Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul: How Choice Works To Create Success or Despair by Glenn J. Morris, Ph.D., Sci.D. Copyright, 2009. Irena M. Morris. All rights reserved. No rights to reproduction without the permission of the copyright cop yright owner. Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul…………..Morris Other Books, DVDs, Inventories, and CDs by b y Dr. Morris CDs: Meditation Mastery , a series of 8 CDs with over forty exercises Bone Breathing Chi Kung and Meditation Timed Meditations Kundalini Awakening Process, only available through the KAP
Seminars Earth through Wind Strategy and Chakra Meditations CDs for
Hoshin members. Business Books: Organizational Sync: Making Your Job Work for You The Flexible Organization Job Search: The College Graduates Guide to Getting a Job
Martial Arts: Path Notes of an American Ninja Master Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master Martial Arts Madness
Videos and DVDs: Teacher Training Videos for Hoshinjutsu Cane and Hanbo Techniques Knife and Pistol Defense Rope and Chain Techniques Short Stick and Pen Techniques Pick Up Weapons Grandmaster’s Energy Defense and Attacks Hoshin Budo Meditation, Basic Massage, and Healing Secret Smile at the Big House, CCA seminar.
Available at www.hoshin.com
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This book is for the enlightened, the protectors, the wannabe seekers, and the needy to aid all with no expectation. Enjoy the read. On a more personal level thankyous are owed to Irena for her patience and toleration while I worked on this project, Trish Walker, and Lenora Rougeou for their suggestions and kindness, Irena for the book cover, my readers in calling for another book, and the senior ryu members for reacting to various versions as I wrote.
-Glenn J Morris
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This book is for the enlightened, the protectors, the wannabe seekers, and the needy to aid all with no expectation. Enjoy the read. On a more personal level thankyous are owed to Irena for her patience and toleration while I worked on this project, Trish Walker, and Lenora Rougeou for their suggestions and kindness, Irena for the book cover, my readers in calling for another book, and the senior ryu members for reacting to various versions as I wrote.
-Glenn J Morris
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Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul……………………..Morris CONTENTS Proem/Introduction or “Ain’t rhetoric a kinda question……………………………………………………….5
Understanding the importance of rhetoric as universal strategy, soft science, and practice is necessary for living well. Skip the intro if you are not interested in applied scholarship. scholarship. The fun starts in Chapter One. Chapter One: Natural or Not Natural Selection……………………………………………………..18
Establishing the animal model for f or rhetoric hardly needs white rats. Chapter Two: Brains Over Brawn…………………………………………………………35
We have four brains and ten chakra that influence sexual selection, energy, dominance, and other matters of importance and consequence. Chapter Three: Religion, Social Control, and Brainwashing……………………………………………….52
We tend to like what we learn first best. Interesting effects of how information is presented from St. Augustine to the web. Chapter Four: What have Birds and Bees to Do with Getting Laid?………………………………………………..72
The seven (or eight) kinds of lovers and other odd facts f acts about sex and gender in people. Chapter Five: Problem Solving, IQ, and EQ……………………………………………………………..93
Who is directing this three dimensional environment adapting meat machine anyway? Three tools of analysis that predict success in most situations. Chapter Six: Ghosts in the Machine…………………………………………………….107
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Flight/Fight Response, Stress Management, and Aging. Why you should pay attention to nutrition, exercise, meditation, and stretching. Chapter Seven: Budo versus Basketball…………………………………………………120
What do we learn from sport that hinders our abilities in combat and sometimes life. Chapter Eight: Surviving Comfortably in a Complex Society ……………………………………………………138
What you should understand about what matters that you can’t do much about. Power, social class, race, sex, and age. Chapter Nine: Getting a Life…………………………………………………………153
What you should understand about what matters that you can do a lot about. Social identity, nutrition, gender, sexuality, ability, communication skills, and technology. About the Author………………………………………………………168
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“ A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.” Nizer “He has never been known to use a word thatmight send a reader to the dictionary .” - Faulkner on Hemingway “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” - Hemingway on Faulkner
Proem/Introduction or “Ain’t rhetoric a kinda question?” No, it isn’t! Rhetoric is part and parcel to human development and should be thought of as weaponry like our brains. Understanding how rhetoric and science are natural problem solving behavior in all sentient and some semi-sentient animals helps us to understand that the choices we all make in even the most mundane circumstances can have life changing and threatening impacts. Haven’t you wondered why some people seem to always get what they want, and others who seem just as worthy fail miserably? The difference often relates to the ancient Greek skills of rhetoric or the more modern terms social psychology and communication skills. Haven’t you ever found yourself suspended over the coals or quagmire due to some indiscretion, or fault, and searched mightily through your repertoire of apology for the words that will let you continue life unscarred and unscathed? Rhetoric is high powered weaponry for the mouth as well as pen. If you get it right you should never need that sword or troop of bodyguards. Both men and baboons derive power through the command of weaker fodder. The baboons, however, sometimes, have to bark it up and survive to hold the title of boss. Haven’t you ever told a whopper to 5
impress someone, or embellished a story to make your self look a little better to the discriminating listener? That’s rhetoric too, working for the man on the street. I’ll warn you going in, this book is a guide for the soul that is stressed out in the daily struggles for survival in this concretized jungle of virtual reality. If you liked my books Path Notes (guided by Musashi and Sun Tzu) and Shadow Strategies (Confucius and Chuang-tzu) and they made you think in new ways, then this book should shake your tree of creativity enough to make something gibber and fall out. Lets take a test. We’ll do this with every chapter. Take a test. See if you know and then fill in some of the holes. True or False: 1. Rhetoric isn’t taught anymore? 2. Most people aren’t swayed much by advertising? 3. American politicians are too virtuous to use negative advertising? 4. Rhetoric and Religion are not related? 5. Rhetoric has nothing to do with natural selection or evolution? 6. Man is the only animal that uses or has a history of rhetoric? 7. The classic educational system paid little attention to rhetoric? 8. Rhetoric and government do not relate? 9. Leadership has more to with real skill than rhetoric? 10. In this modern age knowledge of rhetorical principles will not help you get ahead?
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Rhetoric is often treated as a subcategory of communication or information exchange dealing with persuasion. Rhetoricians or rhetors are scholars who study this subcategory in a disciplined and academic manner. The surprising thing about rhetoricians is how often they are killed by their governments or religious leaders. It is dangerous to examine how we think we think and persuade others, if history written by the winners can be regarded as accurately presenting the lives and deaths of the losers. It has often been pointed out by these hardy scholars that during times of oppressive or authoritarian government rhetoric becomes simply the exercise of formal presentations (like the dumbing down of the Presidential debates, after taking them from the League of Women Voters), and during enlightened government is the hotbed of dialogue and free speech where humans learn to excel at persuasion (like the symposia, or hot hookup bars on Friday nights). Like your hook up statements all of the first test items are false. The psychologists claim that modern human beings are allured by the hypnotic siren of television into a state where suasion is too easy and the bites of info thus delivered deliberately lead to short attention spans and shallow thinking. Thus government becomes more authoritative and thought less rigorous as a product of technology not purpose or neglect so I mustn’t talk down. Lets take a test and see what you know about this media age in which we are all immersed. Read on at your peril. True or false: 1. Psychology was invented by Sigmund Freud. 2. The American Indians have contributed little to our forms of government. 3. The average attention span continues to rise with our IQ.
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4. Music is its own language and has little or no physical effects. 5. Word choice is a function of vocabulary and has nothing to do with financial success, gender identification, social structure, emotional response, or status. 6. America produces more televisions than any other manufacturing country. 7. The average male claims to be more sexually active than the average female. 8. The average person seldom lies so most conversations are truthful. 9. Religion is the arbiter of morality or definer of the good. 10. Theories like evolution can be considered a form of science fiction. How do you think you did? All of the above but number seven are false and since most people lie more often than they brush their teeth that one is difficult to verify beyond the paper and pencil. This book will give you a number of tools to help you make choices that lead to success as normally defined and whatever personal twists that give you pleasure. In Ancient Greece and Rome people who wanted to be successful studied with rhetors or rhetoricians as they taught the skills for being both good and powerful in what we would consider brutal times. The times can still be brutal, but who teaches power and isn’t goodness debatable? Modern rhetoric can be described as being more concerned with how and why a message is constructed as well as its content for achieving an expected result. Aristotle noted that the way we persuade ourselves is very like how we persuade others and defined rhetoric as the art of finding all the means of persuasion in a given situation.
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Most students of persuasion or rhetoric have focused on the persuasion of others to the detriment of developing tools for self- persuasion but it is these skills necessary for making good choices that result in creativity and leadership. Sartre, a modern rhetorician whose existential thinking was forged in the disappointments of French actions during the German invasions of WWII came to the conclusion that choice is the keystone of character. The choices we make reveal the men and women that we are and “shoulds” have little value when facing the deaths of one’s Jewish or freedom loving friends. This position was also held by Aristotle (exiled by the Athenians in his old age), Cicero (murdered by the imperial guard under Marc Anthony’s orders), and Kirkegaard (a contemporary Christian existentialist who wrote about ambiguity building faith safely past the reach of the Inquisition). Unlike poetics, rhetoric concerns a specific communication for a specific audience in a given situation that allows for the examination of specific motive and examination of result that can differ from universal appeals and audiences. Rhetoric is a pragmatic tool and can be considered mightier than the sword as it is often used as a form of weaponry for seeking advantage. Persuasive speaking, simple conversation, writing, painting, graphics, film, song, dance, theatre, performance, music, photography, any representational art can be examined and enhanced through an understanding of rhetorical principles. Hitler understood this and attempted to pervert the Olympics through spectacle following the Roman concepts of visual rhetoric. Churchill responded with his radio talks, copied by FDR, and later Jimmy Carter. Churchill’s speeches during the Battle of Britain and use of Beethoven’s Fifth as a V for victory signature fired the hearts of the allies during the war’s darkest hours. Churchill had a gift for words, his “Iron Curtain” speech shaped British and American foreign policy toward Russia for fifty years. It is the general usefulness of rhetoric that attracts the critics’ censure and the marketer’s praise. Propaganda is hardly the lowest form of rhetoric and even today the military tosses out
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Trojan horses that they hope the enemy will drag into the temples of their mind. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as “the art of finding in any given situation the available means of persuasion” was situational and modern enough to be used and quoted for twenty three centuries. His concepts concerning credibility are still used by many and when added to the Roman Hermogenese’s stasis questions we have tools to examine any speaker, and if we add in Isocrates’ skills for developing good citizens, to make one. Turning to the Roman pre-Dewey pragmatist Cicero, writing for both lawyers and citizens, we can be schooled in creating arguments and recognizing fallacious thought. Cicero also forecasts James’s “conversational quality” by warning against over indulgence in stylistic devices. Quintilian admonishes his students to be careful to select words that best express thought and posits that only a good man can give a good speech (He did start them very young.). Does this spur Longinus to seek the sublime or echo Protagoras and the sophists to measure the higher end of all things? The ancients were into this stuff for good reason. They lived in brutal times where force of arms, and desire for security by the noble or wealthy often became the favored law of the land. Mark Antony had Cicero killed because he made people think about their lost freedoms when Rome went from democratic republic to Imperial Rome under Julius Ceasar. In the Renaissance the humanist rhetors Petrarch and Erasmus studied Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Considerable attention was paid by Pico to the Hermetic writings of the Greek and Egyptian mystics as well as the Hebrew Kaballah (way before Madonna and the Hollywood crowd). Their and his intention was to shape personal and civic advancement through occult knowledge and practice. Were they laying the masonry for a New Age rhetoric, similar to the Scots and Augustine shaping rhetoric to evangelize the Christian faith? While the popular thinker Descartes avoided the Inquisition with a circular defense of Yahweh and logic, Vico postulated that history and imagination provided as rigorous a methodology as logic
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and math to discover truth. His ideas were not embraced readily as he sought transcendence over measurement (and transcendence is hard to measure). Rhetoric, and indeed science, would be very different if Vico had become the dominant voice of the age. He prized imagination over reason, and was rejected by the Roman Catholic Church because of his espousal of mysticism. Whately won over the Protestants a century or two later, and we still pay for the sins of Campbell in our pulpits. The philosophers, the religious, the humanists, the politicians, and the mystics all recognized the power of rhetoric as a tool for shaping and criticizing behavior whether through writing or oratory. Anthropologists and animal behaviorists recognize the place of rhetoric as being ontological and axiological for the human primates pursuit of dominance. Given that all communication is rhetorical in nature, it is only natural those whose nature seeks mastery would value and continue the study of rhetoric. As Darwin pointed out the fittest do survive and Kennedy’s comparative rhetoric shows how. With the internet and worldwide communication systems like real time satellite television modern people can be exposed to the brilliance of world class athletes in fabulous tournaments like the world cup or national playoffs. Is the effect of this panoply of excellence similar to that claimed by the ancient Greeks for the Olympics? I remember asking a son if he wanted to watch a live college football game with me and he replied, “I only like to watch the pros as the college players make too many mistakes.” This was when he was a high school sophomore. He went on to a Ph.D. in chemistry, designs rocket fuels for the Air Force (as a civilian) and already has some interesting patents. He shamed me once by claiming I taught false enthusiasm as well as strategy and rhetorical theory. I don’t think he had been exposed to Plato’s Gorgias at that tender age but he had already figured out how as well as what to think about. His football answer blew me away. The recent odd war in Iraq presented a sanitized version of mayhem to the
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television audience complete with embedded reporters and a very premature “Mission Accomplished.” Shwarzkopf handled the press better for Bush Sr. The dark headed general even used them to broadcast false information like the Marine landings that bunched up the Red Guard close to shore so the bombers had a field day. The GOP is spending big bucks on rhetorical scholarship at Texas A&M, but speech and debate is being dropped from the university curriculum in the Deep South where “no child is left behind,” people fear their neighbors, support NRA, and keep their guns. In 2004’s election with Republican warmongering and threats of terror we can see a building of the fear factor beyond my memory. Maier’s frustration theory indicates the greater the fear and anxiety the more likely people will hold the old and reject the new. Four more years. The internet provides a fertile field for enabling people to respond politically. We now have bloggers to contend with in addition to more traditional commentators. PACs can run out attacks with little money and bandwidth but great effect, like the Swift Boat Vets attack on Kerry’s war medals. A revenge tale that may have wagged the dog only in an election.When a modern reader picks up his favorite author and is momentarily sucked into a fictional world resting in a wormhole of words without sound or gravity, what mechanisms are involved? Do the tools of fiction support discourse? We know that humans lie. Does it surprise us that most animals do too? Is story telling a better tool for teaching than relying on facts. Sometimes Augustine makes me feel I have never broken free of Santa Claus and other mythic list makers. I think reading fiction probably relates to creativity and social skills. I write as an essayist and sometimes poet but read a lot of fiction. Recently my daughter, Teri Dawn, introduced me to women writers who started their writing careers as romance writers and now ply their trade in adventure and mystery. Their books have characters that pay more attention to social skills and description of place than most of their male imagined counterparts.
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Some modern female rhetors support the idea that rhetoric is primarily a male preserve and because of the Greek and Roman influence, overly aggressive. Yet most of us with an interest in history note that Socrates, the philosopher/sophist, and Pericles, the rhetor/politician, were both schooled in rhetorical techne by the courtesan Aspasia, a woman. Those of us who teach today literally are supported by the methods of the hoary past masters. If we recognize this debt are we neo-classicists or protofeminists? Perhaps they are correct in thinking rhetoric would have a different slant had women more power at its inception. However the argument that persuasion is a form of masculine violence reveals an ideal sensitivity beyond ethereal. Persuasion is not coercion. Are not the skills of intuition and persuasion normally thought of as attributes of the feminine in Western society? The argument seems dramatic but specious to me (A hypothesis in search of a gullible graduate student?). A better set of questions might be the perennial, “What do women/men want?” which is taken on in Chapter Four to some extent. I was amazed to read a book by a physical anthropologist who laid the muscular cultural leaps of Western civilization, from the third century pre-Christian era to the nineteenth century, at the nimble feet of the Greeks, particularly the sophists or rhetoricians. Given that the homo sapiens sapiens hadn’t changed much in brain power for the last twenty-five thousand years (New digs in South Africa suggest seventy-five thousand.) there is a certain appeal to his argument. Up until the sophists we see little discussion of free choice or abstract thinking or meta-thought. Information seemed to be passed on primarily as technical description or entertainment with a thick coating of dues ex machina to cover the story tellers’ lack of invention. Sophists introduced the ideas that thinking could be improved by learning certain principles, and that idea leaked on many transactions including story telling and the mass market of the day. All of a sudden the heroes and heroines began to think for themselves in just a few hundred years. Look at the difference between
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Homer and writers/legend makers a few hundred years later. Notice how the gods are fading in puppetry over a very short period of time. From where did this sudden selfblame come? How did the gods lose their abilities to control? This book will examine rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of choice in everyday life and show how the choices we make are immersed in our cultural soup reflecting the evolution of human consciousness and problem solving. Since I now live in Louisiana crawfish bisque seems appropriate. Rhetoric is not one of those attributes which can “only” be attached to humans. In Psychology, “The rat is always right.” That means that animal models are the basis of science and the search for reality. We think of symbol using as primarily a human characteristic particularly when we add symbolic behavior to the description of ontological behavior. We have to include other animals as ontology is the study of innate being or defining characteristics of an entity. (See Chapter One) Because humans are decision-makers, tool-makers, and think in symbols they use language and rhetoric to manipulate their environment, and make sense of their experience. Protagoras is the sophist quoted by the bards as saying, “Man is the measure of all things.” In Chapter One we will use some manly measures to include the birds of the air and beasts of the field to illustrate the usefulness of comparative concepts drawn from anthropology, evolutionary theory, and simple observation. We are judged by the decisions we make. And our self image is constructed by how others react to our decision making skills over time. Aristotle noticed that emotional states reinforced our probable choices and operated to influence our deep psyche. Science reveals that our deep psyche is more complex than John Locke’s tabula rasa (See Chapter Two) and modern rhetoricians are developing their theories with biological and primatological perspectives. Rhetoric helps to create and use values and thus is alsoaxiological. If the above paragraph disturbed you to find man included with other animals you should immediately recognize there is some species centrism in your value system.
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Big words can be fun and rhetoric is also concerned with epistemology or the study of how we discern truth. Some say rhetoric not only gives effectiveness to truth but creates it. Rhetoric on the physical plane is hard to distinguish from strategy, but strategy also includes action where rhetoric is commonly thought of as only words. This is no longer true as we must now consider the media and the visuals as major parts of the message. Action can and does speak louder. As the only constant in life is the instability of truth and the immediacy of change you don’t have to guess where I stand shouldering with the sophist Gorgias and a poked out tongue and “nanny, naaany” to sly Plato whose rhetorical skills dunned the title rhetor far longer than his loss of argument with Gorgias as to whether Socrates took too much liberty with his young male students. Cicero, Korzybski, and George Carlin have greatly influenced my symbolic interactions so I’ll take the position of lightweight generalist lifted easily to the shoulders of the ancient behemoths. This book attempts restoring some valuable aspects of rhetorical study that have disappeared from the common experience with the beginning of the information age and the passing of “print-oriented-bastards” into the minority surrounded by McCluhan’s visually inclined global village inhabitants flexing their tribal tattoos and pinned body parts to appear free of post industrial consciousness. The visually oriented passive mind may be quicker to learn but the question remains as to the value of what is learned. Using television as the psychic baby sitter to our children has introduced a passive acceptance of the presented status quo that can be attacked from numerous perspectives. What effect does watching some 20,000 fictional homicides have on the average teenager? Can that lead to an acceptance of Columbine as normal in the teenage mind? Does it out weigh being able to see the world in real time? Does watching the slaughter in Baghdad effect the presidential election in the USA? Why is the coverage so sanitized? Does Vietnam still haunt us even after Desert Storm’s validation? As a long time
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teacher of communication skills, change consultant to business and industry specializing in leadership and stress management, I have noticed that my students and clients have often neglected to note the impact of technology on learning, and how technological culture impacts natural selection. Some of what I describe will strike the naive as quite horrific, but the world can be a harsh school for the slow to adapt. However, if stupidity were painful we would see a lot less of it. Sex, death, rock and roll have been the mainstays of my life and the study of rhetoric has made it much more interesting. The plan of this book is to share some of my more useful discoveries with my fans and readers. I truly believe in this time that a person who doesn’t have a clue about rhetoric is like a pawn on a three-D chess board, or a perennial victim of crassest materialism, being ground up by society with little chance of making the bottom line or being queened. If you don’t get it, you might as well bend over and grab your ankles because you are going to get it again and again. Rhetoric is the oldest school in what we call social psychology today. The newest school has joined the 18th Century to pursue happiness. Under former president Martin Seligman, my favorite former rat runner and drowner, the American Psychological Association has finally begun to address what makes people happy in a scientific manner. How do we flourish? What enables us to have positive emotions about ourselves and others? This book will share some of those findings in chapters eight and nine. When I quote or paraphrase someone’s best thoughts I’ll throw in the original work in the bibliography for your full perusal. The bib has many treasures and you shouldn’t just look up a page or two. Read them all. Become an expert in what interests you. Benjamin Franklin was deeply impressed by the governing skills exercised by the Iroquois and argued for their inclusion during the first Continental Congress. The American Indian tradition of opening a public forum is to say something like, “May the Great Spirit open our eyes and minds so that you will hear my words on this beautiful
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day made for our learning.” Study on this, as the first is also the last, based on sound rhetorical theories of presentation. Bibliography: The Mind in the Cave . David Lewis-Williams. Thames and
Hudson, Ltd. London. 2002. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition.
Merlin Donald. Harvard University Press, 1991. Rhetoric & Human Consciousness: A History . Craig R Smith,Waveland Press, Inc. 2003. Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician .
Anthony Everet, Random House, 2001. The Wisdom of the Native Americans . Edited by Kent
Nerburn. New World Library, 1999. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics .
Institute of General Semantics, 5th Edition,1995. Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining .
Robert H. Gass and John S. Seiter, 2nd Edition. Allyn and Bacon, 2003.
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Chapter One: Natural and Not Natural Selection “The rat is the proving ground of real psychology and science. If you can’t get similar behavior in a rat through experimentation or observation you are probably pursuing wishful thinking.” Maier “I don’t believe that nature is God, or that we ought to be worshipping it as God. But I do believe that it’s the way God communicates to us most forcefully .” R. F. Kennedy, Jr. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy .” Shakespeare “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” Churchill
Human beings are animals. People who do not recognize their animal nature are easily manipulated by those who do. It is important that one understands nature and our place in it. To quote a long dead white man, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Those benighted humans that do not think they are animals because animals don’t wash enough, have sex in public places, smell bad, and are generally lewd, crude, and rude do not understand the effect of culture.We must pity them because they miss a lot of fun. Human beings are primates. Primates can be divided into human and nonhuman primates. Chimpanzees with whom we share ninety-eight percent of our DNA and many physical and mental characteristics can be considered a hairy distant cousin and all creatures that have spinal columns and brains are somewhat related. Ascent is not a direct conjecture but gorillas; homo neanderthalensis sapiens, homo sapiens sapiens (our team), and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor five to seven million years ago. The physical evidence indicates that some of God’s experiments in homo erection did not survive the test of timely adaptation to a constantly changing ecosystem. Animal lovers are prone to anthropomorphize the subject of their attention whether local god or distant animal and 18
unscientifically unscientifically attribute unlikely qualities that close observation will not support. Lets see what you know about the critters that surround us, or used to. True or False: 1. Birds are really stupid and frail, hence the term “birdbrain.” 2. Animals do not have self-awareness. self-awareness. 3. Animals do not feel pain with the intensity we do. 4. What makes people superior to other animals is social structure. 5. What makes animals inferior to people is they t hey always always tell the truth. 6. Animals do not have signaling or language. 7. What makes people superior is they have a sense of humor. 8. Animals, unlike humans, have little or no sexual boundaries, particularly cats. 9. Animals have small memories and severely limited problem solving skills. 10. We are superior to animals because we adapt to change and they do not. All of the above statements are false as you may discover discover in this chapter. Social animals (us) often share characteristics that establish basic potentials and functions that can be observed to form rhetorical communication. communication. Anyone who has lived lived with animals and paid attention attention will have noticed they use a combination of body language and
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often a wide range of vocalizations vocalizations to express their feelings, manipulate their masters and each other to get what they want. Non-human animals may not employ speech as we do, with the exception of some birds and the chimps who got into Amerslan and passed it on to their off spring, and neither do we do too well at imitating their calls, scent, and physical systems of communication. Observation of animal behavior and consequences, however, gives us some clues to understanding animal rhetoric and behavior. We can see the formation of relationships, bartering for goods, use of deceit, anger, friendship, command, and control that t hat parallel our own behavior indicating a “deep” or shared natural rhetoric. Observation of animals by the astute quickly informs us of our own nature. Birds are often regarded contemptuously in the vernacular as bird-brained or stupid. Some birds like the African Grays and cockatoos are quite clever and have been companion critters to human beings as long as recorded time and probably before. When I was teaching martial arts seminar in Australia I started feeding a wild cockatoo and my Aussie friends warned me not to do that, as the clever birds would strip the rubber from your car and do other surprising things when bored. Much better to ignore the white avian raccoons of the air. Birds in the wild serve as a better example of natural rhetoric. In Louisiana, where I have spent the last six years of my life, is a bird preserve along Lake Martin outside of the friendly Cajun city of Lafayette. In the last twenty years (since this preserve was established) the Roseate Spoonbill has grown from seven observed couples to hundreds. Thousands of egrets of various species swarm the lake and swamp covering the trees and bushes like a white carpet inter speckled with night egrets and cormorants like occasional coal lumps in a snow field. If you are interested in watching exotic birds its an easy drive from the small city crowds of partying celebrants of spring in Lafayette to slip down a dusty country road into the primordial swamp. Lets look at two birds, cormorants and cattle egrets. City bird and country bird respectively, respectively, and wildly divergent in
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their particular strategies for getting a life. The cormorant is one of the oldest species of birds and its reptile forbears can be easily seen in the lizard shape of the newborn as it struggles, a tiny snake necked dinosaur in the nest with only the beak indicating the long bodied bird to come with feathers. I call the cormorant a city bird as they usually congregate in groups of thousands on rocky islands competing with only the sea gulls in an econiche that includes both water and land hunting tactics. Cormorants eat fish and other waterborne critters as well as amphibians and insects. Their only natural enemy is the sea gull that will eat a cormorant egg or chick if given the opportunity. When cormorants mate the male will put on a dare devil display of diving into the water from great heights and swimming under water. He will bring a twig to the female to show his interest in building a nest with her and share his kill. He will dance to demonstrate his flexibility. The females will watch and preen. Eight or ten male cormorants will gather on a limb and serenade the female. She will finally select the male who is last to t o keep singing as the others fall out. The cormorant pair then builds a nest and lay three t hree or four eggs in quick succession. They stand guard over the eggs. One is always at the nest and when relieved goes about being a cormorant without looking back until its turn at watch comes around. The young cormorants usually develop quickly unless ambushed by a sea gull. The cattle egret and country bird is one of the smaller members of the egret family. They are white, usually about two feet tall t all and develop orange trim on their neck and wings when wishing wishing to breed. Cattle egrets are native to India from where they crossed with the traders to South Africa. They began being spotted in the United States sometime in the early fifties, have been seen as far north as Maine, and are quite common in the Deep South. They share a non-threatening econiche with cattle. Typically you will see one cow and three cattle egrets walking about in a field. f ield. Cattle egrets eat insects and the movement of the cattle causes the insects to flee and thus become food for the egret.
