Learning How to Face Right Now: The Deceptions We Inflict on Ourselves and the Possible Liberation

It can seem that some lessons need to be learned over and over again until they finally live in us. These lessons are often the most basic, maybe even the most obvious.

 

But sometimes, instead of an old lesson needing to be re-learned, we’re noticing a new perspective on an old situation, or seeing a new dimension in something we thought we should’ve known all along.

 

For example, we have an expectation, fear, or regret, a project and we get lost in it; we ruminate on a detail and forget why we started the project to begin with. We lose ourselves in thought and don’t recognize that we’re living being lost in thought; we’re living an idea and no longer feel our life. We do something and feel we did it incorrectly and think we’re now and forever a mistake. And then we live angry at ourselves. Or we get angry at someone; and somewhere inside us we imagine this anger at another will save us from our own shortcomings⎼ but there’s no such escape. We’re just living scapegoating, living resentment.

 

Oh, and here’s one that’s common: we’re exercising and thinking mostly of getting it done. Or, similarly, we’re in a car driving to meet friends in order to relax together. But we drive fast; we get all tense trying to get to a future where we can let ourselves relax, instead of driving at a more leisurely pace where we’re at ease right now. How many times do we have to learn such lessons?

 

These insights are inspired by the 13th century Japanese Zen Master Dogen Zenji’s Being-Time, not that I have more than a basic understanding of his teachings. We often try to withdraw from or escape a situation, emotion, or expected future. We certainly can “time travel;” it’s one of humans’ greatest gifts. It allows us to plan ahead, empathically feel what another person feels, imagine a work of art or what the consequences of an action might be. It makes critical thinking possible. But when we lose perspective, time-travel can become a great peril we inflict on ourselves.

 

We can never step outside our lives, outside the universe, outside time. The imagined mental travel is itself a moment of life. A thought is time. A cry is time. A book is time. The first flower after winter, the first snowdrop, is the time that is spring. We are being time.

 

We too easily forget everything around us, everything we’ve experienced, every being around us is our life now. This, right here, right now. There’s no exit from it, not until we die, if then.

 

The French philosopher, J. P. Sartre, who was a member of the French resistance during WWII, gives us an interesting angle on these insights. Sartre wrote a play during the WWII occupation of France by the Nazis. The play was called No Exit. From one perspective, the play can be seen as an exposition of the hell created by a hellish war and the way the Fascist occupiers treated their fellow human beings. The Nazis deceived themselves, lied about their aims and the reality of others, refusing responsibility, refusing to feel the enormity of pain and destruction they inflicted. The play was first performed in 1944, during the occupation with Nazis in the audience ignorant of this layer of meaning in the play.

 

The three main characters in No Exit share a room together in hell for eternity. There are no torturers other than themselves, no flames other than the fire of lies and deceptions they lit in themselves….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The U. S. We Hope and Expect to Be Here Is Almost Gone: DT and DOGE are Killing U. S.

Maybe, hopefully, we’re all realizing that the country many of us loved; that, in a variety of ways, many fought for and dreamed of, is disappearing. DT, Musk, their GOP sycophants and billionaire cheering section are doing all they can to rip away our rights and incomes to feed their own power and greed. And people are already, and increasingly, dying from this.

 

Take elementary aged children people in Reserve, La, whose school is located next to the Denka Performance Elastomer Plant. The region is called Cancer Alley, and rates of deaths, especially for children, are one of the highest in the US. The Biden administration sued to finally curb the plant’s emissions. The DT DOJ stopped the suit. DT seems to care more about profits than common people; and in this case, the majority of residents are black.

 

DT’s EPA has announced it would cut 31 climate, air, water, and emissions regulations, putting the health and lives of millions at risk. According to Health Policy Watch, under attack is a 2009 EPA finding that climate change-causing pollutants, including methane and carbon dioxide, harm human health. Without this “endangerment” clause, the EPA will clear the way for widespread dismantling of greenhouse gas emission regulations.

 

“The potential increase in health-related expenses, environmental degradation, and the stifling of innovation will lead to higher costs for consumers and impede economic growth,” said Margo Oge, former EPA director of transportation and air quality. “These actions will not make America great – they will just make Americans sicker,” she said in a LinkedIn post.

 

The safety of the food we eat is being drastically threatened by DOGE’s cuts to the US Department of Agriculture. According to interviews taken by WIRED, thousands of workers, food inspectors, disease-sniffing dog handlers and trainers fired by Musk remain unemployed, leading to food rotting and pests proliferating. Without inspectors, invasive pests and diseases can slip through inspection cracks, and wipe out an entire agricultural commodity, which can cause national security concerns and price increases. Some people thought DT would lower their food and other costs of living—not so.

 

The same is true with the bird flu killing chickens and raising the cost of eggs (15.2% increase since December)⎼ among those fired (and later re-hired) were those from the Department of Agriculture who had been working to respond to the bird flu outbreak.

 

I’ve written elsewhere about the measles epidemic increasing and spreading due to DT’s Health secretary, RFK Jr.’s history of spreading anti-vaccination misinformation. RFK Jr.’s fixation on attacking vaccinations is also interfering with research into cancer and other diseases. A senior official at the National Cancer Institute told KFF Health News that DT’s acting NIH director sent an agency-wide email directing all grants, contracts, and “collaborations involving mRNA vaccines” be reported to Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy’s office and the White House. The mRNA technology, crucial to the development of successful COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, has also exhibited promise in research on HIV/AIDS and cancer.

 

In a recent column, Heather Cox Richardson warned us that RFK, Jr. is now proposing to address the bird flu decimating US poultry and cattle farms by letting the disease free to run rampant.

