfunctions."

Another of the innovative treatment and learning modalities of that period was Transactional Analysis. One thing distinguished TA from many others were that it was behavioral while still focused on growth and emergence in life. While many of the other techniques abandoned rigorous analysis and research, because of its behavioral focus, TA did not. Transactional Analysis prided itself on being able to see and work with the behaviors through which people exhibited their emotional reality. With some practice, one can see people behaving as a child, as a parent or as an adult.

TA was, on the one hand, a part of the 1960-70 era in that it used a more playful language, "I'm OK; you're OK." "Strokes" "Warm fuzzies" "Cold pricklies" "Games" (The initial popular book by Eric Berne was Games People Play.) "Scripts" It was accessible to the average person. On the other, TA was often combined with insights and tools from other modalities, especially Gestalt Therapy and Decision Therapy.

The 1980s saw the abandonment of free-wheeling experiential, experimental approaches to awareness and therapy. While there was still a component that continued, it became entwined with a lot of "new-age" ideas that were completely based on personal, internal affirmation such as channeling, astrology, and the reification of jungian metaphor.

In the enthusiasm for hard-nosed, bottom-line thinking and practice, Transactional Analysis fell out of favor. It's very use of playful language made it a target of the "reality" based thinkers. The fact that its insights were demonstrated by results was insufficient. It became associated with transpersonal psychology, alternative therapies, and fuzzy-headedness.

Another, and I would suggest, major reason for TA's diminished esteem was the reification of the metaphor done by so many practitioners. Instead of seeing the Child, Adult, and Parent as ways of speaking about behaviors and feelings, some transactional analysts began to speak as though there were, in a presumed psyche, a portion that could be identified as an actual, if non-physical, child; another child; and another parent. Thus these therapists and writers made the same mistakes as the early Freudian theorists. There was a proliferation of ideas, some of them very esoteric that also got passed off as Transactional Analysis

But, in fact, Transactional Analysis has a great deal to offer. The major themes and ideas and the tools that derive from them are very helpful to many clients. (I will call those who come for counseling and therapy, "Clients" however I know that some, often wedded to a medical model, call them "Patients.")

The basic idea that Eric Berne elucidated was the game. There are many games clients (And therapists) play. TA practitioners assigned descriptive names to them. "Ain't it awful", "Yes, but", "Let's You and Him Fight" are just a few. The idea of a game is that there are three positions in a game, Persecutor, Victim and Rescuer. The bad feelings are the payoff when at least one person--and maybe two, switch roles.

But Berne also replaced the old Freudian metaphor of a posited Ego, Id and Superego, with a more useful and behavioral image of Parent, Adult and Child.

Among the differences is that one can watch as a person functions and distinguish from the behavior or thought or feeling, which of the ego states the person is "in."

The Parent and Child behaviors, thoughts and feelings are ones learned in growing up. (Clearly it is more complicated than this and if you have more interest, I will put a few links and references at the bottom of this blog entry.)

Another innovation is the recognition of the need for "Strokes", attention, acknowledgement, appreciation or other responses. Research has shown that children do not grow healthy without strokes. Infants need physical strokes, while adults can survive with verbal. Both do better with positive strokes. TA practitioners divide strokes into warm fuzzies, and cold pricklies. Even though cold pricklies do not have as much psychic nourishment as warm fuzzies, they at least acknowledge a person's existence.

When two people interact, they each do so from one of the three ego states. If they interact in complementary ways, A-A, C-C, P-C, etc. as shown in the following illustration, conversation and interaction can go on for quite some time. (There is no significance to the dash-line. It is only to make it visually separate from the others and not indicate a crossed transaction.) The PAC concept can be further refined because the Child can be adaptive and behave in the way it has decided that the Parent wants, or it can be playful and natural. (This is not to suggest that all adaptive behavior is bad.) Also the real Parent ego state can be either nurturing or critical. But all this is for another time.

You can envision two parents sitting on a park bench (Persons in their Parent ego state) complaining about the behavior of children "now-a-days." They can continue this for lengthy periods and even come back the next day to say more.

The Adult ego state deals with "facts". Of course, people's facts are sometimes wrong, but if two people are dealing in facts, they are in their Adult and can discuss the data for lengthy periods. (Of course, when the people become wedded to their ideas, they may not be dealing in fact, only beliefs masquerading as fact. Witness the current arguments about "super-string theory," which sometimes become quite heated.)

