Food: Serious as a Heart Attack

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At 9:15 PM on Tuesday April 2, 2007, just as the opening credits for that evening’s episode of Star Trek Enterprise started rolling, I had a massive heart attack and died. Three times in fact. I died on my living room floor, in the ambulance and once again in the ER. Long story full of heavy drama, cliff-hanger close calls, amazing technologies and personal transformations, but the upshot was that I spent 6 days in a cardiac ICU and generated well over a hundred grand in medical debt. The nurses later told me that only 4 percent survive the kind of heart attack I had.

Very. Close. Call. Yep.

Phew…

Coming out of that event I was seriously disabled. A 50-foot walk to the mailbox at the end of my driveway required a 45 minute nap afterwards. Nonetheless, in between naps I could go online and I did. My focus was, “What the hell happened?” I had no significant lifestyle risk factors, no family history of heart disease and had been a strict vegetarian for over 40 years, eating a diet that included no meat, fish, birds or eggs, or anything containing those as ingredients. I did eat dairy products, including milk, cheeses, yogurt and butter, but those were the only animal products I consumed and I had them in small amounts. I was 56 at the time of my heart attack, just 3 weeks before my 57th birthday.

How could I – a low-fat, high complex-carb vegetarian eating a plant-based diet as recommended by everyone from Michael Pollan to Michelle Obama – end up with a host of serious and chronic health issues and have one of them kill me dead? (Yes, obviously they brought me back, but that was entirely a function of good luck, modern medical technology and especially the clot-buster injection that went straight into my heart, and then later, the arterial stent. And obviously I was not dead-dead. Nobody comes back from that. I flat-lined. Or, as Miracle Max may have said, I was “…mostly dead.”)

I ate all the “right things,” exercised regularly, didn’t eat “the bad stuff” such as saturated fat, and yet I still got whacked. If I was this vulnerable to heart disease, then something was seriously wrong with how I was living my life, and the first suspect was my diet. That heart attack required that I re-examine all my closely held beliefs about nutrition, health and food. I began intensively researching this topic, and was eventually fortunate enough to find some really significant information and resources. More on that later.

First off let me remind you that I’m not a doctor and I’m not giving medical advice. I’m a survivor of a massive heart attack of a type that very few survive. The nurses and docs warned me that the damage to my heart and cardiovascular system was so severe that they gave me a survival prognosis of three months to maybe two years tops. As of this writing it’s been nearly ten years since. For me, understanding what happened and what to do about it was literally a matter of life and death. While I am no longer afraid of death at all, I am rather fond of my life and am not terribly anxious for it to end. My understanding of this issue was then and continues to be a top priority for me.

At the time of my heart attack I was shocked to discover that my total cholesterol was normal (179) according to conventional wisdom, but that I was prediabetic (A1C of 11.2 so BG maybe around 280 if I remember correctly), that I weighed about 215 (give or take), that I had IBS, high blood pressure, serious arthritis and a host of other underlying conditions. Nobody tells us that half of all fatal heart attacks occur in people with “normal” cholesterol, and they certainly do not advertise that 70 percent of diabetics die of heart disease. Clearly there are direct causative correlations between those two. And now there is even some early data saying that Alzheimer’s may be a form of Type 3 diabetes. We’ll see – more research necessary there.

However. It turns out that everything we’ve been told about fat and dietary health is backwards and comes from a profit-based collusion between government, big agriculture, the food processing industry and the big pharma companies. It’s not that they are in some massive conspiracy, just that everyone’s greed for profits has produced an interlocking set of belief systems that is extremely toxic and damaging to us all. It started with Ancel Keys and his faked research and deceptive cholesterol reports after World War II and the pattern went on from there. It’s called “the lipid hypothesis” and it’s one of the most heinous deceptions in modern medicine.

There is no causal relationship between cholesterol levels and heart disease. The lipid hypothesis is a health scare that has been completely invented, made up out of nothing and sold to the American public using every marketing and advertising technique available to Madison Avenue. If the dietary advice about low-fat diets really worked, why then are the rates for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity still sky-rocketing? I – as a lifelong low-saturated fat plant-eater vegetarian – should have been completely exempt from heart disease. Nope.

It took me two years of research before I discovered, worked out and fixed the culprits in my food supply. I experimented and played with my food and swapped things around until I developed real certainty about what was optimal. I stopped eating any grains or carbs, no sugars or sweeteners, and although altogether the conversion and transformation took about 3 years total, I eventually even quit eating plants at all. The result is that my daily intake of carbs is typically below 20 grams per day, and consistently less than 10 grams.

Turns out that there are two kinds of human metabolism – fat-driven ketosis, where we metabolize ketone bodies, and the sugar/carbohydrate-driven insulin-based metabolism. Ketosis and the fat-based diet is how we evolved, but as a fall-back for times when meat is scarce we can survive on carbs. It’s not optimal, and we suffer for it, but once we get back to a meat diet we can recover very quickly.

Fat doesn’t make you fat and it’s not fat that kills you. The culprit is sugar. And guess what? Every gram of carbohydrate you eat is nothing more than a gram of glorified sugar. Furthermore, obesity (with some rare exceptions) is a symptom of metabolic starvation. When we eat fat it becomes fuel and it burns clean. When we eat carbohydrates and sugars our body thinks we are in starvation and it converts much of that sugar to fat, storing it for later. The problem is that sugar does not burn clean – it requires insulin, and excessive insulin generates severe inflammation, glycation, insulin resistance and eventually hyperinsulinemia, which of course leads to the big 5 – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and many types of the sugar-derived cancers.

The reality is that nutrient-rich traditional fats have nourished healthy human population groups for hundreds of thousands (and quite likely, millions) of years. Humans are natural-born fat-seekers and fat-eaters. Remember, 50 to 60 percent of the total caloric value of human breast milk is from the saturated fat it contains, and that nutritional requirement does not go away when we wean.

Eat this:
Butter, whole raw milk and whole raw cheeses
Beef and lamb tallow
Lard
Chicken, goose and duck fat
bacon fat
Egg yolks
Marine oils (like cod liver oil)
all fatty meats

I find it interesting that medical researchers call this the “French Paradox” because the fatty ingredients above are what make French cuisine so amazingly delicious, yet as a people, the French have a significantly lower rate of heart disease and rates of death by heart attack when compared to Americans. The same high saturated fat ingredient list contributes to the healthier aspects of the Mediterranean diet, which produces health outcomes very similar to what happens in France. In Okinawa, where we find the longest-lived people on the planet, the primary fat is from pork and pork products, which contributes a significant percentage of their daily caloric intake. Saturated fats are so important to our health that if we don’t eat enough of them in our foods then our body will make them out of carbohydrates. This is also part of the reason that people eating a low-fat diet have such consistently high cholesterol levels. If we don’t eat sufficient cholesterol then our body has to make it, and our blood levels spike. We need that cholesterol for every single cell membrane in our body, as well as for all our neurotransmitters. Ever wonder why low-fat dieters are so susceptible to mood disorders?

I recommend reading the ingredients list on every food item we buy. If it contains any of the following 5 ingredients, don’t buy it and certainly don’t eat it:

Avoid these:
1) enriched flour (usually white and heavily refined),
2) white sugar,
3) high-fructose corn syrup,
4) partially hydrogenated vegetable oils of any kind,
5) fully hydrogenated vegetable oils of any kind.

The following laboratory-developed and machine-processed fats listed can cause serious degenerative diseases:

Transfats
All hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils including hydrogenated lard
Soy, corn and safflower oils
Cottonseed oil
Canola oil
All plant fats heated to very high temperatures in processing and frying

When you add in high-fructose corn syrup to the mix, along with all the chemical additives, pesticides and whatever leaches from plastics into our foods, is it any wonder that our diet is killing us? I just read a recent study that high fructose corn syrup is the number one favorite nutrient preferred by cancer cells.

Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, thyroid problems, high blood pressure, arthritis, ADHD, autism, osteoporosis, dental caries and gum disease, obesity, allergies, many kinds of cancers, reproductive dysfunction and sterility – all these have significant contributing factors that arise in some degree from our diet, and the quality of the foods we eat and don’t eat.

