Grasping at straws

In the last post I showed how too many choices can cause misery. But suppose, you ask, that I made a great choice. Suppose I know for sure that there is, never was, and never could be any better choice. I’m certain I have what I want and need. Shouldn’t everything be hunky-dory now? In a word, no.

Buddhism teaches that life can be really difficult at times and that the root cause of this difficulty is attachment. Attachment is the reason your perfect choice can still cause suffering. This doesn’t mean you should avoid all emails with the little paper clip icon. We’re talking about a different type of attachment.

To find out what I mean by attachment we’ll consult my favorite spiritual authority, Webster. Webster defines attachment as the state of being personally attached, and attached as permanently fixed. So an attachment is something to which we are personally and permanently fixed.

It’s the “permanently” part that causes all the trouble, because nothing is permanent. Change is the only thing you can count on. You perfect car eventually ends up in the junk yard, or gets resurrected as chicken coop if you live in Kentucky. That perfect diamond stylus for your perfect turntable becomes pointless. Your perfect fitness club body ages and sags. Your friends move away. Your family joins the Jim Jones Flavor Aid club. And then to top it all off, no matter what you do, you die. Oops!

The point is that you will eventually lose everything you hold dear. If you pin your happiness and peace of mind to anyone or anything , you will end up miserable. Happiness must come from inside you. It cannot come from any external influence, but from a simple decision you make to live that way. As Abraham Lincoln said, "People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

It’s even worse is when you become attached to your thoughts, values, and beliefs, because you are what you think. You create your world with your thoughts, and even they tend to get demolished by time and changing circumstances. You can replace your car, audio system, friends, and to some extent your family; but what do you do when your core beliefs and values no longer exist? What is left when the thoughts you are attached to are destroyed? Suffering.

I speak with some authority on this subject because I have personal experience with it. One fine evening in 1969 I was told that unless I had surgery I would only live 6 months to 2 years, most of that time in a hospital on life support. With the surgery I might live 5 to 10 years until creeping respiratory paralysis finally caused the pneumonia that would end my life. I had a 10% chance of dying during the surgery and a 50% chance I'd come out of it totally paralyzed. I had 15 minutes to make a decision. Great choices. What were the lyrics to that Rolling Stones song?

Whatever world I knew or dreamed of was destroyed. Nothing was familiar. I didn't even know how to think about the world. All the things that had been important to me stop mattering. I quickly realized that material possessions, degrees, careers, awards, accomplishments, adoration, or recognition could not help me. They were no longer relevant. To paraphrase Paul Simon, I stood alone without beliefs.

Just like everyone else in that type of situation I suffered for quite a while. I was really good at it. Then I learned to move beyond those two manifestations of attachment, hope and fear. I gave up any hope that I would get my former life and beliefs back, hope that I could control what would happen to me, hope that I could ever get out of this world alive. I gave up the fear of losing my dreams, fear of losing control, fear of losing my life.

I didn’t exactly like the idea, but once I considered myself already dead life got much easier. I was able to build a brave new world free of the attachments that had held me captive and kept me unhappy even before I received my death sentence. As a result I have enjoyed every minute of my life, even the bad ones. Janis Joplin was right, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Once you begin to get free of attachments you realize you can remain permanently fixed to absolutely nothing. If you have nothing, then you have nothing to lose. Freedom.

You can become free too. Quite often it takes some kind of terrible trauma to shock a person into really looking at the nature of his life and attachments. But I don’t believe you have to wait for your life to be destroyed to start building a better one for yourself, and wouldn’t recommend it. There is no reason you cannot begin today to develop the kind of inner peace it takes to honestly face your attachments and begin to loosen their grip over you. There are many techniques for doing so.

In my next post I’ll describe a simple Ch'i Kung method you can use to calm your mind, heal your body, and let your attachments begin slip slidin’ away. In the meantime I’d suggest you learn a bit more about attachment from a more authoritative source than I by going here. And every time you find yourself using a long held belief to keep yourself imprisoned in old, bad habits ask yourself this question:

Are you sure?

If you're sure, then you're attached. If you're attached, you're looking for trouble. Maybe you need to permanently fix your attitude.

"Grasping at things can only yield one of two results:
Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear.
It is only a matter of which occurs first."
Goenka

Recommended reading:
The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron
An Open Heart, The Dalai Lama

The choice is yours

Last week I sent out a link to an editorial by James Kunstler about the peak oil situation. One respondent, while discussing various lifestyle options said, "...most Americans don't want to live that way." Therein lies the rub. As The Rolling Stones so aptly put it, "You can't always get what you want." This is true whether the peak oil pundits are right, wrong, or in between; which brings up an important question. Is that always so bad?