Adult people who are playing and enjoying each other's company are functioning in their Child ego states. "Let's take the boat out for a sail in the moonlight." While the actions of the couple may be appropriate for mature adults, they are operating in their Child. (Good sex is always in the child. It is when sexual behavior really involves the Parent, that people come to the sex therapist. Of course, children sometimes "play" parent and this can also be so in sex.)

Another key concept which drove an early book about TA is "I'm OK, You're OK" as the psychological position people may take who are healthily relating to themselves, others and the world. The book, I'm OK, You're OK, by Thomas A. Harris, was immensely popular as a self-help book. The OK corral was another easy to understand image. It suggested that each of us functions from a "position" within these four positions,

as we relate to others and to ourselves. Even if this is a bit simplistic, it does help clients understand the way they relate to others.

Transactional Analysis has a quite profound and sophisticated understanding of human emotion and behavior, but it also has the genius to make it easier for people to understand and appropriate their insights.

There are many other concepts which are included in TA theory and practice, but this blog was not intended to be an exposition of all that Transactional Analysis brings to the therapeutic, counseling, coaching and educational table.

As a behavioral based therapy system, it easily translates into the concepts with which cognitive behavioral therapists (CT, REBT, ET, DBT, etc.) are familiar. But it provides another means of "hooking" the client into the therapeutic alliance and helping the client understand their own emotions and behavior.

Why have I returned to TA to take another look? I have had a couple of recent recent experiences in which I was an observer of therapy, particularly marital therapy. As I watched the therapists trying to understand the client's mental and emotion processes, I suddenly had an insight; I knew what was happening and could describe it in TA terms, perhaps easier than the actual therapists were doing. In each case, I could have used TA to help the therapeutic alliance develop. (Of course, as an observer, I could not intervene.) Watching the efforts of the therapists (And these were well-seasoned people with many years.) I became clear that Transactional Analysis still had a place in my arsenal.

I will have to relearn some of my rusty tools, but much of it has remained. I do not intend to abandon any other tools, I have seen the clear end results of the cognitive behavioral approach and have helped too many not to continue on that road, but I will be upgrading my old tool, Transactional Analysis and using it when appropriate.

====================================================
Here are a few introductory links for those who want more information. Feel free also to email me at davidpittle@turningspirit.com .
International Transactional Analysis Association
TA Tutor
A Warm Fuzzy Tale
Claude Steiner's (One of the early collaborators and still active) TA intro

You may also want to see more of my counseling information at
TurningSpirit Center

China Protests

2008-04-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Hang a banner from the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge? Line the route of the Olympic Torch with protest signs? Turn your back on the procession? Call for the US to boycott this Olympics? Demand that President Bush join several heads of state, mostly European, and refuse to attend?

There are many options for today's protest against China. But some people still won't understand. "Don't politicize the Olympics." "What about the poor athletes who will miss their chance?" "Athletics is the one place we can all get along."

The Olympics has been politicized for years. We did boycott the Olympics in 1980 to protest the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. China had major political reasons for wanting to host the Olympics. There have been frequent political considerations involved in the Olympics. So to inveigh against politicizing the Olympics today is either naive or dissembling.

China is not a good neighbor. As much as we may disapprove of their internal behavior--and I for one do not approve of their imprisonment of opposition, censorship of media and Internet, child labor, prison labor, refusal to allow real labor organizations--they are not the only nation whose internal behavior is execrable. But there are other reasons that China is deserving of condemnation.

Under the current regime . . .

China has hardened its occupation of Tibet. Crackdowns on human rights have become even more severe. The trial of Hu Jia for "incitement to subvert state power" is a sham and the Chinese government refuses to allow UN or other outside monitors.
China continues strong support for the murderous military regime in Burma/Myanmar. This abominable bunch has oppressed its people and killed hundreds of Buddhist monks and ordinary people who were peacefully protesting.
China not only supports the genocide in Darfur but encourages and funds it. Southern Sudan contains large oil supplies in the same league, though not as large as, Iraq. China has payed the Sudan government enormous sums to obtain the rights to drill this oil. Darfur is one of the best drilling areas. The government of Sudan, in turn has funded the infamous Janjaweed to commit their atrocities on the people of Darfur. (The Janjaweed were, of course, already committing their murders, rapes, and burnings even before, but they did not have the modern weapons and air power that the Chinese money has provided.)
China has surpassed even the United States in the pollution of the atmosphere and contribution to global climate change. ("Global warming") In addition to China's emissions of CO2, it releases massive amounts of particulates which then circle the globe and damage the health of people in other nations. In fact San Francisco is one of the greatest "beneficiaries" of this pollution.