For over 5 years I only ate fat and meat and drank only water. Period. 80 percent or more of my daily calories came from animal fats (butter, lard, pork fat, tallow and so on) and about 15 percent came from meat proteins. When I’m thirsty I drink water. That’s it. Although this time of year (August) when the wild blueberries are ripe on my land, I might have a handful on the way down to go canoeing on the river that is the western boundary of my place. I see no negative effects from this so far, but the quantities are small and the frequency is low.

My metabolism stays in nutritional ketosis. I’ve lost well over 50 pounds of belly fat and weigh in around 160 give or take a few pounds. My IBS vanished, and so did my GERD and arthritis. My blood pressure is 110 over 70. My A1c is between 4.2 and 4.4, and regular blood testing shows my BG levels consistently run between 85 and 105, so I’m no longer prediabetic. Total cholesterol is about 170, my triglycerides are at 42 and even the plaque in my arteries has been diminishing. I’m in the best health I’ve been in since I was 20, in spite of the old damage to my heart muscle from the CVE in ’07.

My cardiologist, when he found out I was eating a primal diet (some might call it paleo but I don’t because I go way beyond that), just went batshit crazy, jumping all over my case about how I should be on statins and eating very low-fat. I flat out refused the statins. Then I asked him, if all he said was true then how did he explain my blood chemistry results? He couldn’t. I eventually had to fire him because he refused to wake up to the fact that nearly everything he knew and advised about food, nutrition and my health was not only incorrect, but ass-backwards. If you need a doctor, find one who is paleo (or primal) friendly.

If you like to eat plants, then I highly recommend you follow the meal plan of my good friend Steve Cooksey, who is a classic example of an insulin-dependent T2 diabetic who no longer requires insulin or any other meds. (If you eat the way the ADA recommends you will stay sick, stay insulin-dependent and you will die a miserable death for no reason.)

http://www.diabetes-warrior.net/

If you don’t like eating plants and want to experience the most robust health possible for humans, then go full-on zero carb and follow my friend Esmée La Fleur’s elegant eating plan here:

https://zerocarbzen.com/

That is the simplest way of eating that humans can follow – eat meat, drink water. End of story.

For those of you who love the science and the details, I recommend Nora Gedgaudas – links to her videos and her book can be found here:

Primal Body, Primal Mind – Beyond the Paleo Diet

You should be aware that eating this way will generate a lot of push-back from people who have no idea what they are talking about – friends, family, poorly informed true believers such as vegans and dieticians and so on, even many doctors. They have not lived this experience and they are operating from conviction founded upon belief. Instead of listening to them, just trust your body. Do the work that growth requires, heal and live well.

It can take a while to adapt to zero carb and ketosis but once you do, you will be amazed at how quickly you will heal, how great your body feels and how effortless this way of life is.

For more background, I also highly recommend you read

“The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability” by Lierre Keith

And:

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

Also from Nina, this terrific video debunking all the nonsense assertions about
health hazards from red meat – what is the real science about it:

“Science and Politics of Red Meat in 2021”

As well as:

“The Carnivore Diet” by Shawn Baker

For a female perspective on this journey to understanding food, nutrients, and body health,
here is my partner Jenny’s process in three parts on her blog – Our Daily Crime:

Part 1:
The Politics of Food: Questions

Part 2:
The Politics of Food: Reluctant Journey

Part 3:
The Politics of Food: Ideology

And also please read the essays and reports on my friend’s great research web site: L. Amber O’Hearn is a data scientist by profession with a background in math, computer science, linguistics, and psychology. She has been studying and experimenting with low-carb, ketogenic diets since 1997, and more recently writing and speaking about her findings. Her review on the evolutionary appropriateness and benefit of weaning babies onto a meat-based, high fat, low carb diet, was included as testimony defending Professor Tim Noakes in his recent trial. Amber has been eating a plant-free diet since 2009.

https://www.mostly-fat.com/

Ivor Cummins on calcium scores and the root causes of CVD, Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcgT4BYwo0

Ivor Cummins – Part 2 – Healing CVD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Xd9e4B3e8

Here’s a bit of our evolutionary history, human predatory patterns – marrow – us as fat eaters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCV_XFcVPU

Dr. Miki Ben-Dor maintains we have always been eating some plants, but his evidence seems to show it’s been less than 20 percent of our daily caloric intake. Personally I consider them either garnish or medicine and don’t generally partake. If you can take some and not suffer consequences then good for you, but others, like my partner, she can’t even have a few spinach leaves under her scrambled eggs without 3 days of fibromyalgia pain thereafter. Up to you – figure out what works and do that more.

A good text recap of the podcast –
https://www.peak-human.com/post/miki-ben-dor-phd-on-the-humans-eating-fatty-meat-for-all-of-history

the podcast: (about 90 minutes)
What Have Humans Evolved Eating – Meat or Plants? Miki Ben-Dor, PhD – Peak Human Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8znp6SQNXY

Not All Men Are Like That (NAMALT)

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I’ve said this before and usually have gotten a ton of crap about it, but yes – I think it IS all men. ALL men. Even though there are plenty of guys like me who work daily to end this bullshit against women and kids, the reality is that we are ALL capable of it. The fact that I haven’t or wouldn’t beat up, rape, or murder women and children (or other men) for whatever reasons, doesn’t mean (for any practical purposes) that anyone could ever be certain that I can’t or won’t. Context matters. Women can’t tell, and their biological hard-wiring to build connection and relationship makes them always vulnerable. Plus, a woman has no way to discover the difference between me and a guy who will harm her without her getting too close to react effectively before it’s too late.

If you listen to felons in support groups in prisons they will all admit that it takes at least a year of faking it before they will start hitting a woman with fair confidence they can maintain control and keep her from leaving. This is a prescriptive pattern, not happenstance or a one-off.

And when it comes to sex, most guys are just looking for the relief of a few squirts in the dark, but every woman without exception is literally putting her life at risk with every single occasion of intercourse. If you don’t believe that, just look up the stats for eclampsia and other pregnancy-related causes of death among women. We have profoundly different perspectives on the sexual experience. This also speaks to the old cliche – “Women need a reason to have sex. Men only need a place.” In other words, most women will not be willing to have sex unless they feel safe and affectionate or unless they are driven to it by complex and deeply unmet needs. Most men are willing to have sex simply because it’s Tuesday and they want pizza for supper.

And part of the difficulty for women is they need to choose a mate who is violent enough to provide and protect without being so violent or psychologically damaged that he will turn that violence inward and on to her, on to the family, his tribe, or his community. In this day and age, with so many deeply damaged men who have no idea what it means to be a man, this gets really really tricky and dangerous for women and kids, as well as for other men. This is part of the reason so many women get trapped and badly damaged by their attraction to the “bad boy” stereotype. Women can’t tell the difference between a “good enough” bad guy and an actual bad guy, and too many men are very good liars, or are too damaged to self-manage effectively. Men are competent in self-regulation, distress tolerance, executive function, and interpersonal effectiveness. Boys are not. Men own their responsibilities. Boys do not.

As a species we humans are pack-hunting apex predators and obligate meso-carnivores scoring higher on the carnivore scale than wolves but lower than cats. Look at our prey – we kill and eat everything from bugs to blue whales. We are fat-seeking meat-eaters and massive ecosystem engineers who alter every landscape we inhabit. And while women can certainly be violent, human males are the most lethal apex predator ever to walk this planet. If T-Rex still lived we would have fast food Dino-franchises in every country on the planet, and the ads would swear he tastes like chicken. Until we take steps as a global culture to reckon with that innate violence potential among human males – to own it and take real responsibility for it – nothing else we ever do will come to much beyond our own extinction.

The human male capacity for violence is extraordinary, and the only thing I know capable of taming it in any case is to awaken empathy and build a strong ethical structure in place in the young male before his capacity for violence gets set in concrete during and after puberty. This is tricky, because too much empathy makes a man too weak to kill an animal for food or too weak to defend his family when real violence is required. Too little empathy makes him arrogant, selfish, unkind, and overly brutal to others, especially to those weaker than he is. In the old days, the rest of the men in the tribe would just get together and kill an arrogant, abusive, bully male – take him out into the woods and make him climb the honey tree. It doesn’t quite work like that anymore, at least not in a society of laws.