 

She writes that veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project. Thanks.

The Deeply Personal Can Reveal the Universal Patterns that Empower Us to Act: Curiosity & the Transformative Power of Awe

I so enjoy writing and reading about subjects and experiences that are deeply personal, or that bring me greater insight, more than ones about hate and inhumanity. And I don’t think this is just me; it feels clearly true for most of us. When there’s so much in the news about DT and his fear and hate-filled executive orders and pointless cruelty, I need to also discover and support what feeds my sense of love and demand for justice and humanity. But it’s an awareness of the deeply personal that strengthens this sense of ourselves, this sense of connection with others and this world of ours. And it’s this awareness that fuels our ability to face what is most difficult to face.

 

One experience and emotion that particularly feeds and strengthens this deeply personal strength in ourselves is awe. Awe brings together a need to feel and preserve our sense of beauty, love, and wonder so we can face the destructive and horrible around us, to face realistically our fear of hardship and death.

 

Our brains are hardwired to worry, to perceive negatives, threats first. And according to research from the Greater Good Science Center, there are good reasons for that. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be aware of any danger that might emerge from the world around them and prioritized this awareness. But to do that, they had to be ready, open to search beyond themselves, so they could discover ever more about themselves and the world. They had to let go of what they thought they knew to accurately perceive what they hadn’t known. In other words, they had to be curious.

 

And part of curiosity is that feeling we have before a discovery, that sense of not-knowing, worry, anxiety, and possibly fear of what might be there. Science has shown that our reward centers of the brain, and dopamine, our happiness and reward neurotransmitter, is released not only when we get the pleasure, the goal, but when we seek it. And when we feel wonder, awe at what we notice, the memories of and ability to be curious, is strengthened.

 

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, researcher and Professor of Psychology, writes about this in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. One definition of awe that he gives us is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding.” It can transport us back in time or to a sound or aroma, or an epiphany that de-stabilizes our past understanding; that takes us out of our sense of being separate from everyone and everything else, and reveals the vastness around us, reveals an awareness of the mysteries of life.

 

Everything, every experience, says Keltner, originates in how our minds process information. Our emotions are those feeling states accompanied by thoughts, expressions, physiological responses which enable and direct our actions. When we’re locked into emotions about self-preservation or being selfish, feeling totally separate, this undermines our ability to adapt to present circumstances. Awe does the opposite. The sense of vastness, of something beyond ourselves integrates our scattered beliefs, and all the unknowns we experience, so we can create a thesis about the world, a deepened understanding of whatever we need to face….

 

*Please go to The Good Men Project and read the whole article.

How Our Understanding of Freedom Can Liberate or Imprison Us: The Illusions & Delusions in Our Understanding of Freedom

“The mind is the forerunner of all things,” said the Buddha in the collection of sayings called the Dhammapada. We are led by our ideas, not just our emotions. Our mind, our way of thinking guides every element of our lives, what we feel, what we value, what we imagine is possible, and how we relate with others.

 

One word or idea that is so important to understand in today’s world is freedom. The word and what it represents is at the heart of our national anthem; “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It reminds us of the sacrifices people made for freedom and for the survival of a nation, for resistance to an invader and the preservation of a freedom from external control over us.

 

But our understanding or misunderstanding of that word can cause us to lead a life that imprisons or liberates us; that hurts us and others or one that enriches us. And we see the hurtful way of understanding the word expressed daily by politicians and the news media in this country. Because the freedom from which the national anthem primarily expresses is what philosophers call negative freedom; this might be a necessary condition for us to have physical control over our lives but is not sufficient for us to feel liberated.

 

This was recently made so much clearer to me when I started reading a book by historian Timothy Snyder called On Freedom. The subject is one we have all probably thought about in different ways at different times in our lives.

 

Americans are told that freedom was given to us by the Founding Fathers. But freedom cannot be given, says Snyder. A country isn’t free; people are free. If we think of freedom as only freedom from outside sources of control or threat, then we can be convinced we need to sacrifice freedom for security. We can think the personal and political situation is always us separated from and against the world and we become habituated to always rating ourselves in opposition to others, instead of studying how we feel in ourselves. We reduce human beings, with inner lives not that different from our own, to things. Hitler called Jewish people “foreign bodies,” parasites, vermin infesting the German racial organism.

 

DT speaks in terms that are alarmingly like Hitler’s, dehumanizing immigrants of color, as well as Democrats and those who oppose him, calling them, us, “vermin.” Such thinking as DT illustrates makes us feel perpetually uneasy, insecure in ourselves and our world, isolated, suffering.

 

Such thinking leads us to feel that if we just remove obstacles, barriers, regulations, and, limit the reach of government we expand our freedom. That our freedom is opposed to that of others. That we know the truth, and that no other truth, no other facts, are real. And thus, opinions different from our own must be destroyed. Only leaders strong enough to assert their own truth with absolute conviction and power can save us. This misses the obvious; such an absolute leader negates our own power to lead⎼ or to have a meaningful vote. Negative freedom, says Snyder, is not a misunderstanding so much as a repressive idea.

 

He gives us examples from Ukraine and its struggle for life against Putin, an oppressive invader who wants to kill not only the Ukrainian nation but any of its people who would even consider opposing him. But Snyder reports that when Ukrainians remove Russian invaders from their villages, they don’t use the word freedom. They’re glad that “something terrible has been removed from their lives,” that the threat of imminent death or torture is ended. But the term they use for this is deoccupation. The occupier is gone.

 

They realize “freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good.”…

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.