As illogical as it seems at first, the answer is "No". I have two reasons for taking that position, one from current psychology and the other from Buddhism. They go by the terms "the paradox of choice" and "attachment". Let me start with the paradox of choice.

I have long believed that the reason so many of my generation were, and are, seriously screwed up is because we had too many choices. In fact, we were the first generation to have had very many choices at all. Before the baby boomers, most people just had to do whatever they could to get by. There were few options. A lucky few in the upper middle class might be able to attend college, but few choices existed even there. They, and even wealthier people, usually worked in the family business or in the business of a family friend.

But boomers grew up in a time of unprecedented prosperity and mobility. It seemed like we'd be able to live anywhere, study anything, take our pick of jobs, and buy any of the hundreds of new products that were being invented. Having so many choices drove us crazy, or so I believed. Recent research in psychology indicates I was correct.

The March 4, 2004 issue of Scientific American included an article by Barry Schwartz called "The Tyranny of Choice"*. It discussed research that indicated that too many choices could cause suffering, especially among people he called Maximizers. Maximizers are people who absolutely must make the best decision possible. Even simple decisions can require hours and hours of searching and many sleepless nights.

A maximizer's suffering continues even after a choice is made. Sometimes it gets worse after a decision is made because he constantly second-guesses himself. Maximizers need to be sure that every choice they ever made really was the best possible choice. God forbid the maximizer finds evidence that a better decision could have been made, because then the real torment and self-abuse begins. Maximizers are merciless and punish themselves relentlessly for mistakes.

Satificers, Schwartz's other category of decision-makers, fare better because they are content with "good enough". But even extremely low maintenance satisficers must spend too much time and energy when faced with a multitude choices. At the very least we must separate the absolutely inferior and absolutely too expensive (or difficult) choices so we can pick something in the middle. Even when there are no clear winners and losers, we often feel the need to do more than just close our eyes and point.

Take coffee for example. I'm not too fussy about coffee, but I at least think about whether I want organic, fair trade, or plain old pesticide-saturated-ruthless-capitalism coffee. If I decide I want organic coffee I end up in Whole Food looking at 37 bags of different coffees from all over the world. I seem to recall a time in the not too distant past when coffee choices were pretty much limited to two options, Folgers or Maxwell House. And if I wanted decaf I could choose between Sanka and Sanka. I didn't need to ask whether it was decaffeinated with solvents like ethyl acetate or by the natural Swiss water process.

Sometimes no choices make life easier still if. I remember a time in my late 30s when I was still living slightly below the poverty line. I was watching a commercial for new cars at 0% interest. I remember thinking that one nice thing about being so poor was that I didn't even need to think about whether I should take advantage of this great deal and replace my aging Pinto. It was one less thing to worry over.

I've found I'm not alone in this. I know several people who lived ten or more years in poverty before moving up to the middle or upper middle class. While we all agree we'd prefer not to be poor again, we all sometimes miss the simplicity of that lifestyle. We spent much less time and energy making decisions because our options were so severely limited.

The Voluntary Simplicity movement notwithstanding we humans, and Americans in particular, are not good at limiting our own options. Whether we're maximizers or satisficers we feel obligated to make everything bigger and better. That includes the number of options we have even when more is really less. It's much easier for us if external forces limit our options. At the very least it gives us someone else to blame for our perceived unhappiness caused by lack of control.

So if peak oil, deranged politicians, global warming, The Home Shopping Network, or your own bad habits put you in a situation where "you can't always get what you want", relax. Like The Rolling Stones "...you might just find, you get what you need." That being more time to enjoy your life and less fretting over decisions that are essentially meaningless.

Next time, when I discuss "attachment", I’ll explain how even getting what you want can make you miserable. In the meantime contemplate that old Buddhist koan, "What is the sound of too many options falling by the wayside?"


*Barry Schwartz has since published a book on the subject called The Paradox of Choice

Ch'i, Higgs bosons, and Kierkegaard.