That behavioral difference – too much or too little empathy – is also the distinction I personally make between a soldier and a warrior. A soldier is compliant, submissive, and obedient, and will follow orders without regard for any moral or ethical stance. A warrior owns his strength and knows his weakness. He lives and acts in service to his tribe. He is morally and ethically responsible for the expression of his power and his capacity for violence. He will provide for and protect his tribe and his family, and he will not permit or tolerate cruelty visited upon the weak. This is how we evolved as a species. Who did men protect women and children from? Other men. Predators.

We humans must learn to integrate that awareness of our capacity for violence so it doesn’t run us as a species. Embrace the shadow. You cannot manage that which is undistinguished – therefore it runs you. As long as we pretend we are harmless and deny the human capacity for violence it will continue to spill over onto everything we touch, including women, children, and all of the natural world. These are our kin – each and every one – from maggots to maples to men of other tribes. These are all our relations.

All our ancestral societies had methods and rituals to channel the predilection for risk-taking, adventure and achievement, and the innate violence of young men so they could learn how to protect and provide before those drives got misdirected and started to hurt the boys themselves or the tribe around them. We have lost that. We need to recreate it. One of the writers I have read about this topic says that men are wired for the three Ps – to Provide, Protect, and Procreate. To that I would add that we need to install self-mastery as an inescapable requirement for all males graduating from boyhood to manhood. If you cannot effectively manage yourself then you have no business managing anything or anyone else.

Another significant point about this which is likely utterly invisible to most men – over a couple decades of work in my emotional intelligence workshops when I have asked the men in the group what they do on a daily basis to protect themselves against sexual assault there is usually dead silence and puzzled looks. Eventually some wise guy in the back of the room will snicker and say he works real hard to not get arrested and sent to prison. All the other guys chuckle and guffaw. The first invisible thing here is that this too is an expression of the reality of male-pattern violence.

When I ask the women in the group that question (I have by now spent a couple days building trust and safety in the room) they get really nervous and after a bit of hesitation share volumes of experiences, many including descriptions and stories of specific sexual assaults that have happened to them personally, many women having had more than one experience. While the women are sharing this the men get very quiet and look completely stunned.

Understand, out of three workshops of about 40 people each (usually 50/50 or close to it) there will be one woman who has NOT had these experiences, and more than a third of the women had these experiences while they were still children, before they passed through puberty. Most of those women never reported the assaults to the authorities. In those cases where the assaults were reported, most of the perpetrators never went to prison or were held accountable.

The men have no idea. Most men don’t get it. It’s not part of their lived experience. The good ones are appalled and outraged and want to help. The guilty ones defend themselves, cast doubt, criticize, attack, invalidate, and deny.

And sad to say, too many men remain utterly blind to the reality. And thus they interpret women’s natural defensive reactions to men as hate. Nope. It’s about trust and safety. Women want us to step up, to do well, and to be the men they need. And… They want us to stop molesting, raping, beating, and murdering them. Feminism is about women having an equal voice, an equal vote (in all things), and being heard. That you don’t get that and that you misinterpret all of it is the perfect demonstration of why it is still so essential.

This is a real thing, it’s everywhere, and it’s inexcusable. And we men need to fix it. Women can support and help of course, but this is real men’s work.

I highly recommend these essays by Rob Henderson, by Jay, and by Jordan Peterson as well, where they talk about some of the same issues with young males, the differences between males and females, and some of the larger social conversations about what it means to be male:

Rob Henderson – Young Male Syndrome
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/understanding-the-young-male-syndrome

The Male-Warrior Hypothesis
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-male-warrior-hypothesis

Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity: The Meaning Behind The Meme
https://www.musclehacking.com/blog/reject-modernity-embrace-masculinity

Comment on the APA Guidelines for the Treatment of Boys and Men
Political Correctness – Beware the Ideologues in Psychologists’ Clothing

“The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution” by Richard Wrangham

Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly

Masculinity – Dr. Roy Casagranda (about 2 hours)

We (in the human domains of knowing) understand a lot about how all this works. We even know how to fix it. We simply lack the political will to make it so.

Carmine Leo
04/02/24
https://www.carmineleo.com/

—

“Spanking: The Ultimate Disciplinary Failure”

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Let’s begin with the essential distinction between punishment (arbitrary, harsh or cruel mistreatment for wrong-doing) and discipline (which is an organized method of instruction). So zen is a discipline, and mathematics, and Aikido. Hitting children for any reason is not discipline, it’s abuse and punishment.

Next let’s agree to the assertion that for the most part, parents are doing the best they can with the information and resources they have at the time. If they could do better, they would. This of course does not include those who are Cluster-B. People with that level of psychiatric pathology have entirely different agendas which may include feeding off the emotional pain of others. I’m not talking about them – separate conversation there.

A second assertion is that most parent are unaware that there are radically different options for interacting with their children that produce optimal outcomes for both parent and child. We tend to parent the way we ourselves were parented. Most of us were raised in some version of authoritarian parenting – do as I say or else…

Kids raised under authoritarian parenting grow up and become parents who will either apply authoritarian parenting with their own children (I turned out ok) or were so wounded by it that they rebel and become permissive parents.

Unfortunately, permissive parenting doesn’t work any better than authoritarian parenting, because kids need boundaries. They need to know where the edges are. They need to know that their parents are in charge, that they will keep them safe, that their parents are on their side and will teach them how to be people who can self-manage and be effective problem-solvers.

What does work is connection. Every shred of research over the last century – since John Bowlby wrote “Attachment” has reinforced our understanding that the more secure our bonding and attachments are with others, the healthier and more functional we are as human beings. People hear important ideas best from those they trust most. This is especially true in the relationships between parent and child.

As Pam Leo says in her essential book “Connection Parenting” – “In every interaction with a child we can determine what to do by asking one simple question: Is what I am about to say or do going to build and strengthen the connection with my child or will it weaken and break it?” and then just act accordingly. This applies at every level, scalable from one-on-one to considering an entire parenting philosophy.

Punishment doesn’t work because it doesn’t teach. Humans cannot learn when they are being hurt. Furthermore, hitting kids creates an attachment break – a drop in connection, loss of trust, and generates fear instead of respect.

It is absolutely unnecessary to rule children through fear. In fact ruling children through fear is counterproductive and dangerous. Fear literally alters the structures of the child’s growing brain. When they are in fear, when kids are being hurt by those they love and trust who apply fear, the result is that children CANNOT learn. The punishment itself destroys any possibility of learning – the child’s thinking shuts down – they cannot process their painful experience, and their attention is focused on how to be smarter – to not get caught next time. Punishment and the use of fear creates liars and bullies. Kids who are hurt are far more likely to hurt other children as well. We have known about these correlations for decades.

Negative behavior is caused by unmet needs. Decode the behavior, meet the unmet need and the behavior will change. Works every time. What keeps these assaults on children in place is a combination of poor skills in emotional self-management among adults, lack of empathy and compassion, ignorance, denial, laziness, and the idealization of abuse and abusers.

As I said above, humans cannot learn when they are being hurt, our thinking shuts down completely. The lessons a spanking teaches are:

– that you are powerless and I can hurt you whenever I wish,
– that might makes right,
– that love is pain and when I hurt you that means I love you,
– that violence is an acceptable resolution for conflict,
– that you must learn to lie and deceive so you will not get caught,
– that people who claim to love you have a right to hurt you,
– that people who claim to love you have a right to violate your boundaries,
– that your consent doesn’t matter,
– that your physical integrity is not safe,

Spanking locks resentment, anger, fear into an internal emotional conflict with a confusion that conflates love and pain, and frequently turns to hatred. It damages self worth and creates behavioral problems that take up to two years to begin to manifest. And mostly it is a behavioral demonstration that our own needs are deeply unmet and we lack sufficient resources as a parent. We lack emotional self-management skills, and we need to find, learn and apply methods for conflict resolution that do not include assault and physical, emotional and mental violence.

Spanking is also a set up for domestic violence in later relationships, for sexual abuse and furthermore, if you did that to me I would have you in court and charged with assault. Why should those laws be any different for a child?

We absolutely have real clarity about what it takes to raise children into healthy, fully-functional, kindly and capable adults who are able to have nurturing relationships and make meaningful work. We (in the human domains of knowing) have understood most of this for decades, but convincing parents to give up their barbaric practices and to do what works best is an appalling uphill battle.

