We interrupt this silence with an actual report - although we shall probably go silent again.

From MicroPersuasion:

Deliberate practice - at least as a concept - is relatively new to me. However, little did I know it's something I have been at for years. Perhaps the same is true for you. Regardless of your passion, it's something that - when applied - is surefire road to success.

The basic idea isn't rocket science. Basically, anyone with just even a little bit of natural talent in a given domain can master it in about 10 years by methodically practicing the essence of their craft two hours daily (including weekends) and measuring their progress from one day to the next.

The concept was developed by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. It's becoming popular in sports and business. It's a big reason why Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez and Warren Buffet continually get better. They practice on building their strengths every day in a meticulous way. (The links on their names cite relevant stories. The best piece I have read on the subject is this one from Fortune.)

This is still very much, my guiding principle.  Of course, I'm not an "expert" per se, in anything.  The integral concept here, is to apply one's effort, focus, and perception, on a daily basis, to different areas of one's life - from spirit, to community, to health, to love, to yes, one's chosen vocation of expertise. 

I've been silent now, as really, as I envision the next steps of Integral Practice to be the following:

Report on one's chosen practices, in various areas of life.  Making sure to be "doing the work", of course.

Create a group, who joins in, at least one of the practices, and also create a transparent mode of reporting results, in the chosen practice - be it weighlifting, diet, meditation, or a breakthrough weekend.

Since I can be somewhat lazy, there is a gap between the vision, and the execution, no matter how motivating the speaker, or how smart the "personal growth for smart people" articles are, from various...erm...smart people!

Given this, the daily blogging on what's happening in the world, simply holds very little interest for me, unless it's focused around corroborated results and reporting, based on good feedback and evaluation principles. 

I'm still working on that problem.  It's taking up a lot of my spare time, contemplating and working on this challenge.  A community driven site centered around "deliberate practice reporting" - thus separating the wheat from the chaff in change techniques.

This now ends this service announcement.  This blog will now return to it's regularly scheduled silence, until further interruptions are warranted.

Saw this post on how countries with large amounts of Protestantism, work harder, because of that dreaded "work ethic".

Well, our main integral theorist, Kenny Boy, the Kenster, Kenarooni, it's pretty clear this is one thing that permeates the practice arising from his theory - the Work Ethic.

Have you done your 5 practices today?  Your spiritual, your shadow-work, your exercise? 

It also happens that Ken Wilber WAS raised Protestant, of course.

Now, however, Aurobindo's Integralism also places quite a high value on overall development, and work.  I remember being in a graduate and a member of the class, who had spent time at Auroville, spoke about how discouraged she was by  "how hard" it could be, being devoted to the practices of Aurobindo.

So this might be something, that means nothing.

The best answer though, is the quick-witted answer by Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain, at the end of this article, who thinks that there isn't a causality involved here, but merely an artifact of evidence:

"We must not forget that many countries like India started off with very high levels of economic development, but after years of colonial rule by foreign countries, their economic might was stripped. Interestingly, many of the colonial powers in the world also seem to be protestant. But it would be wrong to conclude from this fact that Protestants believe in occupying other countries.”

On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't be wrong to conclude that, given the events of the last 7 years?

Taking some time from silence, to post about the JFK Conference in Integral Theory.  In the Bay Area, so I have no excuse!

I fully hope and expect to meet lots of my online pals, in person.

Thanks to Bill for the heads-up.

A fairly chilling article at the New Yorker, called Black Sites.

This article, of course, is about CIA, and their interrogation methods, at the so-called "black sites", places around the world where people that are labeled "high value" terrorists have been taken.

One of the first things that strikes me (outside of my moral nausea), confirms a long held belief by Wilber, that different tracks in the world - say the moral, and the intellectual - definitely run on their own, without much interaction. 

In this case, all the different technological advances - in psychology, modeling, intake, etc - were applies to extracting informaton:

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

See there, the attention to detail, and the development of a practice, that operated on the physical, emotional, and psychological:

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”

The article goes on to describe the pluses and minuses of the confessions extracted.  The spokespeople quoted of course, emphasize high level information was extracted, while other point out that the men so treated tended to confess to everything they could think of confessing to, thus limiting the value of the information.  (I would suggest, people put in that situation would confess to shooting JFK):

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.

