I was just listening to part of the Power of Now audiobook, and there was a Q&A that I found very profound. Essentially the questioner was contrasting Tolle's judgement of certain emotions as bad or negative with the idea of accepting your emotions, giving yourself permission to feel whatever you feel, not repressing or blaming yourself for them. I have heard the latter idea a lot from Buddhism, and have some sympathy for it, yet I am certainly not willing to withhold judgement about what emotions I want to feel and encounter in others.

I think that the answer embodied in Tolle's philosophy, and partly given in the segment, is simple, true and profound, so I'd like to describe it. The answer can mostly be derived from the simple truth that the past is immutable and we can only act in the present. (By past here, I'm including anything I just noticed about myself - so we can imagine a world consisting of alternating inputs and actions, and the input I just saw is considered the past, even though I've just noticed it.) The answer is to combine complete acceptance of the past and current state of the world with incredible empowerment to affect the future state of the world through present action.

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Patri's Second Motto: Give up all hope for a better yesterday, so that you can act more effectively for a better tomorrow.
[1] This does depend on empirical attributes of the human mind. If we were true behavior machines that learned solely based on the feedback of positive and negative emotions, then guilt and blame might be necessary for learning. Fortunately this turns out not to be the case. Negative emotions are not clear motivators - they can demotivate. They are not the only motivators - I may not have felt guilty for being an hour late to Day 2 of the $2500 NL at the WSOP, but I damn well want to try hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. And even when they motivate, the spillover effects of unhappiness and past-focus from self-blame tend to be larger than the gain from motivation.

[2] I use the Acceptance/Action dichotomy in this post because I'm exploring the distinction between those two, but Observation is critical enough that one might characterize the whole thing as a 3-step process: Observe, Accept, Act. In fact, with practice, Acceptance merges into Observation so that it becomes Observe -> Act, so Observation is actually more fundamental.

I noticed a link between GTD's "Next Action" and "Outcomes" and NVC's "Concrete Requests / Observations". In both cases, our brain's ability to work with concepts / abstractions / generalizations gets in our way, and the solution is to be more concrete.

For those who aren't familiar, one of the tenets of GTD is to specify outcomes rather than goals. That is "If I accomplished this goal, what would it look like?". The example in the book was "Become a better chef" vs. "Cook a 5-course Christmas dinner by myself." You can see in that example how murky and undefined the former is, how unclear it is how to proceed or when you are finished, whereas the latter is much more specific and actionable.

Similarly, while you can have lots of desired outcomes or project reminders, some of which may be somewhat murky, in GTD you are always supposed to have a small, specific next action associated with each. This means that you always have a clear step to take. And often the process of thinking of an action will clarify the goal.

The NVC equivalent is that right speech is not to say "You are a slob", but "It makes me sad to see your clothes strewn about the living room, as they were when I got home today." And to say "I would like you not to leave your things lying around in the common areas of the house", rather than "I'd like you to be neater".

While there is more here going on than just concretization, the concrete observations and requests are very important in keeping the conversation focused, specific, and not about attacking or judgment.

So, when in doubt, be more concrete!

Jarvis was sitting in his cell at San Quentin, with the TV on to give him light to read, and the sound turned off. Every now and then he'd see something interesting on the screen, and yell out to the next cell "Hey, what's happening?".

The first time, the response was "That's the KKK. They're blaming all the problems of the world on blacks and Jews".

Half an hour later, he called out again "Hey, what's happening now?"

His blockmates responded "It's Greenpeace. They're angry about all the pollution being dumped into the air and rivers, and the destruction done to the Earth."

Jarvis went back to his reading. After awhile, he saw something else on the screen, and called out "What's going on this time?"

"It's the Senate. The guy up at the podium is mad at the other party, he's blaming them for all the economic problems in this country."

"Huh", replied Jarvis. "Well, some of 'em are wearing sheets, some are wearing Greenpeace gear, and some are wearing suits and ties, but it looks to me like they all have the same angry faces."