Another argument I have heard against the protests is that we should be protesting our own government. We have no right to protest China's human rights violations while our own country is occupying Iraq, torturing prisoners and spying on its own people. But this argument presumes that we can't protest two abominations at the same time. Of course we must change the actions of the Bush Crime Family. That does not mean we must allow the Chinese freedom to commit terrible acts just because we feel guilty about our nation's dirty linen.

When the International Olympic Committee assigned the 2008 summer Olympic Games to Beijing on 13 July 2001, the Chinese police were intensifying a crackdown on subversive elements, including Internet users and journalists. Six years later, nothing has changed. But despite the absence of any significant progress in free speech and human rights in China, the IOC’s members continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated appeals from international organisations that condemn the scale of the repression.

These protests are not the actions of a few extremists. Many ordinary people in Frances, England, Germany and elsewhere have protested and continue. Members of my own church, a middle-class, fairly ordinary group, covering a wide political spectrum are joining in today's protest. Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility and many other groups view this Olympic location as inappropriate and are protesting. These groups have petitioned the Olympic committee to prevent this Olympics from proceeding in China.

China is not a good neighbor. That they are called Communist has nothing to do with this. China can only be seen as rogue, dictatorial, and inhumane. China has already politicized the Olympics as have others. We must protest China's behavior with regard to Tibet, Darfur, the Sudan and the atmosphere--and we can also throw in their own people.

A Few Sayings on Nudity and Values

2008-04-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy, you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment. Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth)

We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. George Bernard Shaw

Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind. Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn

The body says what words cannot. Martha Graham

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed? Michelangelo

Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Friedrich Nietzsche

A few more Naturist Links:

It is Barack

2008-03-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

I was an Edwards supporter. Among those who might have been electable, Edwards was closest to my prejudices.

Don't misunderstand. What I said in my previous post--too long ago--was correct. I will vote for any Democrat over any Republican who is in the race. There are good, moral and competent Republicans, but none of them have been running for the last 30 years or more. I certainly will not vote for McCain. He is neither moral, nor competent, nor honorable. He has already declared that his policies would be Bush-light. He has already pandered to the religious extremists.

I was and remain unimpressed with Hillary Clinton, who did not declare against the Bush Iraq policies until it became politically expedient. Hillary has too many ties with the corporatist elites. While some of her declared policies are okay, I remain concerned and suspicious.

Until this week, I also saw Barack as too willing to compromise, too interested in "bridging the gap" with the Republicans. I did not believe that he understood the invidious nature of the conservative political agenda. I still have concerns, but in one way, the Clinton juggernaut has contributed to his awakening, his enlightenment. In the military, they say that a soldier is not fully effective until he has been "blooded" by being in real combat. The Clinton campaign has done Obama the favor of "blooding" him. When Hillary Clinton put herself and McCain in the same category over against Obama, she did two things. First she gave McCain more respect than he deserves and second, she "blooded" Obama in a very effective way.

But Obama did something this week that pulled me over. His speech did this. He managed to reject the rantings of Jeremiah Wright without rejecting Mr. Wright himself. Wright and the talk-show loudspeakers had made that an almost impossible task. They had been bolstered by the main-stream, corporate media. Even some of the usually excellent progressive talk-show hosts had joined the chorus. (I'm thinking of Christine Kraft and John Rothman, in particular.)

Obama went even further. He demonstrated a new and different sensitivity to the feelings of "angry white men" who are also short-changed in this issue of race in this country. What is true is that the wealthy elite keep their power, in part, by keeping poor and middle-class whites, African-Americans, Latinos and other groups all divided and fighting with each other. The truth is that the present economic system short-changes all of these minorities (Economic minorities, whether racial majority or minority). He did this without, on the other hand, declaring the wealthy to be inherently, the enemy. There are some of the wealthy who are just as committed to social justice and economic equity. Obama was able to demonstrate a new vision.

If his rhetoric did not soar to the heavens as some other orators have, it certainly did well. Brother Martin was moving in part, because he was addressing the black populace in a style that spoke to them. Others have done something similar. Obama spoke to all of us--a more difficult job.

I will still vote for whichever Democratic nominee arises, but I am now a full-fledged Obama supporter.

A Yaller Dog Democrat

2008-01-28T21:51:00.001-08:00

Perhaps that is a phrase new to your ears/eyes. A Yaller Dog Democrat will
vote for the Democrat even if the party nominates a "Yaller Dog." The phrase
came out of the South in the early 1900's. Despite it's nefarious beginnings, I
embrace it.