So here, we have a situation where, technology works to improve one's knowledge of human beings - albeit of course, in an extremely evil way.

There is some recognition of the effect on the soul, in implementing these techniques:

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

In that center, the center of the soul, or how moral values progress, why the backslide, here, in the United States? 

I think Wilber's theory needs to account for the fact that it is very possible, on a moral level, to go "backwards".   Because in reality - because of the fear of more attacks after 9/11 - the U.S. did exactly that.  Depersonalization and fear, built into a fantastic, terrifying, and abstract "Other",  have acted to retard our moral values.

A really great tool here - The Walk Tool.

As someone who lived in "suburbia" all his life, except for some time spent in the far 'boonies', I have to say that, a GOOD dense neighborhood - where I can walk to  pick up groceries, drycleaning, restuarants, esasy commute to work, etc - is a type of living that I much prefer over the typical "get in the car to do anything" life.

(Of course, it might be different if I owned some fabulous house in the boonies, but as a NON-house owner, it is preferable! )

Why the tool is great is, not just because of the score itself - which is an approximation, and as such, can be wrong.  Example - where I last lived in San Francisco has a score of 88.  But where I currently live has a score of 82.  However, because I previously lived on one of Frisco's most steep hills - in the russian hill/nob hill area - it actually could be quite a pain to walk.  (I still did it, most times very enjoyable, but it could be a pain.)

(In addition, where I live now though, is flatter (not flat), and as well is right along a main line of 4 SF buses and quick access to the underground.  Previously, I was four blocks to a bus, rather than 30 steps, and then taking those buses took me through a very dense traffic area, so it almost took as long to bus as to walk.)

For anyone moving however, this tool is amazing.  On the side layout, you see all types of things to do - groceries, bars, exercise, schools, libraries, etc - and how far your address (or the address you are contemplating) is from those structures/businesses.

This is what makes the tool so useful, for those thinking of moving. 

But remember the caveats, as I pointed out earlier - no references to crime, or poverty, the quality of the neighborhood, or just how close you are to alternative transportation options. 

This is what makes the tool

Norman Borlaug - a household name...really.

By the Guardian, not from the U.S.

A different style of video news - a longer piece, more thoughtful.  Staying with one Army company for a couple of days.  Still brutal, however. Really points out as well, how at this point many soldiers are "captive" of their tour, with the stop loss order.



 

On a completely different tack - How Top Bloggers Earn Money.  The 100 or so blogs that actually make some cash, rather than the 100,000,000 that languish in obscurity!

Saw this explanation of "writing funny" from The Dilbert Blog.

Made me wonder - how well do spirituality and being funny go together?  If "being funny" is a skill - and thus has it's own line of development - can you be 2nd tier funny?  Enlightened funny?

Dilbert points out six essential elements of humor:

Clever
Cute
Bizarre
Cruel
Naughty
Recognizable


The cute, cruel and bizarre elements - a bunny with a bazooka, is the example.   Not really apropos for spiritual discussion. (Prove me wrong here - someone write a deeply wise spiritual story about a bunny and a bazooka!  Please?)

Most of the spiritual teachers I have met actually are good-hearted people who love laughing.  But they weren't really that funny - cute and clever, at the best.

But the rip-roaring comedy seems to stem from two parts smart-@ss, mixed with the elements above.

And smart-@ssery isn't usually a very spiritual thing - usually it's the 'lesser developed' narcissistic aspects of one's personality that is the smart'@ass. 

Stuart Davis seems to be the best representative of 2nd tier smart-@ssery we have so far -and he does it great, in my opinion.  Of course, at the same time, he's a total narcissist exhibitionist.  BUT - tt does seem most of the time though, he manages to be a total narcissistic exhibitionist, while being a fully relational human being and not a complete introvert, despite his claims. (you have to scroll down in this entry, past a lot to get to his frank admittance, but it's worth it, because it's a great blogpost.)