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One egret will usually walk near the head of the cow and the others will flank its sides. Occasionally you will see an egret riding on a cow. We don’t know how the cattle egret slipped across the ocean but it has done quite well in its new American habitat. The Lake Martin cattle egrets arrive with the April showers and begin courting with the May flowers. The thousands of larger egrets have finished their courting and mate selecting when their smaller distant cousins begin to arrive and stake out their territory closer to the road in the lower bushes in the lake’s shallow. The males will often posture and dance, fluffing their white and orange feathers. Sometimes a male will posture near an abandoned nest to suggest his probable nesting skills to a naïve female. They make little dashing flights back and forth across the water. They, too, will offer a female a twig. Where cormorants are dark and snake like, egrets are white long legged water birds looking like miniature storks, but the cattle egrets have for the most part moved from the water to the field except for this birthing ritual. Some cattle egrets do not seem to return to the swamp with the larger egrets. When the male is ready to mate his orange trim will be quite visible. He will stake out a small territory he will defend from all comers male or female. Any bird that enters his turf will be brutally attacked and beaten with his long sharp bill. He attacks both male and female intruders. The females circle and watch this aggressive display, suddenly one will leap out onto the male’s back and attempt to beat him senseless with her bill battering him to the ground. If he bucks her off he continues to attack all comers. If she knocks him senseless, when he is recovering she strokes his neck and head with her bill, and makes cooing sounds until he recovers [He probably ends the Junior High antics by giving one final tug on her pigtails]. Then they go off, mate, and build their nest. Cattle egrets usually lay three to four eggs. The eggs hatch two days apart and two days in bird time is a long time. Baby cattle egrets are mostly mouth which mama and daddy egret cram with lots of insect protein. The first born with its two day head start is twice the size of the second born and
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uses this to its continual advantage. It can leap higher and thus is always first and most fed when the parents arrive with food. The second born does ok during a year when there is plenty of food but the third born is usually pushed from the nest into the maw of the patient alligator waiting below for its annual treat of failed egret. Alligators are very long lived and eventually catch onto the annual evolutionary drift. Lenora Rougeou, probably Cajun, told me that her grandfather left her and her brother to play on a pier while he went to get a drink. The siblings were trying to catch an alligator. They had a piece of rope with some chicken meat on a hook. They had tied the rope to their wrists. An alligator came along and instead of grabbing the chicken grabbed the rope and started to pull them along the pier out into the water. They were excited because they thought they were catching the gator. She says the alligator was equally excited as it thought it had captured a double snack and was busy at pulling them into the water when Mom showed up and shot the gator. She said she’d never forget the absolute delight in the gator’s eyes as it discovered it could pull the two small humans into the water. Reptile brain? More of the Australian Island Watchers were killed by sea crocs than Japanese during World War Two. I wish I knew more about snakes. Cats are interesting. Even house cats are never quite tame. If left with a dead master for any length of time they will quickly regard the body as a new source of food. Big cats regard small humans as snacks of opportunity so it is a good idea not to forget to feed your jaguar ruandi if there are kids in the neighborhood and you let it stray. When I was on camera safari on Notten’s Bush Camp in South Africa we chased leopards at night and cruised alongside a pride of lions in the day. A male lion is a huge killing machine. The females are big enough to make me feel very like fresh meat riding along in an open Land Rover, but the male dwarves its female hunters like an NFL tackle out sizes a normal human being. A pride of lions functions as a hunting family. The females do most of
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the hunting and raise and train the kits. The male services from four to seven females, lolls about in the sun a lot and occasionally if the girls need a little help will rise up from the grass and swat whatever they weren’t able to subdue into a speedy meal. Like hunting dogs, older males will teach courage to the cubs by letting them have a go at something bigger and more skilled. The bigger gentler cat swats the cubs about with sheathed claws and the little ones charge in fearlessly, a lion version of Jack the Giant Killer or Seven At A Blow. Busch Gardens in Florida maintained a pride of lions for the delectation of tourists. They had a big old male called Charley after the roi de sol. Charley was old and beginning to show a little rheumatiz so the females would walk on either side of him to hold him up and ease his perambulation about his kingdom. The managers of the African plains show decided it was time to end this charade and send in a new young male to make the ladies happy. The price was paid and a buff young black-maned stud was brought in from Africa. Now tigers will often kill all the off-spring of a male before or after killing the dominant male and taking over his territory. Lions are usually friendlier and do not live the solitary lives of tigers though lion males usually regard each other as competition and an invading male will often kill any cubs that they find, as a new male wants to preserve and protect its own genes. The females usually accept the loss of cubs and before too long replace the missing with new offspring. It was quite a shock to the managers when the pride of females not only refused to accept managements’ expensive offering but quickly hunted down the new lion and killed him. Not to be discouraged by female preference, management swallowed the bill and ordered up another young challenger to the ancient Charles. Perhaps it was a language problem, or the American raised lion ladies picked up some local prejudice, but once again the costly African invader was swiftly and rudely dispatched. Getting the message, management allowed le roi Charles to finish out his days supported by his ladies even when mounting another female. He finally
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succumbed to Rockefeller’s Syndrome and died in the saddle. After his demise the pride accepted a new male leader. There was a caged lion at the Erie Zoo that I used to visit as a teenager. He was a magnificent beast that would roar and roar until he had a large crowd of homo sapiens in front of his cage. Then he would stretch up with his front paws on the bars to show his virility and while his captors gawked in amazement he would urinate out over the crowd. I always thought he was making some sort of statement but not being privy to big cat thinking processes was never certain. This cat acting out created a daily scramble for safety and the stench of lion urine is cat amplified. Eugene Linden has written a truly interesting book on the many things animals do that prove their wit and ingenuity. In the Parrot’s Lament he records birds, leopards, elephants, dogs, etc. The tales of intrigue and deception indicate a proclivity for rhetoric is universal among animals. My mentor in Psychology, Norman RF Maier swore rats were better at problem-solving than some humans and proved it. You really should read The Parrot’s Lament . It is in the bibliography. Norm is rather dry so I didn’t include him this time. A lot of his pioneering work in animal and industrial psychology is sadly out of print. When I was a graduate student at Penn State one of my best friends was a primatologist working on a degree in physical anthropology. Norris Durham’s specialty was new world spider monkeys but like most anthropologists he was a generalist and we found a lot of common interest in our studies of human and non-human primate behavior. This is a Durham story about pig tail monkeys from Yerkes Primate Center outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Any inaccuracies are a product of my faulty memory. It was nearly forty years ago. Pigtails are free ranging monkeys with a curly tail and because they are fiber and seed-eaters have pretty big canines like baboons or gorillas. They are hierarchical in
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their social nature with an alpha male, who usually resides with an alpha female and other females which are sexually accessible to the alpha male. Usually the alpha male is eventually killed by a challenging male who then takes over the alpha female and other females until he too is replaced by a challenging successor. The alpha male and alpha female get to eat first and are groomed and sucked up to by the other members of the troop. Alpha males will sometimes tolerate a beta or buddy male as a friend who hangs out with the alpha and has the privilege of grooming him and sucking up to the alpha female who acts as a senior wife. Ceta or fringe males are allowed to hang with the troop if related to a troop female, but are usually driven away particularly if they begin to give the alpha male competition for the sexual favors of his mostly female followers. Males are usually larger and more aggressive than females. Such is life in a pig tale troop. Now this troop lived in a couple of acres of roofed in compound with a big stake in the middle, and were constantly observed by graduate students working on their doctorates or masters in primatology. What I’m about to describe became the subject of a number of erudite papers, but is best told in the style of “cocktail anthropology” and could be the source of a monkey epic as good as a chapter from Homer. Alfred the alpha was an aging pack leader with beta male and an alpha female in close companionship. He usually held court near the center pole of the monkey compound allowing his beta male (we’ll call Bubba) to pick off his fleas and occasionally mounting one of the young females to show he could still get it on. His alpha female Alice was pleasingly plump for a pigtail, maybe twenty five pounds and all had a fairly challenge free life being fed and taken care of by the non-obtrusive staff of the center. Alfred tolerated a fringe male we’ll call Charley who was a large but not aggressive male who knew his place and kept his distance from the center pole eating last. As the months went by Charley began to grow and became huge by pigtail standards, almost twice the size of the alpha. But Charley maintained his distance and shy ways remaining
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on the fringe of the troop and sleeping in a corner of the compound. Charley began to be recognized as something of a ladies’ man and more and more of the females of the troop began to spend more time in Charley’s corner than hanging out near the center pole. This was noticed by the primatologists and bets began to be placed as to when Charley would attack Alfred and take over the troop. Charley was large and Alfred though a clever leader was no giant. One sad day Alfred awoke to find his only courtiers were his beta male and alpha female. All the other monkeys had abandoned his leadership and protection to move over to Charley’s corner of the compound. No challenge, no battle…. Just simple primate democracy where the players voted with their feet. What a great paper! “Leadership Change in a Pigtail Troop Without Violence.” It could make a career for someone who wanted to push the concept of “the noble peaceful primate.” However, come the next dawn the observers were greeted with a splattered scene reminiscent of the Texas chainsaw massacres. Alfred lay disemboweled near Charley’s corner and Alice’s brains were spattered on the center pole. Her corpse was thrown against the compound fence. The beta male, Bubba, was peacefully grooming Charley and the females of the troop were going about their business as usual. (The king is dead. Long live the king. What happened? It all seemed to be going so well with the setting of the sun and Alfred’s reign transitioning into peaceful retirement.) Fortunately the video cameras ran all night and they got the following. I can only describe as pigtail vocalizations are beyond my skill to reproduce. Charley and the beta Bubba sat arm and arm at the center pole looking somewhat sheepish but the alpha female was much more active. She would run over toward Charley’s corner and bark at her former companions then rush back to Alfred and scream at him while pointing in the direction of Charley. This charging, screaming, and pointing seemed to indicate both rage
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and disappointment. When she grew tired of rushing back and forth with little result, she settled down in front of Alfred continuing to scream at him and gesture toward Charley. This went on for hours. Finally Alfred bared his teeth spread his neck hair and reluctantly advanced on Charley’s corner. Charley rushed out, seized Alfred, lifted him up and ripped him open like a ripe melon and tossed him aside rushing across the compound to grab Alice by her heels and swiftly beat her brains out on the center pole, swinging her like a baseball bat. While he was bashing her brains out, the beta male, Bubba dashed around presenting his rear end to be mounted so Charley would not mistake him for an enemy. It is interesting to note that in the passage of time Charley fell to another younger male, but Bubba the beta remained the beta for two more alphas finally dying of old age. Such are the advantages of political action and choice in the lower primate troops. Celabese black apes presented another interesting tale. These are big aggressive monkeys and the primate center had a large colony of them. These monkeys often attacked their human handlers and each other exhibiting a high degree of irritability. The handlers carried broomsticks to knock them back if they got too close. Monkey bites are very unpleasant and many of us remember that Green Monkey Fever from bites was remarkably like AIDS and invariably fatal. They asked Norris to have a look at this troop and offer any suggestions as to how they might be calmed down. After all gorillas will quickly respond to a human who offers appropriate submission gestures and end an attack display. They are very polite animals. Norris watched the black apes for a few days and then asked the handlers where the females were. They replied they hadn’t captured any due to the tactics of these fierce primates. When their territory is entered the females and infants immediately flee while the males begin a series of rapid assaults on the interlopers giving the females time to escape. This usually results in a lot of males brought down with tranquilizer darts netted in heavy rope and trucked away, but as yet no females had been captured. Those of
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you who have noticed how irritable young sexually active humans get when they aren’t getting it might suspect a deep connection and realize that this problem will require a unique solution or remain festering. Heroes all. Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal were studying brown Capuchin monkeys for the ability to exchange tokens (cucumbers) for labor. The subjects were happy to do so until they saw that other monkeys being rewarded with grapes. Grapes to the Capuchin seem to be like melons to the Japanese. Once the Capuchin ladies realized they were only going to get cukes for their labor, the exchange rate fell dramatically (from 95 percent to 60 percent). When paired monkeys saw their partners get the coveted grapes the exchange rate fell another twenty percent. It would seem a sense of fairness and envy are universal primate traits and emotions evoke a sense of fair play. (Somewhere one might try to get into a discussion of economic decision-making as rational? Or altruism as genetic long-term thinking?) Both evolution and economics would predict that social animals would selectively acquire information to strategize from or guide behavior. I still remember the first time I ever saw a man break another bigger man’s jaw with one blow! The injured man staggered across the poorly lit barroom’s dance floor and fell between my feet. He was bleeding from the eye sockets as well as the usual nose or mouth. I looked up at the short German male that had slugged him and I memorized him and can still describe him forty years later. There are other people who I can’t remember around the block. The potential for getting your ass whipped does tend to focus the mind. I made a friend. He was a stonemason by trade, strong like a truck mechanic. I was a medic. We were both fond of beer and working girls. Monkeys according to Duke University’s Medical Center will give up or accept more fruit juice to see photographs of familiar monkeys in various activities. Male monkeys would pay extra to see female hindquarters and higher-ranking monkey faces, they also had to be paid to view low ranking monkey faces. This is the first experimental
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evidence that social animals discriminate between images of others based on rank or sex or classification of individuals. They also can count. The anecdotal evidence though treacherous is enormous. The Japanese seem almost hardwired for this behavior. Porn as well as politics basic to primate behavior! Who’d a thunk it? (I can tell you from experience that monkeys tend to love melons, onions, most citrus, and strangely tobacco. I had a friend catch a spider monkey and throw it in his truck cab while he chased another one. The monkey chewed up nearly a carton of Marlboros and proceeded to fire at both ends. The rest does not bear retelling.) The larger primates or apes are also diverse in their organizations. Almost all can be observed hunting cooperatively, food sharing, and tool using. Political use of hierarchy and familial relationships as well as warfare up to genocide is common to bush chimpanzee groups. In the laboratory apes easily learn sign language and recognize themselves in mirrors, a sign of self-awareness missed by monkeys but quickly learned. Jungle living Bonobo chimps tend to be communal, peaceloving, and generally egalitarian. Most social bonding is among females and the status of a male depends on the status of his mother to whom he stays close all of her life. Bonobos are highly sexed and use sexual play as a stress reducer in almost any novel or ritualized situation. Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s recent crack concerning sex orgies as stress reducers indicates he is familiar with the Bonobo literature. The bush dwelling chimpanzee studied by Jane Goodall are different and bond in hunting male groups. The females share territory with the males in overlapping ranges but do not bond strongly to other females or any one male. Gibbons establish monogamous egalitarian pairs and hold to exclusive territories. Gorillas are polygamous and mostly vegetarian eating wild celery and bamboo. The strongest male maintains a territory for his family and females. The strongest bonds are between the adult male and his several females. Orangutans live solitary lives and seldom bond. In his prime an orangutan male will establish a large territory, within it may live
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several females. Each female establishes her own home range. Franz de Waal, an expert on Bonobo behavior describes Loretta’s rhetorical behavior using sex to obtain an older male’s favor when she is too low in the social hierarchy to dominate him. This happened at the San Diego zoo which has a large colony of Bonobos. “Loretta was in a sexually attractive state (swollen genitals) she would not hesitate to approach the adult male, Vernon, if he had food. Presenting herself to Vernon, she would mate with him and make high-pitched food calls while taking over his entire bundle of branches and leaves. When Loretta had no genital swelling, she would wait until Vernon was willing to share.” Suehisa Kuroda, another expert reports, “A young female approached a male, who was eating sugarcane. They copulated in short order, whereupon she took one of the two canes from him and left.” (Need I anthropomorphize? A crack ho in search of food or shelter, or just a friendly romp with a sugar buzz as pay off?) My older brother Paul who was my mentor and master greatly admired began to hear voices and committed suicide at thirty-three out of fear of going on greatly diminished after failing to win tenure at his Junior College. (His administration decided to give it to him at a surprise birthday party a week after announcement day. This was a thigh slapper to someone in power.) He had a wife and daughters and no dowry. He had rebuilt his reputation after killing two of his father’s friends in a car accident near his sixteenth birthday. He lived with the horror of watching them burn to death, he scarred his hands on the locked doors and melting windows and never drove a car again. His marriage was going through one of those rocky periods that all long-term relations endure. I think he saw loss of tenure as a disaster rather than a challenge and no longer had the will to continue. Losing tenure usually means you have no job next year, so start looking…. He was a painter, a poet, and a regional champion wrestler. Lots of demand
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there. There were other recent shocks in and to his system that sorely tried his too noble self image of a man of peace, a teacher, and artist. The city had murdered his kittens. He was under a lot of stress. He hung himself with his belt in John Hopkins Psych ward where he had signed himself in so they could watch him and keep him from harming himself as the voices were calling for his death even in the supermarket next to the vegetables. He could not face failure again. He committed seppuku to his right or left brained warrior gods. I am told that chimps will go on hunger strikes and die when the boredom of captivity becomes too real. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in the soiled soul of a solo caged beast of natural intelligence and figure out the choices. Among the great apes, chimpanzees are obviously closest to humans as models for proto-behavior but all primate social strategies can be observed at one time or another in homosap communities making it difficult to identify particular traits with homo sapiens sapiens. However, it can be said with certainty that human society is the most diverse among the primates exhibiting the most complex communication skills and greatest complexity of cultural adaptation. Males unite for cooperative ventures, and so do females. Both males and females bond with their own and the opposite sex. Monogamy, polyandry, and polygamy are all in evidence, all across human history and pre-human history too. The physical evidence of prognathic brows and jaws and cervical crests would indicate that there was occasional cross breeding between Neanderthals and Sapiens. Since cervical crests are only found with the great apes and Neanderthals it is difficult with the passage of time and extinction to designate the degree of venturesomeness held by our thick-browed cousins in their natural selection. It is generally posited that Neanderthals probably did not time bind, living in an eternal now from their cave paintings, and lacked complex language because of the shape of their jaws and larynx. With some shaving and scrubbing or in the darkness of the cave who is to say what one might do to share a little comfort and warmth on a cold
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night. Homo indicating a species that, like dogs, shows great diversity yet no accounting for lust or taste. Great Danes can breed with Chihuahua but would they? Humans obviously would to the extent that DNA and blood types studies around the world indicate there are only pure racial types in the imagination of some Volks who reside in Idaho and those Mittel European elite fantasists most of whom the Western world united to kill off in Europe during World War Two. These guys would have a lot of trouble getting their arms around the concept that insulin and diabetes studies indicate fruit flies and humans had a common ancestor 550 million years ago give or take a millennium. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” Could telepathy be a chromosome left to the hive-mind honey-bees of wise and beautiful Athena. Spiders are by far the insect (?) most adaptive. Arachnids hunt far and wide with an assortment of home grown weapons ranging from armored claws and fingers like a crab to subtle anesthetics that keep the prey alive and full of juices and adrenalin yet unable to move while they feed. Close observation of some spiders will reveal more than the oddities of ambush and web weaving. Strange casting abilities, creativity of a darker nature, and a more assertive hive minding. We so appreciate and like the spiders, particularly the giant red and white ones that live in swarms under the sea that we gave them a special name….. Alaskan King Crab. That is a piece of rhetoric for great bleeding spiders that can breathe underwater. Ate some spider lately? Marketing, marketing, marketing/rhetoric. As we observe these various rhetorical as well as breeding strategies to secure a life unfolding we have to be impressed by the variety of outcomes. There is more to life than genetic imperatives as the selfish gene carriers or delivery systems have often outgrown the original package to develop a mind of their own moving from mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic modes of living and thinking. Though our consciousness is changing the delivery system has not, meaning there are ghosts hidden in the environmentally adapted three dimensional meat machine that provides our spirits transportation. I.A.
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Richards reported that “Ideas have consequences,” and so do actions. We feel before we think and our brains may only be what we think we think with. There is obviously more going on down below at some deep level than is culturally acceptable in polite circles. Rhetoric operates by the manipulation of emotions. Having established rhetoric as natural animal and human behavior let us look at some of the biological and cultural shapers of sexual selection in the next three chapters. The rest of the book will give you some tools that will allow you to make important choices with greater freedom for living an interesting life. Each chapter, though short, will include an inventory or test that will help you to identify your thinking patterns that can lead to success or failure in our complex society. Bibliography Chimpanzee Cultures . R Wrangham, W C McGrew, F B M
de Waal, and P Heltne. Harvard University Press, 1994. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction . George A.
Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 1998. The Parrot’s Lament . Eugene Linden. A Plume Book, Penguin Press. 1999. Flies R Us: Fruit fly cells mimic the mammalian pancreas .
Science News. pp 180-181. C. Brownlee, Vol.166, #12. Sept. 18, 2004.
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Chapter Two: Brains Over Brawn? “The more complex the structure, the more energy it must dissipate to maintain all that complexity. This flux of energy makes the system highly unstable, subjective to internal fluctuations and sudden changes. If these fluctuations or perturbations reach a critical size, they are amplified by the system into a new state, even more ordered, more coherent, and connected. The state occurs as a steady state .” Prigogine “We don’t stop at our skin.” Krieger “ All systems are regulated not only by known energy and material factors but also by invisible organizing fields.” Brennan
We like to think that our brain is what we think with, but the actual reality is we have four brains and ten chakra that influence sexual selection, energy, dominance, problem solving, and other matters of importance and consequence. We’ll start with the brains as that is easily documented in Western medicine and literature. At the top of our spinal column is the brain we like to think is most important because it is three brains and in men could even take a bicameral split into two more but that is just too complex for this simplistic presentation. Once again to understand the importance of this information you have to have a rudimentary grasp of the effect of selection and choice on the long term development or evolution of primates particularly our team (the winners, unless the eco-niche goes major poopy which will open the door for smart insects like Arachnids). A long, long time ago, many fingers and toes of moons and suns when we were but a twinkle in Mother Nature’s eye and mostly spinal column and stomach we developed what is now called the somatic/enteric nervous system which was/is mostly an info system for digestion and production of various hormones necessary for feeling good. For instance eightyfive percent of the body’s serotonin is produced by the 35
enteric system. Serotonin is a key element in emotional well being. The more the merrier. This part of the nervous system ties into the endocrine system, has proven useful to basic human survival for hundreds of millions of years, and is shared to greater or lesser extent by all critters that have some spine and glands. This system is primarily electrical and chemical in nature. Western medicine and psychology has mostly ignored these systems to the detriment of the general population. Lets take a quick test to see where you stand on these issues. Do not read ahead just respond to the items. There are no right or wrong answers. Rate how much the following statements are like you. 5 = That’s me, and that is the way it is. 3 = I’ve experienced this and will verify it can happen. 2 = Kinda makes sense to me but not for me. 0 = No way, Jose. 1.____ I often feel the urge to take command. 2.____I inspire confidence in others. 3.____Sometimes the job is more important than the people. 4.____I work well with groups 5.____I like to impress others with my skills. 6.____I trust my own judgment and feelings. 7.____I react strongly to many things in life. 8. ____I am challenged by new ideas and technology 9. ____I am often the life of the party 10.___The joy of accomplishment is its own award. 11.___I have little patience with detail work 12.___People describe me as energetic and enthusiastic. 13.___When you really think about it, no position is entirely wrong. 14. ___I am considered tolerant and understanding. 15.___I believe the world can be made a better place. 16.___I enjoy helping others to learn for themselves. 17.___I get a charge out of making something new from the old.
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18.___If you pay attention you can learn from anyone. 19.___Traditions are often based in biology so you have to understand nature. 20.___Technology can be a crutch or an enabler. Each block of four questions tie into one of the four elements in traditional human alchemy which were used to try to explain behavior in mysticism. They correspond to early trait psychology in both East and West. Look to your scores and add up your numbers for each block of four. Where you score the highest reflects your dominant chakra which will be discussed in greater detail farther along in this chapter. Items 1 through 4 partially describe the Earth. Items 5 through 8 are associated with Water. Items 9 through 12 are Fire, and 13 through 16 attach to Wind. !7 through 20 are Void items. Write which is your highest scoring trait and more will be explained in a few more pages. Make a note as to where you put your fives. At the top of the spine resides the fish/eel/snake or reptilian brain. This much maligned superior organ orchestrates breathing, heartbeat, swallowing, rhythm, visual tracking, the startle response, and rudimentary emotion. It is the startle response which creates this brain’s bad reputation. It is not always pretty when you startle a large primate. Rapid, shallow breathing, darting eyes, interrupted digestion, and increased heart rate are all part of this brain’s control system that influence fear and anxiety which can turn the startle into a full blown flight or fight response which will be examined in Chapter Six. Now, reptiles are said not to experience emotions but I’ve seen what certainly looks like anger in alligators and a little close examination of snakes would probably reveal as much intelligence as some birds. Be that as it may, these two nerve rich systems of response are the seat of the emotions and first filter of the senses that create our reality. In other words the biochemical and electromagnetic sensors shape what comes in and goes out of the rest of the brain. We feel before we think. On top of this cone or knob at the end of
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the spine is another layer of receptors that appeared millions of years ago (still really old hardware) known as the mammalian or limbic brain which many experts designate as the brain that transforms the messages of the snake/enteric and/or reptilian brains (snakes on legs) into useful emotional responses or values. “Ummm, I like that. Do more of that! Ugh. Get back or I bite.” The limbic brain introduces quality of life in that we now can choose between pleasure or pain as emotional experience is immediate and primal adding flavor to our problem solving, but having little to do with abstract thought or reasoning. For reasoning to happen we have to add a new layer of sensing and processing nerves that came into being a few million years ago and through natural selection became the dominate physiological characteristic of homo sapiens sapiens resulting in a much higher forehead. The modern model we think of as us. Real human beings, have a neocortex. Well named this new layer seems to have had most of its integration and advantageous effect in the last fifty thousand years. The ones with the bigger brains and communication skills seem to get most of the goodies, breed like rabbits, and pollute worse than rats. The neocortex besides separating us from the rest of the primates gives us a better memory, the ability to reason, deal in abstractions, communicate verbally, time-bind, and set goals. These abilities can also be used to transcend or ignore the emotional content of the earlier and older response systems by layering in cultural expectations to shape learned and emotional response. “A real man doesn’t cry. Good girls don’t.” The neocortex functions with minimal input from the deeper emotional patterns so often people have a false understanding of the impact of emotions and even when understanding from an intellectual appreciation can do little to change the way we feel or act. As the twig is bent, so grows the branch. Past behavior is the best predictor of present and future behavior.
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Understanding this imperfect integration of biological inheritance into four brains allows us to better understand the common inability to rectify the paradox of reason and emotion. When we recognize the interaction of nervous systems of human beings greatly effect our communication as well as inform, and change each other it becomes clear how important understanding rhetoric and persuasion is to maintaining sanity. Our emotional connection to other limbic/sentient creatures affects our hormone flows thus moods, digestion, body clock, and even brain structure. When our biology doesn’t catch up with culture we get ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning problems. This might be thought of as a biological variation on evidence, or observation of the revenge effects of unintended consequences. For millions of years we have had the need to intuit which other humans and animals are safe and which don’t consider us the top of the food chain. As successful mammals we have a limbic emotional connection with each other that does not require thinking to feel. We do not need to analyze or rationalize to feel. The skilled meditator can shut down the learned intellect and without conscious direction experience how our nervous system is always learning, feeling, adapting to our interactions with our econiche. The Japanese call this discipline mushin or no mind which can also be translated as innocence. The unskilled meditator gets this same information but usually ignores it as irrational feelings more appropriate to children. Unless, of course, it is love at first sight that destroyer of parent’s dreams that hold us hostage to our children’s fortunes.This is a very simplified description of central nervous system and some of its basic sensing functions from a Western medical and psychological perspective, but it becomes even more interesting when you introduce the chakra system that is mostly electromagnetic tying into the endocrine biochemical systems. Here we depart from Western brute force medicine to the subtleties of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicinal systems that are much older and easily as effective if you are willing to wait awhile
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longer for your result. We tend to think of the endocrine system becoming primarily important during times of extreme stress or part of stereotyped growth periods. Asian medicine sees greater psychological implications. According to yoga and Ayurvedic doctors chakra have positive or negative impact on thinking processes according to the dominance of yin (feminine) or yang (male) energy in a particular person’s make up. That energy has gender or personality is a little odd to our thinking but has its place in the world view of the medical systems from which I am drawing. Anyway think of chakra as energy pools or wheels (field generators) resulting from or supporting how we use our bodies. I’ve had acupuncturists describe the chakra as biological fuse boxes for our emotional centers. Once you know what you are feeling for you can sense them easily if someone knowledgeable shows you how. (I was taught by Canadian nurses teaching Therapeutic Touch at an American Humanistic Psychologist convention twenty five years ago.) Many alternative medicine systems have used this information enough that it is now becoming mainstream. Enough that about 25 percent of the questions on the national certification test for massage therapists now deal with Chinese, Ayurvedic, and energy medicine. This is a huge change in the last twenty years but a good one. If you had a good Physics teacher in high school or you’ve read a little, you probably recognize on an intellectual if not gut level that everything is energy and the vibration of that energy gives it the appearance of solidity. Since we are part of everything, vibrational or energy medicine might be useful to know a little about. The venous and nervous systems are connected with a bioelectrical system that the Hindu say connects some three thousand points (nadi) on the body that can be connected up to nurture various organs through what the Chinese call meridians. Think of it as your house wiring. (Just like you can’t see electricity but when you throw the switch the light comes on.) Take my word for it. If you injure your lung, kidney, or heart meridian, it will not be long before your physical skills and
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perceptual world begin to decline. The Chinese ideal is to maintain harmony between and with all these complicated systems through “going with the Universe or flow.” This can be difficult when you do not understand your nature. Depending on your culture the following information may be common knowledge like the godai (five rings or guiding principles) of Japanese Mikkyo Buddhism, forbidden by some schools of yoga, hidden in Western mysticism, or clueless among the average American sheltered by the AMA and ethnocentrism. In Chinese medicine the focus on chakra or energy medicine seems to be more on the organs and meridians than the chakra. There interest was mainly in mapping and charting the effects of the electrical system and treated the human body as an interesting cross between a garden and a battery where we tended toward the three dimensional meat machine model. The Hindu and the Japanese were more intrigued with the relation of health and personality and pursued immortality of the soul through meditative techniques, the Chinese focused on keeping the body alive forever. These different goals produced subtle differences in what was examined and taught by the scholars. Shakespeare’s characters were often based on archetypes as were the actors in Greek theatre. Jungian psychology based much of its theory in archetypal behavior which relates to the chakra in my opinion. Shakespeare’s doubling or having characters argue two sides of an action or question indicates his understanding of behavior being on a continuum and consciousness may be divided. In Japanese lore the chakra are associated with certain personality traits according to dominance and positive (yo/yang) and negative (in/yin). Here is what I consider important to know and if makes you curious get in the bibliography because sometimes I get it wrong and you should research original sources. I did a lot of research back in the 70s, 80s and 90s when I had access to fairly large leadership populations to test and compare. I was interested in getting my tenure at Hillsdale College and found the chakra descriptions worked pretty well. In fact very well, probably
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because some of the descriptions people were rating themselves on were based in Chinese medicine. (We used to do that too. What does Grandma mean when she says, “I’m feeling liverish today!” Or Grandpa says, “I’m feeling ballsy.” Probably does not mean you should head for the meat department at your local Whole Foods or Wild Oats even if they like their chow organic.) We’ll move away from the alchemy of Grandma’s Almanac of Everyday Life and move on to a modern description of bioelectromagnetic personality traits that has been tested on some five thousand people since I started collecting data in the 70s. Emotion and feelings like behavior can be looked at as continuums so each chakra is associated across a range of behaviors that can be seen as positive or negative against the reward structure of society. Interesting enough there are colors associated with mental states or fields that you can test by closing your eyes, assuming the feelings or attitudes to see what colors begin to bubble up in the phosphenes in your eyelids. If you want more info on the colors read in the bibliography. I’ll include the colors in the following descriptions and you can test yourself while thinking about how these descriptions fit people you know. What we are describing has a base in biology and ancient survival mechanisms thus fitting an archetype, but our choices greatly individualize what can be construed as success or failure in a society of constant technological change. EARTH CHAKRA (Strength/Stability) The Earth Chakra’s primary motivation is for stability, a desire to maintain things exactly as they are. It reflects a person’s orientation in terms of responsiveness and personal responsibility. The base chakra is associated with Earth elementals in human alchemy and links up the feet and legs into the genitals and spine. The base chakra ties into the genitals of the male or female and generates sexual energy. Lust at its most base but all the good stuff that goes with sex or reproduction too. It is a measure of confidence in your personal belief system which in turn
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allows you to more easily lead others. On a continuum “Earthy” people move from extremes of conventionality and concern for status on the negative, to benevolent self confidence combined with a generalist ability to synthesize on the positive. Depending on the cultural situation these attitudes can result in many opportunities for reproduction. When correlated to other tests and demographics this personality construct correlated significantly with humanistic-helpful, self-sufficient, bold, age, salary, and ability to synthesize. These correlations indicate a strongly positive person willing to help others as they can see the big picture. When the earth chakra is dominate in a person change is always more difficult. They tend to be traditional and past oriented when they say, “I don’t like this modern…. They are really saying, “I like things the way they used to be.” Negative Earth (Rule Bound) (-) Earth is the “old maid school principal” who knows all, particularly the importance of discipline and order; and definitely knows right from wrong. It may also be the “police mentality” of “ I just enforce the laws, I don’t make them” unquestioning acceptance of authority. In psychological jargon Negative Earth can be described as lack of affect and/or superego driven. The color of negative earth is dull black or red. Positive Earth (Centered) (+) Earth is the “command general” out on the battlefield with his troops, impervious to fear or danger, a mountain of strength, majesty, and inspiration. Also, the “earth mother” type solid, steady and loving --- always there for her loved ones and reliable in crisis, or the executive whose life serves as a model for his subordinates and his vision the direction of the organization. Centered self confident and authoritative would be typically used by others in describing a Positive Earth type. People tend to pick these people to be leaders under conditions of danger or instability. Often they will self-select to lead and if their
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tendencies are toward the negative there is a very real danger of failure due to inability to recognize change. The color of the positive earth is bright flag red. Negative Extreme Expression / Positive Extreme Expression
Obsessively sexual / Uninhibited Repressed / Practical Bullying (explosive temper) / Physical (sensory) Passive aggressive / Manifesting (teaching) WATER CHAKRA (Adaptive/ Creative) Primary motivation at the water chakra level is emotional reaction. Water is tied into the liver and kidneys and especially the adrenal glands. People scoring high on the water chakra choices also correlated with tests of outgoing, enthusiastic, bold, self-assured, salary, open-to-people, self-actualizing, lower self-criticism, lower oppositional, experimenting, and more relaxed. People who are influenced by Water are open to new ideas, options and innovation. They respond to outside factors, fads and fashion. Some take control and create for themselves. There is a tendency to react on emotional levels to almost all situations. Water is the level of intuitive, gut level reaction. Water people tend measure themselves against extrinsic factors. Watery people may work too hard at being “successful” and often will suffer burn out and be more susceptible to stress. Water’s basic color is a bright pumpkin orange. Negative Water (Reactive) (-) Water is the “office schemer”, out to topple those who have bettered him, preferably in a manner where they don’t even realize what has happened. (-) Water is characterized by the famed “47 Ronin” who sacrificed all for the moment of complete revenge. The competitive/ approval syndrome is common with “Watery” people meaning the person feels that “ as long as I am winning people will like me, if I’m not; they won’t.” Ego and self esteem are tied to appearance and social status. Change is embraced as
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long as it is perceived to be one’s advantage. Action tends to be defensive rather than constructive. Learning new skills is difficult because new ideas may cause one to challenge ideas that resulted in previous success. This is a very common form of neurosis in America. The color negative is brown. Positive Water (Innovative) (+) Water is the “James Bond” character who always turns disaster into victory. He or she uses all at hand; enjoys using mental, physical, and emotional natures to meet challenges. They appear mysterious, seductive, and powerful, as opposed to strong. They are good listeners and responsive to others usually out-going and build up strong records of accomplishment as they are focused on “getting the job done”. They tend to be sensual and artistic. These people are good leaders in periods of change they also can work well alone or with others but they do like an audience. They like people, gossip, and politics. The color of positive water is orange. Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression
Superficial / Expansive Selfishly Proud / Sensual Manipulative / Optimistic Mistrustful / Ambitious FIRE CHAKRA (Intensity/ Esteem) Fire measures intensity of assertiveness. The fire chakra is located at the solar plexus and is a nexus of stomach, spleen, and pancreas. In Western mystical traditions this chakra is considered the seat of the intellect and the Holy Cross. Fire dominant people are concerned with the attainment of excellence. They are warm, dynamic and expansive, using their reasoning powers to control the environment. It is not aggressiveness in the hostile sense of needing to dominate, but more of using one’s will power to succeed and enjoy that success. They are emotionally stable and relaxed physically, resulting in harmony of mind
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and body. There is little concern for status or control as they are trusting of others. They see themselves as truthtellers and tend to be strongly forthright in their speech which others may perceive as blunt or tactless, particularly if one receiving end of description. Fire also correlated with higher levels of salary and lower needs for power and lowest levels of stress related medical symptoms. Negative Fire (Dominance) (-) Fire is the aggressive, intense controlling person who is always “on” and eventually burns out way ahead of their time. Often the (-) fire person is hard to get to know as they feel distance, whether social, physical or skill level, is safety. They are driven to win because they fear failure. The color of negative fire is beige. It corresponds with Type A behavior. Positive Fire (Exuberant) (+) Fire is the “charismatic leader” who attracts followers naturally by succeeding at whatever he or she does. (+) Fire people are the dynamic ones who enjoy the process of achieving. Their enthusiasm adds to the excitement of all with whom they interact. Positive Fire is sometimes referred to as “star quality”. The color of positive fire is yellow. Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression
Egotistical Intense/ Self- aware Cynicism/ Hostility Eloquent/ Expressive Paranoia Precise/ Planner Divisive / Empirical WIND CHAKRA (Developmental/ Love) Wind reflects the potential to develop others, wisdom, humor, and love. Oddly enough this chakra’s physical location is the heart and thymus. When our personality is under the influence of the Wind manifestation, we experience compassion, acceptance, and conscious consideration of our interactions with other individuals.
