So Who's Really In Control?

Listen, I know your family is well above average, just like everyone at Lake Wobegon.

But in case your statistics class does not cause you to question that, consider instead these insights from an unlikely source ... Dr. Greger talking about marketing and its role in the obesity epidemic:

So please watch this short (< 6 min) video.  Not only to understand how the state of your mind, and your mindfulness (or lack thereof), can leave your unconscious mind open to manipulation by marketing, and hence, over-eating unhealthy food.

But more critically, to make you aware of the science behind your unconscious reactivity to habits, cues, and triggers.  Surely we can relate to the examples in the video, even if we are positive that each of us is well-above average 😬

As I listened to this video, I was amazed at the connections between these marketing efforts, and what insights were needed to counter them.  It is directly related to the Vipassana Meditation techniques and objectives as taught by S.N. Goenka during my recent 10-day meditation retreat.

Really fascinating when you realize this is a 2500-year old technique, discovered by the Buddha through direct observation of his own mind and body.

To become truly free ... in this case from outside manipulation ...  

But more broadly from being controlled by our craving and aversion ...  

We must dig deeply into our so-called unconscious mind-body ...  

And through awareness, wisdom, and equanimity ...

Break the bondage of our habitual, compulsive reactivity.

So many connections ... all pointing in the same direction ... I love it!

In The Beginning ...

The internet served up something juicy today.

A scandal?  Injustice? Another presidential gaffe?

Well yes, of course, but that's not what I'm referring to right now.

How about something as simple as the Singularity!  Do you know what that is?  Does anyone really know?

So how enjoyable then, to skip the science, and go straight into poetry.  In three formats:

The first is the author Marie Howe, reading her poem Singularity, at the 2018 Universe in Verse gathering, overlaid upon an animation with background music:

Followed by the text of her poem (slightly edited since that inaugural reading):

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

        (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were? 

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money — 

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone 

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept. 

For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you.   Remember?
Belongs to you.   Remember? 

There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests 

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if 

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; 

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that 

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not 

at all — nothing 

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness. 

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened? 

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with 

is is is is is 

All   everything   home

And finally, since I really needed to hear it one more time, Marie Howe just reading the initial version (with a little more background introduction) at the 2018 Universe in Verse:

The Universe in Verse: Marie Howe reads "Singularity" (after Stephen Hawking) from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

Enjoy!  Who knew we could learn so much from poets ;-)

We Are All Prisoners

I just came upon this documentary about the teaching of Vipassana inside a New Delhi prison.  It's an excellent movie, and I strongly recommend you find 53 minutes to watch it.  It might just change your life.

Interestingly, as I was watching this, I was wondering how this might relate to a recent meditation retreat I had participated in.  Both of them teach Vipassana.  Well imagine my surprise when I found out they were not related at all ... instead, the were exactly the same course!

So I guess that's what you get when a course is given for free, eh?  Just the same stuff used to try and reform hardened criminals 😳  In retrospect, I am not a bit surprised.

I choose not to talk about the specifics of my experience in the retreat -- in case others find an opportunity to take the same course, I'd rather let them experience it as I did, without any expectations or presumptions about what will occur.  This movie gives you a little taste of what it will be like, and that's just enough.

I will say I found the course had a profound impact on me, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have taken it.  (BTW, my course began on 5 March 2020, just as we were learning about COVID-19; it ended one day early, because of plans to close national borders. The class scheduled for a week later was canceled entirely.  I consider myself very lucky to have had this experience).

I'll write more about some of my retreat experiences in the future, on this or another one of my blogs.  Until then, just consider that we are all prisoners, but only some of us are "doing time" 😬

What do I mean?  Mainly, that we don't see reality as it truly is.  Some examples:

We have a comparative mind, that sees things as good and bad, right or wrong, easy or difficult, beautiful or ugly, or gradations in-between.  That comparative mind is part of what keeps us behind bars.  In reality, things are simply as they are, without any judgments applied to them.  That's just Life!  It is we that apply the labels, perform discrimination, and jump to conclusions.

We also -- by our nature, and as part of society's conditioning -- create a "self" (including the ego) to navigate in our world.  By trick of nature, we think this self is constant and enduring, even though we can see frequent dramatic changes in ourselves as we navigate through life.  There is no permanent, unchanging self.

Finally, we inherent and are conditioned over time with traits and habits that become seemingly "hard-wired" into our being.  These habits can govern our responses to situations, even without any mediation by our rational mind.  These "reactions" are there for evolutionary reasons, but when they are not saving our life to pass along our genes, they can bring us suffering and misery.  Because we think and say and do things in the heat of the moment that we wish we hadn't, and bring harm to others and/or to ourselves.

That's how some of the prisoners in the movie came to be behind bars, and luckily, we have avoided that fate.  But the important point is that these "reactions" can be lessened or eliminated over time, or as Victor Frankl wrote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. 
In that space is our power to choose our response. 
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz Survivor 

And all of that can help us to become equanimous to all that Life brings to us, moment by moment.  This equanimity gives us the opportunity to apply wisdom and discernment when making decisions, setting intentions, or dealing with challenging situations.  And with that insight, we can liberate ourselves.

Did you know you were subsidizing that?

Well this was an eye opener.  Please watch this 5 minute video above.

And this is much more than just an explanation of Government largess and its role in obesity.   It illustrates, to me, a fundamental flaw in this country's perverse economic incentives and anything-BUT-free-market capitalism.

Just imagine if instead of corporate lobbying and corporate profits as the levers of Government, we included things such overall health (not health system profits) of our population.  That would put primacy on the food that we were subsidizing to be health-promoting, which would mean a whole-food, plant-based diet.

Traditionally, this food is among the cheapest ... that's why it's often called peasant food.  Yet now we have tax payer subsidies -- your money -- going to pay for food that is actually causing the majority of our major causes of death!  Which of course, in a perverse way, is also a subsidy to our broken health care system.

This seems relatively straightforward to fix; we have precedences.  We basically need to flip the current model on its head.  We need to DIS-incentivise unhealthy eating (and therefore unhealthy food production).  We can do that the same way this country successfully took on the tobacco industry and the alcohol industry -- through increased taxes, not subsidies, through controls on advertising, and ultimately through health insurance pricing that recognizes diet as an explicit risk factor.

But there is even a larger framework here.  Our system, as it stands, values GDP and corporate profit over everything else.  What about flipping that model on its head as well.  Why not look for the levers that would instead promote citizen health, happiness, education, reduced income inequality, safety, diversity, civility, and equal justice.

Again, we know this can be done; there are many models in the industrialized world that promote most of these objectives.  This just requires Americans to wake up to what is really going on in our country.  And, for me, this video was a surprising wake-up call.

Here's to us making changes that help the current generation, and even more importantly, future generations of our citizens to prosper, in health, in happiness, and financial security.