The Chris Centered Universe

Political Films

2007-03-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

We live in a country where both sides in most political debates are usually wrong. It baffles me sometimes. It almost seems like the debates that are freely discussed in public are designed to give each side ammunition to discredit the other. Let's take the subject of political films and Michael Moore, for example. His movie "Fahrenheit 911", was designed to show audiences that George W. Bush is an incompetent president and that he demonstrated very weak leadership during the 911 tragedy. All of this was true. But Moore went on to paint a picture of our government, and particularly the Bush family, as being controlled by the rulers of Saudi Arabia. This distortion totally undermined the power of his film and gave conservatives an easy out to dismiss the whole shebang as boneheaded propaganda.

Now we have the Oscar-winning Al Gore, and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." As I understand it, the main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100. The inconvenient truth is that there is not much scientific support for this doomsday scenario.

To be sure, global warming is frightening, but the only thing that can be said about it with accuracy is that we currently don't know how high the environmental price we are paying really is for our consumption of fossil fuels - let alone, specifically, how Greenland will be affected. We are driving down a road heading for a cliff in the fog, and we really have no idea how much farther we have to drive before we reach the cliff. That is scary, but it is a different message than "Stop the car right now, or we are all going to die!"

Gore's movie will ultimately give the morons who deny the reality of global warming weapons against more sober-minded politicians when they attempt to argue the subject with scientific facts. Inevitably there will be a temporary reversal in polar ice melting and those on the other side of the debate will declare victory. I suspect that in the long run, "An Inconvenient Truth" will do more harm than good.

If only the general public would pay money to watch the political documentaries produced by Frontline and Nova. Maybe if they hired Quentin Tarantino. I can see it now, Frontline and Quentin Tarantino present "The Naughty Nurses of Walter Reed Medical Center."

Return of the Blog

2007-01-27T04:34:00.000-08:00

I took four months off from blogging. I didn't plan it that way. I just got out of the habit and the next thing I knew, four months had gone by.

So, I am going to try to get back in the habit.

So here is my synopsis of the last four months:

October: I mainly remember these two kids that came by my house on Halloween and scooped up over half the candy in this big bowl that I held out. They would have taken all of it if I hadn't said "Hey c'mon!" and yanked the bowl back. The parent of these two kids was right there and didn't say anything. The whole thing was frightening beyond belief. Demons really do come out and roam the earth on Halloween.

November: The Democratic Party totally waxed the Republican Party in the November elections. I could not have been happier. Gridlock is good. Also, I ate some turkey somewhere. I can't remember.

December: I celebrated 25 years of continuous sobriety in December. That was cool. I gave this 6-year-old nephew of mine a Spider Man Playstation 2 game for Christmas and he learned how to run the controls in this amazing hyper speed. It was freaky to watch. It was expecially remarkable since the kid can't read the instructions. I guess that kind of concentration comes from not having a lot of other crap bouncing around in your brain. Or maybe the opportunity of pretending you are Spider Man when you are six is more motivating than anything I can imagine at 43. December was also the month I really got to know Gerri, who is now my girlfriend. I think it is cool that when people ask "Who is that couple over there?" and they get told, "Oh that is Chris and Gerri," they won't know which one of us is Chris and which is Gerri.

January: This January will be forever remembered for the beginning of my relationship with Gerri, and for the Ice Storm of 2007. Schools were closed for an entire week because of icey roads. I have never seen that happen before. Meanwhile, I drive a Jeep Wrangler so I drove anywhere I pleased, anytime I pleased. At times I was the only one on the road. I felt like Charlton Heston in Omega Man. I love my Jeep.

A Puzzle for Myranda

2006-09-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

My lady-friend Lynda has a 7-year-old daughter named Myranda Bahr. Myranda is very precocious and she loves attention. From what I gather, her mom was reading my blog recently and Myranda saw that I was talking about Pokemon, the passion of her older brother. Myranda asked nicely if I would write a blog entry about her. I have a hard time resisting her, so to make it interesting, I decided to give Myranda a puzzle for her to solve: I scrambled the letters of another phrase to come up with this phrase:

Barry and Ham

Myranda Bahr, if you can solve this puzzle, write your answer in a comment.

Ernest Becker Part 2

2006-09-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more quotes from Denial of Death by Ernest Becker regarding what it means to be neurotic:

"We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways."

"But the whole thing becomes more complex when we see how the lies about reality begin to miscarry. Then we have to apply the label “neurotic.”"

"Generally speaking we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need."