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Wind can be defined as the orientation toward instruction, repair, or control of another person without irreparable damage. Benevolence toward others is primarily characteristic of the Wind. The Wind is the hardest personality configuration to learn and usually develops only with age and experience. It is with the description of the wind that the Taoist hierarchy discriminates between love needs as an emotional reaction (Water) shaped by external factors and love needs which are intrinsically fashioned by experience and the desire to be generative as well as grow. Negative Wind (Idealist) (-) Wind is the “ivory tower dreamer” who over intellectualizes, makes moral mountains out of mole hills, and always defends others “space” no matter what the cost. They tend to be out of touch with street level daily life--- suckers for every theory or program which promises to smooth out or perfect the jumbled chaos of life and society. They tend to believe others need help and cannot solve their own problems. Although their strategies are designed to help people their need to feel superior to the helpee often creates dependence rather than independence. The color of negative wind is olive drab which also is associated with lying to protect one’s concept of ideal self. Positive Wind (Model) (+) Wind is an “Albert Schweitzer” or “Mother Theresa” type, selflessly giving to bring comfort and assistance to others. Wind people believe in doing their part to make the world a better place. Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln exemplify historical figures in the United States of irreligious Wind types. Medical professionals and those who elect to go into helping professions such as social work, clinical and developmental psychology, personnel and training are representative of this attitude. The color of positive Wind is light foliage green.
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Extreme Negative Expression/ Extreme Positive Expression
Fanatic / Ideologue Generous Depleted / Nurturing Possessive / Compassionate Insecure thus authority seeking / Open-hearted VOID CHAKRA (Self-actualizing) This measure is derived from the interaction of three chakra in the head and three outside the body that may not manifest in most people. The three in the head are the throat which connects larynx and the reptile brain (There must be a Garden story in that); the third eye or Ajna which is in the forehead and forebrain associated with clairvoyance, and the lotus which is associated with spiritual development. In Maslow’s words, “What a man can be, he must be.” Void people are more independent, creative, constructive and unrestrained. They prize free speech, intellectual freedom, the right to self-defense, and a desire for justice, honesty and orderliness though recognizing such states are contrived. They describe their lives as committed, self-fulfilled and meaningful. Negative Void (Guru Syndrome) Smug and self-satisfied, one seeks converts to serve as buffers to one’s ego. Often hedonistic in a non-responsible manner and “spaced-out” due to lack of discipline. They tend to be past or future oriented with problems dealing in the here and now. Thinks of him or herself as creative but seldom produce anything but self-serving propaganda. We have all seen the type, particularly popular as a life style in the late sixties. Phosphenes and energy tends to gray, but not the smoky grayish purple seen around Bon Po practitioners. The Tibetans have techniques I can’t imagine. During a Chod initiation of my friend Christina, her Lama’s aura surrounded him in a sparking yellow cloud shaped like Ganesha. Study on that.
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Positive Void (Fully Functioning) Able to draw upon themselves themselves fully as they understand understand both their strengths and weaknesses and have the selfconfidence to strategize using both. The Void can be described as the motivation to reach the heights of one’s personal abilities and talents. Seen by others as having good intentions, trustworthy and expert at what they do. More likely to experience what Abraham Maslow describes as peak experiences, and exist on a higher hig her intellectual plane than most people. The color of positive Void is light blue to purple and with experience washes out into white. Extreme Negative Expression / Extreme Positive Expression
Dogmatic / Committed Day dreamy / Creative Undisciplined Undisciplined Sense of wonder / mystical Instinctual The above modernized Mikkyo description of personality and motivation is an extremely useful and realistic tool for describing archetypal behavior as discussed by Carl Jung. It is similar to Maslow’s hierarchy and also has universal value. Readers familiar with Taoist, Sufi, yoga, Kaballah, and the Manichean Heresies will recognize the crosscultural roots of the description and make the jump to subtle measures of biological differences induced by subtle but similar mental states across cultures. These items and concepts in a longer version have been used in selection tests and as a descriptive inventory on approximately four thousand executives in the 80s and hundreds of college students in the 90s. The norm is a thirty five year old midlevel manager, college graduate, married with children, pulling down about seventy thousand a year. In other words, successful and on their way up the ladder, not the t he usual insane people from Minnesota or Sufi dervishes. I even went out of my way to get some academic high performers, military heroes, female business owners and models, as well as track and football stars. I throw this in as you might want to know k now to whom you are being
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compared. Comparing to a higher standard is a standard rhetorical ploy to move the audience through higher expectations. A leader has high expectations but not beyond the nature of the beast. Silk ears and sow purses.Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Mystics since the beginning of time as well as clever people have developed the means to discipline the mind and stimulate states of well being. These states relate to the release of endorphins (Serotonin and pain killers) and result in euphoria. Recent research indicates these internally produced natural substances are more potent than synthetic opiates and are by-products of the states when physical and mental well-being predominate in people who have a positive regard for themselves and others. In other ot her words at the most basic and fundamental level of our existence thinking positively is not only good for us, but correlates to social success to the extent that the long term choices of evolutionary and/or biological development can be shown. We are not blank slates and when we choose to ignore the marvelous strengths endowed by our biological nature we literally toss aside the capability for success and damn our selves to the role of sheepish followers. followers. I expect the reader to be somewhat familiar with the ideas of Charles Darwin to realize that natural selection is about survival of the species and sexual selection is about reproduction of individuals and that they do not always coincide. Sexual selection is often shaped by culture and is seldom driven by biology alone. In fact the ideas that chemistry, biology, or genes alone drive a complex animal like a human is rather self- abnegating if not just silly. Effect yes, trap occasionally, but rule? Only through ignorance. In Chapter Four we’ll play with some of the interesting effects of gender, sex, and culture. Genetic studies and the breakdown of DNA studies are beginning to indicate that cellular differences can wax quantum large given enough time to become valuable as social indicators linked to survival.
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Bibliography: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Steven Pinker. Viking. 2002 The Touch of Healing: Energizing Body, Mind, and Spirit with the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu.
Alice Burmeister with with Tom Monte. Bantam Books, Books, 1997. Kukai: Major Works . Trans Yoshito S. Hakeda . Columbia University Press, NY 1972 The Psychology of the Body . Elliot Greene and Barbara Goodrich-Dunn. Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2004 Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master . Glenn J. Morris, Frog, Ltd. 1996 New Chakra Healing: The Revolutionary 32-Center Energy System. Llewellyn
Publications, 1999. Molecules of Emotion . Candace Pert. Simon &
Schuster,1999. The Second Brain . Michael Gershon, Perennial, 1999. LAPSI and MAPS, self description inventories prop. Glenn
Morris The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates . Mark
Munn. University of California Press, 2000 Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Daniel Ogden. Oxford
University Press, 2002.
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Chapter Three: Cults, Religion, Social Control, Brainwashing, and Spirituality “The god of the cannibals is a cannibal .” Emerson “Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional .” Hamer “He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.” Reston on Nixon “Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.” Freud
When you hold your spine erect, meditate, or pray the body’s electrical system more efficiently sends energy to the brain. If the neck has been damaged it creates blocks which become sources of friction for this flow and it feels warm. Aristotle thought that this “hotter air” lifted the head and made us stand erect as warm air rises. He was the first word on many things but seldom the last. At the base of the brain we have the hippocampus which processes or prepares emotions and memories to be stored in the larger brain above (reptile/fish brain again). We don’t know how it works but if it is injured odd things happen to our memory and dreaming. People who meditate a lot report visions and much more vivid dreams. Identical twin studies indicate strongly that there is a genetic component to religiosity but the expression such as attending rituals and service is much more cultural or environmentally influenced. There is a big difference between being religious and being spiritual. Lets take a test and see where your tendencies lie. Below are sixteen statements. Assign points to the statements in terms of how well they describe you. 5 = That’s me, and that is the way it is. 3 = I’ve experienced this and will verify it can happen. 2 = Kinda makes sense to me but not for me. 0 = No way, Jose.
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1.____I often feel connected to others, people and animals, like I really understand them. 2.____I believe in miracles. 3.____I sometimes get sudden insights just before sleeping or awakening and during meditation or prayer. 4.____I pay close attention to Scriptures so not to stray from God’s HolyWord. 5.____I have had moments of awe when I seemed to merge with everything and perceived to be part of a flow of energy. 6.____I believe religion is necessary to superior intelligence and for better people. 7.____I have come to recognize that my feelings are just as important a source of information as reason and logic. 8.____I believe that it is God’s will that everyone accepts the laws and beliefs that make for a better and safer society. 9.____My own experience tells me that one can experience ESP phenomena. 10.___I feel that there is a higher power far above and beyond us. 11.___It often seems to me I’m living in a different world from other people because they seem to be asleep or just miss so much. 12.___I believe God has passed on to us laws that we are to discover, learn, and practice. 13.___I often feel uncontrollable rushes of orgiastic energy moving through my body that appears as light behind my eyes. 14.___I take great pleasure in associating with the other members of my faith and feel sorry that there are people who never get to sense this great fellowship. 15.___I have lost my sense of time when concentrating on a task or thinking.
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16.___There are many things in life that cannot be explained by science. Items 1 through 15, the odd numbers reflect statements and reports by spiritual people who are not very fond of religion. Call them independent spiritual people. When you add up the score from the odd numbers you are measuring your spiritual tendency from a secular non-religious viewpoint. A score of 35 to 40 indicates you are a long way down the road to being a mystic and are highly spiritual, 8 to 16 indicates not much interest or awareness of the spiritual nature, and 17 to 34 is just like most of us, somewhere in between. Items 2 through 16, the even numbers reflect statements and attitudes held by true believers who are immersed in their religion. Call them true believers or religious dependent people and the higher your score when you add up the even numbers indicate your closeness or agreement with them. A score of 30 to 40 indicates you have deep religious convictions that you could easily share with others. Scores of eight to sixteen indicate a wishy washy attitude toward religion with 17 to 30 representing an average vocation attraction. 0 to 7 in both means you just don’t have that religious gene or interest in traditional religion or individual spirituality. Most people don’t put religion and brainwashing together, but they should because they do. Just like those three brains at the top of your spine. If you’ve studied your cultural anthropology or sociology you may have noticed that most religions simply reflect the unspoken social structures of their founder’s times. Some people take religion very seriously and others regard rendering what is usually a personal experience of rare individuals as a rarie show or service to the masses as an odd but popular exercise in futility. Be that as it may, it must be recognized that true believers regardless of conviction have been and are responsible for a great deal of divisiveness and sorrow. Some of the most recent research indicates that the intuitional survival mechanisms developed to protect intelligence are being interpreted as acts of God. The
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genetic difference between true believers and the rest of us at least indicates God has a liking for diversity all the way down to our chemical makeup. If this is true it is important to understand that some people do not adapt to change very well and through un-natural selection (Marry your own kind.) may have reinforced traits that only become apparent under stress of forced cultural/environmental change. Those of us that remember the French attempts to stamp out the terrorists in Algeria or are aware of the thumb choppers in South America realize that often good ideas result in revenge effects or unintended consequences of social change. Killing all the known Algerian terrorists resulted in greater polarization of the population and France had to recognize and release Algeria. I believe they were also recovering from their ass-whipping in Vietnam and felt the need to wax imperial to feel proud again. Attempting to kill off the opposition cost them a whole country, again. I won’t draw an analogy with the recent US adventures in the Middle East. Bankers in South America thought to discourage thieves by installing ATMs that required thumbprints. Need I go on? You can probably think of one or two yourself along the lines of we are living longer so the diseases of old age are much more apparent. We have developed better antibiotics so the surviving biogens are evolving in very unexpected directions. I won’t go into all the differences between cults and congregations, but aside from aspersions thrown it is mostly numbers. If the group is small and relies on charismatic leadership it is definitely a cult. The more followers the less likely to be called a cult, but even the largest churches and denominations started as cults. Christianity is a very successful cult. It started with thirteen guys in the Middle East who were tired of the formalities of Judaism, which grew out of one family and its allies in the same locale. The Roman Catholic Church really became a power in the eleventh century is very medieval in its structure and is very close to the Roman Legions. Methodists following John Wesley out of the gin soaked London rookeries of the eighteenth century tend to
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espouse the educational values of the industrial revolution while Baptists are more agrarian and home schooled. Christianity didn’t start out successful. It went through a long period of barely tolerated, after a couple hundred years of frequently persecuted. It would still be a minor religion if it weren’t for Cicero, St. Augustine, and the Roman Emperor Constantine who needed a lot of help to hold on to the remnants of the empire. It was a long time ago. Long before Cambridge was a great university town. Long before the two towers were blown by bin Laden, or Kennedy was shot, or the closet pansy Hitler shot himself and poisoned his wife after inciting half the world to destroy his country. What do you remember about those events? How do they shape your own mythology? How accurate is your memory? It is understandable if you are starting to fade around Hitler and Prince Jack of Camelot, but the religious connection of Osama to Wahabi Islam, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, and Afghanistan should be fresh enough that you recognize that some people take their religious affiliations seriously enough to kill other people. Religion is very serious business to some of us and laughable mythology to others. Others rewrite the history into his or her story for reasons hard to dissemble as time flies by. One of the threads in this exposure that most people miss is that the key religious players today come from an Arabic world that also produced wonderful fables like The 1001 Nights (as well as algebra) and preserved the Greek rhetorics when Rome fell. They used to tell the French that pepper grew on trees protected by giant ferocious rocs and kept the price of pepper about the same as gold in Medieval times. They knew and know how to tell a story and preserve a market advantage. St. Augustine of Hippo was a dark complected speech teacher from North Africa when it was an outpost of Rome, and the former Carthage, in what is Nigeria today. He was a great admirer and scholar of Cicero and a convert to Christianity. He is usually portrayed as a Roman but in Nigeria his portraits are rather brown. I don’t know if skin color still effects credibility, but in the past it certainly was a factor in social
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success rather like our long boned, blue-eyed, brown haired Caucasian Jesus, what we call visual rhetoric in the TV age. Augustine’s greatest contribution to Christianity was some books on how to preach, or sell “the greatest story ever told” which were heavily derivative or plagiarized from Cicero. Back in those days, since everything was copied, people didn’t notice and most people couldn’t read anyway. Only the preacher’s had a clue and it was to their advantage to tell the story in the most effective way to win converts. The Church appreciated Augustine’s contribution to conversion rates and made him a saint. We get four different versions of Yeshwa (Jesus) ben Nazreth’s life in the New Testament but the Book of Matthew is often quoted as being most credible, as each story is wildly different, but all establish that the man was a living god in the mythic tale telling traditions of the far and middle East. Divine birth was quite common as an ancient story telling device to indicate the importance of the hero to the rapt audience. Helen of Troy was divine as well as the Roman Emperors after conquering the infectious Egyptians. Alexander seemed to think of himself as a living god, though his Companions weren’t so sure. Virgin birth differentiates Jesus from the special births of the Old Testament. Signs in the sky, royal blood, life threatening situation, clever escape, angelic heralds, were common to Roman and Greek godlings, too. Mithras slew the black bull of ignorance, was killed in the process and three days later arose from the dead. Two thousand years ago Mithras was the favorite god of the Roman legions. Hercules killed his snakes in the cradle. How you tell the story and prepare for your audience is a very Ciceronian device/advice from Augustine. I remember my father tracing Jesus’s bloodline back to David not realizing the ancient Hebrew were nomadic thus matrilineal. Even today if you want to move to Israel you are considered Jewish if your mother is Jewish. Remember to marry a nice Jewish girl if you want the Holy Land mobility for your children. Nowadays a new version of the Bible comes out in the vernacular every ten or twenty years but in the old days
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when it was hard to split the church from the government, it was a very big deal. The King James Version which is the standard for many Christian Fundamentalists was the product of a long series of rewrites and the man most responsible for its language, the poet and rhetorician Tindal, was strangled and burnt at the stake for heresy shortly after its publication. Interestingly enough we now have a couple of Bibles found by archaeologists back in the early half of the last century which are very different in tone than the heavily edited over the centuries modern versions. In the Nag Hamadi Bible, James, Jesus’ brother, refers to Pauline Christians as followers of the big lie. (What are the implications of that statement?), Mary Magdalene has her own gospel, and according to the Gospel of Thomas, or maybe it was Phillip gossiping about the boss, Peter was jealous of her closer relationship with Jesus. (I wonder why that Gospel disappeared, after all Thomas was the doubter so his descriptions would have been more skeptical or accurate?) Some historians call these the Dead Sea Scrolls or Gnostic Bibles hoping to separate them from their source by philosophy as well as distance. It is hard to remember all these people were Jews not Christians. As much as I’d like it to be true, Brown’s The DaVinci Code is worm holed with inaccuracies but the whole concept of a feminine male or homoerotic league of protector priests keeping a secret like Christ’s progeny together for 2000 years against the church (while keeping their symbols out front for recruiting) is a major rewrite of history. It’s a great piece of rhetoric in its own right and a fun read. It will be fu to see what he does with the Freemasons. History is written by the winners and sometimes the stories vary widely when told by the losers. Practically any event that happened longer than fifty years ago begins to develop spin, and the spin on a thousand or more years can be of tornado force. This is further complicated by the age of the listener and who tells the story. We love best what we hear from Mommy. We tend to believe what we hear first. Credibility studies indicate that we also tend to believe people we admire or
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like, particularly when we are young. Bishop Wickey once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll show you a Roman Catholic forever.” What we learn at our mother’s knee is incredibly hard to dislodge even when there is little social reinforcement. How many of us can remember our struggles with giving up Santa Claus, particularly when those presents were involved. Some educators attribute the hell and damnation New England preacher Jonathan Edwards with developing religious conversion techniques in 1735 at Northampton, Massachusetts. His ability to frighten people into the church was copied by Charles Finney of New York and the mass religious conversion industry was born. Swapping the fear of hell for the joy of heaven through becoming a member of the body of Christ, however, was part of the sermonizing techniques developed by Augustine from Cicero’s writings for the early Christian preachers nearly fifteen hundred years earlier. What did you learn at your mother’s knee before the inner skeptic developed? The tricks of reasoning and faulty logic of Augustine’s emotional appeals falter in today’s forays into media exploitation of the mass audience. Today’s cult leader has a vaster array of tools than the vitriolic tongues of Edwards and Finney. Pavlov of the dog salivating fame had his work on behavioral psychology warped into brainwashing by Lenin’s interest and desire to apply the potential of his work to government ends in Mother Russia. Dick Sutphen, an American musician and hypnotherapist specializing in subliminal effects in his 1984 speech cited in the bibliography states, “In the entire history of man, no one has been brainwashed and realized or believed that he or she had been brainwashed…. Those who have been brainwashed will usually passionately defend their manipulators claiming they had simply been “shown the light” or “transformed in miraculous ways.” One of the fun things about taking a behavioral psych course is training a pigeon to do some task. When the semester is over the trained pigeons are prepared for the next crop of students by being dipped into a bucket of ice water for a couple of seconds which has the effect of wiping out their memory of
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the training. The dip shocks the pigeons little brain just like electroshock treatment or an overdose of insulin or LSD can wash the memory out of ours. Pavlov, the Russian dog-drool psychologist, developed his animal model into three stages of what he called transmarginal inhibition where brain responses and emotions could be converted through impairing judgment and increasing suggestibility. What the Greeks and Romans accomplished through reason and rhetoric could now be accomplished through physiological and psychological techniques with minimal cooperation from the subjects. Some of the techniques are so familiar we just take them for granted already entangled in the web. Others are more sinister and some appear sinister, like meditation, but are actually benign when selfcontrolled. The Quakers and Shakers believed in developing goodness through self-examination. The Quakers did not allow music or preaching, only witness, and the less of that the better in their worship because they found people were influenced by it. Any repetitive beat ranging from 45 to 80 beats per minute or close to the human heart is conducive to hypnotism as it can generate an eye open alpha state of consciousness where one is much more suggestible. You can probably remember “Bringing In The Sheaves,” while marching onward to that Christian state of amazing grace. And if you can’t remember, that’s a characteristic of trance state. It is just the beat that is important. Raves or trance dance music have the same effect. Hitler’s Juden Volk movement had the-SS troopers- to-be march and sing together to build a sense of Aryan community. (Himmler tried to make the Reich into a religious movement based on Nordic mythology but the archaeology didn’t match up with his delusions. He had to settle for training blondes to murder Jews, which wasn’t that difficult given the antiSemitism prevalent in Europe at that time.) Preachers and hypnotists train to speak in what is called a voice roll, using the same beat but emphasizing key words for greatest effect. In the military this is called “the voice of command.” Today we have the technology to hide the process of
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altering mental states in the sound system and the lighting to help the congregation into that suggestible state of alpha that is also associated with feeling good and creativity. The appropriate beat or sound/vibration and dimmer lighting are of primary importance in inducing an altered state where the average human is about twenty five times more suggestible. A company in Los Angeles designs sound and lighting technology specifically for churches. Technicians who install these sound and lighting systems claim the congregation and monetary income of the church will double if the minister follows their suggestions. (Time to pass the plate and thank you, Brother! Relatively harmless? Just good salesmen setting up the marks?) Well it does stretch the envelope where ethical communication resides but this is nothing in comparison to some human development groups like EST, or big rich congregation/cults like the almost Christian Korean Moonies, who have a major toe hold on the Republican Right. How do they work the Pavlov? It usually takes about a week to break someone down so you have to separate them from their usual herd and increase their tension which alters their body chemistry. Separation is relatively easy, a meeting hall, farm house, church camp, any place free from interruption by the outside world. There is often a talk about finding “one’s purpose and living up to one’s word.” EST trainers were famous for increasing tension by locking up the bathrooms. The tension can be raised higher by having people, not smoke, drink, or eat except at breaks and the breaks are short. They are given tasks that cause some mental and physical fatigue, but no time for reflection. Tension is built by bringing participants to the “stage” where they are humiliated to increase their fear as public speaking is the most common fear, f ear, sometimes these humiliates are shills. Vicious language is used to upset the sensitive. When tension becomes high enough the convert slips into alpha as the body releases endorphins to protect it from damage as the body’s flight/fight mechanisms are in a part of the brain that is as old as dirt and can’t tell the difference between
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physiological and psychological attack without special training. (Read chapters two and six.) This form of induced alpha makes the subject from 25 to t o 200 times more suggestible which is a lot of suggestion. You know you have them when their eyes dilate and they t hey get that feel good sappy smile. (Bully for f or the limbic/semiotic nervous system.) New jargon is often introduced here to create a difference in mental alignment as well as creating a feeling of special knowledge and community for the new convert. People make agreements to go find f ind new converts before leaving. Celebration and then go get your buds. “Sell it by Zealot. Get ‘em while they’re hot.” Being aware of how conversion techniques take advantage of the targets once again pushes the ethical communication envelope, but to be quite frank this is usually addressed around politics and advertising, not religion. We have freedom there in America or used to, but giving a fool a rope doesn’t doesn’t necessitate self lynching. Attending a religious or EST meeting armed with this knowledge of how tension over twenty minutes or so results in a suggestive state (Time to run, kiddies.) or what Sutphen calls a brain phase will not lesson the effect. In fact anger, ang er, and you should be, increases tension and almost assures a conversion state. You may wake feeling all squeaky clean reborn with an empty wallet. Special training in detachment helps. Those of us who enjoyed Basic Training in the military or were raised in evangelical religious traditions can associate with the process made more real. Be alert to changes in diet to reduce alertness. There are many ways to reduce alertness and a big influx of sugar is one of them. The brownies don’t have to be doped. A glass of Kool Aid has enough sugar in it to t o stun a horse. When I took my children with Linda off sugar they went from very distractible mediocre students to A students in a month. m onth. “Spiritual Diets” are a major tip off that t hat you are being groomed for cannon fodder or at least worker bee status. Without the grounding of grains, nuts, seeds, dairy products, fish, and even red meat (buffalo is great) people tend to get “spacey” or “air headed”
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losing attention to detail, particularly when combined with long hours of intense physical activity. activity. My friend Esly Caldwell went to the wrong guru in India I ndia and his introduction to their brand of karma yoga almost turned him into a quasi-Mennonite veggy farmer and cave dweller to be allowed proximity to the “god on earth.” He was a sincere fellow and they set the hook with followers f ollowers swooning when the guru approached, and other easily staged opportunities for the guru to strut his stuff. Rather like a Christian preacher smacking people on their forehead to stop brain function in the t he hope that the somatic shock will erase psychosomatic symptoms. Nobody had ever told Esly about the dark side of religious manipulation. He was and is a nice guy. It took a day or two of playing with his friends to break the hold. He isn’t stupid. Not every one who owns an ashram or temple has your best interest in mind. Back to the t he brain and conversion techniques. Once you have that monkey mind slowed down, confuse the suckers with bunches of new information, lectures, encounter groups, and diary writing. This is called decognition or programming confusion. If you keep them busy enough reality and illusion can merge and rather odd logics become more acceptable which allows you to introduce Pavlov’s phase three where the t he dewy fresh converts learn to pray or meditate in ways that allow the mind to go flat or stop thought so you can put in what the convert “should think about.” Thirty years ago I thought the concepts around Bandler’s NLP were pretty simple minded. Well I was wrong. It is more than a tool to seduce the stupid stolen from the great hypnotist Milton Erickson. You can start your very valuable education in his sales techniques with the Richard Bandler book in the bibliography. Twenty years ago, 1984, researchers noted that watching TV put the watcher into a more suggestible state, doubled right brain activity, and in children’s brains alpha waves dominated after thirty seconds. Alpha waves usually dominate when you are asleep or your eyes are closed. Hmmmm? Alpha waves are associated with both creativity and suggestibility. Commercials or suggestions
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are more likely to be accepted by the no longer alert. Studies at Purdue found that 90 percent of the audience missed over 25 percent of questions about a show within minutes of having seen it, suggesting they were slipping in out of a hypnotic state. It’s a given that there is a lot of easily forgettable TV fare and the attention span of the average TV viewer is twenty seconds now. Forty years ago, when I was an instructor in the Army, I was told the average attention span was about fifteen minutes. When you consider subliminal visuals, subliminal messages in the music, sustained musical beats at trance inducing paces, spaced picture flicker rates, television and the internet become interesting tools for conversion. Faster beat creates greater excitement. Why do you think so many products now advertise with a rock musical background? There are a lot of powerful people out there who have plans for you and there are no laws against any of these techniques. Pay attention.When I worked for General Motors in the 80s and 90s I tried to convince some executives that their advertising needed better targeting, particularly the “Cadillac Style” campaign. I worked for the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac platform’s engine division. The response to my complaint was the typical buyer was sixty five and the car was a reward for a life well spent. I thought they should target people about twenty-five years younger and sell that reward three or four times. The ads now look a lot like I wanted then. I guess some folks had to retire. Anyway, back to conversion. I’m not saying that some people don’t go on this conversion trip willingly. Eric Hoffer who wrote The True Believer research on mass movements before the global village, indicated about thirty percent of the population are joiners and followers. They want to give up their personal power and have someone else do their thinking for them. Hoffer indicated true believers are not intent on selfadvancement but crave renunciation of the self and were eternally incomplete and insecure. They are groupies. They don’t have much of that American independent thing going. They want a rule book and someone to tell them how to live. I think the numbers
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these days are closer to fifty percent from simple observation of the Presidential election. At their worst these are very dangerous people looking for a holy cause to die for. Hitler’s Brown Shirts were true believers. The Moral Majority identify as true believers. Wahabi Islam’s baby bombers are obviously true believers and caught young. All cults are composed of true believers that follow a charismatic leader. True believers can be found in politics, churches, businesses, and social causes. They are good haters and keep a sharp eye out for the people who don’t share their passion so they can round you up and get you headed in the right direction, or a lot worse. At their best they are just Fred and Mary who live down the street, keep to themselves, tithe regularly, and hope to get on the school board so they can put an end to teaching meditation, “Values,” or “evil-lution.” Meditation without special belly breathing and keeping your tongue up can result in a permanent state of alpha that is rather nice if you avoid the suggestible effect. Being mellow is one thing, being everybody’s favorite gull is another. Being in a permanent state of alpha ain’t samadhi but it is nice, and you can only get it if you spend a lot of hours in pretty deep meditation way beyond what most westerners and people from Asia are willing to try. It is pretty rare that a guru actually does the work if we use Osho (or the Rajneesh) as a typical example. Real enlightenment has more to do with chi kung than simple sitting, spinal twisting, or dancing. Andrew Newberg, M.D. is a student/friend of Eugene D’Aquili whom I mention in Shadow Strategies with some regard. Dr. Newberg is studying the effect of prayer and meditation on brainwaves and blood movement in the brain. He is well regarded as a neurotheologian and posits that the human urge toward religion is biological. Thus Freud was wrong to prophesize that as people become more educated, and thus more aware, religion would be replaced by science. Like most prophets outside of Nostradamus, and the futurists of the Holy Books, Freud’s prophecy would seem to be wide of the mark. People like to interpret biological states as GOD. The kundalini
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becomes Moses’s burning bush and the flaming cross logo of Methodism. Newberg’s description of limitless input of sensation when you cut out the newer areas in the brain fit with intuition as a feeling mechanism for water bound creatures to me. See Chapter two. Religion lodged in the reptile/snake brain with breathing…. Interesting? Real religious experience, visions of light, flights of ecstasy, etc. can be experienced by modern people. Prayer is very similar to meditation. Regardless of the nature of the actual practice, prayer has long been an unambiguous feature of every living religion. In Islam, prayer is the foremost act of adoration and the salat is offered five times a day while facing Mecca. The Hindus use daily liturgical prayers spelled out in the Vedas. In Buddhism monastic prayers are practiced morning, noon, evening, and midnight. Tantric explorers are producing a literature to rival the patriarchs of old. Shirley Maclaine, the actress writes of her journeys into mysticism with a wide eyed freshness that is compelling. Her pilgrimage at seventy of the Camino Real is an interesting adventure that many younger people would falter. Da Free John like the Rajneesh has provided us all with the spectacle of how delusional the guru can become when encouraged by the worship of his flock. Rajneesh who reinvented himself as Osho after his fall into paranoia was a skilled plagiarist and much of his written work is useful. Margo Anand, whose stuff I like a lot, though highly influenced by Osho, is a woman who must be paid attention to as she is very sharp and richly confident in her experience. As in ancient times both the wise and the crazy can be touched by God and it is still terribly rude and arrogant to impose your truth on someone else and reject their experience as not good enough. Golden rule? Love? By now you have probably noticed that people die. It is a cross-cultural given that everybody at some point in life will give it up and die. Death of the body is more common than dirt and used to contribute to dirt until the Egyptians taught the Jews that the physical body should be preserved creating one hell of an industry for priests and undertakers for the spiritually insecure. A lot
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of religious activity centers around death and dying because most people are afraid to die. Fear of death is a great way to shape how people live. We fear death once we notice it, because of a feeling that we are immortal (sly old reptile spinal brain and lotus chakra). Famous humanistic psychologists Carl Jung, William James, and Carl Rogers all had experiences that led them to conclude that spirit might outlast matter. Rogers noted in his old age that he was too busy to think much about death. Jung’s concept of individuation or the process of self-realization allows us to deepen our consciousness to include aspects of the subconscious that do indeed seem to be immortal. Even those who see death as the end of material and psychic existence, see the value of individuation as a living process worth pursuing. Individuation as a concept seems to render death as a doorway into the spirit world, void, egregore, or superconsciousness where the next order of existence is determined to some extent by the level of development achieved on this side of life. This concept is not so different as expressed in the esoteric expression of most of the great religions and myths of the world. Thus in death the meaning of life is finally revealed. This is not a long leap of faith from “Masturbate and you will go to hell!” or “Tell the truth and you will go to Heaven.” People who have these beliefs do not consider them irrational or neurotic. Freud disagreed. Just because Freud totally blew it around “penis envy” doesn’t mean he was wrong about everything he wrote. He was a pioneer. Pioneers are bound to make mistakes. William James thought of death mythologies as a basic right and opined they made life more worth living, perhaps the only defense against the urge to suicide. My personal experience described in Shadow Strategies and Path Notes side with Carl Rogers in deciding to “consider it possible that each of us has a spiritual essence lasting over time, and occasionally incarnated in a human body.” Hatsumi-san said in the forward to Path Notes that his interactions with me led him to the same conclusion about
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death. I describe sharing energy with him in Path Notes. You can conjecture as to whom benefited the most from the exchange. I suspect our ability to soul merge was as as big a surprise to him as to me. Budo shaktipat. Granville Hall was a pioneer in experimental psychology with a sense of humor similar to Voltaire. He argued that if people really believed in life after death, clergymen would lead mass expeditions of pilgrims eager to cross to and conquer on the other side. “We should hasten to go young and in our prime to make the best of the new opening,” rather like the Aztec basketball players who won to be sacrificed by the priests. Our reaction to Jonestown strongly indicates most people share Hall’s view that a belief in life beyond the grave is a comfortable convention to help us deal with our fear of death. Even those “surest of Heaven” often cling to miserable existences attached to life preserving machinery in the back wing of old age homes and hospitals known as the Veggie Ward. Think they are safe there? See Kill Bill One or check out nurse Charles Cullen on the internet. The concept of immortality can act as a powerful conditioner and great conversion tool. Fear is the factor and for most, it becomes a free form anxiety, as it is fear of the unknown. Biological immortality can refer to the continued existence of one’s children and their offspring; it can be extended to spiritual and social groupings and the traditions they preserve as in a martial or religious lineage. Material immortality is an attempt to increase longevity that invariably fails in some laughable manner as the flesh does not match the spirit in willing. Since preservation of the body is the most illogical choice concerning death, you might want to make the choice of organ donation then cremation. Have a wake. I loved attending NRF Maier’s wake and will emulate him. I’ve known a lot of very interesting people and it would be fun to get them all together for a party even if I can’t be there for the fun. Theological immortality is not always literal but may be representing life changes through the cathexis or conversion of being “born again.” One dies to his or her old ways and becomes a “new person” with new
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behaviors. In budo one “kills the ego” to be renewed in nature. Creative immortality is granted to those whose works are of such quality that they are remembered with their art. Healing techniques, writings, sculpture, paintings, and inventions can lift the creator into the ranks of the immortals. Natural immortality can be achieved through our acceptance of our embeddedness in nature and the Great Spirit. Transcendent immortality can be achieved through meditation techniques that result in a blissful experience of timelessness, a feeling of being lifted beyond the limitations of daily life and death (Might also be a result of reptile brain dominance!). All of these forms of immortality are tools to symbolically defeat death and have enjoyed greater or lesser popularity across cultures and historical epochs. How death is presented and life after it can be used as a powerful tool for conversion. Sex, death, and music are powerful motivators used by many people to shape the behavior of others for centuries. Given what you now know about the brain phasing effect of stress reactions leading to conversion and creation of True Believers you may have some realizations around the effects of war, terrorism, anxiety, and jihad. Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” Religions control how most people think about death, murder, or suicide. Judaism and Islam regard suicide as murder. Mohammad said, “Your body has a right,” thus all forms of suicide are forbidden by Islam. The taking of life is only allowed by way of justice or direct provocation. The baby bombers on jihad are being manipulated. In the Buddhist tradition death is considered inevitable. Buddhists are expected to live in ways that ensure their mental and spiritual development so that they are prepared for death. After all, why should the tree mourn its leaves. The spirit or soul does not mind the falling away of the body. Its up to you to save your soul or spirit. No one else can do it for you and there seems to be lots of different ways to approach truth and the concept of salvation. The book Power vs. Force explains how kinesiology can be used to discover “truth” and levels of consciousness. An expert psychiatrist who uses this
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method told me that my martial art books scored in the six hundreds. (That’s a much higher score than Billy Graham. He was impressed and came to a bump and slug seminar. The comparison might even be fair as some people do consider budo a cult, while others regard the kwoon or dojo a temple.) The methodology can be pretty simple. You hold the article you want to test over your chest and have someone push your arm down. If the arm goes down easily the object weakens you, if not, it is safe for you. What blew me away is it works for food, cell phones, books, movies, and other fun things like herbs and medicines. You should play with this too. Don’t take the author’s rankings for granted, do your own. Truth can be personal. Pay attention. Bibliography: The Holy Longing: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning .Connie Zweig. J.P. Tarcher,
2003. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion . Robert D.