It might be possible for the Republicans to nominate a decent, progressive
candidate but that is about as probable as that I might sprout wings and fly. It
may be hypothetically possible, but the probability is so low as to be
meaningless. It certainly hasn't happened in the last 75 years.

Beginning with the 1969 election of Richard Nixon, who attempted to steal the
nation from its people--an action almost accomplished by George W. Bush--every
Republican president has created a greater and greater disaster. Ronald Reagan
began the war against the middle-class, working women and men, families living
by the sweat of their brows. Since then, through Gerald Ford, through two George
Bushes, the Republican party has made life more difficult for average Americans.
They are, of course, in a proud tradition of disastrous presidential
administrations.

We have to go back to Theodore Roosevelt to find a Republican president who left
the nation better off than before. Theodore Roosevelt was too progressive for the Republican party and finally felt he had to organize the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party and run against the Republican, Taft. Since Teddy Roosevelt, Republicans have
brought us economic ruin, war and disasters.

In each case, after a Republican debacle, it required a Democratic president to
bring us back, to end the war, to return economic health. But even two Clinton
terms of office could not completely undo all the damage created by the previous
Republican presidents.

Now to the present. Every Republican candidate currently in the contest has
offered only to continue the disastrous policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney;
Each of them would, in different ways, bring even more damage to the working and
middle class people of the United States. Each would merely extend the class
warfare begun by Ronald Reagan. The only exception is Ron Paul, who would end
the war in Iraq immediately, but whose pseudo-Libertarian policies would leave
the nation weakened and fail to provide adequately for the commons. While he
might end the Iraq fiasco, his plans would destroy schools, social security, and
other parts of the safety net. He would provide fire and police protection for
those who can pay for it, but not for others. He would dismantle regulations
which protect our food, water, medications and safe working environments.

Those are some of the reasons I would not vote for a Republican. But there are
also important reasons from history and present to vote affirmatively for any of
the probable candidates for Democratic nominee:

Historically, one of the best presidents in the history of the nation was
Franklin D. Roosevelt. In addition to bringing the nation out of the depression,
he prosecuted World War II almost to the end--he died before the end, of course,
turning over the rest of the work to Harry S. Truman, no slouch himself.

The next Democratic president followed Dwight Eisenhower. By the end of
Eisenhower's administration, the nation was once again having difficulties.
Fortunately the people next elected an amazing man, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy not
only inspired us, but also led a strong economic growth spurt. He was the right
man to face down Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuba Missle Crisis. His

forward-thinking domestic and external policies promoted the place of the United
States in the world.

He was followed by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson took the vision of Kennedy and
prosecuted the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty reduced the poverty level in
the US from 22.3% to 11.1%. (It has risen somewhat under the prevailing
Republican presidential administrations since then.) Johnson's weakness was in
succumbing to the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident and wasting economic resources
(and lives) in the Vietnam War.

Jimmy Carter was forced to pick up the pieces after the Nixon-Ford fiasco left a
7.5% unemployment rate, a lack of heating fuel in the Northeast, dismal economic
environment, and increasing inflation. While he has come under fire by critics
as an ineffectual president, the reality is quite different. His policies led to
the Salt II treaty, Camp David accords, an accord with China, and a succession
of human rights successes. His domestic policies were, for the most part,
successful. His energy policies would have left the United States better able to
face our present environmental and energy deficits. Unfortunately they were
faced with extreme opposition from a congress bought by the oil and auto
industry. He is not often given the credit but the Iran hostage crisis was

brought to a close as a result of Carter's work. While the timing prevented
Carter from completing the resolution of this crisis, even Reagan has credited
Carter with doing the actual heavy lifting.

I can assume that my readers will remember that Bill Clinton left the nation
with a balanced budget and a surplus, low unemployment, a prospering stock
market, and growing prosperity. If there were unattained goals (Health care, gay
rights, etc.) we were far better off at the end of the Clinton administration
than either at the beginning, or now.

Finally there is another reason for my yaller dog Democrat status. The basic
underlying philosophical bias of the Republican party is that property rights
trump human rights. Individual wealth trumps common wealth, and the prosperity
of the wealthiest is more important than the well-being of the working and
middle-class. This is exactly contrary to the situation with the Democratic
party.