(As told by Pema Chodron, who goes on to talk about the problem of self-righteousness, hardening your heart into a belief and refusing to see any other points of view).

I think this illustrates the way in which Buddhism cuts across political boundaries (like my dad's definition of a good scientific theory). Being in California, I [1] tend to associate Buddhism with the whole California tree-hugging, earth-loving, crystal-gazing, vegetarian organic-food eating gestalt. But that's just wrong. Buddhism is about (among other things) compassion and love and peace, and against hatred and close-mindedness. Since hatred and close-mindedness can be found in any movement, Buddhism is against at least part of every movement.

BTW, the story of Jarvis is pretty interesting - he went to prison at 19 for armed robbery, was falsely accused of helping kill a guard a few years later, and has been on death row for 22 years. During that period, he became a Buddhist, and has written books like Finding Freedom about his experiences. As of this year, it looks like the courts have ruled that he's innocent, and he will be released soon.

[1] One of the things I'm learning from NVC is to say "I" instead of "We" or "You" - to own my own observations. Although I think they go too far in wanting it all the time - there are times when I'm making statements about my model of how other people work where it seems appropriate to say "Most people think..."

working is just like meditation. Catch your mind wandering, bring it back. It wanders again, bring it back.

Oops, I'm wandering.

Pema talks about how we use things to distract ourselves from negative emotions, to avoid feeling the pain. Food, drink, drugs, spending, etc. I have mixed feelings about it, because I am a hedonist - I think pleasure is great, and I like it when people enjoy food, drink, drugs, and spending.

But the reasons we do things and the frame of mind we go in with can really affect our pleasure. Food eaten guilty and food eaten guiltlessly have the same number of calories - but provide different amounts of pleasure. So the fact that we are doing something for avoidance eats into our enjoyment.

Which is not to say that it can't sometimes still be worth it. But I think there is a big difference between consciously saying "Hey, this distraction is the best way for me to cope right now with this pain that I understand and have long-term ways of dealing with", and with what we often do, which is to blindly, instinctually turn towards pleasures to distract us from having to feel the pain at all.

I see a small parallel between the Buddhist idea of stepping into your pain instead of shutting down and with the Schumpeterian destruction of modern capitalism. In both cases it is tempting to avoid the pain (or the closing of a business), but doing so just leads to more pain in the end. Failing businesses should sometimes be propped up, say if their problems are temporary, but it must be done for very situation-specific reasons and not just a general distate for bankruptcy.

I don't know whether this parallel is shallow (it is only a superficial similarity), or deep (both are rooted in the same human instinct - avoiding short-term pain even if it causes more pain in the long-term). What do you think?

I don't remember if I've ranted yet about the awesomeness of the book Improv Wisdom, which is purportedly about how improv comedy can teach us life lessons, but is actually about how Buddhism can teach us life lessons. It's really dense, and full of exercises, which is awesome because this stuff requires practice. I love it.

Anyway, I've noticed a new habit of mine: every now and then a buzzer goes off in my head and says "Hey, are you doing what you should/want to be doing?". It's very useful! There are arbitrarily many things to do, and it's easy for me to get distracted, so thinking that every now and then really helps me do things that move me towards my goals rather than whatever is shiny.

Err, like blogging...back to work!

I never thought I'd happily listen to religious lectures, but this Buddhism thing as taught by Pema Chodron is pretty cool.

choiceful & I have a new obsession, courtesy of Mr. Knizia: Lost Cities. So fun! Enough luck to keep things exciting, but still plenty of skill. Are there any other 2 player games that are this good? Our previous mainstay was NetRunner.

I have some Betel Nut, anyone have practical experience on how to use it? Apparently you need lime (CaO) in order to activate it, is there any ordinary household food I can use instead?

We're thinking about maybe heading east for the holidays and catching New Years at the Buttery, although it's not yet certain. I'm sort of jonesing for another LA trip, after the last one Shannon started taking a Saturday morning meditation class and I've been stuck home, but I think it's ending soon.