Author Archives: Steve Mays

Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower

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Tom Engelhardt’s Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower is the most encouraging thing I’ve read in a couple of years. An excerpt:

“I have no way of knowing what will first strike you as wrong. I just know that something will. It might be very specific and close at hand — something amiss you see in the program you’re working on, some outrageous expenditure of money or set of lies about what an agency or outfit is doing, or some act or set of acts that you, in growing up, had been taught were un-American. The possibilities are legion. After all, the national security system that they’ve built and engorged with taxpayer dollars, using fear and the excuse of American “safety,” has dispatched armies, and special ops outfits, and drones all over the world to commit mayhem and increase global instability, to kill civilians, wipe out wedding parties, kidnap and torture the innocent, assassinate by robot, and so on.”

Take time to empty ourselves

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“For the first two hundred thousand years of human history, we were only exposed to the news (and the suffering) of those immediately around us in our tribes and villages. We saw birth, sickness, death, and wars, but on a limited scale. Only in the last forty years or so has the news media poured the suffering of the entire world—wars, natural disasters, torture, starvation—into our ears and eyes every day, day after day. This suffering that we are helpless to fix accumulates in our mind and heart, and makes us suffer in turn. When the mind and heart become too full of pictures of violence, destruction, and pain, we must take time to empty ourselves.”

— How to Train A Wild Elephant by Jan Chozen Bays, MD

Meditation Now or Never

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meditationPublisher’s Weekly: Zen priest Hagen, author of Buddhism Plain and Simple and Buddhism Is Not What You Think, offers a brief and wonderfully accessible primer on meditation, which can be a surprisingly difficult practice for many beginners. He helpfully defines meditation via negativa: meditation is not a self-help program, a quick fix, a mind-training technique or a way to relax before jumping right back into the fray of our busy lives. It’s a lifelong practice that can, and should, seep into every arena of the quotidian, so that when we’re attentively folding laundry or taking out the trash, we’re doing meditation. It involves teaching the mind just to be here, says Hagen. Amazon.

A few excerpts:

We live tuned in to ourselves, but tuned out from life.

We easily lose sight of the distinction between Reality and our ideas about Reality.

Meditation is an expression of faith in direct experience itself.

Meditation is useless. (Because) meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. … We can’t do meditation for any reason other than to be aware. … If you’re sitting in meditation to get something — you’re not here.

Meditation is about deeply seeing what’s going on within your own mind.

In meditation, we see that there is no cosmic mystery to break through. … Reality and Truth don’t require any “figuring out.”

You can’t become enlightened (because) you’re already here, immersed in it. It’s like trying to become human.

The practice of meditation frees us from our insane desire to control ourselves and others.

If you can get past the resistance to meditation, nothing else in life will be an obstacle.

In each new moment we can live in either awareness or ignorance.

Our meditation practice reflects the attitude we take in life.

At the heart of meditation is the intention to be awake. (To experience) Reality as it is,before goals, ideas, or desires sprout. … Meditation is never a means to an end.

Meditation is not about doing anything. It is simply paying attention. … If our will is directed toward any object or purpose — even toward meditation correctly — then we’re not in meditation.

Meditation is continually returning to life so that we don’t miss it. There’s no gap, no distinction, between you and what you’re doing.

Instead of practicing now and here, we get lost in thought about it.

Enlightenment isn’t something we need to figure out. It’s just remembering — waking up to what you knew all along but were not paying attention to. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s only a matter of seeing and not talking to yourself.

Over time you’ll discover that meditation won’t give you ideas at all.

Meditation is a matter of zero or 100 percent. Either you’re present or you’re not. There are no in-betweens.

To the extent that we’re not fully present as we live our life, a good portion of our life passes away unlived.

Meditation is awareness.

The very distinction of “out there” and “in here” is just another mental construct. It isn’t Real.

The more present we are, the bigger the picture we see. The bigger picture we see, the more things seem to slow down. And when the Whole is seen, all is utterly still.

Almost everything we do is done for a purpose a result, an outcome. In meditation, however, we let go of hopes and fears, plans and outcomes, and simply come back to here and now.

The desire of one who is awake is simply to be awake.

We can ever really explain how we feel — we can only feel how we feel.

Waking up means, more than anything else, that we learn to see ourselves.

Meditation is about your attitude toward life.

We put together a world in our mind. We carry all kinds of ideas, beliefs, notions, and prejudices — and, for most of us, that is our reality. It’s where we live. We regularly confuse what we believe with what we actually know.

Everything in culture is built around the premise of going after something else.

We find awakening so elusive because we’re looking for it. And if we’re looking for it, that means we believe it’s not here.

There is no “out there.”

We need to awaken, again and again, in each new moment. And in each moment, we have a new opportunity to wake up.

Life is all at once. It’s forever now. It’s never “then.”