As Laura Markham says, “If we’re serious about raising good kids, we need to use methods that teach kids to manage themselves. Spanking does not do that. Instead, it teaches kids to be afraid of us, which is no basis for love. It teaches them to be sneaky so they won’t be caught doing something wrong. It teaches kids that they are bad, so they are more likely to behave badly. It teaches kids to use violence when they want to solve a problem. And it keeps them from taking responsibility to improve their own behavior, because they “externalize the locus of control,” which means they only behave because an authority figure makes them, rather than behaving because they want to.”

Violence against children is what is most broken in this civilization – physical, emotional, mental. Until we change this, nothing else in the overculture will ever change. Look at the world around you. I rest my case.

“However we treat the child, the child will treat the world.” – Pam Leo

Carmine Leo – ©2001-2023
https://www.carmineleo.com/
https://www.connectionparenting.com/

Introduction to Haiku and Senryū

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Matsuo Basho 1644-1694

I’ve dabbled in poetry for 60 years, and there are two poetic forms from the Japanese that I love dearly that are closely related and quite different – haiku and senryū. Most people are familiar with haiku – a non-rhyming verse form consisting of three syllabic lines of 5-7-5, and which have a fairly complex set of guiding rules that are several hundred years old.

Senryū (also called human haiku) is the second variation of Japanese verse consisting of three lines of 5-7-5 syllable lines that do not rhyme. Senryū is usually written in the present tense and typically only refers to some aspect of human nature or emotion. (1)

Years ago I participated in a number of poetry workshops with Robert Bly. In a couple of them we got into the topic of haiku, where he maintained that the structure of a haiku requires two images simultaneously connected and separated by a vast, floating, associative leap. (2) The Japanese also require a haiku to contain some kind of seasonal reference as well as something from the natural world that illuminates something in human nature. You can see that in (what I at the time thought was) Bly’s version of Basho’s magnificent poem:

bright October morning
a sudden chill – underfoot
my dead wife’s comb

Bly must have had a serious brain cramp that day (I’ve certainly had plenty like that) because I later discovered that poem was not written by Basho at all but was Bly’s interpretation of a poem written by Taniguchi Buson. Also, the most delicious irony is that it was written when Buson’s wife was still alive, and she outlived him by many years.

The word “sudden” should instead be “piercing” which has many subtle meanings related to death, autumn, the sharpness of the comb teeth and so on. Bly really missed much of the depth in this poem, though I didn’t realize that until years after. The original in Japanese never mentions the month but refers to Autumn through associative leaps inherent in other words in the poem unique to the Japanese language.

Here’s another translation of Buson’s poem I encountered years later:

piercingly cold
stepping on my dead wife’s comb
in the bedroom

and the associated commentary quoted from that page:

“The opening phrase, mini ni shimu (literally, to penetrate the body), is an autumn phrase that suggests the chill and sense of loneliness that sinks into the body with the arrival of the autumn cold and that here also functions as a metaphor of the poet’s feelings following the death of his wife. The poem generates a novelistic scene of the widower, some time after his wife’s funeral, accidentally stepping on a comb in the autumn dark, as he is about to go to bed alone. The standard interpretation is that the snapping of the comb in the bedroom brings back memories of their relationship and has erotic overtones. But this is not about direct or personal experience. The fact is that Buson (1706-83) composed this while his wife was alive. Indeed Buson’s wife Tomo outlived him by 31 years.”

–excerpted from Haruo Shirane’s essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths,” Modern Haiku, 16:1 Winter/Spring 2000″ (3)

The Edo period poet, Basho (1644 – 1694) is credited as being the creator of the haiku form, although Masaoka Shiki is credited with naming these poems as haiku during the late Meiji period, about two hundred years after Basho’s lifetime. (4)

Basho was a master of both renga and “haikai no renga” which was a poetic form practiced by multiple poets – at a moon-viewing party for instance. One would begin with an hokku (5-7-5) and then the next poet in the circle would move the form forward with a 7-7 mora verse, then another would do 5-7-5, and so on throughout the entire evening. Only later did Basho separate out the 5-7-5 hokku segments that were eventually renamed haiku by Shiki. Renga are usually either 36 or 100 verses long, and each verse must connect to the verse immediately before and the verse immediately after, but not necessarily any other verse.

There are many different translations of Basho’s works, (as well as of many other haiku poets) and some of them suck royally because they were written by translators who were not poets but linguists. It’s a very difficult thing to capture the heart of a poem while bringing it across the worldview gaps between languages, especially translating from a deeply subtle, ancient, and sophisticated language such as Japanese.

We see this even when great poets such as when Bly himself attempted to translate the works of someone like Kabir. That was a miserable failure (in my opinion) as Bly lacked the cultural frame of spiritual mysticism from which Kabir himself wrote. Bly’s Kabir book should have been called something like “Robert Bly’s approximate interpretations based on poems by Kabir” as his translations had very little to do with the actual meanings embedded in what Kabir actually wrote. He and I had a huge disagreement about this after I gave him what I considered to be an excellent translation of Kabir’s work. I have similar complaints about Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi. Great Coleman Barks poems. Only kinda Rumi-ish. (and yes I love Barks)

And so many of Basho’s poems have such subtlety that it may not even be possible to translate them at all. All the puns and hidden cultural meanings just vanish from the English translations. Case in point is his “old mill pond” poem with the frog and the sound of water. Pure zen, and pure Japanese.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the simplest way to describe the essence of what a haiku is would be to call it two images separated (and/or connected, depending on your point of view) by a huge floating associative leap. Leaping is the interior connection of two apparently unrelated objects in such a way that the reader gets the connection, moving from the conscious to the unconscious and back up again – the known to the unknown and back – from the outer world to the inner world and back out again, or vice versa.

The associative leaps that most people make in their thinking are usually short and obvious. For example, you think of summer, that leads to green grass, which maybe leads to mowing the grass which leads to being hot and thirsty which leads to lemonade. Short leaps. There are many good poems with short leaps, but usually the best ones have lots of leaps and they are very quick. But if you can make the leaps at the heart of a poem very large, then something inside us quivers in excitement and surprise. If you can make those vast leaps repeatedly and in rapid fire, and they cover the full emotional spectrum then something unspeakably profound happens inside us. (I highly recommend Bly’s marvelous paper on Leaping Poetry. (2) )

A perfect demonstration of associative leaping can be seen beautifully articulated by Antonio Carlos Jobim in his extraordinary song, “The Waters of March” in the first verse and chorus here:

A stick a stone
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of the stump
It’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass,
It is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death,
It’s a trap, it’s a gun.
The oak when it blooms,
A fox in the brush,
The knot in the wood,
The song of the thrush.
The wood of the wind,
A cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump,
It is nothing at all.
It’s the wind blowing free.
It’s the end of a slope.
It’s a beam, it’s a void,
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope.
And the riverbank talks.
Of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain,
It’s the joy in your heart. (5)

Outer world, inner world, outer world, inner world again and again in the blink of an eye. In my view, this is what lives and breathes at the heart of all art. Can you imagine what kind of person you have to be inside yourself to see all that? To say nothing of making it all visible to everyone else all over the world. Astonishing! I am so in awe of that song and that man’s work and consciousness, I can’t even begin to tell you.