Yes, I do have my preference among the Democratic candidates. Among the top
three leading candidates, I expected to vote for John Edwards who has spent
most of his life working on behalf of working men and women where they are in
conflict with the corporate elites. His support of strong unions and employment
rights continues. However, he has chosen to leave the field in order to best pursue the progressive struggle.

Barak Obama has been inspiring to a whole generation of
young people. He exudes exciting energy and is truly a potential agent for
change. I think he also is a better representative in our relationship with
other nations. It will take years to recover the place of the U.S. in the world
of nations and Obama has the best opportunity than to repair the Bush damage.

Hillary Clinton, to some degree, represents the corporate wing of the Democratic party. It will
require continuous effort to keep her focused on the straight and narrow road. That said
she is still far ahead of any of the Republicans and will make a good effort on
behalf of working America. If she is the nominee, I will be delighted to support her candidacy, will be glad to have her as president and will support her efforts to recover from the disasters of the Republicans.

Yaller-dog Democrat indeed. I will happily vote for whichever of these candidates
emerges to claim the nomination and I will do so proudly, convinced that my vote
serves the best interests of my nation and its people.

Finally a word about other left/liberal parties and candidates. This is not a
game. The future of this country depends on defeating the forces of fascism as
represented by Giuliani, Romney, and Huckabee. It is arguable that Ralph Nader
was at least partially responsible for the last seven disastrous years. The
weakness of the progressive movement is that we constantly split our power into
factions. Ideological purity trumps pragmatism. But politics is the art of the
possible. In our purity desperate working people lose. Poor people are forced to
subsist without adequate care. Unions lose membership. Our rights are trampled
by a right-wing judiciary.

Any third party can only hope to split the progressive vote and make it harder
or impossible for us to take back America.

Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy

2007-12-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have written about Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy without really defining it. A definition is simple. Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy is psychotherapy that sees real mental and emotional health as including behavioral, emotional, cognitive and spiritual components. It is as though one was constructing a table to hold a bowl. All four legs have to be sound and balanced or the bowl will slide and spill. Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy would say that real mental health is radically grounded in the present with full awareness of the present, the so-called “here and now;” that this “being fully present” and available to spiritual awareness is one distinguishing characteristic of mental health, of a balanced table.

The healthy person behaves or feels as though he is actually living neither in the past nor in the future, neither in some other place, known or unknown, but always behaves and feels in the present and in response to what is occurring in the present. Let me be clear, we are congenitally prone to behaving and feeling otherwise. That is why mental and spiritual health are not finally achieved never to be lost again.

Most of us, to some degree all of us, seem to have rubber bands attached to our waist with the other end attached to somewhere in the past. Some of those rubber bands may also be attached to somewhere, sometime in the future. At times, one or more of those rubber bands may stretch and pull us out of the present. We behave and feel as though we are in a time or place when something bad has happened or might happen to us and we are “re-“living it. Historically this has also been called neurosis, though that term is no longer used much, linked as it is to the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. We could therefore say that we are all “normal neurotics.”

Sometimes I am asked if this means we should not examine the past, to learn from it. Or should we not plan for the future? Of course it does not mean either of those things. Looking at the past is not a rubber band if it is done in full awareness of living in the present. Similarly we must plan so that we avoid any pitfalls and we attain those goals that we wish. Doing so, while fully aware of our place in the present, does not bring us to emotions and behavior that are self-defeating, and inappropriate, though they may be painful. Examining other times and places, while maintaining our locus in the present, is healthy.

What then is the tie to spirituality? It is that, while being fully present, we are aware of the sacred or the spirit. People use a variety of words to designate “the sacred.” Some say “God” or “Allah” or use some other name. In the classic study “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James used the phrase, “The More.” By whatever word, most people seem to be touched by a More. But this can only happen in the present. It is the only authentic moment of connection

(I leave alone the question of the locus of this More—whether “out there” or “in here” or between and among people. This is also not a theological discussion so I will not even consider the question of the nature of the More.)

The greatest religious spiritual guides all point in this same direction, the direction of the radical present, as the place or position of spiritual enlightenment.

So the task of Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy is to help each client to break the rubber bands which remove her from the present. To that end, a variety of tools may be appropriate. There are various modes of counseling, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Transactional Analysis, Hypnotherapy, Rogerian, Gestalt, a variety of psychodynamic therapies, and many more. There are educational tools as well. But the goal of each, in Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy, is to bring the counselee to full awareness of the present where he may feel, think and behave appropriately but, also may encounter the More.