So what is this Ch'i stuff anyway? If you saw The Empire Strikes Back you already know. Yoda explained it quite well, except he called it The Force. The Chinese pictogram for Ch'i is often translated into English as breath, energy, or life force, but it's more than that. In Eastern philosophy everything in the universe is made up of a single, elemental force. It is both matter because it makes up everything and energy because it flows through and around everything, binding everything together into a unified whole. That's the essence of Ch’i.

In some respects there are similarities between this belief and concepts from physics related to the Unified Field Theory. Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hope to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the God particle), a fundamental field that pervades all space and interacts with other particles. Sound familiar?

Because of the similarities between Eastern thought and physics, it would be fairly simple for me to come up with some plausible sounding but bogus justification for the existence if Ch'i based on Western science, but I won't. I agree with Kierkegaard that science and faith are two different and incomparable things. One should not use one to prove or disprove the other. I include in faith any belief or concept that is based purely on empirical evidence, which includes Ch'i. More on that later.

Science is the practice of establishing measurable and verifiable cause and effect relationships using mathematics and experimentation. Faith attempts to describe conceptually things that cannot be measured or experimented upon. These are totally unrelated activities. That is why I'm as unimpressed by attempts to use fMRIs to prove Ch'i as I am by attempts to date the age of the earth by using the time lines in the Bible. Both use irrational assumptions that try to link science and faith.

[Note: If the idea of comparing Eastern philosophy and modern physics interests you I recommend a book from the 1970s called The Tao of Physics. It’s a fun read even if the physics is a bit dated. ]

So what is Ch'i and does it really exist? It doesn't matter. The word and concept of Ch'i simply make it easier to discuss and teach the different modalities of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Since TCM began about 5000 or 6000 years ago, they did not have the benefit of MRIs, CT scans, Xrays, or microscopes. The Chinese experimented on themselves (or each other most likely) and began keeping records on what happened to a certain ailment when they tried treatment A,B,C, or D. That is the process that lead to therapies like acupuncture and Ch'i Kung.

Unlike Western medicine, they never tried to figure out logically why action B helped condition Y. They simply checked thousands and thousands of records and determined that if you defecate near your source of drinking water you are likely to get sick and die. Even though they knew nothing about bacteria, they figured out you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom and before eating. This was at a time when primitive Europeans were living in their own filth and blaming diseases on evil spirits and witches.

The concepts of Ch'i and meridians are just conceptual frameworks, not necessarily reality. So when I say Ch'i can get stuck in your joints I do not mean that billions and billions of Higgs bosons are trapped under your patellae. I'm simply saying your Ch'i Kung session is likely to work better if you massage your joints after you do it.

Before you discount any medical therapy based purely on empirical evidence, I’d like to point out that Western medicine does it too. No one has ever proven scientifically that high cholesterol levels cause heart disease. But years of records indicate that people who have high cholesterol have more heart disease. No one knows why, yet millions of dollars are spent each year on statin drugs to reduce cholesterol. It's all based on nothing but empirical evidence gleaned from medical records.

So lets see, modern Western medicine has a couple of hundred years of records at best. Traditional Chinese Medicine has thousands. Keep that in mind if you decide to try Ch'i Kung or any other form of TCM. Try to keep an open mind and see for yourself what, if anything, happens.

Kitchen Ch'i

The last time I promised to tell you about a stress reduction technique that everyone has time to do. And I shall; but first I'd like to give you two examples of why stress reduction is important. These both come from new research that has been published in the past eight years. The first is that people who are frequently angry and upset have significantly higher rates of cancer than folks who are pretty much calm and relaxed.

Would you care to put some numbers with that to see just how much it can help to be happy? That comes from bit of research published in 2000. (http://longevity.about.com/od/mentalfitness/p/positive_aging.htm). People who have positive attitudes about aging live 7-1/2 years longer than people who are negative, all other health factors being similar. Seven and one half years! Compare that with studies comparing purely physical factors. A person who has great genetics, normal weight, perfect blood pressure, normal cholesterol, who exercises regularly and eats right can expect to live 3-1/2 years longer than an overweight person who has lousy genetics, hypertension, high cholesterol, and bad habits. That's right, maintaining a positive attitude will increase your life span more than twice as much as being in perfect health.

I believe that combining a positive attitude with good health and good habits has a synergistic effect that will extend a person's lifespan by 15 – 20 years. That's why I expect to still be enjoying myself well into my 90s. No research has confirmed that, but how often have you known me to be wrong? When I started aerobics training in 1969 everyone thought it was part of some suicide pact. When I became a vegetarian in 1972 most people thought I'd die of malnutrition within a few years. When I switched to health foods and whole grains a couple years later many of my friends and relatives gave up on me completely. Now these are all considered essential components of a healthy lifestyle. I wasn't wrong then and I'm not wrong now. Be happy, be healthy. It's that simple.