—

So in addition to the structure and relationship of images in haiku and senryū, there is the issue of syllabic form. The way Japanese count syllables is called onji (linguists say mora (s) or morae (pl)). (6) Two letter combinations make up all words. For example, the word haiku – in English that’s 2 syllables but in Japanese it’s 3. Ha-ai-ku. In Japanese, a classic haiku is 5-7-5 onji but there are examples of 15, 16 and 18, some even from Basho himself. Many haiku contain a dash. The dash represents the kireji, or the cutting word. This is very difficult to describe in English as there is no analog. Mostly it is a pause, a break in both form and rhythm as well as in the flow of thought. Here’s one of my early morning walking poems as an example where you can see and feel the cut:

small boy spits at me
from a passing yellow bus –
misses

In the modern English language world of haiku writers there exists an enormous ongoing discussion about syllables and lines. I have seen terrific poems with as few as eleven syllables. Here’s one (7) with 10 syllables from the American master, John Wills:

rain in gusts
below the deadhead
troutswirl

and 9 syllables in this senryū from the brilliant Alexis Rotella:

not speaking
our shadows
keep touching

I think any poem that works, that is to say – it has somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 syllables, it leaps, has good images, a seasonal reference, something that reveals human nature through wild nature, and makes you FEEL – that’s a decent poem. But from my own experience, they are devilishly hard to do and though I have written hundreds of the little buggers, I am not certain many of them deserve the name haiku. Maybe a half dozen of mine actually work as haiku, and some are decent senryū. One of them is about the best thing I’ve ever written and I still hesitate to call it haiku. Wanna guess which, and why? 🙂

—

Here are three of mine:

sleepless summer night
through the open window
every distant laugh

—

daughter’s summer tent
mowing her porch
leaving the daisies

—

reflections
on the sea of grass
countless fireflies

**************************

Notes – links:

(1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senry%C5%AB

(2)
https://www.amazon.com/Leaping-Poetry-Idea-Poems-Translations/dp/0822960036/

(3)
http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2014/10/poetic-musings-broken-moonlight-haiku.html

(4)
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-senryu-poems

(5)
Waters of March – Susannah McCorkle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MNknFy2gdQ

(6)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(Japanese_prosody)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)

(7)
The poems of John Wills and Alexis Rotella are published in Cor Ven Den Heuvel’s marvelous book, “The Haiku Anthology” from back in 2000.
https://www.amazon.com/Haiku-Anthology-Third-Cor-Heuvel/dp/0393321185/
—

—

Mastering the Internal Critic – Our Gremlin

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The voice of the internal critic lives inside our very own head. There are many names for this ancient, invisible, and enormously influential wee beastie – the voice-over, the narrator, the internal critic, the gremlin, your conscience, your trip advisor, the mind, the ego, and so on. For the sake of brevity and convenience lets just call it a gremlin.

A gremlin’s job is to maintain the status quo. It’s always the voice of limitation. What it wants is to keep you safe, to keep you in a box, to never take a risk, never be exposed or vulnerable, to never get hurt. Nearly all our gremlins are created sometime in childhood as a survival response when a perceived threat to survival happened. When we were kids someone said something negative and hurtful, and they said it often enough over time that as a matter of self-defense we internalized their voice and started saying it to ourselves. We do this simply because it hurts less if we say it to ourselves than it does if someone else says it to us. Eventually we forget that commentary came from someone else, and we just believe that this noise, this internalized voice is telling the truth about who, what or how we are.

The problem is that human beings like and need to be fulfilled, or else life is not much fun. In order to be fulfilled we need to take risks, change behavior, grow and learn, try new things, explore new territory, stretch and develop new masteries, and etc. When we try to do all those new things, that’s when the gremlin shows up.

The gremlin says:

You can’t do that! You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, young enough, sexy enough, thin enough, rich enough, healthy enough – whatever. You’re too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too stupid, too smart, too white, too black, too sexy, not sexy enough, too male, too female – whatever the pairs of opposites are that come quickly to mind – you’re just not good enough, you are not worthy of it, you don’t deserve it, you better not even try.

The thing is that your gremlin is really not your enemy and you’ll never get rid of it. It is actually your friend because its entire interest is pegged to your survival. For example, if you are going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, you better listen to that voice when it says, “No, don’t do that, you’ll die!” So there are indeed times when you do want to listen to your gremlin.

The trouble is it’s really out of control. It generalizes over everything and it’s often confused about what actually concerns your survival and what does not. It’s highly sensitive and not very smart. Wait. Let me say that again:

A gremlin is highly sensitive and not very smart. (This is an amygdala function – always alert – very poor distinctions.)

Part of the challenge is also that it was created in childhood, so while its interest was our survival, it was usually focused on our emotional survival, not our actual physical survival. We had an experience where we felt we would die of embarrassment or shame, so the gremlin kicked in and now it rallies just as strongly about talking in front of people as it would have if we got chased by a bear. It cares about you not ever being embarrassed as much as it cares about you not ever stepping in front of a bus.

We want to take our power back, and specifically we want to reclaim our power to choose freely yes or no in all the places where we have the power of choice. The trick is for us to become in charge of our gremlin, so we can make our own choices about whether or not something is a real or perceived threat to our survival, instead of letting our gremlin choose for us. We want to use the gremlin as an advisor, but one we can override and say no to when appropriate.

What happens to most people is that they think they are the gremlin. We make no distinction between the human being, who we really are, and the survival voice of the gremlin going off inside our head. As a result, we buy into everything it says, because we think it’s us.

The way we work on this, and it’s very powerful work, is to learn to distinguish yourself from the gremlin. We have to see the difference between the gremlin and who we really are as a being. That is when we get our power back, the power to choose freely, right now in the present moment. What gives a gremlin power is its ability to hide, to remain invisible. So when we shine a spotlight on it, we take back our power to choose what we want for ourselves.

Once we see it, once we really know the gremlin is not who we are, then it’s just a matter of listening to the gremlin, evaluating what it says, and then choosing freely yes or no. Then the gremlin becomes an assistant, an advisor, or perhaps on occasion even a co-pilot.”Yes yes, you’re probably right. If I jump off this cliff I’ll just go splat and die, so I won’t do it. Instead I’ll go out for pizza with my friends, figure out how to open up emotionally a little more, and maybe they can help me understand what’s not working. Thank you for sharing.”

Or:

“You know, I probably won’t die if I go talk in front of all these people and it’s something I really need to do to grow my business, so thank you for sharing but I’m busy now. Please go sit on the bench until I’m done.”

There are three steps to handling a gremlin:

1) First step is to hear that inner voice, that commentary, and acknowledge that it’s not you – that it’s a gremlin. The criteria for recognizing whether or not something is a gremlin is to ask one question, “Is that voice speaking to my greatness or to my possibilities? Or is it speaking to my belief in my limitations?” (Notice how hard it is to imagine and admit that we might have possibility or some greatness stashed away here…)

All this requires is a process of inquiry and the honesty to tell yourself the truth. Just look and see. That insight and recognition has to come from inside you – nobody else can do this for you – just look inside and see what’s true.

2) Second step is for you to shine the spotlight on it. Ask yourself what exactly does the gremlin say? Many of my clients actually write down everything their gremlin says, word for word. Sometimes it’s one sentence, sometimes three pages, but externalizing the gremlin’s narrative will help you see the difference between who you really are and what the gremlin is telling you about yourself and the world around you.

Also if appropriate, give the gremlin a name, describe what it looks like, etc. I’ve had clients who have drawn, painted and/or created a sculpture of their gremlin out of play dough. When I was doing this work on myself I got one of those rubbery finger puppet monsters and named him Fred. One day I realized there was also a female version of that voice, so I got another finger puppet monster and named her Jane. (no offense intended to anyone named Fred or Jane.) Lemme tell ya – we have had some very enlightening conversations over the years…

3) Third step in how to handle the gremlin – in that moment when it starts yackin at you, the criticisms, the warnings, the admonitions – what can you say to it that gets it on the sidelines, puts it aside, moves it out of your way so you can move forward and accomplish the goal or objective, whatever it is you intend or want to achieve?

The point is that your gremlin is not actually your enemy. There is no need to kill it off completely and it’s not possible to do that anyway. That’s just resistance, and resistance inevitably creates persistence. Learn to work with the gremlin, but remember and realize that you actually have the power to choose.

The gremlin is not you, and in and of itself it has no power beyond what we surrender to it. Remember – it’s highly sensitive and not very smart. The gremlin cannot recognize the difference between a real threat versus a perceived threat – between a 3 year old in a tantrum, a pissed-off spouse, or a hungry bear. To the gremlin, anything that looks like trouble of any kind is going to be translated into a 3 alarm fire. It holds no distinctions – we do.

Stop – Listen – Distinguish – Reclaim Your Power – Choose – Act.

I hope you find this useful. If gremlin work is of interest to you, give me a shout.

Warm Regards,
🙂
Carmine
—

Missing Socks – Cosmic Mystery or Confirmation of the Multiverse?

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If you are curious and interested, we will gladly explain for you the mystery of missing socks once and forever. After more than a half-century of research our team has compiled sufficient empirical evidence to confirm our original hypothesis and graduate it into a theory. We even understand the math now. Sort of.