The key to the religions I know is the experience of the present. The Christian prays and meditates to open herself to the presence in the present of Christ. The Buddhist meditates, not to obtain enlightenment, but to find a place of complete present where he can encounter the truth of non-duality. For a Wiccan, being fully present may be “Knowing your Oneness with all that exists,” including the ultimate Divinity which is non-physical consciousness. Other religions and spiritualities have their own ways to move people to the present where they can experience the More. Each has certain rituals that celebrate the past. Many have “scriptures”, the Quran, the Bible, the Upanishads, the Sutras, which contain the learning (And often, rules of behavior) of the past about the experience of the present, but they do not mistake the worship of their scriptures for the awareness of the More or the experience of the radical present.

The purpose of much practiced psychotherapy is to remove or change emotional symptoms that lead to emotional pain and suffering. For Spiritually-Integrated Psychotherapy, removing emotional symptoms is important but not sufficient. Real health is marked by the ability to be fully present to oneself, others and the More.

Marcus Borg

2007-12-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Marcus Borg speak. This was my fourth opportunity to learn from Borg in the give and take of a presentation followed by a Q & A. His topic was Open Hearts and Thin Places: Mysticism and Christianity. Another chance to figure out why I continue to call myself a "Christian."

If you've read my blog, you know that I hold many ideas which are outside the mainstream of commonly declared Christianity. I usually cringe when someone tells me that they are a Christian. When I look through the Craigslist, "Women For Men" category and some woman says she is looking for a Christian man, I move away immediately. I know that I am not what she wants. I consider George Bush, not only a criminal traitor to our nation, but also a cynical religious poseur who uses the words of Christianity to play political games. But he is merely following in a line that begins, in my lifetime, with Ronald Reagan. I am not only a nudist, but one who believes that nudism is a healthier way to raise children. I do not believe that the bible was dictated by God. In fact, I don't believe in a God who is "out there" and who swoops in to perform miracles that defy the laws of nature in response to prayers and supplications from believers.

Yet I am a "Follower of Jesus" and am subject to the common term Christian. I do experience within me, the real presence of something sacred. Is this Christ? Well, that feeling comports with the teachings of Jesus and he experiences of the disciples as reported in the bible. The combination of that sacred presence and those teachings, I call "ChristSpirit." (Others may have other words and some of my friends use the word "deluded.") I am strongly persuaded to try to live my life according to the words of Micah, Amos, Isaiah, and the 25th chapter of Matthew. Nothing in human nature seems to drive me in that direction. When I fail to pay attention to the "ChristSpirit" I find myself doing some pretty venal behaviors, concerned mainly with my own short-term hedonism. Yet I know that I am also capable of great acts of benevolence, kindness and altruism. I attribute this to the sacred ChristSpirit.

Back to Borg. Mysticism is at the center of a modern Christianity. The non-mystical Christianity is a dying religion. It was born in a world where accepted reality was a flat earth, four pillars holding up the dome of heaven. What is now called "hell" was a real place--though not the place which Dante invented--under the surface of the flat earth. The attempts to promote "Intelligent design" will fail. A religion based on the physical cannot continue. A religion of images of God which places God above the dome of heaven simply can't cope with space travel. And there will be more space travel; humans will not fail to travel to distant stars and planets.

Only a mystical Christianity can touch the reality of our sacred sense of God. Only a mystical awareness will do justice to our noetic experience. Finally, only a mystical faith is adequate to accord with sacred reality of panentheism. (The word "God" does not refer to a person-like super-powerful authority figure separate from the universe, but to a reality that is "right here and right now" as well as "more than right here and right now"--present everywhere and also beyond everything.

Only a mystical Christianity takes seriously the (post)modern culture which turns to experience rather than doctrine. "Our suspicion of doctrinal claims grounded in traditional authority." This is an affirmation of my own postulate, "Orthodoxy is by definition incorrect as it doesn't take a constantly changing reality into account."

Borg concluded with four admonitions:

Mystical experiences are not the goal of the Christian life. Becoming focused on them is a form of grasping.
The goal of Christian life is a deepening relationship with God, and greater and greater participation in God's compassion for the world.
The goal of the Christian life (and the height of mysticism) is union with the will of God.
The pinnacle of Christian mysticism is not an altered state, but altered traits

Neither Borg nor I would say that this mystical Christianity is correct and other religions are wrong. In fact, Borg spoke admiringly of both Judaism and Buddhism--and I have, for over thirty years, maintained a Zen practice.

He was only saying that for Christianity, the option for the future is an engaged mysticism.