Cialdini, Ph.D. Quill, 1984. Battle for the Mind: The Psychology of Conversion and Brain-Washing . William Sargant.
Malor Book by ISHK, 1997. The True Believer . Eric Hoffer. Harper & Row, 1951. CICERO: The life and times of Rome’s greatest politician .
Anthony Everitt. Random House, 2001. A History of the Arab Peoples. Albert Hourani. Belknap
Harvard, 1991. The Nag Hammadi Library: The definitive new translation of the Gnostic scriptures, complete in one volume . James M. Robinson, editor.
Harper Collins, 1988. Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior . David R. Hawkins,
M.D., Ph.D. Hay House, 2002. The Battle for Your Mind: Persuasion and Brainwashing Techniques being used on the
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Public Today . Speech by Dick Sutphen in 1984.
www.dicksutphen.com/html/battlemind Persuasion Engineering. Richard Bandler and John LaValle. Meta Publications, 1996. The Carl Rodgers Reader . Kirshenbaum and Henderson, editors. Houghton Mifflin, 1989 How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. Michael Shermer. Freeman,
2000. The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning, and Indoctrination . Malor/ISHK,
2000. Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution. John F. Haught.
Westview, 2003. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes .
Dean Hamer. Doubleday, 2004 “On Facing Death: Views of Some Prominent Psychologists.” Dr. Giampaolo Moraglia. Journal of Humanistic Society. Vol.44,No.3, Summer 2004. Dzog Chen Meditation by Khamtul Rinpoche. Trans by Gareth Sparham. Sri Satguru Publications, 1994. Zen and the Brain . James H. Austin, M.D. MIT Press, 1998. Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master . Glenn J. Morris, Frog, Ltd. 1996. Shamanic Guide to Death and Dying . Kristin Madden. Lewellyn, 1999 The Camino. ShirleyMaclaine. Pocket Books, 2000 The Magus of Strovolos: The Extraordinary World of a Spiritual Healer . Kyriacos
Markides. Penguin Arkana, 1990.
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Chapter Four: What have Birds and Bees to do with Getting Laid? “On an average day, about 3.3 % of the world’s population have sex. Less than 0.4% of these acts of copulation result in a birth.” (Prospect, Oct. 2004) “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts…for support rather than illumination.” Lang “ All is fair in love and war .” Anon “Love’s first sigh dismisses Wisdom’s last word .” French Proverb
In the industrialized world a lot of unhappiness is generated around the concepts of love, marriage, sex, and gender because people make bad choices based on faulty information. We marry until “Death do we part!” That is a vow. Vows are very strong promises that the parties involved are not supposed to break. Breaking a vow is very embarrassing for all concerned. The reality since World War II has been a growing divorce rate. About half of marriages end in divorce within four years with no death, a few sheepish grins, mutters of bad sex and no money, and if not much property or chattel are involved no hard feelings. In modern times where people live long lives under a lot of pressure and change, the old agrarian community vows take more grit than most of us can muster. Still there are that fifty percent that live up to the ideal. Having been married three times and lived with a parade of remarkable women the author does not give marital advice. There is, however, a bunch of useful information in this chapter that the serial monogamist or lover may find more useful than what my father told me the night before I went off to the
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Army (“Keep your nose clean. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t go out with girls you haven’t been introduced to.”). Hey! He didn’t abuse me or beat me. He was just really out of step with the times. He helped raise six college grads into the middle class. He was a good man and great in some ways. Surprise Numero Uno. There are at least four biological
sexes genetically separated for homo sapiens sapiens (our team). And that excludes hermaphrodites who the Sioux, Hopi, and Greeks used to keep around as medicine men because they understood both sides of the sex equation at a gut level. Hermaphrodites or intersexuals are quite rare in any culture. If you ever meet one cherish the experience. When it comes to sex genetic expression can get rather odd. What we try to identify as biological gender differences are rather arbitrary. Biological or genetic differences can be even stranger as sex doesn’t express in humans until we are rather old. People with Klinefelter’s syndrome for instance, appear to be female with breasts but have deformed male genitals, a high probability of being mentally retarded, and are sterile. Turner syndrome girls do not have internal female organs and without hormone therapy will not experience puberty. In the general population homosexual behavior is not rare and never has been. Estimates range from one in a hundred to one in ten. I suspect that the numbers go up around gay friendly locales and occupations and down in those bastions of masculinity and femininity like lumberjacking, rodeo, or interior design. Stereotypes are often based in truth so I can say I’ve only met two straight male hairdressers in my sixty years but then again I rarely socialize with hairdressers as I shave my head. The two I did know seemed to be having an awful lot of fun with their easy access to erotic women. The ancient city of Thebes had a battle group of male lovers who fought as a unit. Alexander the Great wasn’t so great after his favored Companion and childhood buddy was killed. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reflects a reality that the Moral Majority
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won’t get but as population increases so does homosexuality suggesting strongly that God or evolution doesn’t regard the human vermin expanse with the benevolence of “Go forth and multiply.” Study on that. A Chiropractor friend of mine suggests that the female hormones in the water table have a lot to do with it too, but then he correlates carbonated drink consumption with cancer. My experiences with homosexual men and women in the Army, work life, theater, and horrors, the martial arts, have led me to a position of benign support. My brother’s lover seems to be a better man than me and furthermore as the years have gone by I like him better than my brother who was pretty special before he fell into a bottle of vodka. As they say in Texas, “Git uzed tewit!” Jimmy Swaggert is probably safe, and given his taste in rough trade prosties has more to fear from that which he doesn’t. When his remarks about killing gays who found him romantically attractive were made public on national TV, what amazed me was (1) he actually had a church congregation who looked to him for guidance (Somewhere now in the Deep South is an elementary school or boot camp for rather odd Christians?) and (2), they didn’t mention the last time he was caught with his tongue out and pants down. Jimmy has some exotic tastes that even the Roman clerics would probably avoid. The religious economic strategy of outbreeding the other team is a bad choice both genetically and environmentally and Gaia is beginning to notice our cancerous behavior. If you are truly butch you aren’t attractive to the queer eye anyway. Forgiveness is a Christian virtue I struggle with as the fear of Alzheimer’s makes me work on keeping my memory strong. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote an important science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness at the end of the 60s about human interaction with Gethenians that was truly gender-bending. Surprise Dos. As if plain old two sexes did not create
enough problems for most people, research in the 80s and 90s, and this century too, reveals there are at least eight
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kinds of lovers or socially preferred strategies for intimacy. This is important to know because most people egocentrically believe their type of loving is the type of loving. When I was the token liberal professor at conservative Hillsdale College, Types of Love Research was cutting edge and with a little tweaking of the original researchers’ self-test I was able to get some fun data from my students over the years. The original test had a bias against ludus that attached it to coercion that I separated for my data. I also added a new category to the research since moving to Louisiana and talking with Lenora Rougeou, a local psychologist/business grad student. This test is relatively gender free and works across cultures. In other words, it is reliable and you can base realistic decisions on your results. It is/was used all over the world and there are some interesting differences from country to country. To discover your proclivity and thus improve your chances of developing a lasting relationship (as like attracts like and differences create passion) take the test below. Don’t read ahead. Just take it. You’ll be glad you did. Respond to the following statements by assigning a number representing the degree to which you think they describe your thinking or behavior toward those you love or hold intimate (The higher the number the closer the hit.). You are allowed to imagine if it has been a while. 0 = Nothing, nada, not me, never. 1 = I can almost think that someone might feel that way. 2 = Sometimes under certain conditions this statement would be generally accurate. 3 = This statement is about accurate, I have definitely felt this way. 4 = That’s me. 5 = I always feel this way and cannot believe others don’t feel this way too.
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1. ___My lover looks good, and there is a “chemistry” between us that is erotic. 2. ___I feel that my lover and I were meant for each other. Its fate or karma. 3. ___My lover and I are really attracted and instantly understand each other. 4. ___Love is a game where there are no rules but passion and pleasure. 5. ___My lover knows what is good for the goose is good for the gander so we are careful about our other relationships to avoid hurting each other. 6. ___My lover knows I have other lovers so we enjoy what we enjoy about each other while we are together. 7. ___I expect to always be friends with my lover. 8. ___Our love is a deep friendship, not a mysterious, mystical emotion. 9. ___Our love relationship is satisfying because it developed from a good friendship. 10. ___In choosing a lover, I believe that similar backgrounds are very important. 11. ___An important factor in choosing a lover is testing to see what kind of a parent they would be. 12. ___I seriously consider the effect my lover might have on my career. 13. ___Some times I get so excited thinking about my lover I can’t sleep. 14. ___I cannot relax if I think my lover is with someone else. 15. ___When my lover is angry or doesn’t pay attention to me, I feel sick all over. 16. ___I would rather suffer myself than let my lover suffer. 17. ___I would endure all things for the sake of my lover. 18. ___When my lover gets angry with me, I still love him/her fully and unconditionally.
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19. ___My lover is better off not knowing what I’ve done and do with other people. 20. ___You lose your lover’s respect if he/she isn’t a little bit afraid of you. 21. ___If my lover starts talking about commitment, I force a topic change. 22.___I’m really afraid to die alone with no one to care for me. 23.___I want my lover close and to share every meaningful experience 24.___I am willing to give up a lot to be close to my lover Add up each little bloc of three. Each set of three statements identifies one of the seven (now eight) most prevalent styles of loving. Your highest scoring set identifies your dominant style described in a lot more detail below. Pay attention to your three highest scores as no one is all or nothing. You may have put a lot of your eggs in one basket but that four or five in another set may create an occasional surprise for you. STYLES OF LOVING
Where your scores are highest identifies your style of loving. Most people have a mix of two or three. Research that began in the 80s found that there are six positive styles of love and the nineties added a more realistic negative and for the twenty-first century we put in the highangst death lover who fears to be alone. Each is a little different and based on a different view of what a relationship should be. Since most people think their kind is the only kind, understanding the differences can make your life easier, particularly your love life. EROS Statements 1-3 are characteristic of the ‘Eros lover’.
If you put your highest scores here you focus on beauty, attractiveness, and sensuality. Often the erotic lover pursues an ideal that is never fulfilled, however both male and female followers of Eros report the highest satisfaction with life and their love life when compared with all other
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types of lovers. Maybe beauty is more than skin deep. Men tend to score higher here so if you want to be attractive to men don’t forget the work out and the beauty parlor, as for sensuality there are a couple of books in the bibliography that can keep you busy trying new things for a long time. Men are more likely to respond to “love at first sight” as they are more lower brain and chakra responsive. Weirdly enough men and women across cultures associate attractiveness with competence, poise, confidence, strength, happier marriages, and more prestigious jobs. Hetero and gay men and women reported physical attractiveness of the partner influencing how much they enjoyed a date and whether they would repeat the date. It doesn’t make sense but it is true. People attribute positive characteristics to those they find attractive and negative attributes are slathered on those they find unattractive. Given these research findings you should read Chapter Nine regardless of how you score. LUDUS Statements 4-6 refer to ludus love. The ‘ludus
lover’ is not a monogamous lover. He or she regards love as play, and the more players in the game, the greater the variety, entertainment, and fun. Ludus lovers like the shallow end of the gene pool and avoid deep emotional commitment. Ludus oriented lovers of both sexes report more relationships, but with less satisfaction. If your ludus is added to ‘coercive lover’, items 19-21, particularly if you are male, you will experience significantly less happiness, trust, and much more dissatisfaction with life. In general men score higher at ludus than women. The ludus lover is almost a male Dionysian archetype but with the advent of reliable birth control methods females of the ludus persuasion have multiplied. The song line, “When I’m not with the one I love, I love the one I’m with!” sums up the healthy ludus attitude. The ludus lover tends toward excitement and variety of experience as opposed to depth of attachment. They like having another notch on the gun and if it is with a Balinese gymnast at 37,000 feet while crossing the equator during a solar eclipse, how much
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more romantic? Strangely ludus lovers pay more attention to the rituals of romance, which may account for their higher partner rate, as both or all sexes report a desire for more romance in their love life. The deadly spread of STDs in the USA because of a “just say no” educational policy of the last thirty years has not been evidenced in Holland or England but choice indicates the careless of this common type of lover will take a Darwinian hit. When I lived in Detroit I was impressed by the spread of genital warts in teen-agers in the inner city, but the popularity of oral sex has created some venereal disease combinations that even my ex-Medic mind could not conceive in steamy Louisiana. Having nurses for girl friends and wives can be so disturbing of one’s wa (Japanese for harmony). Be careful out there. STORGE Statements 7-9 score tendencies towards storge love. The ‘storge lover’ is peaceful and tranquil. They grow love out of friendship. Sex tends to come late and is not that important to storge lovers. They nurture their lover with caring. The storge lover is a companion not a passion. They pursue someone they know and enjoy to share interests and activities. They are slow to come to bed but as the old Pennsylvania Dutch saying goes “Kuchen (kitchen) lasts… Kissin’ don’t.” Storge love is very similar to friendship and sex is a lower priority than mutual respect, caring, compassion, and concern for the other person. People from the USA usually score lower at storge than Mexicans, the French, or Asians. Women usually score higher than men at storge. PRAGMA Statements 10-12 refer to pragma love. The
‘pragma lover’ is above all pragmatic. They go looking for love in all the right places with a check list of characteristics they want in a lover or spouse. If you don’t measure up, the pragma lover will soon show you the door. Conservatives and, of course, traditional grandmas prize the pragma lover. Pragmas are practical and prefer the concept of like attracts, or cattle marries cattle, and vine marries vine. They are traditional and seek alliance
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and the idea of arranged marriage is not alien to their thinking. Pragmas have an idea of qualifications that a lover must live up to, love may not be necessary for a good relationship but there will be road marks to make the trip through life easier. Is the family respectable? Can this person cook? Will they advance my career or have a good one of his or her own I can share. Less advanced prefer the little red corvette or good supply of nose candy. Interestingly enough conservative women score high on pragma but so do United States women in general. MANIC Statements 13-15 refer to manic love. The ‘manic
lover’ loves with no controls. They can’t drive 55. Love for them is a constant hormonal imbalance. They tend to intense jealousy and fear of losing their lovers to the point of obsession. They want love to be passionate and intense and thus easily go to extremes. Manic love is common in the United States, particularly with younger lovers. If you are high manic and high coercive relationships will tend to be difficult and violent. You may want to consider developing another style. Manic usually does not discriminate across culture or sex with older subjects but younger women tend to outscore the younger men. Teenagers all the way back to Romeo and Juliet fall into this trap that has fed the imagination of writers and unrequited lovers for centuries. There is truly something psychotic about dying for love. AGAPE Statements 16-18 measure agape love.