"It is one thing to ritually wash one’s hands three times; it is another to wash them until the hands bleed and one is in the bathroom most of the day. Here we see in pure culture, as it were, what is at stake in all human repression: the fear of life and death. Safety in the face of the real terror of creature existence is becoming a real problem for the person. He feels vulnerable—which is the truth! But he reacts too totally, too inflexibly. He fears going out in the street, or up in elevators, or into transportation of any kind. At this extreme it is as though the person says to himself "If I do anything at all…I will die.""

"We can see that the symptom is an attempt to live, an attempt to unblock action and keep the world safe. The fear of life and death is encapsulated in the symptom. If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom—say, hand washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage. We might say that the symptom represents the locus of the performance of heroism. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or single fear."

"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself."

"Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem."

"From this point of view the difference between the artist and the neurotic seems to boil down largely to a question of talent. If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into. On the other hand, he still needs himself to be the hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way—at least not for long."

"In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum."

“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.”

Back to the subject of Penn Gillette and his criticism of A.A. and the twelve steps: When Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous, they shared Becker's insights regarding the inability of psychology to address the fundamental problem of alcoholism (or for that matter any other neurosis). Psychologists of that era were deeply frustrated with alcoholics. They understood that self-awareness was ineffective but they lacked the basic insight of Becker that any effective solution must be have a spiritual component or it is doomed to fail. More about this in my next blog entry.

Ernest Becker Part 1

2006-09-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

Last week I caught the tail end of an episode of the cable TV show Bullshit starring Penn & Teller. Penn & Teller are members of the Skeptical Society, an organization that investigates claims of the paranormal and exposes them as, well... bullshit. It is a tradition that goes back to the days of Harry Houdini, when it became very popular to visit "spirit mediums" and chat with your dead relatives. Houdini exposed many of these people as con artists, and in this respect, Penn Gillette is continuing in the Houdini tradition.

The show Bullshit includes subjects like Scientology and UFO abductions, and it can be very entertaining to watch. Last week's show was about A.A. and the Twelve Steps.

Now this subject is near and dear to my heart and to watch it be attacked as irrational and religion-based by Penn Gillette, someone that I generally respect, stirred up a powerful desire in me to respond. There are a lot of things I would say to Penn Gillette in defense of A.A. and the Twelve Steps if I could. For example, there is the free market argument: If another approach was better, then why wouldn't IT be in 97% of the drug and alcohol treatment centers, and why wouldn't people be court-ordered to their meetings instead?

However, I believe the best argument I could make to a rational scientific minded atheist like Penn Gillette would be to introduce him to Ernest Becker. Dr. Becker helped me to see the exquisite rationality behind A.A.'s twelve steps and to my knowledge he never wrote one word on the subject. According to Wikipedia:

"Dr. Ernest Becker (1925-March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia), a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer, came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion...

Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science pigeonholes (given the independence of his thinking in the 1960s), Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that his enormous contributions began to be recognized."

I reread much of "The Denial of Death" over the weekend and I copied down a few quotes that I wish to include in my blog. First here are some choice quotes from Dr. Becker about the nature of the problem, i.e. why we are all crazy:

"...the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."

"We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality with finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew."

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries gill marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."

"I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right..."

"[As Pascal put it] “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same."

"The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would; by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness to both the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action..."

"...to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality."

"But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal..."

In my next blog entry I will provide some Becker quotes on what it means to be really neurotic, in other words: neurotic in the eyes of our neurotic society. Alcoholics and drug addicts certainly fall into this category. Then I will provide some Becker quotes about the solution to the problem, and my own thoughts about how the twelve steps of A.A. fit in this picture.

UFOs at the Zoo

2006-09-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

Friday night was a very special night here in Oklahoma City. Our very own Flaming Lips played a magical concert at the Zoo Amphitheater. The Lips also took the opportunity to film their upcoming live DVD during that performance. I had a fantastic time as did everyone I knew that attended. In a prior article on this blog, I mentioned that I had met Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and that we had several mutual friends. Well, in case you doubted me, here we are hanging out after the show.

More Future Disasters

2006-09-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

The editors of Popular Science this month chose to commemorate the first anniversary of Katrina by listing the top 5 disasters that the U.S. can expect in the future. (I guess great minds think alike.) In my earlier article, I missed one completely and it is this:

Glacial melting in Greenland causes a freshwater cap in the North Atlantic. This stalls the circulation of warm water from the South and shifts the climate. All of civilization bordering the North Atlantic would be severely affected. The Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada along with all of Europe would experience a little ice age. Such a shift happened in the period 1550 to 1850. The worst part of this disaster is that if it only lasts 300 years like the last time we'll be lucky.

