In the field of medicine, or, in this case, the Veteran's Administration, versus all other provided care.

The concluding paragraph:

Upon hearing some anecdote about the VA, we should always ask, “Compared to what?” As a system, the VA outperforms the rest of the health care sector by every conceivable metric, including wait times and, of course, protection from catastrophic medical bills. And it is more cost-effective: for every patient who switched from Medicare to the VA, the taxpayers would save about one-half to two-thirds in medical costs, while the patients themselves would receive demonstrably higher-quality care. Step one on the road to true health reform should be to allow all veterans on Medicare to use their entitlement for VA care, and then gradually expand access to the VA model of care for all Americans.

This Bill Moyers interview with Jon Stewart is very illuminating, on a lot of levels.

For one, he truly continues a level of self-depracation of what he does, that I find admirable.
Two, his general analysis, say, of the Gonzales administration, is very right on. 
Three, regarding Virginia Tech - near the end of this interview with Bill Moyers, there is a segment showing Stewart interviewing Allawi, and commenting on the fact that, in Iraq, there is a Virginia Tech massacre, "every day".  In that, this is similar to my thoughts on the subject.

Worth watching.

I haven't written anything on Virginia Tech.  The truth is, for, me, I've been, choosing, in a way, to hear about massacres for the last 4 years. 

I have an RSS feed for Iraq Coalition Casualities.  It brings all the updates to the "news" portion, on the right side.  (The feed is down below).

As such, for the past 4 years, I've gotten messages of new bombings, mass graves, etc, filling up my Reader, on a daily basis.

And actually, within a week, the number of casualties in Iraq were 10 times the number of people killed due to violence, than were killed in the VA Tech massacre.  And 11 american troops on Apirl 23rd.

Maybe I should stop receiving the feed?

I can't help but view this, as simply another tragedy, yes, horrible, and yes, deeply sad.  I can't make it "bigger" than tragedies that happen across the globe, or more meaningful than those either.

In this sense, it seems I am clearly in the minority.   Even in integral circles.   

Nevertheless, that is what is noticed, from this perspective, and this pair of eyes.

Looks like What Enlightenment, the blog exposing the control tactics of Andrew Cohen, is signing off.

I can fully understand this, as at some point, you simply deal with - as much as possible - any abusive tactics thrown at you by an abusive guru, step away from the PAST, and then continue on into the now.

Still, lots of gratitude for the exposure, to Hal and friends.  A quote:

Three former editors of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, including myself, spoke out strongly here about the abuses in Andrew Cohen's community. Other close students have also put their names on the line to attest to what went wrong with the community's beautiful dream of creating heaven on earth. The woman who financed Cohen's Foxhollow EnlightenNext world center wrote about how he unfairly took advantage of her vulnerability and largesse. Numerous other students have also contributed here, both named and anonymous, shedding light on the authoritarian abuses around Cohen, their causes and their harmful effects. In contrast, not one specific or credible factual denial has emerged from Andrew or anyone associated with him about what has been reported here in great detail and depth. Instead, we have only heard the refrain that we have failed to include the "context," as if any overarching purpose could justify the abuses described here and the pain they caused. No cry of "context" could obscure the devastating truth that the participants in this blog have had the courage to reveal.

The number of individuals alone, involved for many many years, high up in the organization, speak the tale, not to mention previous exposes, such as Mother of God, and Enlightenment Blues.   That much smoke, over more than a decade, it speaks for itself. (When your mother outs you as an abusive control freak, while at one time an enthusiastic supporter, that is really strong evidence.)

Hal hopes for a final exposure, but this isn't usually how this happens.  Most of the time, there is no "final exposure" for a guru.  The guru or other followers, modulate their tactics a bit  (which has happened with Cohen in this case, after the outing by WhatEnlightenment, and that is to the good), but the charisma, speaking ability, writing skills, etc, that initially attracted people, still operates, and still continues to attract people.  How many older cult leaders, and their cults, still exist?  Quite a lot, even after exposure.