Compassionate and selfless the ‘agape lover’ is the saint among lovers. Compassionate and egoless where the lover is concerned she/he creates value and virtue through loving. The agape lover loves people with whom they have no close ties. They love in general with no consideration of reward. Agape is spiritual love offered with no consideration of reciprocity. For women agape is significantly correlated with life time satisfaction. The French and African American women in general score higher at agape. When you fall in love
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with this selfless lover, keep in mind they love the stranger in the bar, the children starving in Africa, the spotted owl, and Redwood too. Agape is spiritual love, offered without thought of gain, so very different from pragma or storge; closer to ludus but with higher standards. For women agape and life satisfaction are positively related. COERCIVE Statements 19-21 measure coerciveness. The
‘coercive lover’ needs to hold power or dominate the relationship. They tend to be inconsiderate, secretive, and dangerous. The coercive lover has to be on top. They control and dominate their partner. When correlated with ludic they tend to sexually abuse, particularly verbally. Not a good style, but more common than usually discussed. Coercive and manic is not a good mix unless you like an emotional roller coaster and enjoy being a drama king or queen. Coercive and Eros might make for a good dominatrix (We’re moving out into what used to be a harmless fringe but with population pressure the wannabes are part of the mainstream. Well, tie me kangaroo down, Sport.). The main thing to remember is there is a lot more diversity in the concept of love than most of us consider. DEATH LOVER statements 22-24. The items 22, 23, and
24 are the new Death Lover category which I’m fairly certain relates to Manic and will tend to be more attractive to women. There is not enough data from this category yet to make any conclusions but fear of dying alone makes people do some odd things. Fear of being alone is the key concept. Surprise Tres. Americans are consumed by sexuality and
yet in comparison to many older societies seem to have developed some rather odd choices concerning sex. University of Chicago’s research team using random samples and face to face interviews (much better than Kinsey or Playboy) discovered that most of us are as exciting as Chef Boyardee’s and a peanut butter and jelly
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sandwich, throw in a cup of cocoa for antioxidants and a little sugar rush. Among the key results published are: Americans are largely monogamous with men having typically six partners and women admitting to two. Adultery is the exception with approximately eighty percent of couples keeping the faith. (These figures seem to have deteriorated considerably in the last ten years.) Married couples who have the most sex and orgasms are less likely to stray. Forty percent of married couples had sex at least twice a week and the second most popular activity was watching the partner “take it off.” Three percent of Americans never have sexual feelings and never have bothered to try sex out. Give it a twirl so to speak. Now it’s a given that people lie about everything. Most people lie more than they brush their teeth so you can’t take anything anyone says about sex for granted. But this study was well done and there were some surprises like the above. People who masturbate the most also have the most sex. Whites do a lot more with oral sex than blacks. Roman Catholics (4%) are more likely to hold on to their virginity (even though the percentage is small). Jews have about twice the national average in sex partners. Protestant women have more orgasmic experience, but Catholics have the quantity factor. Mixed race marriages are less likely to last, but then given the extra stress is that a surprise? Seventy percent of women who have an abortion only have one. Over twenty percent of women say men have forced them to do things they didn’t want to do. Three percent of men say they have forced themselves on women. I don’t know if begging was considered. Begging skills are very important as you age, particularly when one considers the sexual harassment climate. Develop your sense of humor if you like a little more diversity than what is described above. To me it seems like Hobbe’s was right about “short, hard, and brutish.” Life is full of choices and sex is one of the best ways you will ever find to stay in shape, have fun, meet interesting people, and laugh your ass off with them even if you don’t speak each other’s language. However, you aren’t going to get
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laid in your own culture unless you choose to put in the time to develop your communication skills and hunt in the appropriate fields. Hannibal Lecter, the intellectual cannibal of fictive and movie fame, is attracted to what he sees. So are you. Simple exposure creates affection if the interaction is positive or neutral. When the initial interaction is negative, repeated exposure may decrease attraction. First impressions are important and most people make their minds up on someone in under ten seconds. People who are perceived as attractive are also seen to be more competent. Proximity and similarity influence attraction. For most people attraction is a mirror in that they are attracted to people who are similar in nationality, gender, income level, aggressiveness, and academic achievement (the greater the similarity, the deeper the friendship). Perceived attitudinal similarity is related to marital happiness and liking in general over time. Rhetoric or style of communication ties into similarity too. Its just not a matter of subject choice, the message itself leads to the massage. Similar speech rate and intensity increase liking and attraction. The research really supports Grandma and her “Marry your own kind!” theories. If you like marriage. The nice thing about marrying your own kind is it reduces the surprises and fits nicely with social exchange theory where people develop relationships that will enable them to maximize their profits. It’s like a business, profits equal rewards minus the costs even if it may lower the depth in the gene pool. Pragmas tend to follow this model as well as storge and agape lovers. If you think beauty is a reward, rather like a trophy wife or husband, then I suppose Eros will raise his tricky head and bless the union. Social exchange theory is pretty clear cut like business is supposed to be, but there is relationship power theory which argues that the person who controls the rewards and punishments controls the relationship. Of course this can be countered by the guerilla theory that the person who can effectively ignore the rewards and punishments is the less interested party, and therefore actually possesses the
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power in the relationship.(Rather Zen, that!) The more a person needs a relationship the less power they can draw from it. Manic and coercive lovers get lost in the power games necessary for control and seldom experience the fun of equity. Americans tend more toward equity theory where each partner derives rewards that are proportional to their costs. When it is perceived that the share is not proportionate to the expenditures lovers become dissatisfied and move on. Ludus lovers may not prize lengthy relations but do enjoy equity. It should not surprise that relationships where the couple strive for equity correlate with endurance and satisfaction in America but in Europe control is more important. Relationships can be very complex if you don’t know this basic stuff, but if you invest a little of your time in choosing to do a little rhetorical analysis you might choose to adjust your presentation to the audience to win greater acceptance by someone you could love. A real relationship is not about capture but friendship. Friendship enhances lust into love. Why not rate your skill level in maintaining and developing a friendship? This inventory lays out some friendship rules and follows the same rules as the first one in this chapter. Rate the statements one to five by how much you agree with or they describe you: 1.______Stand up for a friend in his or her absence. 2.______Show your intolerance of your friend’s other friends so she or he will realize how special you are. 3.______Share with your friend positive information about feelings around successes. 4.______Share confidences with your friend with your other acquaintances so we all feel equal. 5.______Demonstrate emotional support for your friend. 6.______Be careful to restrain positive regard as such displays can lead to arrogance and false self-esteem. 7.______Trust your friend and confide in him or her
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8.______If your friend exhibits negative traits nag him into paying attention. 9.______Enhance your friend’s self-esteem and feelings of self-worth 10._____Express similar attitudes, beliefs, values, and interests to those of your friend. 11._____Allow yourself to experience the mysterious and blissful effect of being in your friend’s presence. 12._____Remain loyal and faithful to your friend regardless of circumstance. 13._____Acknowledge your friend’s life and identity outside your relationship. 14._____Make certain your friend feels as rewarded by your relationship as you do. 15._____Arrange your affairs so you can spend substantial time with your friend. 16._____Work at being open, authentic, and genuine with your friend. Relationships have rules and when you break them the relationship tends to change for the worse quickly as people expect their friends to play fair and by the “rules.” Here is how you get your score. The odd items, 1 through 7 are considered across cultures to be the mark of a good friendship. The even numbers, 2 through 8 though positively stated are significantly associated with abuse or breakup of friends. Let us hope you put your fives in the odd places. Items 9 through 16 measure romantic ploys and where you put the higher numbers indicates the mundane and expected against the special and extraordinarily romantic. Odd numbers (9, 11, 13, 15) reflect the tendency toward exceptional romance. Even numbers (10, 12, 14, 16) measure the expected actions beyond flowers and candy in a romantic relationship. None of these theories take into consideration smell and simple body chemistry but that is why perfume is a major
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industry as well as a tool for rhetoric and romance. Romantic relationships hold great promise for joy or despair. Few people take the time or trouble to analyze their relationships or style of romance because the skills of analysis are difficult to render when swept up by passion. However the tools given in this chapter may prevent a disaster by helping to identify areas of conflict and incompatibility. Discussion and removal of these obstacles to intimacy result in trust and reduction of fear. It is through the reduction of fear that the natural spirit of authentic love or romance can emerge in many different aspects mentally, spiritually, or physically. With this knowledge the lover can follow Aristotle’s cue in the Nicomachean Ethics that “mutual love involves choice and choice springs from a state of character.” Unrealistic expectations often lead to despair and even existential crises. A couple would do well to respectfully discuss their scores and explore how they may effect the relationship so they can move forward in a healthy manner that satisfies their needs. Surprise quatro. Fifty-six percent of older men report they
think about sex three or four times a day where only twenty percent of women report such an active sexual thought process. This is a huge statistical difference. Women are more likely to think of coitus in terms of times per month or even months. The pleasure/pain principle teaches us that we pursue that we enjoy and flee that which hurts us. What do the above percentages reflect? How could equity theory be applied? Does the gander seem as happy as the goose? (Divorce rate? Infidelities? Hooking up?) Again we turn to rhetoric or social psychology for solutions. Communication in close relationships can be improved by applying basic principles that improve communication in other contexts. At the simplest level you won’t get it unless you ask for it. How and when you ask are major weights in balancing your romantic equation. “Timing,” as we say in bizzness or combat, “is everything.” Understanding the opponent or lover requires empathy which exists on both a subtle and
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a social level. The subtle requires you being able to read one’s energy and the social to learn to interpret the world from the other person’s point of view, to feel that person’s pain and insecurity, to experience the other person’s love and fear. Empathy is an essential ingredient in your recipe for friendship, love, or hooking up. Without empathy your timing always sucks. Self-disclosure in the development and maintenance of relationship is supported by a vast amount of research. Most relationships can benefit from disclosure of present feelings which can add to empathic understanding. Letting it all hang out, particularly past sexual experiences and psychological problems, will often result in it being whacked off. The rules of rhetoric suggest keeping disclosure positive. Everybody changes, just like everything changes. It is like sex, death, and taxes, there is no escape from change. Technology changes so fast now that everything techie you knew when you entered school may be obsolete by the time you graduate. Since people in relationships are interconnected with each impacting the other, changes in one can often demand change in the other. Research indicates that the most frequently requested changes are “giving more attention, complimenting more often, expressing feelings openly, and being more affectionate in public and private.” It may seem I am flogging a dead horse, but do you want to get laid more or not? The ludus lover tends to be more responsive to change as his or her life style tends to be more adaptable and flexible. Willingness to change is in fact one of those very important cross-cultural attributes that contributes significantly to relationship satisfaction and successful family function. Everybody fights. The problem is most people fight dirty. Conflict is inevitable. Hell, conflict is essential. Without conflict we would have no problem solving, no rhetoric, no difference of opinion, no democracy. Combat differs from sport primarily because combatants contest weakness by strength (See Chapter Seven). Usually we are not combatants in fights with our lovers. Getting one’s way, kicking some ass, being verbally abusive, and outright aggression have little cachet in a
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loving relationship. Winning and losing are concepts that will get you sleeping on the couch or camping out alone if you are one of those people who have to hurt to win. The loser will find a way to retaliate and eventually no one is winning in any meaningful sense. Fighting with a friend or lover requires fighting fair. It is possible to enter a conflict with the aim of resolving it by finding a better way through airing of differences, the struggle for mutual understanding can benefit both parties. Don’t be afraid to pick a fight. You can lay down rules and declare fouls for being nasty. A fair fight can actually be fun, rather like an informal debate. The more often you do it, the less often you have to do it. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band have put out some great songs. Being ludus, “Night Moves” struck a sympathetic chord and now the internet age has given us the hookup. Hookups could be considered about the same as a one night stand with less information exchange. Hookups may or may not include casual sex but genital touching is more prevalent than meaningful conversation. For many college students developing a meaningful boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are quaint things of the past when college was an idyll where a spouse could be hunted. The brutal economic realities of the twentyfirst century USA indicate for the survival oriented pragma that building their resumes, getting the grades for grad school, or laying the groundwork for their career leaves little time for romance. College is just another benchmark and people don’t want to be tied down. Looking at the stats from the 80s and 90s tells us that today’s college student is much more sexually active, a real “this is now, and that was then” difference. Approximately eighty percent of students have hooked up. It’s the norm not the exception. Where high school hook ups are best when discrete, the older collegians talk freely of their experience of “beer goggles” (drunkenness leads to disappointing surprise or coyote ugly partner), or the dangers of “catching feelings” (emotional involvement). Some storge report sex is part of friendship and “there is no way I’m going to marry someone I have to teach how to be my lover.” The average
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student reports ten or eleven partners over a four year period and the attractive eros lover may range up into the forties. I knew a pretty hot girl who did a hundred in a semester just because she could. It was her idea of fun. Now if you think of this as indiscriminate, careless philandering injurious to innocence, rather than harmless experimentation preparing the burgeoning scholar for the vicissitudes of adulthood, you might be wrong. It might be like the research showing that people who’ve experimented with marijuana are psychologically healthier than those who abstained. Some of the Michigan longitudinal research is pointing in that direction. So if you are of an age where hooking up is a very real possibility the data indicates a “kiss and don’t tell” advantage to the younger players and skill development for the older. Communication skill is not a high priority when the pool is shallow and the time is limited. However, “the wham, bam, thank you, mam” attitude of the knuckle walker will not suffice where the metrosexual represents the idealized concept of hot. If you are going to play in the fast grope lane you still have to attract partners willing to jump for the hook. Being aware of what is considered looking good is still important.(I let my 25 year old wife shop for my casual clothes and direct tonsorial activities. Since I’m over 60 I handle the fabric and talk to the tailor concerning formal events.) If you hope for a repeat performance it’s a good plan to be a Viagra man. When it comes to performance the sexual practices described in the readings selected for this chapter’s bibliography are not for the faint of heart. Staying in shape is a good choice. Mere stamina is not enough to hold a serious partner’s attention and multiple orgasms aren’t just for women anymore. Recent studies in Germany indicated that eight weeks of exercise using the tantric Five Tibetans restored sexual performance better than Viagra. Tantra can provide a path of spiritual liberation using sexuality for the transmutation and sublimation of sexual energy to reduce aging and speed healing. I’ve found Shaivanistic energy work which uses the chakra system to be quite effective. I
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personally find it almost identical to the Kaballah and Mirkabah systems that have attracted Madonna’s attention, but find they actually work, and a lot faster. Where the systems touted for the influential Hollywooders are intellectually stimulating, they don’t do much for the inner snakes and ladders. Study on that. If you need a further nudge check out my students at www.hoshin.com , or UMAA Tantra on the internet. After all, Tantra is an ancient spiritual path of love, expansion, and union with the divine. It includes a remarkably scientific view of sexuality in a broad cosmology of energy work and a philosophy of enjoying life. It isn’t a religion, a cult, or limited to skilled sexual practice. Unfortunately sexual tantra has been seized upon by a long list of charlatans from ill informed “hippie” gurus, new age lotharios, and Alistair Crowley to exploit the needy. One translation of tantra from the Sanskrit is simply energy work. Like the martial arts, one should peel back the layers of local color and examine the breathing techniques, physical postures, and medical descriptions to find what is really worth doing. It is your choice. This is America. Modern men are choosing to avoid marriage according to a study of a sample of men from around the USA done by Popenoe and Whitehead of Rutgers. Number one reason given was sex was available without the ring, so no need for the legal ball and chain. The second was financial ruin from divorce, not fear of a broken heart. Seems men are becoming less romantic and more pragmatic. The research also revealed that women met in bars are considered casual sex and not soul mate material. When a man thinks of a woman as mate material he tends to wait until the fourth or fifth date before stampeding the bedroom. There are major differences between sex, love, and romance in the minds of most men and women. Men tending to line up behind sex and trophy hunting, or sport f*cking, and women going for love and romance across a spectrum ranging from femininny to feminazi. If the reader is of the female persuasion and is looking for the
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latter, best not to hunt for love or romance where alcohol is sold. If you are appealing to the masculine eye it is an advantage tilted toward the erotic lover, but if you have not honed your intellectual and intuitive powers, beauty then becomes a handicap setting one up for a long chain of experiences where men treat you as a dick wipe. Once again the choice leads to fun or folly. Rhetoric is the art of clarifying choices and hopefully leads one to choices right for him or her. Any intelligent lover will tell you that behavioral mod works best with the opposite sex and once used can often be used with success. Nagging seldom works and mostly irritates the wounds of past and present compliance failures, creating guilt, shame, and loss of respect which often leads to the death of love in a pragma heart. In any contest between behavior mod and nagging, mod should win but the unschooled will nag on. Most people respond reasonably when reasonably asked. Most people are not telepaths, you have to ask for what you want. How you phrase the demand has a lot to do with the attention it will get. That is rhetoric, too. The question of what do men/women want depends on their style but in general it might boil down to Rodney Dangerfield’s Complaint coupled to the Rolling Stone’s musical comment on satisfaction. Bibliography: Gender: Psychological Perspectives . Linda Brannon. Allyn
& Bacon, 1999. The Social Organization of Sexuality . Laumann, Michael,
Michael, and Gagnon. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Sex in America: A Definitive Survey . Gina Kolata. Little
Brown, 1994. Your Erroneous Zones . Dr. Wayne Dyer. Avon, 1976. Human Sexual Aggression: Current Perspectives . Prentky
& Quinsey, eds. Ann N.Y. Acad. Sci. Vol. 528, 1988 1001 Ways to be Romantic . Gregory J. P. Godek.
Casablanca Press, 1991.
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The Perfumed Garden . Richard Burton, trans. Castle
Books, 1964. The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classic Indian Text . Alain Danielou. Park Street Press, 1994. Sexual Reflexology: Activating the Taoist Points of Love .
Mantak Chia and William U. Wei. Destiny Books, 2003. Seduction . Robert Greene. Penguin Books, 2001. Taoist Bedroom Secrets . Master Chan Zettersan. Lotus Press, 2002 Sexual Secrets. Douglas & Slinger. Destiny Books, 1979. Shakti Woman. Vicki Noble, Harper, San Fran, 1991 The Left Hand of Darkness . Ursula K. Le Guin. Ace Science Fiction, 1969.
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Chapter Five: Problem Solving, IQ, and EQ. “The lower the IQ, the more structure necessary for learning. The higher the IQ, the better the odds of self-learning and multi-functioning. The new “heterogeneous”classroom calls for heroic efforts by teachers.” Gottfredson “He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.” Johnson “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” Wilde
NRF Maier, my mentor in industrial psychology started off brown rat running and being interested in problem solving. He was an amazing old man and taught me a lot. We designed a safety program for Exxon’s Baton Rouge plant back in the 70s (when I worked as psychometrician for Human Synergistics) that saved a bunch of lives and reduced their lost time accidents significantly. Two of his pet peeves were how the medical profession abused stress theory by treating symptoms instead of causes (See Chapter Six) and how problem solving and trait psychology had been mostly ignored by the politicians lodged in positions of leadership in the APA resulting in a watered down understanding of intelligence that has only been corrected recently. Norm had a tremendous impact on my thinking as did David McClelland who had Timothy Leary as a colleague at Harvard. Clay Lafferty who trained me in psychometrics had me research the hell out of Leary who was in jail due to his LSD give away program. Clay actually set it up so I could meet people and get into their heads a bit. McClelland thought Clay’s methodology was too simple to work and Norm thought it was too simple too. Leary was happy to have someone listen to him and sold his circle to Clay. However, by loading the samples, going to nonparametric statistical procedures, and other tricks of the trade one could get very significant differences in problem solving and well crafted traits. Crafting and finding
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the significant differences was my job. Elegance often appears simple, i.e., Einstein’s E=MC2. Maier had some great techniques for solution identification, posing problems, and solution evaluation that are very simple but most never use them. The Quality/Acceptance continuum in Shadow Strategies comes from Norm. Over a five year period we crafted some really good inventories and problem solving simulations that allowed Human Synergistics to grow into the international management development company it is today. (Clay often bragged on me as his creative genius but that did not keep him from screwing me out of verbal agreements. Where money is concerned, always get it in writing. America is a low context society which means people will bullshit and the contract is king. Verbal agreements have been a lifelong failing on my part.) Anyway that is how I learned a lot of my psychology while working on my Ph.D in rhetoric and communication. I was lucky to work for Clay as a grad student because I was introduced to a lot of managers and executives and was able to work on some really interesting projects that fed the envy of my professors at Wayne State. Human Synergistics specialized in teaching group work through training simulations. This was before the computer revolution so the simulations were based on individual cases and then group work at coming to a consensus. I’d done a lot of this type of work with teachers at Penn State working on my Masters in Rhetoric and Small Groups at Penn State. Thirty years ago this kind of training was considered outside the box but now it is cutting edge-cognitive-acceleration and learning. I built a couple of long simulations with hundreds of choices that are still used today. Grindtown and Turnaround were my PH.D. projects. Human Synergistics used simulations to reorganize Texas Utilities and later train TUGCO and Exxon workers in Safety. One of the interesting things I learned was people make better choices when they’ve made some bad ones. We always built in some realistic losers in the choices in hope they would be eliminated
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during discussion. Think about that a moment. After Hillsdale College when I worked for General Motors a lot of the leadership training was done through using my tests and simulations. One of the other things Human Synergistics did for corporations was develop selection tests. I won’t take you through the arcane methods of that process but you have to do some real research and comparisons if you don’t want to run up against Uncle Sam at some point. It takes time but if you create a quick reliable and valid test for an occupation or trait that correlates with success in your industry you can save a lot of money in training. Here is my favorite success story. Cargill Corporation hired a hundred executives. The hundred, as part of the hiring process, took some of our self-description inventories and I was given their data. My job was to separate them out on the basis of their scores into “superior performers, acceptable performers, and problem performers.” Nobody but me knew what the separating criteria would be and I never saw any of the hires. The experiment was supposed to take a year, however, after six months Cargill and Clay decided to open the envelopes and see how we did. All the superior performers and acceptable performers were still with the company. What was funny was every one of the twenty people who I had identified as problems were gone. Two had been arrested for various corporate wrong doing. Six had been fired for incompetence and twelve had self elected to go elsewhere. Our paper and pencil test worked better than the corporate very professional interviewing and simulation system because people put on their best behavior for those situations and most know how to play the game. Hell, most Speech departments give courses in interviewing for jobs these days. McKenzie Scott has a brilliant training program for marketing executives who are transitioning through jobs or career changes. Intelligence is one of those slippery concepts kicked around like a soccer ball in the West for a hundred years. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton was fascinated by both
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evolutionary theory and quantification and attempted to measure stuff like beauty, boredom, equanimity, the effects of prayer, and other multi-faceted subjectively difficult traits like superiority. Galton lived in the nineteenth century and developed some useful statistical techniques, but wasn’t much of test maker as the above list of topics should inform you. Alfred Binet picked up on Galton’s ideas and developed tests to predict children’s academic achievement. Theodore Simon partnered up with Binet and they theorized that mental aptitude was like physical aptitude and would show up in various ways. They developed reasoning and problem-solving questions that separated awkward learners from the bright. The tests still work to predict academic success but life success beyond satisfaction eluded the process. This French research captured a California scholar’s attention. Lewis Terman found the Parisian norms didn’t work so well with his Merikans so he developed the Stanford-Binet and with it a concept of mental age. IQ equals mental age divided by chronological age times one hundred. Thus an eight year old who answers questions like a ten year old would have an IQ of 125. When I was in the sixth grade I scored like a high school junior, however my hobbies have hampered that precociousness into social handicaps most of my life (That life success versus curiosity problem that keeps most academics from acquiring much wealth unless they figure out patents, copyrights, or consulting.). The term IQ is still in the popular vocabulary for tests of mental age or academic ability. Intelligence beyond academic prediction hasn’t worked that well as a concept because intelligence is socially constructed. What is smart in one situation may get you killed in another. Modern researchers view intelligence as a capacity for adaptive behavior used in reaching goals, arguments still abide around brain speed, culture bound or free, or multiplicity of skills versus single trait. I tend to side here with Plato who wrote in The Republic that “no two persons are born exactly alike, but each differs from the other in natural endowments, the one being suited for one occupation and
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the other for another.” It is in the differences not the similarities that tests can be used for selection purposes. Real intelligence may not be culturally defined but problem solving skill can be measured. This is part of a little test I developed to select pipe fitters and investment brokers. Both jobs require that one be very intelligent but the cultures are very different. Blue collar and macho versus white collar and detail oriented. Since variations of this test are still used by some companies I’ll only use twenty random items. The hardest items are toward the end of the test and if you want to be tough on yourself the test can be timed. You have twenty minutes. Please answer the following twenty questions by circling the correct answer. 1. A farmer has seventeen sheep. All but nine break through a hole in the fence and wander away. How many are left? a) eight b) seven c) ten d) nine 2. If x + y= x + 5 then y=______? a) -5 b) 1/5 c) x-5 d) 5 3. Choose the word that is most nearly opposite in the meaning to the word in caps…WILT a) prevent b)drain c)expose d) revive e)stick 4. Row boat is to ocean liner as glider is to a) kite b) airplane c) balloon d) rocket 5. Concrete is usually made strongest by mixing a) only sand and water b) only cement and water c) lye, cement, and water d) rock, sand, cement and water 6. You have white socks and black socks in a drawer that are mixed into a ratio of 4 to 5. What is the least number of socks you will have to take out to be sure of having a pair of
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the same color? a) 2 b) 3 c) 4 d) 5 7.What number comes next in the following series? 20 20 21 21 22 22 23…? a) 23 23 b) 23 24 c) 19 19 d) 22 23 e) 24 24 8. Using measuring cans without intermediate markings two gallons of oil can be accurately measured from a barrel and put into a bearing using a) an eight gallon and a four gallon can b) two four gallon cans c) a six gallon and a four gallon can d) a 1 and a ½ gallon and a 6 gallon can 9. Ceylon is to Sri Lanka as Constantinople is to a) Mardi Gras b)Moscow c) Paris d) Indianapolis e) Istanbul 10. Black Beauty is to horse as Lassie is to a) Scottish ballads b) dog c) drugs d) porno e) whale 11. Dandelions double in area every twenty four hours. At the beginning of summer there is one dandelion in a field. It takes 60 days for the field to become covered by the dandelions. On what day is the field half covered with the dandelions? a) 30 b) 46 c) 29 d) 59 12.What letter would come next in the following series a e c g e I g k l m k …? a) I b) o c) m d) p e) n 13. Loops is to spool as straw is to a) pinking b) hats c) boss d) warts e) dogs 14. Halley is to comet as Broca is to
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a) print b) tire c) bovine d) brain e) fruit 15. If it were two hours later, it would be half as long until midnight as it would be if it were an hour later.What time is it now? a) 6AM b) 11PM c) 9PM d) 10PM e) 4AM 16. Uncle Harry bought a radio for $60.00 and resold it for seventy dollars. He thought about the deal, and bought the radio back for eighty and then sold it for $90.00 a week later. Did Harry: a) make money + $10.00 b) make money + $20.00 c) lose money -$10.00 d) lose money -$20.00 e) break even – didn’t make money but didn’t loose any 17. Below is a related pair of words in capital letters. Select from the following lettered choices the pair that best expresses a relationship similar to the capitalized words. SCOFF/ DERISION: a) soothe/mollification b) slander/repression c) swear/precision d) stimulate/appearance e) startle/speediness 18.Washington is to one as Lincoln is to a) five b) twelve c) twenty d) fifty 19. Onions are to leeks as crocuses are to a) bananas b) saffron c) tulips d) orchids e) apples 20. Here are three words: paint, doll, and cat. Pick a fourth word that changes the meaning of all three. a) hair b) brush c) house d) ball e) ladder Well, how do you think you did? If you got eight of the first ten (1 through 10) and six out of the second (11 through 20) and we liked the cut of your jib we might invite you
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back for that second interview. Here is why. The items in this test are age and skill related to the abilities or aptitudes to solve certain kinds of problems. There are several levels of ability and mental age being tested. The breakdown of the groupings is explained below: Correct answers for 1 through 5. (1=d, 2=d, 3=d, 4=b, 5=d) average, non-discriminating The first five items can be answered by a sharp ninth grader in the public schools or an adult of average intelligence having general knowledge with an IQ of one hundred. Items one through three measure reading ability, simple math, and vocabulary respectively, four is a simple analogy, and five combines general knowledge with simple logic. If you missed any of these then maybe that was the day you were smoking in the parking lot or trying to impress the opposite sex by doing something cool. You should correct this deficit if you think you are above average for a ninth grader. Correct answers for 6 through 10. (6=b, 7=b, 8=c, 9=e, 10=b) fairly smart, practical The items in this part are weighted toward intelligence and insight and can be answered quickly by a knowledgeable high school graduate or an adult with an above average IQ of one hundred ten and above. Items six and seven measure reasoning and serial reasoning ability. Item eight nails down mechanical aptitude with special relations, and items nine and ten fall into general knowledge of geography/history/literature. High school wasn’t that tough. I mean practically everyone but Hispanic girls gets a pass and their dropout rate isn’t about smarts. That culture thang can be a killer of achievement. Correct answers for 11 through 15. (11=d, 12=b, 13=d, 14=d, 15=e) above average This group of five can be easily answered by most college graduates or an adult with an IQ around 120 or above. Item 11 is a killer that tests reading ability along with problem solving, intelligence, and synergy. Item 12 checks progression reasoning and 13 and 15 get at pattern recognition. Item 14 tips toward anthropology/curiosity and scientific recall. These were the
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easier items in this set. I picked them randomly and sometimes random is just lucky for you. Correct answers for 16 through 20. (16=b, 17=a, 18=a, 19=b, 20=c) near genius This last group can usually only be answered quickly by very smart people with IQs above 130 which is considered near genius. The items are drawn from MIT’s graduate school for engineering exam and one that Dr. Maier devised to smoke out the dummies. Item 16 measures problem-solving and math skill. Item 17 links verbal ability and reading comprehension. Eighteen is an insight and synergy item connecting presidents and money. Item 19 identifies unique knowledge and environmental curiosity, and 20 correlates with creativity and measures remote association. Problem solving by itself does not correlate with academic intelligence so a life skill test has to get at some other characteristics. Now if you got these and missed a lot of the basic questions we would grant you are probably smart as can be but not worth hiring because your basics are shaky and we would have to spend too much time to train you. In the last thirty years a lot of work has been done in creating personality typologies. The most popular being the Meyer-Briggs based on the work of C.J. Jung and used to identify types in terms of extrovert, introvert, intuitional and so forth. They do give you some tools to describe people but they don’t predict performance. Most personality tests are like that. The MMPI is now rejected by the government as a selection device although it does sort out psychopaths pretty well which is what it was developed to do. The Enneagram is very popular but I’ve never seen any hard science or stats that support its use beyond description. It comes out of Gurdjieff and the Sufi mystical traditions which aren’t wildly different from the chakra descriptions I used in Chapter Two but I question the negative structure validity and placement of types. David C. McClelland put together some rather complex protocols for identifying themes in children’s literature that predicted the rise and all of economic empires. He
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studied the clans of Scotland and was able to predict social standing and political success from tartan colors. He figured out three major motivating factors that heavily affected why and how most people and social groups fared economically. He went to India with a grant and a bunch of grad students and taught the success principles in a region that had little change in hundreds of years. Within five years it was a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity and still is. Lafferty took the ideas of McClelland, Harry Harrison, and Carl Rogers and other psychologists like Karen Horney and refined them into short self descriptive inventories that when taken together made a very easily understood personality profile. He got that idea from Leary who still designed kick ass personality profiles until his death. I was fortunate enough to have the job of researching those profiles to prove their reliability and validity and then went on to craft even better ones with Barb Forisha-Kovach and these days write my own or customize to industry. Anyway, there is a high probability that some HRD person will give you a short test and based on the results you may or may not be hired by a particular company for a specific type of work. (Most of those tests are not reliable or valid, but that is just my opinion as a test maker.) Daniel Goleman who did interesting work with meditation in the 80s has coined the term Emotional Intelligence or EQ and like the profiles developed by myself and Lafferty has had considerable success predicting behavior. Emotional response can be trained and problem-solving can be directed, whereas personality is quite stable and difficult to change. If you are geeked on personality type systems check out Who Am I? Personality types for self-discovery by Robert Frager. He covers many of the clinical ones and even gets into Native American Spirituality, the Tarot, and astrology. Knowing a bit about personality can help you understand your own humanity and others. Practically every culture develops a typology and when you can identify cross cultural aspects you are beginning to tap into biology and archetypes so your ability to predict goes up. Think of this test as an EQ or motivational self-description. Rate each statement by
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how much you agree with it or it describes you. Respond to the items off the top of your head and quickly. If you have to think about it, it’s probably a two. 4 = I almost always agree with this statement 3 = I often agree with this statement 2 = I occasionally agree with this statement 1 = I rarely or never agree with this statement 1.______ I ask for help when I have a problem. 2.______ I have to look for why things happen. 3.______ I have a hard time taking myself seriously. 4.______ I persist in the face of difficulty. 5.______ I know what I don’t want out of life. 6.______ I seldom have colds or upper respiratory infections 7.______ I do not believe in fate, luck, chance, or things just happening. 8.______ I believe freedom is always important. 9.______ I often solve problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. 10._____ I am generally effective at what I attempt. 11._____ I find it easy to share feelings 12._____ I meet and talk with different kinds of interesting people. 13._____ I suspect most folks have similar thoughts and feelings. 14._____ I can learn from and relate to almost anyone. 15._____ I tend to resist conformity. 16._____ I enjoy physical contact and being touched by others. 17._____ I seldom, if ever, have gastro intestinal problems. 18._____ I have to get away to recharge my energies. 19._____ I am open to warm friendly relationships. 20._____ People say I’m hard to predict. Here is how you score. This inventory measures two characteristics of highly successful people. Items 1 through 10 measure task and achievement orientation and items
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11-20 can be considered people and responsiveness orientation. Add your scores from 1 through 10 to give yourself a total. Do the same for 11 through 20. You should now have two totals under forty. This test compares your score to a total average of 2000 highly successful managers and executives. The higher the score the stronger it correlates with the below scores and descriptions. Task and Achievement : (Items 1 through 10) Measures a
concern for completing the job, working positively with others, pursuing excellence for its own sake with little regard or anxiety as to how others view them. They tend to be cause and effect thinkers who recognize barriers to accomplishment and get around them. They are more linear thinkers and see achievement as a step rather than an end. If your score was between 22 and 27 you are scoring in the lowest percentile which indicate that in comparing yourself to high achievers you are taking a great risk of having your self esteem damaged because you have a lot of work to do. Are you waiting for someone to tell you what to do? You should feel sheepish because you score like a follower. Still looking for a Daaaaaaady? Scores from 28 to 31 are on the below but acceptable average and indicate little goal seeking interest. Just an average Joe. 32 to 37 indicates you have considerable fire in the belly and succeed at most of what you take on, and 38 to 40 means you are crazed with achievement and probably over-exaggerate to the point of annoyance. The personality factors TA significantly correlates with are more outgoing, dominant, forthright, self assured, and relaxed. Self Concept measures are pro-active social behavior, positive self identity, and higher performance. Life style correlations are affiliation, lower avoidance, and self actualizing. Demographic relations are higher salary and lower stress related medical symptoms. Now that is a lot of work out of ten items.
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People and Responsiveness : (Items 11 through 20)
Measures people skills like responsiveness and open acceptance of others. This type of person is warm, open, and friendly. They are willing to share their thoughts and selves with others without seeking dominance. They enjoy team work and working with others to achieve their goals. It could be called task-oriented affiliation. If your scores were lower than 25 and someone has called you unfriendly or a cold fish, believe them as that is a low percentile score indicating some real problems in warming up the madding crowd. Scores of 26 to 31 are acceptably low and would eliminate you from most sales or teaching type jobs but you would feel comfortable with engineers or automobile manufacturers. Tech work beckons. 32 to 37 indicates a strong preference for working with and developing others as in charismatic leader. 38 to 40 makes me want to roll up my cuffs as nobody is that nice. Excuse me, while I button my hip pocket. The personality factors PR significantly correlates with are greater emotional stability, and conscientiousness. Self Concept ties into openness to people and affiliation. In demographics, surprisingly PR correlates with both job level and salary in political organizations but not with medical symptoms either way. David McClelland’s work on needs Achievement and Affiliation show that along with Power these motivational trends or patterns are important. (I don’t talk about the Power needs because they almost always result in disaster. No sense studying what doesn’t work when you are in a hurry, and aren’t you in a hurry?) EQ is more important than IQ and Achievement and problem-solving are more important than EQ. Affiliation when directed beyond the family can help one rise in a complex world as it helps to have friends. In other words being smart helps in a complex society and if you are alive right now, this is pretty complex. Being well educated is a choice most smart people would not reject given the correlation with salary or life-time earnings. Being a skilled problem solver correlates with a bunch of positives and being friendly usually doesn’t hurt. These are three choices you can
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control. You want more testing get in touch with me. I am easy to find. Bibliography: Organizational Sync: Making Your Job Work for You .
Forisha-Kovach, Kovach & Morris. Prentice-Hall, 1983. Measuring Emotional Intelligence . Simmons & Simmons.