And just so we are clear, a theory is a profoundly higher order of certainty than a fact. For instance, the Theory of Evolution is confirmed by tens of thousands of facts from across all the scientific domains of human knowing. So far, in every field of science, every field of human study and research, not one single fact contradicts evolution – geology, cellular biology, biochemistry, anthropology, paleontology, genetics and on and on – everything we discover confirms the evolutionary processes of descent with modification through natural selection from evolutionary pressures over geologic time (along with mutation, genetic drift, migration, and more complex processes such as endosymbiosis). The same is true with the Gaia Hypothesis, which has also grown up to become Gaia Theory, now confirmed through observations, data, and empirical evidence from multiple disciplines.

What people really mean when they use “theory” in a pejorative way ( “It’s ONLY a theory.” they say. ) is hypothesis. Scientific method goes something like this – start by observing some phenomena in the natural world. Create an hypothesis for what the phenomena is and how or why it happens. Devise methods for testing that hypothesis until you can either break it or confirm it. Do your level best trying to break it and if you can’t break it then publish your results, and pass it along so others can try to break it. When many scientists over time have failed to break the hypothesis, and all have uncovered a sufficient array of facts that support the hypothesis, then the hypothesis grows up and graduates to become a theory. We have yet to find anything that contradicts evolution. Anywhere. Ever. Same with Gaia Theory.

There are two other requirements necessary for an hypothesis to become a theory. It needs to have highly accurate mathematical models, and those models need to make predictions that are later verified by real world observations. Been there, done that, got the outcomes. Science works. You know. Planes fly. And so on.

Now we come to the fun part: missing socks.

It turns out that the friction, heat and spinning of the dryer creates an intense electrical charge that generates a very small space-time warp, a teeny-tiny little wormhole vortex into which a sock occasionally drifts. The sock has to enter the vortex at just the correct angle, at just the proper speed, at just the perfect temperature, at just the right time – otherwise nothing happens. Good thing, because otherwise we’d all be barefoot forever.

That vortex is a link between various editions of the multiverse, which should be no big deal as congruent versions of the multiverse are quite similar to each other. So a sock slips through from over there coming thisaway at precisely the same time as one of ours slips though headed thataway and both remain as socks and nothing appears to change. Simultaneity, congruence and convergence all play a part here. Everything has to happen just right. and when it does, we don’t even notice that our sock has been replaced by a sock from a universe next door.

In any case, once in a while one of those wormhole vortexes extends quite a bit farther away and connects to a universe just a tad different from ours. When this happens, our sock goes away permanently, showing up in their universe as a sock, but their sock isn’t actually a sock. It’s a coat hanger. And this end of their vortex terminates in our clothes closet or laundry room.

Fascinating…

For some reason this dislocation oddity appears to be a function of a quirk of the quarks that queue up in the quantum-foam tunneling effect. They tend to quiver harmonically so that an unusual resonance untethers one terminus and the wormhole becomes unstable. Thus the probability wave collapses into manifestation as a dislocation, and therefore generates the curious and trans-dimensional quantification of socks and hangers as a quorum. We don’t yet know why, although there is quite a bit of speculation (eleven different hypotheses and at least 3 ongoing experiments of which I am aware) all looking for confirmation in non-causal domains which are unlikely to produce actual verifiable evidence. And remember, without evidence, it’s pure conjecture.

This is why we keep losing socks that are never seen again, but coat hangers multiply in our closets without any apparent source. In that other universe it’s just the reverse – coat hangers continue to vanish while socks multiply unreasonably. In any case, the lambda balance in the multiverse is sustained – there is neither the creation nor destruction of matter or energy and all of us get to persist and endure through time happy ever after.

And by the way, there is some evidence that these wormhole dislocations can also occasionally and randomly involve Tupperware lids, ink pens, eye glasses, beer bottle caps, dead flies, guitar picks, car keys, and/or rubber bands. In fact, we suspect it may be possible to map the structure of the multiverse by cataloging what items vanish from your household, and which items multiply and increase. Perhaps one day we might even be able to answer our most profound question – why is a mouse when it spins?

Again I say – fascinating. The research continues.

A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall – Or Not

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“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

Global warming at it’s simplest is little more than the imbalance between the heat energy received from the sun and held within the system, versus the heat energy reflected back into space. If we lose too much we get cold. If we gain too much we get hot. Ultimately that warming or cooling changes the climate itself up and down in very precise natural cycles. But over the last two hundred years, and especially in the last 50, something has gone terribly wrong. There is way too much carbon in the atmosphere, and there is a serious imbalance in the planetary heat gain. Excess energy (0.58 watts per square meter) is not being re-radiated back out into space at the same levels it has been in easily-tracked cycles for the last 4 million years. Zero point five eight watts doesn’t sound like much until you factor in the total surface of the earth and crunch the numbers. As someone recently posted, that heat gain imbalance is equivalent to exploding three Hiroshima-sized bombs into the oceans every second since 1961. That is enough extra heat to vaporize the entire water content of Sydney Harbor every 12 hours.

Earth’s Energy Budget Remained Out of Balance Despite Unusually Low Solar Activity (2012)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20120130b/

There is a pretty simple way to think about this if you understand a bit of the background. For starters, a tree grows and as it does it sequesters carbon in its tissues, in the lignin and the cellulose, the sugars and starches in it’s sap, and etc.. If we humans come along and cut down that tree to burn for heat, then we are releasing the stored carbon from solar gain over a time period equal to that tree’s life span – so fifty, a hundred, maybe two hundred years. That’s not a lot of of carbon output in the greater scheme of things, at least not on any time scales that matter to climate.

The problem is two-fold and really started a couple hundred years ago when we discovered fossil fuels and began to dig them up out of the ground to burn. When we did that, we started releasing millions of years of sequestered carbon in a time scale that is literally overnight when compared to the geologic time scale during which all that carbon was put away. Additionally, all that incredibly powerful and cheap energy gave us the option to apply it to our food supply, and of course as every biologist can tell you, when you increase the food supply you increase the population. Almost our entire food supply now is converted oil, and one consequence of that fact means that there are over 7 billion of us, all spewing out formerly-sequestered carbon from fossil fuels. Additionally we are taking over and converting to farms all those wildlands formerly sequestering carbon as old growth forest, grassland and prairie, peat bog, jungle and so on. As human fossil fuel consumption and carbon outgassing increases, the natural living systems that provide planetary climate resilience are decreasing – all as a result of human activities.

If you think about this in terms of an annual solar gain/carbon budget, then anytime we generate or consume energy within the domain of a year’s worth of solar gain (or even within 200 years as in the case of a big old maple) then we are not adding substantially to the carbon side of the equation. Cows, corn, trees, soybeans, termites and so on are all within the annual carbon/solar gain budget for the living systems of the planet. You can even see this principle in action if you look at a graph of carbon measurements over time. Carbon in the northern hemisphere goes up in the winter, and down in the summer. This happens because all summer long the trees and grasses and flowers are taking in carbon and turning it to body mass. In the winter everything sleeps, so the carbon builds up in the atmosphere. (I would include a graph from NOAA here but their web site is shut down because of those idiots in Congress.) That cycle is the planetary breath of life – in and out.

None of what we do would matter all that much if we were sticking to that annual in/out carbon/solar gain budget and if there were only a half a billion of us. But because we are so many and we are releasing hundreds of millions of years of stored carbon formerly sequestered in fossil fuels in only a couple centuries we have become significant agents of change in the large scale carbon cycles that generate climate and ultimately, the weather. What we add that is outside the annual carbon/solar gain budget is all about outgassing the fossil fuels and disabling the global living systems of natural resilience.

The carbon balance in the atmosphere is and has been incredibly finely tuned over the last 4 million years with only the tiniest fraction of a CO2 shift causing global climate change as regular as a heartbeat. Remember, we are talking about a ridiculously powerful gas that alters the entire climate of the planet from ice age to an interglacial and back by simply shifting 100 parts per million up or down – from 180 ppm during a glaciation, to 280 ppm during an interglacial and back again. That is an absurdly tiny amount of gas that produces an 18 to 25 degree up or down global average temperature change in a highly stable cycle for millions of years, but that’s how it works and that’s what the global living system does. In our earth system, temperature, methane and CO2 are coupled, so whatever happens to one happens to all and it doesn’t matter which one goes up or down first – with a bit of a lag time, as soon as one moves the others follow – in a time scale measured in years or a few decades. Normally it begins with a shift in the Milankovich Cycles, but we have seen other triggers on many occasions. We have excellent physical evidence, observation and empirical data for how this happens.