For anyone who wishs to read more from Marcus Borg, I recommend the following books available from your local independent book seller--or, if you insist, Borders, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com.

Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time
The Heart of Christianity
Jesus

Immigration Issues

2007-11-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was just listening to a discussion of the New York driver's license initiative of governor Eliot Spitzer. According to Ed Schultz, a new poll shows over 70% of Democrats are opposed to it. I would guess that the Republican opposition would be well over that since they don't have many of us "Bleeding Heart Liberals."

To be honest the illegal immigration problem has me confused. It encompasses several several sub-issues and concerns.

Except in extremis, it seems to me that people ought to obey the law and shouldn't expect a "pass" when they don't. People who enter the country illegally ought not expect the benefits of the rights of citizens. (Please note that I cannot bring myself to call them "illegal aliens". They do not come from another planet. They are brothers and sisters on this earth and must be seen as immigrants, not aliens. But they are in this country illegally, and they are immigrants.)

Should they be able to get a license to drive? On the one hand, it would provide a handle on their presence and could be used to enforce some minimal standards of driving ability. On the other, it seems to legitimatize their illegal behavior in crossing the border illegally.

Deny it if we like, but illegal immigrants do take jobs that citizens would have. Yes, they are onerous jobs, stoop labor in the fields, house cleaning, grunt work in construction and similar work. But citizens would take those jobs if they were adequately paid for it and provided the benefits appropriately. It undermines the power of the labor force to press for fair compensation when illegal immigrants take these jobs for less.

Illegal immigration does put strains on our social services. Generally, the undocumented immigrants do pay some taxes, but figures don't add up. On the other hand, I certainly do not want to deny medical care to children. Even for purely selfish reasons, I certainly don't want people walking around with infectious diseases and no treatment. But more than that, I cannot, morally, allow our nation to deny health care. Immigrant children, again for moral reasons as well as practical ones, have to be educated and provided other social services. The alternate is to build more prisons, and we are already overbuilding.

Then there's the other side--well a couple other sides--well several other sides. That's why this is such a hard problem. Illegal immigrants only take jobs if employers are willing to hire them. Unfortunately many are. They are the real criminals. The poor worker is just trying to survive and maybe send a little back to help his family. The corporation that fails to check the documentation of those whom they hire is guilty of violating the law at least as much as the person who crosses the border illegally. And has less excuse for doing so.

A legitimate question needs asking. Why does Mexican poverty continued to be so great that people will make the perilous trek to the border and the even more dangerous crossing, to live a precarious shadow existence in the U.S.? I was told that NAFTA would improve the lot of both American and Mexican workers. (Of course, I realize that Mexicans are also "Americans" but we call ourselves Americans and Mexicans call themselves Mexicans, not Americans. So let's leave the linguistics for another day.)

Of course there are many reasons. Mexico has long been ruled by a single party, the PRI, which was corrupt and ruled by buying support. In order to avoid real reform, the PAN party, a pseudo-reformist party was created by some of the PRI members. The "mordida" (bribe) became a way of life. It would be incorrect to place the entire blame elsewhere, but the U.S. government had a continued presence of support for the ruling PRI and now the PAN and the wealthy elite of Mexico. This isn't any different from our national activity in regard to other Latin American nations. But Mexico's proximity has led to a more intense version. The US has invaded Mexico both in 1846-48 and again in 1917.

In recent years, manipulation of the Mexican economy has assumed even more gigantic dimensions. NAFTA has only been the latest problem for Mexico. While NAFTA has made possible the macquiladora factories which employ many along the border. It has also meant that heavily subsidized US corn can undersell Mexican home-grown corn, thus putting Mexican farmers out of business. Even for those employed by the factories, many are poorly paid and treated, and many young children are exploited in this. These and other examples of US influence has driven down incomes in Mexico, especially in rural areas.

I do recognize the plight of Mexican and other Latin American impoverished peoples, I am also aware that the illegal immigrants create problems. Open borders, at this time, simply do not work. The truth is that both the illegal immigrants and the working people of the United States are victims of the financial and class elites. It is the large corporations who impede real immigration reform. The elite classes exploit both groups and strive to turn each against the other. It is similar to what has been done with poor whites and poor blacks.

Then there is my Christian faith. The Hebrew bible (Often called the Old Testament.)in many passages calls upon us to treat kindly, the foreigner who is within our gates, the orphans, the poor and the stranger with kindness and righteous compassion. In the Christian New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew (Matt 25), Jesus tells us that the sheep (the righteous) and the goats will be divided exactly by how they treat those in need.