Chapter 24: Weather Watch (PDF) Weather Watch (Steve Hagen)

A quest to save AM radio

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Most of my on-air time for the dozen years (1972-82) I worked at my hometown radio station was on the AM station. In the 60s (?) the station sold (at cost?) “FM converters” because so few cars had FM receivers. This NY Times story tells the tale:

“In 1978 half of all radio listening was on the AM dial. By 2011 AM listenership had fallen to 15 percent, or an average of 3.1 million people, according to a survey by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm. While the number of FM listeners has declined, too, they still averaged 18 million in 2011. (The figures are averages based on measuring listeners every 15 minutes.)”

“In 1970 AM accounted for 63 percent of broadcast radio stations, but now it accounts for 21 percent, or 4,900 outlets, according to Arbitron. FM accounts for 44 percent, or 10,200 stations. About 35 percent of stations stream content online.”

“Nearly all English-language AM stations have given up playing music, and even a third of the 30 Major League Baseball teams now broadcast on FM. AM, however, remains the realm of conservative talk radio, including roughly 80 percent of the 600 radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh.”

Scott Adams’ View of the World

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I suppose a lot of people don’t take Scott Adams serious because he’s a cartoonist (the creator of Dilbert). I’ve read all (most?) of his books have found his explanation of… well, pretty much everything, makes the most sense to me. Today on his blog he gives a tidy summary of his world view.

  1. Willpower isn’t a real thing. Some people just have greater urges than others. If I resist a cookie and you don’t, it doesn’t say anything about your willpower, but it might say you are hungrier than I am, or you simply like cookies more than I do.
  2. I don’t believe in a creator. I see humans as a collection of particles bumping into each other. Or maybe we’re a computer simulation created by some earlier civilization. In either case, no group of particles, or arrangement of ones and zeroes, is superior to another.
  3. I have no individual skill that is not topped by at least one person in every demographic group. Every group has people who are smarter than me, stronger than me, kinder than me, more generous than me, more talented, and so on.
  4. There is no logical way to rank talents or virtues. Is one person’s excellent musical skill somehow better than another’s good parenting skills? Is your kindness better than your friend’s work ethic? None of these things can be compared objectively.
  5. Genes are often destiny. You were probably born with your personality and your preferences, in which case you are not to blame. Or you might have been the victim of some sort of nastiness in your past that changed you permanently, and that probably wasn’t your “fault” in any objective way either. Your particles bumped around until something bad happened, nothing more.
  6. For purely practical reasons, the legal system assigns “fault” to some actions and excuses others. We don’t have a good alternative to that system. But since we are all a bunch of particles bumping around according to the laws of physics (or perhaps the laws of our programmers) there is no sense of “fault” that is natural to the universe.

The ego is what you think you are

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“The face in the mirror, and the haphazard story we associate with it, is the ego. (But) what we think of ourselves is constantly changing, not just day to day, but moment to moment, and mood to mood. At different times, I have thought of myself as anything from an insufferable loser, to a freaking genius, to a guy who can never quite get his shit together, to a guy who’s never had a serious problem in his life. What I think I am is so fickle and so dependent on moods and circumstances, that it can’t possibly be right — ever!”

This is what is people mean when they say the self is an illusion. It is a fictional character that is constantly changing. Therefor, not a real thing in the permanent, unchanging sense of the word real.

David Cain comes closer to explaining this than anyone I’ve read.

Working for The Man

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David Cain — once again — delivers The Most Interesting Thing I’ve Read Today. From his interview with The Man:

“Do you know how people with hoards of money get to have those hoards of money? They make some money, and then they don’t spend it all. They keep some each time it comes in, and they use it to make more come in next time. That’s how power is accumulated. Instead of accumulating power, most of my employees accumulate objects in their homes, or they just burn the money as it comes in, on booze and expensive sandwiches. What I see is people setting up their lives such that they become dependent on powerful people like me, which is exactly the opposite of how one ought to build wealth. That’s why I’m The Man and they work for The Man.”

And how did The Man deal with rock and roll’s threat to The Establishment?

“I killed John Lennon. I bought MTV. And, thank God, Bob Dylan went and found Jesus.”

And one more…

“People in the US, more than anywhere else, respond to personal inadequacy by buying stuff or trying to get in a better position to buy stuff later. This is great, because buying stuff eventually creates disappointment, which creates more buying.”

The Antidote (Oliver Burkeman)

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I really enjoyed this little book by Oliver Burkeman. It’s a more thoughtful book than the title might lead you to believe. I don’t review books but will share a few excerpts:

“At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly. … The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable.”

“Learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one’s experience of the world, to give up trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotions with more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the ‘pursuit of happiness’, a more profound peace might result.”

“What motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.”

And how gratifying to find my philosophy of life within the pages of this book:

“You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.”

A couple of times, in fact:

‘A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.’ — Lao Tzu

And this for you Dale Carnegie devotees:

“The ‘cult of optimism’ is all about looking forward to a happy or successful future, thereby reinforcing the message that happiness belongs to some other time than now.”

I’ve been reading self-help and motivation books for half a century, with limited success. This was a refreshing new perspective.