Also, I mentioned the possiblity of a big Tsunami hitting the U.S., but not mentioning La Palma was my bad. The following two paragraphs are straight from Wikipedia.

"La Palma is not only the steepest island in the world but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canary Isles in the past 500 years. The last few eruptions in the ridge were in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, and 1971. During the 1949 eruption, a two kilometer-long fracture opened and parts of the western half of the Cumbre Vieja ridge slipped several meters downwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. The fracture can quite easily be seen to this day. It is believed that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island.

Scientists warn that in some future eruption within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, approximately 500km3 of land weighing an estimated 500 billion tons, will slide into the ocean -- a so called "lateral collapse". Should that happen, the resulting megatsunami would reach local heights of well over 300 meters and the speed of a jetliner, reaching the African coast in three hours, the coast of England in five, and the eastern seaboard of North America in eight. This could greatly damage if not completely destroy cities along the United States' east coast, such as New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami with 25 to 30m high waves."

Now how cool is that?

Finally, I also failed to adequately cover the potential devastation from a hurricane hitting the city of Miami directly. This oversite was natural given that I am a life-long OU football fan and I have an aversion to anything involving Miami Hurricanes.

A Tale of International Business

2006-09-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend has a son that is totally into Pokémon. So, when I stumbled across an article about Pokémon at Wikipedia.com, I was curious enough to read it. The most interesting fact I learned about the Nintendo multi-billion dollar media franchise was that even though it is Japanese in origin, the name “Pokémon” is not Japanese, and Pokémon was not the original name under which the product was marketed in the United States. Originally, the name for the game was “Pocket Monsters.”

I think I know why Nintendo chose to change the name. It was to avoid the possible confusion that might result when overhearing this conversation in the back of a grade-school classroom:

“Dude, show Billy your Pocket Monster. I have been telling him how awesome it is ever since you showed it to me yesterday.”

“No way. If the teacher sees me playing with it, she’ll want to hold it until school gets out.”

Can you imagine the conversation about the name change decision in the Nintendo boardroom.

“Tajiri-san, we have to change the name of our Poketto Monsutā product in the English-speaking market. It will cost 30 million yen, and set our marketing plans back 18 months.”

“I don’t understand. Why must we do this?”

“Tajira-san, over 15% of our English-speaking focus group identified the English translation of Pocketto Monsutā as a possible slang term for a penis.”

"Surely, you are joking."

"No sir, I am very serious. The term is not commonly used in America. However, it is close enough to the commonly used penis metaphors: 'pocket rocket' and 'pocket weasel' that the interpretation cannot be avoided. The problem seems to be with the word pocket."

“I will never understand how these barbarians ended up running the planet.”

Future Disasters

2006-08-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

This week marked the anniversary of Katrina, and I thought it would be fun to make a list of all the disasters that I have read about that are certain to happen in the United States of America sometime in the future.

1. A major hurricane hits the City of New Orleans causing it to be flooded and resulting in hundreds of thousands of displaced residents. Done. Could it happen again? Damn straight.

2. Mount Rainier erupts. Rainier is covered with ice and the stability of the volcano is constantly being eroded by subsurface water. So when it erupts, it tends to collapse like Mt. St. Helens in a huge avalanche that flows into the sea. The last really big one was 5,000 years ago. If an eruption like that happened today, the towns of Tacoma, Payallup and Orting would be wiped out by pyroclastic mud flows. South Seattle would also be severely damaged. The good news is that Bill Gates would be likely to experience lengthy power and communications outages proving that there really is such a thing as karma.

3. A major earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone wipes out the city of Memphis, causes major damage to St. Louis, disrupting telecommunications throughout the country and giving new meaning to the phrase Rocking at Graceland. The good news would be that the staff at the Memphis Holiday Inn Downtown would likely be casualties.

4. I like this one. A massive solar flare hits Earth just right causing the Earth’s magnetosphere to be temporarily disrupted. Satellites get fried. Astronauts in orbit get lethal doses of radiation (so sad). Jet airliners will drop out of the sky like DDT-soaked houseflies because their electronics become crispy-fried, marking the beginning of a new era of high-speed ocean travel. Most of the world is plunged into darkness because power grids are also crispy-fried. And here is the best part, the power outages last for months. The good news is that billions of people will discover for the very first time that there are stars in the sky at night.

5. An asteroid hits the planet. We all know this scenario. Supersonic shockwaves, tremendous heat. Mass extinction. Blah blah blah.