And so it goes.

My own interest remains is to not have Cohen's spirit and energy contaminate Integral Institute, or Zaadz, but clearly both these organizations have taken a neutral "I see nothing!  I know nothing!"  mentality regarding Cohen, and do the branding thing together.  Luckily, Cohen is fairly easy to avoid on Zaadz. 

It's been demonstrated to my satisfaction that What Is Enlightenment magazine, doesn't have independence from Cohen.  No "I disagree with what you say but will defend your right to WRITE it to the death" at What Is Enlightenment.  As long as you know that, you are good to go.

Came across this post from Marginal Revolution, titled - Harry Potter and the Mystery of Inequality.

And I had an "aha!" moment, in regards to one of my frustrations with how holistic/integral "products and services", seem to be continually re-inventing the wheel.

In various bodywork services, it seems, there is always a new naming - rolfing, heller, network, etc, etc - when it is pretty clear that the base of the services, is very similar, and builds on each other.

Same thing with various movements.  People who are "following" a various movement, whatever that may be, constantly and continually "re-invent" the movement, with some small little advance, and then claim a revolution.

I think this can be cynically understood, by looking at the concpet of branding.  There is no branding "cachet" in advancing massage, WITHIN massage.  If you refine a movement, well, you may get a note at the college course, but no other credit goes to you.

This same thing happens with various meditations.  You look at Tibetan Buddhism, and the vast realm of meditations practiced, still are UNDER the rubric of Tibetan Buddhism. 

But people take those basic meditations, do a little song and dance change, and, presto-chango, they are the "originator" of an entirely new brand, with the books, tapes, videos, instructions, that come from that.

Is this too cynical?

Sometimes I despair, around the label of "integral".  For myself, I've been reflecting - and my integral interests flow in LIVING, and PRACTICING around the following themes:

Spiritual realization/non-dual
Meditation
Holistic living (right food, right exercise, right service)
Right livelihood, productive and practical
Heart-centered full embodiment (energetic, emotional, psychological)
Creative interests

Is that "integral?"  Is that "western Buddhism?" Is that "holistic"?  Is that a "cultural creative"?

It could be any of the above, correct? 

Also, that's pretty encompassing.  Ken Wilber and theory is, perhaps, a philosophical framework for embracing the above LIVED qualities, but I would suggest that integral per se, is limiting.  Integral is great, because that compartmentalization is absent - the body/mind/soul is embraced, but could be limiting as well, given that the philosophical framework is intimidating, and associated for better and for worse with one guy (Wilber).

Zaadz is, in a sense, the community activity around the above interests - I should interact there more, one would think!

At any rate, as a branding exercise - given the above interests, how would you describe the interests above?  Integral, or something else?




   

First from Bill, a heart center meditation, and other thoughts.

Then from CJ, a post on discovering one's true gift to the world.

An article about a new database online application, Coghead.

I'm specifically looking at how to create a web 2.0 assessments application, but the point of the article is summed up in this:

Coghead is playing in an important and new market. There are interesting competitors here, including online suite maker Zoho, the pure-play online database DabbleDB, and Intuit's venerable QuickBase. Coghead CEO Paul McNamara also sees SalesForce.com's AppExchange as a competitor. Startups are still coming into this space, too: I saw a new online database, MyWebDB, at the Web 2.0 Expo.

This type of functionality will make it easier to do things I'd like to do, and involve others in the process.

I've been traveling, and have had no access to the internet for about a week.  Today's the first day I am in a room with internet access. 

Lots of stuff to ponder, when you have been away from the internet for a week. 

At any rate, one important note, that I've seen from Hokai, is that Daniel Ingram has put his book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, in blog format.

Worth reading, a bit at a time.

From Graham.  I need to try something like this. 