Because of fossil fuels, we humans are adding about 4 gigatons of extra CO2 into the atmosphere per year for at least the last 25 years, and the rate of release is accelerating way above the normal annual cycles. The oceans and other natural processes have soaked up some part of that carbon already but not enough, and as a result of that extra carbon (over 400 ppm as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory this past summer during the Northern hemisphere peak output) there is now a gross imbalance in the in/out exchange of energy (solar heating versus planetary re-radiation of that heat back into space.) The planet is heating, both the atmosphere and the oceans themselves – most of the excess heat going into the oceans because the atmosphere holds only about 2 percent of that gain. Remember, as I mentioned above, temperatures, CO2 and methane are coupled in this living system, so whatever happens to one happens to all.

So, we are already at 120+ ppm above and beyond the concentration that normally creates a natural global warming into an interglacial period from a glacial epoch, and we haven’t even included methane which would push us up at least another 50 ppm. (not to mention increased water vapor held in the atmosphere from the extra warming, and nitrous oxide and a whole raft of other powerful greenhouse gases)

How do we know that it comes from human activity? Here’s the thing – we can fingerprint the isotopes of carbon. We have a very good data set about all the natural processes, how much carbon comes from volcanoes, from forests, from a tailpipe or a chimney, how much is captured by the oceans and so on. Plus we have very accurate data about atmospheric concentrations going back hundreds of thousands of years. Natural processes cannot explain the extra CO2 that we are seeing, and that rapid rise began at the same time as the industrial revolution. We know with a high degree of certainty what is normal for this planet when we look at the hard data in ice cores and sediments from glacial epochs during the last 4 million years. The current climate change direction is unprecedented. For the last 4 million years the pattern has been extremely stable – glacial – interglacial – glacial – interglacial, over and over and over again.

Now…

The global climate – as well as all the weather generated by that climate – is driven by a steep temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. When it is very cold at the poles and very hot at the equator, the dissipation of heat energy along that gradient compels the jet stream to act as a laminar flow, going around the poles at a very high rate of speed, keeping all that dense, dry, very cold air right over the poles. That also means that the weather systems progress around the planet in a fairly rapid and orderly pattern. Rain today, sun tomorrow and so on, all the highs and lows moving along in sequence like boxcars on a train track.

The poles heat first and fastest. When the energy gradient between the poles and the equator becomes shallow, such as is happening now because of all the extra CO2 and other GHGs (like water vapor) which are retaining heat in the atmosphere, then the jet stream loses energy and instead of acting as a laminar flow (separating very cold and dry air masses from very wet and warm air masses) it begins to meander, with peaks of warm tropical air extending way up into the Arctic where it should never go, and cold dry air slipping way down deep into the tropics where it should never go. Additionally, that loss of energy in the jet stream creates what are called blocking patterns, cut-off highs and lows that anchor in place and keep the weather systems stuck in place instead of progressing eastward in an orderly fashion, distributing their energy from place to place as they move in an easterly direction.

Dr. Jennifer Francis
Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spEuh8vswE

We have seen this pattern of over-the-top extreme storms and broken records again and again around the planet in the last 10 years, everywhere from Pakistan, Italy, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Mexico, South America, as well as in dozens of places around North America – with Sandy of course, and with Colorado, the floods in Texas, Louisiana and Maryland simply being the most recent. The jet stream locks in place, and whatever is under it or on either side of it just gets hammered and hammered and hammered. It doesn’t matter if it’s a baking hot spell and drought that wipes out crops and generates massive megafires such as in Europe and Russia in 2003 and 2010 and recently in California and the Pacific Northwest, or as a freight train of low pressure systems that dump a year’s worth of rain in two days. The cause is the same – forced abrupt climate change due to human-caused global warming generated by our dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere.

We have many factors at play in the climate system: the co-opting of enormous areas of wild landscapes and natural living systems for agriculture, massively increasing population, multiple positive feedbacks (forest fires, soot, ice loss, permafrost melting), the loss and redistribution of natural carbon sinks such as eHux, and consumption of fossil fuels at a scale never imagined. Human activity is destroying the natural capacity for carbon pump-down. On a healthy earth, carbon residence time in the atmosphere has been about a hundred years. Now it’s up to at least 800 years, so even if we stopped all carbon outputs tomorrow – totally ended it – we still face a thousand years of heating just from all the carbon we have up there now. As William Catton says in his book, “Overshoot” we have become Homo Colossus. A half billion humans would not do much to this planet. But 7 billion plus are changing the atmospheric chemistry and the oceanic chemistry to such a point that we are making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves and all the other species who are adapted to a temperate climate.

We are forcing a heating that has not been seen on this planet in 55 million years, not since the PETM. The reality is inescapable. The data doesn’t lie. The living systems and infrastructure developed by human beings will not be able to withstand the speed, intensity, duration and violence of the weather systems generated by the current level of global warming. Never in all of human evolution have we as a species had to contend with a hot state planet. And when the PETM hit all those millions of years ago the earth was already in a hot state. All the species then were well adapted to heat, both dry and humid. Remember, this was a time when there were crocodiles in North Dakota and date palms on Baffin Island. Even so, when the climate popped hot into the PETM we still lost over 70 percent of all species globally.

There is a direct causal link between human activity, CO2, climate change and the pattern of intense, chaotic, and extremely violent weather systems that have been and will continue to dismantle human infrastructure. Eventually those weather systems will destroy modern agriculture as we know it and that will pretty much be it for this current human civilization. Without food you don’t have population. Without population you can’t support our incredibly complex technology and that’s pretty much that. We have seen this pattern of environmental degradation preceding the collapse of every civilization that came before us. There is not a damn thing we can do about it. We bought it, we broke it and now it’s time to pay the piper.

Instead of cooling slowly until we hit the critical threshold (tipping point) where the climate flips cold and into the next glacial epoch, we are now in the early stages of an unnatural climate shift, going the wrong way, out-of-cycle, to a hot state climate that this planet hasn’t seen in 55 million years. All our contemporary species here now are cool-adapted for a temperate planet and very few will survive into the new hot-state environment. That most likely includes us humans. Just wait until the methane bombs kick in from the clathrates and the permafrost. We are in the initial stages of the climate flip right now. Within 50 years this entire planet will be well on the way into an entirely different climate state.

And if you still have doubts, consider this – as Peter Sinclair says in a video on his Climate Denial Crock of the Week series: http://climatecrocks.com/

“Scientists at NASA collected, compiled and compared 29,500 data sets of natural rhythms – physical and biological markers such as migration of birds, blooming of flowers, migration and spawning of fish, dates of mountain snow-melt, peak flow of mountain-fed streams – 90 percent of the changes were in a direction “expected as a response to warming.” The lesson here is that birds, rivers, lakes, fish and glaciers have no political agenda, but climate deniers and their wealthy sponsors do. And the very same people who told you that weapons of mass destruction were real are telling you that climate change is not. We will never know all the answers to the questions about climate, but what real scientists are telling us is that climate change is real, we are doing it, the consequences are dire, and we need to stop.”

the actual study:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/abs/nature06937.html

That’s what we are facing now, and whether you agree with the cause or not, can we afford to ignore these changes?

Welcome to the Holocene Extinction Part 2.

Welcome to a brave new world…
—–
Here are several reference web sites for additional reading on the current state of climate science:

Best site on the web for explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Alder Stone’s essay: Why large-scale, abrupt climate change (probably) cannot be stopped (& we must, thus, increase our adaptability)
http://alderstone3.com/?page_id=433

Spencer Weart’s complete hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

National Academy of Sciences – Climate Change booklet (pdf)
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18730/climate-change-evidence-and-causes

NOAA Global Warming FAQ
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/global-warming.php

Who Are You?

6 Replies

Yes. I mean that.

Really.

Who are you?

Most people have no idea what to say when asked that question. In fact, most people have no idea even of what to think when asked that question. It’s a show-stopper.

And Byron Katie ( www.thework.com ) adds an additional layer of confusion and exponentially-explosive possibility when she asks that question in a marvelously expanded way, “Who are you without your story?”

You want to cause trouble, ask THAT question. It’s a sure-fire way to stir things up. Works every time.