To be fully human, and fully enlightened, I do think "true" humor (not the fake stuff/fake laughs we do to paper over wounds) is one of the most valuable gifts we get from others, and one of the most integral/whole.

Well, now game playing integrals have an excuse to rationalize their hours of gaming.

Yes, the new Wii Fit - do yoga, stretching, work all parts of your body - and score points while doing so!

Some disruption by christian extremists. 

Does anybody know?

From Wikipedia (no exact link):

The FBI stated that evidence linking Al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable.^[63] The Government of the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion, regarding Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[64] But so far, the U.S. Justice Department has not sought formal criminal charges against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. This has provided what some call "fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings." ^[65]

Is it lack of evidence?

Considering the old maxim - a prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich - what is the reasoning to NOT indict Bin Laden?

Any thoughts?

Great article on   more »

A good article here, confronting the inane ways that the media analysts, personalities, and journalists, are handling Al Gore's book.

I'm not sure how much the confusing fuzz of media idiocy drives governmental policy. 

Mainly, I think, the media dysfunction allows bad policy to be cloaked, camoflaged, and stood by, far past the obviousness of the policy's bad effects.

Secondly, the media dysfunction can act as a enabler of trivia to disqualify policy (whether that policy is good or bad, trivia "about" that policy can act to disqualify it).

Over the last week, I've been dealing with media shallowness, but one comment I found interesting on the Rorty article:

It's all fine and good to be a skeptic in the Rortian vein or Stanley Fish-style and argue that metaphysics and foundationalism are bunk and that democracy doesn't need any sort of philosophical grounding.

The problem is that there is trickle-down of ideas: not directly from academia to the average citizen, but from philosophers to the media elite, who are mostly college-educated and whose views of reality and discourse are a kind of cartoon version of the dominant trends in academic thought.

You wonder then where the MSM gets this idea that empiricism doesn't matter, that reality is just a construct, that public life is nothing but a power-struggle in which the right thing to do is find out what the daddy-party wants, and just obey that?

Look no further than Rorty, Fish, and the two-bit latter-day deconstructionists.

Ideas have consequences, and so does the weak-tea thesis that ideas themselves are inconsequential. Without a strong commitment to truth, empiricism, and foundationalism in ideas, all you have left is tribalism on right, and triangulation on the left.

I've been making fun of the following Wilber quote:

"The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"

I think I may have to take back my fun-making.  That quote above - coming from a completely different place than Wilber - essentially says the same thing.

Something to think about.

I came across this artice on Richard Rorty today, over at the Los Angeles Times.

Richard Rorty was, in many ways, the american postmodern.    He rejects epistemology early on, and situated "truth" as, in his famous expression - ""Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying."

You can't get more postmodern than that.

As the article points out though, he would review other philosophers works, and, to put it mildly, "misinterpret" what they have said:

These positions irritated many people. But what absolutely killed philosophy professors was Rorty's interpretation of the great figures of the Western tradition. The average philosophy professor may spend a decade or a career trying to elucidate the works of Martin Heidegger or W.V.O. Quine. Rorty lined up such figures in support of his own positions in a fundamentally careless way. He quoted them out of context and ignored everything he couldn't use.

This truly enraged people. The Dewey scholars hated him, as did the Wittgenstein scholars, the Davidson scholars, the Nietzsche scholars, the Derrida scholars and so on. Every one of them thought they could prove that Rorty was wrong about their particular boy, and that he'd have to listen and take back all the things he had said. In this, they didn't understand him at all.

Another example"

As Rorty spoke, Gadamer just shook his big, eminent, bereted head. When it was over, Gadamer said, in German-accented English: "But Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty gave the grin and the shrug and said: "Yes, Hans. But that's what you should have said."

Wilber, of course, is coming from a different worldview.  In his case, making room for transcendent truths, without negating the current truths of science and modernity.  A version of perennialism, although one based on perceptual spaces. 

Also interesting then, that so many Wilber scholars not associate with Wilber, share some of the concerns of misrepresentation of other scholars, that drove people crazy about Rorty.