So what is this magic technique I'm going to teach you so you can reduce stress and stay positive? Meditation. Before you start whining about not having time or whatever excuse du jour you care to use, I'd like to point out that I taught this technique to a single mother who had four small children and a stressful, full time job. She was able to fit it into her schedule and benefit from it, so get off your pity pot and pay attention.

Most people think they don't have time to meditate because they don't understand what it is. They picture ascetic Zen monks sitting cross legged for hours and hours under a bodhi tree hoping for some mystical out-of-body experience that will lead them to enlightenment, or at least the nearest Taco Bell®. While that is one form of meditation, it's not the only kind. There is walking meditation, talking meditation, martial arts meditation, Ch'i Kung meditation, going to the bathroom meditation, and many, many other forms.

If you ask a Buddhist teacher how to meditate, the answer will often be, "When you eat, eat. When you sleep, sleep." That's it. Meditation is nothing more than keeping your mind totally focused on one thing: your breathing, the massage you're getting, the steps you're taking when walking, or for today's lesson the process of unloading the dishwasher.

Unloading the dishwasher is normally considered just one more inconvenient task of daily life. But with a slight change in attitude you can transform it into a relaxing activity that will calm your mind and improve your health. The trick is to stop looking at it as a job to be rushed through and totally immerse yourself in the movements, sounds, smells, and textures involved in the process. Throw in some slow, purposeful abdominal breathing and voila, Hotpoint® nirvana.

Stand with your feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart, back straight, knees slightly bent. Clear your mind for a moment as you smell the refreshing scent of the clean dishes. Breathe in as you slowly bend and reach to grab the first plate. Feel your weight shifting to foot nearest the dishwasher. Feel the slight, relaxing stretch as you reach for the first item. Really feel the sensation as your skin first touches the plate: its smoothness, its coolness, it's crusted piece of stuck on dinaguan (http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ci_9107463) that refused to budge even on pot scrubber mode. Slowly stand up and feel your weight shift and your body stretch to put the plate on the counter. Listen intently to the musical sounds of the flatware as they're put in their drawer.

Continue your purposeful movements and focused abdominal breathing. Immerse yourself entirely in this moment. Your mind will calm, your blood pressure will drop, your immune system will improve, your body will begin to heal itself. What was once an irritating chore has now become a path to a more positive, pleasant life that will help you stick around long enough to attend my 90th birthday party.

Apply this technique to all of your daily activities and see if you don’t detect a change in your outlook on life. It’s simple. When you eat, eat. When you sleep, sleep. When you go to the bathroom…well, you’re on your own there.

Kudus to you

The question came up today, "So what are we going to do to get well?" This was from another semi old fart who has medical issues similar to my own. The answer: live and eat like a hunter-gatherer. As my sage counterpart so keenly observed, that does not mean hunting down the closest Twinkie® factory and gathering up all the sale items in their "day old" bakery.

Human physiology evolved over three or four million years into people known as hunter-gatherers. A contemporary example of a hunter-gather society is the Bushmen of Namibia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmen). Hunter-gatherers are so named because they make their living by, well, hunting and gathering.

The women and children in these small nomadic groups typically go out every day and wander around for several hours digging up tubers, picking fruits, nuts, legumes, and harvesting any wild grain they can find. Then they go back to camp and cook a meal for their group. Men will get together in small hunting parties every few days and go out hunting for whatever meat they can find.

Not having access to a Mossberg Ulti-Mag® pump action 12 gauge shotgun, this activity involves a lots of walking and stalking, followed by a short, intense burst of energy, and then a prolonged jog while slowly running down some dying animal such as a lesser kudu. The group cuts up the meat, drags it back to camp, and gives it to the women to sauté along with whatever tubers and nuts they had gathered.

Men being men, whether hunter-gatherers or not, the males will expend no more energy until the last of the kudu been consumed or is to gamy for even a guy to eat. Until then the men lie around, play with the little kids, channel surf, and ogle the women when they start out on their daily gathering rounds. Sound familiar, ladies?