6. A big California quake hits S.F. or L.A. Blah³.

7. A BF rock hits the planet. This happens far more often than most people think. Rocks about 10 meters in size hit the atmosphere and blow up with the force of an atomic bomb blast about once a year. However, they are so high up, that their impact is not even felt on the ground. Much bigger rocks, say 100 meters across, blow up with hydrogen bomb type energies. They wipe out stuff on the ground. It appears to have last happened in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. If that happened today, it would look to everyone just exactly like a high altitude hydrogen bomb detonation. I don’t think that would be good.

8. Bird flu becomes contagious between humans. Blah etc. etc.

9. Huge underwater landslide causes massive tidal wave to hit US. Most likely this would hit someplace like Tacoma, Washington. So if Mt. Rainier erupted at the exact same time, that would be really cool.

10. Here is another of my favorites: The Super Volcano known as the Yellowstone Caldera erupts causing most of North America to be uninhabitable. There are other super volcanoes and any of them stepping on the throttle would make it bad for all of us, but I prefer to talk about our own little time bomb underneath Yellowstone National Park. It’s last major eruption was 640,000 years ago (give or take). It made Mt. Saint Helens look like one of those little wads of paper you throw on the sidewalk so it pops. It blanketed most of North America with volcanic ash. If this were to happen today, the good news is that the war by the U.S. to annex Mexico, Central and South America should be fairly short.

I am sure I’ll think of a few others. Have a nice day.

TWA Flight 800

2006-08-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

As I write this entry to my blog, the top story of the morning is that in London, a plot to blow up airliners over the ocean has been foiled and security on international flights is now much stricter and they are confiscating all liquids and gels from people's luggage. Coincidentally, last night I watched a documentary on the crash of TWA Flight 800 on the History Channel.

As you may recall, Flight 800 was a New York to Paris Boeing 747 that exploded over Long Island in 1996 killing all 230 passengers. You can read all about it here: Wikipedia on Flight 800.

Now, before I share my thoughts on Flight 800 and this documentary, I want to say that I am a very skeptical guy when it comes to conspiracy theories. I believe that most conspiracy theories are nonsense invented by someone that finds more comfort in believing that there is some evil cabal running world events, then the stark truth, which is that no one is running anything. Furthermore, the reason the truth is often hard to believe is usually due to somebody's unfathomable incompetence.

I am fairly confident that the Roswell crash was a top secret ballooning experiment. I think it is most likely that Oswald acted alone. I think it likely that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building.

That said, I must say that Flight 800 is a different story. If I am to believe the official version, then I must accept that the jet spontaneously blew itself up, kinda like the Hindenburg. I am to believe that this is the first time a commercial airline has done this in the entire history of passenger travel. Furthermore, there have been no groundings of 747s because of this tendency for spontaneous combustion. I am to believe that it was a one time thing. Don't worry about it. It won't happen again.

I'm sorry but I can't be that gullible. I just can't. I want to be. Don't get me wrong. I really don't want to believe that the Clinton Administration chose to lie to the American public and cover up a terrorist attack on an airline -- information that could have prevented 9/11. Or there is the other theory, that perhaps the plane was brought down by our own military in a top secret accident. I don't want to believe either scenario, but the eyewitness accounts of a rocket trail, the early reports of explosive residue on the plane, not to mention subsequent history -- dammit I just can't do it! I am with the conspiracy nuts on this one, folks.

More Wisdom From Eckhart

2006-08-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

"Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created. I sometimes refer to these things as "drama." When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego operates and how it creates drama.

Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a seperate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.

When egos come together, whether in personal relationships or in organizations or institutions, "bad" things happen sooner or later: drama of one kind or another, in the form of conflict, problems, power struggles, emotional or physical violence, and so on. This includes collective evils such as war, genocide, and exploitation -- all due to massed unconsciousness. Furthermore, many types of illnesses are caused by the ego's continuous resistance, which creates restrictions and blockages in the flow of energy through the body.

Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that's drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, that's drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time -- the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.

Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their -- usually unsuccessful -- search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there is no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict."

--Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, pages 150-151

Diet & Exercise

2006-07-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

I have battled with obesity since I was a little kid and so I’ve read a lot of books and magazine articles over the years about the subject of how to lose weight. Few subjects in our society are more clouded with complete bullshit than this one. One day, a few years ago, I discovered the truth on this subject. I discovered everything I will ever need to know. I knew it was the truth because it was an insight that fit with all of the knowledge I had gathered over many years of reading and it would have predicted all the things I knew to be true if I had started with that insight and nothing else. I felt like an early astronomer who had studied the heavens for years and then one day got turned on to Copernicus and Calculus and found out that suddenly I can predict where everything in the sky is going to be at any time with exact precision.