One of the deepest and most troubling curses of the modern age – and I suspect with a few rare exceptions this has been true of humans for millennia, at least since that moment when we left our lives as foragers and took up agriculture – is this mis-identification of self (identity) as form or content. In other words, we believe we are our story: our thoughts, our feelings, our roles, our beliefs, our doctrine and dogma, our jobs, our cars, our relationships, our wounds, our bodies, our history and so on.

We have come to believe we are the construct – that survival-driven, painfully and carefully-built assemblage of identification-with. We have lost touch with the magnificent experience of being (in the moment and in the felt-sense experience of our bodies) and have come to believe we are the story about the doing and having of our day-to-day lives. The relentless machinery of our survival mind now identifies content as self and self as content, and our survival is dependent upon the persistence of our point of view. We are completely convinced that this is THE WAY IT IS! And sadly, that conviction leaves us utterly powerless.

Additionally, the machine mind (ego) believes that its content – our story – all those thoughts, interpretations, assumptions, beliefs, identities, and perspectives – are true and real, and that we MUST act on whatever feelings come up connected to those thoughts. Because the survival mind machinery cannot differentiate between our thoughts and feelings in the story – between what is real and what is in our heads – that toxic confusion of thoughts and feelings becomes hypnotic and compelling drivers of words and actions based in fear, disconnection and otherness. And all that is amplified because our limbic system cannot differentiate between a real threat and a perceived threat. Our biology cannot distinguish between a co-worker throwing a tantrum and a hungry bear.

This is a problem.

Every example of what we consider to be real evil in the human world (other than the presence and behavior of true psychopaths, malignant narcissists, and others with Cluster-B disorders and their related identity disturbances ) is a result of this confusion of identity (self as content) and the resulting disconnection from being and presence (authentic self). As a result of the imprinting, constraints and distractions of the overculture, the machine mind, its thoughts, perceptions, assumptions, interpretations and conclusions are profoundly disordered. We have no access to the present moment, and the felt-sense of the feeling body is numbed. We are disconnected from the real world as it is and dwell almost entirely in the fictional world in our heads – our story.

This state of spiritual unconsciousness has truly disastrous consequences for all of planet earth, every being and every species, globally. As a species we humans are the planetary apex predator. We consume everything and we really need to own that about ourselves. We must either grow through this numb unconsciousness and disconnection from our being in the natural world or we will die off, taking nearly all of the planetary biome with us.

Well, all of that still leaves us with the primary question – who are you? Perhaps we now have a bit more clarity about what we are not, but how do we answer the question of who we are?

This reminds me of the zen lesson embodied inside one of the most famous koans of all time:

The zen master sat in stillness with the student for the entire morning. Then, without preamble he said, “The two hands, when brought together quickly will produce the sound of two hands clapping.” and he demonstrated this by clapping his two hands together loudly. Then he held out only one hand and posed the question, “What is the sound of the one hand clapping?”

Now, this is where it gets really tricky, because you see – there is only one true, correct answer to that zen riddle and it’s not possible to figure it out. You can’t think your way to it. You can’t use logic, reason, science, math, art, music, past experience or serendipity – nothing in our culture prepares us for that question. It is intended to actively confound the mind. You can only get there through genuine insight. The masters know this, and every time you respond with an answer from the mind, they know it. They can tell exactly where you are in your mind by hearing what you have to say in response to any of those hundreds of koans. It’s like the punchline of a great joke told by a cosmic comedian. Understanding is not the same as getting it. You know you got it when you are sitting there trying not to wet yourself because you are laughing so hard. When you get it, you get it and you know you got it. The direct experience of being is the same way. Understanding may come later and actually isn’t all that useful, but the moment of awakening is unique to itself. You just can’t fake authenticity.

The sound of the one hand is like that. So is the answer to the question, “Who are you?”

Now, I can tell you who I am, and while this comes directly from my experience, my telling you isn’t going to do you any good unless you can be in the direct experience of being for yourself – without the filters of the mind. Part of the challenge in this is that my speaking of being reduces into language something that words cannot contain. As Mikhail Naimy so famously said in “The Book of Mirdad” – “Words are, at best, honest lies.” Or spoken another way, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” The most I can hope for in my coaching work with clients is to point at the moon. The rest is up to the client. We get out what we put in.

So – things that make you go hmmm – here’s one:

Who I am is the witness – an aware, compassionate, presence of attention – an empty space in which experience occurs.

The trouble is, that’s just bullshit. Self is an illusion. If I can say it, that’s not it. Who I am is not any thing. As someone famous may have said – not this, not that. To be more precise, who I am is no thing. Nothing.

See? I just delivered my punchline and it’s useless to you. And I warned you it wouldn’t do you any good. All you have is a bunch of words describing something that happened to someone else. Perhaps if you are lucky, it’s a finger pointing at the moon. But that’s my experience and you’ve gotta get yours for yourself. Figuring it out and understanding it will not work here.

It’s kinda funny though. Hysterical in fact. That’s exactly the point. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to to do, and nothing to get.

You got it.

And as they say, when you really get it, the truth will set you free. It will also royally piss you off. And then you’ll giggle like a five-year-old who just heard the preacher fart.

Go ahead. Wet yourself laughing. It’ll be awesome.

What’s Up With Boundaries?

3 Replies

07/22/16

If we grew up in a family or a society (such as this current overculture – industrial civilization and most of its ancestors) that does not have and/or does not accept, acknowledge and respect healthy boundaries then we have no models for what they are, how they work, or how we manage boundaries for ourselves or with others. Although we can feel the consequences, typically boundaries are invisible to us and those around us. As a side note, if we grew up in an abusive family then we are certain to have all kinds of trouble with boundaries. It can take years of inner work to repair that childhood damage.

This issue – boundary failure – is the dividing line between taker-societies driven by domination and power-over versus giver-societies living from consent and respect. First thing to know: if we have trouble with boundaries it’s not our fault. AND: as adults we are responsible for figuring out what boundaries are, how they work and what we need to do to function well. No one else can do this work for us.

Healthy boundaries work in several directions: First, they keep you from taking onto yourself that which does not belong to you – other people’s crap, their judgments and criticisms, their values and beliefs, their agenda for you, the troubles and problems that are rightfully theirs and so on.

Second, healthy boundaries keep you from surrendering to others that which does rightfully belong to you – your power, your autonomy, your own choices, your agenda for yourself, your integrity, your ability to walk your own path and learn your own lessons and etc.

There is a third piece around boundaries – and that is that healthy boundaries allow IN those things others wish to give us that we DO deserve – love, affection, the gifts of generosity and kindness and etc. Healthy boundaries support and encourage these kinds of reciprocal bonding exchanges that allow us to receive and accept what others want to give to us because they love us and wish us well.

Remember also that anger has a significant evolutionary role that has contributed to our survival as individuals and as a species. Anger lets us know when our boundaries are being violated in some way and it helps to keep us safe. There absolutely are times when the full expression of anger really is totally necessary, appropriate and effective. The trick is knowing which is which and then coming from choice and intention in expressing the right emotion to the right person to the right degree at the right time. Women especially get disconnected from their rightful and righteous appropriate anger by the varied oppressions of the overculture.

These emotional intelligence skills are deeply rooted in our biology, as we only have ancestors who could quickly read motive and intention and differentiate between friend and enemy. Those who could not do this well simply did not survive.

There is another source of anger that can be quite difficult, and that is managing our expectations of how we think our life should be turning out. When we believe that someone or something is in the way of what we need or what we want we then argue with reality – we say, “It shouldn’t be like this!” or the reverse, “It should be different!” In either case, I am reminded of the old saying, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And of course as the brilliant Byron Katie says, “When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100% of the time.” We only suffer when we believe our thoughts and argue with what is.

If we have not fully integrated our anger then it manifests as aggression. Once we do that inner work on emotional integration, then the emotional energy of anger becomes assertion, and assertion one of the primary gateways through which we create, have and hold healthy boundaries.

Usually, people who have not done that inner work themselves cannot distinguish between assertion and aggression in others, so they tend to see what they themselves hold. So if you are being assertive, they can misinterpret your strength as aggression and will often try to gaslight you into doubting yourself, either your perceptions or your actions.

Boundaries can be very difficult until our emotional body awakens and our attention and consciousness is fully present in the now. Only then do we begin to see the connections – the inner links between cause and effect – and our behavior, our choices, our decision-making and problem-solving become both accurate and wise.