Here is the next installment on Pavlina's Self-Discipline series.  (To note again, any integral practice is predicated on, at a minimum, two things - an opening to spiritual truth, and the discipline to practice to be fully functional in the world.  Self-Discipline is one key to this.)

This particular segment on will, I find very useful.   A quote:

Willpower provides an intensely powerful yet temporary boost. Think of it as a one-shot thruster. It burns out quickly, but if directed intelligently, it can provide the burst you need to overcome inertia and create momentum.

This is a better definition, and more realistic, than either of the two extremes understandings - use willpower to go through everything in life, or, willpower doesn't really exist, as all is a function of environmental and social constraints.

And the advice on how to use willpower to SMARTLY change those environmental and social constraints is good as well:

Here’s how to tackle that same goal with the proper application of willpower. You accept that you can only apply a short burst of willpower… maybe a few days at best. After that it’s gone. So you’d better use that willpower to alter the territory around you in such a way that maintaining momentum won’t be as hard as building it in the first place. You need to use your willpower to establish a beachhead on the shores of your goal.

So you sit down and make a plan. This doesn’t require much energy, and you can spread the work out over many days.

You identify all the various targets you’ll need to strike if you want to have a chance of success. First, all the junk food needs to leave your kitchen, including anything you have a tendency to overeat, and you need to replace it with foods that will help you lose weight, like fruits and veggies. Secondly, you know you’ll be tempted to get fast food if you come home hungry and don’t have anything ready to eat, so you decide to pre-cook a week’s worth of food in advance each weekend. That way you always have something in the refrigerator. You set aside a block of several hours each weekend to buy groceries and cook all your food for the week. Plus you get a decent cookbook of healthy recipes. You learn about Weight Watchers, and find out where the closest one is to you, so you can go to the first meeting and sign-up. Setup a weight chart and post it on your bathroom wall. Get a decent scale that can measure weight and body fat %. Make a list of sample meals (5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners), and post it on your refrigerator. And so on…. At this point all of this goes into the written plan.

Then you execute — hard and fast.

That particular set of advice is welcomingly practical, recognizing both the benefits and the limits of willpower, and how to use the benefits of willpower to, as much as possible, change the environment to a successful one.  

This is one reason why, if you go on retreats of various kinds (exercise, meditation, etc), it simply becomes so much easier to "get in the groove", as the environment and expectations are setup for you to practice, or act, in certain ways.

The thing that isn't touched on, of course, and I've mentioned this before, is the concept of sub-personalities, or fractures of will.  If you really really want to keep eating that sugar, then guess what?  You will.  Your desires are at cross-purposes.  Addictions, or psychological issues (not "severe issues, just normal run-of-the-mill small self-sabatoge), will have you working at cross-purposes.

My own sense is, in terms of "self-initiated growth", working alone to change, without a support structure, that the sub-personalities, lower desires, etc, can act as a major drag for at least 50-70% of the population.

So, while still very good practical advice, and one of the smartest tactical implementations for utilizing will I've read, this particular section on willpower, would end up, if being followed alone, by 50-70% of the population, end up failing.

Actually, a link to another group which has cooperated with Al-Queda, but a lot of these  Pakistan/Afghanistan Islamic groups exchange people, information and resources.

Here is the article. Notable quote:

A three-tier security ring has been thrown around the 72-year-old Buddhist head, who lives at Dharamsala, in the Himalayan foothills, Indian police spokesman Prem Lal said.

All those approaching the exiled Tibetan chief will be closely watched by highly trained Tibetan security guards as well as heavily armed deployments of Indian police.

Visitors are being body-searched before being allowed to approach him.

This makes me incredibly sad, but it's part and parcel of the age.  

And then it brings up, of course, how non-violence may be an inappropriate response, to determined aggression.   We knew this of course, simply from China's extermination of the Tibetans as a separate people, over the last 50 years.

Thanks to Matthew Dallman for the link.