Summit Publishing, 1997 Measures for Clinical Practice . Vol. II Adults, 2 ed. Fischer
and Corcoran.. Free Press, 1994. Who Am I? Personality Type for Self-Discovery . Robert
Frager. Tarcher-Putnam, 1994. “Schools and the g Factor .” Linda Gottfredson. Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2004 Reworking Intuition: Business simulations spark rapid workplace renovations . Bruce
Bower. Science News, p.263 Oct. 23, 2004, Vol. 166
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Chapter Six: Ghosts in the Machine “Let us put our minds together and see what kind of lives we can make for our children.” Sitting Bull “You are what you eat !” Tiny Tim “He loves nature in spite of what it did to him. ” Tucker
In the United States medical experts estimate we spend over 400 billion dollars annually for stress related symptoms and disease. Ninety percent of all hospital beds are filled with people having psychosomatic illness. Probably half of this expense could be eradicated by simple adherence to some simple practices concerning nutrition, exercise, and posturing ourselves mentally for wellness. Some cancers, most ulcers, heart disease, high blood pressure, and other serious ailments are psycho (mind) somatic (body) which means a major component of the disease comes from lifestyle choices and mental processes. Dr. Hans Selye, a Belgian who went to med school in England hatched the concept of stress for human beings. He called it GAS or General Adaptation Syndrome and popularized the concept through his writings as stress. What he identified through observing the population in the London Underground was an endemic look of malaise. Was everyone sick? They appeared so to the trained medical eye. If what he observed was true, then doctors were definitely going to reap the rewards of being in the health care industry. What did he see? He saw the effect of modern society. He saw a population suffering from generalized psychosomatic symptoms or what he came to call stress. Stress is nothing more than the cumulative effect of change on any organism or for that matter, structure. Just as wings fall off airplanes, biological systems (us) also deteriorate over time. Although breakdown and exhaustion resulting in physical death is inevitable we have a great deal of control over our minds, emotions, and bodies which allow us to “manage” or reduce the effect. Health or wellness is a function of our ability to recover from or avoid the cumulative effect of stress or change. Disease or psychosomatic 107
medical symptoms are our bodies way of telling us we have made some bad choices concerning how to maintain or enhance our immune systems. Even if you were skilled at picking your parents so you inherited no genetic time bombs, there still is no escape from the simple wear and tear of having a life called the aging process. Just as manufacturing systems achieve quality through continual improvement, human beings (us/we) achieve “wellness” through continually improving ourselves and controlling our stress. As Plato pointed out, everybody is different. That difference creates the diversity of symptoms that we see as people come under stress. Some are more affected by mental frustration (This is where my friend Norm Maier focused back in the 30s) and others are ground down by physical abuse, and still others get thrashed by societal changes. Where one’s sight may weaken, another gets ulcers, and yet the source of the stress is the same. We forget that we are primates with a long history of adapting to change. Some of the biological systems evolved to save our lives in the pressure of fleeing and fighting are of dubious value when dealing with the insults of modern life. The body (somatic/intuitive systems discussed in Chapter Two) regards threats whether psychological or physical as attacks, and lives in a continual state of positive now or immediacy. When the body feels threatened the endocrine system dumps adrenaline and cortisone-like chemicals into the blood stream resulting in arousal. How long the state of hyper arousal lasts is a strong indicator of how much damage your organs are taking from the chemicals of rage. There are only so many beats in a heart. The stomach and intestine do strange things. You’ve heard the expression, “scared shitless or pissless.” That’s so you can flee without excess baggage. Try explaining to your boss you just soiled yourself because you were so excited when asking for a raise. Universally the eyes dilate to take in more light when aroused, indicating that those who did not wake up quickly (with some night vision) were killed in their sleep (Natural selection at work a long time ago when the population was very small.).
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That same eye dilation also is part of the flush of orgasm that darkens the eyelids and lips which the Egyptians imitated to start the make-up industry. No eye dilation when sharing loving glances with the beloved? Oh my! The thrill is gone. High chest breathing fools the body into anxiety attacks. Blow in the bag and we’ll fool the old crocodile brain in the other direction. Where is your weakness? Stress will find it and make it real for you. Continual states of arousal are not good for you and wear out your organs. The blood vessels stiffen into arteriosclerosis. The stomach ulcerates from excessive acid. Tendons grow brittle and break. Chronic emotional stress has been proven to age cells prematurely and damage DNA. The prospect of an anti-aging medicine to protect cells will be a long time coming. You get the picture? Old survival oriented hardware running or attacking inappropriately. Time to learn how to enter new programming and upgrade the software. It is not like our government is making us feel safe and secure, that your future will be better than the past, or that nobody is really out to get you. Perhaps there is a reason for all that tension in the air. But first lets run some more diagnostics. People are strange. Medical doctors treat stress as some amorphous boogie but it can be broken down into somewhat controllable categories. Holmes and Rahe made up lists of life events that correlated with psychosomatic symptoms. The more life events the greater the chance of illness. One of the interesting pro bono studies I did for Human Synergistics was researching police officers in Detroit. We found that there were personality factors that buffered the effect of life events. Police officers who scored higher at TA and PR (Chapter Five) had significantly less medical symptoms. Life events for some police officers, particularly those in drug enforcement are ridiculously high, yet we were able to identify factors that kept them sane and symptom free, and it wasn’t jogging. Ever notice how many of those MDs who recommended running or jogging as the way to save your heart seem to have cardiacs on
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the track? This is called being a victim of your own wishful thinking. Don’t worry we won’t get you training like a Greek messenger. Seems to me the guy who made the dash from Marathon died of a broken heart too, but I might be wrong about that. Anyway here is the Morris version of the Holmes-Rahe. The following is a list of events from work, home, and school. Mark only the items that apply to you in the last year. 1.____ Sudden significant increases in the activity level and pace of work 2.____ Requirement to work more hours per week than normal 3.____ Restriction of social life, such as moving to new location 4.____ Marriage or Divorce 5.____ Too much work; too little time. 6.____ Feedback is only given when performance is unsatisfactory 7.____ Major changes in assignments, procedures, or policies 8.____ Major reorganization at your place of work 9.____ Death of a family member or close friend 10.____Conflict with people you have to interact with often 11.____Having unclear standards and responsibilities 12.____Trouble with boss or someone who holds the power of reward over you. 13.____Serious Illness 14.____Serious legal difficulties 15.____Change to a new job 16.____Assume heavy financial burden This second group of life events is more environmental. Check off any that apply to you in the last year. 17.____Pollution of your environment 18.____Excessive noise 19.____Concern over the economy
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20.____Fear of terrorism or other victimization (Declining neighborhood) Third group is what we call type five stressors that vary according to personality. You get to assign a value according to how much the event effected or affects your life. You can assign anywhere from 10 to 200. Only assign a value to an item that actually happened to you. 21._________ Raised by alcoholic and/or abusive parents 22._________Early sexual experiences include rape 23._________Sexually harassed 24._________Burglarized/robbed/or prized possessions ruined 25._________Expected insurance did not cover 26._________Stock drop effects personal investments 27._________Intense interpersonal dispute or fight with a stranger 28._________Spouse or child becomes seriously self destructive 29._________Physical injuries or disease create obstacles to one’s goals 30._________Education did not pay off as expected OK. Add up the score from the first section. Every one you picked is worth 50 points. These are items which strongly correlate with stress related medical symptoms. If you checked off more than 600 points you should be nice to yourself as that is a lot of stress particularly if you are over thirty. Items from the second group are not as disturbing to the average person as those from the first so give yourself 25 points for each one. Add this total to the first and then add in the third to give you your life events score. The higher the score; the greater the potential for stress related medical diseases the older you are. An average score for a college graduate in a mid management position thirty five years of age is 400. I’ve seen college students with scores over 1600 and executives and police officers over 2000. If your TA and PR scores are in the 30s you can usually deal
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with a lot of stress. However, it is stress that in the end gets to close the coffin for most of us. Learn to deal with it. Here are 20 statements concerning how highly stressed people describe themselves. Assign each statement a number according to how often you feel it applies to you: 1 = rarely or never 2 = occasionally (some of the time) 3 = quite often (most of the time) 4 = that is the way I am (all the time) 1._____ It doesn’t take much to make me angry. 2._____ I get irritated when I have to wait. 3._____ I find it hard to adjust to change. 4._____ I can easily say I don’t like what I do for a living even though I do it well. 5._____ I set impossible goals for myself. 6._____ My personal goals do not fit what I am doing. 7._____ I’m so uptight, I have trouble falling asleep. 8._____ It’s difficult for me to relax, take it easy or goof off. 9._____ I seem to run everything into a contest. 10._____ I really get upset when I lose. 11._____ I am basically honest with myself. 12._____ I can talk with and get along with a wide variety of people. 13._____ I am confident and relaxed in dealing with people. 14._____ I derive personal satisfaction from the work I do. 15._____ I set realistic goals and accomplish them. 16._____ I have goals to which I am committed. 17._____ I think mistakes are a natural part of learning. 18._____ I know that I’m in a good shape and take care of myself. 19._____ I enjoy cooperating with others to achieve common goals. 20._____ I am able to tell the difference between trivial and significant problems.
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Add all your points from the first ten statements and then subtract that total from the sum of the points from the 11 to 20 statements. Call the first ten total Type A2 as those statements correlate with higher stress related medical symptoms and cardiac arrest. Call eleven through twenty Type B as those descriptions are coping strategies. Subtract the A2 total from the B total to get a score called Coping Strength. You could have a minus score but that is not something you want to have as it indicates ridiculously cardiac prone behavior patterns. 0 to +5 = low coping and high probability of stress related symptoms. 6 to +15 = about normal stress handling but has to work at it. 16 to +25 = stress buffering personality, handles stress well. 26 to +30 = walking on water, bullet proof, probably not true. Do it again. Cognitive realignment is how psychologists say “changing your mind.” You can do that. I can do that. We’ve all done that. With practice one can become less Type A2 and more Type B, but given the pleasure pain principle… What is the reward? The rewards are primarily intrinsic or internal and are as follows: Rewards for Remaining Type A2
Have or develop significantly more stress-related symptoms regardless of life events. Have three times higher rate of cardiac arrest then Type B. If you are suspicious, cynical, and Type A2 cardiac arrests are five times higher. Type A2 are four times more likely to die by accident Type A2 do not admit to anger, do not handle change well, or wait in lines well. Type A2 tend to be competitive, approval seeking, secretive, and perfectionists. TypeA2 tend to plateau at the supervisory level because they reject learning the new. Type A2 work better in structured jobs with lots of rules, particularly if they enforce the rules. Misery loves company. Rewards for Remaining Type B
Have no or develop little stress related symptoms even under high life events stress. Have lower blood pressure, and slow steady heart rate (resting 40 to 60).
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Type B are fluent of speech, sleep easily, eat with gusto, and have pleasant dreams. Type B have little or no arthritic pain, live fuller, and acquire new skills with age. Type B have fewer psychosomatic symptoms than the general population and live longer. Type B accomplish more and report happier lives. Putting the choices to the pleasure/pain test seems to support the Type B as the way to go but there are many Type A2s running about and seemingly happy. Frustration theory suggests that people will continue to do something that is obviously not working just to be doing something. We call it being decisive when it works and fire fighting when it does not. As you can see from the above self descriptions and how they correlate with symptoms there is a lot to be said for examining one’s life and self to discover what makes life worth living. Pets are good stress reducers. Dogs will forgive almost any injustice and cats are so wonderfully flexible, curious, and clever. We had a deaf white with blue eyes cat named Meetzek that was a source of endless fun. From the blood splat on the road whoever ran over him had to cut almost to the curb. My wife, her cat, is transfixed with grief. She can’t talk. That cat had a wonderful sweetness about him. I haven’t wept for a while. It is difficult to forgive some miserable shit who would go out of his or her way to run over a handicapped cat. I wonder if he or she was surprised when the cat didn’t try to dodge. Probably not sharp enough to notice. Johnny Carson of the Late Show before Jay Leno liked a rather odd person who entertained under the name of Tiny Tim. Tiny played the ukulele, sang “Tip Toe Through The Tulips” in a falsetto and offered odd social commentary like, “You are what you eat!” Wisdom from the strangest places. Time for your nutrition test. Circle the ones below that apply to you. In the last 24 hours: 1. Did you eat chicken, fish, veal or pasta as a main meal? 2. Did you abstain from meat at one main meal? 3. Did you have at least two servings of low fat or non fat dairy products (cheese, milk, yogurt etc.)?
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4. Did you take at least 20 minutes to eat each meal? 5. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? 6. Did you eat at least two meals? 7. Did you eat breakfast? 8. Did you have less than two salted/sugar snacks? 9. Did you have two or less servings of caffeinated beverages? 10. Did you have at least one serving of high fiber bread, cereal or pasta? 11. Did you have at least six servings of fruits and vegetables? 12. Did you take a multivitamin supplement? 13. Did you drink at least eight glasses (two quarts) of plain or bottled water? Did you have two or less alcoholic drinks? 14. Did you consume a well balanced diet? 15. Are you within five pounds of your most comfortable weight? 16. Did you consume less than ten grams of salt? Did you use canola oil or flax oil for cooking instead of corn oil, vegetable oil, animal fats etc.? 17. Did you consume less than 40 grams of fat? 18. Did you consume less than 2,000 calories (if female) or 2,500 calories (if male)? 19. Did you consume more potassium than salt? 20. Did you use herbs and spices rather than salt? Each item is worth five points. Lets hope you hit a hundred and keep the Tiny Tim Memorial diet rolling down the tulip petal strewn path of health. If your score is below 80…. You want a C in what you put in your body? That’s like putting sand or sugar in your car’s fuel. Let us see what choice clues and cues we can pull out of the above list. Nutrition is important. A lot of socially acceptable foods aren’t very good for us. Salt and sugar are so prevalent in most of our store bought food that using either is dangerous. Supplements may be a very good idea
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particularly when government studies indicate major soil depletion, and so is drinking lots of water and little alcohol. Life events plus age minus nutrition minus EQ factors like coping strength, TA and PR give us an equation that has a high probability of predicting how well we’ll be able to handle stress. Must be a predictive profile someplace in there? I’ll bet you personality traits are a better predictor of cardiac than conditioning for most folks over thirty. Losing weight, moderate exercise, not training for marathons, quitting smoking, eating healthy food, cutting out the salt and sugar, eating more oily fish like salmon and trout and meditating before starting out your day are all indicated for dropping blood pressure. All, not one or two. Do them all and stress will bounce off you like cold water off the proverbial penguin. This advice is the same advice the research indicated twenty years ago. Nothing has changed but the stress levels of everyday life. Fear factor and anxiety are easiest and cheapest to control through just learning to slow down your breath. Learn to belly breathe (The blow in the bag thang) and fool your body into feeling everything is all right. One of the major reasons I was able to work for GM so long was that I told a vice president at a training event that he had a classical heart attack profile and ought to take a vacation. He barked back that he hadn’t taken a vacation in twenty-five years and wasn’t about to now. Three months later he died with his boots on at his desk of a massive coronary and I had a change agent and coaching job to die for. Do you know how much it costs a major corporation when a successful and popular manufacturing exec has to be replaced? More than time or a cog, for sure. Five years later we had reorganized the platforms and created the Engine Division. The executives and over two thousand supervisors I’d coached had made a lot of changes and I had a lot of enemies because we often had to buck the system and stop feeding some sacred cows. In 1994 I took my money and bought a biotech company in Houston. Big mistake. Major stressor. Probably took twenty years off me. I lost 2.8 million on paper, five years, some people I really thought were
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friends, and at least a bushel of self-respect. It was a humbling experience and if it weren’t for my then girl friend Ari Marquis I would have had the opportunity to experience being a bag person in Houston elbowing a couple of schizophrenic fellow Vietnam Era vets out of the warm place under the I-10 overpass. Nothing like having your ass handed to you over a long slow period to humble you. Takes a lot of work on the positive thinking to keep from leaping off a tall building or developing a taste for nine millimeter barrels. When I was living the GM corporate life I spent my magnanimous salary putting my children through college and traveling to Japan and China to train in my favorite dojo or kwoon. Since my Japanese really sucks I would often take a young martial artist with me who spoke Japanese and could be my mouth and ears. I was approaching fifty years of age and was finally getting to do some of the things I had always wanted to do. There was a much greater emphasis on using soft weapons and stretching before and after training to reduce the chance of injury. Techniques were taught from the basis of how they felt rather than looked. Many of my American ninjutsu instructors had used hard training weapons and my karate instructors never stretched. There was less emphasis on meditation as it was considered to be a personal tool for self-development. I was able to train in some of the legendary dojo as the Chinese and Japanese respect education more than Americans, and I was treated kindly wherever I went as “the good doctor who writes about us.” I was usually able to learn a bunch of new sword and stick techniques to take happily back to Michigan where my colleagues thought I was crazy to spend my time doing such dangerous stuff at my age. It may have been crazy but it was exciting, fun for me, kept me in good shape, and returned a bit of limberness to my aging tendons. (Interestingly enough Cheerleading is the most dangerous sport in America, when you look at injuries. Martial arts aren’t even on the first page.) Sometimes I must have looked like Bilbo Baggins setting off with the elves at the end of Tolkein’s
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trilogy. Stretching is probably far more important than brute strength. Yoga can more than save your life, it can make it fun again. If you have never tried out yoga it is never too late. Yoga and massage will smooth out the bumpiest body and keep you out of the way of the sword. Shiatsu and Thai massage can reinvigorate tight muscles to help you fight the aging process in a pleasant manner. The ancient Taoists named the way of death as stiff and brittle and life as soft and bending. I’ve found the yoga exercise called “Greetings to the Sun” very beneficial and have lately been experimenting with the “Five Tibetans” as well as playing with the Russians by integrating the very flexible and smart art of Systema into my hoshin at the black belt level. I’ve been training with Igor in Scotland and sending my younger spies to play with Vladimir in Toronto. When we can’t figure out a Russian technique we get Scott Sonnon to explain in detail. Rob Williams has systemized the healing side of hoshin into a distance learning system with a certification program in budo massage. Mark and Tina Lawrence who head up my Canadian dojo have helped me put together a brilliant chi kung course also set up for distance learning. Santiago Dobles and Tao Semko of Umaa Tantra have been my friends and guinea pigs for integrating chi kung and yoga into an even faster path to enlightenment that I was teaching in the Kundalini Awakening program. Cardiologist Mike Fenster is working with me to develop a recovery program for those who need heart surgery called HeartSmart. I also was privileged to work with Rev. Trish Walker of the VOA to help street people in Lafayette, Louisiana who were schizophrenics. I went with her to a prison in the CCA system in Arizona and taught my Secret Smile meditation techniques to thirtyeight men serving from 75 to 420 years for homicide. I’m not normally that charitable but it seemed a great opportunity to test my Meditation Mastery CDs on a captured audience, plus get a look at what a maximum security prison was like from the inside and make a video. Pretty scary.
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In 2002 I had broken my leg and in 2003 caught a lingering dry cough from the wrong blood pressure medicine (six months) after getting a flu shot and a rotator cup injury; I let up on my moderate exercise (bad mistake). Now I’m forty pounds heavier than I would like to be and used to coddling myself. The physical road is always rougher as you age. As I approach 2006 and sixty plus I am going to have to slowly build up a regimen of exercise to both reduce the Dunlop disease and increase stamina and stretch. Study on that. Bibliography: The Human Element: A Course in Resourceful Thinking .
Thomas Cleary. Shambhala Press, 1995. Positive Living and Health: The Complete Guide to Brain/Body Healing and Mental Empowerment . The Editors. Rodale Press, 1990. Your Maximum Mind . Dr. Herbert Benson.William Morrow
and Co. 1987 Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. Sally Fallon. New Trends Publishing,
2001. INPALIS, LEAPS, and LAPSI Personality Inventories. Glenn Morris. GJM, Inc. 1985.
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Chapter Seven: Budo versus Basketball “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” Cosby “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” Sherman “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Franklin
The first thing we must realize in life is natural selection is similar to war and sport is not. Now that may seem harsh but sport attempts to level the playing field so that strengths may be contested and winners receive their just accolades. Life, love, and war on the other hand bring out the worst in our self and others and the survivors get to write the history. Savateurs have the concept of malicio which can be translated as an ability to take joy in the confusion and defeat of one’s enemy. Maliciousness gives the skilled fighter an edge beyond technical competency and often results in a flair for destruction. While the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword does have the upper hand at any given moment. Survivor is a key term. One can survive in comfortable or brutal circumstances and I have noticed that people living in what we in the sheltered West might consider abominable conditions often appear quite happy and in reality are. What amazed me as a 3rd Infantry veteran (Vietnam Era) was how clever people tended to get when they were determined not to let you kill them. In Baghdad the kill rate is low on Americans in comparison but take a look at how our VA hospitals are filling up with the disabled and wounded from booby traps and explosives. It does remind me of the bad old days when belonging to the Vietnam Vets Against the War was honorable rather than a sign of errant liberalism. Here is a principled strategy test for martial artists. True or false: 1. _____ Speed defeats strength. 2. _____ Distance and timing defeat speed and strength. 3. _____ Simplicity tends to destroy complexity.
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4. _____ Surprise defeats distance and timing 5. _____ Soft defeats hard as water smoothes rock. 6. _____ One must study hard to learn the soft. 7. _____ “One should rush to embrace the sword.” is a Zen maxim. 8. _____ Earth is destroyed by water; Water is destroyed by fire; Fire is destroyed by Air; Air is destroyed by Void and the false by truth. The sixth statement is purposively ambiguous as a form of koan or pun. Studying hard karate to learn soft karate is a waste of time but the study of the soft can be difficult to the point of ineffable. All the rest are considered to be true. Baltasar Gracian was introduced to me by Jack Cain, Gracian was a Jesuit priest assigned to a wealthy family in Spain in the 1600s. He wrote a number of books commenting on how to develop greatness that are still translated and commented on by people who are interested in strategy and hard hitting satire. He was somewhat mordant which worried his Church fathers enough that they threatened him with exile if his pen became too pointed. (Spain was home to the Inquisition and Church and State were not too well separated in those days though each institution had its own prisons and courts.) Gracian reminds me of Ambrose Bierce who wrote some chilling commentary on the American War Between The States and may have planned the slaughter at Chickamauga. Baltasar Gracian was a favorite of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as Voltaire. In his lifetime his works were translated, plagiarized and distributed in other lands. Just like mine. When he spoke in public thousands showed up making him a rock star of his day, unlike me. Two things Fr. Gracian was very clear about. Greatness in any field took years of study or preparation, so take your time and hide your depth while developing your skills. The second was to be generous to your friends, and not to waste yourself and others frivolously. Like the ninja Gracian commented on inner and
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outer realities and that one should learn to manage appearances as well as actions. Inner qualities like wit, wisdom, or courage can and should be combined with outer qualities like manners, quickness, charm, variety, grace, and careful spontaneity. Even these guiding principles were cautiously modified to recognize our animal nature, “Speak to the many, feel with the few.” As a chaplain in Spain’s royal army he exhorted and went with the troops into battle against the invading French at Lerida, he tended the wounded and administered extreme unction to both Spanish and French dying. After the battle he was called by the survivors “the Father of Victory.” Gracian thought our greatest battles were with our selves and argued that great men and women, noble warriors, able politicians, wise magistrates, and complete scholars were heroes, and offered up two cookbooks to speed the ascension to power. They are much better reads for self development than Dress for Success. Check the bibliography. Sport fosters reliance on tactics and techniques as the rules of sport restrain behavior. We tend to admire athletes that compete in sports as role models for our children and exemplars of our way of life under the law. Chesty Puller, our pugnacious Marine General and Lord Wellington, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, thought that sport helped develop fighting spirit and maybe it does. Masaaki Hatsumi, 34th soke or grandmaster of the togakureryu ninjutsu and founder of the bujinkan researched 280 famous and representative battles from Ancient Greece onward and found 274 were won by ambush or other forms of unconventional warfare. Only six were cases where conventional strength opposing strength warfare won the day. The warning is very clear. When I mustered out of the army in 1966 we weren’t allowed to wear camouflage Stateside. Eventually somebody woke up and decided we should be harder to kill and quit pretending American soldiers never hid in battle. Our fearless leaders seemed to have forgotten the lessons of Roger’s Rangers, riflemen, and the Revolutionary War. I suggest reading H. John Poole, USMC retired as a
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cautionary voice of military wisdom. I notice that the Iraq warriors have not been taught to darken their patches and brass in some battalions. Seems a small thing but the yellow chevrons, bars, and the shoulder flags red, white, and blue make fine targets for the sniper eye whether the uniform is sand and rock or forest dapple. You take out the communication and the leaders first. My father was a wrestler, football lineman, shortstop, and boxer; a life-long fan of the sweet science and often went out of his way to point out what I liked was “dirty fighting.” It did me no good to argue that anyone who attacked me would probably not be wearing gloves and probably would be armed. My being a skinny, bookish, wuss seemed to escape his notice too. Jujutsu, to me, was a godsend. Dad almost had a seizure watching the first moonwalk because he had won a debate in college on the premise that “Man shall never reach the moon.” He even had a sermon or two in his filing cabinets around the idea that “Space was God’s and Man Belongs on Earth!” I don’t think he had an original thought after the 40s and his ideas of good nutrition probably added to his Alzheimer’s. His rules concerning fairness did not help him outside the ring. He was a good man, served the Methodist church his whole life, put his kids through college, coached and refereed wrestling for thousands of athletes, but he won’t be remembered on a national and international scale of immortality like Gracian. He was more of a tactician than a strategist and even though he knew his Augustine he did not understand rhetoric beyond the pulpit. His warrior’s walk was limited to the arena of his church, family, and neighborhood. His strength was not much dimmed by the predations of Alzheimer’s on his mind. In his 80s he still played par golf though he no longer knew where or who had put him on the course with balls and sticks. Research indicates moderate amounts of regular walking boosts brain function in sedentary people. Alzheimer’s damages the body mind and spirit over the diminishing years. It often begins with depression, then anxiety, and irritability. Psychoses erupt accompanied with paranoid delusions and hallucinations. Speech is often impaired as eating and
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sleep disorders emerge. The body stoops, feet shuffle, and struggle to hold the bladder and remember to dress properly is forgotten along with the names and progression of dates fading into the eternal now of the animal brain. Debilitated most victims of Alzheimer’s fall to pneumonia or some other deadly infection. More than four million Americans suffer this long and gruesome death and those numbers are expected to treble during this century as another revenge factor in living longer. The latest research shows that people with mentally taxing jobs are statistically less likely to develop Alzheimer’s but the dietary escape window may close years before cognitive decline is noticed. Although federal agencies warn consumers to avoid consumption of fish due to mercury contamination, a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids seems to prevent memory loss. The battle to wrest a good life is not limited to human opposition and one may be a victor or loser in life’s continuing war with death regardless of one’s compassion or ethical stances. Hard choices not taken can also be deadly in small things chosen. Life is not sport though sometimes a game playing attitude makes it more fun or gives you an edge. When I was in college I discovered the works of Stephen Potter. He was a subtle satirist that wrote a series of books on how to cleverly put your opponents off balance in most skill situations, in other words how to win without actually cheating by rattling them in such a fashion their expertise is thwarted. His books on “manship” taught the art of the ploy and the escape, and gave handy examples to try. In college I worked them on a chess champion from the Netherlands and even though I lost the match he was so enraged he spat at me and then took a swing. His team mates wrestled him to the door and dragged him screaming invectives down the hall. I always regarded the loss as a moral victory. I knew I could beat him if I were a better player. He was tipped over because he thought I had given him the game out of boredom. Years later, after I went back to school on the GI Bill, I saw him at a lecture at the Penn State Chess Club. He was
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lecturing on the Russians. When he saw me in the back of the room he grabbed the podium and couldn’t continue. I left the club and never went back as I knew I wouldn’t be welcome. Potter gave me the insight on how to rub him raw even though he was a far superior player and I didn’t even resort to “trash talk.” The set of books were out of print in the 50s and Holt Rinehart & Winston made them available again in the 70s as The Complete Upmanship . It is out of print again but well worth finding on ebay (The chapters on wooing and politics are priceless.). Bobby Fischer the greatest American chess master was so good at stressing out his opponents that many were hospitalized after a tournament. His books on chess will levitate a good beginner into an expert faster than any other writer on the game. It is a shame he is so singular and poor at people skills, but he is an awesome player and a really good teacher. Chess can be a lot of fun as long as you don’t get too ego involved with the win. My father quit playing me when I was eleven and I always thought it was because he found me childishly unchallenging until years later I realized he hadn’t beaten me for a couple of months. I kept playing my kids after they read their Fischer even though I seldom got another checkmate. There are many lessons in chess beyond winning and losing. I find the average player has to play me about fifty times before he or she can beat me. Most good players can get me after a game or two. I had Garth Clarke, a very good tournament player for a roomie at Penn State. We played about five hundred games over the years. I won eight. The last time we played I won two in a row. Four hundred and ninety three games to go before I can ask for a handicap. Watching Kobe and Shaq do their thang has provided some interesting drama in a game more and more dominated by giants. Maybe the NBA should go to a bigger court and higher baskets. I’ve actually watched the women pros more often than the men the last couple of years which probably makes my sister happy. I took my daughter to a couple of Comets games because I wanted her to see that the game could be played by smaller people. It was probably wasted effort as
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the women are obviously pumping iron and getting bigger. Anyway the title of this chapter was more for alliteration than subject matter. You may have noticed that the discussion is more to exploiting weakness whether biological, psychological, or skills. Enough of basket ball and back to budo. Japanese martial arts with a do or po at the end serve the dual purpose of combining physical and spiritual development. Both can be translated as way or tao meaning their practice can be used as a means to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. No pie in the sky bye and bye. The idea that spiritual development can transcend the horrors of war is alien to Western thinking but is a major theme in the esoteric practices of Asia, hence budo, the war way. By embracing and facing the sword one learns to calm one’s mind and face their fears and death. Combat arts are concerned with living and dying more than winning and losing. Survival is the primary concern and that makes them extremely interesting and very different from sport. The internal martial arts like chi kung are even concerned with longevity and spiritual development. My old friend Dr. Cheng-De Wu has written a foreword to the best book on Chi Kung I have ever seen, Qigong Empowerment. It covers medical, meditative, religious, military, and general energy cultivation with good explanations and plenty of pictures. It is in the bibliography. (If you need hands on guidance go to my Canadian hoshintao chi kung instructors Mark and Tina Lawrence.) Hatsumi-soke has often said the primary skill study of the eighteen warrior skills of the ninja is spiritual development and that the end goal of bujinkan budo taijutsu is to create better people. Morihei Ueshiba, the creator of aikido said the same thing of his art, aikido. Since most of the people who come to the martial arts are looking to kick some ass, the self-selection factor for budo leads to some gnarly associations on the path. Occasionally I’ve been asked to give my seminar to aikidoists on samurai and ninja combat sword techniques and it has been great fun.
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Robert Cowham, in London, returned giri by showing me some aikido grappling that had very nasty potential problems for the attacker if he or she did not submit to a more peaceful solution. Most of the aikido I had seen up to that point was overly dependent on the cooperative skill of the uke. When you are in a strange dojo don’t be afraid to talk to people and get out and drink and eat with them. Do they seem to find harmony in their lives or do they tend to paranoia? How do they treat each other, their children, their money, dissidents? What do their faces tell you. Are they happy? Healthy? What is their energy like? Some dojo seem to instill fear and misery, others want approval, some too aggressive, and some too humble because they really should advertise. Budo can be just like picking a job, school, or church. You have to have some standard above omniscient. We all know that doesn’t work. Dim Mak or death touch is a major skill base in real combat arts. It is very important for a practitioner of the softer arts to learn this arcane set of skills at the least for self protection as many of the strikes have consequences that are not readily apparent. There are three types of death touch: (1) bone and muscle, where one breaks bone and destroys tendons and muscles by where and how hard one strikes to drive bone shards into organs; (2) vascular and organ strikes, which are somewhat effected by the time of day, where blows are directed to create ruptured blood vessels, hematomas that can starve limbs and organs into delayed problems, and organ disruption; (3) nerve and meridian, subtle damage to the nerves can have psychological as well as physiological results and at the highest level disturb the flow of life force inside and outside the body. Usually the third type is only taught to healers. Fear of this type of interference is one of the reasons that many Chinese practitioners avoid being touched. Our hoshin body magic skills teach thirty eight points drawn from both Chinese and Japanese systems and include the rarely taught mu and shu points that counteract damage. Counteract points are really handy when you goof doing tai chi, jujutsu, karate, or ninjutsu, and go too hard.