So now I am going to share this insight with you, dear reader. Why? Because I care. That is why. I want you to live as long as possible and to be as healthy as possible. So here it is:

How can I lose weight? There is one and only one way to lose weight. That is to consume less calories than you burn. Period. End of story. The biggest crock that I consistently hear is that you can do something to increase your metabolism so that it burns more calories while you sleep or some variation. If I know your age, sex, weight and what you are doing, I can calculate how many calories you are burning and it will be spot on. Why? Because you are a human being and we are all alike in this way. Everything that contradicts this is bullshit.

So once you know all this, how do you apply it? Well, you can count every calorie you put in your mouth, thereby making absolutely sure that you will achieve your weight loss goal (Weight Watchers). Or, you can pay someone else to count the calories for you (Jenny Craig). Or, you can change your diet to be closer to what it naturally should be and watch your appetite disappear (Atkins).

So what do I mean by what our diet naturally should be? Well, you and I are animals. We are leaves on the evolutionary tree just like every other animal on this planet. And just like every other animal on this planet, the best diet for us to eat is the one that is closest to the diet in our natural habitat. The same is true for exercise.

In the wild, animals have a natural system that regulates their appetites so they don’t get fat. Even in places where there is an imbalance and perhaps an over-abundant food supply, you don’t see a bunch of fat wolves. Wild animals don’t eat more than they need to stay healthy. However, this self-regulating system evolved around an animal’s specific diet. Start feeding wolves foods that are alien to their diet, like perhaps Snickers bars, and I bet you could make some fat wolves.

That is why our society is so fat and so sick. We are eating lots of sugar and starch and trans-fats (Crisco) that are alien to our natural diet. It would be like pouring butter and candle wax and WD-40 into your gas tank periodically. They all burn, so what is the problem? A whole lot of people’s lives are cut short as a result.

If you want to find out what our natural diet is like, I suggest you go to some really remote area like Alaska (I recommend August) and don’t bring any food with you. You will soon be eating the same diet that the bears eat, mostly wild game and berries. And you will be getting a hell of a lot of exercise chasing your wild game and running away from bears. You will be getting as much exercise as a marathon runner, and you’ll have to eat about 10,000 calories a day not to starve.

That is it. That is the major insight that will allow you to cut through all the bullshit about diet and exercise. You don’t need to know anything else. From this kernel of knowledge, you can deduce the answer to every question in nutritional science.

For example: Why are some ethnic groups more prone to circulatory or digestive diseases than others? Usually this is correlated to how many generations in their family tree have been exposed to all of these alien foods. White Europeans, Orientals, and middle-easterners have been farming for thousands of years; African and Native Americans, perhaps less than two-hundred years. So for some groups, the alien foods that make up the American diet are a lot more alien than for others. For example, yesterday I read that 70% of the women in the Pima Indian tribe will get gallbladder disease by the time they are 30 years old. That is stunning.

In conclusion: If you don’t want to count calories, and for optimum health, eat lean meats, green vegetables, berries (remember tomatoes are berries), fruits, and occasionally nuts, and avoid sugar, grains, legumes, processed dairy, Crisco, and excessive salt. And you can’t possibly get too much exercise. And anything you hear or read that disputes these recommendations is bullshit.

Serendipity

2006-06-28T23:56:00.000-07:00

Just what exactly women find attractive about men has always been a mystery to me. So the day I became invisible to women in their early twenties passed almost without notice. If I had to guess, that day happened while I was in my mid-thirties. Anyhow, I am used to the invisibility by now. However, I am still recovering from when an attractive woman in her twenties recently called me “sir”. That was horrible.

Now after all this time, I have discovered an antidote to the invisibility and the “sir” calling. If only I had learned this sooner. To think of all the humility I would have spared myself. The cure? A Bonnaroo T-shirt. Who knew?

A Tale From Beyond The Grave

2006-06-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Sixteen years ago, my father died of colon cancer. He was only 51. By the time he died, my father and I had become very close friends. It is one of the many great blessings in my life that the two of us were able to mend our differences and grow so close before he passed on.

About a week before my dad died, a liver enzyme test came back and showed that his liver was no longer functioning. The doctors said that there was nothing more they could do. My dad took this news with relief. He was happy that he could stop fighting and finally surrender to the inevitable. At this point, he and I had a conversation I will never forget. My father talked about his excitement about dying. Yes, excitement. He was like an explorer about to set out on a journey to an undiscovered land. He was sorry to leave his loved ones behind, to be sure. But he was truly looking forward to the adventure. I have never been so proud of my father as I was that day.

At one point in the conversation, I said to my dad, “If you can figure out how to contact me from the other side, I would appreciate a postcard or something. Just don’t scare me. That would not be cool.” My dad sat up and said, “I will definitely do that. If at all possible, I will contact you. That is a promise.”