The National Review article, throughout, conflates priests practices Buddhism, with people who are primarily Buddhist, but acting out of nationalism - but the main point still remains that in certain situations, even practicing buddhist priets have responded to force, with force.

Maybe - at least soon!

Here is a guy with a jetpack, flying around.

And here is a startup looking to build the flying car.

It's long been a pet peeve of mine - "all these technological optimists everywhere, and I STILL can't fly around with a jetpack/flying car!".

Well, maybe the Jetsons are getting closer.   I'll tell you what, if we get there, then I expect my talking Astro about a decade or two later.

C4Chaos becomes a U.S. citizen. 

Congratulations are in order - may long distance stop sucking soon!

This is stating the obvious, but numbers now bear it out - blogging has peaked.

Now some have even gone to ask, "Is blogging dead?". 

But that certainly is not the case - still a lot of great information from blogs, especially topical analyses.

But with the explosion of podcasting, social networking, twitter, etc - certainly the landscape has shifted.

The writer of The Enlightened Diet, has, on the Spirituality and Health's website (a magazine, good one too), a diet profile assessment.

I failed this, rather badly, actually.  Pretty much, I'm very utilitarian, when it comes to food. 

Now, there isn't quite enough information here to be really useful, but you get the idea of where you are at, simply by taking the assessment, and the questions asked.

Is here.  Empathy and intimacy being the qualities emphasized.

Also, I will respond to both Gary and Bill, when I have some time.  But I like that I seem to be getting more clarity, and I hope they are enjoying the conversation as well. 

This is making the rounds.  Alanis covering Black-Eyed Peas. Lovely Lady Lumps.  Works on a couple of different levels.

From the Onion:

From Andrew Sullivan.

Shades of Apple/PC, but the Zaadz guy is even cooler.

Definitely a funny ad.

An amazing view of the Universe here - scales of distance.

Props to Webware.

I've been remiss in not blogging this, mainly, because I've been busy, and passed over A Few Random Notes, when it showed up in my reader.

But then I read Joe's post on the treatments he is starting, and I backtracked at the Until site.

So here's what is going on:

Chronic pain. As I've written before, I've been suffering from an excrutiatingly irritating form of chronic pain since last fall. I've chosen not to say more about the subject on my weblog, but I want to mention that the problems have persisted and continue to impact my quality of life (and quality and quantity of writing). I've been doing hyponotic visualizations (vision questing), but it's difficult to say if it's helping or not. I would say no to helping with the pain, but yes it's helping me feel less beaten down and disempowered by the pain.

HIV. My immune system functioning continues to sink into the toilet (with a high viral load count and CD4 count in the low double-digits). Finally things have come together to the point where I can start new HIV medications. I have applied (and hope to be approved) for "compassionate use" access to a new Merck drug that is an integrase inhibitor.

Joe's treatment post points out that he now IS approved, and is will be beginning a new type of drug therapy, so let's all wish him the best.

It's really funny - I've been reading Joe's stuff, since I got into blogging and reading blogs.  Now that blogging has exploded into ten million different ways to get information, he is still one of the sites that I subscribe to.  His honesty, and unique - and can I say artistic? - method of analyzing and writing have given me hours of entertainment, education, and reflection.

He does feel, to me, like a valued member of my tribe, and I've come to care, through this venue called "the internet".

So, I am wishing Joe all the best - I hope others will as well.

Bill links to, and discusses, in a wonderful post, three different relationship articles here:

All are worthwhile, so go read, if you can.

My initial stab at the Integral Relationship post, is similar to the discussion of the third article, Great Expectations  - from Bill's quotes:

Coleman says that the constant cultural pressure to have it all—a great sex life, a wonderful family—has made people ashamed of their less-than-perfect relationships and question whether such unions are worth hanging on to. Feelings of dissatisfaction or disappointment are natural, but they can seem intolerable when standards are sky-high. "It's a recent historical event that people expect to get so much from individual partners," says Coleman, author of Imperfect Harmony, in which he advises couples in lackluster marriages to stick it out—especially if they have kids. "There's an enormous amount of pressure on marriages to live up to an unrealistic ideal."