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If your martial art doesn’t teach pressure points, well too bad. It’s hard to be a hero when your heart has stopped, you can’t make your lungs work, or your bladder just released. Definitely helps eliminate the size and strength factor when you aren’t wearing body armor. I occasionally get professional football players and wrestlers to train with me. These guys are huge. One night one of the guards asked me if I could take him. I replied, “ I think I can, but you will be so pissed off and embarrassed by what I’ll do that you probably won’t want to train with me anymore if you survive. You are just too big, quick, and strong for me to show any mercy.” He dropped that line of inquiry. He’d seen enough to make him ask. Notice how I used my Sun Tzu in this conversation. In ninjutsu, avoiding the fight can be as important as winning. If there can be no gratification in the win, then there is little reason for the fight. If you present yourself as a hopeless loser with physiological problems like drool and displaced hip you’ll seldom be attacked by a warrior, though you might attract a predator. When I worked as a bodyguard and a bouncer sometimes I would escalate the consequences in conversation that discouraged a potential fighter by appearing to be more than a little blood lusty. Now nobody attacks another human being unless they think they can win or beat them into submission or death. In a real attack your assailant is going to keep after you until you go down and then he or she will stomp you, or kick you, or finish you off with a weapon. If your avoidance skills don’t include sensing an attack and getting out of the way then you’d better work on some simple, split second responses to getting hit. Getting hit is never fun because real serious people hit you with weapons. They usually invite their friends too, so you had better play with the idea of multiple attackers. After I’d trained savateur Dr. Kevin Menard, he became the oldest man to win silver gloves ever and with bad knees. You have to fight fifteen rounds of kick boxing, some with multiple opponents. His opponents complained after the match that they were not able to hit him with any power as he was always slipping away. Avoidance skills
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again. Avoidance should include escapes. No matter what other people may say fighting against weapons with your bare hands almost always results in you being injured so you need to run, or attack in a manner that leaves your opponent confused, severely injured, unconscious, or dying. Which takes me to another point about combat arts. Most of them teach you how to use ancient weapons you can’t carry around with you. In fact the police will probably object strongly to you walking about with your sword, nunchaku, or pistol. Learn to look handicapped/challenged and you can carry/limp around with your walking cane. A scarf or t-shirt can become as deadly a strangling tool as a chain weapon if you know how to make the crooked straight. You really should know how to shoot, and pay for the concealed carry course and license. Better to have and not need, than to need and not have. Real combat arts get you out of the dojo and into various types of terrain which means you have to be stretched, balance aware, and able to deal with different types of clothing. Your footwork should keep you standing or allow you to move on varied surfaces. High kicks don’t work on wet grass or gravel, stuff like that can save you a lot of pain and embarrassment. Martial arts like hoshin, systema, tai chi, or ninjutsu that are principle based allow you to figure out what you can do with your body rather than force your body to adapt to a technique (as in sport) depending on the control needs of the teacher. Little things make a big difference. Do you lead with your right, rather than square off, to protect the heart from the blade? Do you know how to protect and attack the genitals because you won’t have a cup? Can you turn anything that you pick up into a useful weapon? Do you have choices built into the techniques so you can negotiate with the police if necessary, though we all know you will be farther ahead to just fade away. I’ve said most of this before in my martial arts books but this is a different audience that may not know about such life rewarding strategies. There is a concept cherished by most traditional teachers called “Oral Tradition
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Only” that restrains some knowledge from being written down so that personal teachings and relationships between expert practitioners can develop. This is a little different from the use of esoteric sound in language like Sanskrit. I’ve studied ninjutsu for twenty-three years with Masaaki Hatsumi, grandmaster of bujinkan budo taijutsu. I have taken lessons from his shihan, Seino, Shiraishi, and Nagato. I was with Stephen Hayes for six years and four years with Daron Navon. Twenty years with Kevin Millis and four years with Dave Bolin and Richard Cearly. Dick Severance, Greg Kowalski, Greg Cooper, and Cheng De Wu have been martial friends since back in the eighties and I did a few Yang Jwing-Ming chin-na seminars at Dr. Wu’s in the nineties. I’ve done seminars with skilled professors in savate, isshinryu, gung fu, silat, systema, etc. Dr. Joe Adriance has six Mexican ninjutsu dojo and is opening others farther south. He is fluent in Spanish and Japanese and his Ph. D is in cultural anthropology. He has discovered more about the inner secrets of ninjutsu than my stroll into ethnography. I’ll travel a couple of hours to study with him. I like studying with people who are intense and knowledgeable. This is my hobby and I don’t have much time so I want to share time with the best. You may have never heard of these guys or schools but they are all legendary in our little world of expertise. Giri demands I thank them for offering me their life preserving techniques both ura and omote. It is like taking a lesson from a bowling or tennis instructor. Private lessons with the professional will speed up your learning. The subject matter is what you are paying for. You want some secret techniques? You buy some private lessons and go to the pro’s seminars not the local storefront. You may still not get the best stuff because you don’t know how to ask. Oral Tradition demands that the student has to invite the vampire to cross the threshold. Hoshin teaches self-protection principles drawn from espionage schools around the world. Its techniques are quiet, simple, and very effective because at heart we’re spies and aren’t supposed to be there. I was taught
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“defendu” and some jujutsu by my uncle after the Korean War (Yes, I am older than dirt.) and got a refresher in O’Neill Quick Kill” during my Vietnam Era enlistment. O’Neill was the British and Canadian selfdefense system developed for special operations/commando units by the old China hands for WWII. O’Neill is the base art of hoshin with bits and pieces of all the other schools we have slipped into providing collections of techniques and occasional improvements. If you want a taste of the Anglo WW II espionage school’s fighting skills, they are described in the recently reprinted Canadian WWII spy school’s training manual How to be a Spy. The European spy network was run by the perfidious military intelligence of Albion’s nobility. Very “Old School” in European terms, still pissed off from the Huns predations in WWI and who knows whatever insults back and forth over the centuries. No quarter given or asked. Even Rome trembled when the Anglo women painted themselves blue and drove the chariots into battle. (The place we ran away from because these bastards had it locked up for their own, but the Germans were truly into madness this time. What the Germans did not know was the Brits had stolen one of their Enigma machines at the beginning of the war in Poland. We had their codes.) Real family values. I thought it was so cool. Elite troops secrets. O’Neill gave me the skills to win most of the time until I met up with the ninja. Back to school. I bet I’m the only spy who spies on the spies for a hobby for fun. Everybody pulls out their best stuff when it is time for war and they are actually deep into it. Col. Greg Radabaugh, (retired like a SEAL) a former top spook against the Russians for the Air Force often lectures on some aspect of interrogation or propaganda techniques at our Kaizen (annual gathering of enthusiasts). One year we had an astral travel expert he used give a lecture on far seeing, once we passed the Geller spoon bending who cares silliness some of us were peeking into each other’s houses drawing pictures of things accurately enough to surprise each other! A statistically significant number of hits in a truly blind study but enhanced by skilled teachers
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and perhaps too much feedback to be considered academically certified science. Lenora described this California aikido and yoga teacher’s study down to where the cockatoo had his perch. We hadn’t a clue about him, he just showed up after being on the hoshinchat for a couple of years and joined the ryu. The Eskimo shaman had similar techniques for moving in the void as do the ninja. I’m not so sure of them as some of my yoga friends but Hatsumi is a master and I sure hope he can find a worthy apprentice for serious dream magic. He even signs his sendings with an animated chop. Way over my head. Higher chakra and tantra combined with an artist’s ability to visualize. The military stuff isn’t as frilly with local color but the Colonel still likes it. You can make up your own mind once you get dipped in it. (Experiential learning was my thang at the Uni. Doctorate even.) Budo, as you can see, has some esoteric aspects beyond punching, throwing and kicking. Even the infantry has to gather intelligence. Dim Mak is just acupressure’s dark side and great preventative medicine. You may be on the battle field or fleeing for your life. I have lectured and demonstrated energy healing to medical colleges in Florida and Sydney, Australia. The look on some MDs faces when something works without physical contact is worth the fee. Budo’s meditative practices have to work in the shortest time with greatest effect. The kundalini is one hell of a flight/fight response. Healing of subtle injuries was probably one of the early forms of mental therapy and works pretty well for more mundane injuries as Rob Williams who is nationally certified in massage therapy and heads up our budo massage therapy can verify. Budo as a spiritual path includes conflict reduction, problem-solving, and meditation as a physical reality. Turning away the sword and creating friendship through recognizing respectable behavior is not quite religious but similar enough to be called philosophy. The remarkable and mystic states reported occasionally by sportsmen at the heights of their game, i.e., illumination, ecstasy, out of body experiences, altered perceptions of time and space, and exceptional feats of strength and
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courage are sought, analyzed and replicated in the higher schools of budo. The better schools have their benchmarks similar to the religious heritages, but budo is purposively, measurably, providing a means of experiencing spiritual development through physical and meditational activity. What happens in sport by serendipity is purposeful in budo and a high priority among the people who tend to be secretive as a traditional understanding of how things work best. No real malice intended, the old once burned, twice shy kind of respect for human nature. If you think such stuff does not exist in sport but only in a temple you should read some humanistic psychologists like Michael Murphy, one of the founders of Esalen. He really gets into the physical work to get spiritual. The Tibetan Buddhists have become a great resource for those trying to understand the traditional Buddhist ways. Locked above the clouds for centuries with minimal exposure to the rest of the world they have had a lot of time on their hands to develop idle ways. The harshness of their environment has made death a constant guest at all their studies. The lamas are parting with huge amounts of amazing techniques for both medical and physical development. Santiago Dobles and Tao Sempko my yoga and silat instructors both study with different lama from different sect. I’ve had three initiations into the bon (shamanistic) techniques that lama claim go back 18,000 years. They very closely reflect American Indian shamanistic techniques for subduing the ego while also placating the demons and abandoned ghosts and spirits. I can verify their power and efficacy, as for the age…. That is a long time and impossible to prove. Lama Surya Das is an American (originally just plain Miller) lineage holder in Dzogchen was introduced to me by Eric Lee this year. This guy lived in Tibet and India for thirty years and does some organizational work for the Dalai Lama. I’m not much for organized religion beyond the role of keeper of traditional wisdom (Chicken soup for the soul may soothe but what are the long-term side effects?). I have authority problems when dealing with the omniscient ignorant. The Reverend Das has written a very lucid
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text for awakening the natural self through following eight steps to enlightenment. His book is a light-hearted offering of basic techniques and fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhism to the darker magics of shamanistic bon. He writes a great manual and clarifies the meanings of practice like only an experienced practitioner can. I find myself shaking my head repeatedly as I read his interpretation of various ritual. He goes in the bibliography for those who wonder why so many martial artists seek refuge in Tibetan Buddhism. Robert Anton Wilson claims the martial arts will make or keep you sane. Like Crowley his advice almost gets you there but relies on anodynes, over-intellectualizes, and does not embody the offered wisdom. The Russian researchers report normal distribution in the human population for self-transformative capacity. Published research from their sport and medical communities indicate they have developed techniques for selective control of various psychological and physiological processes, even for the growth of muscle fiber and affecting cellular and interestingly from a quantum aspect, subcellular processes. At the very least martial arts force you to be in the moment, or present. The Russians claim development of a system for “Psychic self-regulation” (PSR) combining yoga, hypnosis, autogenic training, and the martial arts. Everybody, has it to some degree, according to them, but are unaware of it. Some use it subconsciously, often contributing to the development of disease like chronic fatigue when they burn their kidneys and adrenals, or chi sickness when they develop more energy than their bodies can sustain. But in budo we have ways of healing those little problems if caught soon enough. In fact we have ways of teaching that I suspect are very similar. Now, I ask you. Isn’t all this more fun than basketball? And you can play at a pretty high level for a lot longer than name a giant. Here is what our annual training weekend is like.
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KaiZen 2005 Lafayette, Louisiana August 26, 27, and 28 (Hoshin Penache, BodyMagick, Healing, and EnergyWork)
Lafayette American Legion, Surrey St. Friday thru Sunday $100.00 for Hoshinroshiryu and WWN members and early sign-ups; $150 for non-ryu members or at door. $50.00 dollars a day. ($25.00 for WWN members for Friday alone.) Friday
(10 to 5)Meditation for the Reduction of Psychological and Physical Trauma: Secret Smile, Five Point Breathing, Meditation Dos and Don’ts. Open to Wholistic Wellness Network members. Experiential and Class Lectures Friday Evening
(7 to 9) Get Together at the Legion. Receive tourist packets, t-shirts, pocket rope. Play some games and get some safety techniques. KaiZen Begins. BYO Saturday
(9 to 10) Hoshin Stretching. (New stretching curriculum developed by Steve Sonnier and Nate Bryant of the Lake Charles Hoshin Hombu. (10 to 11) Hoshin Dim Mak with Dr. Death (Stealing your opponents strength through Pain and Knowledge) (11-12) Short Stick, Knife Handle, Fountain Pen, Magazine, Book Weaponry and other techniques for rendering the pen mightier than the sword in restricted areas. Lunch (prepared by our own chefMudge) (13 to 15) Hoshin Pocket Rope as taught by TobyMallet of the “Swamp Devil Dojo” of Lafayette. Scarves, siens, marbles, and t-shirts thrown in so you can go
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armed but look so harmless. (15 to 16)Hoshin Fundamentals of Cane /Walking stick East and West. The challenge of looking challenged. Set ups that give you the edge. Learn a weapon superior to the sword that police are restricted by law from taking away from you. (16 to 17) Hoshin Tanto/folder/straight razor. Blade surprises you can create. (17 to 20) Dinner. Scatter out with Cajun guides and forage in some of the fine area restaurants. (20 to 21) Firewalk. Toast your tootsies and try a gomo wish ceremony. Sunday
(9 to 10) Chakra opening, sensing, and basic healing/energy work. Description of the new distance learning programs necessary for third dan and above…. from Kawartha and Rob Williams. (10 to 12) Massages for upper body with Rob Williams. Lunch (ChefMudge) (13 to 16) Specific Healing Techniques. Chakra Diagnostics, Personality and Health, Meridian Repair, Headache Removal, Energy Rebalancing, etc. Awarding of Ranks and Closing
Bibliography: A Pocket Mirror for Heroes. Baltasar Gracian, trans. By
Christopher Maurer. Currency Doubleday, 1996. The Way of the Ninja: Secret Techniques . Masaaki
Hatsumi, Ph.D. trans. by Ben Jones. Kodansha, 2004. How To Be A Spy: The World War II SOE Training Manual .
Denis Rigden. Secret
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History Files, Dundurn, 2004 The Complete Upmanship . Stephen Potter. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Sports Psychology: Mental Skills for Physical People . Harris & Harris. Leisure Press, 1984. In The Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports . Murphy & White. Penguin Arkana, 1995. Bobby Fischer Goes To War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time. Edmonds &Eidinow. Harper Collins, 2004. Qigong Empowerment . Master Shou-Yu Liang & Wen-
Ching Wu. The Way of the Dragon, Publishing, 1997 Civil War Stories . Ambrose Bierce. Dover Thrift Editions, 1994. Hoshinroshiryu Dim Mak . Glenn Morris. Hoshinroshiryu Publications, 2001 Awakening The Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World . Lama Surya
Das. Broadway Books, 1997. Yoga: 101 Essential Tips . Sivenanda Yoga Vedanta Centre. Dobling Kindersley, 1995. Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia . Thomas A. Greene, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2001. Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to US Firepower .
H. John Poole. Posterity Press, 2001. The Tiger’s Way . H. John Poole. Posterity Press, 2003. The Hiram Key . Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas. Fair Winds, 2005. The Great Tao. Stephen Chang. Tao Publishing, 1987.
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Chapter Eight: Surviving Comfortably in a Complex Global Society “He has sat on the fence for so long the iron has entered his soul .” Lloyd George “There is nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.” Leonard “He has the attention span of a lightening bolt. ” Redford “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best .” Deming
We live in global times as well as a turbulent global economy. Let’s see what you know about how the USA stands in comparison to other countries. True or False: 1._______The USA is the world’s largest democracy. 2._______The USA has the highest infant survival rate of any industrial country. 3._______A large percentage of American voters regularly turn out for elections. 4._______American high school students lead the world in math, science, and biology. 5._______The American dollar is the strongest currency in the world. 6._______America has the largest bank in the world. 7._______America has the largest standing army in the world. 8._______America is the only country still in space and planetary exploration. 9._______The United States is recognized around the world as the leader in entertainment, music, and movies. 10.______The United States is famous world-wide for its open borders and free immigration policies.
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11.______The USA is the world’s largest manufacturer of televisions. 12.______The USA has never fought an offensive war as it favors peacekeeping. All of the above, but number nine, are false. All are markers of great countries and growing economies except number seven. Seven ain’t lucky in this case. It used to be Russia, might be China, but North Korea has a huge army. North Korea is governed by a dictator the world generally regards as crazier than Hitler and definitely as odd. But he does have that humungous hungry horde of military which means he doesn’t have to play nice so everyone is careful around him. He has found a way to employ the unemployable young males (unlike the Arabs), eventually the coup will unseat him if he doesn’t do the war thing to distract the populace. He claims seven nuclear weapons and occasionally rattles them at his opponents like the proverbial saber or Saddam with his hunting rifle. He also likes golf, has one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons, and loves Daffy Duck so he can’t be all bad. He has a well-rounded personality by his standards. As a seminar leader I get around the world quite a bit. The last decade has been allowing me to visit Europe more often and get to know my English and Dutch friends better. In the early 60s as a young soldier I made it my fun to hitchhike from Greece to Spain and out to Wales from London. Europe then was still struggling to repair the damages of World War II, we were fighting the Cold War, and Vietnam was a fast approaching shadow cloud on the horizon. It wasn’t until about five years ago I began to realize that my European friends had a better life style than my own. My black belt Vincent Biemans made fun of the customs inspector who accused him of trying to sneak into the United States by laying out the advantages he had as a Dutch citizen versus us. The inspector was floored, he really thought we were the shining beacon held high for the rest of the world. Vincent didn’t even get into how many of the “victimless” crimes that
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fill our prisons in the USA are simply legal and taxed in Holland. He mostly pointed out advantages in medicine, education, and tax laws. The choices we have been making lately have led many young Europeans to believe the old continent now has the vision of the future with strength based on education and business cooperation rather than military might. This new “United States of Europe” could well replace us as the world focus for wealth, well-being, and security. The new Europe has expanded on the American Dream and in the process was becoming a viable alternative economic democracy. In the early 90s I thought the European Union had little chance of success given the ancient rivalries concerned, but it is now the first transnational political entity with twenty-five members and a thriving economy even if it can’t yet come to a constitutional agreement. The Euro now competes with the dollar and is used by 455 million people. What is the big deal? While we have been letting our infrastructure rust, wasting our wealth on foreign wars, and supervising the decline of our public schools through conservative divine neglect, the EU is fast eclipsing us in education, science, banking, engineering, and construction. In the Global Fortune 500 Europeans have 61 companies while the USA has 50. Rather than ignore social problems for political gain, the European model has emphasized community and cooperation resulting in significant gains in quality of life advantages such as lower crime rates, lower poverty, and cleaner environment. People aren’t afraid to stroll around in their neighborhoods. While we have been devoting our lives to the relentless pursuit of happiness through personal wealth, the Europeans have opted for more balance, spending far more time with family and friends, longer vacations, better food, socialized education and medicine. They claim “they work to live well.” Goods and services cost more, and the taxes are higher but people are getting what they pay for. Schools are not war zones, medical rates are not prohibitive, and there is a remarkable lack of national jingoism. Some the police forces in Europe don’t even carry
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firearms but they do have their SWAT equivalents hidden away for serious business. As the dollar weakens against the Euro it cheapens US goods and services making us a more viable tourist attraction as well as helps revive the manufacturing. Europeans get hit hardest when the dollar is weak because their exports become more expensive. The Japanese and Chinese have little choice but to hold on to their American real estate investments because large scale dumping will ruin their investment. Both Asian countries hold a large dollar horde close to a thousand billion which they have been building for years. The larger our deficit the weaker the dollar and the more important become our creditors. When Korea sold off its dollar horde recently, it was very bad news to people who market money and the American economy. One of the major reasons the United States has been able to dominate the global economy has been its awesome lead in science and technology, a side effect of the post WW II GI Bill. However, a quick peek at the Physical Review, a top science journal, reveals that the number of breakthrough papers published by Americans has fallen from 61 percent in the early 80s to 29 percent last year. This is a side effect of conservative politics interfering in scientific education. China is now the heavy hitter submitting on the average a thousand papers a year. We have long taken Asia for granted but India is producing more than Bollywood, and now is becoming the dominant leader in computer geekdom and medicine. China and India are proud ancient civilizations with large internal economies no longer dependent on exports to the West/us. That means the competition for world markets and prestige is up for grabs and we aren’t doing so well as a leader or holding the “high ground” in quality. If we continue to choose guns over butter we may remain the best armed country in the world but our trade and economic deficits will not just impoverish us but our future generations. We are beginning to resemble England in the last days of the Raj when she fought wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Sudan, while we
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waxed strong building our technological and cultural might through the public school system, and then after WW II, with the GI Bill. If we are not careful, the rise of the USA, (replacing the entrepreneurs of Western Europe of the 17th century to lead the world,) may not be followed, by the expected Pax Americana, but the Asian economic revolution of the 21st century. While we waste our finest resources and limited substance creating wars (instead of commando raids based on good intelligence) and insulting our natural allies by leading our own Holy War against Arab Islamic fascists, China and India are playing strong cards at the table for players in the New World Order. Of course this whole scenario is just based on emerging economic factors and since the Bush regime has shown no respect for our usual rules of engagement, let alone the Geneva Convention’s, perhaps we’ll try to solve those problems militarily too. After all, he who got the gold rules. Right! Right? One of the great contributions of India to the world is the Bhagavad Gita. It is normally thought of as a holy scripture, like the Christian Bible. It begins on a battlefield and teaches, among other things, how to do one’s duty and still maintain mental equilibrium. The Gita tells us not to become attached to the fruits of our labors because comparison will bring inevitable disappointment as the ego is fed by greed and envy. The answer to how to be a good leader is to manage yourself and choices. The book also advises one to perform with loving attention to the divine creating suitable conditions for skill development and excellence. Like the Bible for the Christian, the Gita is the cornerstone of religious guidance and success in life for the Hindu. Some of its prescriptions for success include: (1) Develop and cultivate a strong philosophy of how to live (2) Identify with an inner core of self and be self-sufficient (3) Striving for excellence in any endeavor is worship (4) Do not think in terms of judgments, like good and evil (5) Strengthen yourself so you can enjoy life (6) Work for the good of all beings
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(7) Remain steadfast when facing contrary impulses and emotions The battlefield of Kurukshetra and discussions of strategy by Lord Krishna to Arjuna may seem alien to our way of interacting with the Deities but it should be remembered that the Shakyamuni Buddha was first a Hindu warrior prince, and it was that training that gave him the discipline to pursue, develop, and preserve enlightenment as a structured developmental path. Anyway, the above ideas for maintaining under pressure were good advice a couple of thousand years ago, and indicate that the competition from India will not only seek the high ground but will be staunch. The Chinese have practiced the craft of intelligence gathering and developed and tested theories concerning the ruthless deployment of all kinds of agents with dramatic success beyond any Western nation. They have produced more tomes concerning spy craft than the much studied Art of War by Sun Tzu. They have produced works concerning the deployment, insertion, recruitment, and control of agents; covert practices such as entrapment, assassination, subversion, and sexual exploitation; which have modern applications. There are manuals exploring counter intelligence and military intelligence to include objectives, analysis, and interpretation. As a little known example of their cleverness, chemical analysis of pottery fragments by archeologists reveal the Chinese were making rice and grape wine over two thousand years before beer was brewed in the Middle East some five thousand years ago. The past decade has seen a resurgence of Chinese interest in ancient writings from Confucius to Hein Fei-tsi who resembles Machiavelli. Sun Tzu has had our attention for about fifty years and has become everyone’s war manual whether terrorist, guerrilla, insurgent, businessman, or traditional military strategist. The Chinese take a long view of history where we tend to forgive and forget. This means some cold dishes of vengeance may be served up for our
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edification over the next few years. We live in interesting times. The Japanese are expert at industrial intelligence but the entry of the Chinese into more and more Western markets will probably raise the bar above what I taught GM supervisors to watch for back in the 80s when negotiating with the Japanese. The reorganization of the CIA and other intelligence agencies seemed too politicized to escape collective groupthink. Reminds me of Nixon and Salinger back when. Kennedy’s advisers didn’t think the Cuban invasion force needed air cover in the 60s because of groupthink, and we’ve had to put up with the embarrassing presence of Fidel ever since Groupthink occurs most often in organizations that seek those of similar beliefs. Terrorists are one thing, our commerce, trade, and livelihood are another that may fail to be protected by a government too concerned with marketing a war and the next election. Remember how five years ago we were hammering the Chinese for trying to steal computer secrets for their missile programs? Big Blue has sold its PC manufacturing business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Lenovo has captured thirty percent of the Chinese market using Chinese characters on its keyboards. Lenovo hopes to move from regional heavyweight to global giant. IBM has also sold 10,000 employees to Lenovo avoiding layoffs and changes in pay. Lenovo will be able to exploit some advantages that western firms don’t enjoy. The Chinese government is a significant shareholder as the Communist party no longer seeks a Marxist economy. As more deals like this go down the “Made in China” is going to reflect, like India, that the product was financed, researched, and designed there too. China, like Japan, has a long history of seeing business as war. Westerners will have to deal with care, and may have already made choices that will doom our ability to compete in another ten years, as new technologies proliferate and replace the need for extant skilled workers with newer markets and workers who are more sophisticated. Matthew Slaughter, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, points
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out that the labor force in the USA is diminishing, yet our immigration policy since 9/11 is more restrictive. Also innovation tends to come from educated, experienced, motivated workers not the classic white coats in the labs. IBM just sold a lot of computer innovation to China. We have to learn to think locally as well as globally. We have lost over 1.5 million jobs to China since 1989. I am not advocating a yellow peril position, just common sense. We are not the only players in the Pacific pond. When USA jobs move off shore they take a lot of wages with them. Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics, suggests we can no longer ignore the costs of globalization. It is obvious to her that unless the average worker gets some help in skill development we’ll soon be competing for the bottom jobs on the lower rungs of the technology ladder. I think she is right about the problem not being outsourcing but the long term competitiveness of our workers. We are focusing too much on corporate advantage for the short term and losing our best people resources for the long term. Back in the 60s when I was at Penn State the weather wizards noticed holes in the atmosphere caused by fluorocarbons being released. The Republican Party under Nixon took the position that this warming trend was debatable and trying to fix it has become one of those proverbial political hot potatoes. It is forty years later now and the world has become more interesting. Weather has definitely been changing in the last forty years. The incident of skin cancer has tripled since I was a kid and is now epidemic in Australia. Droughts are common and most Western farmers have adjusted to drier weather. Global warming? Seven of the last ten summers have been in the top ten for hot in recorded history. Recorded history goes back four thousand years. The Greenland ice sheet is melting and slipping into the sea at a much faster rate than normally observed. The polar caps are shrinking and with the Greenland meltdown ocean levels could raise twenty feet in the next twenty years. If you live on a coastal plain
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this is worrisome. At the end of 2004 tidal waves or tsunami in Asia and Africa corresponding with an Indonesia earthquake killed about 300,000 people with about the same missing. These were short term events and the governments claimed they couldn’t get the warning out fast enough. Imagine downtown Miami or New Orleans under twenty feet of water. (Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have made the unthinkable a reality in Louisiana again. Holly Beach, a little resort town is gone without national notice, but we all saw the mess from New Orleans to Mobile. I rode Rita out in Lake Charles and watched FEMA and the Guard timely arrival with public relations and media support locked and loaded, from the wreckage of a town shredded by high winds. Whole neighborhoods flattened by fallen water oaks. No electricity, water, or food for the unprepared but most of the unprepared bailed rather than experience Katrina II. FEMA was on the ball this time.) Most of Florida is about fifteen feet above sea level. I wouldn’t be buying any real estate on the coast for the long term. The weather is changing and the spate of hurricanes ripping up our coast is probably not an aberration but a taste of the warmer weather to come. The movie “The Day After Tomorrow” portents another ice age as that is a lot scarier than things warming up. But warming up has some very scary consequences beyond creating new wetlands, particularly around disease control and weather. A recent Science article, submitted by the Fitters, father and son naturalists from Cambridge, England records that the flowering and blooming of some flowers and plants has advanced some fifty-five days indicating a climactic warming trend. They are also sprouting farther north and at higher altitudes. A major study by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis found the increase of disease incidence to be “astounding.” Even slight increases in temperature allow viruses, bacteria, and fungi to develop more rapidly. For example nasty things that only hung out in the tropics are being transported toward the poles as milder winters and less freezing allow them to live
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and prosper where winter used to stop them cold. People complain about unkillable molds. Epidemiologists predict a warmer but sicker world when combining this trend with the emergence of the new super bacteria developing as a revenge factor of our success with antibiotics. Michael Crichton posited in the introduction to Prey , a scary nanotech novel “If we were to grasp the true nature of nature__if we could comprehend the real meaning of evolution__then we would envision a world in which every living plant, insect, and animal species is changing at every instant in response to every other living plant, and animal. Whole populations of organisms are rising and falling, shifting and changing. This restless and perpetual change, as inexorable and unstoppable as the waves and tides, implies a world in which all human actions have uncertain effects. The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” Time to bolster the immune system with Astragalus and Echinacea and keep to that moderate exercise regimen. Interesting times require careful observation of our leaders because competency is necessary for survival in hard times. In the Old Deep South “where the livin’ is easy,” smoke and mirrors can suffice as good government, because when things get too bad you can always go fishing. Manufacturing may be moving to Mexico and high tech went to Texas and Florida where there is still some possibility of hiring well educated workers. Now it is a given that Louisiana has squandered the possibility of a middle class life for most of its children, but are we seeing the same sort of bread and circuses developing at a national level. I think so. At the least there is a meritocracy that is looking more like a technocracy with every passing year. Well nobody really knows what happens to their tax dollars anyway. Eighty percent of the wealth in the USA belongs to less than twenty percent of the population. We have our old money families who own property and our new money families who make things and sell services. It takes money to make money
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and having been both rich and poor (Rich mostly on paper and promises. Want to buy a promissory note for a couple hundred thousand?), rich is more fun. On the manufacturing front, Deming’s ideas have become pandemic through the world under a number of names raising the standard of quality beyond even the pickiest customer’s dreams. The companies who caught on have gone the six sigma route and the ones who did not are fading from the scene. If you like the manufacturing game apply yourself to understanding statistical process control. The wave of the future will belong to those who can crunch their numbers in real time and pull and add factors to predict cost and profit. The math exists now as does the hard and software but only a few really get it. The corporations who take the time to implement their data into real time modeling will very quickly crush their competition. Wal-Mart is as close to real time marketing as retail can get at whiz-bang communication speed. Go take a look, then do some comparative shopping. One of the problems General Motors had to conquer early in the 90s was no central accounting, or central communication system, no shared business plan, or rationalized vendors. Once those systems were put in place, life became much easier for the decision-makers as they had prices and quality parts in a timely manner. Imagine running budgets for ninety different plants each having its own system of reporting, or not knowing if you had a profit until well into the next fiscal year. Deming style SPC eliminated a lot of the manufacturing line problems. EDS untied the communication knots. Now they have to deal with lack of vision caused by faith in bigness. Once real-time-SPC gets noticed you will see another manufacturing revolution evolving out of being able to better predict the market and build to response. Serious elimination of waste. I believe the formula is 3% eliminated waste equals 20% more profit. That’s in the future. Right now we face a dodgy market and very slow growth in jobs with a huge back log of lost jobs. Losing a job has about the same psychological
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impact as losing a wife. Major stressor and contributor to low self-esteem and depression. Invest in anti-psychotics and anti-depressives. Marketing will become more difficult in an information-based society. Already the craft consumer shops the net to look for best prices and higher quality. Computers and cellular technology enable us to be more productive in shorter bursts of time. I used to tell my students to learn everything about computers, now I know that a good percentage of them know much more than I do. However, for those who are disciplined, this new era will open many opportunities to work in worldwide groups of people with similar interests, as well as develop autonomous life styles based on worldly exposure. Those who pursue excellence will thrive. Defining excellence will continue to be a problem for the masses. Peer pressure will continue to shape the culture at the lower end. Peer pressure is not always a bad thing. Not fitting in is the most common reason for teenage angst and suicide. Take some time in selecting your peers. There are lots of interesting people in the world and some make better friends than others. The net can make them easier to find. Handhelds will soon be as ubiquitous as cell phones are now. People from some cultures avoid uncertainty and have little tolerance for ambiguity, whereas people from other cultures are more at ease with change and the unknown. Cultures that have trouble with change, particularly social change might be Japan, Greece, Portugal, Chile, Peru, and Spain, and they value conformity more than cultures which tolerate greater ambiguity like India, Australia, the United States, England, Canada, and Sweden. Cultures that value personal goals and self-autonomy should be less conforming than more collectivist cultures. Social proof is the “five million Frenchmen” can’t be wrong concept of rightness. People are more likely to try something when they know others have. It works best under circumstances of ambiguity or when people see others similar to themselves using a product. “Buzz marketing or virus marketing” where corporations give away or hire influential
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or visible people to act as consumers is a form of applied social proof. De-individuation or “hiding in the crowd” often “allows” people to exercise their darker sides, the bigger the crowd the greater the tendency to violence, people tend to not work as hard as when they are alone, and will slack off to match the level of work done by others when standards are ambiguous (Remember our primates and the grapes versus cukes in Chapter One? Animal models do predict.). These norms will also develop in virtual groups. Thus if the groups norms are positive, individuals are more likely to act in prosocial ways. If negative, you will see a greater tendency to flaming. Organizations tend to be the same way. Study the culture. See who has the power and why. Decide how long you want to work there. It takes about a year to learn a job, another year to get really good at it. Another to train your replacement while you job hunt and plan your next move. People move around a lot these days and the “company man” is a fading way of life. Still losing a job you like is a heart breaker and rates high as a major stressor. Power rests in the ability to reward. Whatever you reward you will see more of. Ingratiation or kissing up is not as effective as simple praise. Brown nosing detracts from organizational effectiveness. A genuine compliment, however, demonstrates respect for both the individuals concerned as well as recognizing higher standards. People run companies and the people who run companies have power. Research by French and Raven back in the 60s lined out five types of power that people draw on to influence others. The dominate power base tends to define the corporate culture: (1) Reward power has control over valued resources such as promotions and raises; (2) Coercive power has the ability to punish; (3) Expert power is based on knowledge; (4) Legitimate power comes with formal rank or position in the organization, and (5) Referent power based on skill and liking. People with more “power” are perceived to be more persuasive than those without. Politeness is important in gaining compliance and threats and hints do not work as well as direct requests. It is the hoshin way to seek and
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use power to the benefit of all. Be nice, be generous, be grateful, and be wise. Being autonomous or a knowledge worker is rather like the samurai ronin who left their clans to work for the Westerners in the nineteenth century. Although they were regarded with contempt by the feudal clannish samurai, they became a force for change and many founded their own businesses. They had to learn to live in two worlds and to manage their own existence. Like the ronin of Japan it is important to figure out what you like to do for fun and relaxation. What brings you pleasure and what harms through over indulgence. One has to be able to motivate oneself, as sometimes the jobs are unstructured and unrewarding, by creating goals and rewards for oneself. You have to be able to self start and set your own goals which tend to make you different from the average man or woman who chooses to depend on others to start them, set their goals, and dole out the rewards. Musashi, one of my favorite ronin set down nine guiding rules in the Earth book of his The Book of Five Rings for those who wanted to live the adventurous life of a strategist. (1) Be positive and avoid sinister designs. (2) Recognize that budo (the warrior way) is a never ending pursuit (3) Cultivate a wide range of interests and skills in the arts. (4) Be knowledgeable in a variety of occupations. (5) Learn discretion in your commercial ventures. (6) Look for the truth in all matters. (7) Perceive that which cannot be seen with just the eye. (8) Know what is important, even in trivial matters. (9) Avoid useless activity. Musashi killed over sixty men in recorded duels. He was the Billy The Kid of Japanese sword lore. He wrote a book on strategy that moved him from being remembered as a talented thug, to a master swordsman and artist. Musashi led a somewhat tragic life as an itinerant artist continually attacked by swordsman wishing to establish their reputations by killing him. He retired when he was fifty-five from accepting duels and shortly thereafter wrote his book.