So here I am. How do I resolve this dilemma about immigration reform? How can the immigrants be treated with justice and righteousness without damaging the working people of this country? How do we promote respect for law in the face of the illegal immigration--but also in the face of the illegality of the elites. (If you don't understand the latter, it will have to wait for a future post.)

Whatever the shape of change, it must not be punitive for those who cross the border in order to survive and help their families survive. It must account for the welfare of children and adults of the poor, the working class--and the middle class--among both immigrants and citizens of the US. But it must also address our economic relationship with Mexico and Central America.

The Bible

2007-10-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

I love the bible!

The bible contains so many wonderful spiritual insights. It begins with the idea that it is a holy task to bring order out of chaos; that somehow we humans have been invited to be collaborators with the Sacred in doing this. It ends with the demand that we be brothers and sisters with all other humans and treat all with justice and love.

Of course along the way, there is a lot of nonsense, legalism and even some--though not as much as the bible's detractors like to emphasize--horrible, cruel acts and commands attributed to God.

In light of the latter, how do I continue to revere this collection of documents called "Holy Scripture", the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament? Of course there are many conservatives who call themselves "Evangelical Christians" who have no trouble with this question. They claim that God, Himself (And God is always male) wrote all these words or at least dictated them to the authors. They believe that all these writings are absolutely with any error; they are literally true. They manage to argue around all the contradictions, then accept that, "God said it and therefore I believe it to be true." If God wanted to "smite" the children and animals in Jericho then so be it. There must have been a reason, but that is God's decision.

They have all kinds of excuses for the existence of two separate and contradictory stories of creation. They dismiss any claims of similarities with other middle eastern creation stories from the surrounding nations. Moving to the Christian Testament, they have no trouble with the irreconcilable contradictions in the stories of the birth of Jesus. They don't see the myriad of other internal evidence proving that much of the New Testament is mythological, that there is much in the stories that is not objectively factual.

But to answer the question as to why I love the bible: Read as historical metaphor, the bible points to a reality beyond reality. It is fashionable right now to attack all religion and with it to attack spirituality. Sam Harris is the most rational of the critics of religion. Beyond him there are several others--Fundamentalist Atheists. Yet most people discern something sacred in their world. Most of us experience the kindness of others, love and caring and intimations of justice as somehow divine, somehow beyond the rational.

I am not prepared to say that human ethics requires the existence of a deity out there beyond our world. In fact, I have no idea what "beyond our world" even means. But a large number of us feel that we have encountered something, either in ourselves or in the confluence of community, where our own selves and our world come together, something that deserves reverence and that pushes us to a spiritual reality. We don't all use the same language. We often have our perception of the Sacred embedded within our own unique cultural mapping. In fact even when we use the same language, our experiences are not the same, but individual. Yet it there is some common reality that we point to.

So the bible is a mostly metaphorical, somewhat historical, collection of stories in which the writers attempted to explain their personal numinous reality. In those stories, we can discover how others experienced the Sacred and use those discoveries to begin learning--discerning how that works in our own lives. The writers and story-tellers learned from each other. There is, in the bible, a progression from primitive magic to spirit, from archaic rule and law to the justice spoken of by Amos, Micah, Isaiah and the other prophets.

The creation story, of God bringing order out of chaos, lastly creating humankind and enlisting us in the continued work of creation helps me discern my "calling" to work to end war and poverty and injustice; to support those organizations and individuals who are active in this creation work. The story in Matthew 25 about who are the sheep and who are the goats helps me discern my calling to provide for those in need. (And to remember that from my limited perspective, I am not always fully able to discern the goats from the sheep.) The story of Elijah reminds me of the need to go aside from my busy daily life to hear the spirit stirring in a "still, small voice." But also to go back, after a time, to be with those who need what I can offer. The story of Jesus picking corn on the sabbath because people were hungry reminds me that human need supersedes all orthodoxy. Jesus' life explicates the meaning of "Love."

The bible is a wonderful book of wisdom, if it is read as a spiritual finger pointing to the moon of spiritual awareness, enlightenment, the Sacred. If we worship the finger, the bible, we will surely miss the Sacred. But if there is no finger, we can look in all the wrong directions and not see the moon. The conservative Christians worship the finger, the militant atheists dismiss the finger and not seeing the moon, they can't believe that it even exists. Of course the bible is not the only finger pointing to the moon.

(Finger and moon from traditional Zen analogy.)