I didn’t think much about that promise until the year 2000. It was in late September and I was playing cards with some friends and we were talking about OU football. One of the things my father and I shared was a passion for OU football. During the very roughest times in our relationship, we maintained that connection. Sometimes, especially during my late teens, OU football was the only safe subject for us to discuss. When the topic came up, I remembered a dream that I had just a few nights before. In the dream, my father was talking with me about the 2000 OU football season. He told me that this would be the best season ever. He said that OU would go 13-0 and win the national title in 2000. At the time I remembered this dream, the likelihood of that happening seemed pretty remote. I dismissed the dream as being meaningless and thought nothing more of it – that is until the Sooners went 13-0 and won the national title in 2000.

Still, as I watched my father’s prediction come true, I did not seriously consider the possibility that this constituted contact from beyond. After all, I always want the Sooners to go 13-0 and win the national title. So, why wouldn’t I dream that every year? It was just a freaky coincidence.

But then I had a similar dream in 2001 and I have had a similar dream as the OU football season begins every year since. In the 2001 dream, my father told me that the Sooners would lose at the end of the regular season and blow their chances for a national title. As the season unfolded, despite one loss to Nebraska, the Sooners looked like a sure bet to go to a national title game. All they had to do was beat an unranked and frankly terrible OSU in their last regular season game. But they lost. And no one predicted it. No one that is, except my father.

My dream in 2002 was a repeat of the year before. My father told me the exact same thing and the exact same thing came true. The Sooners lost their last regular season game to OSU. By now, I was starting to take these dreams seriously.

In 2003, my father told me that it would be a great season, but that the Sooners would lose in post season play. The Sooners went undefeated and lost both the Big 12 Championship and the National Title games. Exactly as my father had predicted.

In my 2004 dream, my father was more specific. He said that the Sooners would go undefeated into the national title game, and then be blown out by their opponent. He said it would be one of the most humiliating defeats in OU history. As the national title game approached with USC in 2004. I could no longer keep these experiences to myself. When my girlfriend at the time asked me if I was excited about the game, I said that I would be a lot more excited if it weren’t for these dreams. Furthermore, I told her that if my father’s prediction came true that USC would crush OU. As I am sure you are aware, OU lost by 36 points.

When I had my dream in September 2005, my father was incredibly specific about the OU season. He said it would be ugly and that the Sooners would suffer four losses. This was hard for me to take. I was very excited about the 2005 Sooners. I thought Paul Thompson would do well at quarterback and that OU had another shot at the title. In spite of my strong desire to dismiss these dreams as a series of coincidences, I couldn’t ignore the track record, and so last year, risking ridicule, I did not keep the dream to myself. I told two of my best friends all about the dreams and the four loss prediction just before the 2005 season began. If the prediction came true, and I prayed that it wouldn’t, I wanted witnesses.

If you are an OU fan, then you know that the Sooners lost four games in 2005. That is the official number anyway. The referees at Texas Tech threw the game. It was awful. Nevertheless, OU went into its bowl game as an underdog to Oregon, and my friend Bob called me the night before and asked if he should bet his house, since OU had already suffered four losses. I regret not being more encouraging.

This story doesn’t have an ending. I will have to wait until late August or early September to see if I have another OU forecast dream with my father. If it doesn’t happen, I won’t be surprised. I have received the postcard.

The fact that every one of the predictions my father made in my dreams has been accurate, and that I now have witnesses, is intriguing but also more than a little disturbing. It implies that my father may be alive and well in another dimension and with the ability to communicate with me while I am asleep, but presumably not while I am awake. There is nothing troubling about that. However, it also implies that in my father’s dimension, he is aware of the outcomes of events that exist in my future – events that are influenced by huge numbers of seemingly random influences. The philosophical implications of this are. . .. I have to go now. My brain is on fire.

Bonnaroo Part III - The Performances

2006-06-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

And now for a few images from the performances Olivia and I attended at Bonnaroo. Eat your heart out.

RADIOHEAD

BECK

ELVIS COSTELLO

BRIGHT EYES

SOUL LIVE

Olivia had me take her picture with the remarkably talented singer that performed with Soul Live. Unfortunately there was some operator error and the picture is terrible but here it is anyway:

THE STREETS

Bonnaroo Part II

2006-06-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, my daughter Olivia and I attended the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. The festival was attended by 80,000 people. It was simply amazing. I want to share some of Bonnaroo with you in my blog. First, a taste of the people-watching at Bonnaroo:

Showcasing My Art

2006-06-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

I have been exercising (or is it exorcising?) my right brain lately and having some fun with my photography. Here is a sample of my first completed image. It is titled "Bus Station in the Crab Nebula." My plan is to make a series of surreal images by combining elements of one of my photographs with elements of others, or in this case with a public domain image from a space telescope. Many thanks to Adobe Photoshop. I hope you like it.