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It is still used by strategists today as a guide for the individual facing the challenges offered by venturing your life. He knew that the adventure is in traveling up the path not in the destination. The modern day ronin can not predict a comfortable job or the compromises expected of those following a linear corporate career path. As you face the challenges of a turbulent global economy you may find advancement is replaced by self-discovery, lateral moves in new directions result in new knowledge to be used in other work places. Most of the research around happiness indicates higher salaries, good friendships, and family relationships are critical to sustained happiness so work on your social skills and network. Look up as you move out. Ronin are often contract workers who develop by working through the corporation not for it. It is a path comparable to the ancient warriors. As the American Indians would say, “Choose a path with heart! Go where you can have a joyful journey!” Bibliography: The Tao of Spycraft: The Intelligence Theory and Practice in Traditional China . Ralph
D. Sawyer.Westview, 1998. The Art of War . Sun Tzu, trans. by Lionel Giles, and edited by Dallas Galvin. Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. The Book of Strategems: Tactics for Triumph and Survival . Harro Von Senger. Viking, 1991. Roman Warfare. Adrian Goldsworthy. Cassell & Company, 2000 The Way of the Ronin . Beverly Potter. AMACOM, 1984.
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Chapter Nine: Getting a Life “The harder I work, the luckier I get !” Krulak “The scariest thing aboutmiddle age is knowing you are going to grow out of it .” Day “I feel so miserable without you, it is almost like having you here.” Bishop
You should understand about what matters that you can do a lot about. Social identity, gender, immune system, living well, sexuality, ability, communication skills, and technology. Since the world is obviously changing there are some things you should do for yourself if you wish to survive in comfort. First is to put together a longevity plan to stave off the diseases of life style such as heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, and stroke through healthy eating habits, and moderate exercise. Avoiding and reducing stress through meditation, chi kung, and taking food supplements as well as soil analysis shows the vitamin and mineral content of the soil has been vastly depleted by non organic farming methods which will effect what you eat. Sleep is probably more important to brain health and feeling well in general than most people recognize. People who get about seven hours sleep a night memories function about twenty percent faster with about thirty percent improvement in accuracy over those who sleep less. Most of the recent research indicates the brain works better given about eight hours of sleep to restore itself. If you want to sleep better you should cut the caffeine out in the PM. That means no coffee, tea, chocolate, and probably no spicy foods either for at least three hours before hitting the bed. Hot milk is a fine sleep aid, but alcohol is not. Since the changes won’t slow down for you, you have to slow down for them to become more effective and efficient. You can go for long periods without sleep when you are young, and little sleep over long periods, but how much bar time do we really need? We live in a time of great change, what the Chinese would call interesting in their famous curse for the unwary. Interesting times call for 153
a plan or strategy if you wish to live well. Call it a to do list, or a battle plan, or just setting some priorities, but it is important to do as the demands of modern society not only keep us busy, but distracted from what may be important. Most of us are trying to do more things in less time, and sooner or later find we can’t do everything we should. When I was training supervisors and foreman at Texas Utilities I used to recommend that the leaders make priority lists. Write down four or five things you would like to accomplish by the end of the day. Decide which are most important. Mark the most important A, then B, or C. Go after the A’s first. If you get the A’s done, you will have accomplished more than most people do in a typical day. The B’s and C’s will go away or move up. Before you go home put one A in the center of your desk to start on the next day. Do not take work home if you can help it. It is a strong indicator that you are in over your head, not what a hard worker you are. Besides sleep, meditation is another no cost but time, no bad side effects, and good for you means to improve brain and immune function. A slew or research shows that many of the effects of stress, including heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and infertility are reduced by meditation. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports about ten percent of the population are now serious meditators, an additional twelve percent use breathing exercises or chi kung, and five percent espouse yoga. That is close to becoming mainstream. I was fired by George Roche at Hillsdale for teaching meditation eighteen years ago. General Motors hired me within three days and tripled my salary so I could hardly sue for damages. I was tenured though, and it really pissed me off. (Meditation was the reason given to keep the Baptists happy, I’ve always suspected George had more Machiavellian reasons like providing his daughter-in-law with a higher profile job at the Dow Center for Leadership. True believers are easy to maneuver. That’s another story, but google up George Roche and Hillsdale College for a tale of conservative hubris gone wrong on a Greek tragedy
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scale when you are bored sometime. Talk about comeuppance.) Given that the Pentacostals still go after meditators in the Deep South, depending on your practice you might take care how and to whom you describe your life benefiting deep breathing exercises, particularly if you see them as the biological process that leads to spiritual development. Here are some tips. The effect of meditation is compounding and continual which means you have to do at least twenty minutes a day for best results. You should feel rested at first and the benefits will accumulate to recognizable shifts in health and calm by twenty days. After twenty days you will probably feel good enough that you will just make it part of your daily routine. To increase the benefits be sure to keep your tongue tipped up on your palate and your breathing through the nose at a very slow rate, pushing your stomach out as you inhale and pulling it in as you exhale. It also works better if you are sitting up rather than lying down. If you want some real expert instruction get my Meditation Mastery CDs. Twenty years ago this was cutting edge and controversial, now its close to being mainstream. If you use the Secret Smile techniques taught in Path Notes you’ll get all the benefits of stronger immune and endocrine system, plus greater happiness. Reducing stress and sleeping better doesn’t mean quit using the gray matter. About twenty years ago we began to realize that brain cells can rejuvenate and that the slow decay of decision-making powers, memory, and multi-tasking were the outcomes of lifestyle choices and disease more than the aging process. This regrowth of cells may help individuals avoid the declines of perception, cognition, and motor skills once thought to be part of old age. Best of all the regrowth is stimulated by some of life’s simplest pleasures that present mental challenges. Crossword puzzles, chess, moderate physical activity like walking or golf, video games, group salon discussions, reading, and motor skill challenges like dancing or yoga have all been proven by research experiments to be beneficial to the brain. Probably as good as eating fish.
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Need I say that many of these criteria are part and parcel to the higher martial arts like tai chi, ninjutsu, or hoshin. Simple walking has remarkable rejuvenating powers for the sedentary. Some people derive benefit from gardening and taking care of pets, but for a real challenge take on some volunteer work with children like Big Brother and Sister. I had an eighty year old shaktipat client who had married a pretty Hispanic girl who was pregnant. I don’t know how happy she is but he is having a great time taking care of her kid. When I asked him about it. He said, “All my friends are dying. They all talk about their operations, doctors, and medicine. Give me a break. The boy and I are having a great time, and I think she really has come to care about me.” When I was fifty, I took on a baby girl and the loss of sleep nearly killed me in the first two years, but the rest was great fun. A lot more challenging than a dog and greater consequences if your parenting skills aren’t much. The new happiness literature supports that relationships with your children are a great source of happiness. I like all my wives’ kids. As part of this brain rejuvenation process surround yourself with music. Remember one of the main jobs of the snake brain is sensing the pulse of the universe. Feeling the beat. Dancing and music is part of our most basic nature. I suspect the ability to embrace a wide variety of music relates to higher intelligence. Dance is second only to sex as the best form of exercise. Musicians often make better group leaders than athletes and are often more concerned with quality performance. Research seems to indicate that about 95% of us fall away from popular music around thirty five indicating we lose our taste for novelty and begin to embrace repetition. If you are spending more time listening to the “Golden Oldies” than what is new you have fallen into the long grave of being in a rut. New to you is the key. Comprehensive music sites like www.allmusic.com on the web are fun to explore. Www .globalmusicproject.org can take your ears around the world. And if you just want to expand your musical consciousness or see what you’ve been missing www .music-map.com uses algorithms to predict that fans
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that like one band will favor similar musicians in other groups. Plug in your favorites and check out what pops up. Music is a great way to keep the brain nimble. Too bad most school boards will cut the orchestra before the football team. Making music is even more beneficial than listening to it. Reading, and I take it you are a reader since you have this work in hand, is much better for your brain than more passive forms of learning like television. Reading also puts you in charge of the process. Reading fiction increases imagination skills and enhances intuition. Being able to visualize what you read is a skill that transfers into many areas like engineering and decisionmaking. I taught my son Richard who was severely dyslectic how to read using comic books and Louis L’Amour, now I’d use J.K. Rowlings and Harry Potter. He went from being put back two years to graduating National Honor Society. Success of one’s children is another source of happiness. If you want successful kids you will have to work with them. Kids like limits so give them some around TV time. Don’t make childhood too easy. Get them to set goals and problemsolve. Musical instruments are great ways to keep them positively busy. Dave Cowan once told me, “When I was fourteen I got a guitar and…. Then I was nineteen and going to college.” Try to make sure they have some experiences that stretch them and encourage them to make friends with kids who are smart. Make their allowance tie into their grades and encourage part time jobs to save for college. If the grades are good you’ll help with that bike or car. I always told mine if you go to college on a good scholarship I’ll help. If not there is always the Army or McDonald’s but you are out of here and on your own. It worked. I’m very proud of my children and grandchildren but I’m not much on grandparenting. I’m too busy trying to survive. I’ve spent what I have earned traveling and what not with my friends. People who don’t visualize what they read (Read words rather than see pictures created by words.) usually don’t like to read. Using comics or page-turners can heal that pitiful state. Reading fact increases one’s ability to problem-solve and adds to
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one’s knowledge base. Reading “good” or classic literature increases one’s ability to understand motivation and use language as an expressive tool. Magazines keep one up to date. The most useful magazines I have found are Science News, which publishes news concerning the findings of scientists each week written for a sharp tenth grader; The Week which gives a wide spread of news and opinion concerning politics, the arts, and happenings around the globe; the Utne Reader which is dedicated to alternative life styles, and Ode, which strikes me as an oddly edited ecological critique. I try to read one factual and one fictional book a week now. Hopefully somewhere in your undergrad exposure to education you took some philosophy and literature courses. Philosophy is dedicated to examining how to live well through understanding our values. Reading philosophy can help one develop some distance and perspective but most philosophers do not write very well and over explain. My home library has close to a thousand books, most of which I have dipped into and decided to keep for reference or pleasure and there aren’t many philosophers preserved there. I belong to the History Club and often buy selections from their editors. Biographies are a great way to walk in someone else’s moccasins. Keeping up in your own profession is easier if you belong to the appropriate reader service. I think the old maxim, “Readers are leaders!” still applies to most ambitious people. If you haven’t been in a classroom for a while here are some rhetorical tips that get you the good grades: (1). Remember it is not a democracy. Authority, no matter how uncool, resides in the teacher. Be quiet and polite. Act like a scholar. It’s a school and you are paying for it. Everything changes. (2). Sit up front. Try to get in the first three rows. Those are the A seats. Teachers think students who sit in the back are hamburger with learning problems. (3). Ask questions. Teachers think smart people ask questions.
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(4). Make eye contact with the teacher. Shows you are honest as well as paying attention. (5.) Laugh at the jokes when a teacher tells one. What kinds of jokes can teachers tell? Give him or her credit for trying to lighten your load. (6.) Ask an occasional question after class. Makes the teach think you are a scholar so don’t ask stupid questions. If you can’t come up with a thought provoker ask about last week’s lesson. (7.) Check out the other students who are up front, make friends, study together. That way you’ll get good notes and may make some good contacts. All right, that should keep the gray matter perky. What else makes life worth living? Everything I see indicates we will soon be in world wide competition for goods and services, and that bit of social Darwinism has been missed by our government global planners. If you want to be top dog, it takes more than military dominance. Education and economics are pretty important. That is how we wore down Russia and Russia was a great enemy but never real competition, rather like Germany way too stretched out and not enough structure behind the façade. China, India, and the lands of the Euro have shoals where our war craft may founder if we continue to act like the “War On Terrorism” is actually our war and not a necessary global police action. Look what happened in Ireland when they made the schools free and quit killing each other. Given this economic competition, we have to look at our school systems as they are our future, not the industrial/military complex. If we really want a war then lets put in a base or two north of Baghdad and see if the big PX can hold its own against the camel spiders. Since the economics look rocky for the reasons I stated in the last couple of chapters it might be a good idea to strategize around your finances better than I did. Learn about compound interest and retirement funds (Einstein loved compound interest.). If you were to save $80 a month for thirty years earning a conservative 5% each year, you would have saved about $75,000. My friend Dr. Porter suggests putting $500 in a
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compound interest fund and waiting 65 years to collect your several million dollars. Now that is a retirement fund you can set up for a child (I wish my parents had done that for me!). Well, if you are like most of us waiting for our social security to come up, it is also hoped you had the sense to put some fiscal discipline on autopilot by putting away the max percentage allowed into an employer sponsored 401(k). This type of deduction is not taxed and can accumulate rapidly in an asset allocation plan. TIAACREF a fund for teachers and scientists has worked very well for me. I accumulated a little under 65,000 in five years by going mostly into high risk technology. If I hadn’t invested all of my retirement from Hillsdale and General Motors into my bio-tech debacle, I’d have a cool million or more waiting for me. It is a good choice. Start early. When you leave a company or school, transfer your 401(k) into an IRA. Economic theory and the simple reality of profit motives suggest you put it in a mid-cap mutual fund which often pays as well as 90% in five years.The interest on your credit cards is a sure loser. Pay them off as quickly as possible. Pay all your bills on time and don’t seek more credit than you need. When it comes to money, it is good to be pessimistic concerning financial disaster. Keep a running fund of three to six months expenses in a money market account. It is better to have and not need than to need and not have. Take a look at your FICO. That’s your credit score with 350 being lousy no way to 850 making how can we serve you when you apply for loans. 700 is considered a score that will win you the lowest rates. For a fee the three credit agencies, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion will let you know when info has been added to your report. It’s a good idea to check that report from time to time as they occasionally get it wrong. It’s your job to make sure they get it right. Studies indicate they screw it up about thirty percent of the time. Get a paper shredder if you want to avoid identity theft. Of course all this supposes you have enough education to start your own business, or get a job that pays well. Lets look at lifestyle too.
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Clear out the clutter. I’m constantly amazed at the stuff that accumulates in one’s house or garage. If you haven’t worn it in two years make the fashion police and Volunteers of America happy by making making a donation. Real art and treasures you may put in storage or hang on the wall. Get rid of extra electronics, old phones, and computers by donating them to charities too. Organize what you have left by seasons. Summer clothes go with the beach and diving gear, winter with skis and heavy coats. Get rid of your old shoes and if you are over forty check your shoe size and get some inserts. Your feet will tell you why. Shelving and hanging bags in closets can be used to keep cleaning supplies and bath stuff out of sight but handy. You might want to look into Feng Shui. Can’t hurt, might help. Study your computer. Google can sort through jillions of web pages for us but most of us have trouble sorting out our own PC or Mac. Mastering your own data is a great way to start getting organized. Set aside time to learn your search programs. I like Yahoo, but Google has some interesting features like a Desktop Search and Microsoft is getting into the game. Ask Jeeves works pretty well and the name cracked me up. Get into your documents and name your pictures and file them away. Get your resume up to date and post it on Monster. Organize your papers and letters. I mostly word process but am constantly amazed at all the clever things that a computer literate person can really do. Hell, I still need to t o work on my typing skills because I hunt and peck. At least I’m up to two hands and four fingers. You might want to take t ake a course or two. One of the easiest ways to get some great educational experience that wasn’t available until 1990 is The Teaching Company (www.TEACH12.com (www.TEACH12.com). ). What they do is get the best professors onto DVD, CD and video for home study at a reasonable price. You get the adventure of learning from some of the top dogs at top schools without the classroom prison like atmosphere and pressure of homework and exams. Just kick back and listen in the kitchen or car. I just knocked off a lecture on quantum physics and time travel and followed that by one on the
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Gnostic Bible and Nag Hamadi which corrected some of my thinking. All that while playing with the cat and eating breakfast. Now that is putting the pleasure back in learning something new. It’s probably a good idea to t o get as much education as you can in and out of your professional interests. I’m often surprised by some of the questions students ask me about the thoughts that t hat run through their heads and then realize the benefit of a liberal arts education. Most of my students are geeks of one sort or another and “well-rounded” is a concept that whizzed by their keen but pointed perception. They hit on the library with glee when something strikes their fancy. Paranoia is a fond motivator for some when selfrealization comes late. They learn more from movies and TV too. My wife quotes Dangerous Liaisons and M.A.S.H.. When I was in Melbourne this year David Cowan introduced me to the DVD movie Blueberry about a Cajun who is friendly with a Navaho shaman. The visuals when he does the shaman’s drugs show the evolutionary movement of spirit and body familiar f amiliar since the kundalini. kundalini. The story is a bit predictable but it is very well done.Weak script, interesting cast, great graphics, no buzz in the States…. If you have been smart enough to t o buy rather than rent and you have some equity in your house think about where you really want to live and how. Are you living where you want to work? Are you doing work you like? If not start making your escape plan. Hate the city? Small town life goes at a slower pace. Bored in the country? City life has a wealth of experiences to offer and masses to exploit. Country life is supposed to be healthier but these days you may want to check the water table or find out what industries are upstream. Too many people are finding it too easy to separate the general public from being your neighbor, and thus you find a business person willing willing to dump pollutants into a fishing stream or despoil the econiche for simple profit. If you have children the offerings of the local schools become important, and how taxes are raised will point to how good the t he schools are. I’ve been amazed at just how nice Australia and Costa Rica are.
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Travel. Look around. The net can make you free. How did you do on that t hat nutrition test in Chapter Six? There are some tricks to eating better. First of all read the labels. There is a lot of marketing on a container that has little to do with the contents. Veggies with darker colors indicate more nutrients, phytochemicals, or goodies. Spinach is better than iceberg lettuce and so is Romaine. Dark chocolate has more antioxidants than practically anything. Cocoa is actually good for you. Coffee is harder on your kidneys than tea, particularly black coffee. White foods like bread, rice, cakes, cookies are not only nutrient lite, but contribute to carbohydrates, usually have too much salt and sugar so increase the risk of diabetes and heart disease. Avoid the colas as they are heavy on sugar and may contribute to cancer. Drink water or tea instead. Your skin will thank you, so will your PMS. Avoid canned and frozen food and canned soups (mega salt). Try to eat fresh. Fresh foods make a real difference your body will quickly recognize. If you must eat fast food, f ood, try out franchises. Cantaloupes Cantaloupes Subways or other fresh food franchises. have more vitamin C than apples and oranges, as well as great fiber. Blue berries are good for your night vision. Do I need to hit the t he evils of cola and sugar for someone who is already running on empty? Do a little research and get yourself on the right vitamin supplements for your age and sex. A very scary study by the British Agriculture Ministry and the Royal Society of Chemistry comparing nutrients in vegetables across time showed about a sixty percent drop since the forties. Even organic production of food is no guarantee of nutrient richness. It does not take an Einstein to question the consequences of constantly electing to choose junk food. Some studies in Europe are finding f inding links between bad diet and violent behavior but I suspect there is a solid economic factor that confounds the way to peace being through the stomach. Consistently, across history, the culture with the most useful technology t echnology wins. wins. Technology is not always kind to the environment or the people using it. Chariots versus travois. As we grow older there is a strong tendency not to embrace the new stuff. I
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resisted getting a cell phone for years. The James Bondish camera and web connect won me over. If you intend to stay ahead and afloat in the modern economic stream you will have to learn and buy the new toys just to keep up with the kids. Resistance is futile. Go with the flow. Who moved your cheese? Change is the only constant. You just have to learn where to get the most bang for your buck. Just ask the nearest wired up kid listening to his earphones while talking to the air to his invisible friend who might be on the next continent. It is in our hands today! The civilian toys really have to compete with the shrunk down and focused military, so different from the draft old days. Bows and arrows versus repeater rifles, smoke signals taking on the digicamphone on international TV or just back to MI at HQ. Studies by McClelland showed clearly that wearing darker clothes besides providing a camouflage advantage was associated with business success. Dress for success is still a good idea. HRD specialists take about seven seconds to make up their minds about an interviewee. You don’t get to make a second impression in a competitive market. Your resume and education may get you to the interview but your communication skills and ability to make others comfortable will keep you from being shown the door. Learn what the expectations are for the position you are seeking and adapt to your audience. It is your job to make them comfortable with you, not the other way around. Fashion is for media and art industries folk. Business people get to play with a limited range of accessories and like the yakuza usually hide the tattoos. Be proactive. If you intend to lead others take every opportunity to practice your positive thinking, intention, and public speaking. Half of management is telling others how and what to do. And remembering the difference between nagging and behavior modification. Think clearly and kindly, be specific, and speak gently. Which thoughts do you really want to express? Choices, so many choices. When I was a management counselor at the Dow Center for Leadership I used the following mantra a lot, “How can I say this, so this person will learn from it, and not be
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injured.” The Buddhist concept of right speech includes more than just telling the truth. Study on that. Chapter Four may have given you some clues about diversity in sex and gender. It is important to know what you like if you are going to get more of it. One of the sad realities of modern living is that married people are generally healthier physically and psychologically than their single counterparts. Happiness, however, is not guaranteed, the American divorce rate continues to climb, and longitudinal studies in Europe found that there was only a short bump in “life satisfaction” for the married. Often on reflection couples reported being more content before marriage. A study in 2003 showed that middle aged women involved in satisfying marriages were less likely to show symptoms of emotional distress and were less likely to have heart disease than their unhappily married counterparts or single women. Similar benefits for men have been known for years. Married men outlive single or widowed by about five years. A study of identical twins revealed that the married brothers made 27% more than their single siblings indicating a societal bias in favor of married men. A happy marriage results in a better sex life or at least an easier hunt. Unhappy marriages undo all the above, so plan on working at keeping your spouse happy. If you are not happy with yourself, marriage like wealth will not make you happy. Some of the latest research from twin studies by Lykken indicates happiness is about fifty percent genetic. Contentment may be the highest form of wealth. Having been in good marriages and bad marriages I still like being married better than being single. If you want to go the marriage route have a heart to heart about your expectations with your amorata before you get into it and save yourself the expense of an expensive divorce down the line. Tons of research indicates walking, swimming, bicycling, yoga, tai chi, and other soft martial arts are enormously beneficial to the older practitioner. Moderate exercise accumulating to at least a half an hour a day seems to do the most good. In 1988 Hatsumi-soke gave me a bujinkan award for studying the mental
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characteristics of his school members. Interestingly enough, the people in my sample were significantly more self-actualizing, achievement oriented, and scored higher at affiliation than the general population. Rather different from the image of grim assassins put out by the media and competing martial arts. The ability to relax under pressure, common to the bujinden and Russian Systema, is priceless. Most people never realize how much tension they carry around (My trapezius muscles get like cable.), nor recognize how creative, effective, and faster they can be when relaxed. Removing excess physical, emotional, and spiritual tension in a stressful situation is probably the most transferable skill in budo, and the most useful after the spiritual development component in the higher order martial arts. Having fun and playing are a great starting point for slowing down to learn muscle memory. Try out a non competitive martial art which usually means combative because no one wants to get into an arm breaking contest. What you learn may save your life and it is more interesting than pumping iron. Musha shugyo is the budo term for spiritual journeying or knight errantry. Try it out. It doesn’t seem like a hard choice to me. Spiritual journeying is an internal adventure. It means going within and the easiest way to do that is through meditation. Being your natural self or fully human, means you have to pay attention and wake up from the confusions and delusions that most people share to their constant suffering. Change is possible. We are all to a greater or lesser extent the creator of our own destinies. Our thoughts, our words, our choices, and our deeds interconnect with the world to form our experiences that shape our reality. If you are not having a good time, look at your choices. Martin Seligman, Sonya Lyubomirsky, and Robert Emerson’s research indicate that gratitude exercises like keeping a journal where you write down three to five things for which you are currently thankful, or looking up an old teacher or mentor and thanking them for their guidance has both psychological and physiological benefits. Seligman actually recommends writing testimonials and the effect lasts about
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three months. The positive psychologists, like Hatsumi-san back in the 90s, also recommend random, and specific, acts of kindness, as they maintain one’s connectedness, generosity, and feelings of competence and control. Rhetoric is the science of making good choices, first for yourself, and then for others. Making choices for others has a long history of not working out very well, so approach that aspect of leadership with humility. As for yourself there is nothing described here that the author has not applied or tried in his own life to advantage, and where he failed to pay attention and reaped the bitter fruit of despair, there is no recommendation. It is hoped you may avoid my mistakes and arrange for yourself the best application of my meanderings. I like this ebook means of publication to reach my rather limited audience and hope you have fun and gain some insight by this offering. If you want to implement what you have read turn to the experts listed in each chapter’s bibliography. Bibliography: The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle . Baltasar
Gracian, trans. By Christopher Maurer. Currency Doubleday, 1992. Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book . Christopher
C. Burt. Norton, 2004. Crimes Against Knowledge: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Polititians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders . Jamie Whyte.
McGraw Hill, 2005. The H.I.S.S. of the A.S.P : Understanding the Anomalously Sensitive Person. David
Ritchey. Headline Books, 2003 Old Masters. Great Artists in Old Age . Thomas Dormandy.
Hambledon & London, 2000
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