The diet of this type of society is rich in complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetable, and legumes with small amounts of protein at irregular intervals. It also involves a bit of fasting from time to time. Believe it nor not, the human stomach was not intented to be constantly topped off like the oil in a leaking Camaro. The hunter-gatherer also lifestyle involves regular, moderate exercise that is sustained for several hours, then followed by lots of rest (at least for us guys.)

As I said, the human body evolved over millions of years to accommodate this way of life. By contrast, our culture has evolved in just 10,000 years. That’s when people invented agriculture which resulted in major changes to both diet and lifestyle. The industrial age of the past few hundred years hasn't helped any.

Biological evolution works much more slowly than cultural evolution, so there is no way our bodies could have adapted enough to accommodate the way we modern folk eat. We simply were not designed to consume white bread, fast foods, pounds of abnormally fatty meat, genetically modified sugar cookies, and chemicals that would probably be better used for dipping radiators or dissolving unwanted steel.

So, once again, how do we get healthy? Eat lots of fruits, vegetables, beans, complex carbohydrates, and a little bit of meat every few days. Give your digestive system a rest from time to time by doing a partial fast for all or part of a day. And be sure to get lots of regular, moderate exercise. [Note to my accountability partners: Yes, I know; and I am trying to listen to my own advice.]

One other thing we need to do is to learn a stress reduction technique. Hunter-gatherers were sometimes exposed to very stressful situations such as being attacked by a vicious springbok. The bodies of early humans learned to produce large amounts of cortisol and adrenaline to facilitate the fight or flight syndrome when confronted by one of these beasts.

Once again our culture has evolved much faster than our bodies. Few of us ever have to face down a springbok, but thanks to 60-hour workweeks, superhighways, and nightly super delegate counts we are constantly exposed to stress. The cortisol and adrenaline that helps for brief periods of stress will kill you when secreted too often and for too long. Next time I’ll describe a stress reduction technique that can add years to you life and life to your years. It’s something even you will have time to do.

Make up your own rules

On May 16, 1965 Anthony Newley opened The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd on Broadway. Although it is described as a musical comedy it was, in fact, about a very serious subject. The play is about two men who are playing a game. The game is called Life. One of the men always wins the game, so the other always loses. At one point the dweeb looser asks why the other guy always wins. The Winner replies that when playing the game of life, "The secret that few people know is to make up the rules as you go."

That is one of the most profound statements you will ever hear, and it is one of the main secrets to my success.

From the time we are little kids until they put us in a box we are bombarded with rules. They come from our churches, our families, our governments, our cultures, and worst of all from ourselves. Humans have an amazing ability to take something they hear and twist it into the most perverse, self-imposed rule imaginable. I know, because I’ve done it numerous times and paid dearly each time.

I’m here to tell you those rules are all bull. The only rules that really matter are the ones that tell us we should be decent people and not intentionally hurt anyone. All others were created by someone who wants control over your very life: someone who wants to make you lose at the game of life so they can win. "You should do this, you should do that" soon becomes "I should do this, I should not do that, I should, I should, I should…." ad infinitum, ad nauseam until you are a very unhappy, unhealthy person.

Well guys, it’s time to stop shoulding on yourselves. Emerson said, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Don’t let other people define integrity for you. Take the time and effort to figure out what that means for you, for your life, for this point in history. Then make up your own rules that reflect your definition of integrity and live by them. Because life constantly changes you need to constantly re-evaluate and change your standards of integrity and rules accordingly. Do that and you too can be a winner at the game of Life.

It's quick and easy

Relax, bend, and breath. It's that simple to begin improving your health. Even 10 minutes a day can help. But many Americans aren't willing to spend even a few minutes of minimal effort improving their own health? Is it cynicism, laziness, or metafizzle? Lots of noise and movement with no direction is not the road to peace of mind and good health.

Perhaps it's a misconception that one must practice for hours to do any good. Thats a good excuse for wallowing in misery, but it's wrong. One Ch'i Kung practice I teach takes only six minutes a day. It's such a short, simple system that even adults with severe ADD can stick with it and benefit.

So here is your tip for the day. The next time you brush your teeth spend an extra 30 seconds to help the rest of your body. Before you grab that toothbush stand with you knees very slight bent and your ams loose at you side. Relax your eyes so they are open but not really looking at anything. Breath gently from you abdomen. Don't take big deep breaths; just slow, steady, moderate ones. Take 7 - 10 of these breaths, then brush you teeth.

Think you can manage that? If not, I'd love to hear your excuses. I love excuses even though I rarely believe them, even when I tell the to myself.