More:

"There is a mythology of 'the wrong person,'" agrees Pittman. "All marriages are incompatible. All marriages are between people from different families, people who have a different view of things. The magic is to develop binocular vision, to see life through your partner's eyes as well as through your own."

The realization that we're not going to get everything we want from a partner is not just sobering, it's downright miserable. But it is also a necessary step in building a mature relationship, according to Real, who has written about the subject in How Can I Get Through to You: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women. "The paradox of intimacy is that our ability to stay close rests on our ability to tolerate solitude inside a relationship," he says. "A central aspect of grown-up love is grief. All of us long for—and think we deserve—perfection." We can hardly be blamed for striving for bliss and self-fulfillment in our romantic lives—our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed in the first blueprint of American society.

Now, Bill disagrees with that last articel, and I am going to quote in full: -

I think this article is a little dangerous in its tone and stance. There are a lot of couples who marry for the wrong reasons and do not discover that fact for many years. From the point of view of this article, these couples might be encouraged to stick it out when the best thing would be to move on in a new direction.

I think we need to factor in the soul's need for deeper connection. We want to be "in love" with our partner now, in five years, and in 25 years. We don't want only comfort and convenience, as much as those things are nice. We want it all -- and there is no reason we should settle for anything less.

From an integral perspective, these articles are all looking at relationships from a lower developmental level. The last one admits that we are seeking "something more" from relationships than previous generations sought (the emergence of the sensitive self), but it also dismisses this need for more meaningful relationship as a search for an illusive ideal.

As human beings continue to evolve -- and yes, we are still evolving -- our relationship needs are changing. While functional relationships with adequate affection used to be acceptable, for many of us this is no longer sufficient. We want more open, emotionally deeper, egalitarian relationships -- we want partners who are complete in and of themselves and who still care deeply for our own needs and happiness.

I'm guessing these articles would be useful for a lot of people. But some of us want more -- and wanting more out of life is not a bad thing. We are not seeking an unobtainable illusion -- we are creating a new pattern that future generations can inhabit and expand upon.

Okay - so this is the crux of the matter.  How much is longing for the "ideal", for the "integral", a function of narcissism, and how much is it a function of creating a better version of relationship?

As Bill points out, if one buys into the "practical" version too much - and as I stated - you can be in a very unhappy relationship, for years on end.

The other side of the danger, is that you ARE "seeking an unobtainable illusion".

My first round of theorizing (and again, I can easily be wrong) is that Bill is wrong here, based on the following data:

a.  Based on the research, more people ARE becoming more narcissistic - look at latest C4 post.
b.  Most people, who last a long time in relationship, do tend to accept the relationship "as it is", within the boundaries described by the Great Expectations article.
c.  Most self-reporting on successful relationships describe coming back to appreciating the qualities of relating, and human-ness, not some extra-ordinariness.

But again, I could be wrong, Bill may be correct - I still say, however, that integral relationship has to be "a step" beyond successful relationship - so authoritative statements about "Integral Relationship" can only come from those with 10 years of success in relationships under their belts, as well as 10 years of lived experience with Integral.

Even Ken Wilber doesn't meet that criteria! 

(Though I have to say, the relationship of Ken and Treya certainly qualifies).

And strange, as well.

In 1972, 87% of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13% of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a significant parallel, before 1980, only 5% of children were obese; today that figure has tripled, says the CDC.

That's a weird thing, in my ow opinion.  Not too integral...

Hey, why not.

It's a good jumping off point, at any rate, to the discussion.

But here is the Dr. Phil way!

At any rate, here is a relationship quiz.  Good place to start, actually, as the less "points" you have, the better your relationship.  Also - if accurately portrayed as troublespots - then you can begin to focus on what to "improve".