Fun With Space Telescopes

2006-05-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

I found a very cool MPEG movie on Harvard's website. It is time lapsed video of the Crab Nebula in Taurus taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It totally rocks:

Click Here

The Crab Nebula is 6,000 light years away, and about 10 light years across. I also hear they have delicious crab there.

The Crab Nebula is the most famous and conspicuous remnant of a supernova, and one of only a handful of supernovae witnessed on Earth in recorded history. It happened sometime around 5,000 BC. It took around 6,000 years for the light to travel to Earth, and in the year 1054 was witnessed and recorded by monks in both Europe and China. According to records, it was visible in daylight for 23 days, and to the naked eye in the night sky for 653 days. There are petroglyphs in the Southwestern U.S. that many believe memorialize the supernova of 1054.

The supernova is about my favorite topic in astrophysics (a subject that was my major in college for two years). To me, supernovae are not just the mothers of all explosions. God's recipe for life in the Universe includes the instruction "Mix Well." Supernovae are God's Cuisinarts. I also can't think of anything else that has given us more insight into the Universe than Supernovae. So, here's to you Mr. Supernova-Man; blowing the hell out of everything and outshining whole galaxies and leaving behind pulsars and black holes and cool-looking nebula and messing with astronomer's heads with your gamma ray pulses and stuff.

Stoicism

2006-05-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

Lately, my good friend Dave Walker, author of the world famous DaveTown blog, has been teaching me about Stoicism. As an introduction, he emailed me the text of a talk on the subject that was given by Vice Admiral James Stockdale. The talk is plain and simply one of the most powerful things I have ever read. To describe it is to diminish it, so I won't. But I urge you to put aside any preconceived notions about Stockdale you may have from the 1992 presidential race (he was Ross Perot's running mate), and just read the whole speech. It is worth it. I promise.

The speech is in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file format and it is a big file. It takes a minute or so to load even with high speed Internet. If you don't have high speed access, then why the hell not? Are you Amish or something?

Heads Up Angry War Protestors

2006-05-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are angry about the war in Iraq, Neil Young has just released a new album called Living With War that is like a primal scream therapy session. Gone is the melancholy Neil dealing with his feelings of growing old that we have endured through Harvest Moon & Prairie Wind. The Godfather of Grunge Rock has returned, and he is here to kick some ass. Don't get too excited though. None of the cuts off this album rank with his two pissed-off classics Southern Man and Ohio. But it is well worth a listen.

In an Abbie Hoffmanesque gesture, Neil has made the entire CD available for streaming download. You can listen to it by clicking here:

Neil Young's Living With War

Enjoy.

Fear

2006-05-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

For those of you that don’t already know this, I am a member of several spiritual fellowships based on the twelve steps and twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. I would tell you specifically to which fellowships I am referring. However, one of the traditions is that members be anonymous on the level of press radio and film. And it seems to me that a blog counts as press, although that is a very loose interpretation when only 5 family members and friends read it.

Anyway, I have been a member of these fellowships for a very long time. I began attending one when I was 18, because drugs and alcohol had become a big problem in my life. I was very fortunate and the program worked for me. I have not drank alcohol or used any mood altering chemicals for over 24 years.

Through practicing The Twelve Steps, I have come to discover some truths about myself that I want to share here. The first of these subjects I feel compelled to talk about is fear.

Seen at its most basic level, most mental illnesses and certainly alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases fueled by fear, and The Twelve Steps is a spiritual tool kit for combating fear. Now everyone experiences fear, however I believe that alcoholics and drug addicts experience fear differently than normal people. Alcoholics and addicts are more in touch with the basic fear that comes from being aware of your own mortality. On a very deep core level, they are relentlessly terrorized by the possibility of the extinguishing of self.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We all have that fear. All of us know on some level that we could be dead tomorrow, or for that matter later on today. But we all have elaborate systems of denial (personal faith if you will) that allow us to function in spite of that knowledge. For a variety of reasons, these systems aren’t working consistently in alcoholics and drug addicts. For recovery to take place, the alcoholic/addict needs to find a new system; a faith that works.

Ironically, this faulty denial system and the accompanying sense of impending doom causes alcoholics and drug addicts to be quite cavalier about risking death. If you make the mistake of telling a newly recovering drug-addict that his core problem is the fear of death, then he will probably tell you that he is not at all afraid of death – that he risks death all of the time. Often times alcoholic/addicts aren’t even aware that they are in discomfort. The feeling has been with them for as long as they can remember. And even if they are aware of the feeling, they don’t usually have the capacity to recognize the underlying cause. Furthermore, the risk of death creates a rush of adrenaline which serves to diminish the core fear that is causing so many problems. So they go back and do it again.

For example, I once believed that I was fearless. I took up sky-diving shortly after quitting drugs and alcohol. I thoroughly enjoyed it until one day I came very close to death - twice. My main parachute malfunctioned and I had to cut it away and pull my reserve. My reserve 'chute was, to put it diplomatically, minimal. It saved my life, but it gave me almost no maneuverability, and I came very close to landing in some very high voltage power lines. Imagine almost dying, feeling miraculously saved, then almost dying again in about 3 minutes. It threw a breaker switch in my brain. I learned not only do I fear death, but I fear it a lot. I learned that I am really a wimp.

Anyway, today I am 24 years away from my last drink or drug. And The Twelve Steps have diminished that core fear by attacking it from both sides. I have a much stronger faith in a higher power than I once had, and I have more humility than I once had. But I still look for some addictive behavior to engage in the minute I get triggered by fear. Any activity that will keep my mind occupied so that I don’t have to experience the fear will work -- writing this entry in my blog, for example.

More Quotable Wisdom

2006-05-11T00:31:00.000-07:00

This is good stuff:

"Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words -- the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into close relationships.

No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there it can contain anything." Eckhart Tolle

Movie Review

2006-05-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

I saw the movie Akeelah and the Bee this weekend. This movie is supposed to be the ultimate feel good family movie. It is about a little black girl from the ghetto whose dream it is to win the national spelling bee. To achieve her dream she must overcome many evil forces that are out to stop her. Her coach, a former spelling bee champion from the ghetto himself is played by Laurence Fishburne (aka Cowboy Curtis), who also produced the movie. Akeelah's evil forces come in many forms and many are her own personal biases, like her unwillingness to ask for help from others. I thought that was a great message. However, another clear message was that if you are a white, upper-middle class, private-school-educated male, uh... just like me, then you have no business even seeing this movie. People like me are lined up like shooting gallery ducks throughout the movie so that Akeelah can destroy them in spelling bee competitions. For me, this was not the ultimate feel good movie. Rather, it made me want to volunteer my services to some charity like Homeboy Industries just to relieve some of this godawful guilt.

United 93

2006-05-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

One of the legacies of United flight 93 is that no one will ever be successful at hijacking a commercial airline ever again. Prior to 9/11, passengers on hijacked airlines had a very reasonable expectation that if they just cooperated, they'd get out alive. That all changed on 9/11 and United 93 was the result. United 93 illustrates what happens when just a small subset of the 200 passengers is aware that they are going to die. The hijackers don't have a chance. Imagine what would happen today if you stood up on a commercial airline and announced that you were taking over the plane. It wouldn't matter if there were air marshalls on board or not. It wouldn't matter if you had a machine gun. You would look like you'd been through a meat grinder by the time the other passengers were through.

Think about that the next time your toenail clippers are confiscated by homeland security.

Rambling Thoughts

2006-05-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

Why does windshield wiper fluid come in 1 gallon containers, but in every car I have ever owned, the reserve is less than 1 gallon?

I met a new friend over the weekend and he is originally from Iran. Our conversation turned to the current Iran/US tension and he made a comment I found rather humorous. He said that some of his other Iranian friends has suggested (tongue in cheek, I am sure) that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was actually a CIA stooge. I researched this on the web and discovered that the idea of accusing Iranian presidents of working for the CIA has been around since about 2000. It was first floated by a political rival of Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. I found this article from that period:
click here

That Ahmadinejad is maintaining that he needs a nuclear energy program when his country is the 2nd largest producer of oil in OPEC is ludicrous enough. However what makes him really cartoon-like is his vocal hatred of Israel. I would almost sympathize with his desire for a nuclear bomb with the U.S. military on his flank. I understand the need to maintain sovereignty. But to express hatred for Israel while you are building nuclear bombs is such an open invitation for Bush to bomb your breeder-reactor, that if someone wrote this in a movie script, it would be panned for being too stupid to believe. Maybe in this high stakes poker game, Ahmadinejad wants Bush to bomb his reactor facility, for some reason I can't fathom. I don't know, but can you imagine how the people that work there must feel right now. How would you like to be the night watchman at the Iranian breeder reactor facility? It gives me shivers just thinking about it.